The Word Speaks...

Sacraments

April 16, 2024

Long before theologians argued and fought about the correct number of sacraments (seven for Roman Catholicism; two for Lutherans and mainline Protestants; and zero for evangelical Christians) early church theologians saw sacraments EVERYWHERE! It is amazing how many things get called a sacrament in the early church: some theologians identified and labeled hundreds of them.

In spite of the centuries of argument and disagreement, most Christians who accept the idea of sacraments define a sacrament pretty much the way St Augustine did: a sacrament is a visible sign of an invisible grace. Martin Luther completely accepted that definition although he modified it by adding that a sacrament is a visible sign attached to the Word. In order to be considered a sacrament, Luther insisted that there be a physical, visible sign plus a Word of Promise from Jesus. 

Baptism, as Luther reminds us, is not just water but water and Jesus’ word of promise, “I will never leave you nor forsake you, and lo, I am with you always.” In the case of the Lord’s Supper, the sacrament consists of both the physical sign of wine and bread plus the word of promise, “this is my body.” In keeping with the definition of Augustine, the visible signs of water, bread and wine are the divine assurance that what we see brings an invisible grace, by God’s Word, that is effective and efficacious even though we do not see that grace. It is enough for us to see the sign and believe the promise.

All this is most certainly true. There. I have established my theological orthodoxy, and affirmed my thorough-going agreement with Lutheran teaching, so my ordination is in no jeopardy. Having said that, I often have a hankering for an earlier and more flexible definition of sacrament. In some ways, I believe in many sacraments (we’ll use the small “s” for sacrament rather than a capital “S” to keep me out of trouble) – maybe not hundreds of sacraments, exactly, but lots of them.

I owe my understanding of sacraments to a former professor of mine, Karlfried Froehlich, who in the Spring semester of 1992 led a doctoral seminar on a rather obscure theologian named Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141 – Hmmm. I never noticed before, but Hugh’s year of death is the same number as the church post office box number. A sacramental sign? Probably not). Hugh understands a sacrament as the open eyes for what Scripture has to say. That’s pretty good, and worth repeating: a sacrament is the open eyes for what Scripture has to say. If it seems amazing at first that some theologians could identify hundreds of sacraments, it is not amazing, or shouldn’t be anyway, when we consider that Scripture has hundreds of things for us to see about God.

For instance, Hugh sees God’s creation of the firmament in Genesis 1:6 as a sacrament. The firmament that God created is what separated the waters of the earth from the waters of the sky. More significantly, though, the firmament was the foundational platform for the world. Because early church theologians read the Scripture not just in literal terms but also in spiritual terms, they understood that the foundation of the world is not just something physical; it is also spiritual. And what is the spiritual firmament, or foundation, of the world? The Bible – God’s Word. Hugh of St Victor, who took his lead from Augustine, identifies creation and scripture as sacraments because both creation and scripture open our eyes to who and what God is (De Sacramentis, I.I.xvii-xix).

Another way of understanding sacraments, according to St Hugh, is that they are a remedy that restores us to God. “If anyone, therefore, seeks the time of the institution of the sacraments, let him know that as long as there is sickness, there is time for remedy” (I.VIII.xii). Once again, this understanding of remedy is precisely what we all understand sacraments to be, regardless of what we think the correct number is: sacraments bring us God’s grace precisely because we are sinners. 

We don’t just have sacraments: we need them. We need the sacraments because as humans we are ill with sin. If you wonder why we have communion every Sunday, it’s because we need God’s remedy for sin every Sunday. In keeping with this, it is no accident that early Christian theologians specifically referred to the Lord’s Supper as the medicine of eternal life. And isn’t that exactly what God wants us to use our eyes for: to see his acts of grace in our lives. Which is why God gave us His Word. The Word Speaks, and it always leads us directly to his grace.

1-2 Chronicles

April 9, 2024

To which some of you might be inclined to ask, “really? Does God really speak to us in the Old Testament books of Chronicles?” It is perhaps enough to say that the literal title of this book is “Additions.” Not going to set the world afire for creative titles, is it? The book is called “Additions” (or more nicely in English, Chronicles) because it basically re-states much of the history already found in the Books of Samuel and Kings with a few additions. In Hebrew, Chronicles is one book, but English Bibles split into two because of its length. Not only is Chronicles very long, and repeats much that is found elsewhere, let’s not forget that 1 Chronicles has nine consecutive chapters of  genealogies! At first glance, there’s not much here to excite the reader, is there?

So, let me tell you how I first became acquainted with Chronicles and even grew to love parts of it. I was about twelve years old when I discovered that Chronicles is a collection of stories about the kings in Jerusalem, kings like David, Solomon, Hezekiah, and so on. And some of those stories included great battles, such as when King Josiah, the great reformer who found the Law of Moses buried in the Temple, was fighting a two-front war against both Assyria and Egypt, and died in battle against Pharaoh Necho in 601 BC. Kings and battles with chariots, spears, and swords: how could that not be interesting to a twelve-year old boy?

Then, one afternoon in school at Trinity First Lutheran in Minneapolis, my teacher, Mr Rappe, gave us an interesting writing assignment. He wrote the word “Pindax” on the chalkboard (yes, a chalkboard: a long, green board that covered the wall that screeched when the wrong kind of chalk was used) and told us to give a meaning to the word Pindax and then write a story about it. So, I decided that Pindax would be the name of a king in the Ancient Near East who believed in God and fought military battles. The result was something akin to, The Bible Meets Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves! (This was way back when I thought it would be great to be a writer, and when I was too young and naive to realize that good writing requires talent to go along with imagination. Oh well, I learned soon enough).

But back to Chronicles. Although there actually are a few battles recorded in this document, that’s not what the book is about. Yes, it is about the kings who ruled in God’s name in Jerusalem, but their job was not to fight battles. Their job was to govern in such a way that the people would know and understand God’s law, be faithful to God, and worship God exclusively in the Temple. 

This understanding of the king’s responsibility is so strong that the author, the Chronicler, has a very simple formula for judging every king in Jerusalem. The entire reign of every single king is evaluated as either “the king did that which was good in the sight of the Lord,” or “the king did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord” simply by how well the king kept the people faithful to God. The Chronicler is not interested in how high the kingdom’s GDP was, nor in the king’s approval rating, nor in any other way that we might evaluate a ruler. The Chronicler had one and only one criterion: did the king implement God’s law and keep the people’s worship centered at the Temple? 

This single-minded focus of the author was in an effort to answer the question of why God had judged his people and sent them into exile. The books of Chronicles  try to explain all of Israel’s history by answering one simple question: How is that God’s holy people, a people God had blessed and given himself to – how could this people fall under God’s judgment and wind up in Exile? To put it a little more simply, the Chronicler is trying to answer, “Why did this happen to us?” The Chronicler’s answer is that Israel went into Exile because Israel had stubbornly and defiantly refused to obey God’s will. Chief among the culprits of Israel’s unfaithfulness were its kings who, with very few exceptions, failed miserably to keep the people focused on God.

Brevard Childs has pointed out that one of the great values of the way Chronicles views Israel’s history by looking at it backwards from the time of the Exile is that “it bears witness to the unity of God’s will for his people… The Word of God addressed ancient patriarchs, pre-exilic kings, and exiles from the Babylonian captivity with the same imperatives and accompanied them with the same promise… [He thus] faithfully testifies to the unchanging reality of the One God” (Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, Fortress Press, 1979, pp 655-655).

As a twelve-year old I didn’t understand any of the complexities of theological composition in the Bible when I was trying to write a story about someone named Pindax, but there is one thing I could understand. I understood that the Chronicler’s verdict on King Hezekiah, “He did what was right in the sight of the LORD” (2 Chronicles 29:2) is a prescription for how we should live obediently before the one, true God. The Word Always Speaks, and when it does, it speaks of a faithful God who wants us to be faithful to him.

The Gospel of Mark

March 12, 2024

Good Morning Folks,

When thinking about how God’s Work speaks through one of the four gospels of the New Testament, it’s worth considering for a moment that before Mark wrote his gospel around the year AD 65, there was no such genre or document called a “gospel.”  In a very real sense, Mark created an entire new kind of writing when he wrote his gospel. What Mark wrote about God’s Good News in Jesus Christ was so powerful and compelling that a number of other people also wrote gospels to explain who Jesus Christ is and why his coming to this world was so significant. Four of these gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were collected by the early church to establish the church’s Bible and given primacy of place in the New Testament. That’s quite an accomplishment for one document written in the year 65! 

So, what was it that Christians in the early church felt was so compelling about Mark’s Gospel that it created a new genre and was used as the basis for establishing the New Testament?

To answer that, I’d like to go back to the year 2001 when Pixar released an animated movie for children called Monsters, Inc. Somewhere in a parallel universe to ours is a place where electricity is generated by collecting the screams of frightened children. Linking their universe to ours is a number of doors. What happens is that monsters from the other universe step through those doors at nighttime into the bedrooms of unsuspecting children here on earth, frighten the children, and collect the sound of their screams. Then they take these screams back to the factory that funnels those screams into electricity. 

Naturally, there is a bad guy in this movie who tries to devise a machine to maximize these screams by creating more fear. But the hero, Sully, discovers that it is not only far more efficient but far more pleasing for everyone concerned to make electricity out of the laughter of happy children than the screams of frightened children. I would like to think, I know it’s not the case, but I would like to think that the writer and producer of Monsters, Inc had their epiphany about laughter being better than fear after reading the Gospel of Mark.

Make no mistake, the universe of Mark’s Gospel is a universe dominated by fear. We learn this right at the beginning of his Gospel, at its very ending, and just about everywhere in between. No sooner do we open chapter 1 than we find Jesus in confrontation with the devil. What Mark finds important, and which no one else records, is that when Jesus was tempted, he was with the wild beasts. The real terror of this world, says Mark, is not that we are tempted to do bad things, but that we live in a space inhabited and dominated by wild beasts.

This fear persists all the way to the very end, even to the last three words of the Gospel. What are the last three words of Mark? They were afraid. It never ceases to amaze me that this fear comes from Jesus’ own disciples even after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Even in the face of an empty tomb, even after assurance from an angel, Jesus’ disciples are afraid. Wow, who’d have thunk? 

In between the opening verses with wild beasts and the closing words of fear, we continually find ourselves wandering in dark, scary places. No other gospel concentrates so much as Mark on the demonic and the way in which evil not only enslaves, but destroys. The demonic in Mark’s Gospel is characterized by physical illness, mental illness, spiritual misunderstanding, social abandonment, suffering, and violence. If there is one thing that typifies the people Jesus encounters in Mark’s Gospel who need help, healing, or rescue, it’s that every one of them is alone and abandoned. That, of course, is when the wild beasts are bravest and fiercest: when they can find us alone, encircle us, snarl at us, snap at us, and lunge at us, like a pack of wolves in some cold, northern wilderness. 

Not to put too fine a point on it, Mark is not a happy-go-lucky Gospel. If it’s happy you want, Luke is your Gospel; Luke is the guy who uses the word joy in his Gospel some twenty times. Know how many times Mark uses the word joy? Not once. Not once. So by now you’re all dying to know, in the midst of such a gloomy Gospel, how in the world does Mark even dare to start his Gospel with the words, the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God? Really? Did somebody say, Good news? What good news?

Well, Mark is a believer in good news and he highlights three particular ways the good news sets us free from fear. First, even though darkness seems everywhere in Mark’s Gospel, it doesn’t mean he surrenders to it; he acknowledges it for what it is without dismissing it, or pretending it’s not as bad as it seems. Rather than minimize the presence of evil, Mark assures us that Jesus himself suffered the full weight and pain of evil in order to redeem it on the cross. No other Gospel emphasizes Jesus as the Suffering Servant in the way that Mark does, not to make us gloomy but so that we will understand that not only did Jesus suffer like us, and suffer with us, Jesus also redeemed suffering in a way that makes him the healer of every sorrow. 

The second way Mark highlights good news for us comes in the rather odd way he portrays the disciples. To put it bluntly, Mark has a rather low opinion of the disciples and repeatedly shows them in a negative light. But he had a distinct reason for doing so. He wants to make sure that we, who have now read his Gospel, don’t make the same mistake of constantly misunderstanding or underestimating Jesus the way his disciples did. The disciples in Mark’s Gospel never really get Jesus; they’re always a little dumbfounded when Jesus performs a miracle. So Mark writes a Gospel so that we will never, ever make that mistake about Jesus. He is not just a good teacher, a good guy, a cool healer, or salty talker, he is the Son of God.

This explains why Mark ends his Gospel with the words, they were afraid. This is Mark’s way of telling us, don’t make the same mistake they all did! They may have been afraid but don’t you EVER be afraid. Mark’s choice to end his gospel with the words, they were afraid, is an ironic and humorous twist to say, Come on guys, can you believe this? Can you believe those dunderheads were afraid? You’d never do that, would you?

So, to this point, Mark’s good news is that Jesus has redeemed the very real pain that is in this world, and that we are in a far better position than even Jesus’ own disciples to trust and believe without fear that Jesus is the Son of God. But Mark’s coup de grace, if you will, to banish our fear is to show us Jesus the healer, Jesus the miracle worker. Jesus, in Mark’s Gospel, is a man of action and a man on the move. Of 88 sections in Mark’s Gospel 80 of them begin in Greek with the words and then. You won’t find that in English because it gets a bit redundant to read and then, and then, and then, and then, so Bible translators smooth that out into nicer English. But what you lose is the sense that Jesus is on the move and has a mission. 

