Gathering Voices: Faithful Conversations from The Thoughtful Christian

Forsaken

A Gathering Voices Post by Don McKim

 

When Holy Week comes, our hearts are full with the memories of the last days of Jesus. The events lead to the cross on Good Friday. Holy Week puts before us the suffering Jesus experienced, before and upon the cross.

Theologically, the cross is the symbol of our salvation: “But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Through the death of Christ on the cross, our sin is forgiven and our relationship of love and trust in God is enacted. We are reconciled with God (2 Corinthians 5:16-21).

In addition to the physical suffering and agony of this cruel death, Jesus also experienced spiritual pangs. We are familiar with the seven last words from the cross, each expressing some aspect of Jesus’ experience as he clung to life until the end. Each year as we relive Holy Week in through Scripture readings or hear preaching on the last words of Jesus in Good Friday services, the deep sorrow—and deep love of Jesus comes home to us, again.

One of the agonizing words of Jesus from the cross is his “cry of dereliction.” Jesus uttered these words, quoting Psalm 22:1, words attributed to David. Jesus cried out at three o’clock: “‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Mark 15:34; Matthew 27:46). Forsaken by God. No wonder this is a cry of dereliction. It is an expression of utter forsakenness, of neglect, abandonment. Surely at that hour, Jesus felt some form of separation from his Father, the likes of which we will not experience in our lives. We wonder at how this one who was “God with us” (Emmanuel) and who lived and breathed the love of God, could experience the depths of this sense of being forsaken.

Theologians have wrestled with the meaning of this cry of forsakenness; and have proposed differing explanations for what is happening here. Was this a genuine forsakenness by God? Did God turn away from the Son of God at the point of his greatest need? The questions throng. Like much else, this is a mystery. We can never know, fully, what was at work in this hour of despair. We accept this as part of the mystery of our faith. The work of salvation comes through the death of Jesus on the cross.

At times, we too have felt “forsaken” by God. We have had our own agonies. None have been as severe as what Jesus suffered. But we have felt an eclipse of God. It is the absence of the presence of God. Or, conversely, the presence of the absence of God. We pray with the Psalmist: “Do not forsake me, O Lord; O my God, do not be far from me” (Psalm 38:21).

One theologian who has discussed the experience of Jesus being “forsaken” was the Puritan Thomas Watson (c. 1620-1686). Watson wrote this theological explanation:

God may forsake his children in regard of vision, but not in regard of union. Thus it was with Jesus Christ, when he cried out, My God, my God. There was not a separation of the union between him and his Father, only a suspension of the vision. When the Moon doth intervene between us and the Sun, there follows an eclipse. Gods love, through the interposition of our sins, may be darkned and eclipsed, but still he is a Father. The Sun may be hid in a cloud, but it is not out of the Firmament. The promises in time of desertion may be as it were sequestred; we have not that comfort from them as formerly; but still the believers title holds good in law.[1]

All theology is “second order” reflection—trying to give some explanation of what in most cases is inexplicable and in the realm of mystery. Watson’s explanation maintains the trinitarian relationship of Son with Father, even in the midst of the agony of the cross where the “vision” of the relationship was suspended. But “there was not a separation of the union” between Son and Father. That union is unbreakable. The images of the moon and the sun in eclipse are the illustrations.

Watson went on to indicate what this can mean for the Christian life, when we too suffer an “eclipse” in our sense of our union with God in Christ, by faith. He wrote, “The Lord may change his dispensation towards his children, but not his disposition. So that the believer may say, I am adopted, and let God do what he will with me, let him take the rod, or the staffe, ‘tis all one, he loves me.”[2] The love of God holds us, no matter what happens in life.

None of us can possibly experience the kind of agony Jesus experienced on the cross—physically or spiritually. We can try to understand this as best we can. But we believe his suffering and death was “for us.” We see the fulfillment of the prophecy: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Through Jesus we are healed.

Jesus’ “forsakenness” is so we know we are never “forsaken” by God.

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[1] Thomas Watson, The Christians’ Charter (London, 1665), 67-68. Original spellings maintained.

[2] Watson, The Christian’s Charter, 69.

Silence

A Gathering Voices Post by Don McKim

I was recently asked to write a short piece on “Silence.” My focus was on the Reformed heritage and I did this simply by looking at some comments from John Calvin. These do not exhaust what the Reformed tradition might have to say (!) about “silence.”  But they give some orientation to how we might understand “silence.”

In mystical and contemplative traditions, silence can play an important role for prayer and meditation. How silence is understood relates especially to how that tradition or religion regards these topics.

It seems to me that for the Reformed, since prayer is “conversation with God” (according to Calvin), part of conversation is listening to the other person. [1] We say that prayer is both talking to God and listening to God. For listening to occur, silence should reign.

The book of Psalms is a rich source for learning about prayer and finding how the biblical writers experienced praying and listening. I turned to Psalm 62 for some insight. Psalm 62:1 reads: “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation.”

Calvin’s basic attitude toward silence seems set by a comment he made on Zechariah 2:13. This verse reads: “Be silent, all people, before the Lord; for he has roused himself from his holy dwelling.” Calvin said:

By silence we are to understand, as elsewhere observed, submission. The ungodly are not indeed silent before God, so as willingly to obey his word, or reverently to receive what he may bid or command, or humbly to submit under his powerful hand; for these things are done only by the faithful. Silence, then, is what especially belongs to the elect and the faithful; for they willingly close their mouth to hear God speaking.[2]

For Calvin, silence in general is for Christian believers to observe and through which we express our willingness to obey God’s word; or reverently receive what God may bid or command; or humbly to submit to God’s will. This can occur in many times or places. But silence conveys our attitude of readiness to listen to God, hear what God has to say to us, and then turn ourselves to living out God’s purposes.

