You Were Made to Go to Bed Tired

“There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and his soul to see good in his toil.”

- Ecclesiastes 2:24

We live in a fine place with big mountains, rivers, ski trails, hiking trails and mostly better-than-average sports teams. Denver is a favorite destination for folks graduating college looking for some fun in their first years out of school. Its the place every company wants an office. A fairly regular pattern is for young 20-somethings to move to Denver, get a job, work a bit, play a lot and then when its time for life to get serious or kids come along to move somewhere else. We have one of the youngest cities in the country. We have one of the fittest cities in the country. We have one of the most single cities in the country. We also have one of the most sexually active cities in the country. In other words, most people aren’t living in Denver because of a love for building families here, or because of deep vocational ambitions. For the most part, you’ll find a fairly ambivalent attitude towards work and family here - after all, most people are from somewhere else and intend to eventually end up somewhere else.

All of this to say, one of the primary purposes of men and women is to be fruitful and Denver is not a place known for its fruitfulness. In the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes above, we eat and drink, but we don’t see much value in our toil - our fruitful labors. I think this stems from a few misconceptions about the nature of work, marriage and child-rearing that we should get busy rethinking along more biblical lines. The bible’s thinking on these things is richer than our current cultural confusion about these things.

Somewhere along the line we began to believe a few things about the nature of toil that has been confusing. Firstly we began to see work as merely paid work. A person’s value is to be measured by how much income they can generate or by how they can ascend the ladders of corporate America or how vibrant their entrepreneurial endeavors are. Home, marriage and children were at best, side-hustles and seen primarily as places or relationships of comfort. Our lives became increasingly siloed into work life and home life. They were placed in opposition to one another and began competing for our time and interest. Fruitfulness, if thought of at all was defined narrowly in terms of income or revenue generated. Additionally, work has been seen predominantly as a necessary evil. I work, build companies, build houses, or sell coffee because I need money for my home, or particularly in the singleness of a city like ours, simply to play more. We considered the goal of work to be play, perhaps a better future for our children, but largely centered on our own comfort and to support the lifestyle we wanted. I still remember as a school kid viewing each week as largely a long laborious affair to get to the weekend. I remember seeing the whole fall semester (at least once football season ended) as a journey to Christmas break and the point of a school year was summer break.

There are a number of problems with this, but I want to point out just a couple biblical correctives that I think would help us:

1 - The Bible doesn’t do a very good job of categorizing toil or our lives into neat categories. Building a home is labor. Raising children is labor. Planting a garden is labor. Cultivating a vibrant and God-honoring marriage is labor. And so is writing code, making coffee, practicing law or remodeling somebody else’s kitchen. There isn’t much in the way of instruction about the famed life-work balance. Rather we are given a whole bunch of work to give our lives to. Some of that work is exchanged for pay, a whole bunch of it isn’t. This guards against any sort of careerism or strange loyalties to companies wherein your employment evolves into a kind of familial replacement. God has made us to be fruitful. Our lives are to be marked by a full-orbed fruitfulness that demonstrates God’s faithfulness and blessing. And the kind of fruit produced in this life is varied and wonderful. Children are fruit. A happy marriage is fruit. A warm and hospitable home is fruit. Well-ordered spreadsheets and starting a good restaurant are both examples of fruitfulness. Society tends to measure fruit in terribly narrow ways, marking it primarily with pay or prestige. But the fruitfulness that God calls us to is far more copious and varied. And this varied and fruitful work is not some secondary addition to the meaning of your life, it is why you were made. (Ephesians 2:10 - For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works…”

2 - Work is no curse. A number of the difficulties we face are examples of the curse found in Genesis 3. But its important to see that the labor that goes into producing any meaningful fruit is not a curse. The work itself is a blessing. The fruit born by that work is a further blessing. And the generosity that sees that fruit serve others is a blessing as well. The 4th commandment mandates a weekly sabbath, but it also mandates 6 days of good work. This is no auxiliary command added on due to the necessity of sin. It is one of the fundamental ways we honor God and as such, it is one of the fundamental purposes for your existence. Sabbath rest, worship and play are days sanctified and an embodied confession of faith in the good provision of God. It is a day wherein we confess in worship and rest that this world is the Lord’s. And resting in that good confession we get to work on Monday, in offices, in cafes, and with dirty diapers and dinner-making. The eternal God has given us work to do, fruit to grow, and his blessing on this work and this fruit is necessary. So we work and we rest and we play and we go to bed tired.

3 - Tiredness isn’t often heralded as a gift, but it is. When you look about your life you should see an absolutely endless supply of good, fruitful work to be done. You were designed to wake early, get to work on all that fruitfulness and then to go to bed at the end of each day happy and tired. Tired, because God has blessed you with much fruit to be busy with. Happy, because no matter the circumstances of that good labor, God has promised that in him none of it will go to waste. We labor as men and women created for it. We rejoice as men and women for whom God is at work. So eat and drink and  see the good in your toil and smile as you lay exhausted in your bed.

“Therefore my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

- 1 Corinthians 15:58

Love Sometimes Smells Like Death

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word, but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.

2 Corinthians 2:14-17

What sort of odor does love have? If we love one another well with the Word and we faithfully love our neighbors, particularly our unbelieving neighbors,  how would they describe the smell of such love? This is a fascinating metaphor taken up by Paul in his second letter to the church in Corinth. It is a fascinating metaphor because it doesn’t get stuck on the main question all of us tend to ask, namely, what would love look like. Such a question can get preoccupied with the particulars of action - actions that will no doubt look very different in different circumstances. Instead, Paul is asking a question about the impression our love for others will leave on those around us. His answer is disturbing and emboldening as we consider the question of how to love our city well as a church. 

Triumphal Procession 

Paul here describes the ministry of God’s people in a city as a triumphal procession marching through the city, led by Christ. Triumphal processions were a somewhat regular occurrence in the Roman Empire and involved a conquering general marching through the streets of a city which stood conquered. The celebration of victory would be mingled with the sorrow of some of those who had been conquered. As Rome marched victoriously through a city, their arrival and victory meant the arrival of Rome’s authority, their culture, and their way of life. To some living in a city, this was profoundly good news - it was a thing to be celebrated. For others, Rome’s arrival was the destruction of what they loved, what they hoped for, their entire way of life - a way of life that was often counter to Roman rule and Roman culture. 

Paul describes here the ministry of the church as a parade of victory, led by Christ through the streets of cities that - whether they realize it or not - have come under the rule of King Jesus. The ministry of the church, above everything else, is to announce the Lordship of Jesus over the nations. He has conquered sin, death and all the powers. This will be glorious news to some, and wicked news to others. 

What about the smells?

As the church announces and embodies all that the reign of Jesus entails - including his grace and his commands - this will smell like 1 of 2 things. He does not use a range of responses to the arrival of the Word but instead gives us two opposite responses. To some, it will smell like life. To others, it will smell like death. The aroma of life will lead to more life (“...life to life…”), and the aroma of death will lead to a weightier and more permanent death (“...death to death…”). The announcement of Jesus’ victory and kingdom will always lead to one of two responses - one of two impressions. The same substance, but two very different assessments. Death is not simply an unpleasant smell, it is a repugnant one. And note, this isn’t simply repugnance towards the content of what is proclaimed but to the entire life (including their ethics) and worship of God’s people. If all of life is lived in glad obedience to the rule of Jesus, then all of life will begin to have the stench of death to those who do not love God and his words. 

The Christian life and message is not simply an invitation, it is a proclamation. It declares the Lordship, the authority of Jesus over everything. And it invites all people to be reconciled to God in and through the work of Jesus on the cross. Both of these things will smell repugnant to some: Firstly, that no one is their own Lord and in the second place, that reconciliation with God is essential and necessary. To the man ruled by his own lusts and desires, the declaration of Jesus’ lordship is repugnant. To the man who is righteous in his own eyes and by his own efforts, the call to be forgiven and reconciled to God is repugnant. These things smell like death because they require a kind of death - a death to one’s own lordship and death to one’s own self-righteousness. 

What does love require?

Among the many implications of this remarkable description by Paul is that loving one's neighbor is neither contingent on, nor defined by our neighbors’ response. Love seeks the objective (read, Scriptural) good of its object. Love tells the truth. Love will therefore seek the good in accordance with the reign of Jesus and the invitation to be reconciled. This means that love will often smell like death and be received as if you just dragged a dead body into a dinner party. It may be called hurtful. It may be called abusive or oppressive, but if it is love, it will be aligned with the person and the commands and words of God. 

But love is not simply a commitment to what is true, it must also be motivated by the desire for another’s good. As another writer has said, love is “treating others lawfully from the heart.” It isn’t enough to treat others lawfully we must be motivated by their good. You treat others as God commands because you want their genuine well-being. This good is objective (its defined by God in the Scriptures) but it is also motivated by a real desire for your neighbor’s good. 

This is what I mean when I say that loving your neighbor faithfully will often entail making enemies of your neighbor. Not out of meanness, but out of a genuine desire to see them reconciled to God and walking in the wisdom and life that God’s commands provide. This reconciliation and obedience will smell like death. 

Temptations

Paul goes on to describe a real temptation at this point. And it is important to note what he says and what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t emphasize the down-playing of the necessity of reconciliation, though I think that’s a real temptation. He emphasizes the temptation to become a “peddler” of God’s words. We are tempted in a situation like this to begin trading on God’s words. Exchanging bits of it that may not be well received, downplaying the craggy edges of the bible while emphasizing the appealing bits. His answer to this temptation is that we “speak in Christ.” It is an appeal to remember that our speech and actions, taken in love are grounded in a prior loyalty, namely loyalty to Jesus. We continue to speak and love this way because we do not have the authority to trade or cover-up or change God’s actual words to all people. And so we speak and live in accordance with God’s words, in joyful submission to the authority of Jesus and we do so motivated by love - especially when such love will be received like the smell of death. 

So, in the first place, be set apart for Jesus. Belong to Jesus. Trust in Jesus and in so doing, love his words - all of them, even the parts the world around us thinks smell terrible. Then, because you belong to Jesus and because you love your neighbor, speak those words, obey those words, and believe that those words will bear the true fruit that God promises. 

