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.
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.
Worshipping Jesus in a Storm
One of the central tasks of Jesus’ church in the midst of any culture and all the cities is to gather for worship. It is a work of fidelity to our King, but it is also a work of love for our neighbors. You see, every culture is prone towards paganism, towards abandoning what is True to follow after lies. The church gathers and gives testimony to the True and the Beautiful and the Good in Word and Song and Sacrament. We do this every week for one another, in the presence of God and for our neighbors - even the ones who don’t believe.
An interesting part of this new season for Trinity is that we are gathering to do this work about a half block from the cultural and political center of our city and state. Nearly every festival, rally, protest and riot will pass a stone’s throw away (though, please, no one throw any stones.) Tomorrow there are scheduled protests and counter-protests and we will gather nearby, united by an all-encompassing allegiance to Jesus to sing together, to eat Jesus’ meal together and to proclaim what is central and true and real together. In a culture that is currently marked by outrage and counter-outrage, lies and half-truths, we come together to celebrate what is true and beautiful and good. In a world increasingly divided into identity groups and political tribes. We come together. I don’t think there is any more important work and it has been appointed by God that we get to do this work right smack dab in the middle of it all.
May we gather, sing the songs of our King, hear him speak in his word, and feast on his body and blood. We we be reminded of what is truly true and gloriously beautiful and profoundly good for Jesus is Lord and this is a marvelous time to be a Christian.
Kill the Dragon, Get the Girl
“Kill the Dragon! Get the Girl!”
This is the central story of Scripture. A dragon, a bride to be won, and a king who comes to accomplish this great end. It is the story of Christmas told by John in Revelation 12 with all the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse. We’ve sentimentalized the other gospel tellings with Christmas pageants and Peanuts Christmas specials, but John’s telling is strange and wonderful and terrible.
John gives us a dragon, a woman, and a child whose birth will mean the end of the dragon. There is a flood of rage, an open earth, and angelic warfare. The whole thing is pretty marvelous. At the center is the conquering of a dragon, and this is the meaning of Christmas.
The terror of dragons is no small thing, and the need for someone to come to rescue us from this particular dragon is great. Of all the troubles we might find in humanity, this is the root of them all. Here is our primal enemy, the serpent-dragon of the garden, the cursed one who seeks to devour and destroy. John tells us that this dragon has been doing two things from the very beginning: Accusing God’s people day and night and deceiving all humanity.
The dragon does not come like a bogeyman at night. He does not burn cities with fire or horde gold in mountains. No, his devouring work is done through accusations and lies. The Bible’s assessment of our troubles is far simpler and far more incisive than our current social, psychological and political assessments and solutions. Our trouble is that we have been and are still deceived, and that we stand accused.
From the beginning the great serpent has been twisting God’s words, undermining their authority, questioning their meaning, turning men and women to distrust what God says.. To twist God’s words is to twist our very understanding of God himself. In the garden the question stood - “is that what God really said?” Did he really mean that? And so, for centuries now, humanity has disregarded God’s words, mocked God’s words, dismissed God’s words, softened God’s words and otherwise failed to simply come and receive his words - all of his words.
This terrible deception has always had one great end, one great effect: to displace God from his place at the center of all reality, and particularly from his throne, from his authority. Man becomes the measure of all things. Men become the standard of righteousness, of justice, and of morality and love. In the past, paganism has masked this displacement with idols and Superman gods, but in our day secular humanism has made the displacement fixed and explicit. God and his religion, if he exists at all, exists to serve humanity and our ends.
Everyday this lie is told and embraced. Our great project of a humanistic utopia feels possible. With God’s standards out of the way, we might find ourselves to be righteous and moral and just. We might express love far better than some ancient religion with frightening moral judgments. So we sit in judgment on our ancestors for the deceptions they accepted, while embracing our own lies with even greater vigor.
In addition to this great deception, the dragon has stood before the Judge of all the Earth accusing us day and night. Humanity is deceived and so humanity seeks to cast off the words of God and so the Dragon points day and night in the presence of God at our rebellion. The trouble is that we really have sinned. We really do seek to be our own gods. His accusations are accurate. We have been deceived and we have warmly embraced these deceptions which are destroying us, our world and one another.
The story of Christmas told in Revelation 12 is that the coming of Jesus means the dragon is cast down and overcome. We feast for 12 days because the birth of this king marks the end of his deceptions and his accusations for all those who “dwell in heaven” - a code in Revelation for those who worship the Lamb. How is this dragon overcome? Two things are described as defeating the dragon’s work: The blood of this Child-King and the Testimony of God’s people.
First, the accusations of the dragon, before the throne are silenced. His accusations are no longer heard in God’s throne room. You see, they have all been paid for, they have all been atoned for with the death of this king on the cross. The dragon is cast out of the throne room because his accusations will no longer be heard by our God.
Secondly, the lies of the dragon are overcome by the truth-telling testimony of God’s people. When the church gathers to sing songs that are true, to confess things that are true, to hear the Word that is true, the dragon’s lies are overcome, his deceptions undone. When God’s people love God’s words and testify to God’s words and trust God’s words and obey God’s words in the midst of the nations, lies are shown to be lies.
This is, at least one reason why the gathered worship of the church is so vital to us and to our world: Here are a people who gather to give testimony to what is true. In a world overrun with humanistic lies, here is the truth declared and loved with joy and gladness. And in this repeated testimony of the Lamb’s people, the dragon is overcome.
So continue your feasting and celebrating on this 5th day of Christmastide. It is one more testimony in the midst of a world that only seems dark, of what is actually true: the light has dawned. The Dragon’s accusations have been silenced. His lies are, well, lies, for look! We have eggnog, and presents and Christmas lights. A Child-King has been born, whose blood has dealt utterly with our sin and who is the True Word, spoken by the Father and sung by his people.
Kill Children’s Church
A good sign of God’s blessing in scripture on a city is the sound of children’s laughter in the streets. For several decades now a lot of evangelical churches have been involved in a dangerous experiment wherein they sought to remove the sounds of children from their worship. It was an experiment thought up by church growth gurus who wrongly saw children as a distraction to the main event of church for parents and other attenders to the grand worship experience. It was excused because, as the thinking went, we can provide more effective ministry to these children and youth by pulling them out of worship with their parents. This experiment has been a dismal failure for parents and for children, while being wildly successful from a church-growth standpoint.
I say experiment because past generations didn’t do this. I grew up in a church during the 80s in which kids worshipped with their parents. There was a nursery and some classes for very small children, but everything was oriented around getting the kids into worship with their parents. We had Sunday School after the service. We had youth group on Wednesday nights. But the backbone of our life as a church was the gathering of the church for worship on Sunday morning - everybody together, young and old, in God’s presence. Most churches had a similar plan. But then, sometime during the 80s and 90s a lot of really large churches began championing age-segmented Sunday mornings as a way to grow your church and serve more people. Maybe we can get more people to come to church if we offer to watch and educate their kids for an hour was how the thinking went. This has been devastating to generational discipleship and covenantal worship.
A Barna survey released last year shocked a lot of us when we discovered that 64% of those raised in Christian churches leave the church in their 20s (https://www.barna.com/research/resilient-disciples). Organizations have surveyed the church-leavers over their reasons for leaving to try and help us all adapt to the sensitivities of these 20-somethings and their particular social and political concerns (https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/january/church-drop-out-college-young-adults-hiatus-lifeway-survey.html). I think this is dumb for a number of reasons, but dumb in the same direction we’ve been headed for several decades now. We evangelicals love, in the name of mission, to survey people who do not love the Jesus of Scripture as to why they don’t love the Jesus of Scripture and then make sure we adequately adapt our presentation and practice of what Christianity entails.
But the surveys don’t tell us much more than what the Bible does. Of course non-Christians or ex-Christians think a church or a religion is judgmental that maintains moral or ethical norms which fly in the face of our culture’s moral norms (or lack-of-moral norms). “Discovering” this in a survey is not a remarkable thing. If one is newly discovering that belief in Jesus and obedience to Jesus is incompatible with humanistic secularism then one probably had a remarkably thin understanding of what belief in Jesus actually meant all along.
I want to look at a different source of all this apostasy: kids’ church, specifically, kids going to children’s ministry and not worshipping with the rest of the church on Sundays. A few qualifiers.... I don’t mean to say that there aren’t remarkable and yet anecdotal exceptions to what I’m about to say. I don’t meant to say that there aren’t wonderful, godly, well-intentioned ministers leading some of these kids’ ministries. I also believe that there are a whole slew of ways that churches and Christian schools should provide opportunities to train and educate children. I just think that removing children from the worship of God’s people is fundamentally destructive to Christian discipleship - for everybody, young and old alike.
But kids’ church or youth church or whatever-clever-name-one-comes-up-with church (a title that indicates we don’t have a clue what the word “church” means) is a failed experiment. Many churches have taken their children (of all ages) out of worship for the past 40 years in the name of “age-appropriate” lessons, betraying a belief that the church’s worship is merely cognitive. They’ve separated the church by generations in order to have stylistic distinctions, betraying a belief that the church’s worship is mostly about your personal taste. They’ve taken children from parents for the most formative thing in the world: the liturgy of the church and so we have kids who haven’t grown up watching their parents humbly kneel in the presence of God and confess their sins. They’ve grown up and not seen their parents raise their hands in praise and honor. They’ve grown up without eating God’s meal of bread and wine with their parents and without seeing old and young together, as God’s people singing, reading, and listening to God’s word.
A few thoughts about all this, and the 64% of our kids who are abandoning the church and thereby abandoning the God who speaks to us in Scripture.
1) The church is charged with giving word and sacrament to God’s people (young and old). To remove children from the place where this work is fundamentally done (the gathered worship of God’s people) is to cut them off from the means by which God intends to feed them and nourish their faith. Kids’ ministries, in an attempt to feed God’s children, have ironically cut them off from the family table and has thereby led to the malnourishment of God’s children.
