The Word Speaks...

Law and Gospel

September 11, 2024

Last week when discussing ways to read the Bible, I suggested that the best place to start is with the Gospels. Jesus Christ, by his death on the cross, IS the Gospel, the good news. Jesus is therefore everything we need to know about what God can, and has, and will, do for us. Consequently, there is no other, there is no better, place to begin than with Jesus as God’s Good News.

There are, however, other questions that come up, such as, “Why do we need the good news? Why is the human predicament that way it is?” Those are what we call Law questions: questions that focus on our shortcomings, our failures, our sin, before God. So, after reading about what God has done for us in Jesus, the next step is to read the Bible to better understand why we need the good news.

For that, I unhesitatingly suggest that after reading the Gospels the best books to read are Deuteronomy and Isaiah. Isaiah needs no introduction or apology; Deuteronomy, maybe so.

The word Deuteronomy means, second giving of the law. And, indeed, the book of Deuteronomy represents Moses’ second giving of the Law. The first giving of the law was at Mt Sinai, recorded in Exodus; the second giving was on the banks of the Jordan before Israel crossed over into the Promised Land. So it’s easy to think that Deuteronomy is in some ways redundant: if it’s just going to repeat what Moses already said in Exodus, why read Deuteronomy – especially since it’s just a bunch of laws that we don’t follow anyway? I must admit, I was prone to that way of thinking for a long time.

Then I went to seminary. As it happens, I took a course on Deuteronomy because a) it fit my schedule, and b) I very much wanted to have Patrick Miller as a prof for at least one course while I was in seminary. The course lived up to every expectation for the professor, but, more than that, it opened up Deuteronomy to me in a whole new way, and ever since it has been my second-favorite book of the Old Testament, second only to Isaiah. There was, I admit, one other thing I liked about the course. One of the people taking the course was a Christian Brother from Brooklyn. He had the ultimate Brooklyn nasal accent, but in Brother Bob’s case, I didn’t let that accent bother me. He kept a case of Christian Brother’s wine in his room and every Friday when class let out at 4:00, he invited three or four of us back to his room for, well, sacramental wine. 

Many years ago a scholar named Gerhard von Rad argued that Deuteronomy is not so much law as it is a sermon. I happen to whole-heartedly endorse that view (even though my Professor Miller didn’t so much endorse it, but that’s another story). How is Deuteronomy a sermon? Well, that gets us to the crux of why Deuteronomy is so important. 

The central question of Israel’s existence while they were captive in exile in Babylon (from the years 586 BC to 538 BC) was, “How did things go wrong?” How did Israel go from being God’s specially chosen people whom God treated as his dearly beloved, to being a people God punished by sending them into exile? Deuteronomy was edited into its final shape at the end of these years of exile to say “disobedience” was the reason Israel went into exile.

Long after Moses gave the law to Israel, Moses’ words were put into the shape of a sermon as Israel once more stood on the banks of the Jordan. Once more, Israel would hear of God’s love; once more, Israel would hear of God’s unmerited grace; once more Israel would hear God’s law summoning them to faithful obedience; once more Israel would hear how God wanted to bestow his blessing on Israel but would also be warned once more, that disobedience results in punishment. This time, says Moses to God’s people, “get it right! Hear the promise and live obediently.”

If you want to read a book of the Bible that explains how disobedience to God, and faithlessness toward his law, is what has gone wrong in this world and put it in the messed-up condition that it’s in, and why we need God’s good news in Christ, you can do no better than to read Deuteronomy.  I said above that Deuteronomy is a sermon. Actually, it would be better to say that it’s three sermons, and the best way to read Deuteronomy is to read it as three sermons with an appendix, as follows:

First Sermon: Historical overview of how God’s people, by grace, got to the banks of the Jordan and the Promised Land, Deuteronomy 1:1 - 4:43.

Second Sermon: The Meaning and Purpose of God’s Law, Deuteronomy 4:44 - 28:68

Third Sermon: Exhortation to Obedience, Deuteronomy 29 - 30

Moses’ Last Will and Testament, Deuteronomy 31-34

Now, let’s look for a moment at Isaiah. But where to begin? It’s humungo-long at 66 chapters. Not only is it long, it covers several hundred years of history. In addition to that, it also looks into the future for the coming of God’s Servant (Messiah) and the coming of God’s kingdom. Virtually anything and everything to do with why the world has gone wrong and how God plans to fix that is present in Isaiah. I can’t even begin to summarize the whole book in a page or two.

But here’s what I can do. I can encourage you to read Isaiah with an eye to how God plans to remedy our fallen world. At its simplest, Isaiah’s message is like every sermon you’ve ever heard: it moves from bad news (law) to good news (Gospel). What I want to do is highlight how Isaiah makes the transition from bad news to good news.

We’ll start with some verses in Isaiah that are part of Isaiah’s famous encounter with God in the holy of holies in the Temple and after Isaiah’s response to God’s call with the words, “Here I am.” God tells Isaiah to speak a word of judgment against his people “until cities lie waste without inhabitants, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate” (Isaiah 6: 11). What a horrifying message of doom. But that, says God, is the price of disobedience.

But is that all God says? Is God a God of law and judgment only, or is there hope – maybe even eternal hope? Yes, there is. And we find the word of hope – the transition from law to Gospel – in Isaiah 40, with these words: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins” (Isaiah 40:1-2).

It is no accident that these words of hope and comfort in Isaiah 40 are placed by G F Handel in his first section of Messiah, along with almost every verse of Isaiah 40:1-11, that anticipates the coming of Christ at Christmas. Handel, following Isaiah’s cue, understands that the call of God is to proclaim the good news that salvation comes from God’s Messiah. But perhaps the most important verse in Isaiah 40 is this one where Isaiah asks at his new commissioning, “What shall I cry? All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord is upon it; sure the people are grass” (40:6-7). 

Isaiah understands that God wants to offer again his salvation, but he wonders out loud “why bother?” given that human beings are as flimsy as the grass of the field. And God admits that humans are fickle and faithless, but God (sort of like Ford when I was growing up) has a better idea. God responds to Isaiah this way: “[Yes,] the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever” (40:8). But the word of our God will stand forever. In these few short words, God identifies a) how he will save and redeem the entire world, and b) that God’s grace always triumphs over sin and disobedience.

More specifically, this saving word of God becomes incarnate, says Isaiah, in God’s Suffering Servant. Isaiah speaks of this Servant of the Lord in four separate songs (coming between Isaiah 42 and 53) where we learn that the Word of God is the same as God’s Servant who will suffer and die on behalf of the world. The Word of God, says Isaiah, finds full expression on the cross of Jesus Christ. That’s why Isaiah can say that the Word of our God will stand forever: The Word is God.

Even when the Word is discussing sin and judgment, as it does in Deuteronomy and Isaiah, it ultimately brings us to the good news of salvation.

By Starting With the Gospels

September 3, 2024

This past Sunday’s sermon was about the necessity of telling the story of God from the Bible to other people. Today I would like to elaborate a little bit on telling the story by asking, how should we read the Bible? After all, the Bible is a big book! Even the Spark Children’s Bible I talked about on Sunday is 555 pages. The standard Bible (NRSV) that I work from is over 2300 pages, and the New Jerusalem Bible which I love has over 2000 pages that are so heavy that the binding has broken in five places. 

And it’s not just the size: it takes time to read the Bible. I know full-well that the lives of church goers are busy with jobs, raising families, attending to illnesses, and a host of other things that compete for our time and energy. So with all this going on, it’s a legitimate question to ask how one should go about reading the Bible. Should we start at the beginning and read every page until the end? Should we pick a popular book such as the Psalms and read only it? If every page is the word of God, can we just randomly pick a spot and start reading? Is there any particular right or wrong way?

Cards on the table: I am not a fan of reading the Bible by starting on page 1 and reading consecutively until the end. If you want to read it that way, you can; I’m not saying it’s wrong. But I think it’s more helpful to have a specific focus when reading the Bible. Let’s start with why we should read the Bible. What is the Bible about, anyway?  

At its simplest, the Bible is about God, it is about the human condition and the recurring bad news this world experiences, and it is above all about the good news of what God, through Jesus Christ, does for this world. The reason we read the Bible therefore is because of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the what, the how, and the why of the Bible. In the Bible’s own words, Jesus is the Word of God. That means God speaks to the world and to us through Jesus Christ. If we wish to hear God speak then we need, above all else, to focus on Jesus Christ.

The Gospel of Mark highlights this focus on the importance of Jesus with this summary statement of Jesus’ ministry: “Now after John [the Baptist] was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel [good news] of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel [good news]’” (Mark 1:14-15). In just one sentence, Mark introduces Jesus Christ as the one brings God’s good news. 

In another passage in Mark’s Gospel Jesus goes so far as to equate himself with God’s good news. “Whoever loses his life for my sake and for the gospel’s will save it.” Notice how Jesus makes the phrase “for my sake” directly parallel with “for the sake of the gospel.” This identification of Jesus and gospel is so critical that both Matthew and Luke, when they wrote their Gospels, repeat this same passage from Mark.

Anyone wishing to read the Bible, therefore, should begin with Jesus. Of course, there is a rich background to the gospel and to Jesus, and that’s where the rest of the Bible comes in. The purpose of the entire canon of 66 books that fill the Bible is to amplify and explain both the bad news that makes the good news necessary and the ramifications and implications of the good news. 

That is, the Bible gives us an historical overview of how bad news entered the world, how it impacted the human condition, and why human beings are unable to rescue themselves from this bad news that we call sin. The good news makes no sense unless it delivers us from bad news. So, at some level, we need to understand more deeply what the bad news is all about.

The good news, God’s rescue operation to save us from sin, takes place at the cross of Jesus Christ. All of the sin, all of the evil, all of our enslavement to things like illness, starvation, war, and prejudice which we cannot overcome, and which has wreaked unending havoc on this world, must be accounted for. In a word, there must be judgment for sin. The cross does this by placing the judgment we should receive on Jesus’ shoulders while at the same time his death also brings us God’s grace and benefits.

To say that Jesus Christ received the punishment of the world and also brought us God’s grace and forgiveness makes for a simple sentence, but it also raises a whole lot of questions. Could a simple human being do all this? No. So, Jesus must be more than human: he must be God. But could a transcendent, holy God taken on our condition and die as penalty for sin? No. Therefore, Jesus must be both human and God to make this salvation work for us. But the idea of Jesus as God and Human raises further questions. These and other questions are taken up by later authors of the New Testaments. In this way, the Bible not only tells us the story of Jesus but it also helps to explain in a theological fashion questions that arise about who Jesus is and what he has done for us.

So: at the center of the Bible is Jesus and God’s good news. This story is found in the four Gospels. But to really understand what Jesus did, we need to come to terms with the bad news of our condition and to probe some of the implications of what that good news means in our lives today. 

For today’s purposes, the best way to read the Bible is to read the four Gospels. And it makes good sense to read them in the order that we find them in the Bible. The Gospels are in that order for a reason. Next time, I will take up the question of what books to read after we finish the four Gospels. The Word Speaks, both in the Gospels and as Gospel, and it always leads us to Jesus Christ.

August 20, 2024

The Lord’s Prayer is one of the best known and most said prayers in the world. For Christians, it is the most foundational prayer of all. Most Christians say it every time they gather for worship. Even if it’s not a formal part of their worship, all Christians acknowledge that this prayer comes from Jesus himself and that Jesus regarded it as the basis for all prayer.

Never have I been more aware of the power behind the Lord’s Prayer than the time I was accosted in a hospital – out of nowhere some gentleman in a hospital room had seen me walk by, rushed out of his room, grabbed by the arm with both hands and dragged me into his room. With tears pouring down his face, he said, “I can’t remember the Lord’s Prayer any more and I need you to say it for me.” It was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. Even if he couldn’t remember the words, he knew in his heart that the Lord’s Prayer is vitally important. 

Behind the simplicity of that prayer, and the comfort it has brought both the man I prayed with long ago and Christians through the centuries, there is a lot going on in that prayer. There are also a number of questions about just how to say, or to understand, the Lord’s Prayer. Let’s start with the fact that although there is only one “Lords’ Prayer,” it appears in different forms in Matthew and Luke:

Matthew 6:9-13 Luke 11:2-4

Our Father, who art in heaven, Father,

Hallowed be thy name. Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread; Give us each day our daily bread;

And forgive us our debts, And forgive us our sins,

As we also have forgiven For we ourselves forgive every

Our debtors; one who is indebted to us;

And lead us not into temptation And lead us not into temptation.

But deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom 

and the Power and the glory, 

For ever. Amen.

What I would like to do now is raise some questions that occur to me about the wording of the Lord’s Prayer and take note that there are different ways to say it and understand it. After those questions, though, I would like to return to the fundamental question of why is this the prayer above all others that we say?

Question 1. Is it debts, sins, or trespasses? 

All of the above. Here’s why. Matthew in his Gospel uses the word “debts.” This is because Jesus said the prayer in Aramaic (a dialect of Hebrew) and Aramaic the word debt was used not only to refer to literal, economic, debts but also figuratively in a way that could refer to sin. Since Matthew was writing to a mostly Jewish Christian church, all of his readers would have understood that although Jesus said “debt” he meant “sin.”

Luke, however, was writing to an entirely Roman/Gentile audience. For his Greek-reading audience, “debts” could only refer to monetary debt. Therefore, for the sake of his audience, Luke changes the word from debt to sin in order to preserve Jesus’ actual meaning.

It was William Tyndale in his translation of the New Testament into English (which preceded the King James Version by nearly a century) who used the word “trespasses” for debts/sins. Trespass, then as now, referred to violations against the law or against someone’s property and therefore, by extension, to sin as a violation against God and other people. 

Question 2. If there is one Lord’s Prayer, why are there two different versions of it in the Gospels?

I hinted at the answer to this question above. Both Matthew and Luke value the Lord’s Prayer as The Lord’s Prayer. But as they translated their prayer into other languages and for other cultures they sometimes had to change how Jesus said something in order to preserve the meaning of what he said – as with debt and sin.

