Tag: Christian theology

Reformation Day

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 30, 2022
Scriptures: 2 Peter 1:10-21, Romans 1:8-17

Happy Reformation Day, everyone!

I’ve noticed a lot of Methodist churches don’t regularly celebrate Reformation Day, which is a shame.  It’s a great opportunity to look back at our own history; to see where we’re from and what some of our core DNA is.  We need to give it the attention it deserves.  At one of my past appointments, I spoke about Martin Luther during the sermon, and afterwards a woman came up to me and said, “Wow, Martin sounds great!  I haven’t met him yet.  Does he go to the other service?”  Who can’t blame her for what she doesn’t know?  It’s on us pastors for not teaching it enough.

For those curious, Martin Luther did not go to the other service. Martin Luther lived in the 16th century.  He was the founder of Protestantism.  Without him there would be no Methodists!  There would be no Anglicans from which Methodists could come!  Not only would there be no Protestants, but what we know today as the Roman Catholic Church would look different as well.  Martin Luther is a big deal so I think it’s worth a little time to tell his story and remember about one of the great Protestant heroes.  

I want you to imagine that the year is 1521. You are in an imperial court in the city of Worms, a city that’s in what we know today as Germany, but was known back then as a part of the Holy Roman Empire.  This room is full of some of the most powerful people in the world.  Among them is Charles V, the singular man who is the archduke of Austria, the Prince of Spain, the lord of the Netherlands, the duke of Burgundy, and the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.  He is a big deal.  There’s also a papal envoy dressed in some of the finest clothes imaginable.  In front of that envoy, a monk stands next to a pile of books.

The envoy speaks: “Martin Luther, this court has reconvened.  Yesterday we asked you two questions.  The first: ‘Are you the author of these books in front of you?’  You answered yes.  Our second question: “Do you renounce the ideas contained therein and recant your heresy?’  You asked to be granted a 24-hour recess.  This was granted, but we are back today, Mr Luther, and we need an answer.  Do you renounce the ideas contained within these books and recant your heresy?”

You wouldn’t have expected things to turn out like this given where this story starts.  It starts in a little kingdom called Saxony.   Saxony was not the kind of place where life-altering things tended to happen.  It was in Northern Germany.  Northern Germany wasn’t well developed.  It was really rural.  Southern Germany had a lot of stuff.  Northern Italy had a lot of stuff.  Northern Germany?  Not so much.  There were no ruins of an old Empire to build on.  There were no great trade routes.  Most of their top items to sell were natural resources; grain, fish and minerals.  Saxony wasn’t the kind of place where big things happened. 

None of that was helped by the politics of Saxony only a few generations back.  When King William II of Saxony died, his two sons split the kingdom and each inherited half of it.  The elder brother got to choose how the lands were split, and the younger brother got to choose which area he wanted to inherit.  And so the elder split the lands: one of the two parcels was a long, twisty portion of land that was mostly rural, and the other was a little clump of land that had all of the major cities in it.  The choice fell to the younger brother: did he want to rule the urban center of the lands, or the larger rural area?  He took the urban area, leaving the elder brother, a man by the name of Ernest, the jaggedy rural strip.

Since Ernest was the elder and got second pick of the lands, he got something extra: the title “Elector of the Holy Roman Empire.”   I don’t want to get too far into the weeds describing the political system of 16th century Germanic kingdoms, but here’s a really basic understanding: imagine if the United States had a weak federal government and strong state governments.  In this model, the president would still exist, but he would appear on the global stage to represent the collective interest of the states.  Individual states would have a lot of autonomy.  The president wouldn’t really have much say over them.  That’s basically what the Holy Roman Empire was.  There were a bunch of really small kingdoms, some so small that they were just singular cities, all bound together in mutual interest and represented by an emperor that they got to elect.  Not everyone got to vote for the emperor though.  Only a very small group called “the electors” got to vote.  Ernest may have inherited the rural lands, but he was an elector, and that made him, strangely, an important man with a somewhat unimportant kingdom.

That’s the legacy of 16th century Saxony.  Not exactly the center of the world.  But when Ernest passed away, his son, Frederick the Wise, was looking to change all that.  Frederick was bound and determined to make little Saxony the kind of place where things happened.  The capital of Saxony, Wittenberg, only had 2,000 people in it and 400 buildings, but it was the biggest city there was in Saxony, so that’s where he started.  He created two plans to make Wittenberg a destination for people all over the world.

The first was to create the biggest collection of relics the world had ever seen.  Relics were basically Christian artifacts.  The presiding theory of the day was if you looked at a relic God would bless you.  It was a very mechanistic process.  Look at the thing?  Get the blessing.  Frederick started collecting relics and managed to get his hands on over eighteen thousand of them.  He even managed to collect a vial of milk from the Virgin Mary and a twig from the burning bush.  Now, you can decide if you think those relics were legitimate or not, but people at the time thought they were VERY legitimate.  Pilgrims started flocking to Saxony to see all of his relics laid out in Wittenberg’s chapel.  They wanted to soak up all of God’s grace that they could!

Frederick’s other plan was to build a university in Wittenberg.  He’d build a massive, top-notch university and people would come from all over the place to attend!  Maybe, some of them would even stick around and become citizens of Saxony.  So he started hiring professors.  He even bought one of those newfangled printing presses!  Printing presses were a bit of a curiosity at this point.  Books weren’t all that common.  They weren’t even written in language that the average person understood.  They were only in Latin, the language of scholars.  Frederick wasn’t sure how exactly this printing press was going to help him, but new things were exciting and his university would have nothing less but the very latest in technology.

Even with Frederick’s ambitious plans in full swing, the average person would not have expected much from little Saxony.  Nor would people have looked at the hero of the Reformation, Martin Luther, and expected great things from him.  Martin was from a middle-class family.  His dad owned a mining business and managed the business side of things, which was both expensive and risky.  He had to take out loans to buy the mining rights to a piece of land and he never knew when there might be a cave-in or flooded tunnel that would impact his ability to pay off the loan properly.  He spent most of his life in debt as he took out and paid off different loans, but all things considered, he was pretty good at what he did.  The mining business did well enough, so he sent his son, Martin, off to college in a place called Erfurt, a big city in the area, in the hopes that he would become a lawyer.  If he was a lawyer, Martin would be able to help the family business a lot.

That was not to be.  Martin went to college, and one day, while he was coming back to campus from a little trip, there was a storm.  We’re not just talking about a little rain. We’re talking about howling winds crashing thunder!  Lightning struck right next to him!  He was sure he was going to die.  He prayed to God, “Let me live through this and I will do whatever you want. I will give my whole life to you,” and the storm subsided.  So, true to his word, he gave his life to God and became a monk.  His father was not particularly enthusiastic at first, but he warmed up to it over time. He saw his son’s sincerity and wanted what was best for him.  So, Martin started living in his local Augustinian monastery there in Erfurt.  He found a mentor that he really admired.  Things were going well!  Unfortunately, his mentor moved away.  There was this little university that was just getting started up in Saxony’s capital, Wittenberg, and it was hiring up all of the professors that it could.  Since Martin’s mentor was both a monk and a professor, he took a job and transferred over to a monastery in Wittenberg.  Unfortunately, Martin didn’t have a lot of friends around the Erfurt monastery after his mentor left.  The other monks weren’t on the same page as him.  They decided to transfer him to their branch in Wittenberg so that he would be near his old friend and out of their way.  When you’re a monk, you don’t really get a say in the matter.  They’re not asking if you’d like to be transferred; they’re telling you that you’re getting transferred.

You might think that Martin would be overjoyed to be back with his friend.  He was not.  He was really frustrated.  Wittenberg was full of nothing!  All of Saxony was full of nothing!  That was the kind of place where barbarians settled!  Nonetheless, as he settled in, things turned out pretty well for him.  He became a pastor and worked at the local church.  His mentor helped him get on-staff at the university where he taught as the professor of biblical theology.  Everything was slowly turning out ok.

Now we have the right person (Martin) in the right place (Wittenberg) for the Reformation to kick off, but there’s one critical element we haven’t discussed: the powder keg.  The event that blew up and kicked everything off.  At the time, the Catholic Church was selling something called indulgences.   An indulgence was basically a little certificate from the pope that said all of your sins were forgiven.  They were also transferable.  You could buy one and apply the forgiveness to someone else.  A lot of people would buy them for their dead relatives.  The popular assumption of the day was that your dead relatives were probably in purgatory.  Heaven was only for the super holy Christians, Hell was for non-Christians, and purgatory was for Christians that were too sinful to make it into Heaven.  God would purify them over the course of a few thousand years until they had been fully cleansed of their sins.  That process of purification was said to be pretty unpleasant, so you wanted to help your dear sweet relatives get out of there in any way you could.  Buying the pope’s indulgences was the best way to get grandma to Heaven.

I’m sure many of you find that thought process unthinkable, but there’s a long series of ideas that were accepted over time before selling indulgences started to make sense.  I won’t go through all of it, but it starts with ideas like, “Well, if you go to a holy site, isn’t it reasonable to think that God would bless you?”  Sure, ok, that makes sense.  God probably blesses pilgrims that go to holy sites.  “Well, what if Christians do something to help others?  Like defending them from persecutors by going on crusade?  Will God bless them for doing that?”  Ok, sure, intellectual baggage of the crusades aside, maybe it’s reasonable that God would bless people that set out to help others in unfortunate circumstances.  “Well now, what if you donate a large amount of money so that someone else can do those things?  Wouldn’t that also deserve a blessing?  Because you’re the reason someone else can do it.”  Right there, you’ve already got the fundamental framework for indulgences.  You’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from writing certificates. 

Martin hated the church’s sale of indulgences.  They were getting ready to sell them in Saxony for the third time in five years.  Saxony wasn’t wealthy!  Why did they keep selling them there?  And all the money from the indulgences was going to fund repairs of Saint Peter’s Basilica, a really fancy church in Italy.  Why did the pope need the money of peasants to fund a church for the wealthy?  And Martin saw the negative effects that indulgence sals had on people, both rich and poor.  Poor people that had to scrimp and save so they could buy a certificate for grandma to go to Heaven.  The rich, on the other hand, didn’t worry as much about living a Christian life when indulgences were around.  They could do whatever they wanted as long as they made sure to grab a certificate for themselves when they were done.  The whole thing had gotten completely out of hand.

As this was happening, Martin had a rapid spurt of spiritual growth.  He was someone who seemed to have it all: he was a professor, he was a monk, and he knew his Bible forward and back!  But he had a dark secret: he hated God.  Martin hated God because he thought that he would never be good enough for him.  The popular theory to explain how law and grace functioned in the Christian’s life was via something called “imbued grace.”  They thought that God gave you enough of his grace to go out and keep the law pretty well.  If you made mistakes, well, then God would be angry.  If you asked for forgiveness, he might punish you a little less severely, but you would still be punished to some degree.  And after it was done, you were expected to go and live a perfect life again.  Martin believed it, just like everyone else, and so he tried very hard to live a life without sin.  He realized that when he really thought about what he had done on a given day, there was always sin to be uncovered.  There was always a moment when he was jealous or when he was short with someone, and so God was always angry and waiting for him to do better.  His best wasn’t good enough.

But everything changed when he was teaching a class on Romans.  Romans is like that.  Some of the most famous Christians of all time converted while reading Romans. Saint Augustine, one of the most famous Christians of the 4th Century, converted while reading Romans.  Martin Luther converted while reading Romans.  John Wesley converted while reading Romans.  The book of Romans is powerful.   Let’s look at one of the passages that was on the top of his mind.  This is Romans 1:8-17:

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you,because your faith is being reported all over the world.