In prayer, silence has a space in which to function. In conversation with God, we make our “wants and wishes known,” as the hymn has it (“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”). But the space for silence is for us to listen. We listen to God with the attitudes Calvin commends.  On Psalm 62:1, Calvin wrote of the Psalmist:

He expresses his resolution to be silent.* The word implies a meek and submissive endurance of the cross. It expresses the opposite of that heat of spirit which would put us into a posture of resistance to God. The silence intended is, in short, that composed submission of the believer, in the exercise of which he acquiesces in the promises of God, gives place to his word, bows to his sovereignty, and suppresses every inward murmur of dissatisfaction. [*The import of the Hebrew word is “patient silence.”][3]

Silence is submission. Instead of the rashness of action, we remain in silence to listen to God and  acquiesce to what God has to say—expressed in God’s promises found in the Scriptures. In silent submission, we acknowledge God’s sovereignty in our lives and put down any dissatisfactions within us. We turn in all openness to God; hearing God’s word and committing ourselves to following what God has to say to us.

A few verses later, the Psalmist says: “For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him” (Psalm 62:5). The psalmist acknowledged that from God comes our salvation (v. 1). Now he indicates our hope is in God. These acknowledgements are strong in the Reformed theological tradition. With our hope and salvation secure in God’s saving purposes, we give ourselves in submission to God’s purposes for us. We acknowledge God’s word and will, in silence. Calvin commented:

Here it is to be remembered, that our minds can never be expected to reach such perfect composure as shall preclude every inward feeling of disquietude, but are, at the best, as the sea before a light breeze, fluctuating sensibly, though not swollen into billows. It is not without a struggle that the saint can compose his mind; and we can very well understand how David should enjoin more perfect submission upon a spirit which was already submissive, urging upon himself farther advancement in this grace of silence, till he had mortified every carnal inclination, and thoroughly subjected himself to the will of God.[4]

Here Calvin refers to the “grace of silence.” Silence is a gift to help us be in a spirit of submission to God’s word and will. In prayer, we tend to do most of the talking! We should “be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). We should practice the “grace of silence” to listen to God’s word and to indicate our openness and obedience to what God imparts to us.

We live with words. We often seem to be drowning in a sea of words. In prayer, we speak. But we also listen. In silence, we join with the Psalmist in recognizing that “for God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation.”

 

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[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 3.20.4. For Calvin on prayer, see also, John Calvin, On Prayer: Conversation with God, Introduction by I. John Hesselink  (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006).

[2] John Calvin, Commentary on Zechariah 2:13.

[3] John Calvin, Commentary on Psalm 62:1.

[4] John Calvin, Commentary on Psalm 62:5.

Eating and Drinking with Jesus

 

A Gathering Voices Post by Don McKim

When I was in seminary, my theology professor was Dr. Arthur Cochrane. Dr. Cochrane was a Presbyterian from Canada who served our Presbyterian denominations for decades as a theology professor at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He was a world authority on the theology of Karl Barth and helped interpret Barth’s theology in North America. One of his major books was The Church’s Confession under Hitler, a study of the Confessing Church in Germany during the Nazi regime. He also edited an important collection of confessional documents, Reformed Confessions of the 16^th Century.[1]

Dr. Cochrane was finishing his Eating and Drinking with Jesus: An Ethical and Biblical Inquiry when I became his student at Pittsburgh Seminary.[2] He asked me to prepare the indices for this book, which I gladly did. The book was very interesting for Cochrane’s examination of the Lord’s Supper, highly influenced by the theology of Karl Barth. Barth had moved away from the traditional church understanding of the Lord’s Supper as a church sacrament to a view that owed much to the views of the Protestant Reformer, Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531).

Without exploring the intricacies here, Cochrane’s book opened up theologically what we already know: that whenever we share a meal or “table fellowship” together, Jesus Christ is in our midst. Often, we give thanks for our food with a table grace and then never give another thought to the God who has given us our food and drink, or the Christ who is present with us in these occasions by the Holy Spirit. So meals become simply one more “event” in life, like most of the other activities in which we engage.

The title of Dr. Cochrane’s book captured this: Eating and Drinking with Jesus. Cochrane maintained that eating and drinking are good human activities, commanded and permitted to us by God “as a sign that Jesus is the Bread of eternal life and Giver of the water of life” whereby we “may know and proclaim Christ’s death,” and in order that we “may come to faith” (59). In eating and drinking we are proclaiming Christ’s work of reconciliation: We are reconciled with God in Christ (2 Cor. 5:16-21) and dividing walls of hostility between peoples are broken down (Ephesians 2:11-22). In short, “a table fellowship has been made possible among all peoples.”

Think of that! Each time we eat and drink, we do so with Jesus. We are celebrating Jesus’ work of salvation and reconciliation. This is how we, as Christians, must eat and drink. Cochrane said, quoting the apostle Paul: “‘Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God’ (1 Cor. 10:31). All eating and drinking is to the glory of God!” (59). We eat and drink, always, in the presence of the Christ who died and was raised for our justification (Romans 4:25). Every meal is a “witness” to Jesus Christ and what he has done for us. This makes all our table fellowship and the food and drink we share an important—shall we say, “sacred” event?!

