Jesus Isn't Fair, Either

One of the themes that has echoed and re-echoed across this nation after our housing bubble went inevitably kerpop is that of fairness. Millions of folks bought houses that were utterly beyond their means, homes that were either too big or...more likely...whose value had been absurdly inflated by relentless churning speculation.

Those struggling homeowners soon found themselves deep "underwater," as their equity dried up and their income took a hit from the crumbling job market. It weren't just a few folks, neither. Last year, 2.8 million American households faced foreclosure, a rate that is on track to hit 3 million even in 2010. The sheer volume of collapse hasn't just stirred a government response. Banks, realizing that they can't manage or sell that many homes, have often been renegotiating the interest on the loans for these houses. But that hasn't always been enough.

This last week, some banks have started to reduce the amount of principal as well. Meaning, they're deciding, heck, remember that $475,000 townhouse you took out a jumbo loan to purchase in 2008 right before your wife lost her job? The one that's worth $275,000 now? Let's make that a $300,000 loan instead! It's the only way to keep folks in their homes, and while it's a desperation measure, it works best for the banks and for those who would otherwise find themselves out of a place to live.

For some of us who bought smaller and earlier, and who've never ever not once even come close to missing a mortgage payment, this can seem, like, TOTALLY unfair. We were wise. Diligent. Aware of market dynamics. Focused on living within our means. We saw the bubble for what it was, to the point of solemnly warning folks we knew not to buy at the peak of the market. And I did utter that warning, over and over again.

But the world is full of fools and dreamers, suckers ready to believe something that is obviously too good to be true. Why should they be rewarded or cut slack? They should bear the penalty of their stupidity. Moving their family of five into Grandma and Grandpa's basement for three or four years is the only way they'll ever learn to stop making dumb decisions. They made the bed. Let 'em sleep in it. Or on the street. Whichever.

Problem is, self-righteousness and an overdeveloped sense of what is and isn't fair have no place in the heart of a Jesus follower. That was, as I recall, the whole point of that little story he told about the laborers in the vineyard. That story, of course, had mostly to do with quelling the spiritual resentments of those who have always done what's right. We want to be rewarded, and we want our reward to be bigger than the reward of those who come stumbling into the Kingdom at the last moment.

As an ethic, though, it reminds us that Christians don't desire others to suffer. We are not to want others to be diminished or humiliated. Period.

If we find ourselves grumbling because someone is being given another chance, or forgiven a debt, then something has gone very very wrong with our faith. When we allow ourselves to want that suffering as just recompense for cluelessness, or want others to be cut down a notch or two because it's what they deserve, then the spirit of grace that lies at the beating heart of Christ is no longer within us.

On A Hill Far Away Stood A Secular Cross

I've been following the recent Salazar v. Buono court case for a while. For those of you who don't tag along with significant faith-related court cases, this one involves a cross erected on federal land to honor WWII dead.

It's an interesting and convoluted case, in which Congress got heavily involved writing legislation to specifically prevent the removal of the cross. Oral arguments in this case were heard at the Supreme Court this last Wednesday, and the case itself will be decided over the next few months.

One of the most striking and peculiar exchanges this Wednesday came between Justice Antonin Scalia and a lawyer representing the ACLU. Scalia, who is easily the most fiery and entertaining member of the court, was putting forth the conservative case for retaining the cross on public land. The ACLU attorney was putting forth the presumably progressive case for it's removal.

There are some matters of federal jurisdiction at play here, but what to me was most fascinating was the exchange between Scalia and the ACLU around the nature of the cross. Scalia, the court's most vociferous conservative, made the case that the cross was a generic religious symbol, one that universally honors all peoples and religions. He also described it as "..the most common symbol for the resting place of the dead."

The representative of the ACLU described the cross in this way: " ..a cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity and it signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins."

I have two responses to this odd exchange.

First, one wonders if Scalia has ever paid a visit to Arlington Memorial Cemetery to honor our war dead. I'm a DC townie, and I've taken more than one long, slow walk through those solemn fields. The markers there are simple white headstones. On most, there are crosses. On some there are Stars of David. On others, the Star and Crescent.

To my knowledge, there are no Flying Spaghetti Monsters yet. This is not because atheists haven't given their lives for this country, but just because it sorta stops being funny at that point. However you slice it, the cross is not, not, NOT a generic grave marker.

Second, it's amazingly odd to have a progressive liberal making a fundamentally orthodox statement about the actual nature and purpose of the cross, and to have an ultraconservative claiming that the cross should be thought of as devoid of specific meaning, and unrelated to Christ.

Strange, strange times.

I Am Not John Galt

My foray into the writings of Ms. Rand was really a matter of coincidence. Two nearly simultaneous events stirred me in her direction. First, I tend to regularly check CNBC, as a way of keeping abreast of the churnings and whirlings of global capitalism. Earlier this month, I came across an article praising Rand, whose philosophy defined the economic outlook of the Reagan White House. With leftists in the White House, she's more relevant than ever, crowed the article, which was written to pitch a book written by one of Objectivism's disciples.

