The Gospel Crank and Pastor Tim

Wake Me When It's Over

2010-05-05T12:37:00.000-07:00

Have you ever sat through a sermon and when it was over you felt like you just attended a self-improvement seminar? I have. I usually fall asleep during such a talk. You know what I mean, it's where the message is: "You Should Behave Differently than You Do!" It's the most common theme in current Evangelical pop culture. In the Evangelical world it seems to be a favorite pastime - telling people to shape up.

I've been around the block a time or two in my life and when I say I've heard it all before I am one of the few who who actually has heard it all before. Believe me, I would not recommend my spiritual path to anybody and I don't know much about what God is trying to say to us, but I have become something of a whiz at knowing what he is not saying to us. I'm the professor of what it ain't.

God's message to humanity is not, "You people should do better." He is not telling us to clean our act up and then he will get close to us. He is not saying we need to gradually improve ourselves until our behavior finally represents his character. He isn't trying to whip us into shape. He is not saying, "Get it together or you'll be sorry." That's what we think ought to be said. That's our idea of what a god-like god would tell us. Instead, he has a different message than we think he should have. I think he even has a different personality than we think he should. That's why we so often don't get what he is trying to tell us. Our problem is a different problem than we think it is and God has done something in Jesus other than what we would have recommended if God had polled us first instead of acting unilaterally as he has.

You know what the oldest profession in the world is? No, not that. It is religion: finger-wagging let-me-tell-you-how-to-live religion. It's older than that other profession.

Now think about this with me for a moment. If finger-wagging did any good, if telling people how they should look, act, sound, etc. actually worked the world would have changed dramatically for the better by now, and long ago too. We should be living in a moral paradise. I mean every religion and philosophy in the world does that - finger wagging - and has done that throughout the ages. And guess what? We're still broken and we still can't fix ourselves (see the last blog concerning David Nystrom's message). All that moral exhortation, week after week, for at least a thousand years and we're still exactly the same, morally as we were. Amazing.

Moral exhortation, finger-wagging, pastors kicking their sheep yelling, "Get fat! Get fat!" "Ought to" sermons, the raising of the moral bar, trying to fix our inner problem by using outer means just doesn't work. It's a bust. Always has been, always will be. Whatever the gospel is, it is something else.

Listen to what the great Tim Keller, famous Presbyterian preacher said about all this:

To "get the gospel" is to turn from self-justification and rely of Jesus' record for a relationship with God. The irreligious don't repent at all, and the religious only repent of sins. But Christians also repent of their righteousness. That is the distinction between the three groups - Christian, moralists (religious), and pragmatists (irreligious).

I know, most of you probably think I should go find something important to worry about. I don't know why all this stuff seems so important to me, I just think that motives matter more than we think they do. But what do I know? Maybe it turns out that motives don't matter much. Maybe the exterior is more important than the interior, just as preachers have preached through the ages. Maybe I should just take my meds and go back to sleep.

The Gospel Crank

What's-a-Matta whitch You, Baby?

2010-04-19T14:20:00.000-07:00

How about that David Nystrom? He was good. He was “on” yesterday. He snuck the gospel in on us while we were looking at something else. He was a master of misdirection.

Did you notice what he said after he told a little story on himself? Remember, he told us he had just finished preaching a sermon on the topic of patience and then on the way to lunch after church he had a fit when someone cut him off in traffic. In fact he said he became “apoplectic,” which means he looked like he was having a stroke.

It was funny. We could see the irony, and we could relate to the lack of consistency that plagues us all. And then he took a step forward and squatted down right on the stage and looked us straight in the eye and was quiet for a beat or two and then, in a soft voice he offered us something special - if we had ears to hear it. He said, “We are all broken and we can’t fix ourselves.”

Oh! If we only knew that. If only we could actually believe that truth. If only we could become truly convinced it was so. I say that because it is evident to me that we need a constant reminder of that primary element in our relationship with God – we can, of ourselves, do nothing. This gospel-truth describes the way it is. It is not a should be. This is not a reminder of how we all ought to be. This is not a “you must try harder” message. We are not supposed to leave the building with a new found resolve to “do nothing” for Christ.

We can, of ourselves, do nothing. It is a fact. It is, like 186,000 miles per second, not just a good idea – it’s the law!

We are supposed to notice. We should become a little more aware. We should be able, at this point, to observe the truth – that we can’t fix ourselves and that we can, of ourselves, do nothing.

Why is this important? Why does it matter whether we “get” this or not? It is important because otherwise we are trapped in Revelation chapter three where the Laodicians didn’t realize, they couldn’t grasp, they failed to arrive at the only possible conclusion regarding their own spiritual condition – that they were poor and miserable and blind and naked. And so their relationship with Jesus couldn’t really get going. Jesus was still on the front porch knocking to be let in.

And because they didn’t get it they were unable, they had no chance, they did not have the equipment to relate to God on the only terms and conditions that work. The conditions are these: we got nothing; He has everything; He wants us that way. Letting Him in and receiving the revelation that we got nothing are two sides of the same coin.

It was Earth Day recently. I think Evangelical Christians need a lesson in Sustainable Energy. We could power a small city with the energy we waste trying to improve ourselves. It’s like we waste al that energy in an effort to avoid Jesus rather than simply coming to Christ as we are and telling the truth to Him and to ourselves. Nobody knows better than Jesus that “We are all broken and we can’t fix ourselves.”

Thanks David.

The Gospel Crank

Eat or Be Last

2010-04-02T13:32:00.000-07:00

Mixing metaphors, it’s a favorite pastime of mine. I used to collect mixed metaphors. Coworkers used to give them to me for free. One coworker was talking about doing a job in a client’s kitchen while the clients were living in the house. Everything was a big problem plus, as my coworker explained, “They smoked like a sieve.”

It’s probably too late to change hats in midstream, I guess.

As another coworker offered, “I feel like I’m grasping at strings.” Like maybe he should have been pulling straws to get what he wanted?

There are many, many metaphors expressed in scripture. Our problem isn’t so much mixing the metaphors (e.g. I am the vine and you are the sheep) as it is confusing the metaphor with the reality. Jesus uses the device of metaphor constantly. He does so for a reason, and this is really important so pay attention: He uses metaphor because there is nothing that is exactly like Him. As Aladdin’s genie sang, “You ain’t never had a friend like me.”

The world had never, and has never, seen anything like Jesus. We were not equipped to fully understand who and what he was. Even after two thousand years of trying to figure him out, we barely understand. So in an effort to give some frame of reference to himself Jesus resorted to parable and metaphor.

You see? Jesus is like a shepherd and he is like rock you can build on and he is like a man almost beaten to death by the side of the road that the religious leaders wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, and he is like a vine, and he is like a very forgiving father, and he is like an unfair employer. Yet he is not any of those things. He’s bigger than any of those things and all those things combined.

And his work, the things that Jesus came to accomplish, the Gospel, is not like anything we have ever run across before. Even though God designed the covenant of Moses to point to the coming of Jesus, and what Jesus accomplished on our behalf is like the Day of Atonement where the sins of the nation are transferred to the goat, nevertheless his work is not the Atonement. His work is like that but the Atonement picture is an inadequate and incomplete picture, it is not the reality. It is not even an analogy, a this-equals-that equation.

The Religious Thought Police would like to have me arrested right now, if they only knew I was thinking like this. Please don’t tell them about me. The Atonement inadequate? Very much so. Okay, we have the forgiveness of sins. Great! Where is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit? Where is being “born from above?” Where is the creation of the “new man?” Where is being seated with Christ at the right hand of God? Where is the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace and the One New Man made up of all the kindred tongues and nations of the world? Where is the return of Christ and the resurrection from the dead? All this and more is the gospel. It’s not just four spiritual laws, you know. Besides, there is a sheep and a goat in the atonement ceremony. What do you do with them? To name just a few inadequacies.

As the writer of Hebrews tells us (chapter 8) the sanctuary of David, for example, and the succeeding Temple are only “shadows of the good things to come.” They’re only a picture, not the reality. The writer further tells us why the picture of the sanctuary is inadequate, “because the blood of bulls and goats can never take away sins.” Oops! The Old Covenant was never reality. It never worked. It only pointed to Jesus who, as John the Baptist declared, “…takes away the sin of the world.” Now you’re talking.

I’ve heard the Gospel described through many a metaphor. It is like a courtroom scene where God the Father is the judge and the devil is the prosecuting attorney and Jesus is our defense attorney. It is like the Jewish Passover where Israel’s firstborn are spared and God leads them out of slavery. It is like the lamb in the bushes when Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac. It is like a kingdom. It is like a city of God. It is like a building. It is like a living temple, it is like a body, a corpus, it is like a new man, it is like all these things and yet the Gospel is still none of the above!