But there is a deeper reason behind their differences. Matthew places the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, which means it is in the first of Matthew’s five teaching blocks. For Matthew, the Lord’s Prayer is part of the church’s catechesis: it is both what and how the church teaches. This, incidentally, is why Matthew has always been placed first in order among the church’s Gospels: it is the Gospel that was always used for instruction in the early church. That’s why Matthew places the Lord’s Prayer in the same block of material that Jesus contrasts the right way of praying with the wrong way of praying.

Luke, on the other hand, places the Lord’s Prayer in the same chapter with some of Jesus’ parables on prayer. Whereas Matthew had been writing to a Jewish audience who had grown up all their lives praying to God, Luke is writing for people who knew nothing of the Old Testament or traditional prayers to God. So Luke is teaching his church from scratch how to pray. One of the things Luke wants his people to know is that prayer requires patience, steadfastness, and persistence. Luke wanted his church to know that all prayer to God, including the Lord’s Prayer, is not just a matter of saying the right words, but of trusting and having faith.

Question 3. Will any prayer do, or is the Lord’s Prayer special?

God is always more eager to listen than we are to pray, so there is no doubt in my mind that when we need God, any prayer will do. However.

However, there is something uniquely important about the Lord’s Prayer because it directs in a way nothing else in Scripture does, to the Praying Lord. More than that, it takes us directly to Gethsemane. Nearly everything about the Lord’s Prayer is reproduced in Jesus’ own personal prayer life at the most crucial moment of his life. If there was ever a question about whether the Lord’s Prayer is “practical” or matters in “real life,” Jesus shows us in Gethsemane how prayer and personal crisis intersect.

Here are five ways that Lord’s Prayer and the Praying Lord mirror one another in Gethsemane:

• Jesus says in Matthew 6 that when we pray, we should go “to a private place” because God sees in secret. When Jesus needed most urgently to pray to God, he went to Gethsemane, his favorite place to be alone with God.

• Remove this cup from me = deliver me from temptation (or the time of trial). Three times in Gethsemane, Jesus begs God to “remove this cup from me.” The cup was an idiom that referred to pain and suffering; in this case it meant death on the cross. Jesus was fully aware of the incredible pain that lay ahead from him, and he would have given anything (well, almost anything) to avoid it. But he couldn’t avoid it – because that would have left us without salvation. To walk away from the cross, was Jesus’ greatest time of testing and temptation. To go through with his journey to the cross, Jesus needed extra strength in time of trial and found that strength in prayer.

• Yet not what I wilt, but what thou wilt = thy will be done. When push came to shove, Jesus understood that life comes to a choice – there is what we want (in his case, deliverance from death on the cross) and what God wants (in this case, the salvation of mankind). Jesus shows us in his own life, in the most desperate moment of his life, what it means to pray “thy will be done.”

• Abba. Jesus was the first Jew to ever address God using the intimate, informal word “abba” for Father. Rabbis of Jesus’ day said that the first two words out of a baby’s mouth were “abba” and “imma”; daddy and mommy. Although Jesus was surely not irreverent when praying to God, he had the boldness to be intimate and personal because he knew that God is a loving God and that his will is ultimately what is best for us. To say “abba” is not only to say “Father,” it is a way of saying “I trust you no matter what.” And that’s exactly what he did in Gethsemane.

• All things are possible = thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory. Jesus acknowledges in Gethsemane that with God “all things are possible” and it is because of this that Jesus is able to resign himself to what lies ahead on the cross. “All things” here means not only the cross but also the resurrection and the ascension. All things, therefore, is tantamount to Jesus saying, “thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.”

With a Praying Lord like that, why would we ever doubt the need or the efficacy of saying the Lord’s Prayer? When the Word Speaks, it takes us in prayer to Our Father in Heaven. Amen.

About the Lord's Supper

August 13, 2024

In Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer spoken on Maundy Thursday, the night when he instituted his Holy Meal, he prayed that his church would be one. And yet, one of the most obvious features of Christ’s church is that most, if not all, of its members are often in disagreement with one another. In some ways, this is fine because there is often more than one way to see, hear, or understand something. 

Take, for instance, Jesus’ teaching about The Good Shepherd. Sometimes (as in Luke’s Gospel) Jesus used the image of the Good Shepherd to illustrate God’s love for sinners; other times (as in Matthew’s Gospel) Jesus used the illustration of the shepherd to explain how church leaders should handle church order and discipline; and at still other times (as in John’s Gospel) Jesus spoke of himself as the Good Shepherd to illustrate how the sheep of his fold know his voice. All of these are different ways to speak and hear about shepherds, and they’re all true at one time or another in any given context. Is the shepherd God, or Jesus, or church leaders? Well, the shepherd can be any or all of those depending on who the Word is speaking to and why.

The problem comes when different views become a source of disagreement that leads one person to claim that their view alone is exclusively right. Few areas of church life and doctrine foster more disagreements of an exclusive nature than the Lord’s Supper. The dividing line drawn by those who think they alone are right is so severe that they draw a line that separates those who can receive the Lord’s Supper and those who can’t. (Which led a friend of mine to publish an article, playing off of Cole Porter’s famous song, entitled, “Don’t Fence Me Out.”)

My interest today is how the Word speaks to Christians who disagree. As I’ve suggested, some disagreements are fine. It’s okay to disagree about what time church should begin; it’s okay to disagree on what translation of the Bible you like, and it’s okay for you to prefer one kind of music over another. God’s kingdom won’t sink because of any disagreement on those issues. But how does the Word speak when churches won’t allow some people to come to the altar; how does the Word speak when some Christians insist that God’s grace is present in the elements, some deny that God is present, and some have ideas about the Lord’s Supper that are just plain wacky?

My dad knew a pastor named Paul S Rees who addressed disagreements with the question, “can we agree that x means at least this much?” Sometimes agreement is not an all-or-nothing proposition; sometimes it is a matter of taking small steps toward agreement rather than totally agreeing or disagreeing. In the case of the Lord’s Supper, rather than insisting that everyone agree on how Christ is physically present in, with, and under the bread and wine, what would happen if we began by asking, “what is the least that we can agree on? Does the Lord’s Supper mean at least [fill in the blank] this much?”

I would like to suggest a few things that all Christians should be able to agree on. First, that Holy Communion is an invitation from Jesus Christ. Jesus’ words “do this” are indeed a grammatical imperative; a command, if you will. But beyond the command to do something, I think it is clear that he is also offering something. Can we agree that, at the very least, Jesus offers something important in his Supper, and that if it is attached to a command, it must be something very important indeed? 

The Apostle Paul, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all agree that Jesus makes an identification between “the words of institution” and his death on the cross. Let’s pause a moment to consider what Jesus offers us on the cross. Just a partial listing of what the cross offers would include: the forgiveness of sin, eternal life, union with Christ, reconciliation and peace with God. So, if we accept that the Lord’s Supper and the cross both offer something from Jesus, is it asking too much to say that the Lord’s Supper, as does the cross, offers us forgiveness, eternal life, union with Christ, reconciliation and peace? Can we agree that Holy Communion means at least that much?

In all the arguments over what the Lord’s Supper does or does not do, one thing that is frequently overlooked is that Holy Communion anticipates and looks forward to Christ’s Second Coming. Paul is most explicit about this when he writes, “as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor 11:26). 

But it is Luke who draws the strongest connection between the Lord’s Supper and the Second Coming. Luke is the only evangelist to record that Jesus poured two cups of wine at the Last Supper. These two cups are part of the four cups of wine drunk at the Passover meal. Each of the four cups drunk at Passover is associated with the four promises God makes to Moses in Exodus 6:6-8. The four promises are  “I will free you”; “I will redeem you”; “I will take you as my people”; and “I will bring you into the land.” Each cup of wine is, in effect, a toast to each promise and its fulfillment. 

Jesus’ pledge that he will not drink any more wine until the kingdom of God comes is made after the third cup and before the fourth. The significance of Jesus’ pledge is that the fourth cup, the promise of the kingdom and life with God in heaven, is the only promise not yet completed. Jesus’ pledge to not drink until the kingdom comes is the promise of his Second Coming. Luke, in his account of the Last Supper, is making clear that the wine we drink at Holy Communion (the third cup) is a direct anticipation of the feast of victory that we will all celebrate when Christ comes again (the fourth cup). At the very least, Holy Communion gives us the promise of Jesus’ future advent and our life eternal with God.

We began by saying that Holy Communion is an invitation from the crucified Lord. But who exactly are the guests? We all are. Both Luke and Paul, in different ways, show how Christ invites everyone to his meal. 

In the early days of the church, the Lord’s Supper was eaten as part of a larger communal meal, known as a Love Feast, for the entire local church. However, this meal created problems at Corinth where the wealthier members of the church treated other members with contempt by eating much better meals and by beginning their meals before anyone else. Paul takes great exception to this practice. All members, says Paul, no matter their status, importance, or economic level, are equal before the Lord. As part of his instruction to the church at Corinth, Paul tells them “when you come together to eat, wait for one another” (1 Cor 11:33). His instruction to wait for one another can also be taken to mean “receive and accept one another.” We wait for one another and accept one another because we are all equally Christ’s guests at the meal, all equally sinners saved by grace.

Luke goes to great lengths in his Gospel to stress the inclusive nature of God’s grace, particularly in the context of meals and table fellowship. Nearly 20% of Luke’s Gospel records Jesus teaching or healing while he is having a meal. Almost always, the context for the healing or the teaching is Jesus extending forgiveness to people whom the Pharisees consider unworthy of grace. And so it is that in Luke 14 Jesus gives a parable about a great banquet, a banquet that is given for the poor, the outcasts, and those deemed unworthy. The invitation is for those who never anticipated that such a gracious invitation would come to them.

Historically, Holy Communion has been a source of bitter disagreement, anger and division. Over the centuries, squabbles have erupted over issues that have more to do with science than theology, more to do with “whether” or “how” Jesus is present in the bread and wine, than with what his presence actually does for us. But God’s Word speaks clearly enough. 

For now we can leave aside the “how” question and look at all the other things Scripture has to say. If we do that, perhaps we can agree, at the very least, that Holy Communion

• is an invitation from Christ to receive his many gifts and benefits; 

• it is a promise that directs us toward his future coming in glory; 

• and it welcomes us and everyone else who is unworthy, because we are all equally sinners and equally saints.

The invitation, the promise, and the welcome of Christ’s Holy Supper are the very thing that makes us one in the Lord, and are what make us his Holy Church. The Word always speaks, and when it does, it points us to a grace that is greater than our disagreements. Can we agree that Holy Communion means at least this much?

August 6, 2024

In my office are two pictures of my dad and I dressed for worship. The first dates to November 2001 when I participated in a worship service with him at Westminster Presbyterian Church in West Chester, PA, where he was on staff. The other picture dates from 2009 when we celebrated the 50th anniversary of his ordination at my former church. In both pictures, he is wearing a black robe and I am wearing a white alb. Looking at these pictures raises a question you may have asked many times: why do Presbyterian pastors wear black robes while Lutheran pastors wear white? The answer to that fairly simple question involves the different ways that Lutherans and Presbyterians define the role of ministry and the nature of worship.

Presbyterians wear black robes because the black robe has long been the academic garb for teachers. The Calvinist tradition has always focused on the teaching aspect of Jesus’ Great Commission as the centerpiece for worship. That’s why, historically, Presbyterians have always been famous for their preaching: it is, without question, the anchor of their worship service. To overstate the case just a little bit, everything in a Presbyterian church service is incidental to the sermon. 

By contrast, the Lutheran heritage is that preaching is just one aspect of what the entire liturgy is about: proclaiming the forgiveness of sin. One might say that in Presbyterian churches, preaching has always been the safeguard against middling worship (“Well, at least the sermon was good…”) whereas in Lutheran churches, the liturgy has always been the safeguard against mediocre preaching (“Well, at least the liturgy was done well…”).

Although I’m exaggerating a bit for humor, these differences are real, not just stereotypes. The Presbyterian emphasis on teaching is found, for instance, in the way that (historically, if not in every church) pastors base their preaching on the continuous reading of the Bible. That is, they begin, for instance, with Matthew’s Gospel and teach their way through it verse by verse Sunday after Sunday until they come to the end. Then they start over by teaching through another book of the Bible.

As Lutherans, we approach the Bible, worship, and preaching differently. Lutheran pastors wear white albs because we believe everything in worship and preaching revolves around the forgiveness of sin. We come to church not so much to learn about God, but to hear God’s word of promise that because of the cross our sins are forgiven. This forgiveness does not come through learning or teaching, but through preaching and the sacraments.

We take our cue for this from the role of priests in the Old Testament. Moses gives explicit instruction (Leviticus 16:4) that priests are to vest in a white linen garment in the sanctuary when presiding over the sacrifices for the forgiveness of sin on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). Because this day of forgiveness is the absolute highpoint in the Old Testament of the experience of God, we believe that the absolute highpoint of the Christian experience is the experience of forgiveness that comes through Christ’s death on the cross.

My role as a pastor, and the Lutheran conception of the liturgy, is to make sure that everything that occurs in worship revolves around the gift of forgiveness. The reason we need church every seven days is because as human beings we just can’t go more than about seven days without the reminder and reassurance of this gift. And the reason we need the reassurance of forgiveness on a weekly basis is that we take the reality of sin very seriously. We are born in sin and our fallen, human nature is in captivity to sin. Only the grace of God can save us – that’s right: save us – from this sin.

Back in 1973 a psychologist named Karl Meninger wrote a book called, Whatever Became of Sin? As Lutherans, we confess that sin hasn’t gone anywhere: it is all around us and in us and is what separates us from God. I realize that we’re not the only people who talk about sin, but here’s the big difference: other Christian groups who talk about sin talk about it primarily as something that we as humans need to resist and avoid. Avoiding sin, when put like that, becomes almost an entirely human endeavor (and self-congratulatory): sin is something that we can stop doing and avoid. As Lutherans, however, we confess with the Apostle Paul that we are by nature cut off from God and we, left to our own devices, can do nothing about that separation. Only God can forgive us from sin and save us from sin – and he does that through His Son’s death on the cross.

