Choosers Must Be Beggars August 7, 2011 Proper 14, Ordinary Time, Year A Romans 10.5-15

            In his science fiction thriller That Hideous Strength C. S. Lewis places his protagonist Mark Studdock in a crisis of decision. Pressed to choose between good and evil, he replies, “I want to think. I want to think.” Lewis observes, “Mark had said the wanted to think: in reality he wanted alcohol and tobacco. He had thoughts in plenty –more than he desired.”

            Similarly, Paul has hunted his quarry out of every legitimate cover by the time he gets to Romans 10. All that remains is the choice: Confess Jesus as Lord or do not. On that choice hinges salvation or damnation. There’s no need to speculate about how one reaches Heaven – Jesus opened it in the incarnation. There’s no need to dither over the ethics of who goes to Hell – Jesus defeated it in the resurrection. All that remains is the decision: Will my heart embrace the truth? Will my mouth speak it?

            “Jesus is Lord” – four simple syllables, doesn’t seem that tough. But it is, in fact, loaded language for two groups of people. For the Jew, Lord means YHWH God of Israel and this confession takes the straightforward mathematics of monotheism into the incalculable geometry of the Trinity. For the gentile, Lord was the title of Caesar and using it for anyone else constituted an act of rebellion against the visible world order.

            So when Paul magnanimously promises that “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all,” what he essentially means is, “Anybody is welcome to get killed for following Jesus.”

          

As Helmut Thielicke observes, “In countless talks about Christ it has been my experience that what stands between men and Christ is not intellectual arguments but sins.” We don’t need more time to think. We don’t need more theology to think about. We don’t need more tobacco or alcohol or video games or Facebook posts or any of the other smorgasbord of distractions our society serves up: We need to choose. We have no choice but to choose. Live for Jesus and be a heretic to the easy answers of religion. Live for Jesus and be a traitor to the conflation of God and country. Oh for a beautiful pair of feet to kick us in the backside and move us across the line of comfortable indecision!

 

Please Choose from the Following Menu.

Doug

Collect

God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you sent your only Son to keep on our behalf the covenant that we had broken. Grant us now faith to believe and courage to confess Christ as our means of salvation in Heaven and Christ as our standard of conduct on earth, that not the words of our mouths alone but the way we walk through life might carry the gospel to those who have not heard. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Benediction

May all the riches of Heaven and all the terrors of Hell

            Confront you in the choice of Jesus as your Savior.

May all the wrath of religion and all society’s scorn

            Confront you in the choice of Jesus as your Savior.

May all of the words your mouth speaks and every step your feet take

            Confront your world with the choice of Jesus as its Savior.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.

Love Wins . . . And Costs July 31, 2011 Proper 13, Ordinary Time, Year A Romans 9.1-5

“What shall we Christians do,” asks the great Reformer Martin Luther in his tract, The Jews and their Lies, “with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?” He then answers his own question, advising believers:

to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians.

Any interpretation of Romans 9 through 11 must take into account statements such as that.

Paul takes a different approach: Firmly convinced of Israel’s mistake in rejecting her messiah, he doubles-down with an offer so daring he must submit three affidavits as to its accuracy. He invokes the name of Christ, his own integrity, and the Third Person of the Trinity, then describes a love so deep that he would trade places in Hell with his kinsmen if that would open their eyes. So outrageous is Paul’s dare that the grammar of this sentence trembles on the brink of actuality and never quite makes the leap.

When Rob Bell wanted to spring Gandhi from Hell without benefit of conversion, plenty of Christians were furious at Bell, but how many were truly heartbroken over Gandhi? Our preaching must never set the thermostat of Hell hotter than the temperature of the tears we weep for the unsaved.

Mourning Luther’s anti-Semitism, biographer Martin Marty laments that “one could wish that Luther had died before ever this tract was written.” Perhaps charity demands that we remember the crusty old theologian for a better passage, one that more accurately depicts his understanding of the Gospel. In the canticle On the Freedom of the Christian Man Luther declares,

I must even take to myself the sins of others as Christ took mine to

himself. Thus we see that the Christian man lives not to himself but to

Christ and his neighbor through love. By faith he rises above himself to

God and from God goes below himself in love and remains always in God

and in love.