This is a letter from Paul to Roman Christians and you can see that he’s impressed with them.  He’s impressed that they have such incredible faith in a place like Rome.  Christians in Rome endured a lot of persecution.  Torture and even death, depending on who was in charge at the time.  It would have been incredibly dangerous.  You would need an impenetrable faith!  But this is the kind of church where people had impenetrable faith.  They didn’t stumble; they endured.

God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you.

In other words, he wants to visit them.

I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong— that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. 

I love the humility here.  One of the great apostles says, “I want to give you a gift and the gift… is that you and I get to sit down and build each other up.” Faith is not just a one-way street!  It’s something that takes people coming together.  People that are mature and very wise and people that are brand new!  We all stand to learn and be built up by one another.

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles. I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, 

The gospel would have seemed pretty ridiculous by a lot of the popular philosophies of the day.  The average Roman would think that the gospel was nonsense! “Your God’s so great? Well, why’d he get crucified then?  A powerful god doesn’t end up dying on a cross.  I can find a god more worthy of my worship than that.”  The average Jewish person would have been equally disinterested: “Your god is supposedly great, but he hasn’t delivered us from the Romans.  I don’t see any grand miracles that he’s done.  He rose from the dead and apparently did nothing worthy of note for me.”

But Paul is not ashamed of the gospel, regardless of what others think! He goes on to say why:

because it is the power of God 

How often do you think about the gospel in that way?  How often do you understand it not just as a collection of words, but as something powerful?  As words that crackle with energy?   The gospel is the power of God!  It’s not just something for us to mull over in our spare time.  It’s the kind of force that changes hearts and minds.

For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

This whole time, Martin had been trying to be good enough.  And here we see one of the major themes that comes up again and again throughout Romans: you’ll never be good enough to earn salvation.  On our own, we are not capable of perfectly keeping God’s law.  God grants us salvation not because of our works, but through faith in Christ.  When we reach out and trust in him, that makes all the difference.  Our salvation isn’t through legalism.  It’s through love! God looks down and sees not a guilty person, but someone who has been cleansed!  Who is innocent!  Who is pure!  Someone covered by the perfection of Christ.

We are saved by faith, not works.  Does that mean we should go on sinning?  By no means!  Paul specifically says that later in this same letter to the Romans.  But if our salvation isn’t based on legalism, we should be able to act however we want, right?  No!  Paul says that a true Christian should be transformed through their encounter with God.  We shouldn’t want to sin anymore.  We should be totally different creatures, empowered by God to seek what is right instead of what is wrong. And besides that, our motivations for doing what’s right should change.  We don’t keep the law out of fear of God’s punishment.  We do it out of fear of hurting our relationship with him.  We want to make him happy.  We should naturally want to honor and cherish the one we love.  Our relationship with God may not be based on maintaining a code of conduct, but we should still want to honor the God who saved us with everything we do.

And here, inspired by the words of Scripture, we see Martin articulate one of his big ideas: sola fide.  We are saved by faith in Christ alone, not by our works.  Not our abilities.  Not because we’re good enough, but because we have faith in Jesus.  We reach out to him and accept the sacrifice he made on our behalf.  Martin’s big idea didn’t come from the intellectual trends of the day, but through scripture alone.  There’s another one of his big ideas: sola Scriptura.  That’s Latin for “by Scripture alone.”  Scripture is the only authority that we can rely on to ensure that we’re practicing real Christianity and not just something that we made up.

Now we’ve got the who, the where, and the what.  Everything is in place.  Martin Luther started preaching what he had learned in Romans.  And the indulgence sellers came into Saxony and started preaching their doctrines.  This is a selection from the sermon of a man named Johann Tetzel.  He was selling indulgences in Wittenberg, and this is what he preached:

You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the council of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all of their sins…  Why are you standing there?  Run for the salvation of your souls!…  Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, “Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, because we are in severe punishment and pain.  From this you could redeem us with small alms and yet you do not want to do so.”  Open your ears as the father says to the Son and the mother to the daughter, “We created you, fed you, cared for you, and left you our temporal goods.  Why then are you so cruel and harsh that you do not want to save us, though it only takes a little?”  (20-21, A Sermon, Johann Tetzel, as found in The Protestant Reformation, Hillerbrand)

THAT was the last straw.  THAT was what made Martin Luther write his ninety-five theses.  Ninety-five reasons why indulgences were bad! Ninety-five reasons that the pope was wrong! Ninety-five ways the church was failing!  And he didn’t just keep this debate in academic halls. He started writing books.  These were books written in a language that regular people could actually read.  He wrote for the average person because he thought they deserved to know what was going on.  He also made sure that people had access to the Bible in their own language so they didn’t have to take his word for it.  They could go to the Word of God and look for themselves!  He looked to Scripture alone (sola Scriptura) to find the truth, and now everyone else could do the same.  Because even if he was eloquent, his words weren’t worth anything.  God’s word was worth something.  It was and still is the final authority on all things.

Some people get a little confused about Luther’s relationship with tradition They think he brought this new, unheard of understanding to the Scriptures and represented a radical break in Christianity from its past.  That is not the case.  Yes, he trusted Scripture alone as the ultimate authority, but that doesn’t mean he was ignorant of tradition or uninterested in the Christians that went before him.  Read some of his writings sometime!  You won’t make it far without finding a citation from one of the great thinkers from the first 1500 years of the faith.  The man was a professor that sold books.  His goal wasn’t to prevent people from reading and learning from those who went before him!  His goal was to reconnect with early Christianity and recover the faith from people who had slowly twisted it over the years.  Sola Scriptura doesn’t mean separating yourself from the collected body of Scriptural knowledge and just believing whatever you want to believe about the Bible.  It means learning as much about it as you can about God’s word, educating yourself on what it’s saying to you, and taking it as the authority above any earthly thinker, regardless of how popular they might be.

Well, after he posted his ninety-five theses, things got difficult.  It turns out posting ninety-five reasons why the pope is wrong doesn’t exactly put you in his good graces, and in those days, the pope was shockingly powerful.  Pope Leo X wrote a papal decree called Exsurge Domine, which is Latin for “Arise, O Lord.”  It basically said: “Martin Luther, turn from your heresy or burn for your heresy.  The choice is yours.”  And that brings us back to where we started: an imperial court where a monk is being questioned.  He was asked, “Do you recant your heresy?”  Here is how he responded:

“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the holy Scriptures or someone can reasonably prove to me that I have erred (for I neither believe in the pope nor the councils alone since it has been established that they often erred and contradicted themselves) I am bound by the Scriptures which I have cited at length and my conscience has been taken captive by the word of God. I am neither able nor willing to recant. Here I stand. I can do no other.”

From there, things got really crazy.  He was whisked back to Saxony, where he went into hiding.  Remember how Frederick the Wise was deeply invested in making Saxony a place where things happen?  Turns out that no matter how devoutly Catholic he was, he wasn’t willing to give over someone who attracted as much attention and sold as many books as Martin Luther.  Martin’s big ideas kept spreading, and more and more people started hearing the things that he was saying.  That is how Protestantism started.

Why do I think this story is worth our consideration?  It’s not like anybody is going around selling indulgences today, right?  After all, why would they?  The average person isn’t convinced they’re particularly sinful.  They may not perceive themselves to be perfect, but they don’t think they’re a bad person, and that ought to be good enough for God.  Works righteousness has made a significant comeback in the modern era; the bar for salvation-worthy works is just a lot lower than it was in Luther’s day.

People simply don’t understand the seriousness of sin anymore!  In an environment like this, we need to remember our solas: sola fide and sola Scriptura.  From whence comes our salvation?  Not from ourselves!  Contrary to popular belief, we’re not particularly good.  We’re saved because God is particularly good.  He’s the only one with the power to save us.  The best thing we can do is to trust our lives in his hands.  To have complete and total faith in him, rather than ourselves.  Sola fide.  And how do we know that this is the case?  Not because we’ve kept up with the philosophical trends of the day particularly well or because we’ve read the articles that have harvested the most clicks.  No.  Our authority is not the shifting sands of public opinion.  It’s Scripture alone. Sola Scriptura.  We look to the word of God and that is our rock and our anchor.

Aside from the solas, Luther’s boldness is so incredible.  He stands for what’s true, even knowing that he might be killed for it.  That’s the level of boldness that the church desperately needs to reclaim today.  Only a few generations ago, it was socially advantageous to participate in a church.  It didn’t matter if someone believed any of it; they were happy just to be participating in a normative institution of American culture and reaping the benefits that came along with it.  You can find records where businessmen with almost no interest in religion move to a new town and immediately join the local church.  Why?  So that they can promote their business and be seen talking to the right sort of people.  People gave up their Sunday mornings to get something tangible.  Churches that participated in that cultural quid pro quo are in a hard place today.  Why?  Because things don’t work that way anymore.  Nobody stands to gain new clients or a good reputation because they go to a local church.  At best, the church is neutral on both of those axes, and at worst, it may actually cost them a good reputation to be a regular participant in an orthodox church.  The next generation of Christians will not be enticed into Christianity because they stand to gain anything in the secular world.  To the contrary, they will have to pay something.

Martin Luther was willing to pay any price when it came to keeping the word of God.  I pray that each of us would be willing to do the same should it fall to us.

Amen.

Relative Truth

~ Vincent

This entry is part of a series called “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” Learn more about the series here.
Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 23, 2022
Scriptures: John 14:5-14, Acts 4:1-13

If you missed last week, we’re doing a series about culture.  Specifically, modern Western culture.  The postmodern era has brought tremendous challenges both to our own discipleship and our ability to share the faith with others, so we’re going to think about what this postmodern era is.  How it functions.  What are these challenges that it has brought and how can we navigate them well?

There’s no more obvious place to start than a conversation about truth.  Postmodernism is defined by a plurality of truths.  The word “truth” may as well be translated into “perspective” or “healthy mindset.”  It would function almost the same.  Think about when you’ve heard people say things like, “I need to speak my truth.”  My truth?  What is my truth?  In no other era would there be this assumption that your truth is different than my truth and our two truths might contradict each other, but they’re both true.  That would have been insane!  Either something IS or it IS NOT truth!  There can’t be two contradictory truths at the same time.  But here and now?  That’s the norm.  Truth is perspective.  It’s whatever is healthy (by our definition) for us.  It’s certainly not a single unified thing that is the same for everyone.

To see this in action, one need look no further than that reality show legend, Survivor.  Yes, I still watch the occasional season of Survivor.  I know it lost it’s magic somewhere around season 32, but I just can’t help myself sometimes.  In any case, in one episode, a tribe was debating which person they should vote out that night.  It was a particularly nasty conversation.  And of course, nobody’s story is lining up.  They all have their own idea about how things should unfold based on who they think the heroes are and who they think the villains are; who is helpful and who is harmful.  This goes on for a while before one woman finally calms everyone down and said, ““You have your truth, I have my truth, and we have to decide how to navigate in the light of all of these truths at tribal council tonight.”  Everyone stopped fighting and nodded as though she’d said something very wise.  Sure enough, there was a delicate peace until the vote that night.