“This piece of unleavened bread I give you is like my body broken for you. This cup of the Seder dinner is like my blood which I am about to shed for you.” Now I know that Jesus did not use the word “like” in the accounts of the Last Supper. But look what happens when you don’t separate metaphor from reality:

During the early Reformation, say 1550 or so the followers of Luther and the followers of Zwingli, a Swiss reformer, had a falling out. Luther, a former Catholic and good son of the church, never questioned the doctrine of “transubstantiation,” which states that when a priest prays over the elements of the mass they “change substance” as the believer partakes of them, turning into the literal body and blood of Christ inside the believer. Zwingli advanced the theory of “consubstantiation” which states that Christ was with the substance but did not become the substance. Get it? Sort of?

Well the followers of the two reformers killed each other over who was right and who was wrong about this. In fact one faction would capture instigators of the other faction, tie their hands to their feet and then throw them into the North Sea, alive (briefly). Hallelujah.

In John chapter 6 Jesus says that unless we drink his blood and eat his flesh we have no life in us. That’s just plain creepy! And he follows that up by saying that his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink. Real? And that’s how the church, being run by a bunch of non-imaginative legalistic literalists came up with the doctrine of transubstantiation. They couldn’t distinguish between metaphor and reality. The bread and wine turn into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus as you eat it? That’s even creepier!

What does Jesus mean when he says “real?” He means that the fish and the bread that they all just ate, five thousand of them, is temporal, transient, not forever, impermanent, you get hungry again. And in that sense what we would call “real” bread is declared unreal by Jesus and what we would call “symbolic” or “metaphorical” bread is real because “eating” is the metaphor for “believing” and if we believe in him he will, as he says plainly, raise us up (from the grave) on the last day. The bread is the symbol for faith, Rising from the dead is not a symbol it is reality.

Bread – metaphor. Resurrection – real. Can you tell the difference?

It is unbelievable. It is incredible. It is stark madness that the church has grown and thrived while its most fundamental practice, the practice of “communion” or the taking of the elements of the mass, which has defined everything from church membership to absolution from sin, has been essentially misunderstood and essentially misrepresented.

How did we become so neurotic that we severed the elements of communion from their context? Their context is the Passover meal. It’s Jewish. It is entirely Jewish from beginning (wine) to end (singing). When Jesus said “this is my body” he meant “this unleavened bread that we all traditionally eat every year at our Passover celebration is not about the Exodus, it is about me. Don’t confuse the picture with the reality.” And so we didn’t confuse the unleavened bread with the Exodus. We confused it with something else – the creepy notion that Jesus wants us to eat him.

Inconceivable! Have you ever read in Luke 14 where Jesus is adjuring the leading Pharisee not to invite his rich friends and relatives next time he gives a banquet? Jesus tells him to invite losers and the physically impaired instead. I am amazed. I am astounded that in all the years that have followed since Jesus uttered those words; someone has not started a new church movement condemning the practice of inviting one’s friends over for lunch. “The Church of the Dining Exclusion” it could have called itself. I mean given the influence of legalistic unimaginative literalists in the church’s history, how did we avoid this?

Given that we can’t tell the difference between the picture and the reality how did this not happen?

Wow. This whole discussion has really made me cranky.

I need a shot of love. Happy Easter.

The Gospel Crank

P.S What you just read is the second post this week. Keep reading to see part one. I know I am really sporadic in my publishing schedule, but that’s just the way the Crank rolls.

The Curious Incident

2010-04-01T11:55:00.000-07:00

Have you ever read any Sherlock Holmes stories? Remember “Silver Blaze?” The mystery is solved by Holmes and in the dénouement he recaps the case for the Scotland Yard detective, a Mr. Gregory.

Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the nighttime.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

Tim Dally dropped a little one-liner in his sermon last Sunday. It was a footnote, a by-the-way. He pointed out that the roast lamb, which we think would be central to the Passover meal that Jesus and the twelve were eating in Luke 22, was missing. The Lamb is AWOL. Jesus made comments about the unleavened bread and he mentioned the various rounds of wine that were drunk, but no lamb.

I draw your attention to the curious incident of the lamb in the Last Supper. What’s that you say? There was no lamb mentioned in the Last Supper of Luke 22 – or of Matthew 26 – or of Mark 14? Well, that was the curious incident.

We who are Goyim (gentiles) generally don’t know squat about “Seder” or the Jewish Passover meal. I certainly knew nothing but now I know as much as you can learn from nosing around various websites for a couple of hours. Bless you, Wikipedia. It was interesting to me to find the lamb AWOL from all the websites too. The Seder meal apparently has several variations and permutations but there is one thing that is common to all forms, namely that the Passover Lamb is represented by a lamb bone on the Seder plate. It can be old – the same bone year after year. From what I could gather from the sites I visited nobody eats lamb, at least there is no requirement to eat lamb. Most eat gefilte fish and matzo soup. Some eat beef brisket. Chicken and turkey is okay too.

So lamb-eating is not central to the feast. But there is a central feature to the feast. The Pesach celebration is referred to as “the Feast of Unleavened Bread.” The feast is all about ridding the bread, the house and the camp from the taint of leaven (yeast). What’s so bad about yeast, you ask? I don’t know. Ask God. My point is that the point of the feast is about yeast, not lamb.

So, apparently, it is a Gentile misconception that assumes the feast of Pesach centered around lamb. Well, we may be excused our ignorance because the first Passover lamb meal did revolve around a rather weird lamb dinner, the instructions for which lie in Exodus 12 for all to read. The people were commanded to roast the lamb (not boil) with all its entrails and hooves and eat it quickly and eat it all. No leftovers allowed. And even though the entire feast happens because God is about to deliver Israel from slavery and spare their first-born from the Death Angel because of the blood of the lamb sprinkled on the lintels of their doorways, despite all that, the people were not commanded to eat lamb each year after that. They were commanded to drink certain cups of wine and to eat certain servings of unleavened bread and to ask specific questions and to recite, remember and rehearse God’s deliverance from Egypt. Each phase of the Passover meal had its significance and its explanations that are carefully laid out and choreographed in Torah, Talmud, and Midrash. And so the matzo is important and the bitter herbs and the wine and the bowl of salt water and all are important. But the eating of lamb does not appear in the ritual.

Go figure.

All of this adds mind-boggling (at least it boggles my mind, which isn’t hard to do I’ve heard) context to the Last Supper story as related in Matthew, Mark and Luke. We Goy need to grasp that the meal is scripted. Jesus & Co. are following the script as all of them had since they were children. In fact the meal is designed to teach children the story of the Exodus (the “Exit” from Egypt into the Promised Land). Everything from the first cup of wine to the hymn sung at the end is scripted. The meal centers around having children ask four important questions around the theme of , “Why is this night different from other nights?” The questions set the parents up to recite the story of deliverance.

And so there are several breaking of bread and giving of thanks ceremonies in the script. Additionally, the thank-you prayers are scripted and there are four rounds of wine, each one focusing its meaning on an aspect of the story. The fruit paste represents mortar I read. And the bitter herbs (romaine lettuce and horseradish) represent hard times. You see, it all has pre-scripted meaning and significance.

And here’s the mind-boggling part: Jesus is following the script. They all knew it by heart. He takes the unleavened bread and says the scripted thank-you prayer and breaks it as he is supposed to…but then he adds, then he ad-libs, then he steps outside the script and says, “This is my body…”

And it’s like he ruins the moment. He’s not thinking about Egypt fifteen hundred years previously, he’s thinking about this night, his night. This is what he came for. This is his life they’re talking about. No doubt the disciples are a little confused.

Then they go back to the script. Things settle down. The youngest person present (John?) would have asked the next question. Jesus would have explained the answer, “This night is different because we all recline and no one sits.” At some point they dip their vegetables in salt water. At some point they are required to dip their unleavened bread into the salt water too, it appears. Was this when Jesus might have said “One of you will betray me…the one who dips his bread in the bowl with me…?”

Then comes round three and four of the wine. Jesus follows the script but again as he is passing the cup (in Matthew we are told they all drank from the same cup) Jesus strays. He does not explain that this is how God delivered his people from slavery. No. He says “This is my blood, which is poured out for you.”

Whoa. Kind of creepy. Jesus is getting weird. What is he talking about? He is talking about his death, he is talking about bleeding to death. He is talking about flogging and crucifixion. He is not about Passover. Passover is about him.