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it

Isaiah 55:10-11

Culture Wars and the Christians

I miss the days when people could only yell at one another when they were in close proximity to each other. It was always far more entertaining and often more informative than what we’ve got now. We live in a day where this thing called “social media” has afforded us the opportunity to yell at people from all over the world, all the time, with almost no reprieve. Clever yelling gets rewarded by likes. Timid yelling, qualified by nuance and niceties is generally ignored and disappears. People (I’ve grown so weary of David French’s Sunday articles) have built entire platforms online by simply saying over and over again, “Look how stupid these people are.”

All of this has exasperated the much-touted and maligned “culture war,” and left a lot of Christians confused and often divided. The biggest division (as I see it) among Christians isn’t really along the lines of the culture war but along the lines of how to respond to this Cultural Cold War. On the one side, pitchforks in hand, are those throwing their lot in with one side or the other (usually with the political right) ready to step into the fray (or at least post stuff on Facebook). On the other side is a group of Christians who want peace above all else, and are often guilty of proclaiming “Peace! Peace!” when there isn’t any. Both groups are mostly responding to the political lines as they’ve been drawn and are pretty frustrated with each other. Tim Keller (former pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan) gets dragged into the whole thing as an example of either “the problem” or an exemplar of marvelous balance. But while debates circle among Christians about how to be “winsome” or how dangerous “winsomeness” is in this cultural moment, I think the real interesting debate lay underneath.

Both sides have some biblical things to say. The first group recognizes that something grave is truly at stake in the cultural, social, and political arguments of our day. Debates about sexuality, the nature of justice, abortion, and the power/role of the government are of enormous consequence for us, our children, and for our neighbors. The second group questions (rightly) the way the lines have been drawn. Should Christians align with the Republican Party? Should Christians align with the Democratic Party? Why allow secular politics to determine the culture of the church? These are important questions that matter greatly as we consider what allegiance to Jesus our Lord actually means as we live in this cultural moment and the ones that are coming.

To navigate this moment I want to lay out some principles that must guide Christians as we navigate these cultural waters, and that I pray would be central to our life as a church in the heart of Denver, half a block from our state capitol.

Jesus died and was raised and sent his Spirit into the church in order to build a culture.

The goal of Jesus’ death was not simply to whisk people away to heaven, but to redeem the world - to liberate it from lawlessness, from godlessness, and from every defiling thing. This is simply unavoidable in the New Testament. Too many Christians have been taught that the goal of Jesus’ work is merely the forgiveness of sins and a kind of internalized (read: spiritual) reconciliation with God. In the New Testament, these things are vital and central, and they are the ground for something else: namely the formation of a people who live differently in the world. The work Jesus commissioned his people to is the work of discipling the nations - teaching them to obey everything he commanded. In other words, he has commissioned his people into the work of reforming whole cultures into obedience to godliness. We have been freed from sins - sins that shape and define individuals, families, cities, and entire cultures. We are to repent of disobedience to God’s laws and seek to obey God’s laws because he has already redeemed us, justified us, and adopted us in his Son. This obedience will necessarily create a culture - a corporate way of being in the world that gives expression to our joyful gratitude to God, love for God, and obedience to God.

Christian obedience works its way all the way down and all the way up.

We shouldn’t reduce Christian obedience to a list of personal pieties. When we believe that Jesus is Lord we will seek to obey him in every facet of our lives. This, without question, includes our attitudes and the ways we treat people, but it also includes what we eat, who we vote for, how we educate our children, with whom we have sex, and what we believe to be the best way to live in the world. This obedience is never obedience that saves, but rather it is borne of our reconciliation with God. This reconciliation means that we are no longer at war with God and are now learning to trust him - not simply to forgive our sins, but to trust that he is wise and good and knows best how to navigate the world both as individuals and as cultures. In other words, allegiance to Jesus must work its way out all the way into our fingertips, institutions, businesses, governments, and families.

Christian obedience entails repentance and repentance is specific

Believing in Jesus and then obeying Jesus starts (at least in the New Testament witness) with repentance from sin. We have grown too comfortable treating sin as a kind of ambiguous force over against specific attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that are contrary to God’s law and contrary to the way that he has made the world. Sin is regarded as a power that enslaves us to sins. Repentance is not simply “Forgive me Father for sin.” It is “Forgive me Father for lying to my wife” or “Forgive me Father for drinking too much and getting drunk” or “Forgive me Father for neglecting my children’s discipline.” Repentance from actual sins that we actually commit is necessary for faith in Jesus and obedience to Jesus. This is true of individuals, but it is also true of cultural and social evils. Corporate repentance is dangerous and doesn’t work exactly the same way (see C.S. Lewis’ “Dangers of National Repentance), but it does mean that there are sins prevalent in specific cultures that should be confronted. Those sins should be defined by God’s law and the designs of God’s world - but they are real nonetheless, and should be named and resisted.

Obedience to God is the best way for everybody

Here’s where the teachings of Scripture come into direct conflict with our modern sensibilities. We claim that God really does know best. If I am to love my neighbor, I am to pursue what is objectively good for them. I think we are clearly to avoid coercion but I am required by love to call my neighbors to repentance and to be reconciled to God in Jesus and to live good, godly lives in him. This will mean hard conversations about individual sins and cultural ones. You cannot love your neighbor whose moral imagination has been shaped by an unbelieving culture without confronting those cultural claims.

Christian Faithfulness to this Mission will entail conflict - or something akin to a culture war.

Christians, while living in this age, must patiently oppose all rebellion to the rule of Jesus. We must proclaim his reign and therefore, proclaim the true, the beautiful, and the good according to the Scriptures. This will inevitably lead to conflict. Jesus promised this. Please note, he promised this. James tells us that friendship with the world (which he defines in terms of loving what the world loves, aligning ourselves with the world’s self-defined good) is enmity with God. There is all the way down a conflict between belief in God and its consequent obedience and unbelief. We cannot declare peace when there is no peace. If we are to love our neighbors then we will make enemies of our neighbors. If we proclaim and promote and desire for ourselves, our children, and our neighbors what is true and beautiful and good, then we will find ourselves at war with much of what our culture calls true and beautiful and good. If we trust God and therefore love and trust his words, then we will say these things out loud desiring our neighbors to repent of their sins and be reconciled to God. The lines in this culture war will not line up with the Republicans or Democrats - but not because we’ve found some safe space in the middle (what’s often called third-wayism), but rather because we belong wholly to Jesus and must obey and teach what God has said. We will often find ourselves in a world like ours (filled with horrors and common grace) co-belligerents with those who do not share our ultimate allegiances. But do not be fooled. We belong to Jesus and we strain for a world filled with the knowledge of the glory of God (namely the manifestation of his beauty and holiness) as the waters cover the sea. The world does not want this, and will actively oppose it, in fact, is actively at war with it. We should expect fierce opposition, slander and mockery even as we see (slowly and with often very crooked lines) God making all things new.

Finally, this all requires courage.

This sort of thing requires courage. Courage stands on what God has said, pursues the good of our neighbors, and defines love, winsomeness, and the common good in ways determined by God’s words, not on the basis of people’s reactions or feelings. Paul’s admonitions to Timothy in 1 & 2 Timothy are rife with a call to courage, to stand, to join Paul in his sufferings. Paul is thrown in prison, chided as evil, as opposing the Roman culture, beaten, and ultimately executed because he is promoting a culture at war with the one around him. Paul’s words are better than anything else I could say: “Do not be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, nor of me his prisoner, but share in suffering for the gospel by the power of God, who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began…” (2 Timothy 1:8-10)

Who's in Charge?

One of the most immediately relevant questions that was thrust to the foreground of our cultural conversations over the last few years is the question of the nature and basis of authority - and particularly questions regarding this authority over the course of Western history. This came up as we considered government mandates established in the name of public health and safety. Some claimed that the government was exercising its role in saving lives from a deadly disease, and this was necessary even if such mandates had devastating consequences to the overall well-being of the public. Others claimed that such government edicts were an overextension of the state’s authority and while deaths caused by COVID should be wisely minimized, the government’s coercive power represented a big burly club when something more like a scalpel was necessary. Christian brothers and sisters, churches and institutions were torn asunder as they debated the fundamental questions both of “what’s best for our neighbor” and, even more heatedly, “Who’s in charge?” 

Right smack in the middle of this roiling debate, questions about the nature of authority and power laid at the hidden center of our collective reckoning over America’s racial history. Publications like the 1689 Project and other books built on the same view of history, assumed the history of authority as largely, if not completely, as a history of exploitation. Authority was reduced to simply fights over who had the power to exert their will for the sake of wealth, renown, and comfort. And while such debates seemed to largely be about race, they were as much about the history of authority and responsibility and whether exploitive power could be distinguished from them at all. 

Much of history in the West can be accounted for as a great debate, sometimes fight, and sometimes wars over the question of authority. Our cynical age has taught us to see these questions as simply exploitive contests over power, and while this was often at least partially true, to simply see the whole debate as a question of exploitive power is to miss the larger question at stake for all of us. The problem lies in the sinful proclivities of men and therefore, of the institutions they lead. But at the root of all this historic chaos, corruption and endless debate is the question of authority, responsibility and accountability. The most fundamental thing which enables us to begin the process of answering these questions is the confession that Jesus is Lord. In other words, acknowledging Jesus possesses all authority in heaven and earth is not a secondary or merely religious confession irrelevant to the question of politics, power, and who must we obey - it is the prerequisite for answering these questions at all.  You see, this claim is the basis of any legitimate authority or accountability. If Jesus is the ground and source for all legitimate authority (be it political, economic, ecclesial or in the family), then there can be real responsible and God-given authority and all authority is accountable to him in how it is exercised. 

The Christian confesses that Jesus is Lord in a world that says lordship (or authority) is a game played by people who want to use other people for their own gain. But our Lord was crucified to save his enemies from death, judgment and wrath. We believe that all legitimate authority flows from Him and anyone with authority anywhere is accountable to Him. We begin by confessing that at the center of the universe is a throne - and a bloody lamb who is the Lion of Judah (the central symbol of royalty in the Bible) rules there. In other words, there is no avoiding authority or hierarchy or responsibility for the whole world is built on it by God. There will be no world without it, and anyone trying to sell you a vision of a world without such things should be considered suspect or hopelessly misguided.