The contemporary theologian, Wolfhart Pannenberg, also points us in this direction. He notes that Jesus as the Son of Man was accused of being “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (Luke 7:34). Jesus granted table fellowship with those who were outcasts of the community—“sinners” (Mark 2:16; Luke 15:2). This was scandalous when by Jesus’ participation “the table fellowship that he granted or accepted became a sign of the presence of God’s kingdom that he proclaimed and a sign of the acceptance of the other participants into the future community of salvation.” Mark 2:17, when Jesus said, “‘I have come to call not the righteous but sinners,’” shows says Pannenberg, “that the granting of acceptance of table fellowship by Jesus removed everything that separated people from God and his salvation. It meant the forgiveness of sins, so that table fellowship was a real symbol of fellowship with God himself and of participation in the future of his kingdom.”[3]

Eating and drinking with Jesus draws us into the work of Christ, witnesses to the reconciliation of people to God and each other, and witnesses to our fellowship and future participation in God’s ultimate reign. Wow!

Dr. Cochrane’s book spelled out ethical implications of our eating and drinking with Jesus.[4] It also gave the Lord’s Supper its own significance. As Cochrane wrote: “Since the Word and Spirit have been promised to the church, it may know that the Lord’s Supper is to serve God’s glory and is to be an exhibition and demonstration” of how we “may and should eat to the honor of God the Creator, Preserver, Reconciler, and Redeemer” of all people (59-60). The Lord’s Supper is an act of faith (Eucharist); love (the Agape); and an act of hope (the Marriage Supper).

Imagine how our common, ordinary meals would be energized if we saw them more clearly as times of eating and drinking with Jesus—and all that means. All our table fellowship is blessed. Imagine the new dimensions to our celebrations of the Lord’s Supper when we see it as opening our way as “a springboard for the church’s mission and service in the world.”[5] Our participation in Communion is our commitment to serving our host at the Supper, Jesus Christ, as we minister in his name.

In a summary of his book, Cochrane wrote: “Because Jesus Christ is present with all people as the Giver of food and drink and as the Bread of life, and because his presence is revealed to his congregation by the Holy Spirit, and because he permits and commands us to eat and drink, therefore we may and must eat and drink all things with Jesus in faith, love and hope.”[6] We eat and drink together with Jesus and with each other, to the glory of God!

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[1] Arthur C. Cochrane, The Church’s Confession Under Hitler, 2^nd ed. (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Publications, 1976); Reformed Confessions of the Sixteenth Century, 2^nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).

 [2] Arthur C. Cochrane, Eating and Drinking with Jesus: An Ethical and Biblical Inquiry (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974). All page references in the text above are to this book.

 [3] Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998),  3:285. Pannenberg also writes: “It is not without a deeper meaning that the reacceptance of the prodigal in Jesus’ parable came to expression in the feast that the father prepared for him [Luke 15:22-23].”

 [4] Cochrane points out that if the Lord’s Supper is to be an act of love, fellowship, sharing and serving even the “least of these” then all social and cultural distinctions of race, color, and nationality are broken down. Thus “the social and political implications of the Lord’s Supper are incalculable. The Lord’s Supper is, in fact, the ecclesiological basis of social ethics” (100). So the Lord’s Supper has everything to do with life outside the walls of the church building.

 [5] Cochrane wrote: “The church is to serve all people with its words and deeds of love. The Lord’s Supper would not be an act of faith or of love if it did not have this outreach..” See Arthur C. Cochrane, “Eating and Drinking with Jesus,” The Christian Century (April 10, 174), 392-396. Available at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1584

 [6]Cochrane, “Eating and Drinking,” The Christian Century, 396.

The Trinitarian Shape of Life

A Gathering Voices Post by Don McKim

 

Our Christian lives can seem routine, one thing after another. Things keep us busy so we may not take time to reflect on the gift of life in Jesus Christ which God has given us.

I recently found helpful reflections on our lives in Christ by Kathryn Tanner, a theologian at Yale Divinity School. Her Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology has a fine chapter on “The Shape of Human Life.” To Christians, Tanner indicates, God gives the gift of sharing “God’s triune life with us.”[1] Our lives are set in motion by God’s incorporating us within the workings of the divine Trinity. “We, in short,” says Tanner, “engage in an active fellowship or partnership with the Father through our union with Christ the Son and in Christ’s Spirit” (70). Our lives can reflect the goodness of God’s triune being. Says Tanner, “All creatures reflect the goodness of God simply in being what God gives them to be; humans, at their best, reflect the goodness of God by a self-conscious, and freely chosen active alignment of what they are with God’s gift-giving to them” (71).

Who we are as Christians are those aligned with the God who gives us gifts. The greatest gift is God’s coming to us and being with us in Jesus Christ. Through Christ we are enabled to receive all God’s good gifts and to engage in this fellowship and partnership with God, through our union with Christ—by faith; and in and by the power of the Spirit.

Our pattern for action, as Christians, is “one that ministers divine beneficence to others, in correspondence to Jesus’ own ministering of the Father’s beneficence to humanity—healing, nourishing, attending to the needs of the world—what Jesus did in his own life, a prior ministry that empowers our own” (79).[2]  We are engaged in the ministries of sharing the divine benefits as we know those benefits in Jesus Christ.

How’s that for a powerful vision of life and Christian action? Can we think of anything more breathtaking? We share in the trinitarian life of the triune God! Then, our lives take a trinitarian shape as we are incorporated into fellowship/partnership with God, in union with Christ, by the ongoing power of the Holy Spirit. This is no ho-hum existence! This is the most exciting life imaginable! As Tanner puts it: “So incorporated, our lives as ministers of divine benefit have a trinitarian shape: united with Christ we are called to distribute the good gifts of the Father in the power of the Spirit.” This is “the shape that the Trinity takes on the human level” (83). The most complicated and, to some, “remote” doctrine of Christianity: the divine Trinity—one God in three persons—takes on a vital reality in the lives we live every day. The Trinity gives us our identity and pulls us into action, as ministers of the benefits of the triune God!