And by saying these things, by adding to the script, Jesus co-opts, steals one of the three most important annual feasts in the culture of Israel (the other two would be Succoth, the Feast of Tabernacles and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement). He steals the story from the Exodus and claims it for Himself. In so doing he declares that “It is the Exodus that points to me. The Exodus is the metaphor. I am the reality.”

Funny. All I wanted to do in this blog was talk about how we get the metaphor confused with the reality. We mistake the symbol for the truth. We tend to view the reality of Christ (his life, his death, resurrection, the outpouring of the Spirit, his soon return, the resurrection of all) through the lens of the type. But I’m going to stop here and try to pick up the metaphor angle next time.

Meanwhile, I want to draw your attention to the curious incident of the lamb during the Passover dinner.

Happy Easter!
The Gospel Crank

The Guy in the Back Row

2010-03-24T16:13:00.000-07:00

The Guy in Back Row

Luke 14. The parable of the Great Banquet. The focus of Tim’s sermon this week. Did you ever notice the launching pad for this wonderful parable? What was the stimulus that caused Jesus to go on such a “God wants quantity not quality” tirade? The whole point of the parable seems a little odd, but when we consider it as a response to a small, short, seemingly harmless remark made by an unnamed, probably slightly tipsy, little guy in the back row, well, it’s even odder.

Here’s the situation. Jesus has been asked to lunch by a prominent religious and community leader. A man of great social standing and probably some wealth, he is a leader of the Pharisees which means he is a Torah-abiding, clean living soul who would have been regarded by all to have been “blessed by God.” Well, almost all. Jesus seems to be rather unimpressed.

Whatever the glad-handed reason the Pharisee gave for inviting Jesus we are told that the Pharisee’s real motive was to “carefully watch” Jesus as they tempt Him to heal on the Sabbath. This is an old ruse that Jesus has seen before and He is not caught off-guard. It is Jesus Himself who forces the action by taking hold of the bait (a man sick with “dropsy”) and healing the guy before anyone could figure out what was happening.

Jesus seems to be telling his host, “Healing on Sabbath? Don’t be stupid. Of course you heal on Sabbath if you can.” He sends the healed man on his way in perfect health. “Next!” Jesus seems to say. Actually He says, “You tell me, Legal or notlegal?”

But the Pharisees are dumbstruck and say nothing. So Jesus continues on the offensive. He is sarcastic and in-their-face. He challenges His host and the host’s friends, “Which of you wouldn’t help your own son if he fell into a well on Sabbath? Oh wait. I forgot who I was talking to. Never mind your own children, you probably aren’t that attached to your own children. How about your cow? If your prize cow fell into a ditch on Sabbath you’d fetch it out pronto, right?”

Can you imagine? The nerve of the guy. But Jesus isn’t done. He then presumes to lecture them on proper seating etiquette. Now if there is one thing a group of Mid-Eastern religious leaders understand, it is proper seating arrangements and customs. Their status in the community depended upon it. They would never break the rules, either way. First they would never, ever sit in a too-high seat. They all knew the pecking order and rehearsed it every time they ate together. Likewise they would never, ever sit in a seat too low because, why should they? They earned the seat they’re in. Their whole value system of who’s who was manifested in these seating arrangements. It was their system of evaluating who’s who and they took it very seriously.

And this brings us to the whole point of Luke 14 - that man’s way of evaluating the worth of other human beings is all wrong, that mankind’s system of valuing and evaluating stinks. As Jesus said of the Pharisees in Luke 17 a couple of weeks ago, “You are the ones who justify themselves in the eyes of men. But God know your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight.

This is more of that. You guys have not the understanding to be evaluating anything. All of your judgments are wrong. You should heal on the Sabbath, of course you should. What are you, nuts? You should not just invite your friends, and important people to lunch. You don’t know who is important and who is not. You don’t understand how God looks at people, how He sees them, what He sees in them, how He loves them, why He loves them. You guys don’t get it, can’t get it, have not the capacity to get it.

That, in essence is what Jesus tell them. “You’re upside down. You’re backwards. You value all the wrong stuff. You think you are good with God but you are not. God detests the way you guys think.

Jesus is letting them have it with both barrels. He is blasting them. He continues blasting them, “Don’t invite winners to your partys. You don’t know the difference between winners and losers. Invite losers. Even though you won’t know why, you’ll have a better chance of getting something right.”

And it is at this particular moment, at this tense juncture, it is this moment when Jesus is about to really tell them the whole truth about themselves that our little Guy in the Back decides to pipe up and participate in the conversation. He probably has not understood anything Jesus has said. It probably has not occurred to him that Jesus is ripping on their whole life-structure. He is still secure in his little hierarchy-good-time-bubble. And he squeaks what appears to be the most innocuous little amen blessing known to man, “Blessed is the man who shall eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.”

Oops. Dead quiet. The wiser Pharisees wince and put their hands to their foreheads and look down, Jesus takes a breath, looks them in the eye and decides not to tell them the whole truth, He changes course and tells them the parable of the Great Banquet instead.

Here’s is the short paraphrase. Blessed is the man who eats you say? That’s true Cy but it ain’t gonna be you. You think you are “in” by virtue of belonging to the right club but here’s the thing about God: Everybody you invite God rejects and everybody you reject God invites. You can’t be more wrong about this than you are.

And here is the hard truth for us: we’re the Pharisees. They are stand-ins for all humanity. They aren’t the Keystone Cops of the Neaar East. They aren’t Curly, Moe and Larry. They’re us. Our judgments, what we value, who we think is important it’s all dead thinking. Our value system, the things we tell ourselves to make our little souls feel okay is 180 degrees out of phase with reality. Happily, as it turns out, all of humanity gets invited to the Banquet too. But we must first abandon our natural value system for one that aligns with God’s values if we can sus them out. Nothing can keep us out except this bit right here – that we think we know something when we don’t.

The guy in the back row then turned to his neighbor and whipered, “What did he day?”

Happy Crank

2010-03-03T15:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, the Gospel Crank is very happy. I was gone this weekend and didn’t get to hear Tim’s sermon. I had to listen to it online. It made me smile. In fact, I was dancing in my seat. I was doing the Bar Stool Boogie in my seat. I loved what Tim had to say about gratitude.

He implied that gratitude cannot be forced or contrived, but must be a genuine appreciation for what some one has done for you. In terms of God and the gospel, gratitude comes when we “get” what Jesus has done for us. Or maybe I should say the degree to which we “get” the gospel is the degree to which we have gratitude.

If you are a do-it-yourself religionist, a self-remodeler, if you are spending your life’s energies trying to make your dead soul become Jesus-like, if you are busy fixing the “outer man” but have no clue what is happening to the “inner man,” well, you’re not going to be grateful for a teaching like this one. Why? Because this kind of gratitude comes from the heart, the inner man, that’s why. Faking it on the outside, on the exterior means nothing, zip, nada. Doesn’t count with God.

The story of Simon the Pharisee and the slutty ‘ho with the hair is a living object lesson. It’s an ambulatory parable. Jesus has been trying, with no success, to make a dent in the Pharisee’s well defended religious helmet of self-justification. He seems to be, in this passage, ratcheting up the energy. You have to hand it to Him for not giving up on this bunch. You and I would have just thought, “You know, you’re right. I don’t like you either. The hell with the lot of you.” But Jesus keeps on coming with these guys.

In Luke 15 you have Jesus reassuring the poor and down-trodden with parables of the lost and the losers: lost sheep, lost coin, lost sons. Only, one of the Sons obviously represents the religious leaders in Israel who don’t want to come to the party anymore because Jesus is letting in the losers and the riff-raff. They are offended. They are not losers and riff-raff, they believe, so they don’t want that kind of party.

Jesus tells them “you are the ones who justify themselves in the eyes of men. But God knows your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight (Luke 16:15).” Ouch! Detestable? Yes, detestable. And then Jesus tells the Rich Man and Lazarus parable where the apparent loser is the winner and the apparent winner is the loser. Jesus is warning them that they are going to end up like the Rich Man because their value system is upside down.

And then Tim skips back to Luke chapter seven where Jesus is at lunch with Simon the Pharisee and the slutty ‘ho walks in and starts weeping in gratitude and her tears splash on Jesus’ feet (she is standing behind Him while He is reclining at the table) so she wipes them with her hair and pours perfume on them. It’s not a parable; it’s real life. And Jesus tries to make the same point with Simon as with the other Pharisees of later chapters – their value system is upside down. Simon is not thinking like God thinks. He doesn’t love what God loves.