Second, I read a short blog response to Atlas Shrugged written by a conservative with whom I've often gently jousted in past, one that showed him enthusiastic about many aspects of her ideology of self-actualization. In the face of that sympathy, though, he expressed some discomfort with certain aspects of her worldview. Like most conservatives, he's a Christian, and that makes embracing some of her views...difficult.

The reason for this dissonance can be found throughout her book, but nowhere more strongly than in the radio speech of John Galt, the great noble and mighty man of mystery who acts as the mostly unseen influence over the world of Atlas Shrugged. The radio address comes as he seizes control of the airwaves, bumping the weak and bureaucratic president so that he can deliver his monologue, to which the nation pays rapt attention.

And oh, what a monologue. It runs for fifty-three full pages of the book. As someone who preaches regularly from written texts, I did a quick calculation. That's a four and a half hour sermon, with no music, breaks or pauses. Even by Baptist standards, that's starting to get a little long. Even Rush Limbaugh runs out of steam before he can complete a rant of that magnitude. The idea that everyone would sit and listen to this shows that Ms. Rand may have lacked a grasp of 1) how humans process information and 2) the capacity of the human bladder.

This is Ayn Rand's Sermon on the Mount, the pinnacle of her philosophy, and the conceptual lynchpin of Atlas Shrugged. And what it is, unfortunately for conservatives who want to embrace her, is completely antithetical to Christianity. By this, I don't mean it opposes the institutional church. I don't mean that it raises concerns about the way in which Christians have used power to oppress others. It sets itself in explicit and ferocious opposition to the heart of Christian faith.

As Galt/Rand does the monologue thing, most of his invective is against the moral and ethical code that he views as having enslaved and destroyed humanity. That dark and oppressive morality is, as he puts it, "...to serve God's purpose or your neighbor's welfare." For the entirety of this defining speech, Galt/Rand assails the "mystics" who would give themselves over to God, and those "moralists" who would give themselves over to neighbor. The enemy of human actualization is, for Rand, the Great Commandment.

This is, to put it mildly, a non-trivial issue. As someone who'd known the oppression of Soviet Russia, Rand hated communism, and her seething hatred of the state made her philosophy seem appealing to American conservatives. But as much as she hated commies, she hated Jesus most of all. Her whole philosophy is carefully constructed in intentional, fundamental and irreconcilable opposition to the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

You cannot be Christian and believe what Rand believes. I do not say this by way of assailing her, because she and I would agree.

And with that agreement, I think my conversation with Ms. Rand has come to a conclusion. Always nice to end with agreement.

Love of Neighbor and Love of God

"Love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself."

This familiar quotation surfaced several times in several forms in my reading of Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique yesterday. Though it seems pretty basic, it's worth another look. It's kinda important.

Jesus articulated this as the primary purpose of human existence, and it's a concept with traction. He did not say that the authority of the church is the point of being alive. He did not say that the universe was 6,000 years old, and that this concept must be defended at all costs because the Bible is empirically infallible. He called on his followers to do those two simple things, which are really just one simple thing, and in doing so find themselves reconciled to both the world around them and fellow human beings.

It's a pretty straightforward request, and has enough inherent and self-evident goodness about it that even a freethinking enlightenment philosopher like Voltaire can take a hard look and say, "Yup, that's a good thing. I'm up for that." He said it with considerably more grace and wit, but that's the general principle.

What is most striking about his acceptance of this axiom is not the embrace of the second part of the statement. Loving your neighbor as yourself, the ethic of radical compassion, is pretty elemental. But Voltaire embraces the whole thing, both love of God and love of neighbor.

Here's the fuddler: can you do just the latter?

Can an ethic of radical compassion exist if you say: "You know, I'm up for love. That's great. Love is cool. But the whole God thing just doesn't work for me." There are plenty of humanists who make that statement, because the inherent value in compassion just walks right up and gives you a big hug. Who doesn't like compassion and empathy? Besides Hannity, Coulter, and Limbaugh, that is.

On the one hand, I think that ethic of compassion can guide the lives of those who are not people of faith. I'd be willfully deceiving myself if I denied that many secular people live peaceful lives filled with acts of caring for others. Denying the spiritual value and validity of those acts of caring is one of the deeply irritating spiritual ticks of my co-religionists. A God who hates a kindly act because it isn't done in His name wouldn't be worth following. I think you've just got to call something good when it's self-evidently good.

On the other hand, the love of God is in a real sense necessary if you're going to love your neighbor. Why? Because truly loving God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul leaves no room for the love of certain other things. It leaves no space for nationalism, or profiteering, or racial bias, or gender bias, or partisanship. It leaves no space for all of the various categories we use to define "us" over and against "them." That mystic orientation towards something that transcends not just society and culture, but spacetime itself...if done authentically...radically enables us to see past the things that divide us. It enables us not just to love those who are part of "us," but to love across the ultimately meaningless boundaries we establish between ourselves and those we think are our enemies.

That isn't to say that a focus on the transcendent and the eternal can't be subverted and misused. Nearly every religious tradition struggles against those that would use it as a means of coercing and controlling others, or as an excuse for hating others. All sorts of narsty things make absolute claims on us, and when we yield to them, all sorts of unpleasantness occurs.