Nothing illustrates this mission better than Jesus the miracle worker. Far more than in any other Gospel, Mark’s Jesus is one who brings healing, particularly through the exorcizing of demons. This is almost exclusively a Markan trait and the reason for it is that Mark wants us to see how Jesus went head to head and face to face with the forces of evil. And in every instance Jesus first silences the demons and then casts out the evil represented by those demons. 

The good news of Mark’s Gospel is that Jesus the Son of God is on a mission to banish fear, to redeem human suffering, and to silence and destroy all that is evil. That is the good news of Mark’s Gospel. When the Word speaks, it takes away our fear and fills us with the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Obadiah

February 13, 2024

Don’t know much about Obadiah? Guess what: neither do I. Just about everything I know about Obadiah can be summarized in three quick statements. 1) Obadiah is an Old Testament prophet; 2) Obadiah is the briefest, shortest book of the whole Old Testament; and 3) Obadiah never appears in the lectionary which means that we never, ever, hear Obadiah in church. Which kind of makes you wonder, if it doesn’t say much, and doesn’t say something significant enough to get into the lectionary, how did Obadiah even get into the Bible? And, more to the point of this column, how do we hear the Word of God’s good news in Obadiah, a book that consists mainly of judgment on a foreign nation?

So, let’s take a closer look at this book. If you don’t know exactly where it is in the Old Testament, don’t worry. Even I have to take a stab at it by going to the section of my Bible where I kind of know where the Twelve Minor Prophets are and then skim to find the one page where Obadiah is. As I say, Obadiah is a prophet who announces judgment on the tiny little country of Edom below the Dead Sea and to the southeast of Israel. Other than that, we know very little of Edom except that the descendants of Esau, Jacob’s estranged brother, settled there, and that Edom and Israel were always at odds with one another.

The prophecy of Obadiah dates to around the year 587 BC when King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon attacked Jerusalem. With Jerusalem’s army otherwise detained, Edom saw an opportunity for a sneak attack on Jerusalem from behind. For this treacherous act, Obadiah pronounces God’s judgment on Edom. But once again, we have to ask why is this in the Bible? Why did Israel include it in their scripture and why did the Christian church keep Obadiah in its scripture? I think there are two reasons that help explain why this rather obscure book continues to speak from God today.

First of all, nearly every Hebrew prophet pronounced a word of judgment “against the nations.” The nations were understood as the enemies of God’s people who sought to oppress Israel and wipe out the worship of God. In some ways, this dates back all the way to the period of Israel in Egypt when the Pharaoh tried to eliminate the Jewish people and prohibit them from worshiping God. Over time, these oracles “against the nations” were understood not so much to be judgments against foreign countries, but as God’s judgment on the ungodly at the end of the world. In this way, Edom in the book of Obadiah is not so much a historical country southeast of the Dead Sea, but is representative of any ungodly power that would try to suppress the worship of the one, true God.

We can see this same understanding present in the Book of Revelation which was written to offer reassurance to Christians in the Roman Empire experiencing persecution because they worshiped God alone. The ultimate value of Revelation is that it assures the church of all time, and at any time, that the slain Lamb of God is sovereign over history, and that eventually God will punish the ungodly and redeem those who have been faithful.

This leads to the second reason for Obadiah’s inclusion in the Bible as God’s Word for us. Judgment is never the last word in Scripture; salvation is always God’s final word. Even when God pronounces judgment on his people for failing to remain faithful, God always promises that he will restore his people through a saving remnant.

Paul writes to the church at Corinth that “God is not willing that any should perish.” In order for people to not perish, God must have a plan in place for people to be saved rather than to perish. God proclaims this plan to Abraham in Genesis 12 when God says that through Abraham he will bring blessing to all the families of the world. Our history is moving to this end: somehow, even though we don’t know how God will do it, God will use the remnant of his church to bring blessing to the world.

Even the Hebrew prophets, as well as Revelation, look for God to punish evildoers, they all picture the end of the world as a time when people from “the nations” will gather at Mt Zion to worship God when he brings his kingdom. As Brevard Childs puts it, Obadiah shares the overall biblical message of “the promise of God’s coming rule which will overcome the evil intent of the nations, even Edom, and restore a holy remnant to its inheritance within God’s kingship.”

The message of Obadiah, therefore, is not just the word of an anonymous prophet living back in 587 BC, but a word from the living God that history is in God’s hand. Obadiah assures us that God will provide justice and that one day we will all be gathered together in his kingdom. The Word always speaks, and when it does, it speaks of promise and reassurance. Amen.

The Psalms... And Anger?

January 2, 2024

This morning I want to ask two questions. The first is how God speaks through the Psalms. That is not as straightforward as you might think. The collection of Psalms, although one of the 66 books of the Bible, is distinct in one significant way from all the other 65 books in the Bible. The Psalms are not, in the first instance, God’s word to us, but are instead human words directed to God. Often times, the psalms are offered in praise to celebrate the wonders that God has performed. Other times, the psalms are prayers offered to God either in public worship or in private, asking for God to intervene in our affairs. 

But there is yet another kind of psalm, not one we usually chant in church or read for private devotions, but they are there none the less. The academic word for these psalms is “imprecatory”; a word that basically means, “I’m so angry!!” Perhaps the most egregious of these psalms comes out of Israel’s experience of exile where their anger erupts with a curse that God would take Babylonian babies and “dash them against the rock!” (Psalm 137:9). This eruption of anger leads to my second question: how does God’s Word speak to us when we are speaking words of anger and resentment to God? To put it this way, where is God’s Word to be found in psalms of anger?

Before answering that question, permit me one rabbit hole. I mentioned above that the Psalms are human words chanted in worship as a response to what God has done, or in anticipation of what God will do. The key word here is “response.” The Psalms are responses to what we know, experience, and expect from God. This is why the psalm we chant on Sundays is never listed as one of the Scripture readings/lessons. We chant the psalm, as did ancient Israel, as a response to God’s past actions recorded in the first reading. That response to what God has already done prepares us to hear God’s Word anew to us in the reading of the Gospel. This is just one of the many ways that our worship stays in continuity with the worship patterns found in the Bible itself.

But, as I say, not everything in the Psalms seems suitable for worship. This is why you will often find that the lectionary on any given Sunday might omit a verse from a psalm or jump around skipping some verses in the process. When this happens it is almost always because the lectionary wants to avoid an uncomfortable passage in the psalm. Let me give you one example. One of the best-loved of all psalms is Psalm 139 which has such memorable phrases as, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me… Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.” This is also the psalm where we read, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” 

But right in the middle of these loving pronouncements, the psalmist writes, “O that you would kill the wicked, O God… do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loath those who rise up against you?” And then the psalmist concludes – I truly don’t know how he could do this with a straight face – by saying, “search me, O God… see if there is any wicked way in me.” You mean, after a few verses of hating and loathing?

Well, here’s the point. We will chant this psalm this year on Sunday, June 2. Except, we will not chant verses 19-22 since the lectionary omits them. But here’s the bigger issue: even if we do not encounter what Rolf Jacobson labels the “I’m So Angry Psalms” in church on Sundays, the anger is still there embedded within the Psalms. And not just a few, either; Psalms 35, 69, 83, 88; 109; 137, 139, and 140 are all in the category of I’m So Angry.

So, what do we do with all this anger? How does God speak to us through the raw emotion of human anger? The first thing we can do is admit up front that the idea of God taking Babylonian babies and dashing them against a rock makes us all squirm mightily! I should also point out that although Jesus quotes from the Psalms more than any other book of the Old Testament, never once does Jesus quote from an imprecatory psalm. Not once.

However, they are still in the Bible and I’ve avoided for long enough trying to answer how God speaks through these psalms. My answer is in two parts. First, the anger expressed in the Psalms, as in life generally, is always a reaction to some evil or injustice that is taking place. In the case of Psalm 137, the psalmist is angry because the Babylonians had invaded their country, destroyed the Temple where they could worship God and make sacrifice for sin, and the Babylonians had cruelly uprooted the people of Jerusalem and exiled them to a country they did not know. The people living in exile were isolated and alienated from their homeland, from all that they had known, and from God. No wonder they were angry.

Anger, whether we find it in the Bible or in our own lives, is in some way a reaction against evil and injustice. At its best, anger is not petty resentment but indignation that injustice seems to prevail. To be angry about injustice is not a sin; anger can lead to sin, but of itself it is not sin. Indignation can lead in wrong directions, but it is at least better than indifference. So, where do we turn when indignation threatens to boil over?

Part 2 of my answer is to look at how God and Jesus deal with their own anger. Numerous times in the Bible we read that God is angry about human sin and disobedience. Jesus himself on a few occasions becomes angry; at the graveside of his friend Lazarus, Jesus becomes extremely angry. (The NRSV says “greatly disturbed,” but the word John uses is “anger” not “disturbed” in John 11:33, 38). Jesus’ response to Lazarus’ death and in other situations where Jesus’ anger leads him to do a miracle, Jesus always brings God’s healing to the source or cause of the anger. Not destruction, but healing. The same holds true of God’s anger over sin. The cross of Jesus Christ is the answer to God’s anger: not the destruction of sinners but healing, salvation and forgiveness.

In the final analysis, God’s Word speaks to us in our anger, the way God’s Word always speaks: by drawing us to the cross of Jesus Christ.

John

December 26, 2023

Oh wow, you’re probably thinking… Has there ever been a more obvious statement than that God speaks through the books of the Bible? Duh!

Ok, I agree with you. Of course God speaks through the Bible! But, can you tell me how God speaks through Obadiah? Or Haggai? Or, how about the Letter of James—that’ll get an argument going, for sure. Well, every now and then in this series we will take a look at some of the books of the Bible, both the familiar and the unfamiliar, to ask how God speaks to us in these books. Does God, for instance, say the same thing in every book? If so, why do we need 66 books? And if God speaks differently in each book of the Bible, how do all 66 books manage to testify to the one Word of God?

To introduce this subset of The Word Speaks, I want to ask this question: Why does everyone love the Gospel of John? I was recently asked by a colleague, “which is your favorite gospel?” Immediately, he added emphatically, “and don’t say the Gospel of John!” Why do so many people list John as their favorite book of the Bible? Why is the Gospel of John so frequently published on its own as a self-standing document? Can’t say I’ve ever seen Obadiah published separately as a way of gaining converts!

I think we can all agree that the Gospel of John is popular. But I want to suggest a few reasons why that strikes me as odd. For instance, even though the gospel starts with some of the famous words of the Bible, “In the beginning was the Word,” I find that to be a very abstract, philosophical way to begin a gospel. What does it even mean to talk about something called The Word that existed before time and space existed? Matthew and Luke, by contrast, start with the birth of the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. That’s a far more practical beginning: not in the heavens before time began, but here in this sinful world where we so urgently need God to find us and save us.

Here’s another curious thing about the Gospel of John. It consists mostly of the words of Jesus. Jesus talks in the other gospels, of course, but not like he does in John. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, by contrast, record the actions of Jesus. Mark, for instance, is concerned with recording the actions of Jesus that he includes very little of Jesus’ teachings. Completely missing from John’s account of Jesus life are such familiar stories as Jesus’ birth, his temptation, and his Transfiguration. And although Jesus’ baptism is mentioned, it is passed off in just a few words.

But in John, Jesus talks a lot!  For instance, John 6 records the miracle of Jesus feeding the 5,000 in fifteen verses. But John spends nearly fifty verses (!) with Jesus explaining what it means that he is “the bread of life.” 

Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel are also very stylized and poetic. Some translations such as The New Jerusalem Bible indent those verses in such a way that they look like poetry. The New Jerusalem Bible does this not only in chapter 6 but also in John 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, and 14-17. This Jesus really is different! 

But let’s leave all that aside and return to the question of why John’s Gospel is not just people’s favorite Gospel, but probably their very favorite book of the Bible.

John, in his gospel, places an exclusive spotlight on Christ and his divinity in a way that highlights what it means to believe in Christ in a way that no other book of the Bible does. J Christian Beker puts it this way: “The Gospel [of John] asks us only one essential question: Do you or do you not see the transparency of the divine in the human face of Jesus, and seeing it, are you transformed by the divine glory that has descended from heaven to embrace you and take you up into its radiance?” (The New Testament: A Thematic Introduction, p. 103.)

When we see how John highlights Jesus’ divinity, we get a very clear picture of how Jesus represents the triumph of God in this world. If Mark’s Gospel views the cross as Jesus’ human identification with our suffering, John’s Gospel shows us how Jesus triumphs over sin and death on the cross. Jesus’ statement, “it is finished” is God’s ultimate triumph. John 3:16, the I AM statements of Jesus, and Jesus’ bold declaration that “everyone who believes in me will never die,” make it very clear that John’s Gospel shows us a divinity that not only characterizes Christ “but will also be our destiny” when Christ returns (Beker, p. 107).

Perhaps it is not an accident that a gospel which opens with the Word of God should be so loved. Whether it’s two thousand years ago or today, people want to know, need to know, that God speaks. John wrote his gospel so that we could hear God. Put like that, you could very well say that The Word Speaks in John in a way not found in any other book of the Bible. The Word Speaks everywhere in the Bible, for certain, but it speaks most clearly, and personally, to us in John.

How I Discovered Faith

April 2, 2024

In last week’s column I drew attention to Luther’s addition of the word “alone” to St Paul’s claim that we are saved by faith—we are saved by faith alone, meant Luther, because there is no other possible way of salvation. Most Christians have taken Luther to heart and have made Paul’s affirmation in Romans 3 “the just shall live by faith” as the core for everything we believe. But even as Christians acknowledge the importance of faith, they don’t always agree about how to define faith. So, what exactly is faith? 