What does it mean to be “blessed by God?” That you have wealth, health, general happiness, a good looking spouse, smart obedient kids? Almost all of would say, “Heck yeah, such a person would be blessed.” How could we not say that? For many of us being blessed means not being like others. Being blessed means having a better car or house than most. It means catching a few breaks. It means not having any inconvenient crisis and trouble in our life. We are blessed. Thank you God.

But Jesus is telling Simon, Jesus is telling us, that our default value system of comparisons to other people is not only wrong, but it gets in the way of what God is trying to communicate to us. Therefore our value system is detestable to God.

How can we be grateful if we think the ‘ho with the hair and Lazerus at the rich man’s gate are not blessed? I mean, challenge yourself. If you were driving by the rich man’s gate and saw the two characters what would you think. I’ll tell you what you would think, “Rich guy, pillar of society, got it all together, blessed. Guy with dog licking his sores, loser, must have made some really bad decisions to get to this place, not blessed.”

That’s what we would all think. I’m the Gospel Crank and I know these things. And our thoughts would be detestable to God … unless … unless our faith in what God has done for us in Christ has converted our thinking. I firmly believe that the Spirit of God would guide us to assume that they both need help. The rich man primarily needs spiritual help. Lazerus needs to be taken to the emergency ward. The Spirit would give us compassion for both. God wants to work through us to meet their individual needs, whatever that may be.

Our gratitude for what Christ has done for us in the gospel would cause us to “regard no one from a worldly point of view (2Corinthians 5:16)” or “after the flesh” as some translations say. At least this is our only hope of seeing past our default detestable value system. We really are blind, you know. Have you figured out that you don’t see what God sees?

And so we end up right back at the feet of Jesus where we belong. And that makes the Crank happy.Lord, we are blind. Help us Jesus. You’re our only hope.

The Gospel Crank

2010-02-22T15:11:00.000-08:00

Our Own, Personal, Secret Garden?

I was delighted to hear Pastor Tim refer to The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett last Sunday. I was not acquainted with this story growing up, but my wife knew it and read it out loud to our two daughters as they grew up. So I got to hear it as an adult.

The story centers around a girl named Mary who is sickly and unwell but discovers a secret garden where she is so filled with the joie d’vivre that she becomes healthy. She then meets a sickly boy named Colin who is depressed and bedridden. He can’t believe that he can gain health or vitality as Mary did. But Mary is relentless in forcing him up and out and into activity. She shares her secret garden with him and lo and behold, he in fact finds health and vitality after all.

But Mary is relentless. Not only that she is quite unsympathetic, obnoxious sometimes, never taking no for an answer, and always poking and prodding Colin into further action. Her message to the unwell Colin was (my paraphrase) “Oh, get over yourself and do as you’re told.” She is quite pushy, very insistent, and is more stubborn and determined to get Colin up than Colin is determined to stay put. It is a battle of wills that Colin, much to his own happiness, loses.

And the brilliant part about using this story in a sermon is that Pastor Tim clearly intended us to see young Mary, the eleven or twelve year old cousin of Colin, as a type of Christ, the Christ-figure of the story. Tim seemed to be suggesting that Jesus pushes us to expand when we contract. That he is capable of forcing himself upon us when we become frightened and make the wrong choices based on a scared-to-death view of ourselves, of the world, and of God - that maybe Jesus doesn’t give up on us when we give up on ourselves and maybe he pushes and pulls and prods us toward spiritual health and freedom and usefulness and productivity.

I think Tim hinted at all that. And that’s good because we really, really need to be pursued and helped. Because truth-to-tell we are all spiritually like Colin, we are not at all like Mary, no matter who we think we are. We are Colin not Mary. Jesus is Mary.

Generosity, compassion, gratitude. Those are the themes of this series. Who among us doesn’t know we should be more generous? Who among us does not believe we could use a little (or a lot) more compassion? Which one of us can say we are filled with gratitude and thankfulness all the time?

Nobody, that’s who.

It is like the great commandment, love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. Who among us has ever managed that kind of a spiritual state of mind for more than two seconds, consecutively? Hmm? (Don’t lie to me, this is the Gospel Crank you’re talking to).

Where are we going to get the gumption to do, be, or have any of these things - generosity, compassion, gratitude? From within ourselves? Should we do a gut check and tap into our secret stash of will-power and make ourselves behave in these ways? C’mon now, everybody, grab those spiritual boot straps and PULL!

Doesn’t work? Maybe just fake it then. Put on a happy face.

Or does the power, is the source, does the force come from somewhere else, or from someone else or from somewhere outside of us?

If we are all Colins (and we are, don’t argue with me on this one), is there a Mary who will come and get us and show us who we are in her world? Is there a rescuer who will not believe in our version of ourselves, but show us a new version to believe in?

Is there?

The Gospel Crank

2010-01-25T12:23:00.000-08:00

Who Is the Sinner?

I asked my wife if she could tell me the theme of Pastor Tim’s sermon on Sunday, January 17th. It was from Luke 15 and the Lost Coin and the Lost Sheep. She said, “It was that God’s love for us is crazy; He’s more interested in finding us than we are determined to be lost.”

She always was smarter than me. Well put, I agreed; that was the theme. And I added that the practical application was “therefore go hang out with sinners. It’s okay.”

That’s good news. We get to go out and meet the world. By all means let’s go hang out with sinners. Most of us like the idea. Most of us have a nice little fantasy movie in our heads that shows Jesus hanging out with oppressed and rejected peasants who just need to be given a chance, and they seem to love Him so much. They just needed someone to believe in them.

It’s the myth of the “Noble Savage.” It would make a nice 3-D animated movie that would make fourteen year old girls cry. You could end the movie with Jesus and all the oppressed sinners holding hands in a big circle – a true Kumbaya moment. However, I think reality is much more sobering. Hanging out with sinners is probably much less romantic than we imagine. It probably wouldn’t be any more rewarding than hanging out with church poeple. I mean, people are people. What they’re going to do is hurt us and let us down, just like church-people. What’s worse is, we are probably going to hurt them and let them down – just like we do church people.

I was pondering the well-known statistic proclaiming that the divorce rate inside the Church is about the same as the divorce rate outside the Church. And I started wondering if that was true across the moral board.

If we took a giant back-hoe scoop and scooped up a bucket-load of people randomly from a Sunday morning church meeting (say a thousand or so) and another giant bucket-load of people from say, a Giants game (another thousand), and we compared the two groups, would we find about the same percentage of drug addicts, adulterers, closet drunks, sexual predators, chronic liars, superficial materialists, and self-righteous moralists? Would we find that some of these have turned to Jesus and some have not, just like in church?

Hmm? We wonders, yes we wonders…

- The Crank

2010-01-05T14:01:00.000-08:00

Not Apostolic

One thing we might take away from last Sunday’s sermon is this: the “Hell-first” version of the gospel is not apostolic. None of the apostles, as far as I can read, tried to convince their listeners of hell, damnation, an angry God, sin-counting, or a Dante’s Inferno with Satan as the living Captain of Industry down there. None of the apostles had the devil getting bigger headlines and more inches than the Savior.

I think it is safe to say that the “hell-first’ message was an invention of the Middle Ages and not at all what any of the apostles preached. Therefore we can safely banish it from our repertoire of gospel messages.

Anybody agree? Disagree? Any challenges? Anybody out there?

The Goepel Crank

2009-12-17T13:25:00.000-08:00

Better off a Shepherd than a Wise Man

Sheep herders. That’s who got the message first, besides Joseph and Mary that is. It wasn’t the high priest or the Jewish prelates or the most holy person in Israel or the most avid practitioner of the law to whom God revealed his plan. It was sheep herders. That’s one step down from camel wrangler. It might have been the lowest rung on the prestige ladder in ancient Israel, like being a sheet rock hanger or a house painter today (my apologies to those of you applying your honest trade, I was a house painter for many years, so I speak from first hand experience). It was shepherds heard it first.

Not Oprah. Not the new CEO of General Motors. Not the chairman of some Senate committee. Not the Three Wise Men.

Here is what the Scriptures say happened and I will embellish them with my own wild speculations to round out the story. These shepherd boys were doing their job as usual, which means they were staying up all night in the middle of winter (if it was winter) guarding sheep – not a glamour position. Guarding sheep against what? Well, predators first - dogs, wolves, etc., but undoubtedly sheep-rustlers too. Sheep, I have heard, can be somewhat suicidal and I’m sure their job included keeping the more adventurous sheep from wandering off into self-destruction. I’m thinking this may have been very boring, demoralizing work. These shepherds could easily have been guys who were unemployable losers. Maybe they lost their jobs at Starbuck’s or In ‘n Out Burger (for smoking pot behind the dumpster) and they couldn’t go back to live with their mothers and now they’re out of options and doing what nobody else wanted to do – living in the fields trying to keep stupid sheep from killing themselves. I would further guess they found um… less-than-socially-approved ways of keeping themselves amused while they performed this incredibly unsatisfying work. I will not speculate here what they may have been doing all night because this is a family program and I don’t want any small children to end up on the psychiatrist’s couch when they’re forty years old recounting vague and disturbing memories of what ancient shepherds did when they were bored.