2) The primary place where your children will learn to worship God and to love his word is by watching you, their parents, worship God and love his word. The ground of all our worship in the rest of life is the gathered worship of the saints. In the name of teaching our children how to worship, kids ministries have cut them off from the fundamental place where God intends to teach his children how to worship.
3) If your understanding of church is largely shaped by age appropriate, stylistically and generationally distinctive worship programs, it is almost impossible for you to not be shaped to believe that worship is primarily about you and what you “like.” We inadvertently ingraining our children to believe that the worship of Jesus is about finding a bunch of people like them, in their age group, singing music they like and finding a communicator whose communication resonates with them - not too preachy, not too harsh, but authentic and like me. The center of their Christianity will not be God, his holiness and his word. The center of their Christianity will be them, their feelings, and their personal tastes.
4) We need the sounds of children in our worship. It may seem distracting, but when you recognize and learn to savor the blessings that God gives us in Scripture, then there are few sweeter sounds than an ill-timed yelp from a two year old during the sermon or prayer of confession. They are reminders of our deep and varied humanity as a people gathered for worship and most of all of God’s kindness to give his city children to do the yelping. Parents, your children are a gift to the church, even with their fussiness and discipline issues. Your work to discipline and to teach during worship is a gift to the church.
Worshipping with a few toddlers and a newborn is incredibly hard work. Teaching a 5 year old to manage a long-winded sermon (especially one of mine) is, well, effort. But this is the labor, the work, of parenting and discipleship: Teaching our children to worship with the saints in the presence of God. Taking children out of worship for their own private lesson and music robs parents of this effort-filled joy. It robs children of the feast of God’s people and it robs the church of one of God’s surest blessings.
At Trinity we encourage all parents to keep their kids during worship. During most seasons we will offer some care for children up through age 5 where we essentially help prepare these kids to worship with their parents, walking through the different parts of the liturgy and teaching them how to participate. But even this is meant to be temporary. Our hope is that parents will eventually stop utilizing this resource and bring their squirrelly, yelping 2 year old into the service with them.
We also provide a number of resources from bags filled with helps during the service, to some simple ways that you can practice as a family with your kids during the week to prepare them to worship with you on a Sunday. If it feels weird to practice for church, consider what’s at stake when we gather for worship.
Worship is about God. Christianity is about God. The church’s life and worship is centered in the person and work of God. It is a beautiful and wonderful thing to hear the cries of toddlers mingled with the singing of grey-haired saints and teenagers together in God’s presence. Do not rob your children of this glory. Do not rob yourself of this glory. Do not rob the church of this glory. Kill kids’ church and the expectation of kids’ church. Instead train your children, teach your children, but above all else, worship with your children.
The Good Terror of Christmas
When Isaiah saw God, his first response was to say, “Woe is me! I am lost...” Not many people say such things any more. We hear him speak in the Scriptures and almost no one says, “Woe is me!” Instead we go on at length about how I feel about the text. We stand in his presence in the gathering of the church (his Temple) and almost not one trembles in fear anymore, almost no one has an immediate sense of their need for atonement, we just complain about the music, or the temperature, or the preaching). We speak horrid words, trite words, ugly words, slanderous words in jest around a table, in some self-righteous political tirade on social media or in anger while driving never considering in whose presence we said such things nor crying out, “I am a man of unclean lips!”
Tozer once observed that there are few things more important to a person than what it is that comes to mind when they think of God (Lewis’ response to this notwithstanding). Those thoughts will either conform to reality (in other words, they will be true) or they won’t. And it is really important that they to conform to how the world actually is theologically, morally, physically.
There are few attributes of God more centrally attested in the Bible and yet so difficult to grasp as is the issue of God’s holiness. Without it laying at the center of our conceptions of God, everything else He is and does gets reduced, or worse, distorted beyond recognition. His love is reduced to sentiment. His righteousness becomes mere politeness. Our own experiences become the center and God’s attributes become relative (he becomes a super version of us), rather than God’s character being central and our own relative to him.
We have failed to attend to God’s holiness and this is reflected in a whole range of our current troubles. Evangelical worship has become exceedingly casual and a matter of mere religious self-expression - we have abandoned the God-instructed worship in the temple, for our own self-built high places. Or worse, we quickly abandon the worship of God in the church in the name of questionable (at best) public health policy. We unhesitatingly make calls for justice without considering the absolute nature of God’s justice and how His justice comes in both glory and horror - we treat God’s standards as a trifle. We take to social media, quick to slander public figures with little to no pause or actual knowledge of these people - our mouths are unclean.
God is holy. Angelic beings, before whom we would fall down as dead men, cover themselves and cry out “Holy! Holy! Holy!” In his presence. He is not like us. He is not common. He is not simply another being in the world of being. His thoughts are not in the same category as our thoughts. His words are not attempts to describe reality, they create reality. His moral judgments do not accord with some eternal, platonic and rational form, his moral judgments determine morality and rationality and are eternal. His authority is not dependent on us. His purity and righteousness is not on some sort of subjective scale. He is holy and the appropriate universal reaction to coming into his presence is terror. The appropriate human response to God and his holiness is to cry out, “I am lost!”
Without the terror of God’s holiness, Christmas is reduced to mere sentiment. The wonder and the trembling of the incarnation is that all of this holiness comes as a baby. Christmas is the juxtaposition of the holiness of God and a child born of a woman, come to rescue God’s people from their enemies. When God’s holiness is little considered, our ability to marvel at the grace of this season is lost. Jesus is simply a cute baby who will do some fairly marvelous things. But the glory and terror of the world was lying in a manger. The glory and terror of the world was crying and pooping and needed feeding that night. This is why Christmas is marked by glory and terror. It is why we should tremble and sing. The Holy One has come to rescue us, to conquer unbelief, to destroy our enemies, to crush the head of death.
May you consider the holiness of God as you light candles and drink eggnog and exchange gifts. May the mystery of this glory terrify you and fill you with wonder.
Railing against Egypt whilst in Midian
You don’t hear much about Phinehas these days. We have pin the tale on the donkey games and put the nose on the cartoon mouse games, but nobody hangs a poster and plays “run the spear through the people having pagan sex during prayer” games. Yet the story of Phinehas (Numbers 25) is arguably the best story in one of the most interesting books in the whole of the Old Testament. Israel has been rescued from Egypt, they are wandering in the wilderness near Midian, unlearning the worship of the gods of Egypt, and learning to live and worship in the presence of Yahweh. They are surrounded by the local Midianites with whom they will have a rather checkered history. Now Egypt was one of the great super powers of the time with its gods and chariots and represented those deplorable people over there. Midian with their Baal worship and pagan sexuality were right here and were in fact becoming rather insidiously integrated with Israel’s own worship and culture and life (which had been the plan all along coming out of Numbers 22-24 and Balaam’s prophecies against direct warfare with Israel). As God began to bring judgment upon Israel for their whoring and compromise with the Midianite gods (the worship of false gods and the transformation of human sexuality always go together in history), the people gathered in repentance to turn away God’s anger. While they were having this gathering of repentance an Israelite man brought a Midianite woman into the camp, and they began, well, knowing one another. Phinehas takes a spear and runs them both through in one shot. God names him a priest forever for his zeal for the holiness of God’s people in the midst of strange gods and their strange sexuality.
Now besides this story creating all sorts of problems for us modern evangelicals with its violence, sexuality and intolerance for paganism in the church, it also functions as a kind of parable for our time, and I think particularly for our place.
Much of modern evangelicalism - particularly in its urban forms have been very outspoken about the evils of nationalism and conservative moralism. These gods have been very visible and made more so by the ways social commentators like to categorize almost any Christian morality or political theory as belonging to those two deities. That being said, the gods of nationalism and moralism are deplorable. They involve the idolatrous intermingling of Americanism with Christianity. They sustain a kind of religious, apple-pie eating moralistic self-righteousness that is quick to forget the mercy of God, the necessity of his grace and the importance of real repentance for sin. It trades the laws of God for human traditions and is fraught with a kind of wicked bigotry that forgets the mercy we have received. They are wicked gods. They are wicked gods who are largely hated in progressive, urban America where these gods are denounced and mocked, their historic hypocrisy is noted again and again, and there is a considerable amount of social pressure to make sure you aren’t one of those people. And just as there was likely a lot of misidentification of the Hebrews’ religion with Egyptian religion, a lot of secularists see biblical Christianity and the idolatry of Nationalistic Conservative Moralism as essentially the same thing. SO there is an understandable effort to distinguish the two as Christians make their home in progressive cities like Denver and Boulder. We are making our home among the Midianites having come from Egypt and we don’t want there to be any confusion or misidentification. But we also don’t want to be disliked. And herein lies the door to our own temptations as people seeking to trust in the work of Jesus and love Jesus and obey the word of Jesus when real obedience to Jesus and the real teaching of Scripture is often simply considered to be of the same fabric as hypocrisy, self-righteousness and hatred.
The Midianites (or secular progressive humanists) see everybody who isn’t them as hated Egyptians, and in our deep desire to not simply avoid misidentification but to avoid being disliked, we rail against the gods of Egypt and forget to rail against the gods of the Midianites. We minimize the actual apostasy happening in our midst in order to make sure we aren’t confused with wretched self-righteous moralists. As one social commentator put it “Evangelicals are punching right while coddling the unbelieving left.
Secular Progressive Humanism or Postmodern Social Justicism or The Cult of the Self (its hard to pick one name for this pantheon) are deplorable. They destroy human beings (and kill unborn babies by the millions) and call it good. They destroy the givenness of the world - that it was created and ordered and is ruled by a God with all authority over everything - to remake the world however we see fit. They demand the autonomy of the individual, while destroying the individual with intersectional identities and oppressed/oppressor tribes. They demand justice while defining justice unjustly. They demand a slavery to your own image while promising that such a suicidal life is real freedom. And then missionally sensitive evangelicals adopt much of this dogma, blend them up nicely with Christian dogma and rail against the churches doing the same thing with Egypt’s gods. We take these distortions of love and justice and goodness and beauty and then go and find the words justice and love and goodness (righteousness) and beauty (glory) in the Bible and do a nice little definition swap, trading Scripture’s meanings for those provided by the Cult of Self. We affirm this religious irreligion and naively neuter or destroy the Biblical Christianity we were commissioned to teach, believe and obey. We bring Midianite women into the camp and let them redefine the nature of Christian worship, mission and obedience - all the while careful to distinguish what we’re doing from what those Trump Lovers are doing down south in the Bible Belt.