That said, I think if we are to see our neighbor as ourselves, we have to be able to look past our individual and collective expectations, past even the categorical forms and structures of reason itself. If we're going to be continually growing in understanding and compassion for the often very strange Other, and shattering the boundaries that divide us, we do that most effectively by setting our hearts on that which stands infinitely beyond us.

Swinging Over the Generational Divide

A few months ago, my wife found herself in possession of a satellite radio for our little commuter-box of a car. The point of that was, of course, to connect her with the vast array of offerings on XM, and to thus make her day-to-day commute a little more tolerable.

I hadn't been using the radio much, but a recent solo long-distance trip through rural Maryland suddenly had me appreciating it. When your only over-the-air choices are country and country, it's nice to have something to fall back on that hasn't been pre-masticated by executives in Nashville. I'm actually a pretty big fan of bluegrass, but can't stand Corporate Country. The Man is still the Man, even if he wears boots and a cowboy hat. So I prowled through the hundred-plus XM channels, looking for something that just...clicked.

What amazed me was the channel I ended up sticking with. It wasn't current music. It wasn't hip-pop or altrock. It wasn't the music of my own youth or young adulthood. It was barely even the music of my parent's youth. It was big band and swing music of the 1930s and 1940s. Stuff like Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, some sweet live Cab Calloway and Tommy Dorsey mixing like butter with Sinatra. I listened for hours. I just sat and droned along in our little xB, listening to a calvacade of long deceased swing icons, and even the absence of cruise control and an engine overmatched for mountain driving didn't dampen my enjoyment of the trip.

Swing and big band sound had a brief hipster revival back in the 1990s, but it has since drifted back into the haze of musical history. This is a pity, because it's just so...alive. It was the pop music of that generation, and I find myself preferring it to the pop music of this generation. It shows musical accomplishment that isn't studio-dependent. It's suave and elegant, not brutal and profane. And it's...young. It was then, and you can feel the passion and physicality of youth moving in it now.

Preferences aside, though, it stirs me to wonder why it is that church is so obsessed with mimicking our societal obsession with generational fragmentation. There is a dissonance, I think, between being "relevant" and being "counter-cultural," and if church is to be authentic in it's articulation of the Gospel, it needs to be in greatest tension with the culture, both in form and in purpose.

Nowhere is this clearer than in our churchy replication of the separation of ages, kids from tweeners from youth from young adults from young marrieds from older marrieds from retirees from the old from the old old. Ministries box us in by demographic and microtarget interest groups like a marketer on meth, even though the whole point of Christian faith is the shattering of the boundaries between us.

This despite the fact that we grow most in faith and come to know Christ in the the crucible of the other. And sometimes, just sometimes, the other knows music that we don't, and that will speak to us in ways we never anticipated.

My Jesus is Bigger than Your Jesus

Is there a place for the competitive spirit in the church?

I find myself wondering that as I enjoy my latest PS3 game, the slightly dated but still highly entertaining multiplayer online game WarHawk. In it, teams of semi-cartoonish warrior-avatars battle it out across an array of expansive maps, playing games of capture the flag, fighting to seize territory, or just doing some good ol' fashioned virtual killin'.

Behind very single one of your opponents is an actual human being located somewhere around the world. It is, truth be told, not necessarily the most pastorly of pastimes. Dropping your Nemesis fighter into hover mode and lobbing missiles at a footsoldier attempting to seize your flag is hardly turning the other cheek. As I get better at the game, and more folks fall at my hands, I imagine that I've probably been responsible for more folks calling out the name of the Lord in game than I do in church.

As much as I enjoy a well earned victory, the intensity of competition makes me wonder if such a thing has any place among Jesus people. Are we permitted to strive with and against one another as we seek to strengthen our churches and our proclamation of Christ's grace?

I particularly wonder this in the context of my own congregation. Much of the growth we have seen in the last several years has come from our partnership with a Korean church that is now in the throes of a deep church conflict. As the two church camps battle it out, I'm amazed to see their worship numbers growing. Members have left, sure. But as the conflict continues, more and more people are being encouraged to come show their support for one team or another. It has the feeling of two small armies marshaling for a battle. I've heard some suggest that this battle is unquestionably the Lord's work, as they work to build a real church and cast out those who stood in their way for so many years. What better than the crucible of conflict to draw people to church?

This is not God at work, of course. Not if either Jesus or Paul knew what they were talking about. This is just human beings having at one another, which we can do just fine without the Lord's help.

But are there good ways to fight within the church? I think, for instance, that the progressive wing of the church is a little too passive when it comes to striving against repressive and idolatrous fundamentalism. We sit back and are "nice," and do nothing. It'd be better to fight...not by shouting or being obnoxious to ultraconservatives...but by making a concerted effort to make our witness to Christ's grace more intensely viral than theirs.

But We're Up To The Third Coming

There was a lovely little driblet of Jesus data served up by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life yesterday. Funny how these things always come out during Holy Week. Drawing from an exhaustive survey of American Christians done back in 2006, the report gives us a picture of what self-professed Jesus followers do and do not believe about the second coming.

