Gathering Voices: Faithful Conversations from The Thoughtful Christian

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).

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).

 

 

6 Things I Hate-Love About Being a Preacher

A Gathering Voices post by Beth Pyles

1.    Fish bowl – that what I do and what you think, suspect, or dread that I do is of such focus.  Really, my life just isn’t all that interesting. 

2.    Fireman – the idea that I am on call, 24/7, but when not called, am just hanging on a hook like an empty fireman’s suit. 

3.    Words in my mouth – I really should start counting the number of times someone quotes me with something I have never said. 

4.    Plane rides – being captive to conversation with a stranger.  The inevitable “what do you do” is always fraught.  My favorite responses come from the atheists or not particularly religious, which you rush to tell me – a defense, I suppose, to your perception that my job is to grab you, hold you down and sprinkle some water on you saying some strange incantation to bring you into the fold. 

5.    Fashion – the fact that what I wear underneath the robe is of such interest is sometimes amusing and always surprising.  Yes, my favorite jeans have holes in the knees.  Yes, I actually do like my hair short and spiky.  But I have a mother already and she’s the only one allowed to criticize my wardrobe.

6.    The double double standard – I am not ‘better’ than you.  Yet our relationship often begins and endures as if this were the truth between us, which you resent and take great pains to remind me is not true.  It isn’t true that the sun is shining just now either, but you don’t feel the need to tell me that.  So I remain curious: why do you think I need to know that I am not ‘better’, ‘more moral’, than you or anyone else?  Can’t that just be a given between us – like the fact that the sun isn’t shining just now?  I suspect that really you believe either (a) that I am better or, more likely, (b) I should be.  But I am a real human being, not a straw man that needs knocking down (or propping up for that matter).

These are two-sided coins. Those peering into the fish bowl often are simply caring.  It is a privilege to be called upon in times of need or crisis.  As a preacher, I am listened to, which is a great gift. 

The double double standard keeps me humble, this near constant reminder that I am not only not more than, but often less than, in many eyes.  Thus when I am compared and found wanting to other preachers, when someone creates a fictional me and is disturbed because the real me doesn’t measure up, I am very clear that I am not all that.  And that actually is a good thing.

Most days I love what I do and consider myself a very blessed woman, but every now and then, I have to remember to jump off the hook, throw on the holy-holey jeans, and live my life, leaving what you think about me in your hands.

Be Cast on Christ

A Gathering Voices Post by Don McKim

The cares of life are always with us. They afflict us. They can take over our thoughts and hearts. These cares are important because they orient how we feel and what we do.

But we also speak of care in a positive sense. We ask what we care about, what is most important to us? We care about various things, in different ways, all throughout life.

The theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) spoke of our religion being our “ultimate concern.”[i] Tillich said this term is an “abstract translation of the great commandment: ‘The Lord, our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind, and with all your strength [Mark 12:29; RSV].”[ii] Who or what do we love the most? What concerns us ultimately? Where is our care focused? To whom or to what do we give ourselves to, most, in life?

The Puritan theologian William Perkins (1558-1602) reminds us that as Christians, our principal care in life is that we be “cast on Christ.”[iii] This is our ultimate concern, that which matters most to us. Perkins said that as Christians “wee must learne first of all, to moderate our care and our affections, for worldly profits, honours, pleasures; and our principal care must euermore be cast on CHRIST.”

This is a word we all need, constantly, to hear. Our focus in life, our greatest “care”—what we are concerned for most, should not be the amassing of “worldly profits”—increasing our financial portfolios, for one thing. Our primary vocation in life should not be to gain more and more of the kinds of “profits” the world can offer. Making money should not be an end in itself.  Our care for such things must be moderated, pulled back from being our “ultimate concern.”

“Honours” is also a dangerous lure as a candidate for our “religion” or “ultimate concern.” Who doesn’t want to receive honors, the applause of others? It is a tonic, a boost to our self-esteem. But worldly honors cannot themselves be a basket big enough to carry all our eggs. We know that honors are fleeting, at best. They do not endure, often not beyond the memories of our contemporaries. Something else is needed, something which endures, and which turns our focus in life not in upon ourselves as honors do, but beyond ourselves to what is “ultimate” and most important.

Similarly, “pleasures” in themselves should not be our principal care in life. It is easy to fall into this. We desire what makes us feel good, what we can enjoy, what brings the most gratification or amusements to us. “Live it up and laugh it up” is attractive.

Instead, the Christian identity as those who are “in Christ” (2 Cor. 5:17) is that “our principall care must euermore be cast on Christ.” Jesus Christ is our “ultimate concern.” To be “cast on Christ” is to be united with Christ by faith; and to find all we need for life—and our greatest care for life—to be in him.

The title of the piece in which William Perkins made this comment was “The True Gaines: More in Worth Than All the Goodes in the World.” The Scripture text Perkins was expounding here was Philippians 3:7: “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ” (NRSV). The apostle Paul renounced what he was and had in his former life, before Christ. He recognized that whatever “gains” he had, he now—“in Christ”—can see as “loss.” Paul goes on in the next verse to proclaim: “I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8). Knowledge of Jesus Christ—union with him by faith—is completely more important than anything which can concern us.

