Hail the Son of Righteousness!

God's act of salvation in delivering the Hebrews out of their bondage to Pharaoh is Scripture's greatest prefiguration of the coming of Jesus Christ into the world.

When delivering the call to Moses on Mt. Horeb, God tells him, "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey" (Exodus 3:7-8a; ESV).

That good and broad land was Canaan, of course. But the land given to God's people was also a sign of an even greater promise to come. For the oppression of Pharaoh reflects the greater oppression of sin, brokenness, and alienation that afflicts all of creation - and particularly those creatures made in God's own image. And the compassion with which God heard his people's cries in Egypt was not exhausted in the exodus.

The word of the Lord -

     "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power."

 - Hebrews 1:1-3a (ESV)

That Son has come, even Jesus Christ the Lord! And the redemption he is bringing is a redemption for all of creation. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet --

"For you shall go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall break forth in singing, 
and all the trees of the field
shall clap their hands. 
Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall make a name for the LORD,
an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off"

                                (Isaiah 55:12-13; ESV)

So come, everyone who thirsts. Come to these waters.

For with them you will find the spring of the water of life.

Incarnation implications

"The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.  

"But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." - Gospel of John 1:9-14 (ESV)

Modernity's skepticism often means that kids in church are taught that the Bible doesn't really mean a lot of the things it claims: Jesus didn't really walk on water; that's just a literary device! Blind and lame people weren't really healed; they were just re-incorporated into the community! And Jesus wasn't really raised from the dead; it was just the disciples' continuing experience of his spiritual presence!

I got quite a bit of this growing up, and I see quite a bit of it in mainline Protestant churches today. Let me make a couple of observations, the first one short and the second a bit longer (and with help from the bishop of Alexandria).

First, a Church or tradition that makes statements like those above has already lost its faith in God. Its people have already chosen another god to worship; they're just taking a little while to get Jesus out of the center of the picture.

Second, this kind of easy dismissal of Christianity's confessions often - no, usually - betrays a thoroughgoing adherence to a form of radical historical criticism that sets out first principles and then judges the witness of Scripture by them. In the year 2010, we know X to be true about the "natural world," so anything that appears to violate X must be false!

This approach results in an inevitable agnosticism (if not outright atheism). And it also shows a poor understanding of the theological ground of our faith. Here's why:

The Christian faith is rooted in the truth of the Incarnation. That is, God - the wholly transcendent Creator of the universe - deigned to take on flesh in order to redeem his people from the brokenness and alienation that had become their lot. The One who stands outside of space and time entered in, so that the creation might be fully renewed according to his gracious design.

If you believe that - if you believe that God has become incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ - then you believe that the seemingly immutable "laws of nature" are not so immutable at all. If a God who is wholly spirit and without bounds can come to inhabit the flesh of a man, then anything is possible. All of a sudden, a virgin birth, a ministry marked by proleptic miracles, and a bodily resurrection don't seem out of character for God's Messiah at all.

"In the world you will have tribulation," Jesus tells us. "But take heart; I have overcome the world" (John 16:33b; ESV).

 In his great treatise, On the Incarnation of the Word, Athanasius puts it this way:

"For as, when the likeness painted on a panel has been effaced by stains from without, he whose likeness it is must needs come once more to enable the portrait to be renewed on the same wood: for, for the sake of his picture, even the mere wood on which it is painted is not thrown away, but the outline is renewed upon it; in the same way also the most holy Son of the Father, being the Image of the Father, came to our region to renew man once made in His likeness, and find him, as one lost, by the remission of sins; as He says Himself in the Gospels: 'I came to find and to save the lost.'"

 He has come. And he is coming.

Is God with us?

"They will call him Immanuel, which means, God with us."

The doctrine of the Incarnation is central to the Christian faith. It states that God has come into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the one who did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but instead emptied himself and took the form of a servant - being born in our likeness and suffering for us on the cross (Philippians 2:5-11). Through his life, death, and resurrection, he has opened the way to our reconciliation to God's own self and our restoration in God's own image.

The season of Advent is the time when we remember and re-tell the story of the Incarnation. It's a story that can border on sentimentality if we're not careful, so I sometimes think it's helpful to think of both Philippians 2 and John 1 when we're reading from the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. The One who was born to Mary is none other than the eternal Word of God, who was there at the very beginning and through whom all things were made.