One of the questions about faith that emerged in early Christianity is whether faith is a set of beliefs or doctrines that we assent to (“faith in what” as the early theologians put it) or whether faith is a personal response to God (“faith in who” as they put it). To oversimplify a little bit, is it “faith” or “the faith”?

Another way that faith has been discussed throughout church history has to do with the relation between faith and reason: does reason inform our faith, does faith work in opposition to reason, or do faith and reason work together to create a kind of wholistic response to God involving both our will and our reason?

I was raised in a church tradition that was avowedly anti-intellectual and regarded reason and “higher learning” as hostile and antagonistic to faith. From an early age I always instinctively knew that was a silly approach to learning and reason: our reason and ability to think, learn, and ask questions is all part of the whole person that God created and declared “good.” Since an early age I was always looking to learn, and learn more, about God and the Bible. But faith always came first, for me. In the words of Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) in Faith Seeking Understanding, “I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand.”

The reason I have always given faith priority over reason is not because I think reason is bad or evil; reason is, however, inadequate and insufficient to bring us to God. As I tend to say at the drop of a hat, the most important thing Luther ever wrote is his explanation of the Third Article of the Creed, “I cannot by my own strength or reason believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him.” 

When I attended seminary, one of my textbooks was Diogenes (Dick) Allen’s The Reasonableness of Faith. What I can say now, but could not then—he was the professor of the class, after all, and I wanted to pass the course—is that reasonableness and faith should never, ever go together in the same sentence (even though I just put them in one). The other thing I didn’t tell Allen is that I was always more partial to Pascal’s dictum that “faith has its reasons of which reason knows nothing!” 

However, it was the title of his book that helped me formulate my view of faith: the opposite of faith is not so much reason as it “reasonable”; the notion that faith is somehow obvious, self-evident and can be reasonably apprehended by any good or common-sense person. No. It. Can’t. 

Faith is not reasonable; it is not detached or objective. Instead, it is passionate, committed, and involved; it is an all-or-nothing, take it or leave it, proposition. Which brings us, at last, to the topic of today’s column (I guess it’s not going to be a brief one): How I Discovered Faith. It’s a very personal story, and I don’t suggest for a minute that anyone else has to come to faith the way I did; this is simply a personal illustration of how I came to realize the personal, existential dimension of faith. 

It came courtesy of C S Lewis and the fourth (and my favorite) of his seven Narnia Chronicles, The Silver Chair. It’s fitting, I think, that my discovery about the nature of faith came, not through a book of doctrine or theology, but through fiction, something that appeals more to the imagination than to reason.

I first became acquainted with Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia when my fourth grade teacher, Mrs Voskuil, read one chapter to us of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, each day after recess. At the end of the school year, Mrs Voskuil gave us the chance to buy the whole set, and I went home and begged my parents for the money to buy them. As it happens, they were thrilled that I wanted to read Lewis, so I bought the whole set of seven books and have been reading them ever since.

I remember the day in question distinctly. We were visiting my grandparents in Binghamton, NY; it was a hot summer day, I was all by myself reading away. (Where everybody else was, or what they were doing, I don’t know; I just know that I was by myself reading). I knew, of course, that although the Narnia books were fiction they also depicted stories or characters found in the Bible. Most obviously, Aslan the Lion who rules the kingdom of Narnia was a depiction of Jesus. Similarly, in the story I was reading, I understood that when two children, Eustace and Jill, are sent by Aslan on a mission, and given signs to follow to keep them faithful on their mission, that their mission and their obedience to the signs corresponded to the way that our Christian life is a journey and that God has given us signs to follow to help us remain faithful to him on our journey.

The mission that Aslan gives Eustace and Jill is to find a prince who has been kidnapped by an evil witch who calls herself the Queen of Underworld (any guesses who that might correspond to?) One of the signs that Aslan gives Jill and Eustace is that they will know the Lost Prince because he will be the first one in their journeys who asks them “to do something in my name, the name of Aslan.” Because Jill and Eustace cannot accomplish the mission all by themselves, Aslan appoints a guide named Puddleglum.

Puddleglum is one of my favorite characters in all fiction. He is a wet blanket, someone who is always a pest, or a nag, or fussing about something or other. But in a pinch, he is the ideal guide, the voice of wisdom, and always seems to intuitively understand the right thing to say or to do.

And now we get to the crucial scene. Puddleglum, Jill and Eustace have found the Lost Prince but they have been led to think that he is mad, although he is in fact under a spell of the evil queen. In a terrifying moment, the prince begs Puddleglum and the children to release him from the evil spell by destroying the silver chair. The others are scared to death and resolve not to destroy the chair. But in a moment of frenzied despair the prince calls on them to release him “in the name of Aslan.”

While Jill and Eustace debate what to do, and what will happen next, Puddleglum tells them, “Aslan didn’t tell [Jill] what would happen. He only told her what to do.” So in spite of the potential danger, and not knowing what will happen next, they release the prince. Unexpectedly, however, at that very moment the witch comes in, and using all her powers of reason and persuasion, she tries to convince the prince, Puddleglum, Eustace and Jill that Narnia and Aslan are just a myth—there is no other world beside Underworld she tells them.

When they try to describe Aslan the Lion by saying that he is like, but greater than, a cat; she laughs. When they describe the sun and its brilliant light by saying it is like, but greater than, a lamp, she is again dismissive. All of this, she rightly concludes, is not proof of an Alsan, or a world above, or a kingdom called Narnia. It is nothing, she declares, but a myth.

It is at this point that Puddleglum becomes the star of the story and my faith-hero forever. He addresses the witch and says, “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder… But there’s one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things… Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

When I finished reading Puddleglum’s declaration of faith (that’s what it really is) I realized I was all soaking wet. Was I wet because it was a really hot day? Or was it simply that I had just encountered a character in a story who understood if life means anything at all, it means a total, whole-hearted, come-what-may commitment to God—even if God doesn’t exist!

I have known people who make decisions, and who approach Christianity, by adding up columns of pluses and minuses, who look for the upsides and the downsides and then see what decision most of the evidence favors. I’ve never understood that kind of faith; I don’t so much care whether God “exists” as whether God is with me. If he’s with me, there’s no point in weighing the scales of evidence. If he’s not with me, the weight of evidence doesn’t much matter. At least, that’s how it is with me.

It is not reasonable to stake my entire life and existence on whether Jesus’ death on a cross can somehow remove the sin of the world for all time in all places, and that the seal of baptism marks me with the cross as God’s child forever. But as Puddleglum would have it, I’m on the cross’ side even if there is no cross. When God’s Word Speaks, it calls for an all or nothing response, and we call that response faith.

In Stillness

February 20, 2024

I know, I’ve already done a column called “The Word Speaks… In Silence.” But this column is different, I promise. I know that a lot of times books and movies are re-released with only a different title in order to promote sales, but that’s not what I’m doing today. I also considered using a title with the words, “In the Still of the Night,” but that was used in 1956 by The Five Satins.

Speaking of songs and stillness, let’s turn to nearly everyone’s favorite Christmas carol which begins, “Silent night, holy night! All is calm, all is bright ‘round yon virgin mother and child.” We all believe that on Christmas night everything was still; the Word Himself was still, and surrounded by stillness, at his birth. But stillness in the life of Jesus is not limited to the night of his birth. Nine different times in Matthew, Mark, and Luke Jesus heads “to a deserted place” in order to pray and be with God in the stillness of his soul. 

Never was Jesus’ desire for both stillness and prayer more evident than on Maundy Thursday night when he went by himself to pray before his arrest. But perhaps he was never more still than on Good Friday. Just as Jesus was still on the night of his birth, he was still on the afternoon of his death.

We know that Jesus wasn’t moving on the cross; in that sense he most certainly was still. But he was still, also, in the sense of feeling alone and even abandoned. It was in that stillness that Jesus cried out, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” But in that stillness, even in that rejection, God’s Word spoke. The Word spoke to Jesus in the words of Psalm 22. In his stillness, Jesus prayed and heard God’s Word. In fact, he prayed the entire psalm from the cross, and never did meet stillness and prayer as it did at that moment.

We are now into the second week of Lent, a season that invites stillness, both in our worship and in our own lives. In a sense, Lent is the Sabbath commandment writ large: it tells us to just stop already and trust in God rather than in our own efforts. To reinforce this notion of rest, we take more notice of times for stillness in Lent, such as in our liturgy. More than at other times during the church year, there are a lot of still moments, times when nothing seems to be said or nothing seems to happen in our Lenten liturgy. 

When my son was doing field education as a seminary student, his pastor told him that when he came to the part of the Brief Order for Confession and Forgiveness that reads, “silence for reflection and self-examination” he should wait a full thirty seconds. What? That’s right the pastor replied, count to thirty. That, my friends, is a long time to be still in worship! And yet, do we not believe that God’s Word can speak to us even as God spoke to Jesus in his moments of stillness?

If I were designing a personality questionnaire, one of the first questions I would ask is, what are you afraid of? I suspect that if people are being honest, one of the things they fear most is silence. Witness how many people just cannot abide it; they will say anything as long as it fills the silence with noise. I think silence makes people uncomfortable because it leaves them alone with themselves—and what are they going to do with that? And I would suggest that silence is what makes prayer difficult for so many people. 

The last church I served had a prayer vigil in one-hour time slots that went from the end of the Maundy Thursday service to the beginning of the Good Friday service. It was difficult filling in all those time slots because an hour of prayer can be very difficult for people. We all want to hear from God, but maybe not if it means being alone, still, and silent waiting for God to speak. I’ve heard people say that they get bored after a couple of minutes of quiet praying; if we get bored with God, imagine how he might feel toward us?

Prayer is effective, though, only to the degree that any conversation is effective: there have to be moments for listening as well as for talking. Paul reminds us in his letter to the church at Rome that the Holy Spirit prays for us when we cannot find the words to pray. Perhaps we should take the Holy Spirit up on that more often and let the Spirit do the talking while we sit still. Prayer, like Lent, is a great time to realize the words of one of Luther’s favorite psalms, “Be still then and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:12). The Word always speaks, but it speaks most clearly when everything else is still.

How I Discovered Martin Luther

November 28, 2023

So, today’s topic is how I discovered Martin Luther, and by extension, Lutheran churches. Unlike most of you at Zion, I was not a cradle Lutheran; I wasn’t born into the Lutheran church. My earliest introduction to Lutheranism came—are you ready?—by watching Davey and Goliath.

Yes!! Early every Sunday morning in the mid the ‘60s, Davey and Goliath showed on a local TV channel (when the rabbit ears were working anyway—remember those?) and it was how I prepared to go to church. The most captivating part of the whole show, for me, was the glorious music that opened the show. What is that music?, I demanded of my mother, and she obliged me by saying it was a hymn by Martin Luther called “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” I can honestly say that was the first time I heard the name Martin Luther.

If you’re not familiar with this claymation series (by the same people that produced Gumby), Davey and Goliath was produced by the Lutheran Church in America. The first episode appeared in 1961 and the show lasted all the way until 1975. The show featured the Hansen family, particularly the young boy Davey and his pet dog Goliath. The Hansen family were Lutheran and went to church every Sunday. That didn’t keep Davey from getting into scrapes, however, but he was always rescued in one way or another by his faithful dog and then Davey’s dad would provide the moral to the story. Because it was the characters were explicitly Christian, the show was not afraid of addressing topics like God, prayer, faith, and death.

A few years later, we were living in Minneapolis, MN. The particular area where we lived did not have a good school system, so my parents sent me to Lutheran Church Missouri Synod parochial school. My parents had NO idea what they were setting into motion, or what it would do to my life, by sending me to Trinity First Lutheran Day School/Church, but a magic began then that has never waned. I attended Trinity First during my Confirmation years, so every Wednesday I had to recite numerous Bible verses and portions of Luther’s Small Catechism. I memorized more Bible verses in 1973—1974 than I have at any other time in my life! I still have my textbook for our second year of Confirmation, This is the Christian Faith, and I have held onto it it because those years were precious to me.

What mattered most to me was not the Bible memorizing or reading the Small Catechism, but my introduction to a whole new world where worship was concerned. The churches I grew up in had no liturgy and no organized approach to coordinating worship within a broader scriptural sense or with the calendar. More to the point, the churches I grew up in not only avoided liturgy, they ridiculed it and lampooned it as unChristian—Catholic, ya know? 

Trinity First, and people like Pastor Miller, saved me from that kind of silliness and they showed me the purpose and value of liturgical worship. For the first time, I began to get a sense of how Sunday worship was part of some bigger, larger framework that encompassed the Bible, church, and all of life. 

I still remember the day I took home a colored chart of the liturgical year and tried to explain to my parents how, for instance, the season of Pentecost was considered “ordinary time” in the church, in distinction from the “time of Christ” that dominated Advent through Easter. Oh well... 

(Now, if you’re wondering why my parents sent me to a Missouri Synod day school instead of some other private school, the answer is this: biblically the Missouri Synod holds to a very conservative, literalistic interpretation of the Bible that was is mostly compatible with the interpretation of most Evangelical churches. The difference between the Missouri Synod and Evangelicals is that Missouri weds their biblical convictions to a strong Confessional stance, meaning that their theology of grace has priority and is best defined by the Book of Concord, put together in 1577 a generation after Luther’s death. But that’s another story.)