God has established three governments with sometime overlapping spheres of authority, and all of them answerable to Jesus’ own authority. Fathers and Husbands are to govern their homes towards life and flourishing, leading their wives and discipling their children with Christ as their example. The church wields Word and Sacrament for the nourishment of God’s people and the discipling of the nations. The state governs with the sword, punishing evil and protecting the public good. All three of these are to wield the authority they’ve been given for the good of their “realms” and the glory of God. They are to rule in line with the ways that God has designed the world and with what He has revealed in his Word. The Christian account of the world provides both a basis for legitimate authority and standards for accountability. We can both affirm real authority as its been given and name sinful authority that refuses to acknowledge God’s standards and refuses to pursue the ends for which such authority has been given. 

When a society refuses to acknowledge any authority beyond mere earthly powers, what we’re left with is the  tyrannical (rule beyond ones’ sphere or means) rule of the self ironically mixed with the power of coercion. The State has historically been the most prone to tyranny (though different parts of the church have given kings a run for their money in different parts of history) as they’ve been given the power of the sword. In our day, numerous prophetic voices have pointed out the growing danger of the Leviathan of the state swallowing up all authority through tyranny and others have pointed out the tyranny of the “I” that has absorbed the public imagination. These simultaneous threats will lead to the death of our humanity if left unchecked. The Gospel of Jesus provides us with a counter claim in this cultural moment that is both realistic about the nature of power and leads us into something profoundly and richly good. 

Over the next three weeks we will examine the dangers of the hierarchies God has established, as well as the ways these provisions, given by God, can lead to life and our real good when held accountable to the authority of God and conformed to the roles given to them by God. We’ll look at the role of the state this week, the church next week and the final week Ben Zornes will help us to consider the role of Husbands and Parents in the good and loving governance of a home. All three weeks will be finally a celebration of the good reign of Jesus and how His reign is exercised in the lives of God’s people. 

Quit Picking on Thomas (or How to Read the Bible)

Thomas gets a bad rap. We call him “Doubting Thomas” and preachers use him as a kind of lazy example of stubborn unbelief. But in John 20 (the one gospel account we have of Thomas’ doubts), John is up to something different. He isn’t revealing Thomas as an outlier to everyone else. Rather, he reveals Thomas to simply be the climax of a whole progression of unbelief coming from basically everybody in the chapter. 

Much lauded Mary sees an empty tomb, but doesn’t recognize her resurrected Lord. Peter and John see an empty tomb, folded linens and a removed face cloth, but still have no idea what they are seeing (John, being a bit cheeky, tells us that they - including himself - did not understand the Scriptures.) The disciples, having heard of Mary’s encounter with Jesus- the New Gardener in the Garden, still don’t know what to make of it and have locked themselves in a room hiding when Jesus finally comes to them. And then there is Thomas, having heard from his friends who’ve all now seen Jesus, refuses to believe they aren’t barking mad until he’s “put his finger into the mark of the nails…” It isn’t that there is a flood of belief from Jesus’ disciples until we get to Thomas who stubbornly refuses to believe the news. It is a cascade of unbelief - blinding unbelief, such that even if Jesus is standing right in front of you, you won’t see him. 

When an author tells you what he is trying to do with something he’s written, it’s always good to listen to him. At the very end of John’s account of the resurrection in John 20, he turns aside to his audience to clue us in to why he’s written what he’s written. John has written, “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” John isn’t writing as some sort of passive observer, dutifully recording the history. He is partisan. He has an agenda and his agenda is that we might listen to what he has to say (or rather see what he has to say) and believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. Its an odd moment in John’s gospel, as its the first time he’s spoken directly to his audience since turning to his account of Jesus’ own ministry at the end of chapter 1. Its also notable as you follow the progression of chapter 20.

John turns to an audience who hasn’t seen Jesus. But he’s just told us about people who saw Jesus and an empty tomb and had failed to believe. The problem isn’t seeing, it is a matter of believing. We are created by God to believe in Jesus, to believe specifically that he is the Son of God, the King and Lord. Or to confess with Thomas concerning Jesus, “My Lord and My God.” It is faith in Jesus that sees and John has told us precisely what he’s told us throughout his gospel so that we might believe and in believing. have life in his name. 

Our age prides itself in its cynicism. We count ourselves clever by not being taken in by anything. We read the papers this way, we read tweets this way, and when we turn to the Bible, we carry those habits of readings with us. And so we listen to John’s stories with a cynical ear. Withholding judgment on the text’s veracity until we’ve reasoned it out, or concluded that his voice is worth listening to. And even then, we listen in order to make our own judgments about what of his words will give us life. This isn’t how the bible is supposed to be read. We are to read with faith. We are to come to the Scriptures believing and it is this believing that makes us able to see all that John wants to show us. We come to the Bible to receive, not to evaluate and parse out what we like or don’t. We come to the words of our guide John in order to confess the Lordship and Glory of Jesus. This makes the Bible a uniquely scary book. 

Imagine booking a table at a restaurant where the menu is selected for you and you don’t get to pick the chef. We’re used to making dinner choices based on our own desires, tastes, and who we trust. But you can’t approach the Bible this way. We come to almost every other thing we read waiting to partake, to consider whether what’s being served is worth eating. Not so with John’s gospel or the rest of Scripture. The only way to come is to come eating what is served, believing what is confessed, trusting what is commanded, learning to love what it calls us to love and hate what it teaches us to hate. This is what faith is. It is a faith committed to the veracity and glory and wisdom of what God has given us in this book. This is how to read John. This is why John has written and it is these kinds of readers who will reap the blessing promised by Jesus after Thomas’ confession. So come to the Bible, committed to trusting whatever is served up in its pages, for this is the only way to see and to confess, “My Lord and My God!” 

Quit Quarantining Jesus

“Is he safe?”

Grace crushes. Grace drags you out into the middle of the woods and kills you. Grace will make you absolutely crazy. 

When I was first introduced to Flannery O’Connor my second year in college, I would generally leave the literature class disturbed, often in tears. This wasn’t some Christian college with a short worship set at the end of every class. This was a 2nd year class at the U.S. Naval Academy. It was taught by a rather severe professor who fit the ethos and aesthetic of the military quite well. But for those two weeks I encountered the harsh and devastating reality of grace. O’Connor’s writing is dark, grotesque and designed to disturb. She writes to her neighbors in what Ralph Wood has called the Christ-Haunted South. A community with a neat and comfortable understanding of salvation, a cozy vision of God, and a remarkably nice Jesus. O’Connor’s stories aim to violently lay waste to such haunting. She presents grace in far starker and more biblical terms: Grace comes through death and blood and the end of all niceties. 

After reading O’Connor I never read the Gospels the same way again. 

I discovered a Jesus who will hurt you. One who will roughly disturb and unsettle you. A Jesus who will demand from you one of two responses: kill him or fall down on your face in worship and obedience. 

It has been observed by a litany of commenters that “abuse” has been reduced in our day to anything which causes emotional unpleasantness. We speak of people hurting others not in absolute terms but in relative ones. Our good is that which avoids upsetting our general emotional equilibrium. Love is that which promotes the general pleasant feelings of non-distress. We Christian folk then approach the gospels and Jesus more generally as the source of all pleasant feelings and encouragement. We forget that Jesus was killed for a reason. He wasn’t put to death for being a nice guy who was well-liked. The Judean crowds did not demand his death because they felt deeply affirmed by Jesus. The oppressed peasants in Galilee did not walk away from Jesus in John 6 because he kept affirming their self-worth and best efforts. Jesus was killed, hated, and rejected because to encounter Jesus was to encounter the crushing majesty and terror of grace. Grace that convicts and kills and then, and only then, makes alive. To encounter Jesus was to encounter the horror of the holiness of God, the weight of the very Word of God - a Word that always divides the world. Grace is not the divine affirmation of your individual worth. Salvation is not a self-improvement project. Jesus is not your life coach. Grace brings death. It is, to be sure, a death that gives way to life. But don’t sugar coat the death part. Jesus speaks a word to each of us, and that word is a sword which kills, and breath that gives life. 

Our world has become bored with Jesus. Christians have become blind to Jesus. And uncomfortably often, we Christians like it this way. For if the wild and uncontrollable Jesus were to be let loose on the world - well, what would everybody think? If we were to see him as He actually is - well, that would expose our lukewarm-ness, our uselessness, our tepid obedience, our faithlessness. He would expose our obsession with being well-received, well-thought-of, with winsomeness. Make no mistake, Jesus was not winsome. No real prophet or apostle ever was. Jesus spoke a word intended to provoke a response. He was the least boring person who ever lived, and we must recover this Jesus - he is the only Jesus there is. 

Grace crushes. Grace drags you out into the middle of the woods and kills you. Grace will make you absolutely crazy. 

As we turn our attention to the final week of Jesus’ life in this season leading to Good Friday and Easter, may we see him anew. May we leave our Sunday worship disturbed and intrigued and perhaps, offended. May we leave our bible readings in the gospels troubled by a renewed and faithful vision of Jesus as he actually is: the Grace that kills and makes alive, the Salvation that destroys and remakes, the living Word of God. 

Sex, Men and Fruitfulness

I came to my garden, my sister, my bride, I gathered my myrrh with my spice, I ate my honeycomb with my honey, I drank my wine with my milk. Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love!

Song of Solomon 5.1

Note: These are some collected thoughts from a handful of opportunities I’ve had to address the topic of sex with men in a few different settings over the last few months. Some of this is directly from my notes on those occasions, some is later reflections. There is much more to be said for both men and women with regards to these things but, as I said, I was addressing men. 

We are living in an age that is at war with sex. I believe this to be so even as the sexualization of everything proceeds unabated. But even that characterization isn’t quite right. Sex has at its core the mutual delight of difference. These differences carry with them eternal responsibilities, pain, difficulty, and selflessness. This is simply to say that sex is like all the other glories God intends to give his children: beauty, delight and joy tethered to work and responsibility and prudence. Our secular culture, ever attempting to untether delight and beauty from God and his words have reduced sex to some sort of disenchanted pleasure - to sever the fruit from the tree. 