That’s why every week when we gather, we acknowledge our sin, we hear the gift of grace proclaimed to us, and then we express our thanks and gratitude for God’s gift. Right there in that sentence is the entire reality of Lutheran worship. And the reason I wear a white alb on Sundays is to demonstrate visually that my role as pastor is to remind and assure everyone of the stupendous, amazing, mind- boggling gift of forgiveness that God makes available to us through His Word and the sacraments.

The supreme illustration of the importance of vestments, and the white alb in particular, is that when Christ comes for the second time to fulfill the Kingdom of God, we will all be dressed in white robes signifying that we have all been redeemed by his grace (as noted repeatedly throughout the book of Revelation).

I surely value learning about the Bible, and I also value all the learning I received from my father. But that is secondary to the gift of grace I receive from God weekly in his house. The Word always speaks grace, and it does so even through the vestments we pastors wear on Sunday.

(PS. It occurs to me that I mentioned the difference between teaching the Bible and preaching the Bible, but didn’t elaborate on that difference. We’ll save that distinction for another column.)

My Dad

July 30, 2024

One day at my previous church someone said to me, “I’ll bet you wish you could talk to your dad about what’s going on.” In one sense, he was right: I always valued talking with my dad and always looked forward to it. On the other hand, there was also a sense in which I didn’t need to talk with my dad. My dad died ten years ago this June, but I had plenty of time to learn from him, and over the years, I was able to glean a great deal from him: what he knew, how he thought, what he thought about, how he read the Bible and how he understood his calling as a pastor. 

Most of all, however, I knew him as a person of faith and trust in God. To sum him up in what is now considered a rather quaint and old-fashioned way of speaking, he was a “man of God.” Not in the formal sense that he was a man of the cloth, but that he was a person who walked with God, who listened to God, and who learned from God. I learned this by watching him over the course of my life, but also by listening to his stories. My dad was a good story-teller – almost as good as his dad was. There’s nothing better than a good story, especially when God’s own Word speaks through those stories.

Some of his most interesting stories come from the short span of years that he lived as a teenager in Jamaica, Queens (January 1947 - October 1950). Some of the excitement came, unfortunately, from living on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. For some reason, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays he was often beaten up at high school; how these days were different from Tuesdays and Thursdays he didn’t remember. On one occasion in the dead of winter, some guys trapped him, cut a hole in the ice of Baisley Pond (near his home) and threw him in. The only thing that saved him was that a mailman happened to be walking by and heard my dad yelling. When the mailman got dad home, the first thing his parents did was remove his clothes, and lo and behold the pant legs were so frozen they stood upright. 

On another occasion, he was playing baseball at Baisley Park (dad was a catcher) and a gang came and lined up all the players on my dad’s team. Then someone followed behind with a large iron bar and went down the line striking everyone on the head. Until he got to my dad. He looked at my dad and simply walked away. I have always had a strong conviction about God’s providential care in our lives and I think a lot of that had to do with hearing stories like that about my dad. But such stories of God’s presence were not limited to living in New York.

In 1985 my dad became president of a college (Valley Forge Christian College) which, when he arrived, was nearly bankrupt and in danger of losing all its accreditation. My dad’s efforts to deal with the accreditation problem by phone or by mail were useless, so one day he decided to go down to DC and see the person at the Department of Education who handled college accreditation. 

It wasn’t easy to see him, but when he was finally allowed in, Dr Evans barked, “you have exactly five minutes, and the clock is already ticking.” (Sounds like a movie, I know, but it’s real nonetheless). Dr Evans had already made it clear nothing was going to change his mind about denying the college accreditation, but my dad had at least gotten in the door. Not knowing exactly how to start, my dad looked around the room and noticed that Dr Evans’ office was filled with icons that indicated pretty clearly he was Roman Catholic. So my dad took a gamble and said, “Well, Mr Evans, we have at least one thing in common.” “What’s that?” was the reply. “Jesus Christ.” My dad was still in Mr Evans’ office two hours later and at the end of that meeting, there was a plan in place for Valley Forge Christian College to hang on to its accreditation.

One of the most bizarre stories he ever told happened while he was a pastor outside Detroit. It was late at night and he had a strong compulsion (read: Holy Spirit) to get in his car and drive to a particular parking lot at a local street intersection. Two members of the church were in the middle of their own private rendezvous, so dad simply drove up, rolled down his window and said, “I think you two need to go back to your homes now. And come see me first thing in the morning.”

One thing I can truly say about my dad that I strive to follow in my own life was the dedication he gave to his calling. I learned exactly what this meant back in 1976 when I was fifteen. I fell in love with opera at an early age and my great goal was to see an opera at the Metropolitan in NYC. We had tickets to a performance of Verdi’s Aida on April 6. We were going to drive down from Boston on the 6th, attend the performance, stay overnight (how cool was that?) and drive back the following day. However...

However. There was a young boy in the church (he was my age) named Ralph who died of a brain tumor just a couple of days before the 6th. Ralph’s death was a big deal for the congregation and it turned out that the family wanted the funeral on, you guessed it, April 6. So my dad explained how that was going to turn out. There was no return visit planned for the two of us, I might add, and I think it’s because when my dad called the MET and explained the circumstances, not only would they not refund the tickets, they wouldn’t even allow him to make it a tax- deductible contribution. Oh well.

His understanding of God’s call on his life always stayed the same. I heard him say it more than once, including one time when he and my mom were quietly arguing (so that I couldn’t overhear it) about something going on at the church. As I sat there eavesdropping, I heard my dad explain why he was doing what he was doing by quoting John 17, one of his favorite Bible verses: “For their sakes I consecrate myself.” In the final analysis, life itself, not just a call to preach at a church, but life itself, is following the words of the Savior who on Maundy Thursday night, merely hours before going to the cross, explained his action in his High Priestly Prayer by saying, “For their sakes I consecrate myself.”

Over the years we had lots and lots and lots of talk about the Bible. We both shared a love of Jesus’ parables and we talked endlessly about interpretations of the Bible. We loved arguing, in a good-natured way, about the sacraments. (He was wrong if you’re wondering). We also disagreed strongly on the issue of whether the Apostle Paul grew up in Tarsus or in Jerusalem, which hinges in part on how one understands Acts 22:3. One day I may even explore this a little in another Word Speaks. 

But whatever we talked about, and wherever the conversation turned, there has never been anyone in my life through whom the Word spoke to me quite like it did through him. But perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise, since he was part of the communion of the Saints, one of the ways the Word always speaks is through the communion of saints. Thanks be to God.

Jane Dempsey Douglass

May 21, 2024

Today I want to introduce a new category for how the Word speaks to us, namely, through members of the communion of saints: the body of believers who over time have illustrated how to live lives of faith and grace. Melanchthon puts it this way in The Augsburg Confession: fellow Christians (saints) “are to be remembered so that we may strengthen our faith when we see how they experience grace and how they were helped by faith.” Moreover, he adds, the faithful works of other Christians are given by God himself as examples to assist us in our calling (Article XXI).

I have been exceptionally lucky (maybe I should say, exceptionally assisted in God’s providence) by numerous witnesses and examples of faith and grace. If there was ever an embarrassment of riches, it would be the family members, friends, and saints of the past who have made me the follower of Christ I am today. But with all the people close to me I could choose from, my first example is a former professor of mine, Jane Dempsey Douglass. Her class, Liturgies of the 16th Century, which I took in the Fall semester of 1990 at Princeton Seminary, was responsible in a way no other class or book has ever been, for my understanding of what it means to be Lutheran. In may ways, I am a Lutheran because of her.

There is a perverse irony to that, however. Prof Douglass is staunchly Presbyterian and thoroughly Reformed in her theology. Here though, lies the enduring legacy of her class for me: she illustrated a) the great affinity in many areas that Luther and Calvin had with one another as fellow 16th century Reformers, but b) she also highlighted the gulf that separated Luther and Calvin and which they themselves never bridged. In a strange, but valuable way, it was a Presbyterian who taught me what it means to be Lutheran. (Which is not to say that other Lutherans have not had a hand in my development as well. At least, that’s what I assured my candidacy committee when I was going for ordination!! But we’ll save those Lutherans for another occasion. Back to Prof Douglass).

One of Prof Douglass’ greatest contributions to my life and to the church as a whole is her book, Women, Freedom & Calvin (published in 1985 by Westminster Press). Many people, often including Presbyterians, have an image of John Calvin as a stern, severe, austere theologian and churchman ruling over a joyless church in Geneva. Well, he could be a bit austere – he wasn’t the kind of guy you’d invite over for drinks on New Year’s Eve – but his theology can often lead in surprising and interesting directions. One of the virtues of this book is that she takes three things most of us have pretty definite opinions about and shows how we can see them differently, namely women, freedom, and Calvin.

Her own life illustrates how an informed theology can make a difference. Born in 1933, she was raised in a time when women were not ordained in most Christian denominations or allowed to be leaders in them, and at a time when women did not generally pursue graduate degrees, but she managed to do all of those things. She was one of the pioneers in the effort to get the Presbyterian Church to ordain women; she was one of the first women to earn the Ph D from Harvard University; she was the first woman president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and she was the first woman president of the American Society of Church History. I mention these accomplishments not just to suggest that she had a lot of moxie, but because she did these things in the context of being a theologian rooted in the Calvinist tradition. 

She certainly does not invent or rewrite history; neither Calvin nor the other Reformers turn out to be proto-feminists. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how Calvin and others moved forward from the views of the medieval church on the role of women. It is perhaps shocking today to realize that much of medieval theology about women was tied to an Aristotelian science which taught that women were deformed and incomplete human beings. The theological tradition of Thomas Aquinas even taught that women’s physical incompleteness meant women were also spiritually deformed and incomplete.Some scholars even thought, though this was distinctly a minority view, that women might not even be able to be redeemed, because the Latin (Vulgate) translation of the Bible (the only translation available during the medieval period) used the male pronoun (vir) rather than the generic pronoun for mankind (homo) for the saved in Ephesians 4:13. Compared with that, Calvin and others come off as positively enlightened!

Calvin rooted his understanding of the Christian life, for both men and women, in the Apostle Paul’s notion of Christian freedom. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is,” Paul tells the church at Corinth, “there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17, and similarly in Romans 6:18; 8:2; and Galatians 1:4; 5:1). Calvin, like Luther, roots our understanding of Christian freedom in the doctrine of justification. In Christ we are set free to serve and obey God. Calvin applied this notion of freedom to the received traditions governing the role of women in church life (although not always to the same degree in civil life). 

Calvin applied his teaching on women from his understanding that Christian freedom follows from God’s freedom. My favorite part of Douglass’ book is when she discusses the Franciscan teaching on the freedom of God. Throughout its history, the church has been plagued with the inheritance of Greek philosophy that God is some immutable, inflexible being who imposes an ironclad blueprint for the course of human history and of human beings. This foreknowledge all too often leads us to think of God as someone who has scripted every moment of every person’s life such that God and we are merely robots doing what has been scripted for us.

Not so taught people such as William of Occam and other Franciscans. (If you’ve ever read or seen the movie The Name of the Rose, the main character is patterned after William of Occam). God, and his actions, are not confined to a tiny little box; rather, God is free to bring his salvation and his grace at every opportunity. Just think of all the times in the Old Testament we read that “God changed his mind.” In every instance – every one! – that we read that “God changed his mind”, he did so in order to grant forgiveness rather than destroy his people (such as the episode of the golden calf). 

What I particularly love about the Franciscan’s notion of God’s freedom is the way they understand miracle. Again, thanks (but no thanks) to the ancient philosophers, we have been trained to think that miracles have to be explained as “violations of the laws of nature.” But God is not confined to laws of nature; he is not bound or confined by any law. Rather, what we call miracles or exceptions to the laws of nature are in fact nothing but God using his freedom to act in a new way, in a different way, in a free way, to bring his grace to us. The history of God is the history of God freely working out his grace in whatever ways God sees fit.

This part of the book alone on God’s freedom (chapter 2) is worth the whole price of the book. The remainder of the book explores the way that we as the church can learn from God’s freedom to use our freedom as Christians to serve God’s people. I highly recommend this book by Prof Douglass.

But far more, I highly recommend the communion of saints! The history of the church is filled with people like Jane Dempsey Douglass (and even Calvin!) who have used their God-given gifts for the sake of the church to let His Word speak. The Word always speaks, and very often it speaks through God’s own people.

By Distinctive Words

July 23, 2024

If this were a final exam for a course on the Bible, there would be a section called “matching” asking you to match a book of the Bible with a distinctive or characteristic word or phrase. The word might actually appear in other places in the Bible, but each word nevertheless calls to mind one, and only one, book (or one author) of the Bible. So, since there’s no grade for this test, and you have nothing to lose, give it your best guess:

For twenty-five points (or for seconds at coffee hour), match the following words/phrases with a corresponding book (or author) of the Bible.

1. Immediately A. John

2. The Holy One of Israel B. Hebrews

3. Better C. Paul

4. Grace D. Isaiah

5. Truth E. Mark

Answers: 1E; 2D; 3B; 4C; 5A

Now for some explanation about why these words matter to their authors.

1. The Immediate Urgency of the Good News

Mark’s Gospel is without a doubt the shortest, the quickest, and the fastest- moving of all the gospels. If Mark were our only gospel, we could easily assume that Jesus’ ministry lasted barely a single year. This is because Mark hardly ever pauses in relating Jesus’ story. Of the 88 sections (or paragraphs) in Mark, 80 of them begin with the word “and” as if to say that Jesus never stopped. To highlight the speed at which everything happens, Mark uses the word “immediately” 42 times in his gospel. By contrast, the word immediately occurs only elven times in the other three gospels. “Immediately… and immediately… and immediately” is the hallmark of Mark’s Gospel. But why?

It’s worth remembering that Mark’s is the first gospel ever written. Ever. As in, the first of its kind to ever appear. “Gospel” is in fact a genre that Mark created – no such literary genre existed before Mark. So Mark is creating a new kind of literature and peppering it with the word “immediately” because he has something of fantastic urgency he needs to convey. There is something about the cross that Mark needs people to understand – immediately.