Would you believe I still have that chart dated back in October 1974? Funny how things, little things, like that can have a lasting influence and importance. But I have one thing even more significant from time at Trinity First Lutheran. When our family moved from Minneapolis to Boston in late January 1975, in my final week at Trinity First Pastor Miller’s vicar, James Rivett, gave me a Bible with a message on the front page. I still have that page. (The Bible was ruined in a flood that engulfed our church basement, but that, too, is another story. But I kept the first page with its inscription). It’s dated January 24, 1975 and reads, “Dear Wes, may you continue to grow & share God’s Holy Word with all those you encounter. The Peace of the Lord Be With You Always” and is signed, Trinity First Lutheran Church, Pastor Fred M. Miller, and Vicar E. James Rivett.

Little did they suspect—or maybe they did?—that I would indeed be sharing God’s Holy Word as my life’s mission. Obviously, there were other theological developments that informed my life when I began to read more deeply in Luther’s works and the theology of other Lutheran scholars, but I think it must be one of God’s great mysteries that one of the most important introductions to God’s Holy Word could start in a Lutheran claymation cartoon and continue through to a Confirmation class. One way or another, God’s Word Speaks, and in my case, it began speaking in ways that have never let go.

In Silence

November 22, 2023

Hello Everyone,

Some of the best known, not to mention favorite, stories of the Bible are occasions when God speaks and something happens. For instance: God spoke—and the world came into being. In a way, that creation story is the ultimate story of God: he speaks and it happens. More important than God speaking to the stars or to the light is God speaking personally to us. That’s why the image of God walking and talking in the garden with Adam and Eve grips the imagination: don’t we all long to be able to do that with God?

But it wasn’t just Adam and Eve who spoke with God. Abraham did, too. And on numerous occasions, notably when God communicated his Promise to Abraham. Another favorite Bible story is God speaking to the boy Samuel in the Tabernacle.

One of my favorite pieces from Handel’s Messiah is the little chorus from Psalm 68:11, “The Lord gave the Word: great was the company of the preachers.” I have loved that chorus since I first heard it before I was a teenager and to this day, I wish it went longer—it lasts only a minute and a few seconds. But the bigger point remains: all God has to do is speak, and it happens.

Scholars have a phrase for this: Word Event. It means some spoken words carry the authority and the power to create their own reality. We find Word Events all over the gospels in stories of Jesus. When Jesus speaks the word of forgiveness, it happens; even as the words come out of his mouth, they create the reality of forgiveness. Perhaps the greatest single illustration of the effectiveness of Jesus’ words is in John’s Easter story. All Jesus has to do is say the word “Mary” and all Mary’s doubts and fears disappear.

But what happens when God doesn’t speak? That happens a lot, too. In the very long story of Joseph, which takes up most of Genesis chapters 37—50, God never speaks (after he gives Joseph his dream). Even though Joseph suffers any number of horrible things, God never speaks to reassure him. When Joseph is sold into slavery by his brothers, God is silent. When Joseph is thrown into prison by Pharaoh, God doesn’t say a word to Joseph that everything will work out okay. Finally, at the end of the story as Joseph reflects back over his many adversities and the cruelty of his own brothers, he is able to tell his brothers, “you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” Somehow, even in silence, God was present. Joseph never heard a word but, somehow, God was speaking, and God accomplished His purpose.

God’s most conspicuous silence, though, is in the Old Testament book of Esther. Perhaps you know this trivia question: what is the only book of the Bible where the word “God” never appears? Esther. The book of Esther recounts how God uses a woman named Esther to thwart a plan by someone in the court of a Persian king to destroy the Jewish people. This story recounts the origin of the Jewish festival of Purim, but it carries the deeper message that God is present to accomplish His will even when God cannot be seen or heard, and when His Word is silent. 

How confusing is that? Can God actually speak and be silent at the same time? That puzzled Elijah, too. Elijah was hiding for life inside a mountain cave, fearing that King Ahab and Queen Jezebel would hunt him down and kill him. Desperate for a word from God, Elijah listened for all he was worth. He listened for God on a mountain, he listened for God in the thunderstorm, and he listened for God in the blowing winds. The irony of this story is that God could always be relied on to speak on mountains, in the thunder, and out of the wind. But not this time. This time God was silent.

Then God spoke. Many of us grew up hearing that God spoke “in a still, small voice.” Another legitimate way to translate that is that God spoke in a voice “of sheer silence.” How can God both speak and maintain sheer silence? That is a mystery that surrounds God which we cannot answer. But here’s what we can do. We can trust—trust that God’s Word speaks… even in silence.

How I Learned to Pray

November 15, 2023

Hello Everyone,

I have been coming up with all kinds of ideas for this new series. I thought about another in the series, “By the Numbers” by looking at some 1:1s in the Bible. Then I thought about something altogether different called, “The Word Speaks… but in which translation?” But then a chance conversation (or maybe not by chance) with someone about prayer, led me in a whole different direction: how does God’s Word speak to us, and for us, in prayer. From there my mind wandered (it often does) to thinking about how I learned to pray.

I am immensely fortunate that I have been surrounded by prayer for my entire life. So, there is a very short and easy answer for how I learned to pray: I learned from others. Oftentimes, the people who pray have been as important to me as the prayers themselves.

I’ll start with the influence of my parents. Prayer was an ever-present reality at home, principally at the dinner table both before and after we ate. Of course, we prayed before we ate, but there was more after dinner. How many of you remember the Arch Books children’s Bible stories that Concordia (Missouri Synod!) printed back in the 60s? After dinner, dad would always read one of those Arch Books and then conclude with another prayer. 

I also learned the value and significance of prayer from my dad’s parents. I have told the story before (because it’s important) of the time my grandfather took me aside and told me that he and my grandmother prayed for me all the time. My face must have betrayed a look of “yeah, I hear that all the time,” whereupon my grandfather looked me in the eye and with all the earnestness he could summon, he added, “we pray for you more than you’ll possibly ever realize.” Both what he said and how he said that gripped me in a powerful way, and that grip has never loosened.

But my prayer life is not limited to family members. The history of the church is itself a treasure trove of prayer. Prayers that have come down to us through the church around the world represent the collected wisdom of saints who for two thousand years have lived faithful lives for God and expressed that faithfulness in their prayers. As Robert Wilken puts it in one of his books, what Christians teach us is confirmed by how they pray.

I have said this before, too, but the most important things in life bear constant repeating: one of the best treasure troves of prayer that God has made available to us is the Collects that we use as the prayer of the day in worship. The front of our worship book contains the Collects for every Sunday and every festival day of the church year, and you can do no better for your own personal prayers than consult the Collects in our worship book.

At a more personal level, there are four people who have had a very direct influence on my own prayers. The first person is the Rev Kenneth Jones who was on the pastoral staff of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church from 1963 until his death in 1996. His specialty was prayer, and his prayers became well-liked that the church opened a prayer line for people to call for a recorded prayer. At its peak, the line received over 500 calls a day. A collection of his prayers for each day (including February 29!) was published under the title, Lean Back on the Everlasting Arms. I rely on this book nearly every single day, and have used its prayers on many occasions. It remains my favorite source of inspiration for the prayers I write. 

The Rev Michael Brown was pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in NYC from 2009 until (I think) 2018, and I had the good fortune of meeting him a few times. He was a fabulous preacher, and he had a great way of praying before his sermons. Nearly all of his sermon prayers are a variation on this theme: “Gracious God, touch us, here in this moment and in this place, with the power of your Word and may it be your Word that touches us, and not my own.” For a while I used this same formula before giving my own sermons. 

Although I shifted away from this to using my prayer as a brief summary of the sermon, I nevertheless use Dr Brown’s model as the prayer I use every day in sermon preparation. Dr Brown is right—he got the idea from the Apostle Peter, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with that!—that our words are meaningless unless they are informed by the Word of Life, which is the only Word worth preaching. Dr Brown remains my model for prayer that enables me to write my sermons.

Most preachers precede their sermon with a prayer lifted straight out of Psalm 19: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” I used this prayer myself for a while. Sometimes I would smile, though, when saying it because I was more worried whether my words would be acceptable to the congregation hearing it than to God! On a more serious note, as much as I liked the idea of using scripture itself for my prayer, I was honestly looking for something more individual. And then I found it.

That takes me to the Rev. Tom Tewell who was the senior pastor of the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church from 1994 to 2005. And what a preacher he was! But here’s why he really matters to me: he ended his sermon prayers with this petition: “we ask this with (confidence/boldness/anticipation and so on), for we ask it in the strong name of Jesus.” And there it is. The first time I heard that it was like a sledgehammer hitting me. Wow, I thought, that’s it, that’s it! That’s what prayer is: it is the ability to be confident, expectant, and hopeful because prayer goes directly to God courtesy of the strong name of Jesus. Because the hope for every sermon is a personal encounter with God through his Word, my prayer before giving every sermon is offered in the only way that we can truly hope and be confident: in the strong name of Jesus.

But there is one more person I need to name who taught me how to pray. He wasn’t a pastor and he never wrote or published famous prayers. But he was as important as anyone for my prayer life. He was a very dear friend whose name I mentioned a year ago as one of those saints who entered the church triumphant in 2022: Henry Vander Plaat. It was through Henry that I met Michael Brown, and it was through Henry that I became familiar with the preaching and the prayers of both Kenneth Jones and Tom Tewell. Henry’s friendship was valuable to me in a great many ways, but perhaps none greater than as someone who taught me how to pray by introducing me to the ministry of those who pray in great ways.

The Word always speaks, but one of the most important ways it speaks is in prayer and through the saints of the church, past and present, who can teach us all to pray.

Jesus’ Passion Chronology

March 26, 2024

If there is anything we know about events in the Bible, it is often very difficult to date those events with great precision. That’s because time in the ancient world was less precise than it is for us. Even the division of time into weeks, let alone hours, was quite fluid in the ancient world. 

The world today observes a seven-day week but only because Christianity followed the Jewish observance of a seven-day week. At the time of Jesus, only Jewish communities observed a seven-day week. Greeks, for instance, divided their months into three ten-day periods and the Romans followed an eight-day week. But because Sunday, the day of Resurrection, is the all-defining, all-important day of the year to Christians, they followed the Jewish practice of a seven-day week in order to keep Sunday as the first day of the week. Once Christianity became legal in the Roman Empire, the seven-day week gradually replaced all other forms of the calendar.

Oftentimes in the ancient world, people dated events not according to a month and a day but by major events happening around them. One of my favorite examples of this is the prophet Amos who dates his calling to be a prophet not only by mentioning who was king at the time, but also by telling us it came “two years before the earthquake” (1:1). Luke similarly dates the birth of Jesus by listing the names of the Roman emperor, all the local kings and governors, and who was high priest (Luke 3:1-2).

So, with all this fluidity of ancient dating, is it possible to be absolutely precise in dating Jesus’ Passion to a 24-hour consecutive period that we call Maundy Thursday and Good Friday? It absolutely, positively is.

We’ll start with the obvious, that Jesus’ Passion occurred between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. We know, because all four of the Gospels tell us, that Jesus entered Jerusalem for his final week on Palm Sunday. Matthew, Mark and Luke record that Jesus taught in the Temple each day of Holy Week until he and his disciples took refuge in the upper room of a friend’s house. John tells us that they were hiding there (12:36) because a warrant for Jesus’ arrest had been issued.

So, how do we know that the events from the Last Supper until Jesus’ death occurred over twenty-four hours? Because the Gospel of Mark takes great care to tell us so. Mark, very precisely records the Passion events by noting the passing of time, in almost case in three-hour intervals. Here is how Mark tells time during Jesus’ Passion.

Mark 14:17

Thursday, 6:00 pm (for Jews, evening started exactly at 6:00 pm and day started exactly at 6:00 am). Last Supper.

Mark 14:26

Thursday night, Jesus and his disciples go to Gethsemane.

Mark 14:72

Friday 3:00 am, Peter’s denial and the second cock-crow. (Under Roman occupation, Roman military watches were aligned with cock-crows, and the second cock-crow was end of the second watch).

Mark 15:1

Friday, 6:00 am, Jesus is delivered to Pilate for judgment.

Mark 15:25

Friday, 9:00 am, Jesus is crucified.

Mark 15:33

At 12 noon, three hours of darkness descend.

Mark 15:34

At 3:00 pm, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Mark 15:42

Saturday, 6:00 pm, Joseph of Arimathea takes Jesus’ body to place him in the tomb. (In our reckoning, this would be 6:00 on Friday night, but for the Jews, day begins at 6:00 pm. This is why Jewish synagogue services always begin on Fridays at 6: it is the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath; i.e., Saturday).

So, there you have it. Every single event of Jesus’ Passion, except for the exact time of Jesus going to the Garden of Gethsemane, is spelled out explicitly in three hour intervals by Mark. Given Mark’s system, it is most likely that Jesus and his disciples went to Gethsemane at 9:00 pm and was arrested around midnight.

One final, chronological question. Given that Jesus’ Passion happens in 24 hours, how do we know that his Passion started on Thursday night and that it was Friday on which he died? That’s fairly simple, too. 

The best way to answer that is by starting with Easter. If there is anything we know, ANYTHING, about Jesus, it’s that God raised him from the dead on Sunday. That is simply the most basic, incontrovertible fact of the resurrection accounts in all four Gospels, the testimony of Acts, and the record of all early Christian worship. Easter is Sunday.