That’s what we’re talking about right there!  Notice that she didn’t say, “We each have our own perspective.”  That would have been accurate, but she didn’t say that.  She said, “We each have our truth.”  As though there were a million different, completely accurate realities that had played out.  Nobody was actually wrong.  Nobody had a warped perception or different goals.  No, they had their own truth.  And arguing wasn’t pointless because they were all competing to be the last one standing on a gameshow and naturally had conflicting goals.  No!  There were just so many truths that they couldn’t be navigated fairly.  To say, “You’re wrong.”  would have been chaos!  To say, “I disagree” wasn’t worth it!   They all had to all be right to stop the fighting, which was totally insane to the viewers at home!  Because we knew what was happening behind the scenes!  We knew that half of the people were lying through their teeth to try to get their way!  They were obviously more interested in winning the game than discovering any kind of truth!  But no.  They all had their own truth.

Why was that woman’s plea so effective?  Surely it would have been easier to just say that we all have our own ideas and settle things at tribal council.  But no.  Each of the players had something more than ideas.  They had their truth.  Social cohesion within the group was only possible insofar as they were willing to give up their claim to the truth.  It didn’t matter if you were honest or dishonest, winning or losing, none of that mattered.  Unity was possible by giving up on truth.  Was it a true unity?  Not really.  But it was an easy unity.  One in which everyone was equally wrong.

That same spirit is present in the Church.  In an effort to be socially acceptable in this new era, in an effort to get a seat at the table, we often give up claims to absolute truth.  Rather than honestly tell people who believe totally different things, “I think you’re wrong,” there’s a temptation to say, “we’re both equally right in our own way.”

There’s an anecdote that I occasionally hear people tell about religious truth.  There are three blindfolded men all in the same room as an elephant.  The first man is standing near its head, so he reaches out and touches its trunk and says, “This animal feels like a snake!”  The second man is near the back of the elephant and he’s sitting down.  He touches the elephant’s leg and says, “No!  It’s like a tree!”  The third man is standing on a ladder, and he reaches out and feels the bristly hairs on the elephant’s back and says, “Nah, it’s probably a horse.”  Who was right?  All of them.  They only knew what their circumstances allowed, but they were all right in their own way.  The implication here is that all religions are fundamentally the same.  All a little wrong.  All a little right.  Who’s to say what’s genuinely real?  But note that for the story to exist at all, there has to be someone in the room that’s seeing these weirdly-positioned men with the elephant!  Otherwise, there would be no story to tell!  Someone has to have an objective point of view.  Chrisitians used to feel comfortable claiming to be that person.  We were the ones who saw when everyone else was blindfolded!  But now?  Now things seem more complicated.

You heard our first passage earlier today.  Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”  Classic.  That phrase alone makes Jesus such a challenge in a postmodern world, because he doesn’t claim to have a truth.  He claims to be THE truth.  The only truth.  That makes people bristle.  Even pastors!  In one Bible study I attended, someone read this passage and said, “This is why evangelism is so important.  Because Jesus is the only way.  He said so right here.”  Then the pastor spoke up.  “Well, hold on now.  It might say that he is THE way, but I think we need some ontological humility.  We don’t know how Jesus comes to others and how he works with people that we don’t know.  This is him speaking to us, but not to them.  I prefer to imagine him saying, ‘I am a truth, a way, and a life.’  That’s much closer to what he was actually trying to say.”  Where were that pastor’s ideas grounded?  Certainly not in the Bible.  Even if you take these passages back to the Greek, each of those words, way, truth, and life, are preceded by the Greek word “hay.”  That’s an exclusive singular word, not a generic singular.  “The” is undoubtedly the proper translation, not “a”.  And “except through me” could more literally be translated as “if not by me.”  Again, very exclusivist language here.  No, the hesitation wasn’t rooted in the Bible.  It was rooted in postmodern thought.  For Jesus to say that he was THE way was terrifying.  Far too cocky.  Far too self-assured.  And so, to translate the Bible “with humility,” it had to deliberately be mistranslated.  That’s how frightening absolute truth claims are in the modern world.

And it’s not just claims in the Bible that are “adjusted.”  It’s the way we consider our own faith.  A different pastor explained to me once that they believed that they believed that Jesus was God.  I said, “So you believe that’s true, in other words.”  And they said, “I wouldn’t go that far.  I believe that it’s my belief.  I don’t feel comfortable talking about what’s true.  Who am I to say what’s true?”  Who am I to say what’s true… And we wonder why evangelism has fallen on such hard times.  “Hello, I want to talk to you about Jesus.  I believe it’s my belief that he’s a way to living.  And if you don’t like that, it may not be your truth, but it’s my truth.”  What a life-changing prospect to be given something that’s so totally peripheral to your existence.

Postmodern life has shifted the way we think.  We’re afraid of admitting that we have THE truth to all of existence.  We’re afraid of a Jesus that would actually claim to be THE truth.  And so we change our language to appeal to a new culture.  What if Jesus was just an option?  Just a way.  Just a belief you can hold.  And if you don’t like him, that’s fine!  But if you do, then come to church.  Jesus becomes a product in the grand supermarket of beliefs.  He’s great!  Unless he’s not the product you’re looking for, in which case just go a few isles over and try out buddhism or agnosticism or any other thing.   The customer is always right!  Find what suits you.  That’s your truth.

In the battle for people’s hearts and minds, Christians have made a strategic retreat from the concept of absolute truth in the hopes of gaining ground later on other topics.  But when you retreat from a concept as central to the Christian message as truth, everything else collapses after it.  What began as a strategic retreat turned out to be a rout, stacking loss after loss after loss.  

To be a Christian in the postmodern era, we have to wake up to the core of what Jesus was and what we’re supposed to be.  We have to yearn for truth.  Not the safe, comfortable, postmodern truth that is self-contradictory and optional.  We have to pursue real truth. Absolute truth.  The kind that says, “This is how the world is, and if you don’t agree with it, you’re wrong.”  The kind that says, “This is how the world is, and if I don’t live it out, I’m wrong.”  A truth that doesn’t snivel and beg for consideration, but commands respect.  A truth that we may not fully comprehend in every aspect, but one that doesn’t for one second become anything less than binding.  And that’s not to say we can’t be humble.  Of course we need to be humble.  But our humility has to be humility to the truth first and foremost.  If Jesus is God, we have to humbly accept that and accept nothing else.  If he’s not, we need to move on.

As someone who was an atheist, I’m passionate about this.  I hear people say that Christianity is a way but there are many other equally good ways and I shudder.  Because being a Christian is not easy.  It’s hard.  It takes constant repentance, study, and devotion.  It takes self-denial, self-awareness, and the boldness and courage necessary to witness to others.  It’s not comfortable!  You have to give your life completely to something greater than yourself.  If all of this is optional, I’d quit so fast your head would spin.  If I can get the same results by doing whatever I want, I’m gonna go do whatever I want.  If Christianity isn’t true, it’s certainly a much less attractive option than raw hedonism.  I’d take that any day of the week!  If Jesus isn’t actually God, if his commandments aren’t actually binding, if he didn’t actually break the powers of sin and darkness on the cross, if he doesn’t command my heart, my soul, my all any more than my couch does, then why bother?  Christianity is either uniquely true or an unnecessarily rigorous option in the marketplace of ideas.

And that’s the thing about historic Christianity.  Never before the postmodern era did Christianity claim to be a neat way of living for those that were interested.  It rose precisely because it claimed to be the ultimate truth by which everything else was truly seen.  It was the light in the darkness.  It was in a way that nothing else could ever be.  Let’s turn to our second reading here Acts 4:1-13.  We have Peter and John, and they have gone to the temple where tey met a man who couldn’t walk.  They healed him and they started preaching.  Of course, the temple is the seat of religious power in this area, so it starts to cause trouble.  That’s where we pick up.

1 The priests and the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees came up to Peter and John while they were speaking to the people. 2 They were greatly disturbed because the apostles were teaching the people, proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead.

Keep in mind, preaching the resurrection of the dead would have been very controversial here.  The Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection of the dead.  They were a bit of an outlier.  The Pharisees did believe in the resurrection and they were much more popular with the common Israelite.  The Pharisees were men of the people; the Sadducees were men of the aristocracy.  Even if their belief was outside the norm, these men were not to be taken lightly.  Talking about the resurrection of the dead on their turf would have been considered a very bad move.

3 They seized Peter and John and, because it was evening, they put them in jail until the next day. 4 But many who heard the message believed; so the number of men who believed grew to about five thousand.

Only a few chapters earlier it said that three thousand people believed, but now we’re already at five thousand!  They didn’t get there because things were easy!  Because it was just so darn delightful!  No, there was active persecution towards those who were preaching about Jesus!  But the Church grew, not because it was pleasant or easy, but because it was bold!  This was something that people had to take notice of!

5 The next day the rulers, the elders and the teachers of the law met in Jerusalem.

Now we have a list of names.  A few of them should be familiar.  Caiaphas especially, who was involved in the crucifixion of Christ.

6 Annas the high priest was there, and so were Caiaphas, John, Alexander and others of the high priest’s family.7 They had Peter and John brought before them and began to question them: “By what power or what name did you do this?”

8 Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them: “Rulers and elders of the people! 9 If we are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who was lame and are being asked how he was healed, 10 then know this, you and all the people of Israel: It is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you healed. 11 Jesus is

‘the stone you builders rejected,
 which has become the cornerstone.’

12 Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”

That’s a bold claim.  That is precisely the kind of claim that made people uncomfortable across the spectrum of society.  Both the Israelites and the Romans would balk at this.  First, there’s the Israelites.  Did they believe in a savior?  Sure.  But they believed in a savior that was only for them.  He was a military hero!  He’d come and kick out the foreigners and restore Israel to its rightful place on the world stage.  This was a personal savior only for Israelites.  Outsiders didn’t have any business with him.  At best, news about the savior would be neutral for them, and at worst, the news was about their impending downfall.  Israelites already earned their savior by virtue of their birth.  They were waiting for him all this time.  Now these men are talking about a savior that isn’t honoring their birthright?  And this savior is for everyone?  Absurd.  The Israelites loved their good news and most of them genuinely believed it, but their good news was for them alone.

The claims would have caused just as much trouble in Roman society.  They were happy to have as many gods as you can imagine!  If a neighboring country had some gods that they were excited about, great!  Add them to the pantheon.  No big deal.  They would even show how open they were to new gods by making public sacrifices to their enemy’s gods before combat.  After the battle was over, they would claim that those gods obviously liked the Romans better.  Otherwise they would have won!  Sacrificing to enemy gods wasn’t just for bragging rights after the battle.  It also showed the enemy that their gods weren’t a problem.  They could keep their gods.  They just had to bend the knee to Caesar.  Their gods could stick around as long as he played nice with the others.  As long as that god didn’t claim to be THE god, there was no problem.  That’s why one of the earliest charges that Romans would make against Christians was atheism.  People were martyred over that!   Denying the existence of the other gods was horrifying to Romans!  One god wasn’t nearly enough for a fair-minded, tolerant person.

13 When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.

I love this verse especially.  They assumed that these men in the temple must have been powerful or influential.  Maybe they were self-styled mystical gurus or a couple of aristocrats trying to gain power.  Maybe they were even some kind of rare religious scholars with years of research under their belts.  They had to be big shots in some way, shape, or form to be making claims like that!  But then they start to interact with Peter and John and they realize that these are just regular guys.  They’re not even pretending to be better than anyone else.  There’s no arrogance about them.  There’s a humility.  They’re just average people that somehow found the truth, and now they cling to it more than life itself.

The elders and teachers of the law send the disciples out of the room so they can deliberate and they decide to warn them never to do anything like this again.  We pick up at verse 18:

18 Then they called them in again and commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. 19 But Peter and John replied, “Which is right in God’s eyes: to listen to you, or to him? You be the judges! 20 As for us, we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.”