2020 has exposed the church’s willing enslavement to the gods who surround us. We trade, again and again, the birthright given to us in the Gospel, a glorious and God-centered freedom to serve the Lord alone, for slavery to a pantheon of deities. Leslie Newbigin once described the surprise he felt on discovering an icon of Jesus in a Hindu temple. He said he was never confused as to whether the presence of this image represented the genuine arrival of Christian faithfulness, but I fear we’ve done precisely that with our progressive religions here.
A plague has broken out in our midst and many don’t know the way back. We need a Phinehas with a javelin in hand. We need a restoration of worship and a rediscovery of the kind of freedom Christ has freely set upon us in the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of our lives from slavery to Egypt’s and Midian’s gods. We need a renewed commitment to let God speak clearly and sometimes painfully, from the Scriptures - and let Him say whatever it is that He has chosen to say, unencumbered by our embarrassment that we might be misunderstood.
More Singing Together
We’re continuing our foray into singing the Psalms together and in parts the Friday - Here are some more reasons why:
One of the stranger things, culturally speaking, that the church does when it gathers for worship is singing. Public singing has all but disappeared from broader life in our century with the exceptions of the strange phenomena of karaoke bars and concerts. Add to this absence the significant lack of clarity concerning what exactly the church is doing when we sing or why we sing and you have all the necessary ingredients for the church’s music to slide into entertainment and merely experiential categories. We start to evaluate the church’s music merely on the basis of how it made me feel and approach singing on Sunday less as the labor of God’s people and more as a service or product to be digested. But the singing of God’s people, when they gather for worship, is intended to be a sacrifice of God’s people. It is supposed to be, in the first place, the work of God’s people in God’s presence. In other words, it isn’t designed to entertain or to grant a certain experience. We should sing in spirit and truth - in other words, we should truly believe the stuff we sing, and the musical setting helps to align our affections with what is held out to us in the Psalms, but we can’t forget what it is we’re doing when we start singing together as God’s people. We are bringing offerings of musical labor into God’s presence - offerings of thanksgiving to the one who has redeemed us and invited us into his presence. We find joy as the byproduct of this work. We do receive marvelous gifts as the fruit of this labor. But it begins as the worshipping response of God’s people to his grace.
As David begins to develop the liturgical life of God’s people in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles, the sacrifices of God’s people are accompanied and even overshadowed by the work of music. The songs and prayers of God’s people are collected in the Psalter and a whole musical culture develops. There is some foreshadowing here. The complex and bloody sacrificial system will ultimately find its fulfillment in the blood of Jesus, the church’s covenant meal, and the liturgical music of the church. But the sacrificial system was precise, it was labor-intensive and it called on God’s people to offer their very livelihoods before God. When we gather for worship we come to offer sacrifices to God in song and in bread and wine each week. We should approach the music of the church in the same way - with intentionality and excellence. And while the lyrical content of our singing should be of great importance to us, so should the musical quality be of great importance. It involves a set of skills we should give ourselves to developing. Furthermore, we should be sure that we are using the gifts that God has given to the church for this task. While our music shouldn’t be limited to only the Psalms or the songs given to us in Scripture, these, if for no other reason than that God has explicitly given them to us, should serve as the foundations for all our other singing.
These are some of the reasons we’re gathering again on Friday night to learn how to sing together with greater skill and to learn how to sing the Psalms. We’ll have beer and wine, and plenty of room to laugh and to make mistakes. But the goal of our gathering on these monthly Friday nights is to learn how to sing Scripture together, in parts, and with excellence and joy. Join us Friday Night
Fight Club, the 4 Horsemen, and Seeking the Good of the City
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was one of those books that got stuck in my head for a few years. Like all of Palahniuk’s earlier books (his later books seem to indicate his story-telling abilities have been dissolved by his nihilism), he seeks to exploit some aspect of Western Culture and expose us to its troubling underbelly. Here he attacks the kind of nice-guy, consumeristic careerism (its own kind of nihilism) that has eroded any form of purposeful masculinity in our culture. He (quite literally) aims a gun at its head and seeks to kill it. He doesn’t offer any constructive alternatives (Project Mayhem’s aim was simply the destruction of civilization), but he does awaken an army of men to the idea that being the quiet, conformist nice-guys was destroying them and sustaining a soul-crushing society.
Christians have, for far too long, been trained (and happily complied) with a kind of quiet, respectable role. We’ve had our nice-guy and consumeristic career to play in this Postmodern American Project (PAP) and we’ve played it quite well. We’ve offered little resistance to the whims of political power or social corruption or sexual deviance. We keep showing up at Christmas with the typical protests about someone using ‘X’ instead of Christ. We help out at weddings and funerals (occasionally insisting, with much made of our great courage, that we be allowed to choose which weddings we officiate). We adopt secularism’s definitions (of justice and peace and virtue and love) and then pretend that Jesus blesses all these godless projects. But we play our role of cultural chaplain, largely blessing the direction of the culture at large, some of us troubled by the speed at which the whole thing speeds along, but mostly content to play our largely decorative and irrelevant role. We do it all in the name of some refashioned love, meanwhile, the vocation of salt and light has been largely abandoned.
But the church is called, often, to be the “bad” guys. I don’t mean the objectively “bad” guys, but I do mean the ones causing all the right kinds of trouble. There is a kind of turmoil that follows the church everywhere it goes in Scripture. Example after example is given to us in the book of Acts of the gospel being preached and the whole city getting turned upside down. The gospel was not a message of peace and love and happiness, it was a message that divided entire cities and led to all sorts of economic turmoil, violence, and preachers needing to sneak out of town in baskets. Paul and Peter aren’t killed because they were doing their best to be a blessing to the Roman Culture and her Polis. They were killed because they heralded a message about the absolute and universal authority of King Jesus and they insisted that it be believed and obeyed by everyone.
While the book of Revelation is marvelously confusing - largely due to terrifically bad readings of it put to almost satire-level fiction in forms like The Left Behind series, it does provide a revelatory look at what the Church is commissioned to be and do in the world. It is a book that promises to reward study and I want to take just a quick bit of it (chapters 5-7, really focusing on a short section of chapter 6) to give us a better understanding of our vocation in the world, and why the church’s mission in the book of Acts (as well as in other times in history) rightly and predictably caused such a ruckus. I also hope we can learn to be the “bad” guys again.
Revelation 5 opens with a scene that is reflected from a number of different angles throughout the bible. It is a scene packed with meaning and beauty and is worthy of much thought and probably some good songwriting. To see it from other angles read it alongside Acts 1:6-11 (where you can see how the scene starts), Daniel 7, or Psalm 24. But at the heart of the scene is a throne - with God, the one who made heaven and earth, seated on that throne and all creation worshipping this One. In the midst of this universe-wide worship a question, a problem really, arises. It is the question of who will fulfill this One’s purposes for the whole world - purposes of judgment, of glory, of redemption? Who is worthy to open the scroll (which represents all of those purposes executed in its opening)? The answer given in Revelation 5 is the Lion/Lamb of Judah, namely Jesus. As this is revealed a rather remarkable celebration breaks out and we’d be forgiven if we just sat here for a bit, but I want to press on to chapter 6 and the question of what Jesus does when he opens the scroll. In other words, how does Jesus execute his purposes for judgment and redemption in the whole world?
As he opens the scroll he sends 4 horses of different colors into the world that, well, cause a ruckus. What happens in Acts as a reflection of these goings-on in the heavens is the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2) to empower and send the church into the world. Peter Leithart has argued compellingly in his commentary on Revelation that these horsemen represent the Spirit-empowered ministry of the church - or at least, the visible cultural-political effects of the Spirit-empowered mission of the church. In other words, these “4 horsemen of the Apocalypse” don’t represent some far off future evil, but instead, these “bad” guys are the church, or at the very least, the intended effects of the church’s faithful ministry.
Let’s look at the horsemen:
1st is the White Horse who comes with a bow and a crown. He comes to conquer. Here is the gospel announcement of Jesus’ reign over all the earth. Here is the message of his death, resurrection and ascension to the throne. The Church is empowered by the Spirit and sent by God into all the cities and neighborhoods and industries and nations to declare the Good News of the Reign of Jesus and to call everyone and everything to believe in him and to bow to Him. This is the message we are sent to embody and to declare - un-compromised and unapologetic.
Next is the bright red horse. Here is what this message does as it is sent into the world. It takes away peace and creates division and strife. As Jesus said concerning his own ministry - he came to turn father against son, mother against daughter - he came to bring a division that would go all the way down. The church proclaims a message that does not leave the world as it is, it is not a message that can be simply ignored or relegated to the religious or self-help section of the book store. It is a message that redivides humanity and brings division and strife. In other words, the church brings strife. It doesn’t bring strife because it sets out to physically harm people. It brings strife because it proclaims a message that requires one of two responses: faith and obedience or rebellion and suppression.
3rd comes the black horse. Its rider carries a scale and we see how the impact of the church’s mission is not merely in the realm of ideas and theology but transforms the economics and politics of the cities and the nations. The whole economies of places are transformed by the mission of the church. In the book of Acts a number of riots are started because the growth of the church meant the collapse of certain corrupt industries (Acts 19), others began explicitly because of the jealousy of the Jews - holding onto the old bread rather than receiving the wine of the New Covenant. But the point here is the church in her Spirit-empowered ministry is not the good guys, simply reinforcing and expanding the economic and social elements of the culture. Their ministry reorders everything around the person of Jesus and belief in him.