We also know that Jesus died on Friday because John is abundantly clear about this. The reason the Jewish leaders wanted to break the legs of the criminals and make sure they were dead by 6:00 pm was because the Sabbath began at 6:00 pm, the very moment for Jews when Friday becomes the Sabbath. Jesus, noted the Roman guard, was already dead. So, clearly Jesus died on Friday. Then all we have to do is go to Mark’s Gospel and see how all this fits into his very precise chronology beginning at Mark 14:17. 

The numbers from Mark 14:17 through Mark 15:42 speak quite clearly. The Word speaks, but even when it speaks chronologically, it always leads us to the cross!

666

February 27, 2024

I recently saw a Far Side cartoon by Gary Larsen that pictured the devil in hell furious with a painter who had just painted the entrance to the devil’s quarters. Somehow, the painter read the instructions upside down and painted the entrance 999 instead of 666. 

If there has ever been a number in the Bible that exercised more fascination (and not in a good way) over people, it is the number 666. Forget about 40 being a significant number with all those biblical stories that occur in 40 days or 40 years: 40 is nothing compared to 666. The number 666 is taken by many people to be a superstitious, even evil, number and it is used that way in all kinds of silly, ridiculous movies about the end of the world. But in addition to Hollywood’s silliness, there are also a great many Christians who have the idea that just before the world ends, some kind of creature will appear who has that number 666 literally stamped across his forehead and who will precipitate the end of the world.

All of this speculation about 666 takes us, of course, to that part of the Bible that Christians spend far too much time either, a) avoiding; or, b) obsessing over, namely, the Book of Revelation. Many people contend that Revelation is difficult to understand or decipher. Not so; not even close. The author tells us in the first five words of the book what it is about: “the revelation of Jesus Christ.” That is to say, Revelation is in the Bible for the same reason that everything else is in the Bible, because it reveals something about who Jesus Christ is. 

To read Revelation is to receive the assurance that God is in control of history and that in spite of our present suffering we endure on earth, God will ultimately vindicate his people, reward their faithfulness, and wipe away all our tears and sorrows in a heaven that will last with Him for eternity. And the reason we can be sure of all this is that Jesus Christ is the slain Lamb of God, and because he died on the cross, God will give him the final victory over sin, death, and the devil.

Now, part of this message about Jesus Christ is admittedly told with symbols and codes. There is a simple reason for this. When John wrote Revelation around the year AD 90, Christians were being severely persecuted by the Roman government, and so John wanted to reassure his readers that Rome, and all the evil that came out of it, would eventually be destroyed by God. Naturally, John could not identify the Emperor Domitian by name—that would only get more Christians sent to the lions. Consequently, John had to speak of Rome, its emperors, and its sinful ways, in a code language. Part of this code language is numbers.

The Jewish people, dating back into the period of the Old Testament, had always used numbers to signify special things. Two numbers in particular stand out: the number 7 and the number 6. The number 7 is the most important number in Revelation because it is the number for God. Seven is the biblical number for totality and completeness, the number that represents that which is ultimate and perfect. 

Seven is God’s number because it represents the totality and completeness of everything that is good, loving, and wonderful, just as God is perfect and is the ultimate expression of all that is good. In fact, seven is such a perfect number that there is only one way to express perfection better than the number 7 and that is by having three sevens. In a nutshell, seven is God’s perfect number and the ultimate in perfection for God is three sevens: 777.

Which takes us to the number 6. If 7 is the number representing God in his perfection, 6 is the number that represents humanity in all its incompleteness, its imperfection, and in its falling short of everything that God is. Where 7 represents God’s perfection, 6 represents human fallenness and inability to be like God. And in the same way that three 7s represent God to the nth degree, three 6s is the most extreme way of expressing all the ways that we as humans fall short of God. If 7 is God, 6 is the number for the would-be God, the want-to-be God, the try-to-be-but-can’t-be God. In a word, 6—and especially 666—represents God’s counterfeit.

That, of course, is the whole point to Revelation’s description of the anti-Christ. The Antichrist is a counterfeit Christ, a pretend Christ, someone who promises to give salvation and to solve all the world’s problems—but who, unlike the Lamb of God—does not embrace the cross as God’s solution to sin. When John, in Revelation 13:18, says that 666 is “the mark of a man,” John means exactly that: 666 is any man, any person, who claims to be the Messiah, but who defines his messiahship in terms of might and power, not in terms of the suffering of the cross.

There have been, and always will be Antichrists: John says so himself in his third epistle. What makes false messiah’s, Antichrists, so popular is that they offer the same message that Satan offered Jesus in the wilderness: a life totally apart from the cross. False messiah’s always offer a shortcut to God, they always offer an easy way around our own human sinfulness, and they always invoke the use of power, not of sacrifice, as the solution to any problem. That’s what makes them counterfeit to the real Messiah. And that’s why they are represented by the number 666.

When Revelation warns us not to be taken in by false messiahs, by people who are by definition 666, Revelation is telling us that God can only be known through the sacrifice of Christ’s death on the cross. Any other message, any other posturing, is fake. It is a counterfeit. And ultimately, says Revelation, our hope lies with God who, in the end, will expose the fakes and the frauds, and who will lead us home by the cross and Jesus Christ, the slain Lamb of God. The Word speaks, and even when it uses numbers, the Word always speaks the language of the cross.

Final Verses

January 30, 2024

Earlier in this series we explored how various biblical authors begin their works at chapter 1, verse 1 (obviously). Not surprisingly, they were all about beginnings. Genesis, as we all know, tells us that God was present at the beginning of creation. The Gospel of John begins even earlier, and tells us that before time even began God was there, too. The Gospel of Mark focuses his beginnings on the Good News of Jesus Christ, although he distinguishes several different beginnings to the good news. Jesus himself is the Good News, so in the most important sense, Jesus is the beginning. But that beginning was foretold by Isaiah and announced by John the Baptist. But the biggest surprise in Mark is that the Good News begins all over again every time we announce it.

So that got me to wondering about endings. If everything begins with God and his Word, Jesus Christ, is the same true of endings? Well, it depends. Sometimes a book of the Bible ends because its story ends; sometimes the ending is nothing more nor less than The End. An example of this is the book of Acts. Acts ends rather abruptly by saying that the Apostle Paul wound up in Rome and spent the next two years preaching the Gospel. The End! Some scholars have wondered if Luke ends Acts that way simply because he ran out of room on his scroll to fill in more of what Paul did in Rome. There is some evidence that Luke really did just run out of room. (Reminds me of a friend in college who had a take-home exam on FDR’s New Deal that could be no longer than three type-written pages. My friend got so carried away with the beginning of the New Deal that he ran out of room and scribbled at the very bottom of page 3, “and several years later the New Deal ended.” I was greatly amused by that ending, but the professor was not.) 

On the other hand, Luke notes that Paul proclaimed “the kingdom of God and [taught] about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and hindrance” (28:31) and since preaching with boldness is a major theme of Acts, maybe Luke simply ended by restating his theme. I for one, though, wish Luke had gone on to say more about Paul’s and Peter’s time in Rome and their martyrdom by Nero.

Speaking of the Apostle Paul, he has the most interesting final verses of any biblical author. All thirteen of the letters Paul wrote end in exactly the same way: with a benediction. Even Galatians ends with a benediction, so Paul must have had some love for all those troublemakers in Galatia! The benedictions themselves vary a little bit in length – some are quite elaborate and some are just four words (both in English and Greek).

Despite the varying lengths of these benedictions, all but one of them ends by wishing the recipients the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. (The only exception is Romans, but there Paul uses the word gospel as a synonym for grace.) I find this to be absolutely wonderful, that he would conclude every letter by passing on the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. One of the great contributions of Paul is that he was unique in the ancient world for the way he used the word grace. 

The word grace in the ancient world generally meant what we mean by the word graceful: something elegant, charming, or delicate. But Paul added a whole new depth of meaning to grace: not just elegance, but the very gift of God to save, to heal, to redeem, and to make us God’s children. Grace, for Paul, is the word that best defines who God is. Incidentally, it is because Paul was so intentional about the way he used the word grace, that I am convinced his use of the word in benedictions is not just a cute way of saying “good-bye,” or “sincerely yours,” but actually carries the full force of all Paul’s theological convictions.

So that you can get a good feel for Paul’s benedictions, here are a few examples including both the longer and shorter versions. Of course, you can always go and check out all thirteen for yourself: just go to the end!

Paul’s longest benediction is in his letter to the church at Rome (no surprise there, since this is Paul’s most theological letter):

Now to God who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed and through the prophetic writings is made known to all the gentiles, according to the command of the eternal God, to bring about the obedience of faith— to the only wise God, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever! Amen.

Here is one of Paul’s shorter, more typical benedictions found in his first letter to the church in Corinth:

The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. My love be with all of you in Christ Jesus.

In his second letter to the church in Corinth, Paul closes with the famous Trinitarian benediction:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

Finally, his personal letters to Timothy and Titus end simply,

Grace be with you.

Now, I have one more ending for you. Do you know what the very last words found in the Bible are? They’re in John’s Revelation which might make you think that the final verses would have something to do with the end of the world. Well, in a way they do; John’s final words about the one and only thing that matters in life or death, at the beginning of the world or at the end of the world. Here it is: 

The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen. 

How’s that for an ending? As I’ve said many times, God’s Word Speaks, and it always speaks grace.

1:1

December 12, 2023

I suppose the most famous opening line ever written is Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning.” It was such a good opening that John used it again when he started his gospel with the words, “In the beginning was the Word.”

Both Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1 invoke not just a beginning, but the beginning. And in both cases the beginning is about God. We don't know when the beginning was, but we know why it mattered; it mattered because God was in the beginning. God was at the beginning he was active in the beginning for our sake and the sake of the world.

Mark is another book of the Bible whose opening words in the first chapter and first verse invoke a beginning. His beginning though is slightly different from Genesis’ or John’s beginnings. Mark does not begin at the start of time, nor with the eternal existence of God. Mark’s beginning is more focused and more specific; it is “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Mark’s beginning has to do specifically with the good news that is proclaimed about Jesus Christ. But that begs a further question: what, or when, exactly is the beginning of Jesus’ good news? That is the question I want to examine for the remainder of this column.

There are a minimum of three possibilities for the beginning that Mark writes about.  (Actually, there are four, but I’m saving the fourth for a surprise ending!) The three possibilities present in Mark’s text are these:

1. Mark’s Gospel itself, the written document from start to finish, is the beginning of the good news;

2. Isaiah’s proclamation of comfort and release to the exiles is the beginning of the good news; or

3. John the Baptist’s appearance in the wilderness calling for repentance is the beginning of the good news.

It should be noted that all three of these Good News Beginnings focus on Jesus: Mark’s Gospel is the first written document to proclaim the good news of Jesus in his death and resurrection. Isaiah’s proclamation in chapter 40 can be considered the beginning of the good news in its promise of the coming of one who would reveal the glory of the Lord. And John the Baptist can also be considered the beginning of the good news because he himself was the voice crying in the wilderness that God’s Messiah had finally come.

As I say, all of those are legitimate options for understanding Mark’s beginning. Each of these options can also be found, or defended, in the way we punctuate the beginning of Mark’s Gospel. Biblical documents, when they were first written, did not include things like punctuation or the use of capital letters to begin a new sentence. The documents did not even contain spaces to separate words from one another. The task of adding punctuation, paragraphs and the like is the work of translators. 

Mind you, that doesn’t mean that the writers didn’t know how to write sentences! They knew that sentences had to contain a subject and verb, they simply did not put punctuation or capitals in the text, largely for the purpose of saving space on the pieces of parchment they were writing on. (Actually there is one exception: Paul. Poor Paul has the longest sentences you’ve ever encountered, mostly because he gets carried away with his topic, and things like subject and verb agreement just go out the window. If there is one place in the Bible that translators struggle with sentences and punctuation, it is with the Apostle Paul. But that’s another story). Back to Mark and his beginnings.

There are some translations of the Bible, such as the New Revised Standard Version that treat Mark’s opening not as the first words of the gospel but as the title for the whole gospel. Thus, the words “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” in 1:1 stand totally apart by themselves. There is then a large space on the page before verse 2 continues with the words, “As it is written in the words of Isaiah…” Where the NRSV is concerned, the beginning of the good news is a title for Mark’s gospel, but the promise of good news itself begins with the words written in Isaiah.

Notice, however, the way that the New International Version punctuates Mark so that the prophecy of Isaiah is the beginning of the good news by using a comma rather than a period to separate verses 1 and 2:

“The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, 2 as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:

3 “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way”—

“a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’”

The NIV begins verse 4 with the words, “And so John the Baptist appeared” which is a clear way of indicating that John the Baptist is not doing something new, he is simply following through on what is written in Isaiah.

For those who wish to see the appearance of John the Baptist as the beginning of the good news, the best argument for that would be to say that Mark’s real focus in chapter 1 is on the preaching and baptizing of John that, in fact, prepares the way for Jesus’ appearance and his baptism by John.

As I say, all three of those options are possible as ways to understand the beginning of the good news. All of those options depend, to some small degree, on how we interpret Mark’s words and his entire gospel. And that leads me to Option #4, my surprise option. WE have an important place in the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. We are important to the beginning of the good news in two ways. First, as I have already described, we have a role in the beginning simply by the way that we read, interpret and understand what Mark has written.

But second, and more fundamentally, in Mark’s view, we as disciples of Jesus Christ are the successors to Jesus’ first disciples. We are therefore just as important in the proclamation of the good news as were Peter, John, and all the rest.