But it doesn’t stop there. We are not left to figure out the particular shape of our trinitarian lives all by ourselves. For inevitably, “we are united with one another, we form a community, the church, as we are united in Christ through the power of the Spirit” The church is a means of grace to us, as we Protestants have always known—but sometimes forget. The church is crucially important for us. As Tanner notes, “This is to be a universal community in that the whole world is at least prospectively united with Christ in and through the triune God’s saving intentions for the whole world that has always been the object of God’s gift-giving, from the beginning” (83). We call people to faith in Jesus Christ and into the ministry of the church as God’s great intention for the earth and as an expression of the divine intention for us all. (Matt. 28:16-20).

We are most fully alive when we are in Jesus Christ and when we are in the fellowship of the church. Here we can be ourselves and live out our ministries, corporately and individually. Tanner says that “We are brought together in this community without overriding the particularities of our differences. Thus, the Holy Spirit unites us in Christ even as the Holy Spirit encourages the uniqueness of our persons by a diversity of gifts of the Spirit” (83).

If we are ministers of God’s benefits and “ministers of beneficence” in the church, then says Tanner, our relations should reflect “the character of God’s own gift-giving, they should be marked by unconditional giving—that is, giving that is not obligated by prior performance and that is not conditional upon a return” (83-84). This gives us an “agenda” for ministry—the agenda is to give ourselves away for the sake of the ministry of Jesus Christ. We unconditionally give, because this is what God has done in Christ; and what Christ has done for us. This is the only trajectory we need. No matter what the situation or need, we give ourselves, because this is the nature of the God who has given us “all things” in Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 3:21-23).  When our lives become flat, or routine—regain this vision!

The trinitarian shape of life describes who we are and what we do. Our lives in the church as ministers of the divine benefits express our incorporation into the trinitarian life of God. We are called to the most significant lives and ministries imaginable—not because they bring us glory. We give ourselves away to God, to others, and to the world—as God has done for us in Jesus Christ.         

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[1] Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 70. Further citations are from this books.

[2]Tanner notes that “ministers of beneficence” is a phrase used in B .A. Gerrish, Grace and Gratitude, rpt. (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002), 45, following John Calvin (Institutes 3.1.2).

Grace in Winter

A Gathering Voices post by Don McKim

 

Those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere are used to the winter months: December, January and February. For many, this means cold temperatures, snow, and inclement weather that can make life challenging.

Yet even if we do not experience the brutal winters that some do, we can resonate with “winter” as a metaphor. It stands for what can be the coldness of life, its bleakness, the rough times we face when resources feel scarce, difficulties abound, and even for those periods when we may experience the absence of the presence of God. “Winter” is not a favorite season.

But there is a word to help us through our “winters,” even our “winter of discontent.” It comes from the seventeenth-century Scottish theologian, Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661).[1] Rutherford was a commissioner to the Westminster Assembly but at the Restoration of King Charles II, his major book, Lex Rex was burned by the hand of the common hangman and he was deprived of his offices as Professor of Divinity at St. Mary’s College of St. Andrews University. It was voted that he not to be able to die within the college. Rutherford knew something about “winter.”

But a couple comments by Samuel Rutherford help us as we experience “winter” in our lives.

In a letter to the Lady Culross on December 30, 1636, Rutherford wrote: “I see grace growth best in winter.”[2] Similarly, in a sermon, Rutherford proclaimed: “Faith is a grace for winter, to give God leisure to bring summer in his own season.”[3]

“Grace grows best in winter.” “Winter” is the time of our greatest need. So “winter” is when God’s grace meets us most where we are; and gives us most, what we need. We need God’s free grace to help us, lift us, to sustain us. It is the only thing on which we can depend. It is exactly what we need. Our trust is in the grace of God to see us through. We are reminded of Paul’s words recounting God’s word after he sought relief about the “thorn…in the flesh” that was given him. God said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7-9). When we are at our weakest, God’s grace is the strongest. This is the sufficiency we need. As Paul learned , “whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). Winter is the time of our weakness. So this is the time when “grace grows best.” Grace grows best because our need is the strongest. Our need is the strongest and we are at our weakest. But God’s grace brings us through. God’s grace grows in the winter of our lives and is the focus of our trust. Though it may be imperceptible to us—how is God’s grace “growing?”—we can believe God’s grace is growing and our lives are secure in this trust.

In his sermon, Rutherford said, “faith is a grace for winter, to give God leisure to bring summer in his own season.” Here the Scots theologian introduces the dimensions of faith and providence. Faith is the element that is God’s grace to us, to see us through the long, bleak winter. By faith, we experience God’s grace as God is at work. The work of God may seem long and immensely slow. Rutherford’s point, in his comment on faith, is that “to wait in patience for God all the day long, is an argument of great faith.”[4] He cites Isaiah 28:16: “He that believeth shall not make haste” (KJV). For, “continued waiting on God, [is seen] to be of kin to believing; and the longer the thread of hope be, though it were seventy years long, (as Hab., ii, 1, 2,) or though it were as long as a cable going between the earth and the heaven, "up within the veil," (Heb., vi, 19,) the stronger the faith must be.” The people of Israel, Rutherford points out, had the seventy years of exile, forty years in the wilderness, and four-hundred years in Egypt (Acts 7:6). It seemed like God was in no hurry to deliver the people, God was not “making haste.” The people were in a pose of “continued waiting on God.” But they kept believing. “Faith is a grace for winter.” The “winters” for the Israelites were long—very long. Ours may seem long as well. But we need to keep the faith, to “wait in patience for God all the day long”—all the many days (and years), long.