Lastly comes the pale horse made famous by Wyatt Earp. This horse brings death. The church brings death too. One way or another the church’s message, the message of the gospel, is a message of death. As Lewis said in his masterpiece, ’Til We Have Faces - “Die before you die, there is no chance after.” We call all people to come to the waters of baptism and die - before they die. The gospel comes as a message of grace, one which bids people die in these waters, or it comes as a message of judgment - the stench of death to those who will know only judgment (2 Cor. 2:16). We do not bring any sort of neutral message but a command from our King, who bids all men come and die and then be raised in him. This is no feel-good message that can fit nicely into a chaplain’s role to secularism. It is a message of maximum disruption.
The result of this 4-fold ministry of the church in the book of Revelation is laid out for us in chapter 7. It’s a confusing image - 144,000 all accounted for, who are truly a number that can’t be counted. Here is a set number of people (God won’t lose any) who cannot be counted from every nation on earth. The result of this “bad” ministry is a people redeemed from every nation on earth. A people who have died before they died. A people whose lives and vocations in the world are unsettled and transformed by the rule of the Lion/Lamb. A people divided from all the others, enemies for the sake of Jesus. A people sent into the world with the gospel of our Ruling King conquering and to conquer.
May we joyfully learn to stop behaving as if our job were to comfort unbelief and to keep the peace. Stop conforming to unbelief’s expectations regarding who the “good” guys are. Stop trying to be respectable. It might start by insisting on going to church, insisting on breaking bread and drinking wine, and insisting on giving thanks and singing loudly the songs of the Lamb.
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” Revelation 5:12
Know This Thing
There are a rather enormous number of things I don’t know. This is one of the gifts of being “not young” anymore. Not knowing things is something that has gone from being a source of insecurity in my youth to a great comfort in my not-young-ness. A lot of you still think you know all the things… Things about a guy named Trump whom you haven’t met. Things about a guy named Biden whom you’ve never met. Things about why that person says those things that way. You even know why I said Trump first and not Biden (totally because my computer is running that Dominion Software algorithm that everybody is talking about.) You are absolutely certain about the real dangers of the Corona Virus, so much so that you are willing to abandon many of the things God has given us, like worshipping with God’s people, warm hospitality and the nearness of friends. Or, you know its all a hoax - a very complex ruse and there’s no need to risk anything.
All this knowing about all these things runs up against Romans 8:26. Here Paul does something rather mean. He calls all of us “weak.” Its not a very sensitive calling out, but it gets a bit worse. You see, he then goes on to say that we don’t even know what we should pray for. His assertion is that you and I are weak and that this weakness is clearly seen, mind you, not in the fact that we must pray and ask for God’s help. No, our weakness is seen in that we don’t even know what we’re supposed to ask God for in the first place. In other words, we’re super weak. Normal weak is recognizing that you can’t do something and getting help from someone stronger. Super weak is not even knowing what you need help with. In other words, Paul says that we don’t know what we don’t know.
I find this to be a marvelous antidote to all our human knowing here in this Information Age. We have access to more data, more opinions, more expert testimony than any other people in the history of mankind, and we don’t know what any of it actually means or what we’re supposed to do with it. And all the unknowing can create quite a bit of insecurity and devastating, society-wide anxiety.
Paul then counters this with a declaration of something that the people of God do know. In the midst of this terrible unknowing, immersed in data, swimming in opinions, Paul points to a rock on which Christians (those he calls “God Lovers” and “Called” - what marvelous names!) are to stand. He says that even when we have no idea what to pray for, such that the Spirit of God just groans for us, we do know something.
We know that God is at work in all things for our good.
Let these words stick for you just a bit….
We know…
…all things…
…for our good.
And this isn’t meant to be some sort of sentimental truism pasted onto a coffee mug. He’s writing to a people that will be burning in Nero’s garden in a few years and watching their children ripped from their arms. In other words, it is meant to be a rock on which to build a life of unshakable trust in God and faithfulness to His words no matter the dangers or questions you face. Here is a truth that should lead us not merely into quiet, private pietism, but will lead these Christians in Rome into bold and courageous witness that will cost them their lives. Here is something to know when you don’t know anything else, and not knowing enough might cost you. Here is something to know when you are overwhelmed by your unknowing. God is at work for the good of the God-Lovers. God is moving everything (sometimes in very seemingly strange ways) for the Ones Whom He Has Called.
Paul grounds our knowledge of this wonderful fact in 5 verbs - the stupidly controversial “chain of redemption.” God has Foreknown, Predestined, Called, Justified, and Glorified us. God is the subject of these verbs in Romans 8. We are the objects of these verbs in Romans. 8. How do we know God is working in and through all these things happening around us for our good? Because God has done these things already. Here is not simply a rock on which to put our feet, but a place from which to discern and understand everything else that is happening around us and to us. Here is a description of what God has already done for us and to us so that we might worship Jesus and bear witness to Jesus and obey Jesus even in the face of a Nero and his soldiers.
May we all get really good at admitting what we don’t know. And may we cling to these things that we do know.
Oh… And go to church.
Putting up Roadblocks to Jesus
Imagine a car speeding towards a cliff - think Thelma and Louise without the suicidal element or that newish Star Trek without the one-eyed floating motorcycle policeman. I’ve often wondered where such roads-in-the-middle-of-nowhere are and why we put roads there. While driving on the Road to the Sun in Montana I wanted as many barriers, speed bumps and large, unmovable rocks between me and the cliff as possible. I want to see the view, to be sure, but I also wanted very clear obstacles to disrupt any driving into the abyss that seemed relatively easy. Now consider that these abyss(es?ees?i?) are relatively accurate representatives of where humanity is headed apart from faith in the Lordship of Jesus, his death, resurrection, reign and trusting in all that he commands.
There has been a kind of Christianity, popular with us young kids, wherein a type of evangelism and even discipleship is adopted that seeks to remove any teachings, ethical norms, or biblical tones (that’s too harsh!) that might dissuade a young non-Christian from coming to believe in and worship Jesus. The idea is that the loving thing to do is to remove any and all obstacles to a person coming to believe in Jesus. Leave the fatal ethical constructs in place, the inhuman worldview, the incoherent secular dogmas, just get them to believe in a set of theoretical propositions or hold some sentimental feelings about Jesus. That’s the goal. That’s how to get people to become Christians. What you end up with is a really nice Christianity, relatively inoffensive, something that feels loving and which has the rather horrific side effect of allowing people to believe that they can keep any of the other stuff that the old curmudgeonly Christians called sin and unbelief, and still be good Christians. In other words this creates a nice, non-threatening neutered Christianity. It is a Christianity incapable of producing disciples who can stand in the midst a culture which rejects the ethical teaching of the Bible. It is a Christianity incapable of reigning in the overwhelming weight of our own suicidal desires. It is a Christianity incapable of producing a culture of robust truth, and rich beauty and loving, moral goodness.
You know you’ve encountered such a neutered Christianity in a church when the only courageous stands you hear from the pulpit or in a church’s teaching has to do with what everybody in unbelieving mainstream culture already believes. This has its more nationalist-conservative versions and its more secular-liberal versions. It pops up in Texas looking one way and it pops up in Denver looking another, but wherever it pops up it creates a whole community of people who believe that they are Christians because they either have warm thoughts about Jesus or they’ve believed a set of isolated theoretical principles about who Jesus is, you know, way up in the sky somewhere. Neither version pushes into he corners of a person’s life. It never touches the ground. It never confronts with real-time cultural sins being committed right now. Its never concrete.
It fails to produce real disciples of Jesus, disciples who repent of sin and unbelief, whose lives are growing in conformity to the teachings of Scripture and the good demands of Jesus. It produces Christians who largely look and act and believe just like their secularist neighbors.
If a person can come to believe in Jesus without some of their deepest-held beliefs and desires and behaviors being confronted, then there is a very good chance that this person has not really come to Jesus. If real repentance from real sin is not pressed - if a person believes they can keep having sex with whomever they want (with consent of course) and that belief and behavior isn’t confronted in the process of coming to believe in Jesus, then they aren’t coming to Jesus. If a person’s financial habits are never confronted, their way of talking to or about people, their work ethic, how they treat their family or love their wife or discipline their children - then the things the Bible actually speaks to aren’t being addressed, and that should smell really fishy to us. The Jesus we meet in Scripture made demands, remarkable demands. He refused to serve anyone else’s agenda. He confronted those who would follow him in the most pointed and personal ways. Demanding a rich man sell everything to follow him in one place, demanding another leave his parents behind in another. Jesus made it hard to follow Jesus. Who are we to make it any easier?
This kind of Christian evangelism and mission is almost the complete opposite of older forms of Christianity, where the Law’s confrontation of our particular sins was essential to repentance and faith. Where does the Law condemn me? Where does the Law declare me guilty on account of the way I am living? It is precisely here that my need for the grace of God, and the kindness of God is made clear. It is here where the necessity of the cross is made plain. It is here where I can see the cost of believing in and following Jesus. The Law does not confront humans in abstract ways calling us to warmer feelings about Jesus. No, through the Law, God names, confronts and condemns our actual sins. The things we love and do. This never feels good, and is almost never considered loving in a culture like ours. But God saves us through the work of Jesus and calls us to repentance from sins and to faith in the person and work of Jesus.
Conversion to Christianity happens when a person hits a roadblock and turns. They are driving into an abyss, and in the mercy of God the law of God comes like a big set of flashing lights and railing to call you to turn. Sure they’re annoying. They are in the way. The ministry of the church must be a ministry of putting things in the way - disruptive things, oftentimes painful things, but if coming to Jesus is easy - if it isn’t costly, then there is a very good change we’ve simply mislabeled the abyss and misunderstood the mission of God given to the church. This is, of course quite risky. Its how Christianity gets a bad reputation among the cool kids. But it is the remarkably devastating message that Jesus has given to the church- a message about his authority over all things, his death for our terrible sins, and his conquering of death - the penalty for all those sins. So church, do the work of the gospel: Put up roadblocks.