These were humble men, but also ones that were totally transformed by this truth that they’ve found.

We’ve established that absolute truth was core to the Christian message from the beginning.  We’ve established that postmodern Westerners have a really hard time accepting that there is any one genuinely true truth.  So how do we fight for truth in a way that’s intriguing?  How do we promote truth in a way that’s beautiful?

That’s the thing.  Christian truth is beautiful.  God became man and died for us?  God loves us so much that he pursues us even when we’re fleeing him?  The awful things that people do in this world aren’t just subjectively distasteful but genuinely wrong.  And God wants to build a new world by transforming us by his grace.  And in the end, God wins.  THAT’S beautiful.  All of that is beautiful. 

But let’s be honest, people don’t get hung up on that.  People get hung up on parts that they don’t like.  They don’t like what the Bible says on certain topics.  They can’t understand what certain parts of Christian doctrine really mean.  They can’t imagine a God that would say something that they don’t like.  To go back to the metaphor of the supermarket of ideas, they’re standing in the isle, trying to pick out what religion is best for them, and Christianity keeps telling them that they’re wrong about things and need to get with the program.  How offensive.  How absolutely rude.  Why on earth would they pick a product that doesn’t fit them?

But Christianity doesn’t claim to be a product.  It claims to be the truth.

This world doesn’t need more products.  It doesn’t need more philosophies that excuse us doing whatever it is we want in a given moment.  It needs something that dares to bind the world together with more than mutual apathy.  It needs something that dares to tell people, “God cares about you so much that he’s not content to leave you where you’re at.  He cares about everything you do.  He cares about the dumb stuff you post on social media at midnight.  He cares about what you read and what you do and how you act.”  We are not our own.  God will not rubber stamp whatever we feel is acceptable.

The strength of the postmodern mindset is that nobody ever has to feel wrong.  You have your truth and nobody can argue with that.  The weakness is that we KNOW things are already wrong and we need something to change it.  And can we change it?  We in all of our sin?  We who can’t get through the week without doing something that we’re not proud of?  You wanna put all your eggs in that basket?  Or is there something greater that we can turn to.  Someone that is better than our best.  Someone that just might actually be able to clean all this up.

That’s why Jesus is good news to the postmodern person.  He makes the claim to objectively be at the heart of everything.  We have the opportunity to not just live out our own random, selfish, made-up, self-satisfying claims, but to OBJECTIVELY transcend our own nature.  In a world where evil stands strong as ever, a philosophy built on mutually leaving one another to our own devices is not enough.  We need to be held accountable for our actions, philosophies, and desires.  We need objective truth.  We need God



the Gospel in a postmodern world

~ Vincent

Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 16, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 23, Ezekiel 20:18-31

Our first reading this morning was Psalm 23, and it was a version that I know I wasn’t used to.  When it comes to classic Scriptures, my mind just expects the King James version.  When I hear the NIV, it catches me off guard!  Here’s yet another translation of Psalm 23 that’s worth hearing:

The Great Boss is the one who takes care of my sheep;
I don’t want to own anything.
The Great Boss wants me to lie down in the field.
He wants me to go to the lake.
He makes my good spirit come back.
Even though I walk through something the missionary calls the valley of the shadow of death,
I do not care.  You are with me.
You use a stick and a club to make me comfortable. 
You manufacture a piece of furniture right in front of my eyes while my enemies watch. 
You pour car grease on my head.
My cup has too much water in it and therefore overflows. 
Goodness and kindness will walk single file behind me all of my life. 
And I will live in the Hut of the great boss until I die and am forgotten by my tribe.

(Richards and O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, 91)

This psalm was translated by missionaries from Hebrew into the language of the Khmus tribe of Laos and then to English.  It’s always fun to find something that’s been through several translations because certain ideas inevitably get lost in the process. You get to see the limitations of language and just how hard it is to capture the essence of something in a tongue that might not might not even have words for certain things.  I mean, just look at verse five!  “You manufacture a piece of furniture right in front of my eyes.  You pour car grease on my head.” God preparing a table in the presence of our enemies also becomes a more literal task than we usually assume.  And I’m guessing olive oil isn’t common in that region, so instead of that, we end up with car grease on our heads.  We also have the confusion in verse four where it reads, “Even though I walk through something the missionary calls ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’” They were so confused by what that missionary was trying to talk about that they just gave up on translating the idea entirely. “‘Even though I walk through…’ oh geeze.  I don’t know. Whatever that thing was that the missionary was going on about!  That!”  But the part I really want to hone in on is the last line “and I will live in the hut of the Great Boss until I die and am forgotten by my tribe.” That’s a lot grimmer than what it is in English, “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” That’s distinctly more positive than being forgotten.  Why is it so negative?

One of the biggest reasons for that negative tone is the Khmus tribe’s culture.  They live in a collectivist culture.  People in collectivist cultures tend to think of themselves as one piece of a larger cohesive social unit.  When they’re asked to describe themselves, they tend to explain the social relationships that they play a part in: “I’m a father,” “I’m a nurse,” “I’m a sister.”  Their self-identity is built on the relationships that they participate in and the obligations they have towards others.  That’s a very different outlook from us people in individualist cultures.  Individualist cultures tend to focus on how each individual is unique and has their own goals and purpose.  If we were asked to describe ourselves, our descriptors would probably point out the ways that we’re different from the people around us: “I’m smart,” “I’m hard-working,” “I’m strong.”  Our self-identity is wrapped up in the ways they’re unique from other people.  There can be hesitance about the idea of Heaven from people in collectivist cultures.  It sounds like they have to be torn away from the social network that defines who they are.  That’s no good! 

On top of that, the Khmus people think about death in a very different way than your average Westerner.  If you go back to ancient Greece, you can see some of the very early ways that Westerners started to think about death.  In Greek mythology, when you died, you had to pay the boatman, Charon, so that you could cross the river Styx and go on to the land of the dead.  You went from here to there.  We’re hardwired to be comfortable with the idea that death is going from here to there.  In Khmus culture, there’s no sense that death involves going anywhere.  When you die, nobody can see you, but you’re still there with your people.  Going somewhere after you die seems bizarre to them.  Between the collectivist urge to find identity in relationships and the sense that leaving after death is odd, you end up with a disappointing end to a classic psalm.

That being said, it is interesting that missionaries have found that there are parts of Scripture that resonate with them that we have trouble with.  For example, Revelation 21 says that God will recreate everything in the end.  He’ll make a new Heaven and a new Earth, and that new Earth is where all of his people will go.  We don’t just stay in Heaven forever!  We go to a perfect, sinless, recreated Earth.  Then and only then will everything finally be as God would have it.  I don’t know how many times I’ve told this to churchgoers and they’ve looked at me like I’m crazy.  To the average Westerner, death is going from here to there.  That just makes sense.  You don’t go from here to there and then back to a new form of here again.  That’s counterintuitive!  But the Khmus people heard about this passage and were incredibly excited.  Finally, something that made some sense!  You get to come back to a new Earth in the long term.  That was a reasonable sort of plan in their eyes.

Cultures make such a difference in the way we perceive the world.  They’re these collections of ancestral ideas that are tweaked and passed down time and time again.  They’re critical to understanding the world.  All too often, in modern Western culture, there’s this temptation to see someone’s culture as little more than window dressing.  It determines whether you wear a sari or a dress.  It determines whether you celebrate Christmas or Kwanza.  Things like that.  Underneath our clothes and our celebrations, it’s assumed that we’re all decent secular citizens that broadly share the same ideas.  Culture appears to be little more than some seasoning for our otherwise flavorless lives.  But it is so much more than that. 

When we reduce culture to window dressing, we fail to capture the essence of it.  Cultures pass on more than clothes; they pass on ideas.  Tremendously good ideas and tremendously bad ones can both be passed on!  The ancient Spartans would kill children with any deformities.  Why?  Because they needed to be a strong, warrior society.  To them, that was a good idea.  It was a natural idea.  But what seems logical to them seems horrifying to us!  The Aztecs believed in human sacrifice.  If things weren’t going so well, they assumed that sacrificing someone might perk things up.  To us?  Horrifying.  To them?  Logical.  Some may resist calling this culture.  No, this is a matter of morality!  But consider that in Japan only 200 years ago, cultural tradition dictated that someone who made a big, humiliating mistake ought to kill themselves.  That showed that they had some shred of honor left in them.  To live after your mistake?  That was shameful.  To modern Westerners, that seems nightmarish!  If you make a mistake, even a horrible one, you’re expected to build back!  It happens to everybody.  You hear folk wisdom about how it’s not the number of times you get knocked down that matters; it’s the number of times you get back up.  To a 17th century samurai, that would have been the height of cowardice.  Culture is not just window dressing.  It changes our perception of the world itself. It affects what ideas we accept as good ideas, and what ideas we’re wary of.

Now, why do I keep talking about culture?  Because I think we need to address our own culture.  A few weeks back, I was having a conversation with some of the people over in the contemporary service.  Some of the band members were around my age (30-something), and we were just shocked at how much things have changed in the religious sphere since we were young.  It hasn’t even been that long!  We’re not that old!  But it’s changed so much.  When we were young, being Christian was pretty normal.  It’s what you did.  Of course we went to church.  That was pretty reasonable.  Most people did.  You could wear a “What Would Jesus Do” wristband and that was considered reasonably cool.  You watched VeggieTales because of course you watched Veggie Tales.  VeggieTales was awesome!  We couldn’t imagine any of that being popular today.

Christianity is no longer seen as something mainstream.  It’s seen as something odd. Something weird.  Something that’s hard to swallow.  And you can see that in the statistics. Someone that goes into undergrad as a confessing Christian has lower than a 30 percent chance of remaining a Christian over the next four years.  Depending on the poll, you can get as low as 18%.  30% is the high.  I spoke with some people in campus ministry at Ohio University this past week and they confirmed that it was incredibly tough to work in campus ministry.  They said that God’s Not Dead was a little too cheesy to be a reasonable comparison, but the natural cultural environment on a campus made Christianity really hard to practice for the average student.

College campuses aren’t the only place we can turn to for sobering statistics.  If we look at our own denomination, the United Methodist Church lost a net total of 180,000 active members from their lists last year.  The year before that, they lost 220,000 total active members.  We’re only a few million big!  We can’t take losses like this year after year, but people are dying faster than we can make new disciples.

A lot of us may be initially disheartened by these statistics, but we need to fight that reaction. I remember talking to a friend from England.  England is much further along in the process of secularization in the United States.  The number of confessing Christians there is even lower than the number here, and he was wrestling with that.  I got to hear one of his very early sermons and, man, it was just depressing.  His through line was, “The church is dying, and there’s nothing we can do.” He said that throughout the sermon, time and time and time again.  That was the line he ended on!   I left church that morning thinking, well shoot, how am I supposed to go enjoy brunch after that?  Right?  That’s grim!  I’m not one who believes that  sermons have an obligation to be peppy, but the gloom and doom approach is the wrong approach.  We shouldn’t count all of this as some sort of grand failure.  There’s more than that in front of us: there’s opportunity.  We have the opportunity to serve God at a historic moment!  We get to witness to a Western culture that has forgotten the most important thing there is.  That is new ground!  There have always been missionaries called to share the Gospel in challenging places, but the post-Christian West is still brand new on the world stage, and we’re the first ones called to spread the Gospel here.