"Faith is a grace for winter, to give God leisure to bring summer in his own season.” After winter, comes the summer. No matter how long the winter may be. This, we believe. God’s providence is at work: in our faith, in our waiting, in our many prayers for God to deliver us through the bleakness and cold winter. God’s purposes are at work—unknown to us. But God’s purposes are to “bring summer,” at the time God chooses. We are not exempt from our sufferings and difficulties. But our faith is sustained through them all. Our faith is in God’s providential purposes—God’s grace for us. God’s purposes will come, and are in the process of coming, even as we wait in faith. This is how God works in the world; and with God’s people. God gives us the grace and the faith to believe, to trust, and to wait with patience. “Grace growth best in winter.”

 

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[1][1] On Rutherford, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Rutherford as well as http://www.puritansermons.com/ruth/ruthindx.htm. and http://www.puritansermons.com/ruth/howie1.htm.

[2] Samuel Rutherford, Joshua Redivivus, or Three-hundred and fifty-two religious letters, 11^th ed. (Glasgow: William Bell, 1796), Letter #167, p. 255.

[3] Samuel Rutherford, The Trials and Triumph of Faith (Edinburgh: Printed for the Assembly’s Committee, 1845), Sermon XXIII, p. 323.

[4] Rutherford, Sermon XXIII, 322-323.

Impassable Places

A Gathering Voices Post by Don McKim

 

When Paul was imprisoned in Jerusalem (Acts 23), we find what has been called “one of the most tantalizing incidents in Acts, for all who are interested in Paul’s private life and family relationships.”[1] “The son of Paul’s sister” heard about an ambush plot against Paul by his enemies. This was to take place when Paul was to be brought to the council the following day (Acts 23:16-22). The nephew told Paul who had the nephew taken to the tribune who was told  what was afoot. Paul was sent to Felix the governor instead; and the plot was foiled.

The “tantalizing questions” relate to Paul’s family. Who was his sister? What was their relationship? Did Paul’s sister become a Christian? Why was Paul’s nephew in Jerusalem? These may entice us; yet there is no information so we cannot know the answers.

But in this incident of Paul’s nephew uncovering the plot to ambush Paul, John Calvin brings us a nourishing perspective. 

The event shows us that “God counters the plan of the ungodly as though by a flanking attack.”[2] Through this turn of events for Paul, “the Lord shows that his life is faithfully guarded and protected, so that anything that men endeavor to do is in vain.” Old Testament affirmations of God’s supreme power over human devisings (Proverbs 21:30; Isaiah 8:10) are mentioned by Calvin with the comment that God “allows them to devise many schemes and He even allows their wicked enterprises to proceed, but in the end He shows, in the nick of time, that He is laughing out of heaven at all the things that men are busy about on earth.” The biblical considerations are “set before us in the present story, as in a mirror for our consideration.”

But for ourselves, Calvin says of God: “Let us not doubt that He extends His providence, evidence of which He showed on that occasion, to protect us; because the promise remains unshakable, ‘Not a hair of your head will be lost’ etc. (Luke 21.18).” This is the promise of God’s protecting providence, promised to us and carried out by God throughout our lives. This is the best assurance we can have of how to meet life with all its difficulties. Paul was protected in prison; we are protected no matter where we are, or what plans are set against us.

Worth noting also, Calvin continues, is that God is “often in the habit of acting by unexpected means to save his own, in order to exercise our faith better.”  The means God uses to act on our behalf often leave us in wonderment and amazement! I remember one of my seminary professors saying, “Yahweh is full of surprises!”  God has the power to protect and rescue and liberate us; and God has the means to do so. What those means are, at any given time—we can never know. But when God uses unexpected, surprising means, we are find ourselves filled with attitudes of reverence and awe.

Calvin notes how this worked out in Paul’s story: “Who would have thought that the ambush was to be discovered by a lad, when the conspirators thought that they were the only ones who knew about it?” Most improbably, a young person—one of thousands of young people in Jerusalem at the time—this young person “just happened” to overhear the ambush plot being hatched and “just happened” to be Paul’s nephew. How improbable is that?! But this is what happened. God used a most “unlikely means” to accomplish God’s purposes.

Then, finally, says Calvin, “Therefore although no ordinary way of obtaining deliverance is apparent to us, let us learn to lean on the Lord, who will find a way through impassable places.”

This is our word from this story, to be experienced over and over again in our lives. The “ordinary way” of obtaining deliverance—whatever we think it might be for us—often evaporates, or is non-existence. Our perceptions of the “best way” to deliver us from our troubles often do not work out or materialize at all. What to do then? Despair? Think God does not hear our prayers? Give up?

No, even when our human perceptions are that all is lost, that there is no way out, or we are left forsaken by God—then, we should “lean on the Lord.” We should “lean on the Lord” even harder because we realize it is only the Lord who can work to accomplish good for us—and not by the “ordinary way” we think God should use! We lean on the Lord. This is an action we need to “learn,” says Calvin. It may not come naturally to us because we would prefer to think we know best how to save ourselves. Or, we think God should let us use our own efforts to bring our needed deliverance. But “lean to lean on the Lord,” says Calvin.

When we do lean on the Lord, we will find God is a God who “will find a way through impassable places.” This was what Paul needed, an escape from a pending ambush which would surely have brought death. But God used the nephew to thwart this plan and bring Paul out of the death trap that awaited him.

So God is a God of surprises, who “will find a way”—through improbable means; to find a way through even the most “impassable places.” We can’t see how it will happen. We may not believe it can happen. But our God is able. God is able to find this way, through means we cannot dream of or envision. We find this at the point where things seem the bleakest, where there is no apparent reason to hope, and no help to be had as far as we can see. Then. Then, God will find a way. And “impassable places” will be impassable, no more.

