Farewell to a Church, Part 7:

Last Sunday was my final day with the church that I have been working at for the past year or so.  The pastor asked me to speak and I am now posting a slightly modified version of the manuscript here in bite sized chunks.

Part 7:  A Charge

And so the third thing I want to do this morning is to leave you all with a charge of sorts. And that charge is to keep your foundation in this gospel. Do not tolerate teaching that removes the gospel from this world to focus on an “other” reality somewhere else. And do not tolerate teaching that selfishly hides from the reality of life in this world, the reality that desperately needs the hope we have. Instead, cling to the gospel of hope. The director of University Christian Fellowship gave a talk shortly after the earthquake in Haiti and one of the things he said that has really stuck with me was this: “If our gospel cannot make sense to a survivor of the earthquake in Haiti who has lost everything, if it cannot be meaningful to them, if it cannot give them comfort and hope, then it is not worth believing.”

The second part of this charge is to say that I’m not sure it’s enough to just talk about hope from the comfort of our lives here that are largely sheltered from the harsher realities of this world. We have the message of hope, but we are not meant to keep it to ourselves. We as a church are tasked with bringing that hope to those who desperately need it. I have been so thankful that this church does make an effort to do exactly that. Whatever else you do, never stop making that effort to give the hope of the gospel to those who need it. And always be looking for new ways to share our hope with the hopeless.

To close this out I want to read one of my favorite hymns, a hymn that I think perfectly captures this message of hope even in dark times and has been a tremendous comfort to me over the years. It’s called Dear Refuge of My Weary Soul:

Dear refuge of my weary soul, on Thee, when shadows rise,

On Thee, when waves of trouble roll my fainting hope relies.

To thee I tell each rising grief for though alone can heal.

Thy word can bring a sweet relief to every pain I feel.

But oh, when gloomy doubts prevail I fear to call Thee mine,

The springs of comfort seem to fail and all my hopes decline.

Yet gracious God, where shall I flee? Though art my only trust.

And still my soul would cling to thee, though prostrate in the dust.

Hast thou not bid me seek thy face and shall I seek in vain?

Or can the ear of sovereign grace be deaf when I complain?

No still the ear of sovereign grace attends the mourner’s prayer.

Oh may I ever find access to breathe my sorrows there.

Thy mercy seat is open still, here let my soul retreat.

With humble hope attend they will and wait beneath thy feet.

Thy mercy seat is open still, here let my soul retreat.

With humble hope attend they will and rest beneath thy feet.

May this gospel of hope ever comfort us, and may we be used to bring that same comfort to many others. Let’s pray.

Farewell to a Church, Part 5:

Last Sunday was my final day with the church that I have been working at for the past year or so.  The pastor asked me to speak and I am now posting a slightly modified version of the manuscript here in bite sized chunks.

Part 5:  The Faith of Job and the Gospel

The conclusion of the book of Job, I think, is also probably the earliest written form of the foundational belief of our faith. In fact, I think this is the very meaning of faith in Christianity. Faith is not just about believing some statement to be true. Faith is about our trust in God to be in control, to be working all things for good, even when our lives seem violently out of control and headed for disaster. We see this faith played out all across scripture. We see it in the stories of Genesis- God calling Abraham to abandon everything he knows to follow God’s leading, Joseph being betrayed by his brothers and sold into slavery and yet still he trusts in God. We see this in the Exodus account as a nervous, shaking Moses is sent by God back to Egypt to challenge the most powerful monarch alive in his day. We see this faith in Joshua and Judges and the stories of David and Elijah as battles are won that can only be attributed to God working. And we find this faith in God to ultimately be in control all throughout the prophets of the Old Testament. I want to read just briefly from one of my absolute favorite passages in Isaiah 61:

The spirit o the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion- to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness- the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.

Here in Isaiah is a proclamation of the gospel, I think. That the misery and the suffering that we so often face in this life is coming to an end. That God is in control of all things and that we can trust him to bring about justice and to turn our mourning into gladness. I don’t think it is an accident that Jesus begins his ministry in the New Testament with almost the exact same words. Luke records Jesus reading directly from Isaiah 61 at the very beginning of his ministry, and in Matthew chapter 5 Jesus will open his ministry with these famous words: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted”- echoes of Isaiah.  The book of Revelation closes out the Bible by describing a future time when there will be no more pain and suffering, no more tears, no more death, no more sin. God is in control, he is bringing about the redemption and restoration of his creation, he is undoing the effects of sin and death. We can trust him, even when life seems to make no sense whatsoever.

Farewell to a Church, Part 4:

Last Sunday was my final day with the church that I have been working at for the past year or so.  The pastor asked me to speak and I am now posting a slightly modified version of the manuscript here in bite sized chunks.

Part 4:  The Faith of Job

So it seems like God is saying to Job in essence- “You don’t get an answer to your confusion. You don’t have the right to question or challenge me.” And maybe it’s just our American love of freedom, but I feel like I’m not alone in saying that just doesn’t sit well. But before we throw Job out of our Bibles, we need to look at the next part of the conversation. God starts throwing another barrage of questions at Job, this time questions that probably should alarm us- God begins talking about some frightening monsters that he apparently keeps around.  I’ll leave that for you guys to read about on your own- but after this barrage Job answers in chapter 42:

Then Job answered the Lord: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’ I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.”