What to Do When Everybody's Hair is on Fire...
Everyone seems to have set their hair on fire. The word “unprecedented” has been used so often in the past 8 months as to cause a great deal of confusion about what “precedented” is supposed to be. We have an “unprecedented” pandemic (it increasingly looks like it follows several other historic precedents- but I get it.) We have an “unprecedented” election (that one may be true). We have unprecedented social unrest. We had an unprecedented dinner the other night when a friend made some sort of sourdough pancake/bread/English muffin magical item which I didn’t know existed. When everything is unprecedented, Christians might be tempted to just float through the chaos, being tossed by every rapid, slamming into every rock, but there is supposed to be something steadying about what we say we believe. There is supposed to be something rock-like in what we sing and pray and confess.
When everything is unprecedented, what is the church to do?
The author of Hebrews is writing to Christians surrounded by chaos and groaning and very serious times. These Christians were being tempted to turn back from their faith in Jesus in order to avoid persecution. Some were simply avoiding the gathering of God’s people in order to keep up appearances. But there were all sorts of questions about when and how to worship in the light of the coming of Jesus and in the midst of societal chaos and difficulties. In chapter 10:19-25 the author says this:
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
- Hebrews 10:19-25
Now this little passage is chalk full of wonderful reminders and encouragement. But I want to focus on the exhorting at the end:
Hold fast the confession
Stir one another to love and good works
Do not neglect to gather together
Encourage one another.
The book of Hebrews is very concerned with the worship of the Church- how the liturgy of the church has replaced the worship of the tabernacle and temple. In other words, Hebrews is about the life and worship of the church as much, if not more than it is concerned about mere individuals. This is a book concerned with the question of What is the church to do? The church is to hold fast our confession - our hope. Here is a hope anchored somewhere outside electoral results. Here is a confession about Jesus and his work that is unshaken by viruses and doesn’t depend on the magistrate for salvation or for freedom. Here are clean bodies and purified consciences - not made clean by distances, masks, lots of hand sanitizer or anything of the like, but made clean by God. I hope you caught that because there are a lot of people doing a lot of things to try and make their consciences clean. Rushdoony (in Politics of Guilt and Shame) believed it explained most of our political disagreements. Your body and your conscience can only be washed clean by God…. by God.
So what is the church to do in these days?:
Gather for worship. Hold to our confession in hope. Stir one another up to fulfill the vocations God has given us towards love and fruitfulness. Encourage one another. In other words, the church is to do what the church is always supposed to do.
We are not to do unprecedented things. We are to do precedented things. Things that the church has always done, has always been called to do. We do not react, we persevere in the works that God has called us to - calling all men and women to come, to repent of their sins, to eat bread and to drink wine, and to hope in God.
A Statement to All You Feisty Maskers and Anti-Maskers at Trinity
Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. - 2 Timothy 2:23
Trinity Church,
Every Sunday as we worship together we say the Apostle’s Creed. This 1700 year old confession marks the church’s unity. In a world of divided allegiances and controversies, we gather each week to confess and to be reminded that we are united in our confession of the Triune God instead of being divided by the various factions that mark our world.
Our society, over this past year, has been catechizing us to turn every division into a political division and every division into a division between love and liberty. We have even taken a thing like a piece of cloth over ones’ nose and mouth and made it a thing of heated moral division in our culture. I am concerned that such divisions have made their way into our young community. As a church body we have taken the position that we will not have a position on mask-wearing or anti-mask-wearing. We believe it to be an issue of conscience left to each household to decide how to approach this issue. We do not enforce mask-wearing in our gathered worship and people are free to wear a mask at our services or not. We provide different worship spaces (the balcony maintains more space between households, we offer audio outside on the lawn, and transmit the service via radio for those wishing to remain in their cars) for those who want or need more space or isolation and everyone is free to wear a mask if they choose.
But more importantly this is an issue which we will not be divided over. And to that end I want to speak to both groups in our church community:
To those of you who have been convinced that masks are not wise or good: There are those among us, godly members of this church who do not believe what you believe about masks. They have any number of reasons for believing that mask wearing is an urgent health need in our day. There are good medical professionals and scientists, many of whom are committed to the Scriptures and the authority of Jesus, who back this claim and believe that mask wearing in our society is best right now. Please do not assume that mask-wearers are simply enslaved lemmings. Do not assume that they are terrorized by some irrational fear. Your temptation during these times will be towards a kind of scoffing pride. Do not do this. Such pride could harm you and our church for whom Christ died. Your commitment to liberty is a good thing, after all Paul tells us that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. But do not let your liberty be an excuse to look down on your brother and sister for whom Christ died. They likely have very good reasons for wearing their masks.
To those of you who are convinced that wearing masks are the best way right now: There are godly members of this church who do not believe what you believe about masks. There are good medical professionals and scientists, many of whom are Christians who believe that for the majority of our society masks are an unwise way to proceed and cause more harm to us and our neighbors than good. Please do not assume that those not wearing masks, particularly in this community, simply don’t love their neighbor or care about your well-being. Your temptation will be to elevate extra-biblical standards to define love. Do not do this. Such self-righteousness could destroy you and harm this community for whom Christ died. Your commitment to love your neighbors is good, after all Jesus has commanded us to love our neighbors, but do not use your good intentions as an opportunity to sin against your non-mask-wearing brothers and sisters. They likely have very good reasons for not wearing masks.
I want to say as forcefully as I can- We will not be divided over mask-wearing. Do research, trust to God’s providence and care, and then let each of you do what is best. The Bible calls us to all kinds of commands on how to pursue liberty and love together without adding the dividing mark of mask wearing or anti-mask-wearing. In a society that is totalizing narratives about masks - telling stories about love and liberty, our refusal to be divided over such a thing is a necessary form of resistance. If you are afraid, the Word of God gently confronts you with the wonderful command: Do not be afraid. If you are reckless in your freedom, the Word of God gently confronts you with the wonderful command: Love your brother and sister.
May we be eager to obey the numerous ways that Scripture teaches us to pursue liberty and to practice love. And may our liberty and love be expressed not in masking or unmasking, but in our confession of the absolute authority of Jesus over all things, even our faces and certainly our fears.
Lastly, one of the clearest commands given to us in Scripture is to not “forsake the gathering together” (Hebrews 10:23-25) of God’s people. In addition to learning new divisions in this time, God’s people are inadvertently learning to disobey this command from our Lord. We want to encourage all of you to be dligent to resist temptations to forsake the gathering of God’s people in worship. This is not about asserting some abstract principle of rights, but about honoring our King and attending to the means of grace given to us in being together to receive Word and Sacrament. So, in short, come to church.
The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people. But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. As for the person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned. - Titus 3:4-11
Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. - 2 Timothy 2:23
I appeal to you brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them. - Romans 16:17
I appeal to you brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. - 1 Cor. 1:10
For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part. - 1 Cor. 11:18
Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is one, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Jesus Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit. Let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. - Galatians 5:19-25
It is these who cause divisions, worldly people, devoid of the Spirit. - Jude 19
Painting a Car with a Hammer
“This is the most important election of our lifetime”
Probably not, but maybe.
But even if it is, its likely not as important as you think and definitely not important in the way you think.
Nero’s early empire ruling in Rome was a pretty great time for most everybody. The theater was opened up again. Games returned. Christians were largely left alone and the Jews could start returning to Rome. Everything seemed to be headed in a mostly decent direction. Nero’s “second term” was a different thing altogether (a good reminder is that killing your mother has significant consequences for ones’ leadership). Pretty soon impaled Christians are being used as torches for garden parties, Nero is forcing renovation projects to significant parts of the city by starting large, devastating fires, and well the whole political machine had went a bit mad. We get some of the best bits of the New Testament as Paul, John and Peter tried to prepare the church for navigating the fiery end of Nero’s “Make Rome Great Again” projects.
I’m not offering any prophetic insight into what’s coming through either an extended Trump presidency or a Biden one, but I do want to ask everybody (myself included) to take a nice, deep breath and chuckle at ourselves a bit. It can be easy to get enraged or laugh at the other side of this coming election. But I think we need some good universal Christian laughter, the kind of laughter grounded in a healthy view of God as the author of history. If you find yourself wound up at the latest outrage posted on Facebook by that girl you never really trusted after middle school, I would argue that you’re forgetting a few key things about politics and God. What happens next week in the election (let alone on your facebook feed) matters far less than you probably think it does. And it matters differently than you think it does. Don’t misunderstand me, the election certainly matters. Our elected officials fulfilling their rightly ordained vocations is important for the peace of society. But I think we generally forget some things and over sell some things when we think about who is going to be elected President or who’s running for any other government (be it local, state, or federal) office.
Firstly - a thing we forget.
God draws straight with crooked lines. The Bible is absolutely clear, God is going to get us where He wants to get us. But he doesn’t usually take the route you’d have taken if you were in charge of the roadtrip map. As the drivers in our family have doubled in the last year, so have the opinions about which route is the best/safest/fastest/prettiest to most everywhere. God loves curveballs, knuckleballs, and taking “wrong” turns (I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, but that’s part of what God likes to do as well.) He is generally doing a million things in a situation where we are primarily concerned about only 1 or 2. We’re really hoping for an A on our Physics test, while God is moving the universe around and hoping we see the sun peaking through the clouds in that slim little window that looks out over the park from our classroom. We’re often playing baseball when God is doing something far more interesting - like nuclear physics brain surgery.
God was acting through the good and the terrible parts of Nero’s reign. It wasn’t his work the first few years and then something out of control the last part. God was strategically acting in all of it. Now it is important to note, that there is such a thing as a norm by which we can assess the good parts and the terrible parts as being good or terrible. But God wasn’t bound in his work by Nero. Nero was a means for God’s good purposes whatever his particular actions and policies.
At whatever point the election is finalized next week (hopefully!), what we can be sure of is that God has given us what we have. This isn’t to short change anyone’s responsibilities to vote thoughtfully and Christianly, but it is to say that God is doing something on purpose whomever ends up waking up in the White House this Spring.