Sex was always meant to be a weighty and glorious responsibility. For men, in particular, it was designed to be linked to virtue and character and hard work and fruitfulness and skill. Sexual desire was designed to be a remarkably powerful engine driving men to become better men - to be men worthy of a woman’s love, her body, and her trust. Here is the powerful and wonderful desire meant to turn a slob of a man who spends too many hours shooting aliens on a screen or smoking lots of weed, into someone with professional skills (able to make some money anyway), some measure of hygiene and responsibility, strength, and a modicum of honor. I was designed to see a particular woman, to desire that woman, and to become the sort of man who might be worthy of that woman (one who might be able to provide for, to protect, to even lead that woman). Too many Christian men have been taught to see their sexual desire as a bad, perhaps merely organic thing which exists to be kept at bay. But it is actually an engine meant to drive men towards goodness and virtue and strength. You were supposed to see someone strange and beautiful and gloriously different. She was supposed to be difficult to attain to, to be worthy of. There is supposed to be a father nearby making access to this different someone reasonably difficult. And that good, often groaning desire, was to drive you towards godliness and the delights and difficulties of marriage. Difference and Work and Fruitfulness lay at the heart of good human sexuality. 

But there is a deep war happening with all of this. That war is the motivating force beneath abortion, homosexuality, ambiguous sexuality (ambu-sexuality?), pornography and hook-up culture. These are all, ultimately a war against God himself, but they are the corrosive agents destroying the good desire of sex and replacing it with fruitlessness, futility and the death of glory and the delights of sex for men. 

The war on sex is aimed at cheapening sex, neutering sex, and destroying sex. Sex is cheapened by making erotic pleasure cheap. Hook-up culture, romanticized visions of relationships and the ever-lowering standards of what is required of men in marriage gut sex of its power to compel men towards becoming faithful, virtuous, and economically fruitful. When sex is easily accessible outside of marriage and one-night stands become the norm, Sex gets reduced to an individualized experience of short-term pleasure without any required investment or responsibility. When sex is reduced to the fulfillment of some feeling of romantic attachment, its value is reduced exponentially. Many Christians, holding to the biblical norm of marriage as a prerequisite for sex, cheapen the intended cost of sex when entering into the covenant of marriage is simply about a set of romantic feelings two people have for one another. Marriage is romantic, but it is also an economic arrangement. It is religious. It is about raising Godly children. All of these things matter, and a man should be the sort of man who can provide for a family as well as disciple children and lead a family to worship God in Jesus Christ. To reduce the standards a man must attain to simply “evoke romantic feelings” is to reduce the power and meaning of sexual desire. The cost of sex should be a lifetime of responsibility and provision and love, not a fleeting and conditional attraction. Cheap sex erodes the motivating power of sexual desire. 

Sex is neutered as the fruit of sex and their attendant responsibilities are cut away. Fruitless sexual pleasure does this. Pornography, in addition to its many attendant pathologies, offers a short-term satisfaction of the longing to see a woman without the difficult prospect of having an actual relationship with real conversations, real disagreements, real commitments and all the devastating vulnerabilities that come with marriage. It allows a man to find some measure of sexual satisfaction without the threat of rejection, failure or the need to become the kind of man who is desirable. When you consider the billions of dollars being spent by some of the most creative and smart people on the planet to make pornography ubiquitous, normal and free its hard not to see that a real war is being waged against the real fruit that can come when a man pursues a woman by his own growth as a man. Add to this the almost sacramental nature in which abortion is defended by Secularist politics as a fundamental human right, and it becomes clear that fruitlessness has become a strategic goal to both business interests and the political powers. When the atrocities of the abortion process can be hailed as a vital human good or even a necessary condition of equality and freedom, then the world has been flipped upside down, evil is celebrated and goodness is derided.

Sex is destroyed as the dance between two fundamentally different and yet perfectly fitted beings is reduced to an incidental and unnecessary condition for sex. Paul describes homosexuality in Romans 1 as sexual desire turned in on itself. A man was made to delight most in all the ways that a woman is not like him - both physically and otherwise. He was made to see and desire everything about a woman that indicates her fruitfulness. Homosexuality robs sexuality of its “sex-ness”, the beauty of difference coming together. As gender is reduced to internal “feelings”, the manifest physicalness of sex is destroyed. If a man is simply a being who wants the identity of a man, then there is no such thing as a man. If a woman is simply the result a person willing themself to be a woman, then sex is not substantively real. It is destroyed. 

But Jesus Christ came to destroy the works of the Evil One. He has done so by accomplishing the forgiveness of all our sins - all of them, even our sexual sins, our twisted sexual desires, our attempts to short-circuit the design and nature of sexual satisfaction. He died for your sins that you might be forgiven. But he was also raised, and sent his Spirit that we might - that our nature might be restored. He came to restore sexual desire and the fruits it was meant to produce - virtue, honor, courage, cutlure-making work, and the marvelous intimacy that unfolds over a lifetime of marriage.  

Some Reflections for Ash Wednesday and Lent

Began our Ash Wednesday service and the beginning of Lent with this reflection:

We’ve gathered tonight to commemorate Ash Wednesday which officially marks the beginning of the season of Lent. This may seem strange to some of you, since we are a Protestant, Confessionally Reformed, Presbyterian church and that all simply means that our whole tradition was started as a great Protest against many of the odd and gnarly distortions the Catholic Church added to the teachings of Scripture and early church Fathers. The most central of which was the great loss of the doctrine of Justification by Faith. You’ll also note that we are not Anglicans (though I admire much in that tradition). Furthermore, Lent and Ash Wednesday have proven themselves throughout the centuries to be fertile soil for the kind of self-righteous religiosity and merit-earning that plagues almost every aspect of human endeavor. We love to find ways to make ourselves holy. So, create a season of fasting, add some ashes and dust, sprinkle in some instagram and facebook and here you have the potential for a rather explosive mix of just the sort of thing that the Gospel stands against.

So let me begin our evening with a brief explanation of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how it fits into the larger picture of what we’re up to in the world as Christians. The church calendar is not the property of Catholics. Different parts of the Reformed tradition have used different parts of the church calendar for centuries. We celebrate Advent and Christmas and Good Friday and Easter and Pentecost. I love the reminder each year when we come to what’s boringly called “normal time” of how marvelously boring and quiet the normal Christian life is intended to be. The Church calendar is meant to be a tool of discipleship. A means of marking our years by the life, death, resurrection, reign and promises of Jesus instead of the myth of secular time- where we just go in a circle and nothing really matters. In one sense we are here celebrating Ash Wednesday for the same reason we celebrate Advent and Christmas and all the rest - because Jesus is King, he is the Lord of Time, and our lives and every part of our lives find their whole meaning in the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and promised coming of Jesus the Lord.

So what is Ash Wednesday and Lent all about, and why is it so dangerous? The whole season of Lent, Ash Wednesday included, is a season of repentance. It is a season where we are reminded of the most basic of Christian realities - Jesus has called us to repent of our sins. Sins that lead to death. Sins that have been paid for by Jesus and forgiven through his death on the cross. Why is this so dangerous? Seasons of repentance can easily become seasons of self-righteousness. They become seasons where I show that my sorrow over sin, my willingness to fast, and get very introspective is evidence that I’m really a rather righteous fellow. This, by the way isn’t biblical repentance. Biblical repentance begins from the place of recognizing the centrality of the cross, our forgiveness and the mercy of God. We confess our sins, because they have been paid for, because God is merciful. So this season is meant to teach us the joy of learning the sweet pattern of repentance for sin, trusting to God’s mercy, and living freely as his people - the distortions of this season tend to do the opposite. They send us spiraling into ourselves, our motives, our subconscious motives underneath our motives, and what our dad said to us when we were 7 that made us do all of it. So friends, Repent of your actual sins - the ones in the Bible. God has promised (and he never lies) to forgive our sins joyfully. Learn the habit of repentance during this season of recognizing the horrid nature of sin and the far-more-glorious freedom of God’s forgiveness. We gather on this Ash Wednesday to remember the worst things in the whole world: sin and death - and to, in a rather counterintuitive move, laugh because of our baptism. So may we sing, confess our sins, remember our pardon, remember death- even put it on our foreheads - our dustiness apart from the gracious life of God and then, and most importantly remember our baptisms. 

We will not end this night simply meditating on our sin and death. We end this night remembering our baptism. The most important reality to reflect on in all our repenting and all our reflections on death is baptism. Tonight, and this whole season and with it, the whole of the Christian life is fundamentally about Baptism. We repent of sins as Christians. We reflect on death as Christians. Do not use this season to think of sin as those who are not redeemed by Jesus. Do not use this season to reflect on death as those who are without eternal and pervasive and unbreakable hope. In our baptism we are united with Jesus. In our baptism, we have already died. In our baptism, our sins - all of them - are already washed away. In our baptism death becomes sleep, sins are already paid for, and we are raised with Christ over the power of sin and the sting of death. 

The Freedom of Not Knowing

The secular humanism (read: unbelief) at the center of our current cultural problems has left us with much chaos - and a slurry of societal anxiety and fear to go along with it. This fear and chaos and anxiety all intensifies every time God, in his kindness to all of us, gives our world troubles that expose our frailties and ignorance. We live in a society that is currently, by and large, in the business of running as far away from the fount of living waters (Jeremiah 2) as it can get. This means that we’re all in a hurry to abandon the source of all wisdom and knowledge (both moral and otherwise). This is increasingly leaving our well-endowed society with nothing but folly, fear, and a kind of insidious pride that eats away at everything. We are left, as a whole in the condition described by my father-in-law as he commented on an unfortunate waiter at a dinner in Chicago as “enthusiastically incompetent.” We have become like the angry and foolish child insistent about what we do not actually know much about. We keep trying to manage or even control what we barely understand. We have rebelled against faith in God - his existence, his strength and his goodness, and thus his words. This leaves us in the precarious position of scrambling to find certainty somewhere, anywhere we can find it - even if it is a remarkably poor substitute. 