What matters most about Hell is not who is and who is not going there, but the depth of our passion to prevent it from happening. What proves our orthodoxy is not our insistence on eternal damnation, but our persistence in proclaiming eternal salvation. What proves that Christ is the only way is not our readiness to condemn, but our readiness to accept condemnation if that would show anyone the way to be saved.

Hier Stehe Ich

Doug

Collect

Heavenly Father, Your great love sent Your Son to bear the condemnation that our sin deserved. Grant to us such Christ-like hearts that we would rather be condemned than see our brothers condemned, rather face rejection than see our sisters rejected, rather endure wrath than see our brothers face the wrath to come, that when the love of Christ so conquers us it might conquer those we love. This we ask in the name of the One who became sin on our behalf, Your Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, together with You, Father, and the Holy Spirit, one God now and forever, Amen.

Benediction

May you love so truly

            That your love speaks no lies.

May you love so deeply

            That your love spares no pains.

May you love so faithfully

            That your love sees no hope

Apart from salvation in Christ the Son,

Together with the Father

And the Holy Spirit,

One God, Now and Forever,

Amen.

It’s All Good! July 24, 2011 Proper 12, Ordinary Time, Year A Romans 8.26-38

            “If God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be now?” That observation by C. S. Lewis to his fictional friend Malcolm should make Romans 8.26 the favorite verse of many Christians. But God goes Lewis one better: The Lord would demonstrate amazing grace in ignoring our flaky requests; what God in fact does is transform them! The Holy Spirit does the heavy lifting of intercession (“help” is the word in Luke 10.40 for the hard slog of a scullery maid) by smelting the silliness out of our prayer and refining its real intent.

            Ultimately there is only one Christian prayer: “Make me like Jesus.” That’s the one God always answers, the one God is always answering. When Paul claims that “God causes all things to work together for good,” the good he has in mind is for us “to become conformed to the image of His Son.” We can pray for whatever we want; what we will get is whatever makes us more like Jesus. Unfortunately for our flesh, that’s usually a cross.

            So Paul clues us in to some stuff that increases our conformity to the heart of our crucified Lord. He does not guarantee that God will exempt us from tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril or sword; indeed, he seems to invite us to be the guests of dishonor at a general sheep-slaughtering. The Bible never promises that God will separate us from suffering – only that suffering will never separate us from God. And both of those things are true for the same reason: Suffering makes us more like the Son, and thus draws us closer to the Father.

Good Grief!

Doug

Collect

Holy Spirit, you hear our hearts beneath the words we think we mean. Take on your shoulders the burden of prayer that we are too weak to bear and too limited to understand, and pray without remorse or relenting that we may carry our cross until our sorrows conform us fully to the image of Christ Our Lord in whose name we pray together with the Father and You, Holy Spirit, One God now and forever, Amen.

Benediction

May the Spirit stand beside you and speak within you,

            When your mind and your strength are too small.

May the Father who called you cause all things to conform you,

            To the image of the crucified Son.

May the Son who died for you ever intercede for you,

            And make you His inseparable and unconquerable sisters and brothers.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.

The Internal Conversion Engine July 10, 2011 Proper 10, Ordinary Time, Year A Romans 8.1-11

            Last October a gormless lorry driver mistakenly pumped hundreds of liters of petrol into tanks meant for diesel, costing stranded motorists thousands of pounds.

            Let me translate that English into English: A boneheaded trucker pumped hundreds of gallons of gas into diesel tanks, costing broken-down drivers big bucks.

            This happened in a place called Kingswinford in the English Midlands. It didn’t take long to spot the problem: Cars quickly conked out along nearby roads and angry owners hiked back to the station to complain.

I’m no mechanic but it seems clear enough that you can’t run an engine on the wrong kind of fuel. That appears to be Paul’s theme in this passage as he sets up a contrast between “flesh” and “Spirit.” It is important to recognize that Paul does not mean to oppose the big, bad body with the good, sweet soul in some sort of Gnostic cage-match. He writes instead of how we walk, of our mindset, of what we are in and what is in us. Before he’s done Paul will promise that Christ’s indwelling Spirit offers “life to your mortal bodies.” Instead of condemning bodies he speaks of contrasting powers – or fuels – which drive both body and soul.

The problem in Kingswinford was not that people had cars and should, instead, have learned to commute by astral projection like so many Hindu swamis; the problem was that they tried to run their cars on the wrong stuff. The problem with people is not that we have bodies – God invented them and they come in handy for telling one another apart; the problem is that the Lord creates our whole self, body and soul, to run on God’s Spirit and we have instead sucked up what the world falsely offers as superior fuel.

