Ascension Homily: He is Not Here

May 17, 2012 in Bible - Acts, Church Calendar, Creation, Sermon Outlines, Theology - Christology, TRC with 0 Comments

Along with the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the most ancient confessions of faith have always also insisted that the ascension of Jesus into heaven, to be seated at the right hand of the Father is essential to the gospel, essential to the good news we declare. But in order for us to be able to declare it as good news, it must be for us good news.

Whenever a people as a whole are reluctant to share the gospel, embarrassed to proclaim the gospel to the world, we must ask whether it isn’t because we’ve gotten bored with the news. Or sometimes it’s just because we didn’t know how good it was.

There are a number of ways we could run with this, but I want to focus on just one. And that is that the ascension of Jesus is good news because it frees us from the tyranny of looking for our god here. This world is full of slavery and lies, and the fundamental source of all slavery and lies is the grasping for security and safety and salvation somewhere, somehow, here and now. Stuff, money, sex, prestige, beauty, health, power, and there are even idols in our good deeds: salvation through rigorous prayer times, long Bible readings, perfect liturgies, family devotions, parish groups, morning prayer, mercy ministry, reading theology books, going to conferences, or sending your kids to classical Christian schools or homeschooling. All good and fine things, gifts of God to be cherished and enjoyed in their place: but if we find our security, our comfort, our joy in them rather than seeing them as the gifts of Jesus to us and for us, then we are substituting something for Jesus. You’re making something else your god, something else your savior. But if Jesus ascended into heaven, then this is good news because it frees us from the tyranny of looking for our god here. It frees us to enjoy life, to receive the gifts of God, to share the abundance of God freely, gladly, because our God is not here. Continue Reading…

Wild Truth

May 16, 2012 in Against Christianity, Federal Vision, History - Reformation, Sola Scriptura, Why I Won't Convert with 0 Comments

Another follow up thought on the Douthat post below: This American “openness to heresy” seems to me to be a peculiarly Protestant stance, particularly, a sort of political/social manifestation of Sola Scriptura. Protestantism rejects human authority as supreme (whether in prelacy or tradition), and insists that Jesus is the head of the Church, ruling through His Spirit and Word in this world (though respecting tradition and human authority subordinated to the Word). In other words, despite the schismatic sins and fleshly rivalries wound through it, Protestantism has always, in principle, had this “openness to heresy” at least as much because of its confidence and delight in the freedom of the Spirit. As Douthat notes, it’s the heretics, the heterodox who are always trying to tidy up the faith, trying to make the Spirit tuck His shirt in and wipe the jelly smudges off His cheeks. But there is something of a symbiotic relationship between heresy and orthodoxy, such that heretics press in on the faithful in an ultimately sharpening, glorifying way, causing the Church to burn brighter with the truth, slowly, relentlessly leaving lies and distortions behind. Just as God is able to destroy death by death, just as sin and evil are able to be deftly wielded by the omnipotent competence of the author of this story we are in, so too, lies, misunderstanding, and false teachers are bent to the good purposes of the Spirit. And all this without striking a truce with any evil.   Continue Reading…

Chestertonian America?

May 15, 2012 in Church Polity, Culture, History, Politics with 1 Comment

I just starting listening to Ross Douthat’s new book Bad Religion. He makes the fascinating suggestion towards the beginning that while most other western nations had official, established religions, America was founded on a certain openness to falsehood intentionally. But disestablishment was/is not necessarily in itself a capitulation to sects or secularism, though it certainly seems to have tended that way down to the present. What Douthat points out is that perhaps more than anything it reveals a certain confidence in the truth and the irresistible adventure of orthodoxy — in the grand Chestertonian sense. Perhaps it was not agnosticism or deism or some other vague pluralism that drove the founding fathers to design a nation in principle open to heresy. Perhaps it was the adventurous spirit of the orthodox faith itself and a certainty about the timid blandness of all pretenders which created a glad openness to the future simultaneously gripped by a confidence in the “faith once delivered to the saints.”

All Grace

May 14, 2012 in Eucharistic Meditations with 0 Comments

Pastor Wilson has reminded us this morning that everything is grace, and that’s what this table means too. Someone has gone through the effort of harvesting grain and grapes. Someone ground the grain into flour, someone crushed the grapes. Someone else kneaded the flour and baked it, and someone else spent a lot of time cutting it up into little bites for us all. Someone mixed the grape juices together and bottled it and then someone spent a lot of time filling up all these little cups. A lot of human effort went into setting this table, just like how a lot of human effort goes into every table that we spread. Dishes are washed, clothes are pressed, food is planned, bought, prepared, and then we gather around tables and we say grace, and then we make a big, happy mess. We say grace because that’s all it is. It’s all grace, all gift.