You see, faith in God - certainty concerning his goodness, his strength, his love, his words- leaves all kinds of wonderful room for uncertainty elsewhere. Faith in God is, in part, a confession that we cannot control the world - viruses, temperatures, our mother-in-law’s mood at dinner. A society isn’t left to scramble to find substitutes. You aren’t haunted by the existential dread of all the scary things you don’t know and what you can’t manage or control. You don’t have to cover your unknowing with a kind of performative scientific or moral hubris. All of this scrambling and existential fear and anxiety works through a society like ours and quickly devolves into an overzealous dependence on what we feel. Don’t get me wrong, our feelings, or better -our affections - matter greatly, but they were are to be sunk deep into what we know, what we trust. They are to be rooted in the knowledge of God. 

C.S. Lewis noted an important distinction between what he called science and scientism. I think this distinction illustrates what I’m hitting at above. Scientism is the insecure cousin of science. This insecure cousin roots our knowledge, moral and otherwise, in a place where it can never thrive. It grounds our understanding of what is good and noble and wise in profoundly unstable soil, namely our own knowledge or observations of the world around us. Science doesn’t do this. It was intended to move from something solid and certain (God) out to observe the world around us. It observes, it marvels, and yes, seeks to carefully and humbly use what we learn. Scientism assumes (because it must) a kind of mastery over what it sees and then seeks to manage and control that world. Not only is this hubris of the worst sort - it is also deadly. It is deadly because it cannot acknowledge what it cannot see. It can’t cope with the impossibility of control. It can’t acknowledge that there is simply far more to learn and see about a thing than we will ever be able to know or see about a thing. Events over the past 2 years have exposed the great problem of scientism. It attempts to control and manage again and again with a kind of certainty and an expectation of success without ever acknowledging its own limitations, generally vastly underestimating what it does not understand. 

There is a big hill on our family’s land near Pine, CO. I’ve hiked around it and on it. I’ve seen it covered in snow in the winter, fluttering with life in the spring and summer, and (my absolute favorite) accented by changing aspen leaves in the fall. I’ve seen elk roaming along it, a bobcat, and even the rare bear. I’ve hunkered down in my son’s remarkably well-built fort on its steep side. But sitting here across from it now, I am keenly aware of the vastness of what I do not know about this hill. I observe, enjoy, even use that hill, but there is far more I don’t know about the goings-on of that hill than what I do know about it. I know very little about the interconnected ecosystem represented on its slopes. I don’t know about the history of people who may have explored there, what kind of snakes I step past (usually with a very manly squeal and a light jump), or what lives in the dirt up there. This is our way in the world. For example, while we know far more about the human body and our own psychology than we did 50 years ago, we actually know boatloads less than there the body of knowledge to be known about these things. We can observe, experiment, delight in, and use all of this knowledge we do have, but we should do so knowing that there is far, far more to be known - and a lot of that knowledge might be very pertinent to our current troubles. Scientism says things like “I believe in science” without knowing what science is actually for. It simply lacks the wisdom and humility of being far less certain about what we think we know. If this is true for the human body, and I don’t think that’s disputable, then how much more so for things like the climate, or social problems or even seemingly simple things like family dynamics at Thanksgiving dinner. Without the knowledge of God and faith in his word, the knowledge of our unknowing is existentially intolerable. We may confess with our mouths that we love mystery, but we can’t handle a world out of our control. We will desperately scramble to find some relief from the overwhelming anxiety that plagues our culture. (I’ll point out Edwin Friedman’s brilliant description of this communal problem in A Failure of Nerve). 

But Christian. You need not fear what you do not know. You need not adopt the fears of this secular age - either out of some ill-advised empathy or the temptation towards unbelief. No - not only need not, you must not. Rest in the good certainty of the knowledge of God. Find roots in the confession that He is good and strong and that his words are True. Let your roots sink deep into the simple confession that He is there and that he is not silent (as Schaeffer said). Then, from those roots, learn to humbly see the world, to marvel at its beauty and complexity, to tremble, to even be troubled by what you see - but do so from the good ground of knowing the God who is there.  

The Heart of God Towards Sinners

A few weeks ago I was standing on a beach next to the Hood canal in Washington State. A few families were there with kids running around and the air was cool with a kind of foggy mist that seems to uniquely cover the Pacific Northwest like a kind of cooling blanket. The sky above was mostly clear with the sun setting behind the Olympic mountains to the west. I was struck by the beauty of that place and that moment in a way that those kinds of places do. I asked again my very favorite question to ask in those moments, one of the most important questions any of us can consistently ask: What must He be like? The laughter of the children, the beauty of the sky’s colors, the glory of those strange mountains juxtaposed with the ocean water at their feet all combined to overwhelm me with a sense of gratitude and joy. 

A.W. Tozer famously said in his opening to The Knowledge of the Holy: What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.  C.S. Lewis spun Tozer’s question on its head saying: “I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.” If you’ll allow me to reconcile two would-be friends, I think both questions to be of remarkable importance. Lewis’ concern must serve as the foundation. God is not whomever we make Him out to be, nor is He shaped by our opinions of who He should or shouldn’t be. God is the one unchangeably absolute person in the universe. As He reveals his name to Moses in Exodus 3:14, “I AM WHO I AM” Therefore what he thinks about us, his creatures, is of infinite importance when we consider our own lives. But Tozer’s point is that our own thoughts about God should, no must, conform to His own and should therefore be submitted to what He says in Scripture. And what He says concerning his own people- the people who cry out to him, who repent of their sins and plead for mercy and help, is simply and incomparably wonderful. 

As we have worked our way through the book of Romans over the past couple of years we have seen some of the most glorious heights of His power and glory and work on our behalf in and through Jesus. Revealed in all of this is the heart of God towards sinners. What has been revealed in Romans, and indeed throughout the whole bible, is a God who delights to forgive sin. A God who eagerly welcomes discouraged sinners. A Father who does not wait for his children to get their life in order, but who goes to the uttermost to redeem them, forgive them and to bring them home. We must not minimize the horror of our sins, but we must never minimize the heart of God towards sinners who hate their own sin. As Paul reminded us in Romans 11:22, we must behold the kindness and the severity of God. His kindness towards us, his people, is staggering. His kindness towards us, his people, is the strength to renew weary hearts and anxious minds. His kindness towards us, his people, is steel poured into the spines of people who have grown afraid. 

And so for the next four weeks, in preparation for wrapping the final chapters of Romans this fall, we will meditate on this marvelous gentleness towards us, his people. I pray that you will join us to meditate on these truths, and then to worship in response to these truths as we gather on Sundays downtown. We will walk through 4 ways God reveals his heart towards sinners in the gospel:

1- The Wrath of God Against Sinners

2- The Victory of God for Sinners

3- The Intercession of Christ on Behalf of Sinners

4- The Restoration of God to Sinners

Come and have your minds shaped by God’s almost unbelievable words concerning people like you and me. Come and behold what God thinks about us. 

Justice isn’t Sexy

Biblical justice doesn’t play well at rallies. It’s not really inflammatory. It doesn’t go well with fits of rage or emotionally-driven appeals. It doesn’t get caught up in the moment. It fails utterly at our current obsession with empathy. If you’re looking for a quick remedy to an immediate social problem, biblical justice may be your best bet, but its going to be frustratingly slow. God is intent on stubbornly protecting the accused from unfair indictment. He refuses to favor the rich. He absolutely forbids showing partiality to the poor. And he is committed to a fair, repeated processes. For these reasons when you see people or courts (be it in online communities, real life churches or societies like ours) rushing to condemn and punish, you aren’t looking at justice. God’s justice is slow. God’s justice is patient. God’s justice is firmly planted in balanced and fair process. God’s justice accounts for all kinds of human madness and refuses to appease crowds, mobs, or our emotional needs. It isn’t designed to be emotionally satisfying. 

This is frankly frustrating and it is absolutely best. 

Furthermore, almost everyone agrees that we should love our neighbors. But start to define what that means in concrete terms and you’ll quickly see everyone set their hair on fire (masks or personal liberties, anyone?). I don’t know anybody who claims to hate justice, but start to define what that means and how we should go about pursuing it (whether in the context of our homes or in the broader arena of today’s social problems) and things will quickly come to blows. And this simply exposes a few things about us. We can all pretend to be unified about words, but the actual work of embodying those words is where the real division lay. Pursuing a good and just society is apparently desirable to almost everybody. Start defining the word “good” and “just” and you’ll find yourself quickly standing alone. But giving lip-service to ideas like justice and mercy isn’t good enough. God demands that his people pursue these things in concrete and meaningful ways. And he commands us to pursue these things in obedient ways. It isn’t enough to simply repeat slogans and it isn’t enough to simply do what seems best to us. He calls us to obedience, an obedience that actually bears real fruit in the world. 

So when we begin to see A) How gloriously frustrating the Bible’s presentation of justice is, and B) How much conflict such concrete ideas can generate in our day - we can be sorely tempted to either redefine our terms “justice” and “mercy” as to be more emotionally satisfying in a secular age, or instead to skirt the top of the trees and refuse to actually engage in concrete definitions of what these things mean in real-world obedience. So we either alter our definitions in unfaithfulness or we refuse to define them concretely in unfaithfulness. Add to this the embarrassing truth that secularism and therefore secular societies are fundamentally incapable of coherent definitions of either justice or mercy (which makes these things all the more controversial - people want definitions independent of faith in God and obedience to the Scriptures while we must insist on both God and the authority of Scripture.)  If we are to see our world marked by justice and mercy, then we must turn to what God has said. If we are to be a people who obey the oft-repeated command “Love your neighbor,” then we must learn how to do justice, how to love mercy and how to love our neighbors from a God who commands us how. 

Join us as we explore these themes through the whole of Scirpture starting this Sunday and continuing for the next four weeks: 

May 9 - The Foundations of Justice

May 16 - The Promise of Justice

May 23 - The Coming of Justice

May 30 - The End of Justice

Act Justly. Do Mercy. (At least for four weeks in May.)

“The Justice of God is fixed, universal, timeless and transcendent, but lawlessness is random, capricious and arbitrary.” 

On Sunday, May 9, Trinity will begin a 4 week series of sermons exploring the Justice of God and the justice God commands of his people. God commands us to “Act justly. Love Mercy.” In previous days, these two commands were erroneously set in opposition to one another. Our age has subverted the meaning of these commands completely. This has happened because we live in a what the Scriptures call a lawless age. We have rejected the authority of God and so rejected the authority of God’s laws.  To do justice and mercy there must be a universal standard, and One whose standard it is. Godlessness will always lead to injustice and a mercy that crushes and destroys. God’s justice and mercy will lead to joy and peace for all his people. 