So it was a typical night, nothing unusual … when suddenly “an angel of the Lord came upon them and the glory (doxa) of the Lord shone around them (perie-lamps-en = shone like a lamp) and, as the Greek text says, “they feared a great fear (ephob-ethe-san phobon megan).” Fear like that rarely comes to the likes of you and me. I mean here they are rolling dice and drinking and telling lies about the girls they’ve known when all of a sudden the glory of God turns on like a lamp and bang! they are sitting or standing in the light. What were they thinking? The same thing you and I would think, I think.

“Busted!”

“Please don’t destroy us; we’ll be good from now on.”

“I’ll be in the synagogue this Sabbath, I promise.”

“Does anyone have any extra underwear?”

“You don’t scare me; my dad’s a lawyer.” (Okay, none of them thought that.)

And the angel says to them, “No fear. No need to be afraid because I hereby announce to you all a great joy (karan megalen)…” and the angel goes on to touch on the basics of Christmas. That God is coming to earth. The Word, the Logos, is coming as a human born of God, and he will reconcile all people (laos) to himself. Nobody, not even you losers will be punished for your evil deeds because God has reconciled or made right, your relationship with him – from his side. It’s like the Year of Jubilee has come permanently to earth. And we’re not just talking about the Jewish nation; we’re talking about all the people (panti to lao). “Can you boys grasp how joyous this news is?” the angel seems to ask.

I think they do. I think they get it. I think they get it real good.

And the angel tells these shepherd boys to go into Bethlehem and check it out and see for themselves. And they do and they beat the three wise men there. They’re first. The sheep herding loser crowd is first to the barn where Jesus lay. I think this is very significant.

But before they leave for Bethlehem, something even more amazing takes place with the angel. Suddenly it’s not just one angel with a glory lamp, suddenly it’s a giant heavenly army (plathos [multitude] stratias [army] houraniou [of a heavenly]) praising God. It’s like this giant army of angels were sort of hiding there in secret but when they hear the angel explain the Christmas story, the Father’s plan of redemption for the world, they lose control, blow their cover, reveal themselves and erupt with applause and praise and cheers and rejoicing because the plan is so … cool. They just can’t help it.

And the whole giant army shouts out “Glory to God … who figured out how to save these people by becoming one of them! Who saw that coming? Who knew? What a plan!!! God is great and every human being (anthropos) who agrees with, or accepts, or approves, or has good will toward this plan, or says ‘yes’ at the right place will have peace with God and be the direct beneficiaries of the complete work of the Son of God!!!”

And the sheep herders realize that they have just gotten the biggest break they will ever get in their whole lives times ten and they forget about the sheep and go looking for the Savior in Bethlehem.

And so it was that the persons who first heard the Christmas message were the ones who needed it most. God bless those boys. That’s why we would be better off as a shepherd than a wise one.

And this tells us something very important about God. God is patient, not willing that any should perish, not even loser shepherd boys who can’t hold a job.

2009-12-01T12:47:00.000-08:00

True Confessions: I am Frodo

…more on self-crucifixion…

I finally figured out what’s wrong with me. I am Frodo. I am just like Frodo. I will always do what Frodo ultimately did. Here’s what he did:

He dutifully carried the evil ring, with its growing weight, hundreds of miles. For more that a year he voluntarily carried it through peril and against foes more terrible than he could imagine. He received help, often unexpected help, and encouragement from many quarters. His intentions were good and noble, but his soul was seduced by the allure of the ring. In the end he took it all back, all the good intentions, all the noble motives. Ultimately he couldn’t follow through with the one action that actually mattered. Finally he stood inside Mt. Doom on a promontory overlooking the great fires, the only fires that could destroy the evil ring. But he hesitated and did not throw the ring into the fires.

Instead he decided that the ring was too beautiful, too precious and he could not bring himself to destroy it. And he felt and thought “ after all, the ring is mine.” And Frodo chose to keep the ring for himself and not destroy it even though he had exhausted himself in bringing it to this place.

The ring is like the sin nature. I am like Frodo. I can spend years in church studying and learning with the intention of one day, or little by little, crucifying the flesh. I can coexist with the intention and purpose of learning how not to live according to my sinful nature.

But in the end, when the test comes, I cannot do it. I cannot willingly abandon the old nature. The alluring false promises of self-fulfillment and soulful-pleasure and final self-completion, and the possibility of touching wholeness in the here and now - not in the hereafter - are too beautiful. Besides, I want all the earthly joys and pleasures for my own.

Death to the old self: Like anything else important in my life, I need someone to do this impossible task for me. I cannot betray my own desires and so-called “needs.” I cannot crucify myself. I refuse. I choose not to do it. Like Frodo.

Who can help someone like me? Where is encouragement? Where is hope? Where is the happy ending? How can I, who fail every significant test, who nurture and protect selfishness in my heart, who want the illegal but beautiful things, how can I be saved?

Is there a hero who champions the cause of losers? Is there someone who will destroy my sinful nature for me? Instead of me? Because I can’t do it myself???

Do you know anyone like that?

Respond, if you please,

-The Gospel Crank

2009-11-24T14:07:00.000-08:00

On the Happy Thought of Self Crucifixion

The whole idea of crucifying oneself gives me the heebie-jeebies. Crucifixion is a horrible enough picture to contemplate as it is but to consider doing it to oneself is, well, unthinkable. Besides, the fact is I am almost incapable of administering the smallest needle wound to myself. How could I even begin such a gruesome task? I’m just too squeamish. But all that aside, I don’t think self-crucifixion is a human possibility. I mean I can imagine a person nailing his feet to the wood. I can sort of imagine him leaning out and spiking his left hand. But then what? His right hand would be flailing around with no way to finish the job. It’s a physical impossibility.

Besides, if we’re not careful we can find ourselves wandering off the gospel rails. There’s something self-serving and almost narcissistic about the whole idea. We have to kill ourselves so that we can start to mold ourselves into a likeness of Christ? Sounds like the gospel plus something to me. It’s ironic that in an effort to kill off our own old nature we can find ourselves caught up more in self-salvation than when we started.

But this is where the finished work of Christ comes into play. If Jesus is the “author and finisher” of our faith how does the work of God in Christ on our behalf fit into this whole question of the crucifixion of the old man?

Scripture declares (especially Paul declares) that “of God” or by His doing we are “in Christ Jesus.” And, apparently we are to believe that the experience of Christ counts as our experience. If Christ was crucified, so were we. If Christ rose from the dead, we did too. 1 Corinthians 15:22 “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” If Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father and sits there now, then that’s where you’ll find us as well. Done.

John remembers Jesus simply saying that because we believe in Him we have already passed from death to life. Done.

This is a great mystery. Do any of us know what death is? I mean, really? Have any of us begun to appreciate what death can do? Do any of us understand anything about what it means that God, the creator of life, voluntarily entered death? God died? He became human and let us kill Him? And He co-opts death for His own purposes and now death is the only way to get to God, instead of being the only thing that could separate us from Him?

And then God declares His intentions: “If it happens to me, it happens to you. My death is your death. My resurrection is your resurrection. My new life is your new life. All of the old things, as far as I am concerned, have passed away, behold all things have become new.” Somehow we are already dead in Christ and risen in Christ and separated from our sinful nature in Christ so that this old nature cannot reign over us in this life even if we fail and cave in to its desires upon occasion.

We don’t need to kill off our own old natures. We need to believe that, thanks to the work of God in Jesus, we’re already dead! Hooray! Ain’t it grand? I’m dead and I’m starting to feel better already.

I love the way the King James puts it in Romans 6:11, “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive unto God through Christ Jesus our Lord.” Reckon. We are to reckon (figure, assume, count it as true, impute to ourselves, consider ourselves to be) already dead. And as everybody knows “Dead men don’t lie.”

I mean “reckon” has this great cowboy grade B movie ring to it.
Slim: Gee Tex, I heerd we wuz dead already in Jeezus.
Tex (Spitting first): Yup. I reckon.