But wait - there's more.

Intimately connected with the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is the gift of the Holy Spirit. Before he ascended into heaven, Jesus promised us that he wouldn't leave us alone. Indeed, he poured out the Holy Spirit onto the Church so that we could be taught, counseled, encouraged, and transformed.

An emphasis on the persona and work of the Holy Spirit is one aspect of Wesleyan theology. As Wesleyans, we understand the Spirit to be essential to the affirmation that - yes! - God is still with us.

John Wesley writes in his Letter to a Roman Catholic, "I believe the infinite and eternal Spirit of God, equal with the Father and the Son, to be not only perfectly holy in himself, but the immediate cause of all holiness in us: enlightening our understandings, rectifying our wills and affections, renewing our natures, uniting our persons to Christ, assuring us of the adoption of sons, leading us in our actions, purifying and sanctifying our souls and bodies to a full and eternal enjoyment of God."

That's a strong statement of the importance of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. And Wesley echoes it elsewhere, particularly in relation to the work of the Spirit in salvation. For instance, look at this comment by Wesley in his sermon, "The Great Privilege of Those that are Born of God," where he speaks about what he calls, "the life of God in the soul of a believer."

Wesley writes, "It ... implies the continual inspiration of God's Holy Spirit: God's breathing into the soul, and the soul's breathing back what it first receives from God; a continual action of God upon the soul, and re-action of the soul upon God; an unceasing presence of God, the loving, pardoning God, manifested to the heart, and perceived by faith; and an unceasing return of love, praise, and prayer, offering up all the thoughts of our hearts, all the words of our tongues, all the works of our hands, all our body, soul, and spirit, to be an holy sacrifice, acceptable unto God in Christ Jesus."

Our election is, it turns out, conditional. It is conditional upon the action of the Holy Spirit upon us, and upon our willingness to be swept up in that wonderful work of grace upon our souls. Wesley's statement captures that aspect of salvation beautifully. What he's describing, in essence, is what it means to be perfected by grace.

Considering the presence of the Holy Spirit with us here & now, in my mind, adds something significant to how I think about Advent.

A Prayer for Christ the King

Almighty Father, who gave your Son Jesus Christ a realm
where all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him;
make us loyal followers of our living Lord,
that we may always hear his word,
follow his teachings, and live in his Spirit;
and hasten the day when every knee shall bow
and every tongue confess that he is Lord;
to your eternal glory. Amen.

(UM Book of Worship, 420)

The Incarnation of the Son of God

Our theme at DYA today is Christ, and Dr. J. Kameron Carter got things going at our plenary session this morning by talking about Incarnation.

He encouraged the students to think about some key aspects of God's revelation in Christ Jesus:

- The truth of the Incarnation: Jesus Christ as truly God and truly human.

- The story of the Incarnation: Christmas! Or, restoration and reconciliation (which brings to God's creation a revolution).

- The ethics of the Incarnation: Or, the freedom of the Christian. It is the freedom to be God's creature; not to be in bondage, but to be in solidarity with God and one another. The ethics of the Incarnation is the ethics of freedom!

Prof. Carter spoke about the body of Jesus Christ as pointing to a social order, which we become part of through our baptism. We exist in a number of social orders, of course: our family, neighborhood, city, nation, university, fraternal organization, political party, place of employment, etc. But the social order that Jesus creates seeks to supersede all other social orders.

And particularly since so many of our social orders treat someone or something other than Jesus as Lord, our calling into the body of Christ ultimately calls those social orders into question. Remarking on the incompatibility of those earthly social orders that represent idolatries and false gods with the social order of Jesus, Dr. Carter said, "The social order that is Jesus Christ kills all false social orders. And the name for that is Easter."

It was a fascinating presentation on the meaning of God's Incarnation in Jesus, made more so by Dr. Carter sharing stories and pictures of a recent trip he took to Sao Paulo, Brazil, where he was able to study ways in which the history of that country shows how the Church actively cooperated with anti-Christian political, social, and military forces during the Portugese and Spanish colonial periods in Latin America.