I like how the great English Puritan, Thomas Watson (c. 1620-1686) put it for us. He wrote: “Faith knows there are no Impossibles with God, and will trust him where it cannot trace him.”[3] Paul’s situation seemed impossible from the human point of view. The ambush was planned. But “all things are possible with God,” said Jesus (Mark 10:27). God found a way for Paul, through “impassable places,” to do the “impossible.” We can trust this “God of the impossible.” So there are, ultimately, no “impassable places” in our lives. We trust God, even when God’s ways and means are not apparent to us. God “will find a way.”

 

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[1] F.F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, The New International Commentary on the New Testament rpt. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), 457.

[2] John Calvin, The Acts of the Apostles Vol. II, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. John W. Fraser, rpt. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1979), Comm. Acts 23:16. 7:239. Further quotes from Calvin’s commentary are from this verse.

[3] Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity (London, 1692), 4.

 

 

 

Overcoming Fear

A Gathering Voices Post by Don McKim

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was the famous theologian and martyr who was murdered for his participation in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. His life is fascinating and shows a brilliant mind devoted to service of the church.

Bonhoeffer wrote technical works on theology as well as works that dealt with the practical life of Christian faith. Life Together and Discipleship (better known as The Cost of Discipleship) are two such works. But he was also a German Lutheran pastor who highly valued the place of preaching as a means of God’s grace.

Throughout the sixteen volumes of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Collected Works in English are sermons which Bonhoeffer preached at various times. Some of the best have now been drawn together in The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, edited and introduced by Isabel Best (Fortress, 2012). These extend from April 15, 1928 (“God Is with Us”), when Bonhoeffer was an assistant pastor in Barcelona, Spain to November 26, 1939 (“Death Is Swallowed Up in Victory”) when Bonhoeffer preached to the seminarians he was training, then at Sigurdshof, a farm belonging to the von Kleist estate in Tychow, Germany.

This fine collection of thirty-one sermons show Bonhoeffer’s deep insights into Christian faith and his gift of applying the Gospel to the real needs of his congregations. His words speak with power, comfort, and challenge to us, just as they surely did to his hearers, seventy-five to eighty-five years ago.

An especially powerful sermon is “Overcoming Fear,” preached in Berlin on the Second Sunday after Epiphany on January 15, 1933. This was a tension-filled time in Germany, shortly before Hitler came to power. Fears of the collapse of the Hindenberg government, of communism and other extreme movements, and fighting in the streets, made everyone fearful.

Bonhoeffer preached on Matthew 8:23-27, the story of Jesus and his disciples in the boat. When the disciples were in deep fear of being lost, Jesus was wakened from his sleep, rebuked the winds and the sea and “there was dead calm.”

Bonhoeffer began by proclaiming that “the Bible, the gospel, Christ, the church, the faith—all are one great battle cry against fear in the lives of human beings.” Fear causes us to reach back into ourselves, “helpless and despairing, while hell rejoices.” Fear “takes away a person’s humanity.”

But humans can know there is One who overcomes fear, “Jesus Christ, the Crucified and Living one.” So, says Bonhoeffer, “look to Christ when you are afraid, think of Christ, keep him before your eyes, call upon Christ and pray to him, believe that he is with you now, helping you…Then fear will grow pale and fade away, and you will be free, through your faith in our strong and living Savior, Jesus Christ.”

In the little boats of our lives, a stranger enters and says, “I am Fear.” Now, “fear is in the boat; all arms are frozen and drop their oars; all hope is lost. Fear is in the boat.”

But then, “Christ is in the boat.” When this call is heard, “fear shrinks back, and the waves subside. The sea becomes calm and the boat rests on its quiet surface. Christ was in the boat!”

Fear is a reality. For “fear is in the boat, in Germany, in our own lives and in the nave of this church…Fear is breathing down our necks.” Yet “Christ is in the boat!” This is the talk we hear from the pulpit of the church. For “from this pulpit the living Christ himself wants to speak, so that wherever he reaches somebody, that person will feel the fear sinking away, will feel Christ overcoming his or her fear.” So: “Be of good courage, strong, firm, adult, sure, confident, not shaking with fear. Don’t hang your heads; don’t complain about what bad times these are…I am in the boat. And Christ is here, too, in the nave of this church. So why not hear him and believe him?”

“Fear is,” said Bonhoeffer, “evil’s net, spread to catch us.” In the midst of depression and despair, as people believe “there is no more mercy coming our way from God,” there is “only one thing that helps, and it is what the church does with any of us who thinks and feels this way. It takes the cross and places it before our eyes and asks: Did God abandon him? And since God did not abandon Jesus, we will not be abandoned by God, either.”

It is in the hour of storm, proclaims Bonhoeffer, that “God is incredibly close to you, not far away.” For “God wants to show us that when you let everything go, when you lose all your own security and have to give it up, that is when you are totally free to receive God and be kept totally safe in God. So may we understand rightly the hours of affliction and temptation, the hours in our lives when we are on the high seas! God is close to us then, not far away. Our God is on the cross.” For “the cross is the sign that stands in judgment on all the false security in our lives and restores faith in God alone.” Faith “does not rely on its own strength or on other people’s strength, but believes only and alone in God, whether or not there is a storm.”

Christians know that “when Christ is in the boat, a storm always comes up.” The world, with its evil powers try to destroy Christ, along with his disciples. Indeed, “no one has to go through so much anxiety and fear as do Christians. But this does not surprise us, since Christ is the Crucified One, and there is no way to life for a Christian without being crucified.”

But despite skepticism that Christ is “hidden away” so we think he may no longer be there at all, Bonhoeffer challenged the congregation: “Dear brothers and sister, what do we know about what Christ can do and wants to do for us, this very evening, if we will only call upon him as we should, if we call out, ‘Lord, save us! We are perishing!’ That was fear all right, but it was faith in the midst of fear, because it knew where help comes from, the only place.”