And so if we reckon ourselves dead to sin in Christ, we can avoid the snare of trying to take that work away from God and falling into the do-it-yourself pit. Consider Jesus instead who is the author and finisher of our faith, and save yourself the embarrassment of walking around having applied a wide variety of tourniquets to our personality, and having hacked off a limb or two, and only making a botched job of it. We could end up half-dead. We might struggle all semester only to receive a grade of “incomplete.” We might find out we are just another “do-it-to-yourself-er.”

Or as Max the Miracle Worker once explained, “It’s a good thing your friend here is only mostly dead.” Only in this case it would not be a good thing.

Happy Thaksgiving

-The Crank

Apostolic Lenses

2009-11-11T15:36:00.000-08:00

Apostolic Lenses

There are a lot of lingering questions out there regarding the Law. I think most Christians are not at all clear regarding what our relationship to the Law ought to be. We know we don’t want to sacrifice bulls and goats anymore. And we are pretty sure we’re not required to eat Kosher and just because God says in the Old Testament that certain things were an abomination to Him (like women wearing men’s clothing [read: pants]) that doesn’t necessarily mean it is still an abomination to Him … does it?

We all know we’re not supposed to lust after our neighbor’s wife, but what about the fourth commandment: Sabbath-keeping. I mean, Sunday is not the Sabbath. It’s Saturday. Who said you could switch days? Maybe our Adventist friends have it right.

As one alert reader put it: What’s the deal with the Law? Rationalists need to know.

Well, my answer - and I know this answer would have gotten me excommunicated at various points in history, and I know that Christian-moron-hate-bloggers would like to see me drawn and quartered and have the pieces boiled in oil, if they only knew me, which they don’t, happily - my answer has to do with what I call “Apostolic Lenses.”

I think we are supposed to view all scripture through these “Apostolic Lenses.” I will try to explain.

I think there is a priority to the parts of scripture. Some parts explain other parts. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus changed the way we are to look at all of scripture.

When the Christian message first began (see Acts 2) the message was quite primitive. It was raw, undeveloped. “We thought He was the Messiah, and you killed Him but God raised Him from the dead.” That was it. That was the message.

We are told that the early disciples gave themselves over to “the Apostle’s teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” At this point the full meaning, the whole interpretation of what the Jesus event meant, was not clear. Twenty-some years later, however, just listen to Paul, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created; things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible … for God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things … (Colossians 1)” and so on. And that’s just the abridged version.

After twenty years of living in the Spirit and being taught by the Lord through the Spirit the Apostles were actually led into “all truth, ” or at least more truth than you or I are going to be led into in our lifetimes. The Apostle’s doctrine is the Gold Standard for us. They explain what the Jesus event means. In other words, we look at Jesus through the lens of the Apostle’s teaching – and that’s a good thing. John, Paul, Peter, James et al tell us what it means! Likewise we look at the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus. John 5, “…it is they (Torah) that testify of me.”

All of scripture is about the gospel. All of scripture is about Jesus. All of scripture is about the Apostolic interpretation of what it all means.

Okay, baseball metaphor. Let’s say there is a game between two professional baseball teams – the Owls and the Pussycats. The Old Testament is the league office that scheduled the game-to-be back in January of the year. Jesus is the game that gets played on July 4th at the home of the Owls. And Ray Ratto and Lowell Cohn are the super-smart pundits that tell us what the game means to the pennant race, who needs to get traded, and why the manager has to be fired. And they tell us these things the day after the game was played after they had put some thought into it, we hope.

But confusion abounds regarding Torah nonetheless. Many current theologians dissect the Law, Torah, into three parts: civil, ceremonial and moral. They reason that since we are not Israel, a nation, the civil law part does not directly apply to us. Likewise, they conclude that the ceremonial part of Torah (the sacrifices and so forth) was fulfilled in Christ so it no longer applies. But then they come to the moral part (read: the ten commandments) and say that this is neither outdated nor is it fulfill-able therefore it remains binding on the believer.

And this makes a lot of sense to the rational mind. It’s just that the Apostles never, ever made that distinction, that breakdown. For them, Torah remains a whole. It remains the covenant between God and Israel, the covenant whose time had run out.

Finally, I point to Luke 24. On the famous Road to Emmaus Jesus sets us all straight by co-opting the Torah. He owns it. It’s about Him. Its value is that it foreshadows Him and His work. The Torah is a model of the gospel; at least it would be if we were not fools and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.

The Gospel Crank

the law and a frozen lake

2009-11-11T10:00:00.000-08:00

in a book by n.t. wright he opens a chapter in reference to the law of God and its place or season in his will for followers...

"The lake freezes over for four months in the winter, to a depth of at least ten feet. People drive not only snowmobiles across it, but even cars and vans. It's exciting - and also quite convenient - to be able to drive across the water to the village on the opposite shore.

But there comes a time, in late March or early April, when spring comes even to the lakes north of Montreal. Suddenly the ices is not so firm. Wise drivers don't attempt the crossing any more. The villagers leave an old car on the middle of the ice; when it begins to sink, they know the time has come to stop driving across the ice. Soon the lake will be unfrozen; boats will be operating again; and anyone who wants to take the car to the other side will have to put it on the ferry.

Paul's point is this: spring has come to the people of God. For over a thousand years their fellowship with God has been established through the law. This was always essentially a winter regime, a time of waiting. There are, so to speak, modes of travel which are appropriate during that winter season. But if you become so keen on them that you don't want to abandon them in spring, you're going to be stuck at the water's edge - or maybe will even risk trying to get across when the ice will no longer hold your weight." (Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians, 61)

spring has arrived. through Christ a new season of fellowship with God has arrived. it is through the Spirit that we live in this new season allowing the Spirit to be the wind that fills our sails as we negotiate the season and life on the water.

2009-11-04T15:43:00.000-08:00

Why the Law in the First Place?

Alert reader, Wayne Cannon, writes in with a question regarding the study in the book of Galatians that seems to reveal a flaw in Paul’s Abrahamic argument of grace over law. Why law at all? Why not just skip it? It doesn’t save anybody and apparently causes the entire nation of Israel to run down the wrong track altogether. Why not just cut to grace first and last?

Good question.

In answer let me start by saying I don’t know and neither does anybody else. I hate trying to answer those questions that start, “Why did God…?” I mean I wasn’t invited to the meeting where the Triune God discussed instituting the Law. Anything we say here is mere speculation. On the other hand speculation can be fun and even rewarding, and not knowing the answer has never kept me from faking it before, so here we go.

First of all I am going to avoid the more obvious explanation of needing the Law of Moses to provide us with moral conviction which shows us our need for a savior. Mostly I will avoid the argument because I don’t believe it. I didn’t know a ding-derned thing about Torah or the Jewish law as I was growing up but boy, I sure got a clear moral standard impressed upon me. Nothing Jewish about it. Well, okay there was some Old Testament stuff mixed in there with other moral sources such as Walt Disney and the U.S. Marines.

So I didn’t know squat about Torah, couldn’t have listed the Ten Commandments (what’s harder the Ten Commandments or the Seven Dwarves?), let alone any of the other 603 commands of the Law of Moses. But I certainly did know about guilt, sin, the need to be good, getting in trouble, needing forgiveness, and wishing I could be different but wasn’t. I didn’t need the Law of Moses to let me know I was frequently in deep do-do; I figured that out on my own.

So I am going to let that part of the answer to our main question slide on by.

My real answer to Wayne’s question is this: God needed to institute the Law because He wanted to establish a nation for Himself. The Law created Israel. Without the Law there could be no Israel. It’s what made Israel different from all other nations. It put the “us” in the “us and them” and gave Israel its identity. It was the label or stamp of God. Plus you can’t underestimate the strategy that giving Israel a list of commands as long as three or four arms just might keep them out of trouble for the next fifteen hundred years or so until Jesus arrived.

You could challenge that last assertion by saying that Israel got into plenty of trouble, what am I talking about? And I would reply by saying you should have seen the trouble they would have ended up in if they had had no Law.

I think the point is that Jesus needed to come from the Jews, the chosen people. And in God’s mysterious economy the Jews needed to be found fumbling in legalism and missing the point nearly altogether. Somehow, that was an important part of the plan. And even more oddly, the fact that the Chosen People played a major part in the death of the Messiah squeezes irony out into the entire world like a lemon slice over the iced tea, or like a wedge of lime being squeezed over an authentic Mexican taco. And I think that’s important.

There is a kind of right-brained left-handed reach-out-with-your-feeligs logic to it all. Paul hints at it in 1Corinthians 1 when he says, “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise and the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things and the despised things – and the things that are not – to nullify the things that are.”