It’s also worth considering that Mark’s Gospel gives more attention to the presence of Satan and the demonic than the other gospels. Mark shares the Jewish mindset that world history is governed by two ages or aeons: the present age, which is the age of Satan, and the age to come, the time when God’s kingdom would invade this world and overthrow Satan. What makes Jesus’ ministry so powerful is that Jesus brings the future age of God’s kingdom into the present age of evil. Thus, already in chapter 1 of Mark Jesus goes into the wilderness to battle Satan and defeat him. 

To a world struggling with evil, fighting against despair, and clinging, it seems, by a thread to believe in God, Mark wastes no time telling the Good News of God in Jesus Christ. Now is not the time to despair, says Mark; now is the time to embrace the Good News that comes to us through Jesus Christ who died on a cross for us.

To get a fresh sense of Mark’s urgency, I would invite you to read his gospel, and every time you come to the word “immediately” replace it with equally valid phrases such as, “without hesitation” or “without wasting any time.” Consider the following:

Mark 1:12        [Following Jesus’ baptism] “Without wasting any time, the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness…”

Mark 4:29,30        [After the woman with the issue of blood touches Jesus’ cloak] “Without any hesitation, her hemorrhage stopped… And without pausing, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?”

Mark 14:43        “Without wasting a single minute, while Jesus was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived.”

If you read Mark this way, I think  you’ll see immediately how urgent his message is.

2. The Holy One of Israel: God in Unapproachable Majesty and Unequaled Mercy

When C S Lewis wrote that “amiable agnostics who talk about man’s search for God might just as well talk about the mouse’s search for the cat,” he was thinking of Isaiah’s description of God as the Holy One of Israel. This designation for God is entirely unique to Isaiah, and he uses it repeatedly (1:4; 5:19, 24; 10:20; 12:6; 17:7; 29:19; 30:11-12, 15; 31:1; 37:23). This is the God who declares, “as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and as the dry grass sinks down in the flame, so [Israel’s] root will become rotten, and their blossom go up like dust; for they have rejected the instruction of the Lord of Hosts, and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel” (5:24). There is no casual messing around with this God.

Isaiah’s understanding of God is inextricably linked to his own experience of God in the Temple. As God thunders in the Temple and the seraphim sing, “holy, holy, holy” Isaiah despairs and cries out, “Woe is me! I am lost… for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts” (6:3).

The origin of the word holy entails both a sense of separation and a sense of brilliant light. To say that God is holy is to say that he is unmistakably transcendent and wholly different from his creation. Thus, Isaiah can say, “the Lord of Hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread” (8:13). In this same way, the brilliant light of God’s appearance is so dazzling as to be blinding. Woe betide the sinner who takes God for granted or casually dismisses as someone not to be taken with deadly seriousness.

And yet, because God is God, God always looks favorably and mercifully on his creation. Our insufficiency, measured against his majesty, is not what makes us a sinner. It is our refusal to acknowledge our insufficiency that constitutes sin. All God requires is that we confess who we are and submit to his mercy. 

Phillips Brooks (author of “O LIttle Town of Bethlehem”!) penned one of the mottoes that I live my life by: “whoever fears God will never fear anything else; whoever does not fear God will fear everything.” The fear of God really is the beginning of wisdom, because it is the simple confession of who God and who we are. Once we acknowledge that, we can say with Isaiah, “The meek shall obtain fresh joy in the Lord, and the neediest people shall exult in the Holy One of Israel” (29:19).

3. Christ: the Better Priest, the Better Sacrifice, the Better Covenant

Twelve times the author of Hebrews uses the word “better.” That may not sound like a whole lot, but consider this: outside of Hebrews, the word only appears one other time in the New Testament. That Jesus is “better” or “superior” marks the author’s fundamental understanding of Jesus Christ. In contrast to the priesthood, the sacrifices, and the covenant which preceded him, Jesus is in every respect better. 

At the center of Hebrews is the proper understanding of covenant, hope, promises, law and the approach to God. The Book of Hebrews was written to clarify that Jesus is better than anything that came before him because Jesus took care of everything to do with our relationship with God, once and for all on the cross. Jesus did it all, and he had to do it only once. 

In contrast, the old way of approaching God required priests to make constant sacrifices, it required sacrifices that could only grant forgiveness one act at a time, and it was based on a covenant that could not erase human sin. But Jesus, by going to the cross, takes care of a priesthood, sacrifices, and a covenant that were all limited in what they could do. Jesus in his role as high priest, as the sacrifice for our sin, and as the basis of a new covenant, grants forgiveness of all sin, opens forever the pathway to God’s intercession for us, and fulfills all the promises of God. 

In the words of Brevard Childs, the Book of Hebrews “contrasts the old covenant and its earthly tent with the new covenant and its heavenly sanctuary in order to to make clear the inability of the old dispensation to provide true communion with God” (The New Testament as Canon, 1985, p. 416). 

4. Grace: New Realities Require New Language

If there is any single word that defines Christianity, most of us would pick the word “grace.” We know that because Paul tells us so. Actually, he tells us so 100 times!

But here’s the interesting thing: Jesus himself never uses the word once. That’s because grace, understood as the free, undeserved gift of God is something that Christians came to understand after the cross and resurrection.

Paul didn’t entirely create the word grace; it existed in Greek literature but only in the sense that we use the word “graceful”; it referred to things that were elegant, or kind, or beautiful. Grace was a quality, but a human quality.

Then, one day, a man named Saul was on the road to Damascus and had an encounter with the risen, resurrected Lord sitting in glory at the right hand of God the Father. And in that encounter, the man who took on a new name, Paul, had to come up with a way to describe how he, a hideously unworthy human being, was suddenly on the receiving end of all God’s abundant, lavish, inextinguishable mercy and love. There was no such word that could say all of that, so Paul had to come up with one of his own. And he chose the word, grace.

That’s why, although the word does appear a total of 155 times in the New Testament, Paul owns that word. Other writers use it, but they use it with the meaning Paul gave it. He owns the word because he gave it the meaning that has come to describe the experience of every one of us: the total, complete reception of all God’s divine favor, in spite of the fact that we don’t deserve it all. God gives it freely. In a word: grace.

5. Jesus is The Truth Who Sets Us Free

When it comes to favorite words, “truth” is one of Saint John’s favorite words. John uses the word “truth” 25 times in his gospel and another 20 times in his three small letters. Just in terms of numbers, that means half of the uses of “truth” in the New Testament come from John. But there’s more here than just numbers. 

As any dictionary will tell us, truth is usually defined and understood as facts, or propositional statements which can easily be identified and proven. QED, right? But not in the Gospel of John. Truth for John is nothing less than believing in Jesus Christ. To put it even simpler, Jesus Christ IS truth. We can see this not just in its frequency but in the way John uses the word at the most critical moments of his gospel. Here are just a few of those instances.

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth… No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (1:14, 18). At stake here is nothing less than how human beings can behold the face of God. The only reason we can see God, and therefore grace and truth, is by seeing Jesus Christ. Seeing God and knowing the truth are identical things, because they are both about Jesus. This becomes even clearer in the next example:

“If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free… Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin… If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (8:31-36). Here Jesus states unmistakably that the only liberating “truth” is knowing him and his word. We can know definitively that Jesus is referring to himself as the truth, and not some intellectual concept, because only Jesus can set us free from sin. 

“What is truth?” (18:38). If you love irony, this verse is for you. There is no greater irony in all the Bible than Pontius Pilate asking, in John’s Gospel, “what is truth?” because the truth in the person of Jesus Christ is standing right in front of him. Pilate, indeed, sums up the feelings of the world at large by wanting to discuss truth as an abstraction, or an ideal, or a set of facts. But none of those things will solve his problem, which is what to do with Jesus. No philosophical discussion will save the day here; Pilate’s only option is to believe that Jesus Christ himself is the truth. If only Pilate had been with Jesus less than twelve hours earlier (!) when Jesus declared to his disciples around the table of the Last Supper,

“I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me” (14:7). For John, and for all of us, that says it all. The Word Speaks, and although it says many different things, it always leads us back to Jesus Christ.

Psalms that Provide Milk for Spiritual Ulcers

July 9, 2024

One of the things that I most cherish about my grandfather was his knack for clever sermon titles. A particular favorite title is “Milk for Spiritual Ulcers.” There may be an additional reason I like the title, aside from its cleverness. My mom struggled with ulcers throughout her life and more than once had surgery to remove parts of her intestine. (One of those occasions was nearly fatal thanks to a dunderhead doctor, but that’s another story.) I still have a childhood memory of my mom running to the fridge, grabbing a blue bottle of Maalox and drinking straight from the bottle. To this day, that particular hue of blue always reminds me of Maalox and my mom’s ulcers.

Of course, there are spiritual as well as physical ulcers, and we all know how doubts, fears, and anxieties can whittle away at our physical and emotional well being. So the question for today is, does God’s Word truly provide comfort for spiritual ulcers? Most people tend to turn to the Psalms for comfort, and that turns out to be a pretty good place to hear God reassure us of his eternal presence. Today’s list of psalms for spiritual ulcers looks at four specific psalms (3, 20, 23, 46) and a clump of fifteen psalms (120-134) known collectively as ascent psalms.

Psalm 3: Comfort in Sleep

“I lie down and sleep;
I wake again, for the Lord sustains me” (3:5)

It doesn’t get more explicit than that, does it? Sleep doesn’t come easily to most of us. Yes, there are some people who close their eyes and are gone that quickly, but I’ve never known it myself. There are countless ways that people have created to induce sleep. Some people (at least in the cartoons I used to watch) count sheep; others listen to Brahms’ Lullaby; some people read; and still others turn on the TV, the radio, or even a fan hoping that some external noise will neutralize a mind that never stops and is always mulling over problems.

King David, however, simply turned to God in prayer when he went to bed. David wrote Psalm 3 during one of the most perilous moments of his life (though, come to think of it, he had a lot of perilous moments, didn’t he?). This one comes when his son Absalom staged a coup in order to steal the throne away from his father. It’s a wonder that David even had time to sleep, given that he was fighting for his life.

But that’s the great testimony of this psalm. It’s not just about getting forty winks; it’s trusting that even in the worst of times “deliverance belongs to the Lord” (3:8). We repeat all the time Jesus’ own prayer to be delivered from evil; Psalm 3 is a reminder that Jesus himself found comfort and reassurance in the psalms. If Jesus could find his assurance there, we can too.

Psalm 20: Victory in Jesus

Here is another psalm of David. His writings, like his life, certainly take on a familiar refrain, don’t they? Adversity => Prayer => Deliverance and Victory pretty well sums up David’s life and he regularly employs this same sequence of adversity, prayer, victory in the psalms that he wrote.

Psalm 20 is one of a series of “royal psalms” that affirm God’s choice of David and his descendants as anointed kings in Jerusalem. The royal psalms are often triumphant in tone because if God has anointed the kings in Jerusalem, what can go wrong? Right? Well, here’s the really interesting thing. The line of David did, in fact, come to an end in the year 587 BC when King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem, putting an end to both the Temple and the Davidic kingship. At that point, God’s people went into exile. 

Which is about as bleak as things can be. God had made two very specific promises to his people, that he would be with them through the kings coming from David, and that he would be with them in His Temple. But after 587 BC, neither of those two things existed. There was no anointed king and there was no Temple.

So, why, then, did God’s people continue to chant royal psalms like Psalm 20 in worship? Why hold on to the promise of victory when there was no king to give the victory? Victory, after all, is the theme of Psalm 20 expressed in verses 5, 6, and 9. The answer is found in the word translated “victory,” which can also be translated as “salvation.” 

The word in Hebrew for victory/salvation is yeshua, from which we get the word Joshua. However – here’s where things get really juicy! – Psalm 20 speaks not only of victory/salvation, but also of God’s anointed, God’s messiah. And what do you get when you put king, Joshua, and Messiah all together? Hint: the word Joshua when translated to Greek becomes Jesus. And there you have it. Even in times when God’s promise seems to be invisible, God’s people have learned to trust that victory and salvation are in the hands of God’s greatest king, Jesus the Messiah.

Psalm 23: Thou art With Me

Okay, Psalm 23 is an obvious choice for comfort, isn’t it? But just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s not true. There are many things to be said about Psalm 23, and most of them you probably know. But here’s my favorite part of the psalm, the reason I find it truly calming for spiritual ulcers. It’s the phrase from verse 4 (pardon me for using the King James I grew up with), “for thou art with me.”

Here’s the really great thing about that phrase (and for this I am indebted to James LImburg’s fabulous commentary on the Psalms). There are 26 words (in Hebrew) that precede the phrase “for thou art with me” and 26 words that come after the phrase “for thou art with me.” David has therefore made the phrase “for thou art with me” the climax and highpoint of the entire psalm. Everything in this psalm builds to this phrase, and everything else in the psalm follows from it. Life for King David truly revolved around the idea of God being with us. But to make sure we don’t miss the point, he uses numerology to drive it home one more way.

As is well known, the Hebrews loved numerology, the notion of finding truth in the various ways that numbers can be used. David uses numerology not only by the number of words in Psalm 23, but also by connecting the number 26 with God. There are four letters in the Hebrew name of God, YHWH, from which we get the word Yahweh, God’s own personal name (which God reveals to Moses in Exodus 3). As it happens, the four letters of God’s name equal the number 26. If the number 26 revolves around the phrase “for thou art with me,” the number 26 identifies who the “thou” is who is with us: it’s the living God himself. In every way possible, Psalm 23 gives us milk for spiritual ulcers by assuring us that God is always with us.

Psalm 46: Comfort in Strength

There are times when we need assurance and comfort in life that is soft and tender, like a loving mother who wipes away our tears. But there are other ties when the comfort we need is strong and mighty, like a solid rock. God offers both kinds of comfort. According to Isaiah 66, God is like a mother who comforts us by rocking us on God’s knee. But there are also times when God provides a comfort that is strong, unshakable, and unmovable, the kind of comfort that could inspire Martin Luther to write A Mighty Fortress is Our God. Where did Luther find his inspiration to write about God as a mighty fortress? From Psalm 46.