Imagine the ways our faith could be bolstered if we began each day—and repeated throughout each day: “Christ is in the boat”!  Christ is in the boat of our world, our churches, our homes, our lives. If we affirmed that “Christ is in the boat,” our fears would be met by faith; and we would experience calm in our souls.

The thirty-one sermons in this collection can be read—one per day—for the next month. Imagine ways our faith could be strengthened if we listened to the word of God spoken by God’s servant, Dietrich Bonhoeffer!

 

 

The Divine Pattern

A Gathering Voices Post by Don McKim

We all interpret the Bible. We hear the preacher say, “The Bible says…” but we realize there needs to be a next step. We read “what the Bible says,” then we try to understand meaning. We try to perceive what the biblical text meant when it was written and read to or by its early audiences. We try to perceive what the biblical text means to us today, in our own contexts. This is what Christians have done from the beginning. The interpretation of biblical texts is a primary work—in study, preaching, and teaching; as well as for our own lives of faith. Interpretation inevitably happens. The question is “how” we will interpret?

In the larger view, we “interpret” the Bible as we approach the Scriptures themselves. We certainly do so by the division of the Bible itself. In the Christian canon we have the “Old Testament” and the “New Testament.” Right from the start, we recognize the differences in the literature of “Old” and “New” Testaments. How do the two testaments relate to each other? In what ways should we interpret the “Old in light of the New”? And vice versa?

Christians have always seen Jesus Christ as the bond between Old and New Testaments. He is the promised Messiah; and in him all God’s promises are fulfilled.

Some theologians, including Karl Barth (1886-1968), have a strongly Christocentric method of interpreting Scripture. As one of Barth’s leading interpreters, George Hunsinger puts it, Barth “believed that Jesus Christ is attested, directly or indirectly, by virtually any biblical passage, whether in the Old Testament or the New. He therefore read all of Scripture from a center in Jesus Christ.”[1]

But Hunsinger goes on to discuss a divine pattern that he perceives Barth seeing throughout Scripture.

The big moments in the biblical drama are the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. These may be described as “affirmation,” “negation,” and “negation of the negation.” This is a divine pattern throughout Scripture.  Those blessed by God (affirmation) face suffering, difficulties, reversals (negation), and by the grace and power of God are restored and established again (negation of the negation). Through it all, Jesus Christ is the pattern and the one toward which all lives point.

Think, for example, of biblical characters such as Joseph, Moses, David, or Job. They are presented as major characters who, as the plots of their lives unfold, face reversals or flaws or woes. But the purposes and power of God bring a “negation of the negation” and their lives are restored and blessed. Their lives can be read through the lens of Jesus Christ to whom they, in their own ways, point.[2] Hunsinger writes:

With Christ in view, think of Joseph, his father’s favorite, in the pit, or later in Pharaoh’s prison, or still later in his role as the Provider. Think of Moses, as the abandoned and rescued child, as the one-time murderer, as the Liberator from Egypt, or later as the Lawgiver and prophet, who died in exile from the promised land. Think of David, the messianic though notoriously flawed king; or of Job, with his innocence, his languishing in terrible affliction, and finally his unexpected restoration.[3]

Hunsinger notes that “each of these figures in its own way was a pointer or type that was somehow reconfigured, restored, and surpassed in Christ.”[4]

This divine pattern may also be seen as a pattern in our own Christian lives. When we think of the promise of Romans 8:28: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose,” we can believe that God is at work in our blessed lives. We too face negations of all types—sinfulness, losses, sufferings, tragedies. These can seem to be “the last word” for us. We cannot envision how life can ever be better. We cannot imagine how God’s love can somehow redeem us. But in Jesus Christ, all this is possible. God can use even our sin, reversals, and sufferings to move us into new life. There is a “negation of the negation.” God’s redemptive purposes can take shape. Our lives can be blessed in ways beyond our knowing or perceiving. In Jesus Christ, we can be a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). Our lives are “reconfigured” to a new sense of God’s loving grace, our commitment to Christ, and our service in the Spirit. What seemed utterly impossible becomes a reality by God’s power and redemption in Jesus Christ.

At Christmas, we celebrate the incarnation. The eternal God has become a human person in Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. We celebrate and rejoice. On Good Friday, we see the most sinful and dramatic reversal imaginable. The Son of God has been crucified on a cross. But on Easter Sunday, the glorious message of the Gospel is proclaimed: In Jesus Christ our sin is forgiven and the Risen Christ brings new, eternal life—now and forever!

The divine pattern shows God at work, in Christ, and in us. We are grateful for all blessings; trusting in all our “valleys of the shadows,” and believing in the providential power of God who, in divine love, brings us to new life!

 

 

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[1] “Introduction” in Thy Word is Truth: Barth on Scripture, ed. George Hunsinger (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012), xi.

[2] Hunsinger points out that these biblical figures for Barth can be regarded as “types” of which Jesus Christ is the “antitype,”

[3] Hunsinger, xii.

[4] Hunsinger, xii. He continues by saying that “their ultimate significance could only emerge when the type was juxtaposed to Christ as the antitype....A similar move could sometimes be made with texts from the Psalms, or with the Sermon on the Mount, or with 1 Corinthians 13. They could be interpreted in light of a hidden Christological center that was secretly but ultimately their subject,” xii.

When to hold ‘em . . . when to fold ‘em

A Gathering Voices Post by Beth Pyles

I listen to ministers speak about various reasons for leaving a church they serve.  Some have left simply because it’s time for a fresh start.  Some leave as they climb a sort of ladder or better, trajectory of a career or calling path – moving toward a goal, each church a step along the way as well as a ministry in its own right.  But far too many move on due to unresolved conflict.

What is often common is the silence of the bystanding majority – those who do not agree with what’s happening before their eyes but either don’t know what to do or lack the wherewithal to do it in the face of angry opposition.