Wayne, my friend, I realize that that may be a completely unsatisfactory answer to your question but as Sir Thomas More summarized in the play A Man for All Seasons,
More: I trust I make myself obscure.
Norfolk: Perfectly.

Any thoughts?

The Gospel Crank

crucified

2009-10-29T14:42:00.000-07:00

"There is no military battle, no geographical exploration, no scientific discovery, no literary creation, no artistic achievement, no moral heroism that compares to it.

It is unique, massive, monumental, unprecedented, and unparalleled. The cross of Christ is not a small secret that may or may not get out. The cross of Christ is not a minor incident in the political history of the first century that is a nice illustration of courage.

It is the center."

when eugene peterson says this statement he is stating something that is true about Jesus and the cross and is supposed to be true about us. the gospel must be at the center. this is essential. it is at the center of our theology and our thoughts, it is at the center of beliefs and behaviors, it needs to be at the center of our understanding of grace and the center of our self-understanding.

if the grace of God through the work of Christ on the cross is at the center...then other items are de-centered...my ego, pride, preferences, opinions, actions, ambitions, prejudices, among other items are put in a different place. those things that are both good and the bad about those things are not significant enough to be at the center. they are the sand the foolish man built his house on, as opposed to the wise who built his house on the rock (Jesus)...everything else is sand.

td

children of God

2009-10-27T12:11:00.000-07:00

"Suddenly we are free with God, like a child is free with a parent. We are not involved in stiff, formal protocols in relation to God. We don't have to be afraid lest we put our foot in our mouth, or embarrass ourselves, or get sent out of the room because we didn't use the right title. We can address God as freely as we address our parents. It is the kind of freedom that combines intimacy and reverence. We are still award of the majesty and awesome glory of God. We do not try to reduce God to the level of coziness where we can manipulate him. The intimacy is a freedom to share ourselves, to express ourselves fearlessly in God's presence. We are free to be spontaneous, personal and uninhibited. Faith is not a formal relationship hedged in with elaborate courtesies; it is a family relationship, intimate and free."

i really like this paragraph from peterson.
it reminds me of family...i wonder does it remind others of their own family?
paul uses family here so we can connect to a vital truth.

is it possible that if one has not experienced family like this in any way, or a parent like God that we might miss the point of God as loving father/parent and his acceptance and our freedom?

td

baptism in galatians according to scot mcknight commentary (a covenant guy)

2009-10-27T11:49:00.000-07:00

in the galatian text 3:26--29 mcknight makes these comments in regard to baptism...

"Some will no doubt have problems with the observation that faith and baptism are parallel expressions for Paul. Among many free churches in the world, baptism has taken a secondary importance and is too often confined to 'nothing more than an entrance rite' into the church. While it is clear that Paul makes a fundamental difference between external rites and internal reality (cf. Rom. 2:25-29; Phil. 3:3; Col. 2:11; cf. Gal. 5:6), and can even suggest that baptizing was not his purpose (1 Cor. 1:13-17), baptism was in the early church the initial and necessary response of faith. To be sure, their world was more ritual-oriented than ours and consequently got more out of rituals than we do. Nonetheless, we dare not make baptism "nothing more than a ritual of entrance," for it was for the earliest Christians their first moment of faith, and we know of no such thing as an "unbaptized believer." Baptism was not necessary for salvation, but faith without baptism was not faith for the early church. The Galatians knew this, and so Paul appealed to their experience."

he goes on to say:

"The early baptismal ceremony was, in effect, a dying with Christ and a rising with Christ (Rom. 6:1-14). This was its symbolic virtue: it dramatized salvation. Furthermore, the ceremony was frequently associated with two moral ideas: the putting away of sin and the putting on of a new life (cf. Rom. 13:12, 14; Eph. 4:24; 6:11-17; Col. 3:5-17). To be "clothed with Christ" perhaps refers to the early Christian practice of stripping and then reclothing oneself in a white, liturgical robe after the baptismal ceremony, thus symbolizing disrobing oneself of sin and then putting on the virtues of Christ."

and before you can say enough already:

"One more connection needs to be observed. As noted above, "sons of God" in verse 26 parallels the expressions "united with Christ" and "have been clothed with Christ" in verse 27. I would also suggest that the baptism of the Galatians (v.27) was the moment in which they all learned to call God "Abba" (cf. 4:6-7) and so, in effect, learned that they were all "sons of God" (3:26). Paul is now ready to make his point: the Judaizers are wrong because they do not realize that at their baptism the Galatian converts learned that they were sons of God."

it has always been a challenge to say enough in the weekend service and there are always things that we don't have time for...thought this might be an interesting extra...

td

remember the poor

2009-10-05T12:41:00.000-07:00

i was thinking about this one line in galatians that is tacked on to paul explaining a summit with the jerusalem leaders concerning his ministry out on the edge of the map....

the jerusalem church asked him to, "remember the poor." (2:10)

they have been discussing and exploring paul's ministry and theology and as they affirm his calling to follow God into the mission to reach as many people as possible with the gospel of grace...then there is this one thing they request...remember the poor.

paul was completely comfortable carrying that concern and doing something about it (see 1 Corinthians 16, 2 Corinthians 9, Romans 15).

i am thinking how important it is to understand that theology must get practical. theology must be lived. beliefs will give birth to actions; so can we embrace the preoccupations of Jesus and his church for the poor.

only someone who is blind or is looking at the bible through a broken or cloudy lens won't see God's concern for the poor. it is talked about so much in the bible as to be a little disturbing how it can be overlooked or devalued.

paul was eager to help.

td

religious apartheid

2009-10-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

i enjoy n.t. wright and he opens some work on galatians this way...

"Imagine you are in South Africa in the 1970's. Apartheid is at its height. You are embarked on a risky project: to build a community centre where everybody will be equally welcome, no matter what their colour or race. You've designed it; you've laid the foundation in such a way that only the right sort of building can be built. Or so you think.

You are called away urgently to another part of the country. A little later you get a letter. A new group of builders are building on your foundation. They have changed the design, and are installing two meeting rooms, with two front doors, one for whites only and one for blacks only. Some of the local people are mightily relieved. They always thought there was going to be trouble, putting everyone together like that. Others though, asked the builders why the original idea wouldn't do. Oh, said the builders airily, that chap who laid the foundation, he had some funny ideas. He didn't really have permission to make that design. He'd got a bit muddled. We're from the real authorities. This is how its got to be."

this may be a good way to understand what happened after the apostle paul left the galatian province and these others came in and challenged what he had been building.

paul is fighting for something. i wonder if we can appreciate what matters here. our faith is not some new system...it is not about being religious...it is not some new way to be moral. our faith is the announcement of a new kingdom through Jesus the savior and lord of a new worldwide humanity. a new humanity founded on Jesus and everything promised to us through him.

we understand rivalry, racism, seperation, division, pride, and various ways to determine who is an indsider and who is an outsider. do we understand how big this kingdom announcement is and the barriers it destroys? do we understand the gospel? do we care about the things heaven cares about?

td

his love is based on nothing

2009-10-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

i am a fan of brennan manning when it comes to thoughts of grace and lives worn out by trying to be more than Jesus...

"God's love is based on nothing, and the fact that it is based on nothing makes us secure. Were it based on anything we do, and that 'anything' were to collapse, then God's love would crumble as well. But with the God of Jesus no such thing can possibly happen.

People who realize this can live freely and to the fullest. Remember Atlas, who carries the whole world? We have Christian Atlases who mistakenly carry the burden of trying to deserve God's love. Even the mere watching of this lifestyle is depressing.

I would like to say to Atlas: "Put that globe down and dance on it. Thats why God made it."

And to these weary Christian Atlases: "Lay down your load and build your life on God's love."

We don't have to earn this love, neither do we have to support it. It is a free gift. Jesus calls out: "Come to me, all you Atlases who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you."

i enjoy today on this day reading 'the message' and the way the phrase turns in jeremiah 31:3 - "God told them, 'I've never quit loving you and never will. Expect love, love, and more love!'"

td

no one will trust jesus

2009-10-05T11:42:00.001-07:00

how can we learn to trust and begin with the foundation of what galatians proclaims: grace and freedom from God, through Jesus, and accelerated by the Holy Spirit.

we trust ourselves...our efforts...our regimen...our work. we embrace our faithfulness as the thing we will trust to be good with God. we are not taking actions prompted with gratitude because of grace...we are making sure we have all the bases covered, as if there was something Jesus has not accomplished.

i was reading something about God's love and our experience of it in the work of julian of norwich. she wrote back in the 1300's and cared significantly about grace.

