non-metaphysical stephen

I recently had a conversation with someone who explained that one of her concerns about the way some churches emphasize the death of Christ is that if God would do that to Jesus, who’s to say God wouldn’t do that to us as well?

My first response was to emphasize that in putting Jesus to death, God was allowing himself to be put to death (according to the orthodox understanding of who Jesus is). Jesus’ death is self-sacrifice, and it is self-sacrifice by God, who gives himself to us so completely that he allows us to kill him so that he might redeem us. This act is not cruelty, but immense, overpowering love–a love so strong that it conquers even our rejection of it.

As Ellul has said, we kill God whenever we refuse to accept him in the way he chooses to reveal himself to us. In this case, God chose to reveal himself as Love in the flesh. When we reject that Love (and we do, even though we claim that we all agree with love), we reject God and God truly becomes dead for us. Yet Love is stronger than our rejection, and cannot be completely conquered.

Because God offers himself, we need not fear that God will demand the same of us. For the teaching is that God did what we were (and are) unable to do ourselves. Jesus accomplished all that needed to be done, and we are safe from the wrath of God.

Thinking about it later, though, I recalled that frightening passage in Job 13: Though God slay me, yet will I trust Him. And I recalled that this life of ours isn’t really our life. It never has been, and it never will be. It is on loan to us for so brief a time. The reality is that we live and move and having our very being in God. It is his life that has been given to us. And it is his to recall to himself at the proper time.

What a difficult thing it is to trust God–to truly, fully and faithfully trust that God has our best interests at heart. To believe that all that happens to us works for good because God loves us. To be willing to walk through the water and through the fire if God calls, knowing that God’s we remain in God’s hands and will not be hurt. Even death itself cannot separate us from God’s love. Our death is precious in God’s sight, and to die in the service of our Lord is truly one of the most blessed deaths.

Should God slay us, will we still trust him?

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No, I’m not directly referring either to Terry McMillan’s 1992 novel or to the 1995 movie with Angela Bassett and Whitney Huston. But I do think of that movie every time I have the experience, and it was the phrase itself that made me notice the actual phenomenon.

Hunh? What?

Sorry, didn’t mean to lose you. (Can’t you all read my mind???)

Every once in a while, when I’m stressed, I realize that I am holding my breath. More accurately, I am waiting to exhale, as though a full tank of air in my lungs will make whatever problem I’m facing dissipate into harmlessness.

As a trained singer and sometime actor, I’m aware that we do better the more smoothly we breathe. The breath not only supports our voices, but helps us temper our emotional reactions. As William James noted, sometimes (if not all the time), our emotions stem from physical reactions we have to events, rather than vice versa. So when I should be focusing most on breathing in and out as a way of relieving stress, I am only making it worse by creating the physical condition that leads to emotional tension.

From a spiritual standpoint, the experience is similar to the one I referred to earlier about walking, namely, how easy it is for us not to entrust ourselves to the ground as we walk. It is strong enough to hold us without breaking, while its inertia enables us to propel ourselves forward, backward, or even up in the air (should we so choose). And I wonder if our walking patterns reflect our faith in God’s ability to care for us.

The same with breathing. I have to remind myself that there will always be enough air. I do not have to fight to get enough breath. Even when I’m singing, I know that if I will relax, there will be enough air to get me through the phrase. But this is never my first reaction; I have to work to trust in what should be automatic.

God promises to be like that — to provide for all that we need, simply out of love for us. Yet we continue to strive after all those things God is willing to give us. We continue to work to earn a love that God has already given us. We continue to believe that we must earn what is already ours through Grace.

Breathe in, breathe out. There. Enough breath. No matter how tight things get, there is enough air. And there is enough God.

Amen, and amen.

I’ve been involved in a discussion on GCN about Christians and money, and I was reminded of Jacques Ellul’s discussion of wealth as one of the 6 powers that govern the world according to the New Testament. Here are the relevant passages, taken from Chap. 9 of Ellul’s The Subversion of Christianity:

The Bible refers to six evil powers: Mammon, the prince of this world, the prince of lies, Satan, the devil, and death. This is enough. Concerning these six, one might remark that if we compare them we find that they are all characterized by their functions: money, power, deception, accusation, division, and destruction.

[...] The same applies to money. Once we have demonstrated the mechanisms and explained finance and the economy, there is a strange irreducible residue. Why is money so seductive? Here again we have an exousia, which Jesus personalizes by calling it Mammon, the Mammon of wickedness. As for Paul, his warning is clear: It is not against flesh and blood that you have to fight, but against thrones, powers, dominions, authorities (exousiai), against the princes of this world of darkness, against wicked spirits that dwell in heavenly places (this last feature is the strangest of all).