Secondly - Remember what the Magistrate is for.
In the opening episode of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom McKenzie asks Jeff Daniels’ character a question loaded with a common and problematic assumption in our day. She asks, “Is government a force for good or is it every man for himself?” She’s in the middle of a great little monologue that exposes where and how our hope lay for a better world. Both the Right and Left are tempted terribly by the idea that government and politics are tools for the building of their vision of what the world should be. We start with very different visions of the good, the beautiful and true for society, and then we expect a government who will give us that. We subtly begin to believe that the magistrate is the fundamental tool for achieving human flourishing. This is a poisonous religious belief. And it leads directly to the kinds of incoherent and screeching discourse that we find in our politics today.
The government - whatever its particular design, is incapable of creating human virtue. It is not made for cultivating love. It will never be very effective at sustaining faith and its attendant obedience to God - necessary conditions for the long-term thriving of humanity as a whole. Economic flourishing can not be created by a government. Neither can social flourishing or real, positive goodness. The sort of generosity where people give of their very lives to one another and where business owners give of their very profits for the further thriving of their employees - neither of these can be created or sustained by governments. Joy-filled, faithful and healthy families cannot be built by the government, even though you cannot have a sound economy or healthy human beings without them. We can try to use government to prop up a society that lacks these things, but very soon such an arrangement will lead to increasingly serious problems.
There is a subtle belief on the Right, that I witnessed living in various places throughout the U.S. that somehow we can create a good and noble society. We can make families strong. We can end the pervasiveness of pornography and its attendant lusts. We can improve hunting season and make Christmas better. All of this if we can only get the right people into office. This isn’t (obviously) universal, but it is a real temptation and it is founded on a belief that the government can do things that it was never designed by God to do.
There is a belief on the Left, that I encounter daily living here in Colorado. It is the belief that we can build a good and equitable society by political means. We can end poverty. We can make it so no one feels excluded and everybody is safe - from viruses, from narrow people, and from any future apocalyptic environmental catastrophes. And all of this can be so if we can simply get the right people and policies into the right governmental spot. This isn’t universal, but I will say it is a temptation and a prevalent one on the left. A vision for an activist government virtually requires a belief that government can give us the society that we think we want.
But this is like painting a car with a hammer. You might smear some paint on there, but your doing the wrong thing. God gave us the magistrate for some fairly specific purposes (to punish evil, protect the innocent, and to protect space wherein liberty and righteousness might flourish) and it was never designed to do the job that the church and the family was made to do. Sorkin’s dichotomy was a false one. In the world that God has made, it is never every man for himself, but neither should we look to the government as our source for the growth of good.
For far too long we have demanded of our politicians (and they have been eager to oblige) that they promise to create the great society. We demand that they give us hope. We ask them to transform the tattered fabric of our cities, to overcome what amounts to collective sin. Look at the two campaign slogans on offer from our current candidates: “Battle for the soul of the nation” and “Make America Great Again!” - these are both breathtaking claims. When the magistrate takes up such projects, it never goes well. They cannot do this and we should stop asking them to, in fact we should be far more suspect when they start making those kinds of claims.
This isn’t to say that Tuesday’s election doesn’t matter for the promotion of a just and good society. Its just to say that it doesn’t matter that way. We should elect magistrates who will do the job that’s been entrusted to them by God, and outlined quite satisfactorily in the Constitution. We should expect of them that they will do the job they’ve been given faithfully. And then we should get busy doing the rather mundane work of raising families, hard work with our minds and hands in the places where God has given us work to do, and learning to live as Christian men and women who love their neighbors and who worship and obey the triune God. And we should keep doing those things regardless of who wins the presidential election on Tuesday. We should keep pursuing those things no matter what policies or laws or newfangled attempts at transforming society into some utopian and disease-free dream come down the pike. God is on his throne, the president and everybody else answer to him. May we get on with the great work of seeing the world filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.
Singing Different
On Friday evening we’re going to start a new monthly (at least) practice around Trinity wherein we are going to begin gathering to learn how to sing together - particularly learning some hymns, psalms and other songs taken directly from Scripture. And while getting together to sing may not be particularly strange for a church to do, what we hope to learn to do is how to sing beautifully together by learning to sing different musical parts together. You see, what normally happens when the church gathers to sing on a Sunday is that a few skilled musicians perform the music up front, and the congregation listens or joins in by singing in unison with the primary vocalist leading the music. The benefit of the church performing her music this way is its simplicity. It allows the church to adopt popular musical styles and allows what we think of as non-musicians (the vast majority of us) to participate in the church’s music without having to learn any new skills (other than lyrics and generally easily mimicked tunes). But when compared to the way much of the church has sung in the past, these gains come with some significant losses. We want to start learning how to do something a bit older and quite a bit different than our normal practice on Sunday mornings and so we’re going to start learning this old way on Friday evening.
The development of music and singing in Scripture provides some wonderful insight into its purpose in the church’s worship. Without launching into a full blown biblical theology of singing and music I want to point to a few things that are, for me at least, newish thoughts:
1 - Singing specifically, and musical development more generally is attached quite remarkably to the coming and enthronement of kings throughout the New and Old Testaments. Saul’s coronation is preceded by a band of singing prophets. David establishes royal and priestly musicians and singers upon his own enthronement as king. One of the great scenes (of many) in Revelation is the commissioning of the Lamb at the Throne in Revelation 5. Here the elders and all the heavenly host and eventually all of creation itself sings in celebration of the One on the throne and the Lamb who is commissioned by God to conquer the nations.
2 - This imagery and the event that corresponds to it (namely Jesus’ own ascension at the beginning of Acts (and described in Daniel 7) points us to another link with the singing of God’s people that clues us into its purpose. It is often attached to the military - or God’s hosts, which is simply our nice way of saying God’s army. The armies of Israel are led into battle by the Levites singing God’s songs. The Lamb who is the Son of Man is commissioned to conquer the nations in Revelation 5 and sends out his horsemen in Revelation 6 and they are accompanied by song. The singing of God’s songs by God’s people marks their commissioning by their King into and among the nations. It is the music of a host, an army, a people sent by their king.
3 - Lastly (though there is a lot more that should be said), you can trace a development from the music established by David throughout the history Old Testament worship (and reaching its pinnacle in the New) as the blood sacrifices are first accompanied by and then slowly replaced by the sacrifices of song (along with the atoning blood of Jesus.) In other words, as central and particular as the sacrifices of Tabernacle and Temple worship were, so also should the church’s music be in its own worship in God’s presence. Our singing should accompany our full hearted belief and allegiance to our King. Our singing should have a militancy about it - it marks us as a sent people. And our singing should be as central to our worship and as intentionally done as many of the offerings were to Israel’s own worship. These realities should shape not only our concern for the lyrical truthfulness of our singing, but also our concern for style and skill and congregational involvement.
Our prayer is that as we all learn some new skills (how to read musical lines, learning to sing different harmonies together, learning to sing Scripture) we will grow as a congregation both in our ability to sing, but also in being formed in some new and enriched ways by the music we sing. Our hope is that soon music will fill every part of our church’s life- whether gathered in a living room or on a Sunday, that we will learn to sing skillfully and with all our hearts together whether there is someone there to play guitar or not.
Contagious Belly Laughs
In the midst of a world whose madness keeps getting more pronounced and whose madness promises to get even more pronounced in the next week or so - what are all you clear-headed folks to do? When mayors are threatening to cancel Christmas, churches are holding sad-faced segregated diversity sensitivity trainings, and racist Boogala-fire-breathers from the right are threatening to attack cities over against masked Antifa-er brick-throwers on the left, what should Christians be doing? Do we mournfully wear our masks, avoid worshipping together and go along with the whole thing quietly, with our quiet, sensitive voices? Do we angrily demand “our freedoms” and buy more ammo? When the culture is convulsing and having a whole bunch of remarkably emotional fits - How are the people of God to respond - like if we actually believe the Gospel is true?
Proposal: Deep, cascading, belly laughs. The sort that go all the way down to your toes.
Wait a minute (I can hear some of you saying in the back), shouldn’t we be a bit more, well, sad? Maybe even afraid of what’s to come. Shouldn’t we treat All This Seriousness with a bit more seriousness - with furrowed brows, and soft glistening eyes, and an understanding nod? What about all this death? What about all this economic and psychological suffering? What about what could happen if That Guy is president in February?
Well, to clarify, you should weep with those who weep. You should stand by and with those who suffer. But I don’t mean anything like abstract people with abstract weeping. If you see your neighbor in need, sick, without much hope - don’t laugh at them. If someone you know is suffering a terrible injustice, don’t laugh at them. But as you stand back and look at the world losing its collective mind, laugh deeply, heartily. Be a jolly lover of neighbors and weeper with weepers. And do not be frightened by the madness that swirls around right now.
There are two grounds for this jolly laughter. Two things I would implore you to hold on to as we continue to worship together on Sundays, turn to the Bible for how to understand everything, and do our best to practice hospitality to one another and our neighbors. Here are two reasons we must keep singing, and laughing as we do so.
First: In Romans 8:18ff., God promises that the suffering surrounding the Christians in Rome (which in the context includes things like poverty, sickness, hunger and slaughter in verses 35-36), once its all collected and accounted for will be accounted as nothing compared to the weight of the beauty and goodness to be given to us through all of it. It is scary. It is truly painful. But it is the birth pains of glory. Magnificent, overwhelming glory. For all who belong to Jesus, we find ourselves in the birthing room and there seems to be a lot happening right now. It may even seem like chaos, like sadness and death are certain (after all we are in a hospital). But something altogether beautiful is happening. God is doing all of this right now. People are losing their minds and there’s a lot of noise, but God is subjecting the whole world to this futility, and He’s doing so in hope. Oh just wait - Paul says in verse 25, you can’t see it yet, but everything is going to be just glorious.