As always, I find myself either 1) in the minority or 2) just not on the map at all. The study shows that of American Christians, 79% believe in the return of Jesus, although once you get to asking how and when and why, things get a bit murkier. 21% don't believe in the Second Coming, don't know, or just don't care.

I guess I'm in some variant of the latter category. Though this is not particularly orthodox of me, I can say it without reservation: anticipation of the bodily return of Jesus of Nazareth is not a central part of my faith. If it happens, fine. But it's not the focus.

I tend to feel this most strongly around Easter. As I read through and pray over the story of Christ's passion, death, and resurrection, I tend to become more and more annoyed with the folks whose faith seems to revolve entirely around hollering about his physical return in the mothership. Though Jesus in the Gospels teaches mostly about 1) the immanence of the Kingdom and 2) his interwoven relationship with God, somehow most of Christendom has made itself theologically indistinguishable from pre-Jesus Judean messianic belief. This seems to render all the things that went on in Christ's previous appearance almost irrelevant. Or, to be frank, his appearances.

Jesus comes the first time. He teaches us everything we need to know to live as God wants us to live. Then, he shows us the depth of God's presence in Him by embodying that life right up to and including a particularly unpleasant death. That's...well...isn't that the First Coming?

After that, we hear that even that death can't stand against His grace, and His disciples witness that He returns from death. "Resurrection" means "again-rising," so if you're doing it again, that means you're not doing it for the first time. If we're being fair about it, isn't that technically the Second Coming?

And then we hear that the Spirit that filled him poured out upon his disciples, and that through that Spirit he was present in them and they were all made part of Him. Unless the Holy Spirit is somehow not actually fully God, doesn't this count too? As a Progressive Pentecostal, I'd say this one is much more important than we generally make it out to be. Not only that, but it would take us up to arrival number three, which is still in process.

And yet still we're waiting around, pointlessly dithering about when and where and who and how. I mean, gracious, how many times does Jesus have to show up before we get it?

There Was No Point At Which He Was Not

I'm going to spiral back to my previous thread on the Christian assertion of the pre-existence of Christ and how that relates to the flesh-and-blood of Jesus of Nazareth. We say he's part of creation from the very beginning...but how? And which part of Jesus is eternal? Lil' Baby Jesus, Eternally Asleep on the Hay? Tweener Jesus eternally wowin' 'em in the temple? Jesus the carpenter's apprentice? Teaching Jesus? Jesus dying on the Cross? Jesus strangely shrouded and unrecognized at the tomb, or walking the Emmaeus road?

But that big mess o' Jesuses gets too confusing. Instead, most of us carve ourselves out an eternal Christ that is separate from the man who lived and died, that familiar and resplendantly white-robed Caucasian with a neatly trimmed beard and feathered, touchable hair who floats smiling towards us from a golden cloud. But that seems to make the life and the death and the cross a brief and tangential codicil to Christ's eternity, a blip, a 33 year flicker of flesh instead of the central fulcrum of God's self-expression to humanity.

As I struggle to wrap my head around this, it's always a useful caveat to remember that when it comes to talking about things that are eternal, our language is a fumbly and clumsy thing. Our words are imprecise symbolic instruments, and while they're useful for describing the structures and movements in the world around us, they're far less helpful when we wrassle with the transcendant.

That said, I've found the distinction between the Greek terms chronos and kairos to be helpful in understanding the eternity of Christ. To which you might say, rolling your eyes, there's nothing like bringing in Greek philosophical terms to clear things up. Fair enough, but hear me out. Where English only has one term for time, Greek has several. Chronos time is clock time, the generic passing of moment to moment. Kairos, on the other hand, is best translated as "God's time," or a time set aside in which something is fulfilled. (see Luke 21:8) It's not about the ephemeral, but about the permanent.

I see the life of Jesus of Nazareth as a life lived as an indwelling of the eternal God's self expression into the flow of our time. The moments of His life are all kairos moments, not fleeting and substanceless, but of God and part of God's plan for creation since the dawn of creation. From the moment our universe was spoken into being, that Jesus-event was already part of it. Every instant of that life reflected God, and every instant of that life is part of God, eternally.

Angels on the Head of a Pin, Shakin' Dey Booty

I know this doesn't matter much to most contemporary Big Stadium Christians, but I find myself struggling now and again with the question of Christ's pre-existence. This tends to come after I've done any significant reading in the Gospel of John. Christ is the Word, the Logos that is God's own creative power and self-expression. This, I get. Fine.

But in what way does that relate to Jesus of Nazareth? This is Jesus the human being, who wept and taught and laughed and went potty like the rest of us. Without the event of that particular life, I can't see any way to meaningfully parse out where the pre-existent Christ begins and the Holy Spirit ends. I can't say Christ without seeing Jesus, nor do I think that term has any meaning without the specific phenomenon of his life.