And so, in an age that is increasingly without any such standards, and yet also an age demanding justice according to lawless and egalitarian standards - How are we to live as Christians? How are we to speak of the God who always does what is right — who always acts justly? At stake in these things are not only our own discernment about the current cultural climate, but also our understanding of the cross, of justification through faith, of the very meaning of heaven and hell. Also at stake are the more mundane, and sometimes far more pressing questions about adjudicating disputes between siblings, how to treat our employees or what to do when your kid wrecks the car. In other words, the question of “what is justice” touches the toughest social questions we face as Christians and the most mundane parts of our lives. And if we don’t do the work of establishing definitions and drawing a clear distinction between what our secular neighbors call justice and what God calls just we will find ourselves in rebellion against God himself.

Sin doesn’t just take the shape of direct rebellion against the commands of God, it also leads to the kind of confusion that calls evil “good”  and labels good “evil”. It leads to a world that labels injustice “justice” and calls justice “unjust”. Far too many Christians are inadvertently going along with this confusion and doing so in the name of love. But we are to act justly — according to God’s standards and we are to see clearly the nature of true justice. Such living and such seeing will create a people who love and celebrate mercy. 

I invite you to come with us over the month of May to worship the God who is just, to learn from the God who does justly, and to eat with the God who meets us with mercy. 

May God use these weeks toward that great end. May God grant us clarity on how to live faithfully before him. May God cause us to marvel at his justness. And may we be a people who learn to act justly and love mercy.  

Elders and Parishes

Trinity is publishing a series of short introductions to our church and her life together. It’s an attempt to provide at least some answer to the occasional question "Yeah, but why do you do that?". These will be available as cards on Sunday morning, but we're putting them here for safe-keeping:

We believe that the church has been given a rather remarkable job. In Matthew 28, Jesus commissioned his church to disciple the nations. God has sent the church to see the whole world brought into glad submission to King Jesus. This task is all the more remarkable because he gives them only two tools to use: the word (“teaching them all that I commanded you”) and the sacraments (“…baptizing them…”). There are a number of ways that we wield these tools, but most of all we wield them in faith, faith that the Spirit will take them up and transform people, cities, and nations. 

The Bible provides a particular structure and hierarchy to the church as she does the work God has appointed. God calls elders to shepherd the people of God with these tools exercising authority in the church for the good of her people. At Trinity we have different kinds of elders who do this in different ways. Our ministering elder oversees our weekly worship and preaching. Teaching elders work to apply the scriptures to different aspects of the church’s ministry whether through counseling, evangelism or musical leadership. Parish elders care for specific segments of the congregation through hospitality, discipleship and care. 

Hebrews 13 describes elders as those who will give an account for the members of the church. We’ve sought to organize our church such that this accountability (before God!) means that all the members of our church are connected to a specific elder. When our elders gather we spend a significant part of our time together praying for the needs of specific people in our church. When issues of church discipline arise, our hope is that our elders are close enough to the people involved as to address these things close up. Proximity to the actual members of the church is a priority as we consider the work God commands the elders of the local church to do. 

For many people this feels really strange.  Many churches have functioned largely as purveyors of religious goods and services with elders or pastors functioning as a kind of board of directors, voting on budgets and determining particular strategic initiatives with little organizational or relational connection to the actual members of the church. Furthermore, we live in an age that has lost the concept of authority and replaced it merely with power. We’ve grown to distrust authority because it fits prominent secular narratives about privilege and self-promotion. God’s way is better. He establishes authority in the church for the good of the people of the church. Elders use this authority as a responsibility to shepherd God’s people with Word and Sacrament, not lording their authority over others, but using their authority to promote holiness and the Glory of God in the lives of people. They serve, they feed, and they protect. This is the work of biblical shepherding. 

When a person joins Trinity, they come under the care of our elders and usually under the specific care of their parish elders. Parishes meet for various functions throughout the month. In addition to these dinners, bible studies, and other get-togethers, parish elders pursue regular meetings with individuals and households. They are available to meet with members of their parish. They help direct diaconate support towards specific fiscal and physical needs of the people under their care. 

Where the church devolves into worship experiences and programs she loses her soul and forsakes the mission God has given her to disciple the nations. God has appointed shepherds to lead the church in worship, to care for the people God has brought into the community and to nourish the church with the Scriptures, bread and wine while washing her in the waters of baptism. This is the aim of the church:  the discipleship of the nations. This is the means of the church: Word and Sacrament. And the elders are those who wield that means for the formation of God’s people. 

Asking the Bible Questions

Here at Trinity we continue to encourage everybody to read their bibles. In the scope of things given by God to encourage the saints, and to build and sustain the faith of God's people I'd place bible reading and prayer second only to gathering with the church for worship each week. In other words, it's really, really important. In counseling anyone who wants to live well in the world: Worship with God's people, read the bible & pray are the soil out of which everything else should grow.

But what should we do when we open our bibles? Well, I'd begin by just reading. "Oh begin!" was John Wesley's exhortation to his fellow pastor when it came to calling him to read. God has set before us a meal to eat and be nourished by. Sometimes you have extended time, sometimes you only have a few minutes, but make coming to this meal and eating a priority. And when you come, come in faith - particularly believing that the bible describes God and the world and you "right side up." Sin individually and at a societal level has turned our understanding of the world upside down and encountering the bible's teaching about sex or gender or judgment or grace can be jarring. Let God correct you in the text. Finally, as you begin to read and listen to the scriptures, it can be helpful to be guided by a few questions. Here are some questions I've found fruitful as I read, whether I have 20 minutes or an hour:

1) What is it I'm reading? (Context, Genre)

Is this a letter or narrative or poetry? What can I know about when it was written and for what purpose? Understanding what we've picked up to read is important to understanding the meaning of what we're reading. Take a few minutes when starting a new book of the bible to get a basic lay of the land and discover what exactly it is that you are holding in your hands. Then as you progress each day, remind yourself what you're reading. We've been given a plethora of resources to aid in learning this information - study bibles, the Bible Project, commentaries. A few minutes here will help you see so much more of what the bible is saying.

2) What preceded this bit of text?

If you find yourself in Romans 11, its important to remember what was in Romans 10 (and 9 and 3 and 1). Scripture does not exist in isolation from other portions of scripture. That verse you really like is connected logically to the verses that came before and after. Take a minute to remember what's come before what you've taken up to read today.

3) Does this point me to anything else I've read in Scripture before?

The bible is always quoting and pointing forward and backward to other parts of the bible. The work God is up to in history is filled with promises and types and fulfillments that help us see numerous layers to what God is saying and doing in the bible. Think back to what you've read before - anything oddly familiar? Use those handy cross-references in the margins or at the bottom of the page- here are gifts given to us that are worth their weight in gold.

4) Are there any clear logical connections or arguments in this text that I should take note of?

The bible argues. Look for words like 'because', 'therefore'. 'in order that' and 'if...then' these help trace the logic behind the bible's arguments. Also take note of how stories are told and in what order they are told in. Look for odd details that seem out of place. This is how the bible argues. Learn to pay attention to these things as you read, and get curious.

5) What does this text tell me about God?

Be constantly asking the question: What must He be like? This is the main thing about every part of Scripture, it reveals to us the character and actions and words of God. May this question undergird all of your reading of Scripture (and frankly your whole way of viewing the world). If you are looking you'll see things that comfort you and disturb you and confront you about who He is and what he does all over the bible. See him as he actually is in the text, not as you want him to be or as you think he should be, but as he actually is. Our family asks this question every time we sit together to read the bible as a family - what does this psalm, story, letter, promise, warning, judgment tell me about the character of God -about what he loves and hates, about how he acts, about his power? This question has borne more fruit in my life than almost anything else.

6) In what ways does this text confront me or the world around me?

If the bible is right side up and often times my way of thinking or feeling or desiring is effected by sin, then I should find myself surprised and confronted when I read the bible. The same is true with our secular culture. Take note of the ways that the bible is out of sync with how I naturally feel or think or the world around me feels and thinks.

7) What surprised me about this text?

Take note of places where something surprises you in the bible. And, you should look to be surprised. Where does something happen that shocks you or offends you? Does Jesus say something that delights you, or makes you laugh? Does God do something that causes you to throw up your hands in shock or incredulity? Don't blow past these things, take note of them and think on them.

Lastly, pray. Pray before you read. Pray while you read. Pray after you read. The Spirit loves to illumine the words of God to help us see, to love, to worship, to repent. Pray that God would cause you not only to see and understand the words on the page, but also to learn how to delight in the words and the commands of God.

For Further Reading:

Theopolitan Reading, Peter Leithart

Through New Eyes, James Jordan

Reading the Bible Supernaturally, John Piper

Beholding and Becoming

G.K. Beale has written a wonderful book with a wonderful title: We Become What We Worship. His idea picked up from a variety of places throughout the Scriptures, but most explicitly in Psalm 115 and Psalm 135, is that transformation happens in the context of worship - and that our vocation of image-bearers is part and parcel of what it means to be human. In other words, you will always image what you worship. If you worship the triune God you will reflect his image, you will become like him. If you worship other gods, then you will reflect them. The secular gods will produce secular Christians. Which explains a whole bunch of what's happening to the church in our day.

Paul develops this idea a bit further in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4. There he links this becoming to beholding. In 2 Corinthians 3:18, he says, "And we all with unveiled face, beholding (or reflecting) the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness..." He goes on chapter 4 to link this "glory of the Lord" explicitly to the "face of Jesus Christ." His point is not simply that we become like what we worship, but that we become like what we look at.

Much of pastoral work is meant to be ruthlessly practical. How do we live Christianly in the world? It is about practice and life and relationships and living Godly lives under the reign of God in the world. The bible speaks in the most earthy ways imaginable to almost every human relationship and institution and when it doesn't speak directly to a thing, it lays out principles and ideas that are applicable. It is authoritative to everything it addresses, and it addresses everything.