Just as Mark wrote his gospel for a world that had not yet heard of Jesus Christ, and felt compelled to tell the world about Jesus’ good news, so we too face a world that does not know Jesus Christ. For those who have never heard of the good news, if they are ever going to hear of it, it must begin with us.

1:1’s in the Bible are invariably about beginnings and the way God has always been present since the beginning. But Mark 1:1 is about telling the good news, the Word of God. The Word definitely speaks by the numbers, such as in Genesis 1:1; John 1:1; and Mark 1:1. The Word speaks, and it starts with us at 1:1 and the life we begin anew each day. Amen.

3:16

November 8, 2023

The most familiar verse in all the Bible is without a doubt John 3:16, and with good reason. But there are a lot of 3:16s in the Bible, some of them instructive and valuable. It is striking just how many 3:16s in the Bible catch our attention. What’s curious about, though, is that no biblical author realized they were writing a “3:16.” No one said, “oooh, I’m coming to verse 16 of chapter 3, I’d better make this profound!” No author included chapters and verses in their writings; those didn’t until much later, not until the 13th century. (The whole matter of chapters and verses is interesting, too, but we’ll save that history for another time). My question for today, though, is whether all the 3:16s in the Bible carry the same weight or whether some are more crucial to our faith than others. 

So, let’s look at some 3:16s in the Bible and see what they offer. We’ll start in the Old Testament with 1 Chronicles 3:16. This verse comes smack dab in the middle of a four-chapter long genealogy and just like the verses that come and after it, the verse reads, “The descendants of Jehoiakim: Jeconiah his son, Zedekiah his son;”. Right. I’m sure it’s interesting for historical reasons, but it’s never going to make my “favorite five list” and it doesn’t exactly light my faith on fire. Let’s keep looking.

Galatians 3:16 is a significant verse in the Bible because it is part of Paul’s explanation of justification. This verse is part of a larger discussion about how the church receives, through Christ, all the promises that God originally made to Abraham. Here’s the verse: “Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring; it does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ as of many, but it says, ‘And to your offspring,’ that is, to one person, who is Christ.” As important as this verse is to Paul’s theology of justification by faith, the verse doesn’t really stand alone; it requires some additional explanation. For instance, some explanation is needed to explain why the distinction Paul makes between “offspring” and “offsprings” is so important. So, let’s keep looking for the one verse, the one 3:16, that makes it all happen.

Leviticus 3:16 is part of a long section of material that describes how God’s people were to bring their offerings for well-being, for purification, or to receive forgiveness from God. The specific offerings described in Leviticus chapter 3 are animals. When people made their sacrifices to God, they brought animals to the priest who killed the animal and then burned the fatty parts of the animal’s meat on the altar. Once the offering has been brought to the priest, we read, “Then the priest shall turn these [fatty animal parts] into smoke on the altar as a food offering by fire for a pleasing odor. All fat is the Lord’s.” Interesting to be sure, but it’s not very likely that we’re going to start burning animal fat in church on Sundays. There are other ways to create a pleasing odor, and there is a different way for us to receive forgiveness for our sins besides burning fat. And that takes us directly to John 3:16.

There is a reason that Lutherans stand for the reading of the Gospel in our Sunday worship services. We stand for the Gospel because God’s Good News comes to us directly from Jesus Christ. And that’s what makes John 3:16 so powerful. It is everything we need to know about God’s love for this world, and how that love comes through his Son, Jesus Christ. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.” God’s Word really does speak.

Psalm 51 and Our Heart Condition

March 19, 2024

Psalm 51, especially verses 11-14, has been at the forefront of our Lenten worship this year. Psalm 51 is considered the premiere penitential psalm, and it is therefore entirely appropriate that it should be present throughout Lent. We began Lent on Ash Wednesday with Psalm 51, and we will mark the transition from Lent to The Three Days (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday) with Psalm 51 at the beginning of the Maundy Thursday worship. The first fourteen verses of Psalm 51 were one of two psalm options for the 5th Sunday in Lent, and on top of all that, we at Zion sing verses 11-14 every Sunday in Lent as our offertory (Create in Me).

There are a great many things of interest in Psalm 51, but one that has always intrigued me is the wording of Psalm 51:11, “renew a right spirit within me.” (Incidentally, English and Hebrew numbering for the psalms differ, so in some translations 51:11 might instead be 51:10). At least, that’s the wording in the King James, RSV, and NRSV. But what exactly is a “right” spirit? The opposite of a “wrong” spirit? Right and wrong, however, are not usually words applied to the human spirit, or the human will. So, I’ve been wondering, what exactly is David asking God for in this psalm, and how is it a necessary corrective to David’s heart condition?

The first thing I did was to check out some other translations to see how they understood the word “right.” Here are some of the translations I found for Psalm 51:11.

Renew a right spirit within me—KJV, RSV, and NRSV (although the NRSV has a footnote that an alternative for “right” is “steadfast spirit”—as always, the NRSV puts the better translation in a footnote rather than in the text itself).

Make me faithful again—Contemporary English Version

Renew within me a resolute spirit—New Jerusalem Bible

Renew a steadfast spirit within me—NIV. I checked out Martin Luther’s translation for Psalm 51:11, which is in keeping with the NIV. Luther uses the German word beständigen which would translate as steadfast spirit.

I always check out Eugene Peterson’s The Message because it is so unpredictable—sometimes it offers a wonderful translation; other times, as in Psalm 51:11, it is too clever by half, and even a bit silly: shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.

Well, with all that variety, it seemed like a good thing to check out the Hebrew word, which happens to be kûn. The word appears almost 300 times in the Old Testament with about five different connotations. That really  helps, doesn’t it? But not to worry. At its most basic, the Hebrew word kûn refers to something that is firmly established. Sometimes it is connected to God’s creative power: when God creates or makes things, he firmly establishes them.

A further connotation of something being firmly set or established is that it is steadfast, reliable, and faithful. This is the basic meaning in Psalm 51:11. The whole problem with King David and his sins (note the plural: there wasn’t just one sin, there were many sins David perpetrated before for his confession of Psalm 51) is that his heart had been unfaithful to God and had lacked a steadfast reliability to keep God’s law. David had a bad heart condition because his heart was not faithful or steadfast. What David needed, therefore, was for God to give me a new heart, a new spirit, that would be steadfast and faithful.

That’s why Psalm 51 is so important in Lent—or for that matter, our entire Christian life. The reason Jesus had to die on the cross was to fix our heart condition, because it is above all things faithless before God. Christ went to the cross to fix that and give us a new heart, a new spirit, that would be faithful to him and as steadfast as the rest of God’s creation. Because of sin, only God can fix our heart condition, which is why he went to the cross, and it is why we pray Psalm 51 on Maundy Thursday, the night Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper and the night of his arrest before he went to the cross. God’s Word Speaks, and when it does, it always leads us to the cross where God makes all things new for us. Amen.

Remember

March 6, 2024

Good morning Folks,

One of the most common invocations found in the Old Testament is the plea for God to “not remember” someone’s sin. Psalm 25 is typical. In verse 5, the psalmist pleads with God to “remember… your compassion and love” and in the following verse, the psalmist cries out, “remember not the sins of my youth and my transgression.” There are also times when God declares that he will remember Israel’s sins no more. This sentiment is expressed particularly in the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, and it reaches its apex in God’s promise to Jeremiah that he will provide a new covenant. In those days of the new covenant, says God, “I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34).

That’s pretty good news, isn’t it? And pretty straightforward, too: the word remember simply means “remember”; there is no other translation you’ll find in the dictionary for the Hebrew word zakar than remember. Nevertheless, I would like to propose a different translation for passages like Jeremiah 31:34. But first, a little digression…

Of the 53 times that the word remember is used in the Old Testament of remembering for good or for ill, all but four are used of God remembering or not remembering. Frankly, I have always been bothered, even when I was a child, by the notion of God not remembering our sins and needing to remember to be good to us. As much as I might like the idea that he would not remember my sins, I’ve never been comfortable with the notion of a God who forgets. A forgetting God does not sound very reliable, at best. If he can forget my sins, what else is he going to forget? And at worst, a God who forgets sounds a bit dangerous.

One of the reasons God gave us a memory is for our own protection: we need to remember, we must remember, when bad things are done against us so that they are not permitted to happen again. To forget the sins of an abuser is not a good thing; abuse is criminal, it should be remembered and stopped by the courts, not forgotten. To forget is to invite more of the same injustice. While it might be convenient for God to forget my personal transgressions, the idea of a God who forgets abuse and injustice is not a comforting thought.

So, how are we to understand passages like Jeremiah 31:34 where God promises to forget? The key to the translation is that Jeremiah 31:31-34 is to consider the meaning of God’s covenants. A covenant is a legal arrangement, a binding legal contract between God and God’s people summarized in the words, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” A covenant stipulates the ways that God will keep faith with his people, just as a covenant stipulates how God’s people must keep faith with him. As we are fully aware, God manages the “I will be your God part” but we have never managed to keep the “I will be your people” part.

In spite of what God has done for his people, their behavior is always characterized by sin and disobedience. God, therefore, puts his people on trial and punishes them for breaking the covenant. Passages where God puts Israel on trial are called “covenant lawsuits.” Covenantal lawsuits are rampant throughout the prophets, and examples can be found all over the place. Just a few examples include Isaiah 1:18-20; Jeremiah 2:1-8; 23:16-22; Hosea 4:1-6; 12:2-14; and Micah 6:1-5.

In a number of these covenantal lawsuits, such as the one in Jeremiah 2, the language of remembering is always present, and it is the legal context of the covenant that provides the word “remember” with a distinctive meaning. In the context of the covenant, to not remember our sin “means a valid verdict of not guilty at the Last Judgment.” In the same way that forgiveness means a legal pardon, “‘no more remember’ is a legal term which really means no longer bringing the evil thing before any court of law; it means dropping the case once and for all” (Hans Walter Wolff, Confrontations with Prophets, Fortress, 1983, p. 59).

When Jeremiah reports God saying of the new covenant, “they shall all know me,” he means, “they will live on the strength of an intimate contact with me, they will acquire immediate and reliable insight into my ways, and they will experience complete, living fellowship with me” (Wolff, 58). This complete, living fellowship, however, is only possible once God has dropped his lawsuit against us. The promise of the New Covenant accomplished by Jesus’ death on the cross means that Jesus has taken on our punishment and suffered the sentence we should have received. Since the legal debt has been paid, there is no more case.

This is the sense in which the prophets can say that God will remember our sin no more: Jesus Christ has won for us a verdict of not guilty and the charge can never be brought against us again. Ever. So, if I were translating Jeremiah 31:34, it would end by saying, “I will forgive their iniquity and I will drop all charges against them. They are now and forever Not Guilty.” When God speaks, he speaks not with amnesia, but with the full awareness that His Word is always a Word of grace. Amen.

Bible Verses

February 6, 2024

The first thing to say about today’s edition of The Word Speaks is that this is entirely personal: it’s about my favorite verses! The thing about favorites—favorite anythings—is that we can turn to them when we need help getting through a difficult patch. There’s a reason we call our favorite foods “comfort food.” Comfort food is exactly what it claims to be: food that brings us comfort when we need it. The same holds true with a favorite story, a favorite poem, or a favorite piece of music. We turn to them when we need strength or renewal. Favorites are like old friends: they’re what we turn to when we don’t know where else to turn. 

That’s what the following verses are: they are some of my personal favorites. (I have other favorite verses beside these, but I need to save them so I can write another column!) These are not a collection of “the Ten Most Important Verses,” nor are they “Verses For Building Doctrine,” and they are not “Verses In Support Of…” No, these just happen to be some of my personal favorites that keep me going and remind me that God is God. That is all the comfort I really need. So, in no particular order, here are some favorite verses. 

If God be for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31).

My senior year in college I was a copy editor for the yearbook. The yearbook staff for the previous year had missed every single deadline for the whole year and nearly given the faculty rep an ulcer. So, we were a whole new staff and the new editor was determined to NEVER miss a deadline and worked the rest of us to the bone. (It didn’t help that none of even had yearbook experience, but that’s another story). 

This is the year I went 57 straight hours without sleep just so we could complete a dumb deadline. Anyway, during this span of sleepless hours I put a sticky on the wall beside my desk that quoted Romans 8:31 with its rhetorical question, If God be for us, who can be against us? Later that day I went back to my desk and discovered that the other copy editor did not consider Romans 8:31 to be rhetorical, and he had added this to my sticky note: Almost everyone! The great thing about that sticky is that both sentiments are entirely true. Almost everyone is (or can be) against us, but that doesn’t matter. The assurance of Paul is that God is with us even when everyone else seems aligned against us.

There is a man (Daniel 5:11). The fuller version of this verse reads, Do not let your thoughts terrify you or your face grow pale. There is a man in your kingdom in whom dwells the spirit of the living God. (New English Bible)

The story behind this quotation is Belshazzar’s Feast, the dinner banquet with the famous handwriting on the wall. The story is recounted in Daniel 5. At this point in time, Daniel is in retirement after many decades of service to Babylonian kings. The current king, Belshazzar is presiding over an empire that is about to be toppled, but he is completely indifferent to his fate and the reality around him, so he throws a party to end all parties. During this party, a hand appears and writes some strange words on the wall. Neither Belshazzar nor anyone at the party knows what the words mean: not the king, not his advisors, not his counselors, no one. Meanwhile, the queen mother (who was not invited to the party) hears what’s going on and heads down to see for herself. It is when she sees the inability of anyone to understand the writing on the wall that she tells Belshazzar, there is a man.