Part of my wrestling is that I do grasp...and conceptually embrace...the foundation of Trinitarian doctrine in Aristotelian categorical structure. Yeah, I know. Take a deep breath, and try to bear with me. When the early church was struggling to articulate who Jesus was, the Cappadocian fathers (following Tertullian) used the philosophy of their day to show how he was essentially united with God. That ancient articulation, found in the fourth Century Nicene Creed, used the Aristotelian principles of "substance" and "accident" to express how the persons of the Trinity interrelate. When they say that Jesus is of the same substance as the Father, we're saying that He shares an ineffable "Godness" with God the Father. At his very core, he is God. All of the particulars of who Jesus is are "accidents." His height, his skin tone, his genetic composition, the way his vocal cords vibrated to produce Aramaic in his unique voice...all of those things do not get us to his "Godness," to his substance, which is shared with the Father and the Holy Spirit. It is in those "accidents" that we are able to distinguish the persons of the Trinity.

As I assess the role of Christ in my faith, I find that all of the accidents that define "Christ" revolve around the life, death, and strange return of that first century Judean. Without the particularity of those events and that life, I have great difficulty seeing my way to a meaningful Trinitarian faith. How do I resolve this? More later...

The Scandal of Universality

What is salvation? Salvation comes when we stand in right relationship with God. It's a healing of the rift that exists between we selfish, solipcistic creatures and our Creator.

All of the terms and images that are used throughout the Gospels and Epistles point to Jesus of Nazareth as the One who fully manifested the self-emptying servanthood that is required if we are to conform our wills to God. He's the physical reality of the logos that underlies the universe, so woven up into who God is that parsing out where the man ends and God begins is a fools errand. Or the errand of theologians. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

More importantly, through him we come to see that this logos isn't just the disengaged Enlightenment clockmaker or the abstraction of an Aristotelian unmoved mover. Instead, Jesus expresses the logos to us as love. He has soteriological power..that means savin' power, kids...because he is God's own self-expression. He's not the Ba'al of a neo-Canaanite Trinity, sacrificed and raised by El like a subordinate mediator god in a tripartite pantheon. At his most essential, substantial level, Jesus is God.

As such, being Christian..and being saved...is less about emulating Christ and more about participating in Christ. It's not about our own heartfelt emo conviction that we've been adequately spattered with His plasma and corpuscles. It's not measured by our ability to memorize and recite scripture or the doctrinal assertions of our particular tradition.

It's measured by our participation in that love that is God the Father, which Christ expressed through his life, and which the Spirit struggles every day to manifest in us.

Word Up, Y'all

The Greek phrase "En arche en ho Logos" begins John's Gospel. It's the soaring start to John 1, and Jesus People have heard it a trillion times. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

For John of course, the Word with a capital W was Jesus. We hear that easily. It's nice and familiar. What is harder for us to do, living outside of the first century Greco-Roman world, is for us to hear the beginning of John's Gospel in the same way as the people who would first have heard it read in a small assembly of early Christians.

The term logos can be translated to mean a verbal utterance. It does mean that. However, the reason we slap a great honking uppercase Dubyah onto it has everything to do with the broader meaning of that term in the philosophical movements of that time. Logos was a term that had deep roots in Greek philosophy, having been used since the time before Socrates to describe the underlying order and nature of the universe. It can equally well be translated as "reason," or "meaning" or "thought."

During the time of the early church, it was used by the Stoic movement to describe the creative power that caused all things. The Stoics believed that fragments of that power, the logos spermatikos, resided in every human being as the power of reason.

At it's very outset, John's Gospel is making a stunning claim for Jesus...that he is, in fact, the embodiment of the underlying creative power that formed the universe. "Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made." If you heard that in the first century, you knew exactly what that meant. Logos. The Word.

Just as the universe was spoken into existence, Jesus is God's own self-expression, in human form. Can we call him Rabbi? Does he teach? Sure. Can we call him prophet? Does he proclaim God's justice? Yup. But the most essential assertion we make about Jesus is that Jesus is integrally woven into the Creator's intent for the universe, that he manifests that intent, that in some ineffable way he was and is that intent.

How, if at all, does this relate to the way we Christians understand salvation?

The Baked Good from the Sky

While the three synoptic gospels do tell us a great deal about who Jesus was, the primary focus in each of them is his 'splainin' to us what it means to live in the Kingdom of God.

If we want a more intimate discussion of who Jesus is, we go to John's Gospel. The witness of the Beloved Disciple comes to us from a different set of oral and written traditions about Jesus, which focus much more intently on Jesus himself. Who is he? Well, let's ask him.

John contains a series of what are called ego eimi, or "I am" statements, in which Jesus tells us who he is. So who are you, big guy?

"I am the bread of life. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. I am the light of the world. I am the gate for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I am the resurrection and the life. I am the way, the truth, and the life. I am the true vine."

To which we might say, huh? You're a baked good from the sky? A gate for livestock? A plant that does well on polygraph tests?

But we'd only say that if we were metaphorically challenged. Jesus speaks about who he is in ways that demand thought, that use symbols and language to force us to see him in a more complex way. He's what sustains us. He's what lights and guides our way. He's what gives us life and growth.

Why is he all those things? The answer is found in this Greek phrase: "En arche en ho Logos."

Where do we find that, and what does it mean?

Who Is This Guy?

So just who is He? Who is this peculiar figure around whom we Christians build our entire worldview, and in whose name we make such intense claims?