"We pray to God because of his holy body and precious blood, his blessed Passion, and his most dear death and wound. As the body is clad in clothes, and the flesh in skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we clothed, body and soul, in the goodness of God and enfolded in it. Our lover desires that our soul should cling to him with all its might, and that we should ever hold fast to his goodness."

i want to cling, to live life that way...enfolded in the love of God. in that experience i may discover what it means to live free and to trust the lover of my/our soul.

--td

2009-09-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

Would You Get Circumcised for Your New Religion?
(A Discussion of the Term “Law” in Galatians)
By
Jim Gruenholz

Most of us would answer “no” to the question above, except for those who would answer “hell no!” But some of the Galatians in Paul’s day were seriously tempted to do that very thing…you know, get their foreskin cut off! I’m talking about grown-ups, adults who were considering this radical action. It seems so weird to us today. I mean, where in ancient Galatia (which was a group of little villages and towns like Lystra and Derbe) would you go to even get circumcised, the butcher’s?
But this is now and that was then and even though such a temptation doesn’t make much sense to us today there must have been some persuasive reasoning at work which motivated the Galatians to even consider such a drastic sign of covenant with God. The issue at hand was Torah, the Law. The Law was God’s covenant with Israel. Should Gentile believers (non-Jews) keep the Law?

In a written response to the Galatian crisis Paul makes the following dramatic claim that has changed the way Christianity has viewed religion ever since:

Clearly no one is justified before God by the law, because, “The righteous will live by faith.” - Galatians 3:11

No one? No one who follows the law carefully and meticulously will end up justified? This is a hard saying. This is bad news for a lot of people in Paul’s day that put great stock in the Law and invested their lives in the following of it.
After all what is righteousness if it is not loyalty to the Law that was given by God to Israel? The Law is what set Israel apart. It’s what put the “us” in the “us versus them,” Jews versus Gentiles. The lack of the Law was what made “them” them. The lack of regard for the Law was what made “them” unrighteous. It didn’t matter if a Gentile was a very moral person – they didn’t have the Law, they were outside the covenant, therefore they were unclean (unrighteous). You see? It’s not that the Gentiles were bad or immoral people; it’s that they weren’t committed to adhere to all the commands of the Law of Moses. Therefore they were unrighteous – not like us.
So let’s suppose you were a gentile, one of “them,” and you came to faith in the Messiah of Israel, and came to believe that forgiveness of sins and membership in the family of God (Israel) came through Jesus, wouldn’t you want to show yourself to be part of the family, part of Israel? Wouldn’t you want to join the club, God’s club? Wouldn’t you want to be one of the righteous? You have to remember, many of these Gentile converts were “God fearing” Gentiles whom Paul found hanging around the Jewish synagogues on Sabbath days anyway.
If righteousness was not allegiance to the Law, what was it?

This is the question Paul faces in writing to the church in Galatia. This is the question the Galatian gentile believers were trying to puzzle through, with dubious results. And this question begs a more general question of us: What is righteousness? Where does it come from? What does it look like? Paul, a Jewish Christian, has very different answers to those questions than did the Jewish Christians from Jerusalem.
Most of us have no notion of the ancient Jewish definition of righteousness. Why would we? When we modern gentiles are asked to define righteousness, we probably talk about moral uprightness. We might say that a righteous person is someone who is honest, doesn’t lie, doesn’t cheat, can be trusted, is unselfish, giving, and loving. Most of us would choose to define righteousness with character-words, words that described good human qualities.
In Paul’s time, these good human qualities would no doubt have been much appreciated by the Jewish community, but these qualities would not have constituted “righteousness.” Righteousness, to the ancient Jewish mind, could only mean one thing - adherence to the Law of Moses. And the thing we gentiles often forget is how much, how very much, of the Law of Moses and the traditions surrounding the Law had nothing at all, nothing whatsoever, to do with moral character. An enormous amount of the Law and its traditions had to do with strange, off-the-wall requirements that have no connection at all with what we would call righteousness.
I mean, think about it: don’t mix dairy and meat products on the same plate? How does this affect moral fiber? How about Sabbath laws? You can walk so many steps and carry a burden weighing so much and no more. Big deal. Do you really think wearing phylacteries made you a better person? Yarmulkes? Sure, let’s cover our bald spots guys, that’ll help get the girls but it won’t make us righteous. You may eat meat only from animals with cloven hooves who also chew the cud. That makes you a better person than one who eats ham on rye?
I mean would you cut off your foreskin for your new religion? Because nothing said “person of the Law,” nothing proclaimed righteousness like circumcision.
That was the whole thing for the practicing Jew, to do it all, just because it was commanded, not because it made any sense. The practice of the weird, nonsensical
parts of the Law were the very thing that made a man righteous! You were committed to the Covenant to do all that is written in the Law.
Therefore, if you were a truly serious religious male (ladies had other less invasive but not less weird proscriptions placed upon them) who had just come to faith, you would willingly be circumcised, as the Law commanded, in order to show that you were a righteous man. You would do this of your own accord, to the admiration of the Jewish-Christian community, even though your Gentile friends would think you had lost your mind and no doubt thought you would be drinking the poison Cool-Aid next.
And so that is how reasonable men like the ancient Galatians were deceived into thinking that in order “go all the way” in their dedication to the One God of the Jews who gave the world the Messiah and the Law, they had to get circumcised.

It is quite an ethical knot Paul had to try to unravel. But the Apostle to the Gentiles had a totally different take on the relationship between Law and gospel. He wasn’t buying the Jerusalem Judaizers line for one minute. His understanding was essentially a spiritual understanding. He was less concerned with external behaviors (like keeping the Law) than he was with inner regeneration and he believed that God thought that way too. Furthermore, he wanted all believers to see things with their spiritual eyes, as he did.
Paul was a theologian, a spiritual philosopher and it was important for him to explain how we got from the “covenant of Moses” to the new “covenant of Jesus.” He couldn’t just throw out unfounded assertions; he needed to show step-by-step how we got from “there” - Law to “here” - gospel. He further needed to explain the difference between “law-keeping” and “walking in the Spirit” (i.e.: living in Christ while Christ lives in you).
In fact, the crisis in Galatia was the perfect vehicle for Paul to compare and contrast many things new and old. His efforts lead to quite a list of brilliant and dazzling conclusions and repercussions. In the book of Galatians Paul contrasts Law with grace, the Spirit with flesh, the “fruits” of the Spirit with the “works” of the flesh, legal righteousness with a new creation, Abraham with Moses, faith with legal observance, and law v. promise. And in doing so he finds his way to describing our freedom as believers, our assurance as Christ-followers, and our never-failing standing with God because of what He has done on our behalf in Jesus Christ.
The whole crisis in Galatia serves as the opportunity for Paul to lay the true spiritual foundation for all believers. He uses the problems with the Judaizers as the reason for digging down to the basement of faith and laying the foundation that no other man can lay: Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
And while Paul is discussing all the above, he begins to hint at the universal truth about moral standards. The Law is a perfect stand-in for any moral system you want to name. Paul uncovers the truth that because of our sin nature we all strive to justify ourselves by our good behavior. We want to earn our standing before God. And Paul successfully demonstrates that no version of self-justification has any place in the new faith. No man is justified through adherence to any moral standard.
And so it is important for us today, as we attempt to understand Paul’s arguments in the book of Galatians, that we first see the Law of Moses as a whole thing – ceremonial, civil, and moral – as it exists in scripture and as it was practiced in ancient Israel and as the Galatians were tempted to practice it.
Only after accepting the very “Jewishness” of the Law can we make broader applications of the term “Law.” Only then we can see the term “Law” as a metaphor for any and every kind of moral or behavioral system we want to name. “Law” eventually becomes a synonym for “human effort” or “works of the flesh” – anything we humans do to make ourselves feel justified before God. But it starts in Galatians as Law = Torah.
Paul will eventually move from the anti-Judaizer mode of Galatians to the universal human dilemma mode of the book of Romans, but in Galatians Paul nevertheless makes all the grand assertions and arguments that seal the great doctrine of “Justification by Faith Alone” that became the foundation of the Reformation and that is the foundation of Evangelical churches today – whether we remember it or not.

Welcome to Our New Blog Spot

2009-09-24T11:43:00.000-07:00

Pastor Tim and I (Jim Gruenholz, the Gospel Crank) will be posting an interesting, we hope, running commentary as we work through the book of Galatians. We invite your comments and reactions. We hope to get quite a discussion going among RCC people, and if it reaches out further than that, well good.

Be aware that all responses will be screened but not edited.

Tim, do you have anything to add?