Just look at how new this whole thing is!  There was obviously a time in Western nations for initial conversions.  We wouldn’t be here without those.  There were also times where individual people and even whole people groups were called back to the faith, but that’s just the thing!  They were called back to faith.  That cultural Christianity from the initial conversion was still strong in their minds.  People didn’t have to argue about whether or not Christianity was good or explain what its most basic premises were.  That was obvious!  The average citizen literally learned in schools that the goal of life was to love God and to glorify him forever.  That was a logical fact that even a child could tell you!  Evangelization wasn’t built on education or argument; it was built on convicting people to live out what they already knew was true.  That’s the history of Methodism.  How did Methodism get so big?  Because when America was a young nation, Methodist pastors had maximum enthusiasm, minimal educational requirements, and were willing to travel.  Baptists were the same way.  Those groups could get new pastors to frontier regions really quickly to convict people with a classic evangelistic sell: “You should be worshiping the God you know exists and live a life that’s pleasing to him.”  That’s why there are so many Methodist and Baptist churches across the United States.  They did so well because they were experts at reaching people that were already Christians that lived beyond the reach of established churches.  It doesn’t work like that anymore. We are now missionaries in a culture the likes of which we’ve never seen.  If we want to share the word of God with people, we can’t call them back to the faith they already know.  Culturally, it’s no longer dominant.  It doesn’t seem true or intuitive.  A lot of people may not even fully understand what it is!  We have to change the way we think about outreach if we want to be effective.

I’m sure some of you are thinking to yourselves, “Hold on now, pastor, you’re saying we have to change the way that we go about doing things if we want to reach people with the word of God?  Not so!  I’ve seen some of the big churches around here and I know there’s three timeless things you need to grow a church: better preaching, better music, programs for families.  Do those three things your church will grow.  That’s what the big churches do!  If we do those three things, that’ll work.  Simple as that.”

 To that I respond: you’re not completely wrong.  You can do that… for now.  It kind of works.  Some large area churches do use that methodology.  They’re primarily reaching out to people that are already interested; people that I will call “cultural conservatives.” Of course, that doesn’t necessarily correspond to political conservatism.  That’s neither here nor there. In this instance, cultural conservatives are people that just like things from the past.  They might live in an area where they grew up, just because their family has roots there.  They might take up certain hobbies or historic styles of dress that aren’t particularly trendy anymore.  They might even explore Christianity!  And why?  Because they just have a certain affinity with the past. They enjoy things that connect them with their roots.  In the case of religion, this pull to the past is a massive blessing for them.  In following their inclination, they may stumble onto the beauty of the Gospel  But not everyone is going to do that.  Not everyone is a cultural conservative.  A lot of people will be looking at what is popular, rather than looking at things that have faded from popular imagination.  They’re not naturally interested in Christianity.  That’s their grandparents’ religion!  They went to a few services at Christmas to make ‘ol grandma happy, but it wasn’t trendy.  They think they know Christianity enough from cultural osmosis that it’s safe to dismiss it  They’d prefer engaging with something that has more of a contemporary buzz around it.

If we only reach out to people who are already interested, the group we’re reaching is going to get smaller and smaller.  Maybe we’ll get some cultural conservatives to join us, but will their children also be cultural conservatives?  What about their children’s children?  You get diminishing returns over time.  God doesn’t want us to just reach out to people that are easy to talk to.  We have to reach people beyond the reach of our safe, cultural boundaries!

We are people at the dawn of a new era.  We have the privilege of sharing the good news of Jesus with people who think they know it when they don’t. And the best part is God hasn’t demanded that we just keep grinding away with the same programs, the same slogans, and the same outreach opportunities year after year after year.  He did not tell his church we had already achieved the ideal final form and we’re obligated to keep it for all time.  He said something more exciting than that!  He said, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation,” (Mk 16:15).  And what is that good news?  Christ died so that we could live. This is a life-altering truth, and we have the opportunity to take that to people.  That’s exciting.  It’s not all gloom and doom.  We’ve got something amazing to share.

I know that some people are intimidated about sharing their faith.  It’s been built up as this big, frightening, socially-awkward thing, and it shouldn’t be any of that.  I think C.S Lewis gives a helpful corrective for that fear of evangelism.  He asks, what do you do when you find a really good restaurant?  You tell people about it!  What about if you find a scenic vista?  You tell people about it!  That’s how we’re built!  When we find something that’s good, we want to share it.  And what greater good is there than the truth at the center of all things?  We should naturally want to reach out! 

That’s a passion that you have shared with me since I arrived at this church.  You’ve told me that you want more people in this church.  If you want to do that, you have to be missionaries in this new era.  You have to learn how to reach out in spite of a resistant culture.  Not every missionary shares our unique challenges!  There are some places where Christianity is growing rapidly, like Asia and Africa.  North America and Europe?  Not so much.  This place is a challenge.  If we want to reach out well, we have to learn the culture.  That’s what missionaries do!  That’s not the totality of evangelism, of course. You can’t deal with people in abstract.  The heart of it is always personal relationships, but how can you communicate well in those relationships?  By knowing a person’s culture.  You need to know what ideas will excite them, what they’ll freak out about, and what will likely feel natural to them.  That’s not to say you tailor the gospel to suit them.  Of course not.  You do, however, need to know how to share the truth compellingly with the person you want to share it with.

The advantages of a cultural study extend beyond evangelism.  Even if that were the only benefit, it would be worth doing, but there’s more than that.  As we study our culture for the sake of others, we learn about ways in which it’s impacted our vision of God.  Some of the things that we assume are godly are not in alignment with God’s will!  When we sit down and see how the philosophies of the day have impacted us, we get to learn about our own blind spots and learn how we can follow God better.  This second Scripture shows the Israelites experiencing this second benefit.  God is showing them the ways that they have been blinded because of cultural norms that seemed intuitive, but were wrong.  It starts in Ezekial chapter 20 verse 18:

I said to their children in the wilderness, “Do not follow the statutes of your parents or keep their laws or defile yourselves with their idols. I am the Lord your God; follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

From the beginning of this passage, God is reminding the Israelites that he’s given them something so precious: the truth.  It’s not just an abstract, theoretical truth.  It’s a whole way of being.  He’s given that truth to them to keep, but repeatedly they’ve walked away from it to take on the accepted norms of the day.  As we continue on, we’ll see three different disobedient cultural practices that the Israelites always seem to come back around to.  They do these things throughout the Old Testament.  When you read the prophetic books or make your way through Kings or Chronicles, you’re sure to come across these three sooner or later.  The Israelites can’t seem to leave them alone!  They naturally assume these are reasonable practices, even though they’re repeatedly warned against them.  

First, we have the high places.  God asks them in verse 29, “What is this high place you go to?”  He didn’t want them revering these particular places!  But they sure seem to think he does!  Now, a high place is not necessarily literally high up off the ground.  It might be!  Verse 28 reads that any high hills or leafy trees were tempting for the Israelites to make a big deal out of, but throughout the whole of Scripture, not all of them are so elevated in a literal sense.  High places are often metaphorically high up.  These are places of all types that people saw and thought, “That’s close to Heaven!  God would like it if I worshiped there.”  Now, what makes them think that certain places are holier than others?  Associations with past Gods that they worshiped.  Can you imagine how insulting that is for God?  Imagine if you told your spouse that for your anniversary, you were going to a special spot: the place where you first kissed.  They get all excited and you drive them out there that evening and as you pull up they tell you… it’s the wrong place.  You never kissed them there!  That was some other person!  But rather than back down, you double down!  If it was good enough for someone else, it ought to be good enough for them!  You park the car and try to keep celebrating the anniversary.  How do you think that would go over?  They want to worship God in a place that was special… to some other god!  It’s insulting!

But it’s worse than that.  These other gods were not like God.  They demanded different ways of worshiping, and these ways were profane.  They wanted human sacrifice, ritual prostitution, and other such things at their high places.  The true God doesn’t want anything to do with that!  He hates things like that!  He has no historically special relationship with these high places and he knows the associations they have with them are often impure, so he repeatedly tells them to stay away from them.  But whenever the Israelites get the chance, they think to themselves, “You know what God would really like?  The high places!  He’d love those!  He says he doesn’t, but someone must have misinterpreted him.  We’ve had such good memories in those places!  Good enough for other gods, good enough for this one.  Let’s go worship there!”  Not good.

You also see idolatry mentioned several times.  Verse 24 says that “their eyes lusted after their parents’ idols.”  The Israelites were very physical people.  They liked things that they could see and touch.  That made them feel more real.  Now, did they always worship the idol directly?  Not always.  Sometimes they were stand-ins for the god in question.  People thought that if they worshiped the image, they could grow closer to the god in whose image that idol was created.  God always commanded people not to do this!  If they were worshiping the idol in and of itself, they were worshiping something that was not real.  And if they were worshiping a God beyond the idol… that was still not real!  God is infinitely bigger than anything our minds can come up with.  When an idol is created, it’s always something less than the real thing.  Something more limited.  When you really think about it, the process of creating an idol for God is blasphemous.  It fundamentally reverses the order of creation.  God created us in his image.  When we make an idol of him, we turn around and try to make him in our image.  God wants nothing to do with the shallowness of our idols and tells us to avoid them.  But what did the Isralites do?  They get to thinking, “You know what God would like?  Some idols.  That’s the sort of thing gods like! It’s just a fact.  Everyone knows it!”  But God doesn’t actually like them.

Now we have what may be the most dramatic instance of disobedience in the Bible: child sacrifice.  Verse 31 reads, “When you offer your gifts—the sacrifice of your children in the fire—you continue to defile yourselves with all your idols to this day.”  Child sacrifice would have been something that the rival god Molech would have enjoyed.  Some of the groups around the Israelites worshiped Molech.  They would burn up their child, literally, in fire.  That was a good thing in the eyes of Molech.  That’s how you pleased him.  And the Israelites thought, child sacrifice?  I bet God would like that.”  Now, God has explicitly said not to do that.  There is a sacrifice necessary to make things right, but he will make it himself.  He will be the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf.  Our sacrifices are not good.  God doesn’t want people to sacrifice their children.  But the Israelites ignore God and do what is right in their own eyes.

You can see repeatedly that the Israelites are influenced by the trends of the people around them.  The tribes in their region lead them to make choices that are bad!  That fundamentally warp their view of who God is so far that God says, “That’s that’s not even me anymore!  You’re doing something horrible!  Stop!”

Taking the time to think about the culture that we’re in is not just for the sake of people outside the Church.  It’s for us!  When we critique culture, it’s not something we get to do at a distance.  It’s not us looking out at the outside world and seeing how they think.  It’s uncovering some of the assumptions we make too.  Culture is something we live and breathe.  We are inevitably affected by anything that we can point out and consider.  So as we look through this series, we’re not just seeing things that can help us be good missionaries in this new post-modern era.  We’ll learn things that can help us know God better and worship him rightly.  Remember, his thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways are not our ways.

If we want to understand the nuances of God, our neighbor, and ourselves, this is the task we have before us.  In the coming weeks, we’ll look piece by piece at our postmodern Western culture.  How was it shaped?  What are the assumptions that it presses on us?  In what ways does it help us, and in what ways does it challenge us?  And in spite of its challenges, how can we be effective at making disciples?  I hope that each of us gets the opportunity to think about the way we can reach others with this precious truth we’ve been gifted with, and that we ourselves grow to recognize that truth even more perfectly.  Amen.