Among those who respect him, there are many who view him as a teacher of wisdom, a sage, a rabbi. Certainly, there were many times he was called rabbi (for example-Mark 9:5; John 3:2), and he did fulfill many of the roles of a rabbinic teacher. But delimiting his function to that alone just makes him one among a thousand other voices of wisdom. If we take that route, eventually, we end up Unitarian. Which, as we've all been told, is just half a notch on the dial away from becoming a Wiccan, or worse yet, a...Democrat. And we all know what awaits Democrats in the afterlife. Shudder.

There's also the "he's a prophet" meme, which I think also has some merit. This, however, only points you towards who he is if you understand what a prophet actually is. Prophets aren't primarily soothsayers, or prognosticators of future events. Neither are they only folks who make a clarion call for justice for the oppressed...although they certainly do that, too. Understood in a biblical sense, they are individuals who act as conduits for God. They don't just tell us about God, but are instead so filled with God that their voice ceases to be entirely their own.

This gets us closer, but it's still not quite it. Of all of the Gospels, which focuses most intently on who Jesus was?

Dropping the Ba'al

One of the larger challenges we have as Christians is telling the world about who Jesus is, and why we feel he's important. As important as John 3:16 is to all of us from this side of the looking glass, I think that unless we can unpack that a teensy little bit the rest of the world just hears us talkin' loud and sayin' nothing.

"He's the Son of God," we say, sounding much like Uhura on that Star Trek episode most Trekkers would rather forget. What, you mean like Hercules? Is Jesus the demi-god offspring of divine canoodling? Has the Holy of Holies, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, just become the Jewish Zeus as a goose, coming down to do the humpty hump with an underage Judean Leda? No, of course not. That's not what we say at all, but I'm not sure that most of us have an adequate grasp on the depth of what orthodox Trinitarian theology actually says to be able to fend off that sniping.

"He died for our sins and was raised again, so that we might have eternal life," we say, and we really mean it. But then some jaded former Christian with a chip on their shoulder asks us how that's different from the Canaanite Ugaritic stories of Ba'al the lifegiver, who dies in battle with Mot, the god of sterility and death. In his death, the hold of Mot over the earth is shattered, and Ba'al is then resurrected, restoring life to the earth, giving a great harvest and hope to humanity. "It's...different...,"we stammer, but they're hardly going to be convinced if that's all we have to offer. There are plenty of distinctions, but to really surface them, we have to both know the witness of Scripture and tradition.

Then...and I think this is the hard part...we have to be able to tell the story of who He is in such a way that a world that no longer is steeped in Bible stories can understand it. If all we can offer are what amount to terms of art, the language of our own in-group conversation, I think our ability to show the world who Jesus was and what He meant will fade to nothing.

The Only Real Christians Live In Denmark

I've just done a fascinating bit of reading over at Public Discourse, a conservative web journal. The article I'd commend to your attention is written by W. Bradford Wilcox, a University of Virginia sociologist. He opines at totally manageable length about the impact of social democracy on faith, drawing from a recent 33 nation study by two University of Washington sociologists. That study confirmed something many folks have noticed anecdotally: that nations that provide cradle-to-grave care for their citizens tend to be less religious.

For Dr. Wilcox, this reality poses grave concerns for the landscape of American faith during an Obama administration. Given this administration's focus on providing health care, a functioning infrastructure, and an educational system, things could get particularly ugly for the church if all of those things are successfully provided. Why? The answer is simple, says the good doctor:

"The bottom line: as government grows, people’s reliance on God seems to diminish."

Why is this? It isn't that folks aren't religious in countries like Norway and Denmark. There are Christians...just not as many of them. Why? In his review of the 33 nation study, Dr. Wilcox pulls out the core finding:

How do we account for the inverse relationship between government size and religious vitality? As Gill and Lundsgaarde point out, some individuals have strong spiritual needs that can only be met by religion. This portion of the population remains faithful, come what may. But other individuals only turn to churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques when their needs for social or material security are not being met by the market or state. In an environment characterized by ordinary levels of social or economic insecurity, many of these individuals will turn to local congregations for..support.

So let's make the shift from sociology to theology. What does this mean theologically?

It means, if we're attending to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, that the "success" of American Christianity only comes because most American Christians don't have a clue what Jesus actually taught. The findings tell us that we turn to God when we are seeking material well-being. We turn to Christ seeking physical security.

What we do not appear to be seeking is the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. We're as confused as the Samaritan woman at the well, who had trouble grasping the difference between water and Living Water. We come to Jesus not because we feel the yearning to be conformed to the will of God and transformed by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Instead, it's because we got us a jones for some a dat schweet, schweet Mammon, and we expect that Jesus in his infinitely beneficent blingitude will supernaturally serve it up if we ask real nice.

Perhaps, to flip Dr. Wilcox and his conclusions on their head, what a welfare state actually does is help separate the wheat from the chaff, the True Kirk from the Church of the World, the Heavenly City from the Earthly City. Those who would otherwise go to church seeking first their own interests and their own comfort find what they seek in the state, and fall away.

Those who recognize that there is more to our purpose life than material possessions and security...well, they keep seeking the Holy until they find it.

