Your Agenda, or His?

Who made the heaven and earth, the seas and all that is in them;

who keeps his promise forever;

Who gives justice to those who are oppressed,

and food to those who hunger.

YHWH sets the prisoners free;

YHWH opens the eyes of the blind;

YHWH lifts up those who are bowed down;

YHWH loves the righteous;

YHWH cares for the stranger;

he sustains the orphan and the widow,

but frustrates the way of the wicked.

- Psalm 146:5-8 (BCP)

Honestly, I have no idea how we read our bibles and walk away with our priorities so screwed up.

This is going to seem like a rabbit trail, but hang in there with me for a minute.

There is an extrodinary passage in Josephus' autobiography (chapter 110), in which Josephus describes a moment when he was being sent from Jerusalem to Galilee (AD 66 or so) to confront one of the brigand leaders of the day (confusingly, called Jesus of Galilee...there are 17 men named Jesus in the index of the book). He doesn't want this Jesus to continue with his voilent resistance, but instead adopt a more diplomatic path. Here's what he says to him in Greek:

metanohsin kai pistoß emoi genhsesqai

metanoesin kai pistos emoi genesesthai

Lit: "repent and believe in me".

In context in means, "give up your agenda and trust me for mine." This is what this phrase meant in AD 66.

Jesus is the light in the darkness of religion. It's time to drop our agendas and trust him for his. It's time to drop our culturally-based prejudices and trust the whole biblical witness for its priorities.

So, that said, how about a quick poll? How many times are following mentioned in the bible?

Homosexuality: 3

Justice: over 2100

Holding Correct Doctrine: 3

Caring for the Poor, the Widow and the Orphan: 290

Fixing People: 0

Grace: 175

Our Right to Judge Anyone: 0

Mercy: 129

Creating Exclusive Culture Clubs: 0

Including those who don't have all the right identity markers: 86

At the end of Luke 12 Jesus draws out a metaphor for the coming of the Kingdom. He likens it to a storm gathering on the horizon, and asks his audience if, seeing what's coming they can't "judge for themselves what is right"?

Knowing the priorities of scripture, make up your mind as to what is right.

Or, as Augustine puts it, "Love God and do as you please."

Knowing versus KNOWING

I married up. Seriously. Hannah is pretty great. She's brilliant, funny, beautiful and confident. If you don't know her yet, you're missing out on the best life has to offer. So, let's say you wanted to get to know Hannah. I've been married to her for over ten years now, so I could write a book detailing everything I know about her. If I try really hard and put a lot of work into the details you could know a whole lot about Hannah by the time you're done reading the book. But you wouldn't know Hannah. Not really. Knowing a person and knowing a lot about a person are two different things, aren't they?

When the bible says that God "knows" us it uses the Greek word GINOSKO rather than the alternate words NOEO or SUNIMI (I'd type the Greek for you, but I don't have the font). They all mean "to know" or "to understand", but the first word has to do with knowing by experience while the latter two have to do with the acquisition of factual data or new dialectic frameworks. The first is a relational word; the others are academic words. That is not to say that there is no overlap in meaning or usage. For example, in Psalm 139, when God is said to "know our thoughts" (before we think them) the Greek word SUNIMI is used to mean "discern", but that is a use exclusive to God. Our thoughts are as present in his mind as they are in our own, and at the same time. Obviously we don't have the same openness with our fellow humans. If we did there would be no such thing as individuality; how would I be able to distinguish between my thoughts and yours? Just a verse before that in Psalm 139 God is said to have known us (EGNOS). He knows us because he lives with us in dynamic relationship. We know him because we experience the reality of his presence.

But there is a difficultly here: we confess as part of orthodox belief that God is transcendent. He exists beyond space and time. If there is no space and time for God, if all of his actions and activities can said to be both actualized AND eternal, how can we relate to him at all? On what basis? There is no spaceo-temporal playing field, no common ground where interaction with mortal creatures could take place. This is the reason why the Greco-Roman world had no concept of a personal god; their philosophy would not allow for it. Unfortunately, neither does ours, which is why many people continue to deny God's existence on purely academic grounds.

This is why the bible is so extraordinary. It reveals God who intervenes in history, from the election of Israel through God's ultimate rescue plan in the life and work of Jesus. Over and over in the New Testament God says that we cannot know him except through Jesus. This is not a metaphor or a simple restatement of the Gospel message; God means it to be taken literally. No mental process, no way of thinking or philosophical framework will allow for an understanding of God. He is impenetrable darkness. Christ is the light. He is the very image of God. He is everything God means for us to know about him. Everything else is just educated guesswork.

You will not KNOW God by hearing others talk about him. You will not KNOW God by reading the bible over and over again. You will not KNOW God by sitting in a pew or chair in any church anywhere on any Sunday morning. You will acquire data, much of it of a very good and useful sort. You will learn theology and doctrine, both good things as well. All of it will lead you all the way to the edge, where you will be required to leap across a chasm of infinite width. You must KNOW him, and to do that you must accept that you can never know him by means of careful study, via the proper application of the scientific method or rigorous logic. You must accept God has he presents himself to you in the person of Jesus, whether you understand it or not. You must accept the love that he offers and not make it harder than it is. You must trust that what he says about himself in the life, death and resurrection of Christ is the fullest Truth, and when it conflicts with your philosophy, then philosophy gives way.