[...] Mammon is money imposing itself as a law of relationship: exchange, buying and selling, nothing for nothing, everything to be bought and sold. This is integrally and totally contrary to grace (see L’Homme et I’Argent). The spirit of it has made its way into the church, where sometimes grace has been put on sale, or the church has become a center of rapine and self‑enrichment, or (like the French Reformed Church today) it is so obsessed with its financial problems that all its other concerns and functions take second place. In a hundred ways money has effectively corrupted the church. But what we see here is not just the world of money itself or our subjective desire for it. It is in truth a demonic power that has given money the ability to change everything that ought to be free and open grace into bitter conquest, possession, and obsession. The Book of Acts and some of Paul’s Epistles show how things ought to have been and to have continued to be‑why not? Giving is the general rule in all relationships. It conforms perfectly to the application of grace. The holding of goods in common by the community is the normal result of the disparaging of money. But this does not last.

The traditional theory is that these first believers were constructing an “eschatological” community, that they believed that the end of the world was imminent, that they could thus live in common and spend their time in prayer, not working but living off what others had made. But when these resources were exhausted, what then? They had to come back into line, working like the rest, earning their keep. This rather highfalutin story of a community of goods then has to come to an end. I am not satisfied at all, however, with this type of explanation, which is marked by such flat banality and gross common sense. In the course of the church’s history there have been periodic repetitions of such communities, and I know of some today. The real question is a different one. When the spiritual tone, or intensity, if one will, is strong and faith is vital and brotherly love is resurgent, money is no problem. Money becomes dominant only when men and women really cease to hope or believe and enter into routines and conformities. The Christian life is not a matter of having but of being spiritual in Christ. When this is weak, having immediately becomes dominant. Mammon sets up its law in the church precisely to the degree that the church loses its relationship with Jesus Christ. But Mammon is a power that waits patiently for faith to fail. In its abundance it prevents faith from coming to birth. The logic is implacable. What use is faith or hope when we have everything and need only a little more to spend? Mammon with its satisfactions (everything may be bought) and its law (nothing for nothing, or no free lunch) builds up around us an impenetrability to grace. Christians have experienced this in every age.

The conventional wisdom is wrong: walking is not a continuous falling motion. Rather, it is a pulling motion, in which the muscles of the legs pull the rest of the body forward using the ground for leverage.

I am reminded of this each morning as I walk the hill just outside my apartment. If I rely on the falling motion to propel myself, I get shin splints and soon become out of breath. But if I adjust the way I walk so that my legs do all the work, I can climb the hill with much less exertion, and with no pain and no shortness of breath.

We humans are funny when we walk. Some people (like myself) tend to clomp the ground when we walk, slamming the entire sole of our foot into the earth with each step, as though we have to propel ourselves through our own strength. Others of us slide across the ground, gingerly setting our toes down first, as though the ground is fragile and might break under the force of our steps.

But the natural way of walking is to allow the foot to roll–heel to toe–with each step, trusting that the ground will be there to support us, and that we can use the ground’s inertia to do the work of propelling us forward.

It is an act of faith, a belief and active trust that the ground will be solid enough to support us and to carry us forward. We do not have to do all the work, for the ground will be our strength. Nor do we have to be cautious, for the ground will be strong enough to hold us up.

It’s a lot like the way we walk in faith, no?

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Entries may come farther apart for a while, as school picks back up. But every semester is another chance for me to dedicate myself to God by trying to do all that I do–every course I teach or take, every paper I write or grade–for God’s sake rather than for the degree or the job or etc. May I do my work for the sake of the Creator, and may I trust that He will provide all that I need to fulfill His call.

Work is hard for us to devote to God, isn’t it? We often feel that work pulls us away from our “true” calling–our work in the church or in our families or in our communities. But work is just as much a part of our calling as all these other things, and needs to be devoted back to God just as much as they do. From a biblical perspective, work is given to us by God before the fall (Gen. 2.15), and while we may be cursed to sweat in our work, the work itself can still be used by God for His glory.

I fear that many of us connect our jobs with our paychecks–we work because we have to provide for our needs (and for those of our families). But this is not correct. More accurately, God provides all those things for us, although He may use our paychecks as the means to do so. Still, it is God who provides, not the job, not the boss, not the company. Work becomes an idol in the worst sense–the idol who enslaves us and from whom we dare not break free. This should not be so.

Let us then devote our jobs, our careers, our toil and sweat, to the God who gave us work to do because it was good in His sight. Let us dedicate our every task to God, and trust that everything we need will be provided for us in the meantime.

Amen, and amen.

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While walking to campus today, I was reminded of the concept of Between, one of the most difficult challenges we face in our Christian walk. It’s easy enough (relatively speaking) for us to think about our duties, our jobs, our home lives, etc., in terms of our calling in Christ. But what about all the times we spend between those places? What do we do with the time we spend commuting to places, or walking to and from the parking lot, or waiting for an appointment?

There’s no one answer, of course. There are many constructive ways to handle the between times. After all, God is a creative God and has created us with the freedom to create new ways to worship and serve him.