Gettin' Personal, Continued...

Picking up my previous thread about what it means to have a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior..."

What we hear in John's Gospel is Christ proclaiming something very different from the personal relationship we have with other people. It's easy for us to pray to Jesus, and tell our innermost thoughts to God in those times when we need an ear to hear us. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, although my compulsive Calvinist tendencies invariably remind me that I'm not praying to tell God anything God doesn't already know.

The challenge in this is that a God to whom we chat can easily become our own pet god, as we mumble our needs to Him like Queequeg whispering softly to his little wooden Yojo while the Pequod tosses in the gale-driven night.

What Christ is calling us to is a much deeper relationship than that--an immersion in him that transforms our inner person. It is a mystical relation, but not in the ethereal self-absorbed hi-I'm-Madonna-let's-talk-about-Kabbalah kind of way. Instead, it's a relationship that involves us being changed in the here and now. God and God's Kingdom cease to be *other* than us and separated from us. We participate in them, and through them, we participate in each other.

That, I think, is a better way to understand being "born again." It moves us into the sort of practical mysticism that Paul declares in Philippians:

Philippians 2:1-13 If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Gettin' Personal

The foundational assumption of the evangelical movement is that we need to have--everyone say it together--a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Our Lord and Savior. We need to be aware of Jesus not as an idea, or a historical figure, or a teacher of doctrine, but as a real presence. He's always there for us. He's our friend. He walks with us, he talks with us, he tells us we are his own. All that good stuff.

But then I read through John, and all those intimate and powerful teachings about who Jesus was and what it really means to be his disciple, and I git to scritchin' my head a little bit. Because the relationship Jesus describes in that Gospel seems to be of a radically different character than the relationships we have with other homo sapiens. Jesus says:

John 14:20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
John 15:4-5 Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.
John 17:21-23 As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

That's not a "personal relationship," at least not as we generally understand it. The bond that Jesus expresses seems to go far deeper than that. What Christ is describing is transpersonal, a relationship that breaks down the normal existential boundaries between we human beings. I think there's a real difference between relating to him as we relate to another person and abiding in him, so immersed in his presence that it becomes hard to tell where he begins and we leave off.

So which is it? A little bit of both, methinks.

While the Weak Eat Only Vegetables

It's been...what...over 15 years since I ate meat. Initially, it was more a question of convenience than anything else. When you marry a vegetarian, you've got to be motivated to prepare your own meat for meals. And I wasn't. Just too lazy. I'd eat meat when we went out, though. Like this insanely delicious steak salad at the Little Viet Garden in Arlington. Cubes of steak marinated in red wine, salt, and garlic, placed hot atop a bed of cool crisp greens. It's been ten years, and I still have Pavlovian slobber in my mouth at the thought of it.

But the more I thought about it, the more I thought theologically about it, the less I was able to sustain it.

From the standpoint of our God-given stewardship over creation, I couldn't justify it. We are given dominion, sure. But the purpose of that dominion was to exercise care over the Eden into which God placed us. Eating the flesh of other creatures was not a part of that plan, or part of what God called good (Gen. 1:29). If in Christ I am a new creation, and if Christ's work in me is to restore the breach established by our fall from Eden's grace, then not eating meat can be one way of personally affirming the healing of that rift.

Further, I feel that it is my responsibility as a Christian to minimize the amount of hurt and suffering I cause in the world. That's what it means to live according to God's law of love. Though chickens, pigs, cows, and the occasional possum are not as sentient or aware of their mortality as we are, they suffer nonetheless. They know pain, they know fear, and they die just as we do.(Eccles. 1:18-19) I personally prefer not to harm another creature if I don't have to.

And I don't have to. So I don't.

Notice the recurrence of "personally." I'm more than happy to tell people the variety of reasons why I don't chow down on animal flesh. But if you choose not to, I have no right to judge you. God alone judges. That's the whole point Paul's making in Romans.

Predestination

Predestination is a challenging doctrine, made even worse by the fact that most of it's adherents use it as an excuse to become insufferably smug about their own salvation. Then again, holding to that doctrine doesn't inherently make you a Nazi...at least, I hope not.

As a Presbyterian, predestination is part of what I believe--so I'll offer up my overly long two cents on the subject.

First, "predestination" cannot be understood temporally. As mortal beings, part of the ebb and flow of time, we tend to think of it as God's foreknowledge of all of our actions. We've got this image of God planning things out in the back room before pressing that Big Bang Button, carefully charting our lives and deciding whether we gets ta be saved or not. But that's absurd, and antethetical to how God has revealed himself to us. The span and flow of time is meaningless to God. All of temporal existence rests before God as an eternal now. Predestination is a statement of God's limitlessness, of the God who stands above all of the temporal and spatial structures of creation. It is an inescapably necessary correlate of an omniscient, almighty God. If you want to worship a small and clueless godling who is unaware of what you've got planned for next Thursday, go right ahead. I wouldn't quite see the point, but...