In short, you must experience him. Don't place experience in tension with the way God reveals himself in scripture. Don't do crazy stuff that's not in the bible, in other words, then defend it with the assertion that your experience is just as valid as anything that's in the bible. It's not. On the other hand, you can't have a relationship with the bible. Don't try. It gets weird really fast. It's both/and, not either/or. As we say a lot around here, the bible is the menu, not the meal.

...but she is also my Mother.

"The Church is a whore, but she is also my mother."

- Attributed to Augustine, as quoted by Martin Luther

There's no getting around it. The Church is imperfect. You know the situation is particularly bad when the word "imperfect" is a euphemism for what the Church has traditionally been. Pick the immorality or crime against mankind, and the church has either been guilty of it directly or has been complicit at one point or another. She has had consensual alliance with secular power since Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day, AD 800, and she has used it to great effect to oppress and marginalize the very people she was commissioned to embrace. These are not aberrations of normally stellar behavior; they have been repeated and explicit. They have been her habit, not a an occasional slip-up. So, that's the bad news.

The good news is that the Church is a profound mystery, instituted by our Lord himself, empowered by his Spirit, authorized to carry his name and entrusted with the administration of the sacraments, which are themselves deep mysteries. The Church is our Lord's physical body on the earth, literally not figuratively. Jesus is present in creation through his Church in a way that acts in the present to address suffering and injustice, and in a way that looks toward a future fulfillment when all tears will be dried in a final way. The Church is the arbiter of God's covenant with his creation, the outworking of his faithful, everlasting love, a love that loves as an act of the will, fully aware of the probably cost. It is at once a sobering responsibility and a shining opportunity; we stand or fall based on our ability to love, not to rule.

Despite her many missteps, misunderstandings and frequency hypocrisies the Church is still the bride that Christ loves; she is the wife of Hosea (who was herself a metaphor for Israel), a wanton prostitute who in the misery of her licentiousness repents and in the comfort of absolution and grace returns to her former indulgences, which land her, predictably, on the slave blocks again. It comes down to two choices: to abandon her, which would be an act of direct disobedience to the revealed will of God, or to pray for her as David does for Jerusalem in Psalm 122:

May they prosper who love you.

Peace be within your walls

and quietness within your towers.

For my brethren and companions' sake,

I pray for your prosperity.

Because of the house of the Lord our God,

I will seek to do you good.

Unchanging...?

When we say that God is unchanging, what do we really mean? We mean that his essential character and characteristics (so far as they can be discerned by us) never change. Thus his love, justice, goodness and faithfulness (just to name a few) will always be the same no matter what we do. To put it another way, "good" will always be "good" because God IS, and "bad" will always be determined by its relationship to "good. Furthermore, God must be necessary (uncreated) and not contingent (owing its existence to another being or process) in order for us to have any basis for rationality at all. How we can know that we know anything as "true" were there not an unalterable standard by which truth is measured? In terms of our being, since we are contingent he must be necessary because the changeable can never owe its existence ultimately to the changeable. God's very existence provides a stable playing field for us. If he were changeable every minute just like we are we would have no foundation from which to relate to each other. This is just a very incomplete, thumbnail sketch of the importance of this issue. Everything depends on God's nature in this sense. To put it another way, were God not immutable he would quite simply not meet the standard for divinity. He would cease to be God.

However, we must be careful as we explore this issue of immutability not to build our theology solely from Aristotelian/Socratic metaphysics, ignoring the biblical witness, which shows us that God does, in fact, change his mind. This requires little examination or interpretation of scriptural subtleties; he quite clearly intends to do one thing, then "repents" of it. The bible uses precisely the same Greek word when it speaks of us "repenting", only the context is typically very different. We repent of bad things mostly; God can never do that, of course. The bible shows as a polemic against the pagan religion of the day a God who is dynamic and purposeful, who loves us and lives with us, who will alter his plans based on our prayers or changes in our states of being. He is not, in short, the "Unmoved Mover" of Aristotelian metaphysics. He feels with us, but not like us; he loves with us but is not fickle. He assumes our form but never reduces his own. In Christ we see God who is literally with us, one of us, in the mix and in the mess. Through it all his character is unchanged. He can change his mind without every introducing corruption into his nature. He is not pliable, so to speak. He simply chooses to relate to us based on the current conditions.

Critically, when God makes promises his nature requires that they should never be broken. That is what the Old Testament most often refers to with respect to immutability, not the idea of the Unmoved Mover. Jesus is at once a present fulfillment and a future promise. We can know that God will keep it because God cannot break a promise that he has made while still remaining God. The Holy Spirit is the engagement ring if you will; the tangible presence of a not-yet-realized future certainty.

We can love God and each other confidently and extravagantly because He loved us first and best, lives with us every second and will never change.

Remember your word to your servant,

because you have given me hope.