Series: The Gospel in a Postmodern World

~ Vincent

I don’t usually post sermons on here. This is a place for sharing cool things from my random studies, not sermons. It feels a little lazy to just throw all of my church work up here equally. If people want sermons, they’ll hunt them down on the church’s YouTube channel. That being said, sermons are an underappreciated medium. They tend not to get much attention after the Sunday they were preached, and sometimes, a little extra consideration is merited. This past year, there was one sermon series that I was particularly pleased with: “The Gospel in a Postmodern World.” I’ll be adapting the series to a written form and posting it here. If you’re looking to learn more about evangelizing and existing as the Church in the postmodern era, this is for you.

United No More

~ Vincent

The United Methodist Church was, in hindsight, a pretty bad name for our denomination. I can’t count the number of times that there was something controversial going on in a conference and someone would say, “UNITED Methodist?!? Why are we called united? We’re NOT united at all!” Which is fair. When you’re a part of a massive entity that’s been struggling to identify what exactly it is for as long as anyone can remember, having a name that begins with “united” must seem pretty silly. But that word didn’t get there because we were so wildly harmonious! We were named “United” Methodists because of a church merger. The Evangelical United Brethren Church and the Methodist Church came together in 1968 to create the United Methodist Church. “United” is a nod to the EUB side of the merger.

The EUB was a much smaller church than the MC. Previously EUB congregants represented about 7 percent of total UMC congregants after the merger. That being said, this all happened the zenith of Methodist power in the United States, so the EUB’s membership was still nothing to sneeze at. There are quite a few denominations around today that wish they were as big as the 750,000 member EUB church! Sizes aside, the goal of the merger was to forge a marriage of equals. There was this great ecumenical hope that more and more churches would find common ground and come together, so nobody wanted to kill that enthusiasm by creating the appearance that the MC gobbled up the EUB. Again and again during the merger, people sought out ways to ensure that EUB distinctives and heritage would be protected going forward.

But did it work? Not really. The fact that the average person doesn’t know why “united” is in the name is pretty clear evidence of that. And why should they know that? Who cares about some boring ‘ol historical details. As long as a fact sounds like an answer to a trivia question, it’s going to seem trivial in people’s hearts and minds. Education about the Evangelical United Brethren Church are still requirements in United Methodist seminaries, but again, as long as it’s kept safely in the Methodist History section, it’s not going to become something that pastors make use of in their ministry. John Meunier recorded a little piece of a General Conference petition on his blog that specifically laments several ways in which the Methodist side of the merger hasn’t honored the full heritage of the EUB. Unfortunately, the original source that he linked to has since been removed, so a big thanks to him for preserving this little piece of history:

A widespread, but largely overlooked obstacle to being an inclusive church is the omission of United from our church name and the name of our people. The Methodist Church ceased as an organization on April 23, 1968, as did The Evangelical United Brethren Church (EUB). On that date, The United Methodist Church was born, a new church created by the marriage of the two former bodies. This was the  intention of the Plan of Union. When the word United is omitted, it suggests that the marriage was a pretense and that the union was, as some disappointed former EUB’s have termed it, a hostile corporate takeover.

Since 1980, the General Conference has declared that omitting United from our church name is “unacceptable usage.” Yet the practice continues in conversation and in print. Former EUB’s are not being oversensitive about a few syllables. When Methodist is used in place of our proper name, it becomes, to them, a painful reminder of more than a dozen serious betrayals of the spirit of union and inclusiveness:

1. Glorifying Wesley and Asbury, while ignoring or belittling the inheritances from Otterbein, Boehm, and Albright.
2. Abandoning beloved EUB institutions, including Westmar College, Otterbein Press, Kamp Koinonia, and the Church and Home magazine.
3. Cutting off EUB clergy widows from their only pension income, the dividends from Otterbein Press.
4. Repeated attempts to close United Theological Seminary.
5. Identifying Heritage Sunday with Aldersgate Sunday in 1976 and 2004.
6. Removing the EUB Hymnal from circulation and canceling its status as an official United Methodist hymnal in 1972 .
7. Including only two EUB hymns in the 1988 United Methodist Hymnal.
8. Replacing “debts” or “sins” in the Lord’s Prayer with “trespasses.”
9. Excluding the EUB service of infant dedication from The Book of Worship.
10. Restoring the Lovely Lane Chapel while leaving the EUB birthplace, the Peter Kemp Farmhouse, just a few miles away, to the fickle mercies of a secular economy bent on commercial expansion.
11. Suppressing the fact that the twin flames in the cross-and-flame emblem represent the Methodist and EUB traditions and that, when depicted correctly, the two flames are equal in size.
12. Closing a disproportionate number of former EUB churches (28 percent of those closed between 1975 and 1985).
13. Representing an ash-less Ash Wednesday, the EUB practice and the universal Protestant practice before 1970, as “un-United Methodist.”

2012 UMC General Conference Petition, as cited by John Meunier at
https://johnmeunier.wordpress.com/2012/02/23/an-eub-laments/

As I’m headed to the Global Methodist Church, I’m leaving the “United.” Which is ironic. From what I can tell, the EUB was more evangelical than the Methodist Church and had distinctly less modernist influence, but now their name has been claimed by the faction that they would have least agreed with! Oh, politics. Either way, popping that word in front of the denominational name didn’t preserve any heritage. We have the opportunity to honor our theological history in more than name; we can actually know it. But it’ll take work! We need to know about more than John Wesley. Yes, I get it, he’s the guy that started the thing. Nobody is downplaying that. But where did Wesley get his much of his theological outlook? Jacob Arminius. Who helped Wesley get Methodism going in the colonies? Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury. Who wrote the famous covenant prayer he adopted? Richard Alleine. Who helped get the Gospel to German-speaking populations in the colonies? A disgraced Mennonite bishop, Martin Boehm, and a Reformed missionary, William Otterbein. And who literally helped spread Methodism among German-speakers when the actual Methodists didn’t allow preaching in German? Jacob Albright.

Of course, we also have a million ecumenical saints going back to the very beginning of Christianity to learn from and celebrate, but it’s worth noting that Global Methodists have some really cool heritage that a lot of us don’t even know about. We lost the name, but let’s not lose the treasures that history has for us.

Going Global

~ Vincent

For about a year now, I haven’t posted all that often on the ‘ol bloggerino. Some of that was because I had just moved and was settling into a new job (which I wrote about here), some of it was because I just had a son (which ironically was a couple days before the entry on birthdays, which I didn’t plan at all), but the biggest reason was because of what’s been going on in the United Methodist Church. The church split in a super-political mess and evangelicals and traditionalists left and started a new denomination: the Global Methodist Church.

Unsurprisingly, a guy who regularly blogs about classic theology is very much a theological traditionalist, so I found myself navigating the tricky politics in all of this. I led a church through a discernment process to see if they wanted to leave. I constantly stayed up-to-date on the circumstances as they unfolded and shifted. I managed the gross politics of it all. Needless to say, it was really stressful and hard. Frankly, I don’t plan on writing about the specifics of it here anytime soon, if ever. It was ugly and there’s no immediate need to relive it. A quick google search will help you discover just bad the politics of leaving the UMC were/are. There are already very skilled people with a greater knowledge of the political circumstances than myself writing about this, so I’ll leave it to them.

But why didn’t I write anything about historic church splits? After all, I did a ton of research on the topic of church splits in America over the past hundred or so years. There were several times I wanted to blog about it, but it would have been pretty imprudent to openly talk about church splits with an orthodox/traditionalist bias when I was still working for the United Methodist Church. There were even a couple articles that I posted that I ended up taking down, just because I knew that if a congregation member stumbled across them and felt that they reflected my own opinion too clearly, it might cause trouble down the road. I had to play my hand close to my vest until their discernment process was done. If they wanted out, I’d help them navigate the process. If they didn’t, I’d head out on my own. Sadly, the final vote from church members ended with them choosing to remain United Methodist (they needed 66.6% to leave and only managed 62%), so I had to say goodbye and move on to the Global Methodist Church.

I won’t pretend it wasn’t a terrifying transition. So many of the churches that leave the UMC are able to do so because a supportive pastor helps guide them through the disaffiliation process. It only takes 34% of people to block a disaffiliation vote, and if the pastor isn’t interested in helping you leave, drumming up 34% tends to be pretty doable (if they even present disaffiliation as an option to them in the first place). I wasn’t sure if there would be an open church that I could get a job at, but God is good. Not only were there multiple opportunities available, but one of them was perfect. Sometimes, you just go to a place, meet the people and realize, “Yeah, this is it.” I’m off to Kenton, Ohio to work with Walnut Grove GMC, and I’m incredibly grateful to God for that opportunity.

It’s been a hard year, but I’m a few weeks away from being a part of a new denomination with a new church and a new future, and I’m so excited. The simple fact that clergy are actually expected to affirm the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Chalcedonian definition is music to my ears, but on top of that, language in church law concerning Scripture is elevated, language concerning tradition is more reverent, church rites have been rewritten to be in-line with historic norms, there are more listed reference documents for historic orthodoxy, and the church bureaucracy is slimmer. I’m happy as a clam (assuming, of course, that clams are pretty darn happy on the whole).

For those reading this that are United Methodist, no hate. I’m dear friends with many of you and have grown a lot during our time together. That being said, we know we believe different things. It’s time to go our separate ways. I’m sure we’ll still be friends and learn from each other, but we’ll have more integrity working seperately than we would together.

For those that are looking to jump ship and haven’t made it quite yet, hang in there and keep excited. It’s worth it.

For those that aren’t Methodist at all and are wondering why they should care about this, just remember that for Christians in any denomination under the sun, orthodoxy has a cost. No matter what tradition you’re in, no matter how sure you are that it could never happen there, it absolutely can. A friend told me that when he joined the UMC, he warned them that he would resign if they ever changed the definition of marriage in church law. Everyone laughed because “it could never happen here.” They were wrong. There is, as good ‘ol Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught us, a cost to discipleship. That cost is fighting for the faith. Don’t shrink away from heresy and call it “a matter of opinion.” Confront it with love and compassion. Correct it if you can. Leave if you must. But don’t give up. It’s worth it to keep the truth that was entrusted to us by God.

As hard as the battles can be, there comes a day when the battles end and you can beat your swords into plowshares. I found that ending, and I pray that you do too.

Birthdays in Job?

~ Vincent ~ 2 Comments

I hadn’t thought a lot about birthdays and the Bible. I had heard some vague rumblings that birthdays were a pagan custom that was imported to the faith at a relatively late date and I uncritically accepted that and moved on. Imagine my surprise when I got to John Calvin’s eleventh sermon on Job and he spoke AT LENGTH about the Scriptural, spiritual value of… birthdays?

The origin of celebrating birthdays was the fact that the ancient fathers knew that it was right to give thanks to God and that this day was a solemn time every year for blessing God openly. Yes, for if we have lived some years of our lives, even though we are to remember God’s benefits incessantly, it is nonetheless good that, on the day we entered the world, there be a perpetual reminder to say, ‘A year has passed. God has brought me this far. I have offended him in many ways, and I must now ask him for forgiveness. But especially has he granted me great grace. He has always assured me of the hope of the salvation he has provided, and he has delivered me from many dangers. So I have to remember that, and now that I have entered upon another year, it is fitting that I prepare myself for God’s service, for the bad periods I have gone through have shown me how much I need his help and how I would have been a hundred thousand times lost without him.’

John Calvin. Sermons on Job – Volume 1: Chapters 1-14 (Kindle Locations 2362-2369). The Banner of Truth Trust. Kindle Edition.