So our cares and affections must be moderated, as Perkins says. We cannot care for and desire worldly profits, honors, and pleasures as the central axis around which our lives revolve. For the Christian, our “principal care”—what we care about most—is to be “cast on Christ.” Our whole lives are cast on him, united with him by faith. This is the “true gain” in life. It is worth “more than all the goods in the world”!

 

 

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[i] Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 1:11.

[ii] Tillich, 1:11.

[iii] William Perkins, The Workes of That Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge,  3 vols. (London: John Legatt, 1616), 1:648.

Jesus Shall Reign

A Gathering Voices post by Don McKim

We learned recently that the statement, “American is a Protestant Christian Nation” is no longer true.[1] According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the Protestant majority—a hallmark of U.S. demographics since the beginning of the Republic—has now dipped to 48% among those expressing a religious affiliation. On the rise—to 20%—are those who expressed no religious affiliation. This was an increase of some 15% from the data assembled five years ago.[2]

Interpreting this data involves many dimensions. If this is purely a “numbers game,” Protestants will be worried to see their percentages drop. If this is a sociological look at American society in general, the “Nones on the Rise” is a phenomenom of contemporary society to be explored further as providing clues for some cultural phenomena. If a theologically-laden perspective is adopted, Protestants may feel sorry that less people are experiencing the theological joys that Protestant theology provides. So the data is multi-valent and can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

Certainly there are important questions for Protestants to raise. Is evangelism happening in Protestant churches where the good news of the Christian gospel is being proclaimed and shared? Are children of Protestants continuing in the faith of their forbearers? What new ways of sharing the Gospel should Protestant churches be engaging in while American culture continues to change? The questions throng. They all need to be considered.

What also needs to be considered is the theological perspective that is behind, beneath, and in front of us all. This does not lessen or negate the important questions the Pew study raises for Protestant Christians. But it does keep us focused on a reality that can sustain us in the midst of all questioning; and a reality that is an end toward which we move in the midst of all polls and questions and causes for despair.

The reality is found in Isaac Watt’s hymn: “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun.”[3] This hymn was first published in Watts’, Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1719).[4] It was his way of paraphrasing or rendering Psalm 72. Watts’ hermeneutic was decidedly christological here. Some stanzas have rightly dropped out of this well-known hymn these days.[5] But the glorious truth remains:

            Jesus shall reign where’er the sun

                        Does its successive journeys run,

                        His kingdom stretch from shore to shore,

                        Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

 

                        Blessings abound where’er He reigns;

                        The prisoners leap to lose their chains,

                        The weary find eternal rest,

                        And all who suffer want are blest.

 

Then, finally:

 

                        Let every creature rise and bring

                        Honors peculiar to our King;

                        Angels descend with songs again,

                        And earth repeat the loud Amen!

 

The hymn points us to the ultimate reign of Jesus Christ. It points us to the future, coming reign of God in Jesus Christ. It points us to the end toward which we move, when “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).

In the midst of all the difficulties of life, the turmoils of society, and the vicissitudes of our churches, “Jesus Shall Reign.” “Jesus Shall Reign” no matter how things are going personally for me these days; no matter how faithful or unfaithful our churches may be; no matter who wins the U.S. Presidential election (though the choice is very clear!).

We need this word to lift us above our current situations. This does not exempt us from dealing with our situations. We are called by God to live out our vocations—as the church lives out its vocation—in the midst of the world and all its contours. But we have a vision that pulls us toward the future. We give of ourselves fully and totally, the church lives its mission, simply because “Jesus Shall Reign.” Christ’s kingdom pulls us ahead. The future is secure. So we give ourselves away for Christ’s service in the present.

This is the perspective of which New Testament scholar Paul Minear reminded us:

In his eternal plan God has appointed Jesus as the ruler over all authorities, placing all things under his feet. He has ‘filled’ him with the divine fullness, his austere authority and gracious love, his world-encompassing wisdom and all-reconciling power. In Jesus, God has chosen to accomplish all things ‘according to the counsel of his will’ [Ephesians 1] (v.11).[6]

“Jesus shall reign”!

Our vision of hope keeps us from becoming nervous when the results of the most recent religious polls get announced. It keeps us from giving up, throwing in the sponge when things are tough, or when it does not seem like God is pouring it on for my ministries or those of my church. We need a galvanizing vision to help us keep on keeping on. “Jesus Shall Reign” is that vision! In the midst of it all, we can look to the coming future, secure in the counsel of God’s will. Then,

                        Let every creature rise and bring

                        Honors peculiar to our King;

                        Angels descend with songs again,

                        And earth repeat the loud Amen!

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[1] Jim Nedelka, “One Nation Still Under God?” in “News & Announcements from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), October 15, 2012.

[2]The complete study is available online at http://www.pewforum.org/Unaffiliated/nones-on-the-rise.aspx.  

[3] The Presbyterian Hymnal, ed. LindaJo H. McKim (Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1990), #423.

[4] LindaJo H. McKim, The Presbyterian Hymnal Companion (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 293.

[5] The imperialistic reference to “barb’rous nations” is an example.  

[6] Paul S. Minear, The Kingdom and the Power: An Exposition of the New Testament Gospel, rpt. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 33.