This is my comfort in my trouble,

that your promise gives me life.

- Ps 119:49-50 (Z)

Get Busy Getting Rejected

"The very stone that the builders rejected

has become the chief cornerstone." - Ps 118:22

We talk about the United States as though it really were a nation "under God", founded on godly principles, and that if we could just get back to our roots, God would bless us now as he did then. I've got news for you. First, it wasn't so "blessed" then either. We largely took what we wanted at the end of a rifle, committing all kinds of atrocities under the aegis of Manifest Destiny. Secondly, the only people who say that are Christians, and most of them don't have any unbelieving friends, don't listen to secular music and know little or nothing of philosophy, physics or secular culture in general. These are all things that are critical to those without a Christian (or even a religious) framework. If everyone you know and everything you're exposed to looks Christian, then of course the whole country will appear Christian to you.

The fact is, Christianity is viewed by the most learned, trusted parts of secular culture as an error in logic at best. It's a misconstrued conclusion that doesn't derive from the facts as they are presented. It's an unwarranted assumption; a non-sequitur. At worst, Christianity is viewed as immoral and dangerous, much more so than the worst parts of secular culture. After all, secular culture has the ideal of secular ethics to rely on, which is itself based on the Socratic Ethical Principle: good is good because it is inherently so; there is no divine basis necessary for morality because good would be good no matter what divinity had to say about it. Christianity, on the other hand, has license to do pretty much whatever it wants because it has manufactured the ultimate moral principle: God. Genocide, war, racism, sexism, bigotry and all other manner of horror and injustice have all been carried out under the Christian banner.

It's a good thing that the reputation of Christianity rests of Christ and not on Christians.

As a social movement, Christianity has a lot to overcome. We believe that Christ, who was rejected religiously and socially in his day, has become the cornerstone of true humanity. He is God's truth, his justice and his love, his rescue plan for us. He was despised and persecuted, hated and abused, but he never fought back. Instead he was God's arms outstretched for a hurting world full of broken, rejected and disenfranchised people. The Church should be the same cornerstone for culture, not just a loud mouth pushing moral reform or an exclusionary social or political agenda.

Love became a man who ran to our rescue and was largely rejected. Why should we be any different?

Are You on the List?

So, we've got this thing all figured out. After 1,980 years it's about time. After all, the bible is easy to understand and unequivocal on what constitutes grave sin. It says it right there in the bible: idolatry, drunkenness, sexual immorality and homosexuality. Those who practice any of those things will not inherit the kingdom of God. All settled.

Well, no. All that sounds pretty good except that those four things are never put all together as a concise list of disqualifications anywhere. Furthermore, exclusionary use of that short list in essence implies that, though you must never do any of those four things, all the other stuff isn't as "bad". Now, you might even get away with living out that contradiction until you run into Galatians 5:19 (also written by Paul, probably 20 years before Romans), which adds the following to the list of offenses for which the offender will not inherit the kingdom of God: sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions and envy. Oh, and as long as we're being literal without regard for the historical, cultural or biblical context, we'd have to add circumcision to the list (Gal 5:2).

We all do at least one of those things at least once per day, and probably many times per day. Most of us wrestle with several of them as part of our ingrained personality. In other words, that kind of behavior isn't the exception...it's the rule. We're angry more than we're forgiving. We're jealous more than we're trusting. We're envious more than we're generous. None is worse than the other. They're all disqualifying. The solution is that we go to God for forgiveness over and over and over and over, then start again every time. This is the nature of divine forgiveness even though it has an enabling effect in some cases. What's the alternative?

So, we're absolved by God's mercy. The thing about mercy is, it's not like kindness or generosity. By definition, mercy is only mercy if you're giving it to someone who doesn't deserve it. We are the beneficiaries of mercy...all of us, no matter what sin list you're reading from. There are no distinctions to be made; we are all equally screwed, and we are all justified (declared "not guilty" by God) on exactly the same basis: faith. Not "faith" with the hidden clause "as long as you don't do the stuff in Galatians 5", but faith alone.

Christ is our only hope. None of us gets to come to him and remain precisely as we are, but he will do the work in us. We don't do it for ourselves or for others. God can love us and judge us at the same time. We can't do the same.

Rebellious Love

I suppose churches have lots of different callings. God is calling this one (The Richmond Hill Vineyard Church) to radical, rebellious love.

This is love that doesn't spend much time worrying about what the rest of the religious community thinks.

This is love that never draws boundaries or imposes artificial limitations. This is love that risks what it already has to reach further and love more.

This is love that cares about you are, not simply about what you do because love knows that you are more than the sum of your choices.

It does not love because of the beauty of the beloved, so it does not cease to love when beauty is gone.

It meets all objections with "I love you", and not with pat answers and pity suggestions for self improvement.

Love acknowledges injury and grieves deeply.

Love hopes without qualification and risks enduring brokenness when hope is lost because love never trades pain for safety.

Love suffers well.

God will judge us one day; he must because he loves us. When he does he will find us wanting...every one of us. But he will find us wanting because we loved too much, and not because we loved too little.