Psalm 46 is divided into three parts (verses 1-3, 4-7, 8-11). Each section is set off by the word selah which indicates a pause during worship for a time of reflection; it may also be an indication of a musical interlude in the Temple that assisted reflection. Specifically, this psalm describes the comfort of God’s mighty hand against three different threats: threats from nature, threats from foreign nations, and threats from war.

Psalm 46 is known as one of the Songs of Zion (Psalms 46, 48, 76, 84, 87, 122 and 132). Zion, another name for Jerusalem, celebrates the way God resides with his people in a special way in God’s own city. Jerusalem was the city where God’s anointed, David, was made king, and it is the city where God dwelt in his Temple. As befits the city of God, it was built on a mountain (Mt Zion) where it was secure and easy to defend. There was also a stream that ran through the city so that even if an enemy surrounded the city in an attack, there would always be water to drink. Jerusalem was a mighty city, a place of comfort and security. As always, the work of salvation is God’s and God’s alone. In response to this salvation, all God’s people need to do is “be still and know that I am God!” (46:10).

Psalms 120-134: Comfort on the Journey

Each of these fifteen psalms are designated as “A Song of Ascents.” These psalms were written to be said aloud during the long ascent up Mount Zion to the Temple. As people walked up the mountain, they would recite these psalms, all of which reassured them that God was with them on their journey and would be present with them in the worship of his holy Temple. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the exclamation “I was glad when they said unto me, ‘let us go to the house of the Lord’” comes from one of ascent psalms (122:1) that was spoken on the way to the Temple. 

Eventually these psalms became important not just for pilgrims who traveled to the Temple but for God’s people on any and all journeys. The journey is one of the most common descriptions throughout the Bible of life with God. The literal journeys of people like Abraham and Sarah, of Moses, of Hebrews in the wilderness, or the road up Mt Zion became metaphors for life with God as we journey “to that city whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10). This same metaphor of journey underlines our understanding of Lent.

One of the interesting things about these pilgrimage psalms is that their subject matter is not devoted to heavy theological issues as it is to simple things such as family and daily life. Klaus Seybold writes that the world of these psalms “is the world of the simple person and the little people, of the farmer, the handworker, the mother with small children, the father of the family, who works from early until late, who experiences both tears and jubilation, who rejoices at the festivals and thinks about religious matters. These psalms are witnesses from everyday life, witnesses of folk poetry and folk piety. All of this makes them especially precious” (quoted in Limburg’s commentary, p. 421).

I find it striking that a series of psalms about the journey to God’s presence in the Temple gives such reassurance that God is not only with us at the end of the journey, but is with us every step of the journey and pays attention to our smallest, most basic, everyday needs. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that it is one of the ascent psalms that has the answer to life’s question, “I lift up my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come?” The answer, of course, is that “my help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:1, 2).

Surely, one of the best places in Scripture to find milk for spiritual ulcers is in the psalms. And when you don’t have time to read all 150, you can start with psalms like 3, 20, 23, 46 and finish off your journey with 120-134. The Word Always Speaks, and in the Psalms it speaks a Word of comfort and reassurance.

And Helps Us To See

June 11, 2024

I don’t know what Saint Mark’s favorite Christmas carol was, but I’m going to guess that it may have been “Do you see what I see?” Actually, he probably didn’t know that carol, but I’m going to suggest that this carol is most appropriate for explaining Mark’s Gospel. A correct understanding of Jesus requires the ability to “see” who he really is. Seeing is one thing; seeing correctly is another. And in Mark’s Gospel, seeing correctly hinges on how we perceive him as the bringer of God’s good news through his death on the cross.

Like any good author, Mark has his own distinctive vocabulary, his own set of words he likes to use to convey his purpose in writing. One of those words is the Greek word blepo (βλεπω) for see. What I would like to do in today’s column is look at the list of Mark’s uses of “see” to see how this word leads us to Jesus Christ. Interestingly, the old King James translation of blepo as “behold” has a lot going for it even though we never encounter that word in conversation any more. Mark uses the verb see fourteen times in his gospel, twelve of those times with a heightened, specific sense of see. Of these fourteen uses of the verb see, 

• eight of them have the special sense of “beware”; or “be on the lookout” (4:24; 8:15; 12:38; 13:2; 13:5; 13:9; 13:23; 13:33); 

• two have the technical meaning of “discern the meaning of Scripture from a Christian point of view (4:11; 8:18), and 

• two mean see in the sense of “recognize who Jesus really is” (8:23, 24).

• (That leaves two uses of see in the standard sense of the word, 5:31; 12:14). 

Here is the listing of all those appearances. (I have put the translation for blepo in bold print).

4:12 ‘they may indeed look but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’ 

4:24 Jesus said to them, “Pay attention to what you hear; the measure you give will be the measure you get, and it will be added to you.

5:31 His disciples said to Jesus, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’ ”

8:15 Jesus cautioned them, saying, “Watch out — beware of the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.”

8:18 Do you have eyes and fail to see? Do you have ears and fail to hear? And do you not remember? 

8:23, 24 Jesus took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village, and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Can you see anything?” And the man looked up and said, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.”

12:14 They came and said to Jesus, “Teacher, we know that you are sincere and show deference to no one, for you do not regard people with partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

12:38 As Jesus taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces.

13:2 Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

13:5,9 Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray… As for yourselves, beware, for they will hand you over to councils, and you will be beaten in synagogues, and you will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them.”

13:23 But be alert; I have already told you everything.

13:33 Beware, keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come.

Curiously, but not, I think accidentally, all these uses of “see” fall into law and gospel categories. To really see Jesus is to behold him as the bringer of God’s good news. But at the same time, we must beware, for a failure to see God’s good news at work in Jesus is to be led astray.

The highpoint of these usages comes in chapter 8 of Mark. Not coincidentally, Mark 8 is the exact midpoint of his Gospel. Mark 8 contains Peter’s climactic confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Everything in Jesus’ ministry builds to this confession in chapter 8, and everything following that confession in chapter 8 leads to the cross. Jesus and his mission to the cross are identical because Jesus’ death on the cross is what brings us God’s good news. The goal of Mark’s Gospel is to help us see this. So, to illustrate this theme, Mark places the story of Jesus healing the blind man in the verses immediately prior to Peter’s confession.

This is the only miracle of Jesus that happens in stages; this is not an accident, for it illustrates the gradual manner in which people come to truly see Jesus. In fact, the blind man illustrates the gradual manner in which Jesus’ own disciples are seeing who Jesus really is. 

After Jesus places his hands on the blind man, Jesus says, “Can you see anything.” The man is able to see, but only in a blurry manner, not at all clearly. So Jesus places his hands on the blind man again. This time, the man “saw everything clearly.” And no sooner does the blind man clearly see who Jesus is, than Peter confesses two verses later that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. At which point Jesus speaks of his death and resurrection.

Mark’s brilliance as an author is clearly at work in the way that he places his stories about seeing Jesus and seeing that he must die on the cross. That question that permeates and dominates Mark’s Gospel is, “do you see?” But there is much more than artistry at work here; more than either Matthew or Luke, Mark has highlighted in one chapter the way that the way to understand that the fulfillment of all God’s promises about grace and forgiveness hinges on seeing Jesus as Suffering Servant who must go to the cross for our sin. (John does something similarly in his story of a different blind person in chapter 9 of his Gospel). The Word always speaks, and when it speaks it helps us see who Jesus really is.

Tears

June 4, 2024

Assembling interesting lists, or any list at all, has never been one of my skills. I’ve never been one for making decisions based on lists of upsides and downsides, and I’ve never been clever enough to create lists that were both intriguing (such as baseball’s top ten knuckleball pitchers) and also said something meaningful beyond the list itself. That is, does a list of top ten knuckleballers actually say something worthwhile about the game of baseball?

Ever since I started this series of columns I have been trying to come up with a worthwhile list – something that went beyond just a list of Ten Great Men or Five Famous Women. Hopefully, I’ve found one today with a list of those who cried to God in the Bible. Beyond just a list of people who shed tears, I hope I can answer how God’s Word Speaks to and through those who cry. Specifically, I want to at the tears of King David for his son Absalom; the Psalmist who speaks for all of us in our darkness; Paul and the church at Corinth; and Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus.

King David for his Son

Tears, whether shed by people in the Bible or not, are almost always a result of pain, physical or otherwise. I think that one of the painful and heartfelt examples of tears comes from King David at the death of his son, Absalom. When David hears that Absalom is dead, we read that “the king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, ‘O my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son’” (2 Samuel 18:33).

Behind David’s searing, painful grief lies an equally painful story. David, of course, had been specially chosen by God at a very early age to be His anointed leader of the people of Israel. David’s early years had been marked even then by grief – a king who tried on more than one occasion to assassinate him, a wife who came to despise him, and a friend named Jonathan whose death also caused David to cry. But over against all this was the certainty of God’s call, and God’s own determination to be with David, to sustain him, and to give him victory.

Comfortable with his victories, at ease with his own press clippings, David’s dependance on God falters and amid a series of sins, David’s own family falls apart. One of David’s sons rapes his David’s daughter, Absalom’s sister. When David refuses to impose any punishment on Amnon for his rape, Abaslom takes things into his own hand and avenges his sister, Tamar, by killing Amnon.

Still angry with his father, Absalom plots a coup to depose David and set himself as king. Word of the rebellion leaks out, and David is forced to send troops to arrest Absalom. But even though David expressly commands that Absalom not be harmed, David’s general, Joab, decides to kill Absalom anyway. And David weeps, and weeps, and weeps for his son. As awful as a child’s death can be, I suspect that David’s tears are a reflection not only of his son’s death, but of the family tragedy he unwittingly had a hand in, and a reflection of where his own walk with God has faltered by his own sinning. Tears for death, tears for tragedy, tears for what should not have been. By any standard, David’s tears are deeply moving.

The Psalmist and Us

One of the great virtues of the Psalms is that they express in song and prayer the feelings we need to express God. This is why we chant the Psalms in worship: they say to God what we need to say to God. And oftentimes these prayers to God come from a feeling of deep darkness. No psalm expresses the tears of inner darkness more than Psalm 88.

This psalm is composed by the group of professional musicians known as the Korahites who were appointed by David son, King Solomon, to provide music for worship in the Temple. Psalm 88 is one of these hymns. What stands out more than anything else in this psalm is the desperation of the speaker. For example, this: My soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who can go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help… You have put me in the depths of the Pit, in the regions dark and deep… I suffer your terrors; I am desperate.”

Twice the psalmist cries out to God. Sometimes the verb “cry out” merely means speaking in a loud voice. But there are times when Israel cries out to God with such desperation that real tears must lie behind these cries, as when Israel cries out to God when they are suffering bondage in Egypt (Exodus 2:23). I think the same holds true in Psalm 88. Anyone so afraid that God has put them in the darkness of the Pit is surely shedding real tears.

And yet, tears cannot be the last word, can they? If so, Psalm 88 would not be in the Bible. One of my themes throughout this column is that “Bible” doesn’t just refer to a bunch of individual statements or books that have been collected into one; “Bible” is the entire volume that God has providentially given to his people to help, lead, guide, and sustain them. The Bible is the church’s worship book: it allows us to express our pain, but it points us to the One who saves, heals, and redeems from pain. If Psalm 88 expresses the tears that come from an inner darkness, the witness of the Word is that God meets us in precisely those situations.

Paul and the Corinthians

If there is anyone whom I find it difficult to imagine crying, it is the Apostle Paul. If nothing else, he was a hard, hard person. Who else but a hard person would have severed his relationship with his mentor Barnabas and fired Jesus’ own disciple Mark as his companion in ministry? This guy didn’t shed many tears.

And yet, he did. He cried over his church at Corinth. If there’s anything we know about Paul’s relationship with the church at Corinth, it’s that they gave him fits. Adultery, church factions, disagreements over worship, and disputes about the resurrection are only a few of the things that Paul had to deal with at Corinth. Oh yes, and then there’s his love for the congregation. At one point during his dealings with Corinth, he completely lost his patience with them and read them the riot act. This is known as The Tearful Letter, and he alludes to it in 2 Corinthians 2:3-4 when he writes, “I wrote as I did, so that when I came [to visit you again], I might not suffer pain from those who should have made me rejoice, for I am confident about all of you, that my joy would be the joy of all of you. For I wrote to you out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain, but to let you know of the abundant love that I have for you.”

Whatever Paul wrote in his Tearful Letter, it did the job. The Corinthians repented and the relationship with Paul, their founding apostle, was restored. Incidentally, Paul wrote several letters (probably a total of five) to the church at Corinth, although not all of them have survived. Probably the Tearful Letter has been lost, although it is possible that chapters 10-13 of 2 Corinthians might actually be the Tearful Letter and that this was tacked on to the end of 2 Corinthians when Paul’s letters were collected at his various congregations.

But whatever happened to the Tearful Letter, this is what really matters: however harsh Paul may have been with his congregation, the tears he shed over them were tears of love. And if his letter produced tears at Corinth as it most surely did, they were tears of repentance. Tears of love and tears of repentance. In a way this summarizes the entire Gospel. And that takes me to Jesus and his own tears.

Jesus at the Tomb of Lazarus

We all grew up knowing that John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.” Boy, did this verse come in handy when I had to demonstrate my ability to memorize Scripture. The NRSV translates this verse, “and Jesus began to weep” which is more accurate in a very technical way, but somehow doesn’t convey the punch of “Jesus wept.”

Here’s what I find really interesting about Jesus’ tears: not that he cried – he was, after all, human – but that John connects his crying to anger. Not only does John record Jesus being angry, he uses a word for strong anger that literally refers to the way a horse snorts in disgust (11:33, 38). Do not be misled by the NRSV translating anger as “deeply moved”; Jesus was more than deeply moved, he was furious. The question is, Why? What is Jesus so angry about when he is at his best friend’s tomb?