But there is another, vital, non-negotiable aspect to pastoral work and to the life of the Christian that is easily lost or buried under the deluge of practical questions. We are called to behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. I don't think this means some sort of abstract existential "beholding." When Paul describes this process he is explicitly talking about the reading of the Scriptures in 2 Corinthians. We behold Jesus by actually looking at how the text of Scripture describes Jesus. Be it through the law and his fulfillment of it. Be it through the types that give us the meaning of his coming or even more clearly through the actual descriptions of his work and person given to us in the gospels. There is enormous value in simply looking at Jesus and discovering who he is - as he actually is. The Spirit of God takes this seeing and transforms us into Jesus' likeness. This will involve denying our imaginings of what we think Jesus is like, or who we think Jesus is like and coming to terms with the actual contours of who he really is, in the bible. We will be confronted with a Jesus who did things and said things that seem remarkably unChristlike. He was at times harsh, at times gentle - and often gentle when we expect him to be harsh and vice versa. But we will not be served if we come to the gospels with our own pre-packaged understanding of who Jesus is or what Christlikeness means. We must come as children to discover and to see who he really is.

As we head into the final weeks leading up to Good Friday and Easter, may we be compelled to go to the Scriptures and behold the One we worship again. May the stories of Jesus' final weeks surprise us and shock us. May we be fascinated again at his words and actions, scandalized by his authority and his demands, and stunned by his grace.

May God open your eyes to behold marvelous things in his word.

The Narrow Way is Expansive

I've been to Glacier National Park 3 times in the last 4 years. It's not easy to get to. It's not on the way to anywhere. I go there, and will continue to go there, because I love gasping as my heart leaps through my chest and I'm reminded of how remarkably small I am - cosmologically speaking. I've been to a handful of places in my life that caused me to stop and weep as I get about as close as imaginably possible to what C.S. Lewis said we all secretly long for: not simply to see the beauty but "to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

I've been on a handful of hikes in the park and my favorites inevitably lead out of the trees into sweeping vistas, huge drop-offs and very narrow trails. It's always a bit disorienting as you try not to fall to your death as you resist looking down so you can keep your eyes on the scene in front of you. My first time on the Highline trail was a doozy. The trail had shrunk to about 3 feet wide with a drop of a few hundred feet and you could see mountains for miles. I found myself involuntarily whispering "My God! My God!" as a kind of overflowing prayer of gratitude while also becoming increasingly aware of how far down I was looking. Oddly enough, I didn't think, even for a second, "This trail is terribly confining - so narrow." Also, and perhaps more odd given the nature of our current age, I wasn't caught up into deep reflection on who I am and how I can finally be free to express myself and my desires. No, in that moment and in that place I was free. Free to forget about myself almost entirely and to marvel and to tremble at the sheer size and weight and color and hardness of reality as it exists completely independent of my own anxieties, lusts or insecurities.

Modern American life is obsessed with the liberated self. Selves unencumbered by nature or God or God's law. So much of our recent and ongoing arguments about equality and justice and gender and sexuality are so muddled up by false notions of liberation that we can't get anywhere. We get sucked into staring at our own navels or other people's (which gets a little weird) and find ourselves fighting in a vacuum of our own insecurities, anxieties and emotions. It is frankly like standing on that trail, closing my eyes, trying to feel something inside and move accordingly. But we are forgetting that there is a world that is simply there, with a particular order and design and beauty, that is, quite frankly, independent of what you think of it. It was made and ordered by God. He didn't make it for you. It wasn't custom designed with your preferences in mind. It's not a blank canvas on which you are to write your own story. It is a world with an order, a beauty, a morality hard-wired into it and then - grace upon grace, described and revealed by God in his book. He gives us laws fitted for this world He made. He gives us wisdom so as to help us all not be fools in this world He made. He even gives us stories and songs and promises and warnings. He has made a world and placed us in it. And it is a world designed in all kinds of ways that you are absolutely going to hate. You'll find whole bits of it designed in poor taste. Big nasty smells and poor color choices. Where he designed the trail 3 feet wide, you'll have expected 6. He likes to bring hail and rain at exactly the worst moments. But here's the thing about this world that He made.... He didn't ask for design input from you. He didn't get anyone to sign off. There were no safety or equity inspections.

Given a world like that, we are all confronted with two staggeringly different approaches. One, increasingly attempted in our current society, is to put me and my feelings- and by extension humans and humans' feelings at the center of everything. I become the measure of beauty, liberation, equality and justice. We redefine the world and ethics and beauty and sexuality and gender and justice around ourselves. At first this feels so expansive! We get what we want! It feels so free! But such a world is so terribly small. In the end I find myself alone with my tastes, my preferences, my own self-righteousness, my own desires and my own foolishness. I can only be confronted by my own conflicting desires, other people's conflicting desires and the stubborn consequences of all these desires.

But another life is possible - actually its eventually unavoidable. It looks very, very narrow. It's filled with all kinds of doctrines and ethical norms and family structures and babies and endlessly mundane days and churchy people and early mornings with loads of laundry and blisters and learning to say no to yourself (a lot!). Its a whole life where you learn to bring your appetites and feelings and thoughts into line with something outside of yourself - and that is frankly hard, painful work. Learning to believe what God says, to trust what God commands - to bring your life and your appetites and your definitions into conformity with this Word seems, at times, restrictive and confining. But, I mean wow, it is beautiful. There are these marvelous turns where you behold something other than yourself and your own hopes and dreams and desires. Here is a joy rooted in something other than the endless pursuit of your own self-actualization. Here is sanity and liberation and an expansive beauty and joy that can only be found along a narrow road.

So may we give up endless quests to discover ourselves, and learn to lift our gaze to see the God who is simply and wonderfully there. May be overwhelmed with gratitude for a world with rules and a design that is put in front of us without our consent. May we tremble at the steep drops, gasp at the prominent vistas, and learn to enjoy the cool meadows. But above everything else, may we have the gift of forgetting ourselves.

Eros, Friendship and Cultural Accommodation

In a world straining for eros we have lost the meaning of friendship and are thus in danger of losing the heart of Christianity. The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis is a wonderful and insightful book. I commend it to you if you have not read it recently. In the book, he defines the nature of eros as two people facing one another. It is a kind of delight in the person of another. It makes much of the person with whom eros is shared. I delight in your delight. I savor and enjoy the person before me. Friendship, alternatively, is imagined by Lewis to be represented as two people facing something else and walking side by side. It is a shared delight in something outside of either person. It is an ambition aimed at something beyond or greater than either of them.

Our world is drenched with a kind of explicit and yet tepid sexuality. It is a distortion of eros that has taken over everything from entertainment to advertising for potato chips. Sex is everywhere, which is to say that one (potential) expression of eros has become the dominant motif of our culture. I say potential because sex is not equivalent to eros. Sex can still be bent further in on the self and thus lose its true eroticism - its real nature, love for another. In a culture like that one, we find that other forms of love - like Lewis' notion of friendship - atrophy and even die.

Love in our day has been largely redefined as giving someone good feelings, or avoiding making someone feel bad. It is, increasingly in our day, to make much of them, to make much of their feelings. In other words, where people are condemned for being unloving, it is increasingly more about how someone else felt rather than about their objective good (I realize here that it is possible to harm someone and for them to feel it emotionally - but it is also possible to seek someone’s real good and it feel really bad emotionally). In other words, we've come to define love in almost exclusively erotic terms. For me to love you, I must magnify you, magnify how you feel, and act accordingly.

Friendship isn't like that. It is surely patient and kind and slow to anger like all real expressions of love. But it is a kind of love that is aimed supremely at something else. It is concerned mostly with a third thing, a love shared by two people that delights in something outside of either of them. It is no wonder that in a culture pervaded by sexuality, that we've lost any conception of love that does not end in making much of the self. It is no wonder that preaching in our age has, in many places, distorted the message of the bible to make the gospel largely about how God makes much of me - and this is redefined as his love. It is no wonder that calls to behold the majesty of God, to consider the wisdom of God's law, to tremble before the terrible wrath of God and to reorder our lives in accordance with these things is seen as unloving or ineffective. When love can only be experienced as a distortion of eros - as a making much of me, then the call to behold and be chiefly concerned with someone gloriously big and sovereign who is not centered on your emotional well-being or fulfillment can seem like the furthest thing from love imaginable. And yet this is what Christian discipleship and Christian worship is supposed to do. When we accommodate the message of Christianity to a world like that one, we gut it of its true power: a power that can bring sanity and beauty and goodness. A power that lay in its ability to lift the gaze of self-obsessed people.

Cultural accommodation in a world consumed with the me and how I feel will mean recasting biblical Christianity in terms that make much of me or you and fails to confront us with the infinite superiority and worth of Jesus - and such a Christianity will never be truly good news.

What are we doing here? Worship at Trinity

Trinity is publishing a series of short introductions to our church and her life together. It’s an attempt to provide at least some answer to the occasional question "Yeah, but why do you do that?". These will be available as cards on Sunday morning, but we're putting them here for safe-keeping:

Here at Trinity, we believe that the worship of the church is the most potent thing that the church is commanded to do. This worship both transforms God's people and is the vanguard in God's work to renew the whole world. The strange thing about all this renewing and transforming work that occurs in worship is that it is not fundamentally oriented to people or to the world at all. It is fundamentally oriented towards God. We gather because God has called us. We confess our sins to God. We offer our praise to God. We listen to God speak through His word. We eat bread and wine provided by God. We are sent out by God wherein we give thanks to God. Sunday worship reorients us to God and the great work of Jesus in the gospel. And it is this reorientation that provides the means by which we and the world are renewed.

If you've been around churches much, you've likely experienced a lot of different approaches to the church's worship. Worship at Trinity may seem a little different to you. We follow a formal liturgy that is scripted for us each week. At the center of our worship, each week is the bible and the sacraments. The word is sung, read, prayed, and preached and every time we gather we eat bread and drink wine together. God calls us and speaks to us and feeds us - and in this process, we renew our covenant with God each time we gather.

All of this requires our participation. God speaks and we respond. God calls and we sing. We stand and kneel and raise our hands. For many in the broader church, worship has centered on a handful of professionals who provide an experience for attendees. But worship is meant to be work for all God's people. Work that renews. Work that is the fruit of grace, to be sure. But it is the work of God's people in his presence. Sundays should involve an ongoing conversation between God and people. Sundays should involve the whole person - our bodies, our voices, our minds, and our affections. Every part of us presented to God and engaged in the act of worship.