I heard a sermon on this text when I was twelve or thirteen years old, and I have carried Daniel 5:11 in my heart ever since. It is a kind of motto for my own ministry, a promise that God has decided (no matter how foolishly) to use me. The point to the text, of course, is not the masculine pronoun—it just so happens that Daniel was a man. The real point here is that God always—always—has an appointed person to speak for God. That might actually make the best paraphrase of the verse: God always appoints a certain someone to speak God’s Word. God never leaves himself without a witness. As Jesus reminds us, if nobody else will do, God can make the stones speak for him. Nevertheless, I think God prefers to use humans. 

This verse works two ways for me. First, it is a reassurance that God is never totally silent. There may be periods where it seems like God is silent, where God is not speaking, but God will never miss the right opportunity to appoint someone to speak his word. The second way Daniel 5:11 works for me is that it reinforces all the other verses in Scripture that convey the urgency God gives to all whom he has called to proclaim his word. Amos puts it this way: The lion has roared: who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken: who can but prophecy? St Paul puts it this way when he writes of his own preaching ministry to the church at Corinth: Necessity is upon me; woe is me if I preach not the Gospel. God’s call to proclaim his word is not a casual word, it is an irresistible call, just as his Word is an irresistible Word.

Part of the ordination of a pastor is what we call “the laying on of hands,” the moment when all the gathered clergy place their hands on the head of the ordinand (or as close as they can get to the person’s head!) which is the biblical order (in both testaments!) for the conferral of spiritual authority. A friend of mine once described the laying on of hands as both the weight of God’s call and the support that God gives to those he has called. He was right. Having dozens of people leaning on your head is a very weighty experience, indeed. On the other hand, God is also letting us know that his hand holds us up and gives us strength and support.

Behold, I will do a new thing (Isaiah 43:19).

Several times in Isaiah 40-55 God announces that he will do a new thing. Honestly, if I were to choose a portion of the Bible that has the best collection of favorite verses, I would be hard pressed to choose between Isaiah 40ff and Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. I suspect that Isaiah might even beat Romans (heresy!), and one of the reasons for this is God’s repeated promise to do a new thing.

God doing a new thing, by the way, does not mean that the other things God has done are only so-so, and now he’ll finally do something good. The real point to God’s promise to do a new thing is the element of surprise; what God intends to do next is so wonderful that we can’t even guess at how good it will be. God is many things but one thing he is for sure is a God of Surprises.

A fun game to play with Scripture might be to list all the times in the Bible that God pulls a big surprise. Think Pharaoh wasn’t surprised when his army was swallowed up by the Red Sea? Think Mary wasn’t surprised by Gabriel’s visit (not to mention the surprise Joseph got)? There are, of course, a great many more surprises but the greatest surprise of all is what lies ahead, and this is why the Bible closes with God’s promise to do something new when Christ returns again. 

John tells us that when God unveils heaven, he will wipe every tear from [our] eyes [and that] death will be no more; mourning and crying will be no more. God then declares, Behold, I am making all things new! 

God is indeed saving his greatest surprise for the end, and given the other surprises he has had in store for us, I can only wonder what remains. But that’s what favorite Bible verses are for: the Word always speaks, and when it does it most decidedly speaks a new thing.

Pectoral Crosses

January 12, 2024

Today’s column is a bit personal because I want to say a few words about the crosses I wear on Sundays during worship. Although the clergy in many church denominations do not wear pectoral crosses during worship, almost all Lutheran clergy do, and I certainly have always made a point of doing so. The reason is simple, but always worth pointing out: we believe that the cross is central to everything that occurs in worship, and it needs to be seen as well as talked about.

Mind you, I don’t go to the extremes that some early Christians went to when it comes to venerating the cross. One of the most important records of early church worship comes to us from a woman named Egeria, a Spanish nun who went on numerous pilgrimages and kept an extensive diary of everything she saw and did. Of great significance is her record of worship during Holy Week at six different churches around Jerusalem sometime around the year AD 430 (unfortunately, we cannot date her any more precisely than that). During her Holy Week observations she mentions that although pilgrims were welcome to come and pay homage to the cross, the cross was heavily guarded to keep people from touching it. The reason, she tells us, is that in the past Christian pilgrims were so eager to get a piece of the cross that they would pretend to kiss it but, in fact, would take a bite out of it just to have a piece of it. 

As I say, I don’t quite go that far with my own crosses, but I nonetheless take good care of them and, more importantly, always have some reason for choosing to wear one cross and not another. I don’t have rules about this, but I try to select a cross that is in some way fitting for a particular Sunday.

The first cross I bought is one constructed of horse nails. The size of the horse nails, and therefore the cross, is rather stark and ominous, so I always wear it on Good Friday and any other Sunday where the readings stress the way the cross and suffering go together.

Of all the different types of cross, my favorite is the Jerusalem cross. This cross is so-named because of Jesus’ words to the disciples in Acts that they are to spread the gospel, starting in Jerusalem and taking it to the four corners of the world. Consequently, the Jerusalem cross is one large cross with four mini crosses, one for each corner made by the larger cross.

I have two Jerusalem crosses. The first was a gift from a parishioner in my first church, Bethel Lutheran in Trenton. This particular cross is made of silver and is one I value because the person who gave it to me, Joe, was a wonderfully supportive and helpful person in my congregation.

The second Jerusalem cross was a Christmas gift from my son a few years back and is made of wood from Olive trees in Bethlehem. Because of the connection with Bethlehem I tend to wear this cross during the Christmas or early Epiphany seasons.

I have a second wooden cross, one that is just about as simple and plain as can be. This, and the cross made from horse nails, are the first two crosses I bought when I was ordained. Because of the simplicity of this cross, I tend to wear it for church Sundays that emphasize the common, unpretentious ways that God’s Word can reach our hearts during the course of an ordinary day. In keeping with the simple, ordinary way the Christ-child came to us in a manger, I wore this cross in Advent.

The cross I wear for most festival services is a cross of black onyx that Judy and I bought when we were at the Vatican during a visit to Italy (in 2012). I have a dear friend who is a monsignor at St Michael the Archangel in New Jersey and I was honored to have him bless the cross for me.

I also have a couple of crosses that Judy got for me. The first is the Luther’s Rose cross, a cross that has Luther’s rose in the center. I always wear this on Reformation Sunday, but because the center of Luther’s rose is a heart, I also wear this cross on Sundays that emphasize the amazing extent of God’s love for us.

Another cross that Judy bought me is made of silver and has what, for all the world, looks like three wrappings, or paper clips, going around the crossbeam. People are always asking me what that means, so I’ve come up with two answers that sound half-way intelligent. One possibility is that the three wrappings around the cross could be an allusion to Jesus’ shroud that was placed under his head in the tomb. Another possibility, though, is that the three whatever-they-are symbolize the Trinity. In my mind, either or both could be the case, and I often wear this cross during Lent.

Along with all these crosses, I have a very straightforward Latin cross that serves as a kind of all-purpose cross. I often wear this at funerals and on many of the Sundays during the season of Pentecost.

Finally, I have a gold (well, gold plaited) cross that came from Abiding Presence Lutheran Church in Ewing, NJ, which was my sponsoring congregation throughout the ordination process. Once the date of my ordination was set, Pastor Whitener invited me to preach at Abiding Presence before I left to take my first call. I realized on that Sunday that I had no pectoral cross to wear, and so Dan gave me one that was on hand at the church. The Gospel text that Sunday was Jesus calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and I’ve often wondered whether that text was prophetic for my ministry? Anyway, it’s great to have a cross from a congregation that helped nurture my faith so significantly.

Throughout most of my ministry, I’ve had to keep my crosses stuffed in a drawer in my church office and then rummage around to find the one I wanted on a given Sunday. Fortunately, I don’t have that problem any more. Dale Sheets was very kind to build me a shelf with pegs for my office from which I can hang each of my crosses. But most important of all, the cross is what defines my ministry, my call, and my life, so these and all crosses are ways that God’s Word can speak to us and call us by name.

Below is a picture of the crosses in my office:

Sword

January 23, 2024

Of all the physical objects in the universe, I can’t think of one that has a greater mystique than swords. For some reason they tend to be identified with valor, nobility and greatness. I had a pastor friend whose greatest family heirloom was the sword his great-grandfather carried into battle in the Civil War.

Literature is filled with examples of magic swords that can guarantee great things if only the right person can wield it. Think: Excalibur and all the legends surrounding King Arthur (including Disney’s The Sword and the Stone.) And what about the swords in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The really great swords have their own names, they shine to alert its owner that bad guys (the orcs) are in the area, and they always carry the promise that the one who wields the sword will do great and noble things with it. 

I have to admit that swords have always fascinated me. When I was in high school I asked the phys ed department to offer fencing. Why? Because I wanted to be like Errol Flynn. As it happens, the phys ed department had foils but were afraid to put them in the hands of students, so my request went nowhere. Oh well, I can always pretend, and one of my favorite scenes in all of opera features a hero (Siegfried, of course!) who forges a sword named Needful that will carry him on to feats of greatness, like killing the dragon the Fafner. 

Well, enough of that. Swords also feature prominently in the Bible. If you’re wondering, how prominent, would you believe the word sword appears 463 times in the Bible? For instance, the Angel of the Lord carries a sword—and not just any old sword, but a sword of fire, both when he seals off the Garden of Eden and when he appears to Balaam.

Most of the time, a sword is just a sword, a weapon used in combat. There are also times, though, when sword is used as a metaphor for God’s judgment; when the prophets want to warn God’s people of judgment, their favorite metaphor is that God will send the sword.

But by far the most interesting use of sword in the Bible is its identification with the mouth, or the word, of God. When God commissions his Suffering Servant to speak to Israel, the Servant says that God “made my mouth like a sharp sword” (Isaiah 49:2). The notion that God’s word functions like a sword inspired the author of Hebrews to write that God’s word is a two-edged sword that is able to cut through to the intentions of the human heart (Hebrews 4:12).

The Apostle Paul also uses this metaphor when he describes the battle armor of God. Using the analogy of a Roman soldier dressing for combat against a foe, Paul enjoins Christians to put on the armor of God in order to defeat the wiles of the enemy, Satan. Most of the armor is defensive in nature, but the one weapon of attack that Paul identifies is the sword of God’s Word (Ephesians 6:17).

The author of Revelation uses this same analogy twice. He uses it to describe the final conflict between God’s Messiah and Satan where the Messiah, Jesus Christ, is pictured as having a sword come out of his mouth. The inference is clear that it is God’s Word, and God’s Word alone, which will finally defeat Satan (Revelation 1:16; 19:13). John also uses the metaphor of sword and word of God to offer encouragement to the church at Pergamum in this way: “These are the words of him who has the sharp two-edged sword… You are holding fast to my name, and you did not deny your faith in me” (Revelation 2:12, 13).

So, what do we get when we combine these New Testament references that speak of the Word of God as a sword? What strikes me is that they all have to do with faithfulness: God’s faithfulness to us in defeating evil and our faithfulness to God by obeying his Word. This becomes especially clear when we link these references to the Word as a sword with what I regard as the single-most important statement in all the Bible about God’s Word: that human beings do not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. 

What I find most telling about this statement is the way that Jesus quotes this passage from Deuteronomy 8:3 when he is battling Satan in the wilderness. God’s weapon of choice against the Enemy is his own Word. Not only does God’s Word defeat Satan, God’s Word is what allows us to stay faithful to him. This is the key to the verse in Hebrews about God’s Word penetrating to our hearts. God’s Word is what saves us from Satan, and it also is what enables us to remain faithful to God. The Word always speaks, but never does it speak more decisively or more conclusively than when it speaks like a sword.

"Spiritual" Music and the Doctrine of Creation

January 16, 2024

Because I regard music as one of God’s greatest gifts to the world, I hope to write several entries about how God speaks to us through music. My interest today, though, has to do with what makes music “spiritual.” I put the word spiritual in italics because when I was growing up, the churches I was familiar with engaged in constant battles over what kind of music was appropriate for church and what music could be called “Christian,” and by extension, I guess, “unChristian” or secular.

So, today I want to give you my own take on how music is spiritual. The absolute starting point for any discussion of music has to be creation. God called all of his creation good in Genesis 1, and music is unquestionably a part of God’s creation. James in his epistle reminds us that “all good gifts come from our Father above.” Not only is music a gift, so is the ability to compose it and the ability to perform it. Like all aspects of God’s creation, the gift can be put to bad or wrong uses, but the gift itself still comes from God. Just because some music is bad doesn’t mean that all music is bad; it just means that God’s gift can be put to bad uses.

The other thing to say about music and creation is not just that it is good, but that it is a reflection of the very God who gave it. Because God is the author of music, music must inevitably reflect something about the author who created it. Music, like all of God’s gifts, makes a reflective shine that points back to its author. In the same way that a piece of music written Beethoven somehow always sounds like Beethoven, music that comes from God always reflects an essential aspect of the creator: his goodness, his majesty, his power, his beauty, and so on.

Now that we’ve tackled the doctrine of creation, let’s ask, what makes music spiritual? One answer I’ve already given: music is spiritual when it reflects its ultimate author. A second answer would be: if it’s written specifically for church use. The most obvious example of this kind of spirituality is Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach wrote over 200 cantatas for church singing in church. His job actually required that he write a cantata for every single Sunday of the church year plus all other church holidays. What has survived is 200 of those cantatas; however many were written and lost, we have no idea.