But, as Dr. Carter argued, the very way of life offered to us by the gospel of Jesus shows us that the Christian faith is not destined to be allied with those powers and principalities that would corrupt it beyond recognition. Jesus always calls us to himself. And that is good news.

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In the next couple of days, I'll try to write more about my own role at the Duke Youth Academy. I am the Ministry Coordinator for Christian Practices here, and my main duties are to oversee our Arts Village and Prayer Practice Workshops. These are ways that we try to help our students "live into" their faith by understanding that the salvation God is bringing to us involves our bodies and that theological reflection is inherently aesthetic and corporeal.

And so we invite them to study with professional artists who are also committed Christians, as well as to engage in forms of prayer with which they may not be familiar.

More on that to come!

Our Independence Day

The Fourth of July was always one of my favorite holidays growing up. The City of Paragould hosted a municipal fireworks display on the grounds of Paragould High School, and we'd always head up there with the rest of the town to wait until dark so the show could begin.

Like any other holiday, the traditions surrounding the day itself could sometimes obscure the reason you were celebrating in the first place. But all it took was one replay of Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." to remind me that I should be "proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free."

I take seriously the liberty that we enjoy living in American society. I've had the opportunity to travel some in my life, and I admit I wouldn't want to live anywhere else - at least not on a permanent basis. And I think there's some truth to the old saw by Churchill that democracy's the worst form of government, except for all the other forms of government. As a pastor, I particularly appreciate the way I am able to gather my flock for worship and preach the gospel as I am called to do without any fear of government persecution. Not all Christians have that same privilege.

But then, I also agree with theologians like Stanley Hauerwas, who argue that liberal democracy is dependent on an essentially violent mythos. It defines a peace-loving and democratic "us" over against a depraved and totalitarian "them," which must occasionally be engaged militarily in order to remind "us" both why we need to stick together and why our way of life is superior.

But on an even more intimate level, liberal democracy also posits property rights as one of the fundamental liberties on which society is based. This means that consumer capitalism has to be allowed to flourish in as unfettered a form as possible, which as an economic philosophy encourages us to disregard the good of others in our own individualistic "pursuit of happiness." And if you doubt the violence of that particular modus vivendi, you only have to look at the suffering of hardworking people at the hands of large corporate employers, the suffering of unborn children in the womb at the hands of abortionists, and the suffering of the environment at the hands of all of us in our chronic overconsumption.

So, is there a way we can celebrate a kind of freedom that is not freedom against tyranny, but rather freedom for something good and holy? We see evidence of such a freedom in Galatians, where the Apostle Paul says, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free" (Gal 5:1). This freedom teaches us that we are neither bound by our sinful nature nor by the law that would serve ultimately to convict us in showing us a holiness that we cannot achieve.

But it is also more than a freedom from these things. It is also a free for something wonderful.

"The only thing that counts," Paul says, "is faith working through love" (Gal 5:6). And to that end, he encourages us to "live by the Spirit," which we can know we are doing when our lives - as individuals and as the church - are bearing fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Such a life is a life of freedom.

And that life was offered to us on our true Independence Day, which didn't occur in 1776 but rather in 33 A.D.

Christ the Savior is born

For unto us a Child is born,
Unto us a Son is given;
And the government will be upon His shoulder.
And His name will be called
Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of His government and peace
There will be no end,
Upon the throne of David and over His kingdom,
To order it and establish it with judgment and justice
From that time forward, even forever.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

- Isaiah 9:6-7 (NKJV)

O come, O come, Emmanuel

This Sunday we enter the season of Advent, that time of anticipation and expectation when we watch and wait for the birth of the Christ child.

Perhaps now more than any year in recent times, we need Advent. We are living in a world that seems to be situated atop shifting sand. The economy is weakening rapidly. We hear of wars and rumors of wars. And many people are unsure of what the future holds for them.

I reflect on the importance of Advent in my new UM Reporter column, "Advent message needed amid 21st-century fears." At this time of the year, we have the opportunity to pause and reflect on the wonder and mystery of the Incarnation. I think at times we tend to be overly-sentimental about the familiar story of Jesus' birth. While it is good for us to know this story in our very bones, it's also good for us to look afresh on what it means for God to come into the world in human form, so that we might be saved from this world of sin and death.