Many answers have been given to this question but by far the most convincing is that Jesus is angry at the reality of sin and the way sin brought death into the world and into our lives. Jesus is angry because sin is corrosive and oppressive that it is destroying God’s own good creation. But that’s why Jesus came, isn’t it? To overcome sin, death and the devil. And that points to another interesting feature of this story. When Jesus is crying, even his opponents are moved to say, “behold, how he loved him” (11:36).

There you have it: tears, anger and love. Jesus weeps and Jesus is angry because he loves us and all God’s creation and is torn apart by what sin has done to us and this world. It is for our sake, and not just for Lazarus’ sake, that Jesus cried, that Jesus was angry and that Jesus went to the cross. And for Jesus’ tears we can be eternally grateful, because it was those tears that led him to the cross.

Four different people, four different kinds of tears. David wept for his dear son and for his own failings; the Psalmist wept for himself, but also on behalf of all God’s children, when he was in a dark place; the Apostle Paul wept for his congregation that they would repent and once again hear the Good News; and Jesus wept not only for his dearest friend but for all of creation. But in every case God was present and continues to be present through the cross. The Word Speaks, sometimes in tears, but always in a way that leads to God’s love and the cross. Amen.

Questions

July 16, 2024

Today’s column looks at my favorite five questions that come from the Bible – not questions about the Bible, but questions that come right from its own words. (I actually have six favorite questions, but Jesus’ question, “who do people say that I am?” deserves a whole column just for itself.) So, without further ado, my five favorite Bible questions. 

But will God indeed dwell on earth? I Kings 8:27

The Elusive Presence is the title of one of the most important books on Old Testament theology, written by Samuel Terrien in 1978. The title says it all. We all seek God, we all need God, but somehow when we want him most he doesn’t seem to be around. We all know, we have all experienced, that God can be elusive. So where is he, and can I find him here on earth?

This is the question King Solomon asks at the dedication of Israel’s greatest worship site, the Jerusalem Temple. Solomon’s Temple is in many ways the highpoint of Old Testament history, and the writer of 1 Kings devotes a lot of attention to it. The writer spends thirty-eight verses describing the architecture and furnishings of the Temple (7:13-51); thirteen verses on the assembly in the Temple and the procession of the Ark of the Covenant (8:1-13); seven verses to Solomon’s dedicatory speech (8:14-21); thirty-one verses to Solomon’s prayer of dedication (8:22-53); and twelve verses (8:54-66) to Solomon’s blessing, sacrificial offerings, and celebration. For people who like ceremony, fanfare, bells and whistles (and incense, too), this is a stunning chapter.

And yet, amid all this fanfare and hoopla, right in the middle of Solomon’s dedicatory prayer, he pauses and asks aloud, “But will God indeed dwell on the earth?” That is a profound question because the whole point to the Temple is that it is God’s special dwelling place. That’s why Israel was commanded to go to the Temple: that’s where God would be. 

However, Solomon is wise enough – remember, this dedication occurs immediately after Solomon’s prayer for wisdom – not to presume on God. God is not an errand boy who can be summoned by snapping our fingers; God does not automatically show up just because we yell, “garḉon!” God is not to be commanded; God is to be served, worshiped and loved.

And yet, because God loves us, he does dwell on earth with us, particularly in the person of Jesus Christ. St John tells us this point blank: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14) The first, most important way of experiencing God is through the personal Word of God, Jesus Christ himself. But we confess that there are three forms of the Word. The first is the personal Word, Jesus Christ, but we also know God through the written Word, the Bible, and through the visible Word, the sacraments of baptism and holy communion. 

Solomon posed a great question, one of profound importance, and God’s answer is yes: through the personal Word, the written Word, and the visible Word.

Shall a man die and live? Job 14:12 (New English Bible)

The great Swiss theologian Emil Brunner regarded this question as the fundamental question of the modern world: is there anything left after we die? The question was first posed by Job, however, a great many centuries before the modern world came to pass. Nevertheless, I think Brunner is right. Job’s question is the basic existential question of every human: when we die, will we live again?

By the time we get to Job 14, Job has lost his wealth, his possessions, most of his family, and, not least, hope. In a discourse beginning in chapter 12, Job laments everything that has happened to him and despairs even of life. At this point, I can imagine him pausing and, facing the futility of life, asking, “shall a man die and live?” Job answers his own question in the following verse with a negative. No, Job says, when we die, we die.

But Job’s question, even his despair, is not the final word in Scripture. The final word is Easter. Easter is the promise that God can take even death and transform it into something better and greater: namely, life with him. This is the promise of Jesus to Mary and Martha who are grieving the death of their brother, Lazarus. “I am the resurrection and the life,” says Jesus. “Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live” (John 11:35).

This is also the testimony of the Apostle Paul when he writes to the church at Corinth. For Paul, the resurrection is completed redemption; resurrection is our final, complete transformation from mortal sinner to redeemed creatures who will live with God in eternity. Paul affirms this when he writes, “Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], so we will also bear the image of the man of heaven [Jesus Christ]” (1 Corinthians 15:49). At this point Paul, speaking for God himself, answers Job’s question with another question: “O death, where is thy victory? O grave, where is thy sting?... Thanks be to God who gives us the victory” (15:55-57).

How often should I forgive? As often as seven times? Matthew 18:21

When Peter asks this question, I’m pretty sure he thinks he’s being generous in his offer to forgive seven times; it does strike me as a lot. And for most of us, maybe it is. The problem however, is not just the number of times that Peter is willing to forgive, it’s his determination to keep track of them. The only way to know whether you’ve forgiven three, four, five times or whatever, is that you’ve kept track of just how many times you’ve already forgiven. 

Human forgiveness is always doled out piecemeal; we forgive one at a time, and finally, there comes a time when we forgive no more, and that’s that. I found an interesting illustration of this some years ago reading the autobiography of a hockey referee named Bruce Hood. Back in the 1960s, if a hockey player was tossed from a game, it came with a $50 fine. The way Hood assigned game misconducts was that he kept track of players’ infractions and at whatever point they reached what Hood considered $50 worth of infractions, he gave them a game misconduct. That’s just how most of us forgive  – up to $50 and no more, and that’s not even allowing for inflation!

Jesus, however, shows us a different model when he dies on the cross. The best way of describing this comes from a favorite hymn of mine, “When Peace Like a River,” which declares in verse 3, “my sin, not in part, but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more.” Jesus does not forgive piecemeal. Instead, his one act of forgiveness on the cross covers all sin.

I think the hardest thing to understand in the Bible is not a doctrine of the Trinity but that God has forgiven all our sin. How much is all, you ask? It means just what it says: ALL. The Word is quite definite. God forgives, not 7, not 49, not 490, not any particular quantity of sins, he simply forgives them all. On the cross.

And the things you have prepared, whose will they be? Luke 12:20

The Word never quite lets us off the hook, does it? Especially when we’re reading the Gospel of Luke. More than any other book of the Bible, Luke has a great deal to say about how God’s people use money and possessions. And here’s the hard part: Luke, or better yet, Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, takes a dim view of money and possessions when they are not being used for God’s kingdom. 

Luke makes this clear in the way he presents Jesus’ Beatitudes, the story of Dives and Lazarus, and Jesus’ injunction to “sell all that you have.” But Jesus makes known his view of possessions most clearly in the parable of The Rich Fool. What I find interesting about this parable is that Jesus is inherently opposed to money or possession: the rich person is not a fool because he’s rich; he’s a fool because he doesn’t use his riches. In fact, the person’s riches at the beginning of the parable are regarded as a gift from God. But that’s the problem: God gives his gifts with the intention that we will use them.

The man in the parable is a fool not for being rich but for hoarding his riches, and because the man refuses to use his riches God calls him up short: “And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” Although this is a particularly Lukan question, it shows up in the other gospels as well, particularly in the Sermon on Mount.  In this sermon Jesus addresses the issue of unused possessions this way: “do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:19-20). The question, contrary to a familiar TV commercial, is not “what do you have in your wallet,” but how are you spending it? Sometimes when the Word speaks it makes us squirm.

Then what should I do with Jesus? Matthew 27:22

This question rather speaks for itself, but it takes on added pathos when we consider that it was spoken by Pontius Pilate at the trial of Jesus. Pilate’s question doesn’t leave many options, does it? It boils down to either accepting Jesus as Lord or sending him away to his death.

In a sense, Pilate’s question is the culmination of the other four questions we have asked today, questions about where to find God, about life and death, about forgiveness, and the way that we use our gifts and possessions. Here’s what we have learned so far: God can be found in the personal Word, the written Word, and the visible Word; God will complete redemption in eternal life with him; God has forgiven ALL our sin; and the possessions that we waste time in fretting over are actually gifts to be used in his name. 

Given all that, the answer to Pilate’s question should be easy. The Word Speaks, and when it speaks, it draws us to the God of forgiveness, grace and life eternal.

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:

In Superlatives

July 2, 2024

I don’t think there is a Christian in the world who would dispute the Apostle Paul’s claim that we are “saved by grace.” Everyone knows that. And everyone rejoices and celebrates that we, that I (!), am saved by grace. But although we all know it and we all celebrate it, I’m not sure we all realize its full impact.

One of Jesus’ most famous stories is about grace – of course! But it’s also about how we misunderstand grace. The story, recounted by Luke, is about two people who go to the temple. One of the two was a respected religious authority, a person who had committed the Five Books of Moses to memory and a person who worked diligently to keep all 613 laws of the Torah. This same person regularly gave offerings in the Temple, gave alms to the poor, and prayed without ceasing.

Alongside this really impressive figure was a much hated and despised sinner. This character, known as a tax collector, was even worse than someone who worked for the IRS; he not only profited personally from the collection of taxes, he collaborated with a foreign, godless country to collect them. A traitor and a profiteer!

But something strange happened when they both knelt to pray in the Temple. The religious figure, taking note of the pathetic fellow by his side, prayed, “Lord, I thank you that you have not made me like this, this, tax collector.” Meanwhile, the tax collector called out, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” And we all know and rejoice that God gave his grace to the sinner, because the sinner was truly repentant. How nice! 

So, how is it that every time we hear this parable of Jesus, we say (even if we do it quietly), “Lord, I thank you that you have not made me like the Pharisees”? In spite of the fact that we have all received grace, we can’t help but be snide when it comes to other people who have received grace as well, because they can’t possibly be as deserving of grace as we are. At which point, we have utterly failed to grasp what grace is all about.

The Apostle Paul, however, understood fully what it means to receive grace. What interests me today is that Paul articulates his personal awareness of what grace means, and his own personal experience of it, in a really strange grammatical way. In writing to the church at Ephesus, Paul uses both a superlative and a comparative adjective to describe his unworthiness before God: Paul is, in his own words, “less than the least of all the saints.” 

A superlative, by definition, means that there can be nothing more extreme than what the adjective says. So, when Paul says he is the “least”  of all the saints, he means that it is just not possible for anyone in the whole wide world to be less worthy of grace than he is. That should end it. But it doesn’t. Paul adds another comparative adjective to the superlative. Not only is Paul the least of all the saints, he is “less” than the “least.” Actually, it’s not possible to be less than the least because the least is already the least! But Paul insists that he is less than the least.

This strange grammatical structure of adding a comparative to a superlative exists in only one other place in the entire Bible: that’s how rare a grammatical form it is. It’s as if Paul is saying he is the “leastest” (you won’t believe how many times I had to type that word before spellcheck accepted it without changing it to another word) or maybe even the “smallerest” of all the saints.

Paul shows that he truly understood grace because grace goes to the undeserving. Hence, it is not possible for Paul to even conceive of thinking, “Lord, I thank you that you have not made me like so-and-so,” whoever so-and-so might be. So-and- so might not even be a Lutheran! They might be a Democrat or a Republican; they might play the guitar in worship or they might use incense at the altar. It just doesn’t matter in God’s sight. There are no comparisons where God is concerned. We are all sinners. Period. Or, if I might quote Paul one more time, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” All. As in all. No one is better than anyone else in God’s eyes.

And yet, it is precisely this awareness of who Paul really is before God, that he can celebrate God’s grace and acknowledge that God in his grace allows Paul “the privilege of proclaiming to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ.” Why does Paul combine a superlative with a comparative only here in all his writings? Because, if we’re going to use superlatives, let’s use them where they belong: in describing the unfathomable riches of Christ. 

Here’s how Ephesians 3:8 reads in the New English Bible (which offers the best translation of this verse):  “To me, who am less than the least of God’s people, he has granted of his grace the privilege of proclaiming to the Gentiles the good news of the unfathomable riches of Christ.” The Word always speaks, but when it comes to grace, it speaks in superlatives.

Even When It Doesn't Speak?

April 30, 2024

Last week, Zion’s music director, Jonathan Hall, gave a presentation about the role and purpose of music in the church’s liturgy. Along the way, he mentioned that the New Testament says very little explicitly about music, singing or musical instruments in worship. In spite of the New Testament’s relative silence on music, however, Martin Luther was insistent that both congregational singing and the use of instruments in worship are essential to our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving in worship.

I would like to elaborate on Jonathan’s comments about the relative silence of God’s Word with regard both to music but more generally to how we live a life of faith and trust. To put it simply, God’s Word does not give us, and never will, the answer to every question or problem. God’s Word exists to draw us into relationship with God, to help us trust him, not to provide us knowledge. To  live by faith means trusting God when we don’t know—not expecting him to give us answers.

Let’s tackle the music question first. No, the New Testament does not stipulate whether instruments in worship are appropriate and it does not tell us that every worship service should have a hymn at the opening, after the sermon, and at the end of worship. So, what do we do when God’s Word doesn’t say? Or does it? In my view, and one of my basic Lutheran convictions, is that God’s Word actually does say. What God’s Word says is, first, Grace, and then second, live by faith. Here’s how this worked during the Protestant Reformation. It’s convenient to use Luther and Calvin as foils, and I will do so again.

When it comes to both Scripture in general, and music in particular,  Luther and Calvin can be summed up thusly:

Calvin: If Scripture doesn’t expressly approve something, it must be wrong.

Luther: If Scripture doesn’t explicitly prohibit something, it can be done in faith.