And we thank and bless God because that’s the only reasonable response. Because it’s not automatic; it doesn’t add up. The math never works out. We always only have five loaves and two fish, and Jesus always says, ‘sit down, stop worrying, and let me feed you.’ And there are always leftovers.

So come all who are weary and heavy laden, and Jesus will you give you rest.

 

God Had You In Mind

May 14, 2012 in Bible - 1 Corinthians, Exhortations, Theology - Soteriology with 1 Comment

Christ is risen. We’ve just announced that, and we continue to announce that throughout the season of Easter. And really, we mean that every time we gather on the Lord’s Day. As Paul says, if Jesus did not rise from the dead, we should find something better to do on Sunday mornings. We are here because Jesus is alive.

In this historical fact lies pretty much the entirety of our faith. Jesus rose from the dead defeating sin and Satan and all our foes. But that means that it isn’t your job in the first instance to defeat sin or Satan or any of your foes. Jesus already conquered them. That lust? Jesus suffered the infinite penalty. That bitterness? Jesus bled for that too. That theft, that lie, that angry outburst? When Jesus rose up from the dead, He threw those sins down. And not just in a vague, general sense. God had you in mind. God knew all of the sins you would face, all of the sins you would commit, all of them, and He has prepared your salvation for you ahead of time.

When the gospel comes, when Jesus is announced, we are not proclaiming an opportunity. We are not proclaiming a possibility. We are proclaiming the finished work of the cross. When Jesus said it is finished, He wasn’t lying, He wasn’t exaggerating. He cried out in agony that it was finished because there’s absolutely nothing more to be done. And when Jesus stretched and pulled the grave clothes away that first Sunday morning, He proved that it was true. Death could not hold Him not merely because He is God, but because there was no sin, no guilt, no handle for Satan. He was innocent, and the promise is to you and to your children.

Our struggle, our battle, our work is not the work of possibilities or potentials, of what we might be able to accomplish. Paul says: therefore my beloved brethren be steadfast, immoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, for your work is not in vain in the Lord. Why? Because Christ is risen. You are working on something that is finished. You are working out your salvation.

 

Word, Sacraments, & Hogwarts

May 9, 2012 in Against Christianity, Grace, Pastoral Theology, Preaching, Theology - Pneumatology, Theology - Sacraments, Theology - Soteriology, Worship with 8 Comments

I’m an Incarnation groupie. I love me some beer and brats, sweat trickling down my face with the smell of saw dust in the air, the taste of my wife’s mouth, her small lips. And Jesus gives all those gifts to me. As the brilliant (& unorthodox?) Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann taught me: the sacraments are not creation made strange. Rather, the sacraments reveal the real nature of the whole world. God became flesh, God became food for the world as the beginning, the down payment towards God’s glorious plan to restore the whole universe to its rightful role of being sacramental, being the place in and through which people meet with their God and commune together. In other words, sacraments are not magical portals to God, as though the “natural” world occasionally hiccups and you’re Harry Potter on a spiritual trip to a heavenly Hogwarts.

But this is primarily because there’s really no such thing as a purely “natural” world. There’s no such thing as “sacraments” (as in holy portals) because the whole universe is shot through with the presence of God. At the same time, Jesus is training us to discern God’s presence faithfully, and one of the central ways His Spirit does this is through water, bread, and wine. He said to do it, so we obey, and trust Him, and seek Him there. But just as water, bread, and wine become, by true evangelical faith, places where the Holy Spirit ministers the life of the Triune God to and through His blood washed saints, so too, all of creation contains this potential. The picture of the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven to earth where God makes His dwelling forever with man — that’s the picture of this world, this material world bursting with God’s glory and presence, where the gift and the Giver are held in perfect balance establishing both without obliterating either. That’s what I mean by incarnation groupie. God is good, His creation is good, and His gifts are good. Continue Reading…

Fifth Sunday in Easter: Tenth Commandment: Gen. 18:16-33, Eph. 1:3-22, Jn. 21:15-25

May 7, 2012 in Bible - Ephesians, Bible - Genesis, bible - John, Sermon Outlines with 0 Comments

Introduction
In the Tenth Word, God forbids His people to covet anything that belongs to another, and this means that God’s people are required to cultivate contentment (Heb. 13:5). Contentment is not apathy or stoicism because true contentment is the life of Jesus inside of you which proclaims and lives both: ‘It is finished’ and ‘Go into all the world…’