Second: This is all well and good, but does it justify the laughter I’m advocating for? Why all the laughing? In Psalm 2 God shows us what this patient hope looks like when confronted with the convulsions coming from the nations. Here is what God does in Psalm 2:4, “He who sits in the heavens laughs…” The nations, with very serious faces and complex crayon-colored diagrams align themselves against God and his rule - his truth, his beauty and his goodness. They press against His sanity, His order, with very serious plans to cancel Christmas this year. And right when you expect to hear a fire-breathing roar from heaven, instead you hear infectious laughter. It is a laughter that unravels rebellion and the fears of His people and sets God’s enemies to flee. It is a laughter, rooted in the glorious hope Paul talks about in Romans above. You cannot stop the glory He is delivering right now.
I imagine God’s laughter to be the most glorious sound in all the universe. And like all good laughter it is unavoidably infectious. Laughter spills into a room and pretty soon everybody whose in on it can’t help themselves. I remember sitting in a room as people told stories about my mom after she died. I was pretty sad. I was weeping. And yet some of those stories, I mean, she was a doozy, absolutely hilarious. And then somebody, I don’t remember who, started having a laughing fit - just like my mom used to have. And soon, in the midst of all the tears the whole room was laughing uncontrollably. The One Who Sits in Heaven laughs way better than that. And when all his enemies come together, he laughs.
So, Christian, learn to laugh at these days. Live and worship and love as those who are free: truly free. Forgiven of all our sins, children of the God who owns and runs all things, and living in the world that is His to give. Drink wine, sing and celebrate the days that are to come. And when you see the world’s madness - laugh all the way down to your toes.
Shaking
We worship a God who delights to shake things. He has done so again and again and again throughout our short history. This can be the cause of no small amount of confusion. And if you don’t know what’s coming, or what to expect, it can lead to a kind of unnecessary despair. Let me explain.
You find yourself in the normal rhythms of everyday life here in 21st century America. You’re ordering your burrito on your phone, meeting friends for happy hour, observing relatively normal political disagreements in the various Op-Ed sections of the newspaper and otherwise enjoying all the conveniences of modern day living. Here things are, continuing as they always have, only with more burritos, nifty cameras that fit in your pocket, and better TV. Your job is okay, your kids are going to school everyday, you aren’t embarrassed by the President, and you can go up to the mountains often enough. You spend your days largely concerned about how many burritos your eating, how much screen time your kids are digesting, and how you can get to the mountains a little more often. Then a pandemic hits. Your kids are now on their screens 10 hours a day to get their math homework, which is just beyond what you can recall from your own math classes. You can’t buy burritos anymore because all the burrito shops are closed. The mountain towns have become viral swamps according to the news, so you can’t go there to get away from it all. Politics have turned into a giant dumpster fire and then there are the literal fires. What, only 8 months ago was mostly a nice, normal world with some idiosyncrasies that were a bit annoying, has become an apocalyptic ball of uncertainty with no sign of where we can land this mad plane.
Now in the middle of all this, if you forget what I said up front, namely “We worship a God who delights to shake things,” you could be confused, even a little riddled with anxiety. You might think this is all just a big ball of madness being thrown into a washing machine filled with radioactive goo. But you’d be forgetting one of the most fundamental things God does, and you’d miss that this madness isn’t a flaw of this whole thing called history, but rather a feature. God shakes things and he does so according to plan. In other words, these things aren’t chaos, but rather they are headed somewhere on purpose.
The author of Hebrews reminds God’s people in chapter 12:26-29
“At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.” This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain. Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”
This shaking is filled with glorious purpose. We’ll see this weekend in Romans 8 that it is a shaking accompanied by groaning and suffering - real suffering. But that the glory that will be revealed on the other side will cause us to count that suffering as nothing. Think about that for a minute or two (or well, a lot longer)… All this shaking and the accompanying fall-out - which can be devastating and could get quite a bit worse - all of that loss which is real and the Bible doesn’t make light of (and we shouldn’t either) will be nothing compared to the glorious and gracious accomplishment of God.
You see, He shakes in order to establish that which can’t be shaken. Here is a God who, with glee, overturns all our perceived stabilities in order to give us what is truly stable. He overturns all our mediocre beauty for what is in fact beautiful and glorious and good. So what are we to do with all this shaking? Well, we should do what the author of Hebrews instructs us to do: Worship with awe and reverence. Gather with the saints, tremble and marvel in the presence of a God who can shake everything, worship Him and then, give thanks for this kingdom He loves to give in the shaking - an unshakeable kingdom full of beauty and grace.
He isn't Reacting.
Most Wednesdays I get out of the city, head up to the mountains, and take a seat perched above the South Platte River. I spend those Wednesdays wrestling with the text I’ll be preaching the upcoming Sunday, praying, and being reminded of something absolutely essential in our age. Here I see gallons and gallons of water steadily pouring down the valley. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t wait to consider what’s happening all around. It asks no questions about the upcoming presidential election or what latest controversies are boiling in the lives of people around it. Here are trees, big evergreens and a small grove of aspens, swaying in the wind but mostly just standing there, oblivious to all the concerns and the latest outrages everyone’s all jazzed about. Here are mountains, definitely unmoved by all the things that throw us around, changing our blood pressure, anxiously spinning our thoughts and emotions as we are moved by an endless wave of news and scandals and trends. It dawns on me this particular Wednesday that here is an entire world, full of glory and life and death and all manner of things - speaking constantly about the sovereignty, power and majesty of God - and it has almost no regard for the things that consume most of our lives and news cycles.
And then, still sitting in this same spot, I consider the Scriptures themselves. Here is testimony and law and song and grace upon grace fixed on pages by God’s Spirit. All of them witness to God’s sovereignty, His power and his majesty. All of them unmoved by our fears and ambitions and tragedies. Here is a rock of God’s revelation - of truth and beauty and goodness that is not concerned with responding to all our latest foolishness and not attempting to coddle us in our sins and anxieties. Rather, here is a word that simply and gloriously stands, in the midst of all our madness and seeming chaos, it stands and speaks the same word over and over and over again - unchanging, unconfused. And such a word, in a culture such as ours, can be a rather remarkable anchor. An unmoved Word in the midst of stormy seas and a cacophony of voices demanding your attention. Here is another grace given to us in the Bible - a steady and sure word.
The Westminster Confession (echoing the author of Hebrews words) tells us in chapter 1: “Therefore it pleased the Lord at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his church; and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the church against corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing…”
“…for the…comfort of the church…”
God has given us these sure words, these unchanging words for the “comfort of the church.” It isn’t simply the content of His words that are to comfort God’s people, it is also the simple fact of their existence, their unchanging nature is itself to be a comfort to the church. These trees, this river, these mountains do what they do - and they keep doing what they do, because God has commanded them to and only because God commands them to. These words, in this marvelous book called the Bible, they are given to us, unchanging, as a comfort, a steadying rail as we’re shoved and pushed and spinning around often confused by the storms that swirl around us.
Another thing strikes me in considering this comfort: God is not reacting. He is not spinning around, scrambling to make sure he stays ahead of the latest trouble or confusion. He isn’t coming up with new responses to address an ever changing world. He isn’t updating his research in light of new sociological and scientific data. He has spoken. His word and his words stand forever. When we return to dust, with our political and social agendas, his words will remain - always doing what they were intended to do. When we return to dust, with our anxieties and addictions and rebellions, his words will remain - always doing what they were intended to do.
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.” - Matthew 24:35
“I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness, for you have exalted above all things your name and your word.” - Psalm 138:2
“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
The Good News of Specificity
There is a big difference between simply saying “I love you” and saying “I love *this* about you” as a dad. Oh, we should and must tell our children that we love them, but there is something powerful in expressing specific delight in some aspect of who your children are. There’s a big difference in telling your children to “behave” or “be responsible” and telling your kids to clean up their rooms, brush their teeth and go to bed at a certain time. The specificity matters, its an important part - both in expressing delight and in shaping behavior. But such specificity can be hard - both in parenting and in the work of evangelism and discipleship in the church.
One of the more subtle ways that otherwise bible-believing Christians avoid God is through our tendency to believe and confess in generalities. We can accept the Bible’s teaching on sin, the need for repentance and confession, the kingdom of God, the call to believe in Jesus and to then obey him. Pastor’s will teach these things. Christians will get together and talk about these things, read about these things and admonish one another concerning these things. But they all remain marvelously general. They never touch the ground. Sin is treated as generally as possible. We might occasionally confront things like pornography or esoteric concepts like pride or a failure to love - but I find it rare that we will talk about specific sins and specific instances of biblical obedience in the concrete realities of everyday life. I think we avoid concreteness in our own lives and in pastor’s sermons for a few reasons.
Living in one of the most divided eras in our culture’s memory, I think we are terrified of interpersonal conflict. And while the Bible confronts ideas and philosophies, it does so by confronting concrete behaviors. While it commends faith and obedience to Jesus, it does so through concrete actions and relationships and practices. If we begin to get specific with either our own behaviors or the lives of our neighbors and friends, the teaching of Scripture goes from being a theoretical set of potentially appealing ideas to actually confronting real lives, real addictions, real fears, and real comforts. The command of Scripture is not simply an esoteric call to have some new ideas layered on top of a life lived in modern, secularist and individualist terms. It is a specific call to believe something new about the world and God and ourselves and to therefore live differently in that world. This necessarily means conflict with specific ways that we or our neighbors are actually living. And while conflict can be done really poorly. It ought to be pursued in love and because of love. Evangelism will involve conflict. Discipleship will involve conflict. Conflict is often very painful - strong relationships can be shattered. Our own need to be well-liked or respected can be threatened. Its often right here, when we start talking about specific ways that God has commanded us to live that we can find ourselves embarrassed because of how God speaks or feeling the pain of our own need to repent of specific behaviors and change. Specificity creates conflict in our own lives and with our friends.