Here’s the background on their views. For Martin Luther, God’s grace gives us freedom from the law that condemns, restricts and prohibits. The Christian life, for Luther, revolves around Bible verses such as, “there is therefore now no condemnation”; “whom the Son sets free is free indeed”; or “Christ is the end of the law.” Grace, accordingly, sets us free from bondage to serve God with a joyful heart.

Where Luther sees the Christian life as one of freedom, Calvin sees the Christian life as one of obedience. Consequently, Calvin is more concerned with the commands of Christ that we are to follow. With regard to music, therefore, Calvin (and the Calvinist tradition) required church music to conform to what Scripture commands: which is very little! For that reason, the only music in Calvinist or Reformed churches for many, many years was the chanting of the Psalms, often without any musical instruments. 

This perspective held sway from the time of Calvin (d. 1564) until the time of Isaac Watts (1674-1748) who recognized the fundamental irony of Calvin’s position on music. If we can only sing what Scripture commands, then we are not able to sing about Christ! What kind of worship is it that is not allowed to sing praise to Christ, Watts wanted to know? He rectified that problem, first, by paraphrasing the Psalms into hymns about Christ. That’s how Psalm 98, for instance, became Joy to the World, because Watts regarded the future coming of Christ as the fulfillment of the joy expressed in Psalm 98.

But Luther had known this all along; he understood that even when Scripture does not expressly address a certain topic, we can still act in faith, trusting that God will help guide our thoughts and decisions. That’s because grace is what defines God and the life he has given us. Even if the Word doesn’t speak explicitly, it still speaks grace.

Normally, that would be a great stopping point, but I want to add an extra word (or two) about faith and trust. Music is far from the only issue that Scripture does not address in explicit terms. To state the obvious, there are a lot of issues we confront in life where there is no “thus saith the Lord”—especially in the 21st century, when we are, chronologically at least, so far removed from the times of the Bible. So, what do we do as Christians when we don’t know? There is only one thing we can do in the absence of knowledge and that is to trust God and act in faith.

Luther’s dictum to sin boldly (that grace may abound) has come in for a great deal of censure over the centuries. At worst it comes across to some people as a rather cynical way of excusing our sin. I would like to suggest, however, that Luther’s dictum is not cynical or self-justifying in the least. What Luther meant is that there is no substitute for acting one way or another, just as there is no substitute for faith. Given that we have to do or decide something, the only way to do it is by faith—meaning that whether it is right or wrong, it is done with a faithful disposition to God. 

In fact, Luther would go so far as to say that sitting on the fence and making no decision is itself sin, because it is a refusal to act in faith. Anything not done in faith is sin, because faith is what defines (or should at any rate) our life. Will we make wrong decisions? Of course we will! How could we not? We are fallen human beings, not God. We don’t know everything and we never will. 

But we know this much: God has made us his children by grace and we are called on to live every moment of our lives in faith. Faith is not an excuse for wrongdoing. It is, however, the realization that as humans we will make mistakes and get things wrong—and when we do, grace will abound because that’s what God is all about. The Word always speaks, even when it is silent, because the Word is always grace.

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.

24

June 25, 2024

Today, The Word Speaks through the number 24 in the Bible. I must confess I have an ulterior motive in choosing this number. I’m writing this on the day after Willie Mays died, so I’m taking my inspiration today from his number 24. 

I should note in passing that Mays was my dad’s baseball hero. He saw Mays play several times at the Polo Grounds during the years my dad lived in Jamaica, Queens. Willie Mays also served as one of my dad’s favorite forms of encouragement to me. Whenever I would get discouraged or think I was not doing particularly well at something, dad would always say, “Remember, Willie Mays went O for his first twelve at bats before getting a hit, which just happened to be a homer off of Warren Spahn.” So, without any more baseball references, here is a look at Genesis 24, Jeremiah 24, and Luke 24 and their presentation of a God who provides providential care of his children, desires a genuine heart of repentance, and who provides resurrection joy.

Genesis 24: A God who appoints, leads, and provides well-being

As it happens, there are some really interesting things to note that occur in the 24th chapter of several books in the Bible. We’ll start with the very first one, Genesis 24. This chapter relates the story of how Isaac met his future wife Rebekah and married her. Isaac’s marriage is no little thing: God’s entire promise to Abraham to provide descendants is entirely dependent on Isaac marrying so that he can have children to continue Abraham’s line.

It is in this context that we read that God “appointed” Rebekah to show up at the town well so that she and Isaac could meet and fall in love. Also twice, Isaac confesses that the Lord “led” him to Rebekah (vv 27, 48). This chapter is the only place in the entire book of Genesis that uses the verb “led.” Genesis reserves the notion of God leading people for the way in which God fulfills his promises. To confess that God appoints and leads is to acknowledge that God is truly sovereign and that his will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Elsewhere in the Old Testament this same verb “led” of God’s guidance through the wilderness (Exodus 13:17; Psalm 60:9; 78:14, 53; 108:10) and it is also used of God providing well-being in times of stress (especially in lament Psalms such as 5:8; 27:11; 31:3; 43:3; 73:24). But of course, the best known use in all the Bible of the verb “lead” is found in Psalm 23 where we read

The Lord leads me beside still waters ;

        He restores my soul.

He leads me in paths of righteousness

        For his name’s sake.

Jeremiah 24: Good Figs, Bad Figs, and a Whole Heart

Jeremiah 24 records a vision from God showing Jeremiah a basket of wonderful, scrumptious figs and a basket of figs so bad that they are inedible. This vision comes to Jeremiah at a time (598 BC) when King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had taken the first captives from Jerusalem into exile in Babylon. The good figs, in Jeremiah’s vision, are the religious leaders going into exile: they are the hope of the future and the basis of the remnant that stays faithful to God. The bad figs in the vision refer to the religious leadership that stays behind in Jerusalem, but which is morally compromised and corrupt.

Although this story of good figs (good guys) and bad figs (bad guys) seems pretty straightforward, there are a couple of things worth pointing out. First, I think it is a bit of a surprise that God would designate the religious leaders who stay with the Temple in Jerusalem as the bad figs. The Temple, after all, was the visible sign of God’s presence among his people; the Temple is where the people offered worship, where the people made their sacrifices, and where God granted forgiveness. But, no. God has now abandoned the Temple (an unheard of thing) and shifted his allegiance to the exiles in Babylon. 

Second, and related to this first item, God declares that the good figs are those who return to the Lord (i.e. repent) with true, genuine, faithful heart. The reason that God goes with the exiles is that they are genuinely seeking the Lord. Faithfulness to God is here understood to be a matter of the heart, not something that can be presumed on. Jeremiah’s message is very much in keeping with prophets such as Hosea, when he records God’s Word about the good figs in 24:7, “I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord; and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they shall return to me with their whole heart.”

Luke 24: A God of Resurrection and Joy

Luke is most definitely my favorite of the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). It’s also in some ways the oddest of the three, but I’m sure that doesn’t reflect on me.

Chapter 24 begins with the story of Jesus’ resurrection and concludes with Jesus’ ascension. Obviously, the resurrection is a big deal because it’s the climax of God’s plan of salvation. God’s raising of Jesus from the dead marks God’s triumph over sin, death, and the devil. But what really makes Luke 24 a standout for me is its closing verses where we read that after Jesus’ disciples witness Jesus ascend to heaven, “they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.”

Why do I love these verses? Because Luke sets them off with a word of joy. Indeed, Luke sets off his entire gospel from the birth of Jesus to his ascension with notes of joy. Luke uses the word joy twenty times in his gospel, and he records another seven instances of rejoicing or praising. So, twenty-seven times in Luke there is joy or rejoicing (if it had only been 24!). That may not seem like a lot to you, but consider this: Mark does not use the word joy in his gospel once; not one single time. So for Luke to use it with the consistency he does suggests that if there is any one word that sums up Jesus Christ and the Christian life, it is joy.

Joy also seems just the right word to describe all of the little gifts God sends us, even when they come in the form of entertainment or athletes, because joy is a gift from God himself. 

God’s Word Always Speaks. Sometimes it speaks of God’s leading, sometimes it calls us to return to him with our whole heart, but it always shows the joy that can only come from serving him.

Four Gospels, One Story

May 29, 2024

If there is one thing people know about the New Testament, it’s that it has four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But throughout the history of the church, people have often wondered, why four? One way of asking the question implies that we shouldn’t really need four. If there is only one story of Jesus, why do we need four versions of it? As far back as the mid-2nd century, a man named Tatian took the gospel versions of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and re-wrote them into one gospel (known as the diatessaron). As interesting a notion as that may be, the Christian church never accepted Tatian’s one-gospel version of Jesus to be satisfactory: the church needs not one, but all four, of our New Testament gospels.

More recently, however, people have been asking why there are only four and not more? This question has come up because of all the discoveries in the last century at Nag Hammadi and other places of other gospels. Dan Brown gave momentum to this question with his novel The Da Vinci Code. Unfortunately, he popularized the idea that the four gospels in our New Testament are there only because of a vast conspiracy on the part of early Catholic bishops to suppress all views of Jesus except their own. Mind you, I’m all for good mysteries, but I couldn’t finish that novel because I kept getting frustrated with the way Brown went from writing fiction to rewriting history.

Nevertheless, it’s worthwhile to ask, a) why do we need four gospels to tell one story, and b) why are gospels such as The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Judas, and The Gospel of Mary excluded from the Bible? The short answer is this, a) we have four, not one gospel, because the story of Jesus is much bigger, grander, and deeper than any one version can give us. Even when Mark and Luke tell the same story, they can tell it in ways that highlight different meanings. To borrow a phrase from a favorite hymn, these four gospels show “in manifold witness” that the meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection cannot be reduced to just one thing.

But, b) the selection of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as canonical gospels means that these documents alone show us that although there are many ways to experience the Good News of Jesus Christ, every story of Jesus must revolve around the cross and resurrection. The Gospel of Thomas, for instance, contains many sayings of Jesus also found in the four canonical gospels, but says nothing of Jesus’ Passion, death, or resurrection. 

Now that you’ve had the short answer, let me give you one that’s a little longer. I’ll begin with a question: where did the material for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John come from? There are two answers to this question. The first answer is that gospel material came from preaching about Jesus. This is clear from the Book of Acts. Acts is full of sermons, but the one thing every sermon has in common is its connection to the death and resurrection of Jesus. To put it simply, there was no preaching in the early church that was not preaching about Jesus’ death and resurrection. One could not tell the story of Jesus unless it explained Jesus’ Passion, death, and resurrection as God’s solution for sin.

But in addition to preaching about Jesus, there was an apostolic witness to the teaching and preaching by Jesus. This included Jesus’ parables, his conversations with his disciples, and his memorable pronouncements in the synagogues or Temple; in dialogue with the Pharisees, other religious leaders; or with individuals who approached him with questions. In the decades following Jesus’ death, therefore, there were two different kinds of material circulating about Jesus which included Jesus’ own words and preaching about the meaning of his death and resurrection.

Eventually, however, these first-generation apostles began to die off, so in order to preserve an apostolic witness to Jesus, it became necessary to collect and write down all the material about Jesus that either came from Jesus or was said about him in preaching. Theoretically, that could be done in one document. But it wasn’t. Mark first, then Matthew and Luke, and finally John, each wrote their own gospel, each with their specific way of telling the significance of the Good News of Jesus Christ.

To give just one, quick illustration of this, each of the four gospel writers highlights different sayings of Jesus from the cross, and in each instance these sayings from the cross emphasize a particular theme of each Gospel. Luke, for instance, is the only gospel to record Jesus’ words, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). This is totally apropos for Luke, for more than any other gospel, Luke highlights Jesus’ ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation. By recording Jesus’ words of forgiveness, Luke is showing the cross is the culmination of Jesus’ ministry of forgiveness.

Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is recorded both in Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34. Matthew’s interest in this is that Jesus is quoting from Psalm 22. One of Matthew’s primary concerns throughout his gospel, from Jesus’ birth to his death, is to show how Jesus is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. By recording this statement of Jesus, Matthew is reinforcing for his audience that Jesus’ death on the cross proves that Jesus is God’s Messiah.

In Mark’s case, the cry of dereliction is a reminder that the cross entails pain and suffering. Beginning in Mark 1 when Jesus was with the wild beasts in the wilderness, Mark shows that Jesus’ journey to the cross is fraught with peril, and that Jesus’ summons for us to pick up our cross and follow him includes bearing the suffering of others.

Jesus’ words, “It is finished” are recorded only in John, and as with the other gospels, Jesus’ words from the cross are the climax of what his life and ministry have been all about. As early as chapter 1, verse 5, John shows us a Jesus who has come in order to overcome the darkness. Jesus in John’s Gospel, is triumphant and victorious over sin, death, and the devil. When Jesus proclaims “it is finished” he is simply asserting that God’s great plan of salvation is now coming to its climax with his own death on the cross.

Thus, in four different tellings of Jesus’ death on the cross we get four different interpretations of what Jesus’ death means for us: it brings us God’s forgiveness; it testifies to Jesus being the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy; it reminds us that the call of the cross includes suffering; and it proclaims God’s ultimate victory over the forces of darkness. One story; four gospels. The Word speaks in many ways, and through more than one gospel, but it always leads us to the cross.

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.

Esther

June 18, 2024

Here’s Bible Trivia 101 from my seminary days: what is the only book of the Bible that never mentions God? The answer: Esther. That’s right, the book of Esther never once mentions God. Which raises the question, why is the book of Esther in the Bible? I can tell you why it’s in the Hebrew Bible. The story of Esther explains the origin of the Jewish festival of Purim. Purim commemorates Queen Esther for her role in saving the Jewish people in the ancient Persian empire from extinction during the reign of Ahasuerus (or as he is better known by his Greek name, Xerxes). But for Christians, this raises another question: why did the church retain Esther as God’s Word for the church? How does a book chronicling a Jewish festival from around 465 BC help lead and guide the church of today?