So we break down: Our lives sputter and cough and endanger ourselves and others. The good news is that Christ comes to set things right, to fill us with the fuel for which God designed us. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” the passage begins, and it ends with a reference to “His Spirit who dwells in you.”

Fill ‘Er Up!

Doug

Collect

Righteous God, You sent Your Son to take on sinful flesh that through His death sin might die. Grant us grace to walk according to the Spirit that we might please You, the Father who raised the Son and gives us life through the indwelling of the Spirit, one God now and forever, Amen.

Benediction

Because the Spirit of God indwells you,

            You have escaped the flesh.

Because the Spirit of Christ indwells you,

            Your have life in the spirit though your body is dead.

Because the Spirit of the Father who raised the Son indwells you,

            You have life even in your mortal bodies.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.

A New Lease on Life July 17, 2011 Proper 11, Ordinary Time, Year A Romans 8.12-25

            “I am always saying ‘Glad to've met you’ to somebody I'm not at all glad I met,” admits Holden Caulfield, the narrator of J. D. Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye. To justify his conduct, Holden explains that, “If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”

            Do you have to lie to live?

            That’s the question Paul takes up as he anticipates the ultimate coming of God’s Kingdom. The answer to the question depends on who’s holding our note, who’s underwriting our lease on life. He uses the metaphor of debt: The New American Standard translates the word in verse 12 as “under obligation,” but the old King James comes through, rendering it “debtors.” It’s the same word Jesus teaches us to use when we pray about forgiveness “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” (Mt 6.12)

            We don’t have a choice about spiritual debt; only about who carries the paper.

            The First Bank of the Flesh makes an understandable bargain: a little more death now in exchange for a little more life now. Call is a Caulfield Loan – sacrifice a slice of your integrity on the altar of a lie and polite society will continue to give you access to a job and money and a certain amount of social acceptance. The problem with this deal is the balloon payment at the end: ultimate, eternal death when we have bargained away our last sliver of true self.

            This moral economy makes us spiritually stingy because we need every bit of our minimal resources to beat back the inevitable for just a little longer. Alexander Solzhenitsyn records that the Russian mafia had a saying about death: “You today, me tomorrow.” Sure I have to die someday, but if killing you now buys me even one more sunrise, it’s a price I’m willing to pay. Or, as Scott Bader-Saye puts it, "Disordered and excessive fear has significant moral consequences. It fosters a set of shadow virtues, including suspicion, preemption, and accumulation, which threaten traditional Christian virtues such as hospitality, peacemaking, and generosity."

Jesus Savings and Loan sets different – and rather bizarre – terms: Kill everything (including possibly your own claim to life) up front and hope it pays off at last. “If by the Spirit you are putting to death” – The present-tense verb denotes ongoing action: tell the truth and die the death in order to live what is truly life. And in the end, instead of a balloon payment that bankrupts you, you receive a dividend that sets you up for all eternity.

            This is not works salvation but how salvation works. Enslaved Israelites bargain tomorrow’s grave for today’s leeks and garlic while freed Israelites trust for tomorrow’s manna and make the down payment of today’s pilgrimage. Orphaned children scavenge scraps while adopted daughters depend on their unseen Abba. Unredeemed creation fights a duel to the Darwinian death but redeemed creation insists these are labor pains that lead to life.

            Of course, nobody can prove any of this. Proof belongs to the delayed-death kind of debt. Hope deals not in proof but in patience, and brings the excitement of the unknown to the ventures of life.

You Pays Your Money, and You Takes Your Chances.

Doug 

Collect

Holy Spirit, assure our spirits that we are heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, so that in our sorrows we may take present comfort in sharing the sufferings of the Son and future hope in the promise of sharing His glory. In the name of God our Father, Christ our Brother, and the Holy Spirit our Comforter, Amen.

Benediction

May you put to death the deeds of the flesh,

            Because God gives you life in the Spirit.

May you cry out to your Abba Father,

            Because God’s Spirit speaks in your spirit.

May you seek to soothe creation’s groanings,

            Because you bear first-fruits of the Spirit.

In the name of

God our Father,

Christ our Brother,

And the Holy Spirit our Comforter,

Amen.