Second, an orthodox understanding of this teaching does not allow for any smugness. You can't EVER say with complete certainty, "I am among the elect." You can trust that God loves you. You can trust that God is just, and that Christ is your Savior. You can delight in God, and serve God. But Calvin's clear on this: the number and identity of the elect are known only to God. Election rests in the mystery of God's glory. Those who are chosen are not to be confused with any church organization. Being convinced "in your heart" that you've been saved doesn't cut it. Being a staunch and dogmatic Calvinist doesn't either.

Oddly enough, that uncertainty is the point of predestination.

Predestination, for Calvin, means that you don’t have to fret over every little action, worrying over every little step. Predestination, for Calvin, means that you don’t have to lie awake at night with eyes wide open and mind churning, compulsively recounting every last thing you could have done better that day. God is almighty and graceful, and if God has claimed your life, then it is out of your hands. God is just and loving, and if God has called out your name from across eternity, then it is out of your hands.

And if it's out of your hands, then you don’t have to worry about it. The true end of your life, the true purpose of your life, the true meaning of this brief and fleeting flicker of existence, all rest behind the deep veil of eternity. Trusting God to be true, you can roll up your sleeves and be about God’s business.

Or, at least, that's my take on it...

Women, Men, and Christian Marriage

I spoke several years ago to a young evangelical on Christian women submitting to their husbands. She spoke openly and earnestly about how eager she was to enter into a relationship that has that dynamic. While I don't reject all marriages that take a more traditional form, I'm really uncomfortable with the assumption that true covenant marriage *must* have this structure.

Having been challenged by the good sister to a genial scriptural battle royale on that point, it's hard to know where to begin. 1 Timothy seems a good place to start, as it's usually where folks go to make this point.

Of course, if we take 1 Timothy 2:12 as literalists read it, I win by default. Yield to my inherent God-breathed chromosomal superiority! Submit to my saying you don't need to be submissive! Hee hee. But that would be cheating.

The issue with 1 Timothy (and the other epistles) is whether we read them as speaking to an eternal ideal, or to the way that that eternal ideal expresses itself in the particular context of 1st century Roman society.

As an example, the repeated exhortations for slaves to be submissive to their masters (Titus 2:9; Colossians 3:2; Ephesians 6:5) assume a societal situation that we now universally reject. The assumptions about women in Roman society are similarly outdated.

Yes, scripture says it. But if you accept --and you must--that slavery is an institution that is antithetical to Christ, then it is important to understand that the assumptions made about Roman marriage were very similar. A wife was understood as part of the household, with status not considerably higher than a slave or a Barcalounger. Though a tiny minority of women had property rights under Roman law, most were, de facto, owned.

We no longer live--nor should we in Christ desire to live--in the world to which that scripture spoke. But other scripture speaks on the subject as well.

Genesis 2 and 3 provide the foundation for most of church attitudes towards women. Eve, or so the story goes, is responsible for messing us all up by chowing down on the fruit of the tree of good and evil. She falls from her created purpose—which was what?

Woman was made to be “a helper.” (Genesis 2:18) Viewed through the lens of tradition, this gets interpreted as implying a submissive role. Adam decides, Eve helps. Preferably with the laundry and the diapers and the vacuuming.

Yet the Hebrew term for “helper” in Genesis 2:18 is "ezer," which does not have a submissive connotation. It is used, for instance, in 1 Kings 20:16, to mean “ally.” In Psalm 30:11 and Psalm 54:6, it is used to describe the help that comes from the Lord. Not what one would call subordinate, eh?

The ideal for the relationship between men and women is found in Genesis 22:23-24, where they are united “as one flesh.” This form of union is affirmed by Christ in his teachings on divorce (Mark 10:1-9, Matthew 19:1-6). It does not seem to necessitate one having inherent authority over another.

But the Yahwist story of creation in Genesis 2 and 3 goes on to describe our fall from grace. Our key verse relative to the issue at hand is Genesis 3:16, where the Hebrew Issha (she wasn’t Eve yet) is told that for her disobedience “..your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” So what does this tell us? Is a man's rule over woman part of the goodness of God’s creation? No. It’s part of the curse that befell humanity when we fell away from God and God's intent for us. So should Christian marriage reflect our fallen state? I obviously don’t think so.

We are in Christ a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 6:15). Through Christ, we are--men and women alike-- liberated from Adam’s fall (Romans 5:12-21; 1 Corinthians 15:22). If Christ is the new Adam who restores us to right relationship with God, does that curse of submission still rest on womankind? As Paul would say, “By no means!”

There are some other overarching principles in Paul that are worth surfacing when you try to understand Christian marriage.

First, Paul’s organic approach to the church. Again and again, Paul returns to the idea of the church as the body of Christ (Romans 12:5; 1 Corinthians 12:27). Within that body, there exist a variety of roles and gifts, but it is not for us to prioritize among those gifts. They are each necessary and complementary to one another. (1 Corinthians 12:1-28) In challenging the assumptions of the fiercely competitive Corinthian Christians, Paul aggressively rejects the idea of hierarchical authority within the body of Christ—of which married Christians are most certainly a part.

Further, if we claim that gender should provide a basis for authority in Christ, that would require us to reject Paul’s soaring and revolutionary assertion in Galatians 3:28, that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Ancient Rome didn’t have the ears to hear that, but that’s no excuse for us.