Most Bach cantatas follow a simple format. There is an opening chorus that introduces the main theme for the day (based on the Gospel for that Sunday). There follows solo arias and duets. The words for the solo arias tend to come directly from Scripture. The duets are usually for soprano and bass and represent a dialogue between Christ (the bass) and his church (the soprano). The cantata then usually closes with the chorus singing a chorale which the congregation was expected to join in singing.

But Bach wrote other music that was not intended for church that can also be considered spiritual. Here’s why. Bach closed every piece of music he wrote, whether it was for church or not, with the words “to the glory of God” (which he often abbreviated SDG, soli Deo gloria). He also began every composition with the words, “Jesus help me,” (or JJ for Jesu Juva). Whether Bach was writing for church or not, he recognized that everything he wrote came from God and he dedicated it back to God. My favorite example of this is his Coffee Cantata written for his favorite coffee shop, Zimmerman’s Cafe in Leipzig. Even music written to express the joy of coffee drinking can come from God and be dedicated to God!

Yet another example of music that can be called spiritual even though it was not written expressly for church is concert music such as Handel’s Messiah. Handel labeled Messiah, “a secular entertainment on a sacred subject.” We all know (especially since Christmas has just come and gone) how Handel’s Messiah consists entirely of Scripture verses set to music. No one would ever dispute the sacred nature of Handel’s oratorio, but it was written for the concert hall, not for church. There is a lot of other music that meets this same criteria. I have emphasized classical music today simply because that’s what I know and life; but God can speak just as well through other music. God is not a snob, and his gift of music speaks to us in many and different ways. The main point is to recognize the true author of music. Just as God spoke at creation declaring it good, so God’s Word continues to speak through music, declaring it good.

“Saints” in Bible Translation

January 9, 2024

The Apostle Paul’s favorite term of address for Christians that he wrote to was “saints.” Paul’s letters to the churches at Rome, Corinth and Philippi frequently call the church members there “saints.” I like to point that out because the word saint gives people the heebie-jeebies like no other Bible word I know, unless it’s predestination. (Not going down that rabbit hole today; another time). 

The reason many Christians are unsettled by the word saint is that it seems to imply that being a Christian (or more horrific yet, a good Christian) is a result of our efforts to be good and holy. We know this is true in the Roman Catholic tradition; their entire definition of saint lays stress on the amount of merit that a person can earn before God. But in a strange way, evangelical Christianity has its own version of good works to earn favor with God: they call it holiness. And, indeed, the word holy in the Bible is basically the same as the word for saint.

This misunderstanding of saint and holiness finds unfortunate expression in several Bible translations. I want to give just a couple of examples of the way the word saint is handled in 1 Corinthians 1:2. My particular focus is on the words in italic:

“To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy…” (New International Version)

“To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints…” (New Revised Standard Version)

“To the church of God in Corinth, to those who have been consecrated in Christ Jesus and called to be God’s holy people…” (New Jerusalem Bible)

All of those translations are at the very least misleading if not outright wrong. The reason they are wrong is because the words “called to be” clearly and unmistakably suggest that sainthood or holiness is something we become, something we grow into or improve into. That is just flat out wrong: we do not become saints or holy. God has already done that for us. Period. We are not called to be saints, we are simply called saints. Know what translation gets that right? The good ol’ Revised Standard Version.

(By the way, I am not trying to disparage the other Bible translations; the NIV, NRSV, and NJB are all good and valuable translations. In fact, the NJB is a personal favorite of mine, but no translation of the Bible is right all the time; that’s why we have so many).

So what I would like to do now is explain for a minute why it really matters (a lot) whether we say “called saints” or “called to be saints (or holy).” Let's start with a definition of holy, and by extension, of being a saint. Holy, in both Old and New Testaments, means to be exclusively dedicated to something. For instance, the worship vessels in Solomon’s Temple, such as the container for the Bread of the Presence, were holy because they were dedicated to serve in God’s Temple. Therefore, worship vessels could not be used for any other purpose except the one designated by God: they could only be used in worship. What that means is that if we were having a dinner in the fellowship hall and ran out of pitchers for water or juice, we could not use the wine pitcher we use at communion. That would be a desecration because it would violate the holiness of that pitcher; it can only be used for communion because it is dedicated solely to that purpose.

For God’s people to be holy, or to be saints, means that we are dedicated exclusively to serve God. One of the best illustrations of this is the story of Isaiah’s calling to serve God while he is in the Temple. Part of that story is that Isaiah’s lips need to be made holy. That doesn’t mean that Isaiah is having his mouth washed out with soap for saying naughty words. No, it means that Isaiah’s lips are being dedicated to the sole task of proclaiming God’s Word. Holy lips, a holy mouth, is for those dedicated to speaking God’s Word exclusively.

But here’s the bigger point: who actually makes Isaiah’s lips holy, or sanctifies them? Does Isaiah make them holy? No. God makes them holy. God takes hold of Isaiah and burns Isaiah’s lips with a coal from the incense burner in the Temple and claims Isaiah for his own. That’s what makes Isaiah holy: God’s action and God’s word.

The same is true of all God’s saints. God has taken us by the action of his Son on the cross, and has redeemed us by his Word. There is no other way to belong to God, except that God takes us and makes us his. Consequently, our efforts at what we call “being holy” are totally misguided and doomed to failure: if we could do it, God wouldn’t have to do it for us in the first place.

All of this is found in what might look like a minor difference between “called saints” and “called to be saints.” But because God’s Word always speaks grace, we can only be satisfied with a translation that tells us we are “called saints” by God because of what he has already done for us.

Psalm 23:5 and “Honored Guest”

December 6, 2023

Hello Everyone,

One of my favorite hobbies is comparing Bible translations. Like most people, I have my own personal favorite translations and consult them all the time to see how they are similar or not, but also to see if they have a particularly arresting way of expressing God’s Word. 

There was a time, though, when multiple translations simply did not exist. For over a millennium, from about AD 400 until the period of the Reformation, Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible (known as the Vulgate) was the only translation commonly available in the western world. Around the time of the Reformation, the Bible began to be available (thanks to scholars like Erasmus) in its Greek and Hebrew original. Of course, only a few scholars could read Greek and Hebrew, so the Bible also began to be translated into local, vernacular languages by people such as Luther and John Wyclif. 

The King James Version published in 1611 became the standard English-language translation for some three centuries, and it was the only Bible most people in England and America ever read. That began to change In 1952 when the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was printed and from then on the English-speaking world has seen new translation after new translation. According to the American Bible Society there are currently about 900 translations and paraphrases of the Bible in English.

In the face of so many options for reading God’s Word, an obvious question is, Which translation is right? Well, in some sense they are all right. All translations of the Bible are God’s Word speaking to us. God is not tied down to specific words; rather, God can use any word to make it come alive as good news. 

I prefer to use the word “faithful” in speaking of translations rather than the word “correct.” Here’s why. We probably all know from taking language classes in school when translating from one language to another, word A in one language almost never means exactly word A in another language. For instance: Germans have an expression about things being “two miles after Christmas.” In English, those precise words don’t mean a thing: how can anything be two miles after Christmas? But in German, that’s just the point: nothing can. So for a German to say that something is two miles after Christmas is a way of saying that something is impossible or could never happen.

It works the other way, too. When I took German in high school one of our assignments was to take common phrases and translate them into German. I took for my expression, “it drives me up the wall.” That’s a ridiculous statement in German (or in any other language) because it can only mean something like an automobile that somehow travels up the side of a wall. But in English, the expression has nothing to do with driving or with walls: it refers to things that make you crazy. So, a faithful translation of the phrase “it drives me up the wall” would not use the same exact words but would use other words that convey the same meaning. And so it is with translations of the Bible.

At a deeper level, however, faithfulness in Bible translation requires us to ask, what does the Bible really say? What does God really speak to us through his Word? Ultimately, the answer is that God speaks Good News. That’s what Mark tells us in what is really the title, not just the opening words, of his Gospel: “The Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” A little more specifically, the Good News is that God, in Jesus Christ, has taken all the initiative and done all the work necessary to to forgive us, redeem us, and make us his children forever.

Let me give you an example of how being faithful to this sense of Good News can inform how the Bible is translated. I will use as my example a translation I generally don’t care for, The Good News Bible. (The title, though, is great!) 

One place The Good News really nails it, though, is in Psalm 23. 

We’ve all known since hearing Psalm 23 as children that God, the Good Shepherd, anoints our head with oil. Both the KJV, the RSV, and many others as well, translate Psalm 23:5 with total, literal accuracy: “you anoint my head with oil.” But what does that mean? Does God dump olive oil on our heads every time we read or hear Psalm 23? No, God does not. But in the days of King David, extending also into the time of Jesus, pouring oil on the head served an important purpose.

Back in the days before baths, showers, and perfume people living in hot and humid climates got dirty and smelly. And it didn’t take long during the course of a day to get both dirty and smelly. If, however, you went to the home of a friend or someone of importance, and if they really liked you (!), they would take some of their own scented oil and pour it over your head. Instantly, you would smell better, feel refreshed, and appreciate what your host had done for you. In a word, your host had treated you like a special guest. And that’s just how The Good News Bible translates Psalm 23:5, “you welcome me as an honored guest.” That translation fully captures the meaning behind the literal words and it certainly conveys the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Translating from one language to another may not be simple or easy, the variety of translations can sometimes be confusing, and some translations are better or worse. But one thing is most certainly true. God’s Word always speaks, in any translation, so long as it tells us that we belong to him.

Les Miserables

December 19, 2023

Many, many years before the musical Les Miz popularized his story, Victor Hugo wrote a novel that highlighted the misfortunes of those he called The Miserable Ones—Les Miserables (1862). It is a story of one particular miserable one, Jean Valjean, and the way his suffering transforms his life in such a way that he is able to bring grace into the lives of others and their suffering.

I first read Les Miserables as a sophomore in high school, courtesy of my wonderful English teacher, Mr McCarron. He was a feisty old Irishman, but he had a gift for making written stories come to life. As I read that rather long novel (it’s over 1,200 pages long) it occurred to me that the story of Jean Valjean and the relentless detective who eagerly hunts him down, Javert, tells the story (among other things) of Law and Gospel—the message that God’s good news will prevail against the incessant hammering of a Law that tells us we are abandoned, lost, and forsaken.

Because I grew up in church from Day One, the vocabulary of grace and sin was a part of my daily life. And, like many people, I somehow grew up with the notion that sin meant badness—specifically, me doing bad things. But sin is much, much more than a series of bad things. For starters, not everyone is even a bad person—I know lots of people who are good and always have been. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t sinners. Whether we are good or bad, we are all sinners, often in spite of our goodness rather than because of our badness. 

At the root of sin is the feeling of lostness, alienation, and abandonment that all human beings feel at some point. We are born in sin because we are lost and incapable of finding God on our own. Grace is the answer for precisely that kind of lostness. Grace means we don’t have to find God because he has already found us. That is the glory of Christmas: God came in human form to find us and rescue us from being lost.

It is one thing, however, to recognize and understand the reality of sin in theoretical or theological terms. It is quite another thing to feel in a very personal and life-changing way that sense of being found and saved. Very often this occurs in story form. There is a reason that Jesus’ teaching and preaching ministry was essentially one of telling stories in a form that is called parables. Like all stories, parables have a way of working their way directly to our heart and imagination in a way that doctrine or abstract ideas never can.

For me, the realization that grace finds and saves us from being lost came to me repeatedly while reading Les Miserables. There is one particular incident, however, which really spoke to me and to which I have returned to read over and over again throughout my life. Nor is it an accident that the scene takes place on Christmas Eve night. The scene is from Book 2 (Cosette), chapter 3. Jean Valjean, who so resembles the Suffering Servant, has gone in search of Cosette, an eight-year old girl living a horrible, pathetic, suffocating existence in the cafe owned by the Thenardier’s. Cossette has just been sent out in the dark, harsh coldness of night without coat or gloves (barely with any clothing at all) to fill a large pail of water from a well that is some distance from the cafe.

Hugo begins the scene this way, “Darkness makes the brain giddy. Man needs light, whoever plunges into the opposite of day feels his heart chilled.” After Cosette fills the water bucket, Hugo writes, “Her hands, which she had gotten wet in drawing the water, felt cold. She arose. Her fear had returned, a natural and insurmountable fear. She had only one thought, to fly; to fly with all her might… This took place in the depth of a wood, at night, in the winter, far from all human sight; it was a child of eight years; there was none but God at that moment who saw this sad thing.”

As she wanders through the woods heading back to the cafe, knowing that she will be beaten as soon as she returns, she despairs of life and cries out, “Oh! My God! My God!”

“At that moment she felt all at once that the weight of the bucket was gone. A hand, which seemed enormous to her, had just caught the handle, and was carrying it easily. She raised her head. A large, dark form, straight and erect, was walking beside her in the gloom. It was a man who had come up behind her, and who she had not heard. This man, without saying a word, had grasped the handle of the bucket she was carrying.

“There are instincts for all the crises of life.

“The child was not afraid.”

I only had to read that scene once to know what was going on. Yes, Jean Valjean had found Cosette and saved her; in the bleakness of life, grace takes us by the hand unawares. Grace is a reminder that His yoke is easy, and his burden light.

The Word always speaks, sometimes in literature from the pen of Victor Hugo. But whoever’s pen it comes from, it is a Word from God when it is a word of grace. That’s why the Word speaks so clearly and unmistakably at Christmas. Merry Christmas!