All of this comes in reference to the third chapter of Job when Job cries out, “May the day of my birth perish!” To be clear, Calvin isn’t suggesting that’s an explicit reference to a birthday celebration. In context, it’s obviously a reference to the original day of Job’s birth. Calvin is arguing that the day of our birth is a sacred gift. On that day, God imprinted his image on us and honored us with the gift of life. From then onwards, he nurtured us with sustenance and care. We should hold the memory of such a day as holy and never speak ill of that event. Honoring its anniversary is a tradition passed down from ancient times that has sacred value. He admits that pagans twisted birthday celebrations to be something primarily about self-indulgence and that all too often, that’s what birthdays end up being. But the core of the tradition is beautiful because it’s about honoring God and acknowledging what he has given.

So John Calvin thought there was a biblical aspect to birthdays. I was shocked! But even if he’s dealing with an indirect reference in this case, Job 1:4 says that Job’s children feasted together on their birthdays in the NIV translation. Not the translation I was most familiar with, but certainly one that holds a fair amount of weight. Even beyond that, a solid chunk of commentators agree that the best understanding of this passage is that Job’s children were celebrating birthdays (John Hartley’s commentary, Pulpit Commentary, Elicott’s Commentary, etc.). Clearly, this isn’t a wild minority viewpoint. A chunk of legitimate theologians believe that birthday celebrations are biblical!

So are there other references to faithful people having birthdays in the Bible? Well, first off, let’s take care of the obvious references. In Genesis 40, Pharaoh has a (somewhat infamous) birthday that involved executions. To give some background, Joseph had previously met Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer and told the cupbearer that he’d be restored to his previous standing and the baker that he would be executed. The prophecy comes to pass on Pharaoh’s birthday. Unfortunately, the exonerated cupbearer doesn’t remember that Joseph’s prophecy and so Joe ends up stuck in jail for a few more years. The other obvious example of a birthday isn’t much better. Matthew 14 and Mark 6 both refer to King Herod’s birthday, on which he allows a beautiful young girl to wish for anything. She wants John the Baptist’s head, and he reluctantly delivers. You can definitely see why birthdays have negative cultural connotations for some readers. But there are a few more references worth delving into.

In the Jewish Encyclopedia (archived online here), Adler and Roubin argue for a few other passages being indicative of birthday celebrations. Hosea 7:5 has a festival called “the festival of our king,” or “the day of our king.” The king gets really drunk that day. They argue that a remembrance of the day of his coronation would be a more somber affair (judging from the notes Josephus left in Antiquities), but a birthday would fit the description reasonably well. They also point to Jeremiah 20:14 in which Jeremiah cries out, “Cursed be the day I was born!  May the day my mother bore me not be blessed!” On one hand, this is an obvious example of Hebraic parallelism (saying the same thing twice for poetic effect), but asking that the day of his birth “not be blessed” does suggest that doing something to bless that day was a custom, which would line up very clearly with Calvin’s argument for a day of remembrance and prayer. Genesis 24 also refers to Isaac’s day of weaning, which was cause for a great feast. Rashi, perhaps the most famous Jewish commentator of all time, holds that children were weaned at 24 months and references Talmud tractate Gitten 75b as proof. This establishes that, at absolute minimum, there was a customary celebration of the second birthday, which may well have led to future remembrances as well.

There does seem to be a reasonable amount of weight against birthdays as well. First off, let’s acknowledge the bad arguments. A lot of the arguments against birthdays in that you’ll find across the internet comes from bizarre speculation. Weird websites argue that all birthdays come from this cult or that cult and gift-giving is representative of making sacrifices to false gods. There’s a mysterious lack of citations in all this, which makes sense. Birthdays aren’t really “from” any particular place, as far as I can tell. A handful of cultures all developed some form of commemorating the day of their birth, and there’s even certain eras where such celebrations gain popularity and others where they lose it depending on cultural trends. For example, Professor Howard Chudacoff argues that the modern American birthday rituals took shape in the 19th century when standardized education made age a more important factor in a young person’s life (which helps explain why there’s still an active copyright on the shockingly young song, “Happy Birthday”). All of that to say, it’s more complicated than some of the poor arguments make it out to be.

But let’s evaluate the good anti-birthday arguments. If we look to that ancient Hebrew historian, Josephus, in Against Apion book 2 chapter 26, he argues that Jews do not celebrate birthdays because they don’t want to drink to excess and want to live sober lives. Early Christians also appear nervous about birthdays. Origen definitively comes down as anti-birthday, saying in his Homily on Leviticus:

Not one from all the saints is found to have celebrated a festive day or a great feast on the day of his birth. No one is found to have had joy on the birth of his son or daughter. Only sinners rejoice over this kind of birthday. For indeed we find in the Old Testament Pharaoh, king of Egypt, celebrating the day of his birth with a festival, (Gen 40:20) and in the New Testament, Herod (Mark 6:21). However, both of them stained the festival of his birth by shedding human blood. For the Pharaoh killed “the chief baker,” (Gen 40:22) Herod, the holy prophet John “in prison.” (Mark 6:27) But the saints not only do not celebrate a festival on their birthdays, but, filled with the Holy Spirit, they curse that day.

Homily on Leviticus VIII, trans. Barkley

It does seem likely that early Christians carried the same discomfort towards birthdays that Jews of their time did. Judging from a handful of secondary sources I got my hands on, some of that Christian discomfort tended to uniquely focus on Roman and Greek religious practices that were incompatible with Christianity (the act of honoring birthday spirits and the like). As time went on, those associations dimmed and birthdays didn’t seem as threatening as they once were.

So were birthdays an alarming heathen practice throughout the entirety of Bible that the people of Israel had to resist? Or is Calvin right? Was some memorial of the day of one’s birth both reasonable and respectful and twisted only by heathen influences? I think the attitude towards birthdays likely depends on the era you’re looking at. There were a lot of groups in that region throughout history that celebrated birthdays in some way, shape, or form (Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Arabs, etc.) It would be odd for that to have been permanently and absolutely resisted as evil, especially when we take some of Adler and Roubin’s references into account. While far from airtight, they establish that there’s precedent for the idea of something like birthdays in Israel, depending on the timeframe you’re looking at. Were Job’s kids celebrating birthdays? They very well may have been, especially when you consider that Job and his family did not live in Israel and were probably used to different cultural norms. That being said, by the time you get to the New Testament era, it seems clear that the dominant Greco-Roman understanding of birthdays (along with some historical bad influences) left a distaste for them among devout Jews and Christians that wore off over the coming centuries. Ultimately, I think Calvin has a leg to stand on when he’s talking about the potential scriptural value of birthdays. Which is just a delight. Next time you have a birthday, you can rest easy knowing that you’re not secretly engaging in wild pagan idolatry.

Engaging Existentialism with Sartre

~ Vincent

People tend not to give their ideological opposition fair representation in arguments.  I remember a VERY Methodist professor at Duke Divinity School that would rail against Calvinism on a weekly basis.   I’m not sure most of the students in his class knew what Calvinists really were, but that didn’t stop him from explaining why they were wrong.  To all listening, the primary characteristics of a Calvinist appeared to be intellectual cruelty and absurdity.  Had any of us ever met a real Calvinist after his class, it’s safe to say they wouldn’t have recognized them, much less have been able to meaningfully debate them.  And why?  Because we didn’t actually know what they stood for.  We didn’t know what they believed in their words.  We only knew them through a lousy argument about how dumb they were.

It’s so important to actually know what people we disagree with actually believe.  More than that, I think it’s important to hear it in their own words.  Even a bad idea can contain a shocking amount of beauty. And what better school of philosophy for a pastor to explore than existentialism?  It tends to be seen as the most popular anti-Christian ideology in pop culture. Is that wrong? I don’t think so. Existentialist dogmas tend to be about as far as you can possibly get to Christian ones. There are almost no commonalities to build upon in dialogues with one another. It’s easy to hold them up as the thing that we ought not to be, but how often do we really sit down and listen to them? Sure we don’t agree. We know that. But how can we offer a meaningful and fair critique unless we really know what it is that they believe?

I stumbled across At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell a few weeks ago, and what an absolute treat it’s been.  It’s a history of modern existentialism, but the way she presents everything is so engaging.  She takes extra care to talk not just about ideas, but people.  Who were these thinkers?  Why did they believe what they believed?  What were their weird little eccentricities?  It’s so much easier to remember people and what they stood for when they’re such vivid characters in your mind. That being said, the challenge of the book is that it throws a LOT of people at you relatively quickly, which lowers your odds of fully remembering anyone.  So, I’m taking my time with it. I’m reading some primary sources from people that seem like they’re worth remembering.

I’m starting with Jean-Paul Sartre’s book, Nausea, which I found by starting with his cornerstone work Being and Nothingness, realizing that it seemed really unpleasant, and googling “easiest fun book to read by Jean-Paul Sartre.”  I mean, the guy was a novelist and a philosopher, so leaning more on the novelist side to enjoy his stuff feels intuitive.  I’m still working through it, but there can be no doubt that Sartre can write beautifully.  For example, take his description of a conversion experience. He recognizes that things his life have shifted and he’s pondering why that is when he stumbles onto an answer:

I think I’m the one who has changed: that’s the simplest solution.  Also, the most unpleasant.  But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations.  The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place. 

Nausea, Sartre, p. 4- 5 (New Directions, 2013)

Strangely, I can relate to that conversion experience more than I can most Christian ones.  There’s this pressure to have a clear, obvious moment where you have a divine experience that brings you to faith.  I don’t doubt that some people have the privilege of these sorts of experiences, but many do not, ESPECIALLY not in their early days of faith.  I’ve sometimes felt obligated to carve out a grander narrative so people aren’t disappointed.  I have a hard time keeping my own conversion myths straight when I do dabble with them. Little details never seem to line up from one telling to the next. One time, it was all because I was asking questions. The next, it’s because I loved my mother. The time after that, it becomes a sort of rediscovery of my childhood faith. Which is true? All of them, I suppose. And none of them. The true story is hard to pin down. Conversion was transformation little by little until… I’m not even sure!  I don’t know the moment when I officially moved from one to the other.  I could throw some options out there, but the simple truth is that a great deal of moments went into the creation of a “veritable revolution” in my life.

***Sidenote: Why do Christian conversion stories so often feature encounters with the divine? Is it to establish that God is real? That we have a relationship with him? Probably. Relationship with God over theory about God. But I didn’t get any good divine experiences until a ways down the line, so I maintain a little less grand conversion stories are totally valid.***

Back to Sartre! Another major theme he’s exploring is adventure.  What makes an adventure?  Can one really have an adventure?  That’s what he’s sought out all his life, to be a man of adventure, and he’s had many travels and experiences that might qualify as such, but he wonders, are they actually legitimate adventures?  Or can they only really be adventures in hindsight?  For example, when he traveled around the world, almost any exotic location started to seem like just one more plot of land in a matter of weeks.  The newness would wear off and the adventure would just turn out to be a continuation of regular life.  Similarly, he remembers a time that he was robbed and fought off the mugger.  What a daring tale!  But was it an adventure?  How could it have been?  He didn’t even know it was going to happen when he set out that morning.  You ought to set out to have adventures, not just declare something to be so after the fact.  But there’s the problem: when he sets off to have an adventure, he ends up just living regular life, and when he recalls adventures, he rarely knew he was about to have one.  One morning after a dreadfully long passage detailing every tiny bit of a relatively boring evening that he was reveling in, he writes:

What disgusts me is having been so sublime last evening.  When I was twenty I used to get drunk and then explain that I was a fellow in the style of Descartes.  I knew I was inflating myself with heroism, but I let myself go, it had pleased me.  After that, the next morning I felt as sick as if I had awakened in a bed full of vomit.  I never vomit when I’m drunk but that would really be better.  Yesterday I didn’t even have the excuse of drunkenness.  I got excited like an imbecile.