First, a quick review of the story. King Ahasuerus (Xerxes) is searching for a new queen. So, the king’s men go throughout the empire searching for virgins for the king’s harem. Esther eventually finds favor with the king. Esther was raised by her older cousin Mordecai and Mordecai comes along to the capital and serves as Esther’s counselor. Meanwhile, Mordecai falls foul with the Persian Prime Minister Haman, and in revenge, Haman plans to kill all the Jews in the empire. Esther is a Jew, but she has to this point in the story kept her lineage a secret. But now, says Mordecai in one of the more famous verses of Esther, is the time for her to speak up for her people. “Who knows?” Mordecai tells Esther, “perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). Then, at great risk to her own life, the new queen goes to the king and explains Haman’s plot to kill all the Jews. When the plot is foiled and Haman judged, the Jews celebrate their deliverance with a great feast that is binding on all future generations (9:20-32).

As it happens, Esther was the theme of this past week’s Power in the Spirit event held by the Virginia Synod, which is why Esther is on my mind today. The focus of our conference was Esther’s bold risk-taking that put her own life in jeopardy in order to save her people. And even though God is not mentioned, God is clearly at work providentially inspiring people – whether they know it or not – to accomplish God’s will for God’s people and the whole world. 

While the focus of the book is certainly on Esther, I want to look at the role of God’s providential care in Esther – unspoken, but nevertheless present. My favorite word for the book of Esther is “secular.” Secular, in this context, is not a bad word, or an anti-Christian word, but simply a way of describing God’s activity outside of the church. An example of the word secular in this context is Handel’s famous Oratorio Messiah. Handel was a Christian and his oratorio comes entirely from Scripture itself, he labeled it a “secular entertainment.” But it is secular only because he wrote it to be performed outside of church. (It had to be that way because he wrote the work for women soloists, and women were not allowed to sing in church in 17th century England). So, Handel’s Messiah is definitely a Christian composition, but it is also secular – secular because it takes place outside of church.

I believe that the value of Esther is that it calls on us to trust that God is at work in the events of the world at large. We affirm and believe that God is always present and can always be found in the worship of God’s house. But are we as certain that God is present outside of church? Do we believe that God’s will can be or will be fulfilled on earth as it is in heaven – especially when God’s name is totally absent from so much of the world today.

There is no doubt that our world today is very secular, both in the sense that it operates outside of what we do on Sunday, and also in the sense that God can often seem very removed from what is taking place in this world. The question for us is whether we can affirm that somehow, in ways we may not see or understand, God is in control and that eventually God’s will shall truly be done on this earth as it is in heaven. God demonstrated that this is indeed the case when he saved his people during the time of Esther. 

And here is the good news from Esther. Chapter 9 closes with a feast that commemorates the turning from sorrow into gladness. In spite of the threat to God’s people, despite how close God’s people came to extinction, God acted behind the scenes to turn his people’s story from sorrow into gladness. And because we worship the same God today, we can have the same faith as Esther, and the same conviction that our God turns sorrow into joy. God’s Word Always Speaks, even when the culture is secular. Amen.

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.

John 7, Pt 2

May 14, 2024

Last week I pointed out that in John 7, Jesus makes a promise that “rivers of living water” will be made available to those who are parched and thirsty. This is a great promise, but the grammatical construction in John’s Gospel is unclear whether the source of this living water will be Jesus himself or those who believe in Jesus. Most Bible translations lean toward the notion, or state it quite explicitly, that believers, not Jesus, are the source of this living water. 

It’s because I think this translation is manifestly wrong that I wrote last week’s column by posing this question: How do we make a translation when the grammar is ambiguous? My answer is that our understanding of any particular passage of the Bible needs to be informed a) by the theology of the author of the text, and b) by what Scripture as a whole has to say about a particular issue. So, to finish off our conversation about John 7:37-39, I want to suggest that John’s Gospel and the Old Testament both consistently understand the Messiah and Redeemer as the one who will provide water as the source of eternal life. For John, this can only refer to Jesus Christ.

Let’s start with this: Jesus makes his promise to provide living water on the last day of the Festival of Tabernacles. This festival featured a ceremony for seven straight days of priests bringing pitchers full of water to the Temple and pouring the water out as a reminder of how God had provided water to Israel during its wilderness wanderings. But on the last day, the priests brought empty pitchers, signifying Israel’s emptiness and thirstiness before God. It is precisely at that moment that Jesus stands and makes his promise of living water.

Jesus as Moses struck a rock to receive water as a gift of God, Jesus seems to be saying, God has made living water available again – this time through his Son, Jesus Christ. This is obviously how St Paul understood the water from the rock, because he comes right out and says “that rock was Christ” (1 Cor 10:4). Can’t get any clearer than that.

It’s also worth noting other places where John understands water as a gift and Jesus as the source of all God’s gifts to be synonymous. Obviously, Jesus’ conversation about living water in John 4 comes to mind. “Drink from the water I give you,” Jesus tells the Samaritan woman, “and you will never thirst again.”  But John gets even more specific about Jesus as the source of water. It is no accident that it is John, and John alone, who records the Roman soldier piercing Christ’s side with a spear, whence water and blood came out of his belly (John 19:34). No way that that is just a random reference; it is John being very specific that at the moment of Christ’s death on the cross, Jesus makes salvation available to all as signified by his blood and the water that flows from his belly.

(Rabbit hole: you might be wondering why in John 7:38, some translations have the rivers of living water flowing from the “belly” (KJV), some from the “heart” (NRSV); and some simply “from within” (NIV). The actual word that John uses is the Greek word for stomach, but the Jews of Jesus’ day used both “stomach” and “heart” to refer to a person’s inner feelings and emotions. We do the same thing in our own culture when we say someone is “speaking from the heart” or have a “feeling in their gut.” It’s not really about the particular body organ, it’s a way of describing a person’s core). John quite clearly thinks of Jesus as the source of water, of salvation, and of the Holy Spirit (John 19:30; 20:22). 

But what does the rest of Scripture have to say about this? I’m glad you asked, because this introduces another fun little rabbit hole. John has Jesus quote Scripture (7:38). But which Scripture, exactly, is Jesus quoting? This is where the fun begins, because the words that Jesus cites do not come from any one specific verse of the Old Testament. That doesn’t mean Jesus made a mistake – even though Mr Behnke, my old Missouri Synod Confirmation teacher would not have given full credit for it: when he wanted Scripture memorized, he wanted it memorized verbatim. Fortunately, Jesus is a little more flexible – although I never said so to Mr Behnke.

Jesus isn’t making a mistake, nor is he quoting from a single verse of the Bible. He is giving witness to the overall testimony of Scripture that water is always a symbol of God’s gift of life and can come only from God. We have already seen this regard to the water from the rock in the wilderness, a theme from the wilderness repeated throughout the Old Testament in the psalms (such as 105:40-41; 104:8; and 78:15-16) and the prophets (such as Isaiah 43:20).

But there is another water theme in the Old Testament that comes primarily from Ezekiel. Ezekiel chapters 40-48 are his vision of the new Temple in the age when the Messiah comes to bring God’s salvation. Part of this vision is that the Temple itself will flow with a river of eternal life (40:11). This is hugely significant for our understanding of John 7, because the Feast of the Tabernacles was closely identified with the Temple: the Temple was dedicated during the Festival of Tabernacles. Jesus is thus the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s vision: the source of living water that gives life. 

Whether the Word speaks about water from a rock, water from the Temple of God, or water from the side of Jesus on the cross, the Word always says one thing: Jesus is the source of salvation and eternal life. Taste and see that the Lord is good!

John 7:37-39

May 7, 2024

On the last day of the Festival of Tabernacles in Jerusalem, John records that Jesus stood and cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his belly [or heart] shall flow rivers of living water.’”

There are several questions that arise from this brief passage, but by far the most important is, to whom does the “he” refer in Jesus’ quotation? Is Jesus referring to himself as the source of living water or to the believer? Grammatically, it could go either way. So, here’s my question for today: how do we decide on the meaning of a text in Scripture when the specific words and grammar themselves don’t give the answer?

One of my convictions that has grown stronger and stronger over the years is that we interpret individual passages of the Bible in light of the witness of the entire Bible. The Bible is not just a collection of 66 individual books, it is the totality of God’s Word to us, and we read and understand the individual books within the Bible in light of everything else that God says to us in the Bible.

So, let’s look a little closer at John 7:37-39 and see what’s happening inside those verses. Then we’ll step back from that passage and look at how the notion of living water is used elsewhere in John and in the Bible to determine whether Jesus or the believer is the source of this water. 

The first thing to note is how various Bible translations handle the matter. And I am shocked – shocked! – that most translations favor the idea that the believer is the source of the living water. (That’s actually why I am writing this column; it just seems so clear and obvious to me that Jesus himself has to be the source of living water that I felt obligated to set the record straight!)

We’ll start with the New English Bible which is quite literal in its following of the Greek text. It leaves the ambiguity of whether Jesus or the believer is the source of the living water, but implies that the source of water is Jesus by making the entire Scripture quotation refer to Jesus’ words. Here is the NEB:

“On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and cried aloud, ‘If anyone is thirsty let him come to me; whoever believes in me, let him drink.’ As Scripture has said, ‘Streams of living water shall flow out from within him.’ He was speaking of the Spirit which believers in him would receive later; for the Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified. In this translation, the entire Scripture citation is taken to be a fulfillment of the water that Jesus is offering.”

Most translations, however, lean toward the idea that the believer is the source of living water. For instance, the King James Version:

37 In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. 38 He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. 39 (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)

The King James punctuates verse 38 in such a way as to make it clear that “his” refers to the one who believes in Jesus. The New International Version similarly follows suit:

37 On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” 39 By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.

But what the KJV and NIV imply, the New Revised Standard Version makes explicit:

37 On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, 38 and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ ” 39 Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive, for as yet there was no Spirit because Jesus was not yet glorified.

Well, there you have it: the NRSV substitutes the word “believer” for “his” in verse 38, stating “out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.” However, I think there are very compelling reasons to think that Jesus is declaring himself to be the source of living water in John 7. This view of Jesus being the source of living water is consistent with

1. The Old Testament themes of a) water flowing from the rock in the wilderness, and b) the river of life flowing from the Temple when the Messiah comes;

2. Jesus’ statements in John 4 and John 6 that he is the source of living water and of the bread of life;

3. The blood and water that flowed from Jesus’ side on the cross (John 19:34), and;

4. Jesus giving of the Spirit (John 20:22).

To keep this column from getting too long, I would like to stop here for today, but next week I want to look more closely at how Jesus’ fulfills the two Old Testament themes of water coming from the rock in the wilderness and from the Temple, and tie both of those themes into John’s observation about water and blood flowing out of Jesus’ belly on the cross. By doing this, I hope to make the case that the translation of John 7:37-39 is not just about grammar, it is about the way the Word speaks –  of Jesus and his gift of life in the Bible.

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.

In Church

April 23, 2024

My earliest memories of life all revolve around being in church. I had no choice, since my dad was a pastor during the early and formative years of my life. Whenever he had to be in church—guess who also had to be there? When we lived in Hillsdale MI in the mid and late 60s I always sat in the very front pew so that my dad who was on the altar, and my mom who was at the organ, could both keep an eye on me. That’s all it took for me to behave in church, because I knew that a certain look from my dad was, as our current liturgy expresses it, a foretaste of what was to come when we got home. Not the kind of feast I was eager for.

I suppose you could say that my earliest thoughts about church were that church was a place (the place) where I needed to be. But I have other memories, too. Would you believe that I can still remember flannelgraph boards from Sunday school that were used to tell stories from the Bible? I’ve always loved stories, so I was totally in to Bible stories. Then there was the music. I’ve always liked music as well as stories and there were certain hymns and songs that I still love today which I learned in church as a child. 

Obviously, with a dad for a preacher, preaching from the Bible was always at the center of my understanding of church. Another memory had to do with communion—the first Sunday of the month. Even before I paid attention to calendars, I always knew it was the first Sunday of the month because all the men (and it was always men) who helped to serve communion (give away: the grape juice was passed out in trays, so now you know I wasn’t raised Lutheran!) wore black suits.

So at one level church meant a certain place; listening to music; hearing a sermon from the Bible; and observing certain solemn ceremonies accompanied by black suits and serious faces. But above and beyond all this, I realized that church carried with it a certain kind of expectancy: a feeling and an awareness that God himself would be there. That’s what I was told, anyway, to keep me from running in church. But even aside from not running, I knew that people came to church because in some sense, they actually met God. Imagine: coming to church with eagerness!

To this day, that’s what keeps me in church: knowing that I can meet God in church in a way that is totally different from encountering God anywhere else. I’ve known people who claimed to know God from sunsets and from private meditation. I even have one friend who said his closest encounter with God came when he knelt at the 50 yard line of Notre Dame Stadium. Without dismissing anyone else’s claims about where they know God, as Lutherans we stand on this one, rock solid conviction: although there are many ways to know and experience God, there are only two ways that we can know with certainty: the proclaimed Word and the administering of the sacraments. This was Luther’s own personal conviction, and it has been the stated bedrock of Lutheran theology since the writing of the Augsburg Confession in 1530. Here is how Article VII of the Augsburg Confession defines the church:

“It is also taught that at all times there must be and remain one holy, Christian church. It is the assembly of all believers among whom the gospel is purely preached and the holy sacraments are administered according to the gospel.

“For this is enough for the true unity of the Christian church that there the gospel is preached harmoniously according to a pure understanding and the sacraments are administered in conformity with the divine Word. It is not necessary for the true unity of the Christian church that uniform ceremonies, instituted by human beings, be observed everywhere. As Paul says in Ephesians 4:4-5: ‘There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, on Lord, one faith, one baptism.’”

If there is one constant in my life, starting from my very earliest memories and continuing forward for another six decades, it’s that there is no substitute for being in church. Just as when I was five, church is the place to be.

So, here’s the funny thing: everybody claims that we want to know God, find God, and experience God. Well, God has told us both how and where this happens. It happens in church and it happens where we hear God’s Word proclaimed and receive grace through the sacraments of his grace. That settles it for me. Now we know where we’ll meet next, don’t we? The Word always speaks, but it speaks with certainty in God’s own house, the place we are proud to call the church of Jesus Christ.

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.

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!