But everyone needs allies – even pastors.  Not followers, not adherents, not golf buddies, but genuine allies. 

I often wonder when such conflicts occur whether those involved stop to consider the collateral damage: PK’s  who leave the church and never look back, having observed up close and personal the attacks on a beloved  parent with no one stepping forward to be their champion.  To quote Dr. Martin Weber, “Congregational criticism of pastoral family members portends future attrition of adult children.”  Why PKs Leave Church

Having served on a number of charitable boards, the conflict phenomena of the church remains a mystery to me.  Nowhere else have I observed the behavior that we so often see in church – not in business, not in volunteer groups, not even in homes.  And maybe that’s part of the problem:  church in our time is thought to be a combination of all three, too often picking up the worst rather than the best attributes each has to offer. 

Business models offer efficiency and productivity, but church is anything but efficient and productive, at least as measured in human terms. 

Good volunteer groups are excellent at motivating people to active involvement in their mission, but many churches today in the West can barely whip up enough enthusiasm to get members to share a meal together, let alone travel to distant lands to work for the good of the neighbor who is far away.

And families are, at their best, a place of safe haven where each member is accepted on their own terms and loved for their own sake.  But too often in the church, we demand agreement as the yardstick for belonging.

I think of how Jesus’ contemporaries and followers after wrote about him as one who counted his own reputation as well as his own life of little value in contrast to the job he came to do.

Maybe that’s the heart of our problem: maybe we’re more worried about being ‘right’, particularly in the eyes of others, than the job we were sent to do.

And maybe what I’m looking for is a new country song theology: I’d rather be wrong than be without you.

Warts and All

A Gathering Voices Post by Don McKim

 

We’ve heard the expression “warts and all.”  It is to indicate that the whole of a thing is presented and that the less attractive parts are not omitted.

Traditionally, this phrase is said to originate from a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England in the seventeenth century. The painter, Peter Lely, supposedly painted the portrait, seeking—as was the custom of the time—to flatter the head of state. So he smoothed over the imperfections of Cromwell’s face. When Cromwell saw it, he said, "Paint me as I am, warts and all!"

Today this account is not believed to be true.[1] But the phrase endures: be realistic, tell the whole story—paint the whole picture—even the difficult or embarrassing parts: “Paint me as I am, warts and all!”

This perspective is especially apt in regard to the church. We love the church. We give our lives in service to Jesus Christ through the church. We affirm when we say the Creed: “I believe in the holy catholic church.” We affirm the church as God’s people, living out God’s desires for us in the midst of history.

But we have had experiences of “church” when it seems our theological convictions of the church are not lived out as we think they should be. The church fails. The church sins. The church seems full of “warts”—sometimes that’s all we see!

Instead of confessing our faith in “the holy catholic church,” we need to confess: “I believe in the not so holy local church.” This is the church we know. Week in and week out, it is the common, ordinary people in our lives who form the local congregations of which we are a part. This is where “church” becomes real to us. This is what Ernest T. Campbell said in his sermon, “I Believe in the Not So Holy Local Church”: “The local congregation is the basic unit of the Christian enterprise. Within the local congregation we learn together, grow together, work together, rejoice and suffer together. To the question, ‘The local church, who needs it?’ the answer is: ‘We all do.’”[2]

We do believe in both dimensions here: the holy catholic church and the not so holy local church. Theologically, we realize that the church we know in the here and now is composed of sinners—forgiven sinners, but sinners just the same. So we do need to paint the portrait of the local church with “warts and all.” Theologically, the “visible church” is the church we see. The “invisible church” is the church God knows—the “elect” in biblical and Reformed theology terminology. When we confess in the Creed that we believe in the “holy catholic church,” we mean both the “visible” and “invisible” church. God is free to do whatever God wishes with the church and in and through the church. But for us, we believe God calls us into the fellowship of the church—the people of God—and that call leads us into the local congregations where we worship and serve.

Karl Barth reminds us that there is “one church.” It is the church we believe in, theologically; and it is the church of God which takes an earthly, local form:

The visible and the invisible Church are not two Churches—an earthly-historical fellowship and above and behind this a supranaturally spiritual fellowship. As we have already seen, the one is the form and the other the mystery of one and the self-same Church. The mystery is hidden in the form, but represented and to be sought in it. The visible lives wholly by the invisible. The invisible is only represented and to be sought out in the visible. But neither can be separated from the other. Both in their unity are the body, the earthly-historical form of existence of the one living Lord Jesus Christ.[3] 

The mystery of God’s love in Jesus Christ, through which God elects or calls us into the body of Christ, the “church,” leads us into the local body of believers where we live out our calls as disciples of Jesus Christ. “The mystery is hidden in the form,” says Barth. We cannot despise or disparage the local church since this is where the mystery of the Gospel is experienced. “The visible lives wholly by the invisible.” The local church is like no other institution. Its life comes from beyond itself, from the invisible loving, electing God who brings diverse people together in the church through the Holy Spirit. In the local congregation we are united as the body of Christ: “the earthly-historical form of existence of the one living Lord Jesus Christ.” It is here that we hear and obey the Gospel.

We love and are thankful the church, “warts and all”!        

 

 

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[1] See  http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/warts-and-all.html

[2] Ernest T. Campbell, “I Believe in the Not So Holy Local Church,” Sermons from Riverside (February 1, 1970), 2. See http://archive.org/stream/sermonibelievein00camp#page/2/mode/2up

[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. G.W. Bromiley  (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1956), IV/1, 669. For a fine study of Barth's theology of the church, see Kimlyn J. Bender, Karl Barth's Christological Ecclesiolody, Barth Studies Series (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005).