This, I think, contains the entire point of this lengthy book. Job says to God- “You are in control, I know that now, and so whatever comes to pass, I trust you to be doing what is ultimately best, even if I don’t understand how.” The conclusion of the book of Job is that in good and bad we can trust God whether or not he explains to us what he is doing because he is in control, there is none who can match his power. The God who made the world, the God to whom none can compare in power or splendor, that is the God to whom we pray when sorrows come, the God we can trust in any and every circumstance.

Review: Exclusion and Embrace by Miroslav Volf

I think I may have found my new favorite author! And to make this even better, he will be my theology professor at Yale!! Miroslav Volf does a fantastic job of blending theology, psychology, and philosophy in this book, Exclusion and Embrace. The book is a personal response from Volf to wrestling with the issue of how to follow Jesus' command to love our enemies in the face of atrocity (he wrote this in the wake of a civil war in the Balkans in which many of his own native Croatian people were brutalized at the hand of Serbian forces). In responding to this deeply personal issue, Volf attempts to develop a distinctly Christian, Trinitarian view of how we can love others.

Here, essentially, is the argument that Volf makes: The duty to love others is an individual, not a collective duty. We cannot change society to include others unless we have changed ourselves to be willing to include and embrace them rather than exclude them. So Volf's solution to the problems associated with the sin of exclusion (a sin that he says lies at the heart of all sins) is a change in ourselves. In saying this, Volf recalls what he says is maybe one of the most controversial (from a political standpoint) of Jesus' teachings: that the victim must repent every bit as much as the perpetrator of a crime. In essence, Volf's argument is an attack on the prevailing ideologies of both Modernism and Post-modernism: as long as we insist on viewing conflicts in terms of one innocent and one guilty party, as long as we insist on justice being the vindication of the innocent (a liberation motif) at the expense of the guilty, we will only perpetuate the conflict because the innocent, once in power, will subject the guilty to equal if not worse atrocities. Instead, argues Volf, we have to recognize two things: 1) it is almost always the case both parties are guilty, at least in part; and 2) no amount of reparation will ever make up for an abuse (you cannot undue the crime done, and no payment will ever make up for the loss). Instead, Volf argues, the message of the gospel is one of reconciliation, which means both sides laying down their arms and embracing the other, forgiving the crimes committed and forgetting them, starting the relationship anew. This kind of forgiveness does not mean casting aside all our means of protection (though Volf does seem to advocate absolute pacifism, I'm not sure that is a necessary corollary of his argument), but it is an inherently risky business (but witness Jesus' ultimate embrace, the embrace of the cross, and recognize that the risk is necessary)- we cannot control the other person, we can only open ourselves up to the embrace. The risk of rejection is real, but the faith of Christianity is also a faith that in the end God will triumph and those who reject his embrace will be brought to justice!

Like I said, it’s a fantastic book and I highly recommend it. I think it should be required for every Christian in ministry to read, it does an excellent job of cutting right through the many inconsistencies in the way the Church has responded to contemporary Western culture, I believe. The language is a bit technical sometimes- he interacts a lot with Nietzsche, and the post-Modern philosophers (especially Derrida) . But, as a little bit of encouragement, I can say that I have spent very little time studying existentialist and post-Modern philosophy and still understood most of the discussion (he does a good job explaining the ideas he is interacting with). There are many points where Volf challenges our natural thinking, which is healthy whether or not we come to full agreement with him. I think that on a whole in those points where he challenges our thinking he does an excellent job explaining why the challenge is necessary and giving a good argument for why we might want to change stance. Beyond that, the book does an incredible job of highlighting the absolutely beautiful and personal significance of the message of Christianity, the message of the cross, for us. Very well written, very, very helpful!!

The Righteous Will Live by Faith

Very often when we think about what it means to "have faith" we think of this in terms of a very abstract, distant thing- a "belief" that we hold about God. Frequently having faith in Jesus means that we believe that he is real, or we believe (in a very abstract sense) that he is the savior who forgives our sins. Which we should, those are all good beliefs to hold. But James tells us that even the demons believe these things. So what separates holding these beliefs from faith?

In thinking about what Paul means when he discusses our faith, its important to look back at where he is drawing a lot of his information from in the Old Testament. Paul makes the statement that the righteous live by faith, a statement he derives from Habakkuk. How does Habakkuk understand faith. In a lengthy vision or prophecy, he describes the contrast between those who are wicked- those who serve themselves and trust in their own ability to accomplish what they want- and the righteous- those who trust in God to make everything right in the future, who are not violent or treacherous but are obedient to God, humble, and compassionate to others. It seems that from the standpoint of Habakkuk, faith is not an abstract belief in God or in a theological claim. Faith is much more personal than that. Faith is a guiding principle, a trust in God to accomplish what he says he will accomplish. As a result of this faith, we are certain kinds of people, we live a certain way. Without some-sort of response, faith is worthless. James and Paul will both make that point very clear in the New Testament. Faith is very much rooted in who we are and how we live, not in what we say we "believe."

So in light of this, here is a question to ponder: What is the source of our faith? What causes us to have faith or where do we get our faith from? What makes our faith "real," causes us to live as those with faith in God and not as those who put our trust in ourselves?