Nausea, Sartre, p. 94

Who among us hasn’t had an evening where we felt like a grand adventure was unfolding?  Where we feel like a big hero. In those moments, time is passing in such a way that things feel incredibly meaningful! But when we look back… we just went out to eat with a friend. How ridiculous! What a perfect insight into people. I imagine this sort of thinking will blossom into a greater emphasis on our perception of events, rather than the events themselves. I’m eager to see what I’ll think when I get there, but in the meantime, I’ll be darned if he didn’t write it beautifully.

A fun start to Sartre. Even if I don’t subscribe to his philosophy, he writes beautifully and there’s a lot of insight to be enjoyed. More to come!

Beyond the Mundane: William Carlos Williams and John Heath-Stubbs

~ Vincent

A friend and I have a standing engagement to read poetry together and judge which poet is better (using the very precise metric of whatever we happen to enjoy in a given week). Each week, we each pick a new poet to do battle. Not that there’s any sense of competitiveness. We often pick poets we’ve never heard of before. Who cares? It’s just a silly excuse to hang out and read stuff. But this week, I’ve found one of the most imbalanced matchups so far: William Carlos Williams vs. John Heath-Stubbs. I can’t fathom giving William Carlos Williams a vote, but not for the reasons you might think.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with William Carlos Williams. He wrote the famous poem This is Just to Say:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

This is Just to Say, William Carlos Williams

I hadn’t looked at this one since high school, but here it is again. Here’s another of his, Danse Russe:

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

WCW

Now, WCW’s opponent is someone I’m sure most of you haven’t heard of: John Heath-Stubbs. Who on earth is that? I didn’t even know who he was before I stumbled onto him. He’s much less famous and considerably more contemporary, but here’s a little selection:

In the middle of the world, in the centre
Of the polluted heart of man, a midden;
A stake stemmed in the rubbish

From lipless jaws, Adam’s skull
Gasped up through the garbage:
‘I lie in the discarded dross of history,
Ground down again to the red dust,
The obliterated image. Create me.’

From lips cracked with thirst, the voice
That sounded once over the billows of chaos
When the royal banners advanced,
replied through the smother of dark:
‘All is accomplished, all is made new, and look-
All things, once more, are good.’

Then, with a loud cry, exhaled His spirit.

Golgotha, John Heath-Stubbs

And, at the risk of posting altogether too much poetry, here’s another that’s indicative of his style:

The Old Swan has gone. They have widened the road.
A year ago they closed here, and she stood,
The neighborhood houses pulled down, suddenly revealed
In all of her touching pretentiousness
Of turret and Gothic pinnacle, like
A stupid and ugly woman
Unexpectedly struck to dignity by bereavement.

And now she has vanished. The gap elicits
A guarded sentiment. Enough bad poets
Have romanticized beer and pubs,
and for those whom the gimcrack enchantments
Of engraved glass, mahogany, plants in pots,
Were all laid out to please, are fugitives, doubtless,
Nightly self-immersed in a fake splendour.

Yet a Public House perhaps makes manifest also
The hidden City; implies its laws
of tolerance, hierarchy, exchange.
Friends I remember there, enemies, acquaintances,
Some drabs and drunks, some bores and boors, and many
Indifferent and decent people. They will drink elsewhere.
Anonymous, it harboured
The dreadful innocent martyrs
Of megalopolis- Christie or Heath.

Now that’s finished with. And all the wide
And sober roads of the world walk sensibly onwards
Into the featureless future. But the white swans
That dipped and swam in each great lucid mirror
Remain in the mind only, remain as a lost symbol.

The Old Swan, John Heath-Stubbs

I’ll be the first to admit that Heath-Stubbs isn’t my ideal cup of tea.  Golgotha, for instance, has some clumsy-sounding alliteration (“gasped up through the garbage” and “discarded dross” are a bit much for my taste).  The Old Swan seems to play to his writing strengths a little more, but I recognize that it’s a poem that may stick in my mind because I can relate to the circumstances. Not everyone can, and I’m sure some people would just find it dull. All of that to say, I’m not arguing that John Heath-Stubbs is some kind of perfect paragon of poetry (points off for alliteration; it’s a bit much for my taste). I do, however, think that his work is infinitely preferable to that of William Carlos Williams.

At first, I didn’t really get what WCW was doing at all. Why the jaunty plum poem? Why the weirdo dancing guy? So I read up a little on his goals. Williams wanted to uncover the poetic spirit of the everyday life and the beauty of American language as it was genuinely spoken. No traditional prose was needed. Nothing fancy. Nothing extraordinary. Instead, just look to the ordinary and see it for what it is. Cut away all the unnecessary ideas about what poetry is supposed to be and what fancy words should be used and you’re left with an honest statement of what is. While all of WCW’s work doesn’t conform to this methodology (American Imagism), most of his famous stuff seems to (This is Just to Say, Danse Russe, The Centenarian, Between Walls, etc.). To WCW, what is poetry? It’s a note that you left to your wife explaining where the plums have gone. It’s a broken bottle in a parking lot. Poetry is nothing pretentious. It’s just life! Simple, beautiful life.

Now when we look at the selections from Heath-Stubbs, what do we see? Not a glorification of the mundane, but a yearning for something just beyond the mundane. Why is an old pub worth remembering? Because that place was different somehow. It was a place where community was possible between radically different people. It was a place of ideas and chatter. It may have reeked of a tacky faux-elegance, but both it and everyone there aspired to something more than what was. Even his more straightforward poem of the two, Golgotha, looks at what humans are through deep metaphorical, religious language. We have this brilliant depiction of Adam, the heart of what humanity is, discarded each person’s heart, buried in a trash-heap. He’s crying out to be created properly. Something beyond has to rescue him. What is poetry to Heath-Stubbs? It’s capturing something more. There’s something juuuust beyond our eyes. Can we see it directly? No. Can we fully understand it? No. But if we use the right words and look in the right places just right, we might get a peek of this thing that’s better than all that we’ve made.

Ultimately, I see two styles: one content with what is, and one that looks beyond what is to see what really is. One is glorifies the mundane, while the other sees the mundane as something that beckons them onward. William Carlos Williams would see a pub and write a poem about a fun moment that occurred at that pub or a beer glass that gets a special sheen on it when seen in a particular light. Heath-Stubbs sees a pub and he sees the glories of Heaven.

To be clear, I don’t think William Carlos Williams is some kind of despicable hedonist. I just think he’s missing out. I think the simple, self-contained pleasures are just a shallow taste of what lies beyond them. To paraphrase Saint Augustine in On Christian Teaching, every thing exists either as something to be enjoyed or something to be used. “Toenjoy a thing is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake.” (I.4), whereas to use something is to find whatever you’re looking for through its proper use. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with using things in Auggie’s model. After all, God is the only real end for our desire. Nothing else will fully satisfy us! Even people are meant to be used as means to the end of enjoying God. That’s why we ought to talk to people and care for them; we enjoy God through them. William Carlos Williams spends a lot of time on plums and tiny, self-contained ideas. He’s enjoying the thing. I wish he would move past enjoying the plum to enjoy the God that we can know through it.

Christian Whimsy

~ Vincent

This is a brief departure from my current series. I’ve been chipping away at the fundamentalist/modernist debates, but this came up and it was too fun not to write about.

I don’t know that Christianity is usually associated with whimsy.  Sure, you have your happy-clappy Christians that play guitar while they sing who are a good deal more relaxed than their high church counterparts, but even they’re pretty serious in the grand scheme of things.  They seriously implore people to love their neighbor.  They seriously talk about the need to emulate Jesus.  Though they may be chipper and informal, they’re still not exactly playful on average.  Whimsy seems not to come naturally when your centerpiece is a crucified God.  That’s the thing I love about the Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton. He taps into a level of whimsy that is so rare within Christian communities. 

For example, in his book Orthodoxy, he recalls an incident in which he was working in a publishing house and his boss had just turned someone’s manuscript down.  This boss muttered, “He’ll be ok.  He believes in himself.”  Chesterton promptly argued that point with him:

Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

(Ch. 2, Orthodoxy, Chesterton)

Sure enough, when we’re logical about it, when recognize that believing in ourselves doesn’t actually make us any more likely to succeed than anyone else.  Every would-be pro-athlete and aspiring instagram influencer believes in themselves.  Some delusionally so!  We’ve all known someone who has no ability to sing and yet insists that they will be the next great pop-star.  We’ve all known someone who wrote “the next great American novel” without being able to handle simple sentence structure.  But telling them that they won’t hit it big won’t change their plans one iota.  Why?  Precisely because they believe so strongly in themselves.

Our individualist society says that if you believe in yourself, you’ll get somewhere, but Chesterton takes that secular dogma and flips it on its head.  Logically, we are the least trustworthy people when it comes to evaluating our own ability.  We’re incredibly biased, either for or against ourselves.  We need to believe in something more secure than our own ego.

He does the same flip with our faculty of reason.  We assume that if you use your reason, you’ll figure things out sooner or later.  But how flawed is that assumption?  Some of the most rational people in the world are the least reasonable:

If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.

Ch. 2, Orthodoxy, Chesterton

Again, the tables are turned!  We assume that a keen sense of rationality can make sense of the world, but none of the people in this scenario are illogical!  They all make perfect sense!  And yet, we know they’ve reached the wrong conclusions.

The world we’ve constructed in our minds is far too narrow.  We assume that we need to set out with our brain and our ego to conquer a largely stagnant world.  But in the process, we miss all of the delightful joy that surrounds us.  For example, we fail to celebrate the greenness of a leaf.  We all assume that leaves ought to be green because they’re always green.  But what if that leaf were polka-dotted?  Or puce?  Or teal?  Why not?  Things could have been any way imaginable!  And yet, the leaf is green.  What a delight!  What a pure, unpredictable delight to see the greenness of a leaf and know that it could have been any other way, but it is green.  It’s only our own self-centeredness that stops us from seeing the joy in that leaf!  We assume that things are the way they are because “logically” that’s what they have to be.  Or we assume that the green leaves are just backdrops for our grand story that we’re responsible for making.  But these leaves are more than that!  Once we start to delight in the crazy random joy of green leaves, we can start to wonder, why are they like that?  Is it all just mechanistic detail to be relegated to the background?  Or is there a joyful logic to it?  Is there a god that happens to delight in green leaves?

The world we live in is so dreary.  There’s so rarely anything greater than ourselves.  We are expected to go out in all of our power and make something out of both ourselves and this mixed-up world.   But Chesterton tells us to stop.  There’s so much more at work in this world than what our little minds can perceive.  Rather than drawing the limits at our own horizons, he invites us to rediscover a world infinitely larger than our own perception.  A world in which a green leaf is a miracle and in which we are a tiny speck in the plans of an infinite God.

Chesterton’s works are all in the public domain, so if you’re intrigued, check out a free copy of his work on Amazon or google.  And if you don’t have the time for a new read right now, reawaken your sense of whimsy.  Don’t believe the narrow constraints that modern philosophy places on the world.  The good news of Christianity isn’t all somber.  A creative, world-creating God is real, and he’s in charge of every little thing you see.  That truth makes mundane existence more of a fairy tale than you might expect.