Another reason we avoid this specificity is fear. It is easy to appear courageous when a pastor stands up and preaches about sin and the need to repent of sin, the centrality of the cross, and the offer of forgiveness. But to do so without naming specific ways that real people and real ideas and real behaviors are in conflict with God and what He says is to treat the gospel as a series of theological platitudes. If we champion the systematic teachings of Scripture without speaking to the specific ways it calls people and cultures to real repentance and obedience, then we may sound bold and orthodox and courageous, but we’ve avoided the actual places where courage and boldness are needed.
But one of the glorious implications of the incarnation is that holiness and obedience and faith have been seen and touched and heard. James warns us that faith without the (concrete) fruit of obedience is a dead faith. God’s gracious gift of the law and the prophets, as well as the gospels and the New Testament letters gives us enormous amounts of material to learn how to trust God and to obey God in all manner of different circumstances. The danger of sin remaining in the esoteric realm is that God’s mercy remains there as well. Instead of wonderfully concrete instances of confessing our specific sins and believing on God’s grace for those specific moments - we can be haunted by a vague sense of guilt, God’s grace can become just a generalized sense that God loves us despite the fact that we are marred by sin. Obedience becomes defined and driven more by generalities and less by the actual biblical commands and examples that can bear rich fruit in our lives. It gets reduced to common cultural norms dictated by secularist ideas from the right or from the left. But God has given us more than this. He has called us to repent of real ways that we’ve failed to obey his word. He offers forgiveness and grace for specific deeds and attitudes and ideas that we confess.
We must make sure we aren’t simply taking Christian concepts and layering them on top of lives being lived however we want. We should insure that our evangelism isn’t doing the same thing with those who don’t believe - merely inviting them to adopt a new set of ideas to fit neatly into lives lived in rebellion against God. The Gospel addresses specific people with specific sin and specific needs with a remarkably specific hope.
Come and Welcome
For the past 7 months we have been trained to regard ourselves as quite dangerous. We’re surrounded by signs and policies commanding us to keep our distance from one another. We quarantine the healthy. We are told we must cover our faces for the sake of love. Even our skin color has become a source of danger for others. Whiteness needs to be isolated just as the old racists believed (and believe) that blackness should be. We’ve been catechized, discipled to believe that in order to love our neighbor we must repent of our skin, stay away from one another, and cover our faces - the part of us designed to uniquely reflect God’s glory (2 Corinthians 3-4). This is a catechism from hell and it must be resisted.
The church’s witness has been badly compromised in these days. Not because we’ve necessarily abandoned the creeds, but because we’ve abandoned or neglected what is the necessary fruit of those creeds. We’ve forsaken the gathering of the church for disembodied video streaming, reinforcing the message that everyone is safer at home. We’ve abandoned the one table where we share bread and wine together, adopting instead individualized communion, segregated seminars where we are sheltered from one another’s skin, and buffet-style Sundays where the people of God eat one church’s online music, drink another’s online preaching, and abandon the practice of hospitality for one another and to our neighbors. We’ve done these things in the name of love and justice, destroying both in the process. Hell wants this - to call evil good and to call good evil. Hell wants this - to reinforce the animosities that have haunted our nation’s past. Hell wants this- a people fearful of what the other people might be carrying, what they might breathe, or even who they are. In the name of love, indeed in the name of justice, such madness must be resisted.
Each Sunday the liturgy begins with a call to worship. Here God calls his people together, as their father, to worship, to pray, to read, to baptize and to eat. He welcomes us as his children -brothers and sisters, not as potential disease-carrying threats. He brings us together, not as embodiments of racist oppression or victimization, but as one family, one tribe gathered from the nations of the earth. He calls us to testify in song and prayer with faces reflecting his glory and grace. He issues an invitation to come and be welcomed home, to be together in his presence with lives that overlap, breath and song that overlaps, and even bread and wine that overlap. We meet one another as a redeemed people. We meet one another as forgiven people. We meet one another, with bodies and faces and stories to tell. Unlearn the unhuman catechism. Worship the triune God with body and with people. Go to church. Come and Welcome.
Three Governments and the Government
A Primer on Governments and Authority
As we near the upcoming delight known as the United States election, I thought it might be good to provide a basic primer on how government and authority work from within the Christian tradition - and particularly the reformed Christian tradition. This will have the effect of telling you what bumper stickers to buy, which neighbors to harass and, hopefully, who to direct your angry electorate letter to. I specify the “reformed tradition” because the Anabaptists have their own take (its wrong, and frankly kind of weird - but prevalent in our day), the Catholics have theirs (its terrifyingly wrong), and the Anglicans’ theirs (its interestingly wrong). So here’s a swing at a relatively short explanation of it:
Christians begin with a basic and yet all-encompassing confession: Jesus is Lord.
Jesus tells his disciples that all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to him. The announcement of the Kingdom of God is a claim laid upon all the earth, every nation and every sphere. Nobody and no institution is excluded from all of heaven and earth. Everybody and everything is answerable to him, they have to obey him.
To make it more explicit: You have to obey him. Your neighbor has to obey him. Congress has to obey him. The Supreme Court has to obey him. The mayor of Denver has to obey him. The Starbucks manager has to obey him. This is necessarily uncomfortable, but it is also unavoidable. There will be a god ruling over every particular thing - every government, every family, every individual. To deny that Jesus should be obeyed in all these spheres is to say that Jesus should be disobeyed in some of these spheres and that is a denial of the basic Christian confession: Jesus is Lord.
Does this mean that America should be a “Christian nation”? Well, yes, now that you ask, it does. To deny this, is to say that God wants America to be a secular nation, to disregard his character, his laws, his justice, etc. To deny this, is to say that God wants America to find some other standard by which to evaluate its life. To deny this is to deny the commission of Jesus himself who told us to “Disciple the Nations.” What standard can we as Christians appeal to beyond the words of God? Some say “Common sense.” But there isn’t really much of that around anymore. Some say, “the will of the people.” But that’s terrifying. The will of the people has frequently led to some rather devastating horrors. A society that grows out of the worship of the triune God would reflect his character, his grace, his law and his love - and none of these things are in conflict. Every society will have a god. All laws are religious laws. The question is which god’s laws are they? And is that god a good one?
But I am getting away from myself. The main point here, is that Jesus possesses all the authority that is.
The Bible establishes other authorities underneath his authority. In the Scriptures we see three fundamental governments that are given authority over different areas of responsibility: the family, the church, and the government (or the magistrate). All three governments have their own lanes, their own particular responsibilities. All three governments are given tools by which to exercise their responsibilities in the world. All three governments are to explicitly obey Jesus as they do the things they’ve been called to do.
The Family: The family is given the ministry of raising and discipling (education) children, the well-being and flourishing of people through healthcare, as well as the production of wealth and fruitfulness. The father is given responsibility to rule his home and to see it bear fruit (think raise godly children and work and produce wealth in the world.) This government is to oversee work and child-raising. (Included here would be things like healthcare and education). As businesses in our world becomes increasingly complex, its helpful to see these entities as vast partnerships between families taking the raw materials of the earth to produce fruitful things. The charge of this government is to raise children to know and fear God, to grow up, get married and raise other children. And raise your children to work hard with their hands and their minds and bring fruit and wealth and life from the raw materials of this world. We do these things in the light of the gospel of Jesus and in obedience to God’s law. This means that generous hospitality (a key note describing the homes of God’s people) is integral to the life of this government whether around the dinner table or in the businesses started. The father and his family and the various businesses and institutions they produce answer to the rule of Jesus.
The Church: The church is given the ministry of grace and peace, of word and sacrament. The church is charged with discipling the nations, bringing all the peoples of the earth to recognize Jesus’ Lordship, to trust in his death and resurrection and to do all that he commands. For this unbelievable task they are to bear the Word, the sacraments (water, bread and wine), and discipline. Elders are to bear this authority as the church gathers for worship and calls all the peoples to worship and obey God in every sphere of life. We declare the good news of what Jesus has done for us in his life, death and resurrection and testify to his ascension as King and Lord. In other words, the means the church is given for this gargantuan task is simply its worship. We worship the Triune God in Spirit and truth. We worship as His covenant people (in person, preferably without masks, with bread and wine and cleansing water) and the nations are transformed. The church and her ministers answer to Jesus.
The Magistrate (or the State): The government is given the ministry of justice. She bears the sword to punish evil-doers and ensure that the just are free to flourish. The heated arguments in our day about the definition and nature of justice are therefore really vital debates that Christians must engage in biblically. Good governments insure that people and their businesses and families are free to thrive and bear the kinds of fruit they are commissioned by God to produce. Different governmental systems are more or less effective at doing this. Studying U.S. civics will expose you to the rather marvelous way that the U.S. system was designed to do precisely this. Monarchies attempt this in other ways.But regardless of how the system is organized, the magistrate answers to Jesus.
None of these three “bring the kingdom of God,” rather they testify and submit to the kingdom of God through their faithfulness in doing what Jesus commands in the sphere’s they are given responsibility over, and using the means that God has given them to do so. All three are accountable to defend and execute justice and mercy with the authority they’ve been given (the magistrate with the sword, the church with her discipline, and in family and businesses according to just balances.) The temptation is to always put too much stock in the ability of any one of these to do too much. Our age is particularly prone to believing that the magistrate might save us from poverty and disease and suffering. But this isn’t what the magistrate is designed by God to do. The family cannot function as the church. The church can only supplement the work of the family. When the church fails to be faithful to her calling or her gifts, she should be called to repentance. When the magistrate fails to be faithful to its calling (corruption) or when it reaches beyond its established boundaries (tyranny), it should be rebuked and called to repentance.
The failure of any of these three effects the collapse of society. The faithfulness of these three can be used to aid the flourishing of the other two. Strong churches shape the life of the family and call the magistrate to faithfulness (think Reformation Scotland). Thriving families lead to thriving economies for everyone and can result in a healthy state and churches. While these three spheres have different lanes, the lanes are deeply interdependent.
When we confess Jesus is Lord we are making a politico-religious-cultural statement. He rules everything. He forgives sin and he calls all people, all institutions to repent, to be forgiven and to submit to his reign in everything.