At my church this Sunday, we will light the first candle in the Advent wreath, sing the great Charles Wesley hymn, "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus," and remember anew the great promise of Christ's coming through the rich liturgy of the church.

He is coming. Hallelujah!

Happy Easter!

On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Whey do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 'The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.' Then they remembered his words.

When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.

While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you..."

- The Gospel According to Luke 24:1-12, 36

A difficult, life-giving word from Jesus

This morning, I heard Ched Myers preach in the Duke Chapel. The title of his sermon was "The Kingdom of God as the Discipleship Practice of Commonwealth," and the text was Mark 10:17-31. If you have never read this text, or if you haven't read it in a long time, I suggest turning to it before you read the rest of this blog post.

This is the story of Jesus and the rich young man. I have read this story a hundred times. I have even read commentaries on it that explain how embarrassing it is for the church and how much energy preachers have spent over the years trying to explain it away. But I have never heard it, and I mean really heard it, the way Ched preached on it this morning.

He started by acknowledging what I just wrote, that this text is embarrassing to a church that has never (well, almost never) sought to live it out. He pointed out how theologians have traditionally wanted to interpret it to say that the rich should not be controlled by their possessions. Theologians have done this, Ched said, despite the fact that Jesus specifically rejects the piety of the rich in the text itself. And he said that this type of explanation is particularly dangerous in a country where so many good, upstanding churchgoers are among the wealthy.

He pointed out that the response of Jesus to the rich young man is far away from the typical response of either the liberal or the conservative wings of the contemporary church. Liberals want Jesus to open his arms to the rich man in a big, enfranchising hug of total acceptance (which he does not). Conservatives want Jesus to require assent to a set of doctrinal beliefs from the young man in order to attain eternal life (which he also does not).

Instead, Jesus invites the man into a new way of life. He invites the man into a fellowship where faith, the pursuit of justice, and economic arrangements are all deeply intertwined. I won't attempt to recreate Ched's sermon from this point on. There is no way I can do it justice. But if you want an approximation of it, I suggest that you go back to the text in Mark and read the story two or three times. Try reading it without the superificial spiritualism that the church has always tried to apply to it in order to tone it down. Try to read it on Jesus' terms.

And then ask yourself: Does my discipleship even come close to what Jesus asks of me? Am I still - despite Jesus' constant invitation to freedom - enslaved to the things of this world? How much of my daily routine have I shaped so that I can ignore the call of Jesus upon my life?

For me, the answers to these questions are, "No, Yes, and A whole lot." I have been somewhat unsettled since my wife and I moved to this new place. I have missed my old congregation, and I have felt unsure of my abilities in this program I am in at Duke. But I have been unsettled on a deeper level as well, sure that God is calling me to something that I just can't see yet. I think this morning may be the beginning of a process of lifting the veil from my eyes.

"This is the good news," Ched finally said to us, "that Jesus loves us so much that he speaks the truth to us."

The truth is difficult to hear. But I heard it today, and I am going to do what I can to respond. That begins with repentance: a personal repentance and commitment to walk in a new way of life. And after that, the walking begins.

Anyone care to join me?

Greater love has no one than this...

It was one week ago today that a milk truck driver named Charles Carl Roberts walked into an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and shot 10 Amish schoolgirls between the ages of 6 and 13. He killed 5 of them and himself. The horrifying and senseless nature of the crime has been placed in bold relief by the reaction of the Amish community, which has both forgiven Roberts and reached out to his widow and children.

Those terrible few minutes in the schoolhouse were also witness to an incredibly powerful act of Christian self-giving. A recent CNN story reports that Marian Fisher, one of the murdered schoolgirls, asked Roberts that she be shot first because she thought it might serve to save some of the younger girls. Her younger sister Barbie, who was seriously wounded but survived, has related the story to adults.

Think about that for a second. Could you make such a sacrifice? Could I?

That 13-year old girl could, and she did. "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

This is love as Jesus taught it. It wastes no energy on sentimentality or ephemeral "feelings." It is grounded in a disposition of self-giving and expressed in acts of self-sacrifice. It is the love that all Christians are called to receive and express, however imperfectly.

Faced with monstrous evil, Marian Fisher responded in the most sublime way possible for a Christian - she offered her life for the lives of her sisters.