The Sovereign Goodness of God
Paul begins the book of Ephesians with a doxology, celebrating the fact that in Christ, God has blessed His people with everything they need: every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:3). God sovereignly tells the story of the world, planning from the beginning that His people would be holy and blameless as His sons, adopted, forgiven, and sealed with the Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:4-14). In Christ, God is reconciling all things in heaven and earth, accounting for poverty, sickness, broken relationships, sin, failure, weakness, and ultimately death (Eph. 1:10). That is our inheritance in Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the guarantee of our inheritance till we receive the whole thing (Eph. 1:11-14). Continue Reading…

Twitter Bombs & Modern Judiazers

May 2, 2012 in Against Christianity, Bible - Galatians, Culture, Grace, Pastoral Theology, Preaching, Wisdom with 8 Comments

When pastors attack sin, they are either attacking sin outside the church, calling sinners to repentance, or attacking sin inside the church, calling sinners to repentance. While there is a crucial difference between talking to a corpse and talking to a resurrected corpse, the sin is still sin. And the sin is always a crutch, always a cover, always an idol: an attempt at finding safety, security, comfort, peace in something or someone other than Christ. And almost always, those crutches were snatched up from family, friends, television, celebrities, etc., grasping for what looks safe, what looks secure, what looks cool.

Which means that what we’re really talking about is the age-old heresy of Judiazing. The Judiazing tendency starts off with Jews following Jesus who cannot believe that God would not continue to require the complete keeping of the law as part of their full membership status in the people of God. Surely, the followers of Jesus must still be circumcised, surely they must keep the kosher food laws and refrain from trimming the sides of their beards.

But what Jesus lives and teaches implicitly, and the apostles proclaim freely is that Jesus is the end of the law for all who believe. Jesus is enough. It’s not Jesus plus sacrifice. It’s not Jesus plus circumcision. And therefore it’s not even Jesus plus baptism or Jesus plus the Lord’s Supper or prayer or organic popsicles. Continue Reading…

Pharisees Don’t Like Vague Generalities

May 1, 2012 in Against Christianity, ethics, Pastoral Theology with 1 Comment

My Dad sent me this quote on the subject of one of my recent tweets about the tyranny of nuance and exceptions:

“In the interpretation of the law there was always a tendency to eliminate vagueness by exact definition. The commandment to love your neighbor as yourself invited the lawyer’s question, ‘Who is my neighbor’ (Lev. 19:18; Luke 10:29). If the law forbade work on the sabbath, the rabbis would naturally ask what the law intended by ‘work’ and answer their own question with a list of thirty-nine catregories (Mishne, Shab. 7.2). Yet there can be dangers in too great of precision. Jesus’ reply to the lawyer denied him the right to limit his liabilities by definition. At other times Jesus attacked the Pharisees because, in their determination to know exactly what the Torah meant so that they might live in total obedience to it, they concentrated on the minor and practical pieties, to the neglect of the broad and inexhaustible principles, ‘justice, mercy and good faith’ (Matt 23:23). A sound ethical system cannot dispense with the vague generality of the unattainable ideal.”

G. B. Caird THE LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY OF THE BIBLE

 

In Defense of Pastoral Tweet Bombing

April 25, 2012 in Against Christianity, Pastoral Theology, Wisdom with 3 Comments

What use is Twitter and Facebook when it comes to pastoral ministry? Should we even try? Is it really smart for pastors to lob verbal grenades into cyber space where any number of people in any number of conditions and situations may do anything they like with them? Is it really all that helpful? I want to defend the practice and encourage those who feel inclined to give it a try.

Why?

First of all, I would defend the art of pastoral tweet bombing by pointing to the perfect pastor: Jesus Christ. He’s the Head Pastor of the Church, the Chief Shepherd, and we take our cues from Him. Jesus invented Twitter. Jesus was the first pastor to employ Twitter in His pastoral ministry.

He may not have had a smart phone or even a dumb phone, but Jesus was the master of throwing out short truths that were calculated to poke, prod, and offend.

Here are a few samples from Matthew’s Twitter Feed:

“Follow Me, and let the dead bury their dead.” (Mt. 8:22)

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Mt. 9:12-13)

“Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.” (Mt. 10:34)

“I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” (Mt. 10:35)

“Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.” (Mt. 16:6)

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come follow Me.” (Mt. 19:21) Continue Reading…

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