For instance, between-time can be a good time to practice centered motion. We’ve all heard about centering prayer, but too often the notion of centering assumes that we will be stationary. This makes sense, but we don’t live stationary lives. We need to learn how to carry our stationary centering into our activities. The old metaphor of the spiritual life is to keep one eye on God and the other on the world. As such writers as Catherine of Genoa, Brother Lawrence and Thomas Kelly have described it, we move through all of our activities with an active awareness of God’s presence and guidance.

Between-time can also be a time to look at the world for examples of God’s glory. The animals finding their food already provided for them. The tree limbs reaching up to heaven as if in prayer. The flowers revealing their pre-designed glory. The clouds drifting along the invisible currents of the wind. The sun that shines on the good and the wicked alike. The ground that will always be strong enough to support us, no matter how weak we are. The natural world is full of analogs for faith and worship.

But today, I was reminded of another use of between-time: intercessory prayer. As Eugene Peterson has put it, we must pray for every person we meet. As we spend our time between places and between events, we pay attention to what we see and hear around us. We overhear snippets of conversation or see people in need of help (the car on the side of the road, the homeless person asleep on the sidewalk). We recognize that all of us here on earth are going through the craziness of life together–and we’re all making it up as we go along. We are all struggling–to make good decisions, to hold ourselves together, to get through the day. For each of these people, we can pray.

Between is one of the hardest places to be, because there is no “there” there. But when we consider how much of our lives we spend Between, we realize how important it is for us to abide in that space, worshiping God and loving our neighbors. Amen, and amen.

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WOW. And, Ouch!

Cenk Uygur’s column at HuffPo, and especially the comments that follow, reveal the kind of anti-religion bias that I hear about from right-wing commentators but never believed really existed.

Mr. Uygur is worried that 25% of the nation believes that Jesus will return in 2007, a statistic which reflects both the popularity of “Left Behind” type Christianity and a general pessimism amongst conservative Christians about the world situation. Now, even from a Christian perspective, I understand some of his concern. In all probability, many of these same people have expected Jesus to come back every year for some time now — we do always assume things can’t get any worse than they already are, no? And there is reason to be concerned about the rhetoric (not to mention the theology) coming out of the end-times camps.

But Mr. Uygur apparently believes that these 25% represent all Christians. Moving beyond the qualifier that Jesus will return in 2007, he broadens his attack to the idea of Christ returning at all:

“You people are seriously disturbed. You think a magic man is going to appear out of the sky and grant you eternal bliss. If the man’s name was anything other than Jesus, that belief would get you locked up as a psychotic. And the fact that you have given him this magic name and decided to call him your Lord doesn’t make it any more sane.”

And the people who replied to his post are even more vocally anti-religion.

So what about those of us who trust in the return of Christ, but who have no expectation that he will be returning this year? What about those of us who believe Christ might not return for another 50 centuries? Are we certifiably nuts too?

And what about those of us who disagree with Mr. Uygur’s presentation of Christian eschatology as found in in the quote above? What if we don’t believe that Christ is coming simply to help us escape into eternal bliss, but to be a righteous judge, a ruler who will establish peace and justice on the earth? What if Christ is going to return in order to set right all the things that liberals like Mr. Uygur see as wrong in the world: oppression, lack of compassion, mistreatment, inequality, etc.?

And what about those of us who believe that Christ will return to do all this, but also believe that it is our responsibility as bearers of Christ to work toward those goals now and with all our might? Are we nuts too?

I understand Mr. Uygur’s frustration. I too am bothered by this type of Christianity. And I tell myself, perhaps too easily, that what Mr. Uygur and his readers are reacting against is not really Christianity at all, but an American religion that has only tangential connections to Christianity.

But I worry that the truth is more difficult to chew: What if this is the only Christianity that people like Mr. Uygur see? What if they never see people living out the commands of Jesus to love our neighbors as ourselves, not to return evil for evil, to lay down our lives for others?

What if Mr. Uygur’s mis-characterization of the church is closer to the reality of the situation than the gospels’ depiction of the church?

And what can we do in 2007 to give Mr. Uygur and his readers a better picture of Christianity? Or of religion in general?

“Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” (John 14.13)

This verse has been in my head the past few days — not sure why. I’m not going to complain though. There’s plenty to pray about, and if Jesus is going to make a promise like this, I’m going to take him up on it.

Meanwhile, it’s a new calendar year. Not a new year for the church (that was 5 weeks ago, on the first Sunday of Advent), but a new number at the end of the date. Really, it’s just a day like any other day (today was windy and cold, and gasoline wasn’t any cheaper than usual). But it does provide a useful opportunity for us to stop and take stock of where we’ve been for the past year, to recognize how much has changed, how much we’ve come through, how far we still have left to go.

This year, let us renew our commitment to Christ, to recall the promises of Psalm 139 that God is always present with us. And let us renew our trust in Christ’s promise that what we ask in his name, he will do. He is faithful and true, if we will believe. Amen, and amen.

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