We sing a wide range of songs. You should pick up on old hymns as well as some newer music. But at the heart of our singing, you should hear scripture and particularly the psalms. We sing the Psalms because they are the headwaters for prayer and worship given to the church in the bible. We sing hymns and other songs because they testify to the Spirit's work throughout the history of the church.

Finally, you'll notice that you might be distracted by the people sitting and standing around you. You are not sitting in a dark room looking at a screen. You are surrounded by brothers and sisters, children and their voices (and the occasional toddler's yelp). This is very much on purpose. Worship is something we do together as a community that God has brought together. The church includes her children and we don't want them hidden away when we worship God. We believe that they are learning to worship Jesus alongside us, even when it involves challenging seasons for parents. Worship not only brings us into the presence of God, but it also binds all of us together as God's covenant family. Children, parents, friends, grandparents - all of us together. Sunday worship is not supposed to be a private experience between you and God. It's a family with all our distractions and joy and crying babies and pain and clumsy worship guides standing and singing and kneeling in a very physical and human practice. We come together from a whole slew of different contexts and backgrounds to sing and read and pray and break bread together in God's presence.

Welcome to Trinity. May God meet you here, right in the middle of his enormous gifts of word and sacrament, as well as in this growing community of people who are learning to love the good reign of Jesus, to seek the welfare of the city where God has sent us, and to worship the God who is worthy of all honor.

2 Questions... for Pastors, leaders of things, and Christians generally.

I find the right questions to be remarkably valuable. They can help to clarify points of actual disagreement and agreement (one of the more important tasks in our day). They can distill issues into their essence. The wrong questions will almost always get you the wrong answers and will muck up already cloudy conversations. But the right questions can create clarity and dispel anxiety in a way that few other things can.

In a truly helpful conversation with a few pastors from other churches a series of interconnected conversations about the church and this cultural moment was distilled nicely as one of the more stately fellows summarized nicely: "Its fine to disagree about the particular placement of the line for political resistance or social offense, so long as we can agree that such lines should exist and churches need to know how to find them." There has been a lot of back and forth in these months about the actual authority and role of the magistrate, societal health concerns, and how the church is to best love her neighbor and communicate that love. This conversation has run the gamut of topics from masking, and church gathering restrictions, to broader social issues like sexuality and race. For my own part, I've had to wrestle with a great deal of confusion about how to think biblically and theologically through these different and oddly interrelated issues. It hasn't helped that for decades I was a participant in an unofficial cultural movement of pastors and Christians who approached mission and evangelism from a perspective that was firmly committed to, as best we could, covering up or softening the offensive bits of biblical teaching in order to make sure that the gospel was the main thing left to offend people or compel people. Without getting too far into the remarkable limitations with such an approach. I want to propose two questions that I think are particularly important for churches and leaders of churches to consider right now. Two questions have served me well in the last few months and I think will be helpful as Christians consider what we're up to at this moment. They certainly aren't the only questions to be asked right now. But they should be in the mix.

Before I ask them, I want to point out a historical comparison Carl Trueman has made in his wonderful book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In it he argues that the most relevant age of church history for us to learn from at this particular cultural moment is the 3rd Century. During the third century, the church existed in a tenuous relationship with Roman society. There were occasional outbreaks of violence and persecution, but nothing of the sort that the church had seen earlier or would see later. Instead, the church's beliefs and worship practices were seen by the broader society as immoral, even evil. They were considered a threat to society and the good of their neighbors. The church learned to maintain her faithful witness during this period and it eventually gave way to significant conversions and a cultural shift in society. But she had to learn how to hold fast to what was objectively good and to do so while being perceived as the bad guys. I believe that this will increasingly be the challenge we face in the west. With this in mind, here are two broad questions we are considering:

1) At what point would you be willing to say ‘No’ to the powers-that-be (be it the local magistrate, the state or the Federal government - or landlords, other pastors, denominational leadership, etc.)?

There has been an abundance of helpful reflections offered encouraging the church to defer, when possible, to the authority of the magistrate (Here is one from Steven Wedgeworth and the Gospel Coalition. While I disagreed with some of his conclusions, I do think he framed the issues helpfully). From where I sit, almost no pastors I know needed that encouragement. There were very few pastors locally, publically raising questions about the authority of the magistrate to pass the ordinances that were passed on churches. And while granting that different circumstances may dictate different responses to various government mandates or laws, as well as recognizing that wisdom is essential to discern when to apply what principles from Scripture, almost all Christians admit that there is a point at which church leaders should resist laws and orders from those who bear authority. We may disagree on whether that line is 12 weeks into this pandemic or 12 months or 18 months. We may disagree on whether the point of resistance should come with mask mandates or attendance restrictions or banning public worship altogether. Finally, we may disagree on whether a pandemic killing less than 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 or 1 in 100000 justifies such restrictions. The point is to recognize that such a point of resistance exists - that there is a point at which Jesus requires the church to say, “No.” Perhaps it will be an issue unrelated to global pandemics and will instead have to do with regulations on what can be explicitly taught or who can or can't be hired. But what is that point? What theological principles will be determinative for you, your church and your leaders? Can you imagine what that line looks like and how your church’s leadership could arrive at such a point and what it would look like to lead your people at that cultural moment? It is important, I think, to add the further circumstance of public opinion here. When the church resisted Rome’s rule in the 3rd century they did so as a community perceived to be immoral and a threat to the public good. When churches in China resist government edicts that appear so obviously anti-religious from our distance, they do so as communities perceived to be enemies of their neighbors. Do not presume that such a point of resistance will come with anyone believing that you are doing anything other than making a selfish power grab or behaving in a way that is harmful to society and your neighbors.

2) What social, ethical or theological positions would you be willing to state, with biblical clarity (being willing to state what the bible says in the way the bible says it), knowing that such claims will lead to you and your church being deemed bigoted, evil, or unloving?

We live in an age where it is increasingly common to see traditional ethical or social dividing lines between secular people and Christian people become volatile. It is no longer deemed a moral oddity that Christians believe that homosexuality is a sin or that sex is given only to a man and a woman who are married, it is seen increasingly as a societal evil. The doctrine of hell and God's judgment is morally unacceptable in our day when applied as broadly as the law of God applies it. We live in a world comfortable with Christians who can articulate a softened vision of God's love or a vision of the Kingdom filled with people from every conceivable ethnic group (seen as a reflection of secularism's inclusiveness). But we live in a world where a real call to repentance for real sins is no longer seen as a religious oddity. It is increasingly perceived as a fundamental and divisive problem with the world. So, granted that there may be disagreement on where and how the best ways to articulate these calls to repent of sin and believe in Jesus, what are the points of contention you see where love requires we call our neighbors to repent and believe? The rub here will likely come in the issue of specificity. Our neighbors will not be offended by calls to repent of generic, ambiguous idolatry. They will be offended when you actually burn the idols. The gospel proclaims that sins have been atoned for in the death of Jesus. But these are not ambiguous unnamed sins, they are real rebellions against actual commands given to us by God. Those commands are likely to get everybody in trouble someday.

A Chaotic Unity

Worship simultaneously reflects and creates cultures. 

Yesterday, the National Cathedral hosted an inauguration prayer service. It featured representatives from about as far and wide as could be imagined - at least with regards to religious traditions. Muslim Imams prayed alongside Jewish rabbis who prayed alongside liberal Protestants including a transgender pastor from Longmont. It was intended as an expression of unity in prayer to (what was called upon at the close of the inauguration) “the great name of our one shared faith.” It was an attempt to give expression to and perhaps even garner some sense of national unity at a time in which our nation is deeply divided and for whom the last 8 months have been marked by social chaos. And while the attempt was unity, the affect was chaos. Disparate voices all barely connected to their own religious traditions praying in the name of some shared faith. The worship of the people will reflect and create culture. 

If you read the Bible much, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that if you pray to Brahma among the other unnamed monotheistic gods on Sunday night you will get chaos and a Buffalo Man standing in the same spot at the Wednesday night prayer meeting. The worship of the people will both reflect and create culture. 

Religious chaos reveals cultural chaos, more than that, religious chaos creates cultural chaos. 

Paul, in Ephesians 5 pushes for a different sort of unity. He has talked about the ethics and truthfulness of unity in chapter 3. A beautiful (if difficult) combination of truthful speaking and gentle humility towards one another.  But in chapter 5 he begins to describe the practices of this unity, particularly a call to sing to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Here the unity that the work of Jesus creates among a people redeemed by him is sustained and expressed in the practice of singing to Him and to one another. This is one of the many reasons the people of God gather to sing to Jesus every Sunday in our worship: It is an expression of and the creation of real unity. Jesus calls and saves a people who then, in his name (and not some other unnamed god), sing - this is a sort of confession of faith (that we are, despite appearances one) and the creation of that unity (we are singing together). You see, Worship both reflects and creates culture. But this isn’t simply something the church does for herself. She worships as salt and light in the midst of culture that has gone chaotic. Churches spread like salt throughout a city and a nation, calling on the Father in the name of Jesus, singing as one, and the cities and cultures are both preserved and even changed . When the church doesn’t gather, in force, to worship in the presence of God together - there is a cost to society, not just the church. 

We think this singing is so important at Trinity that we’re willing to gather together and practice. Practice doesn’t sound like fun, but we have a good and rowdy time gathered together, laughing and learning how to sing the Psalms in harmony and unity. This is both an expression of a real unity in the name of Jesus Christ, and a means by which such unity is sustained and grows. Worship both reflects and creates culture. 

Tonight we’ll be doing just that: singing psalms and learning how to do so with skill and rowdy joy. Join us for our monthly Psalm sing. 7pm in Arvada. Next month we’ll be downtown. 

You cannot use scotch tape and strip the gods of their names to pretend some national unity. You will only get chaos and madness. Choose which god you will worship. But if you worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Triune God who made heaven and earth, and who has come in Jesus to rescue us from our sins, conquer death and reign forever, you should count on something: He will not share his glory. All honor and glory and power is His and he will not share the podium with other gods. And he loves to teach us to sing together.