Bottoms Up! April 8, 2012 Easter Sunday, Year B Isaiah 25:6-9

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been 


Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, 


Tasting of Flora and the country green, 


Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! 


O for a beaker full of the warm South, 


Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, 


With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, 


And purple-stained mouth

-       “Ode to a Nightingale,” by John Keats

Or, in less exalted language, “I could really use a belt about now.” Tuberculosis had recently carried away Keats’ brother. As a physician himself, the poet knew his own odds were not good, and indeed the same disease ultimately choked off his life. Solomon prescribes a stiff drink for those whose best hope is a temporary amnesia regarding death. (Pro 31.6-7)

God, by contrast, calls for a kegger in the New Jerusalem, not to forget the triumph of mortality, but to celebrate the death of death! Two times in verse six Isaiah calls our attention to the wine list at this messianic feast. A day comes when God will gulp down, not just death, but the very coffin that contains it. He swallows a winding-sheet so big it drapes every nation that has ever existed ‘round the 360-degrees of this distracted globe. In that day there’s only one decent thing to do, and that is to celebrate.

When Jesus burst from the tomb on that first Easter Sunday, the appropriate toast was “Bottoms up!” because God had just turned everything upside down: The depth of the grave had become the pinnacle of Heaven! Prisoners in the lowest dungeons of death had heard the gospel of eternal life! Defeated disciples had become royal servants! Nobodies had become everybodies and everybody had become somebody and it was bottom rail on top from here on in!

“Behold, this is our God.” The God of the Christian faith is the God revealed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the life-bringer and death-slayer who is ever with and for those condemned to die. No longer must we guzzle the rot-gut of entertainment or denial or addiction or distraction or exploitation or corruption to drown out the inescapable tread of the fell sergeant death. Instead we quaff the new wine of the Lord’s table and dare to live life instead of simply dodging death.

Party On!

Doug

Late and Little April 1, 2012 Palm Sunday, Year B Mark 14:1-15:47

            Bobby Bales of Norwood, Ohio, was a likeable, humble kid who once helped train boy who replaced him as the school’s starting linebacker. Sergeant Robert Bales of the United States Army strolled into an Afghan village on March 11 and slaughtered sixteen civilians, including nine children. Between those two facts lie four combat deployments, financial problems, a missed promotion, and a brain injury. In the end, perhaps he just felt the need to assert his self-respect in some way.

            The Roman soldiers who tormented Jesus may have been humane men, once. Maybe the low wages, boredom, and terrorist attacks of an extended foreign deployment finally got the best of them. In the end, perhaps they just felt the need to assert their self-respect in some way.

            In a sense they got it right: Jesus bore those blows for all of Roman-occupied Israel, and for every murdered Afghan and Iraqi civilian. In a sense they got it wrong: Jesus also bore those blows for the men who inflicted them, and for the man who used to be Bobby Bales of Norwood, Ohio.

            And Simon of Cyrene bore both, briefly, for Jesus.

            Palm Sunday calls us to the small service of temporary crucifixion. “Filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions'” (Col 1.24) we weep for the wounded and their wounded wounders and walk our little way along the Via Dolorosa. On occasion, we even acknowledge that the pilgrims on our right and left bear crosses burdened with the weight of our own weakness.

            Poet Holly Ordway beautifully captures this shared sacrifice of salvation in her haunting sonnet, “Bearing Each Other’s Burdens.”

Our Lord calls me to follow him, to take


My cross and not turn back, to die and live


In him. But weak and weary I will break


When at the last I have no more to give.


Yet Christ fell too, along the stony way


To Golgotha. The cross was more than he


Could bear alone, but on that fateful day


One man stepped in: one Simon of Cyrene.


He did not, could not know the real weight


Upon the wood, the world’s weight of sin,


But still he carried what he could, though late


And little. Coinherent, we begin


To recognize each other on the road


And gently bear each one the other’s load.

Hosannah!

Doug

           
Read more of Holly Ordway's work on her blog, Hieropraxis at http://www.hieropraxis.com/.

            

A Great Adventure March 25, 2012 Final Sunday of Lent, Year B Jeremiah 31:31-34

When the Arab Spring drove dictator President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from power, the people of Tunisia found themselves suddenly free. “Freedom is a great, great adventure,” explained dissident leader Fathi Ben Haj Yathia, “but it’s not without risks. There are many unknowns.”

Freedom of any kind brings the terrible blessing of many unknowns. The college freshman who finds himself free from his parents also finds himself free to fail. Economic, medical, and social changes in our society mean that marriages once bound to succeed are now free to fail. Right-to-work laws set an employee free to find a job, and an employer free to fire her.

The sovereign God of Christian scripture takes seriously the great, great adventure of freedom. God offers covenant love and grants the awful risk of humanity’s rejection. Of course, any other form of freedom is no freedom at all.

In his essay “The Principles of Newspeak,” author George Orwell outlines the official language of his futuristic dystopia. “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as ‘The dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’” God could have created humans “free” from the weeds and lice of sin, but that would neuter any real freedom for holiness and love.

The Lord promises ultimately to reconcile sovereign love and chosen love: God’s new covenant will inform the heart, allowing it to govern the head. Jesus tweaks the image slightly when he promises that the new covenant will get into our blood (Lu 22.20). The presence of the crucified and risen Christ will cause us to pulsate with the power of the Father’s love.

Coercion makes loving God a possible choice, but not a real one. External freedom makes loving God a real choice, but not a possible one. A new heart pumping Christ’s shed blood makes loving God both a real and a possible choice.

Free At Last, Free At Last!

Doug

Well, Looky There! March 18, 2012 Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year B Numbers 21.4-9

            When Israel gets drunk on malcontent moonshine and suffers the hangover of judgment, God prescribes some scale-of-the-serpent-that-bit-her.

            Fresh from avenging their previous loss at Mount Hormah (Nu 14.39-45), they forget the new lesson of obedience and instead lapse into the familiar litany of grief: the food is terrible and the portions are too small! God sends serpents that sting like fire and proves that if righteousness cannot pierce our hardened hearts, it can at least puncture our tender flesh. When the people repent, God prescribes a curious cure: Look at the snake!

            There are two things wrong with this approach.

            First of all, they all have to look on the embodied image of their own sin and the condemnation it produces. Secondly, all they can do is look: a passive act with no logical connection to the healing it provides.

            Jesus co-opts this story to offer Nicodemus a metaphor of salvation. (Jo 3.14-21) Sin-stung people who seek salvation only find it by looking at the One who embodies their condemnation, and by looking only. The image mortifies our self-righteousness, and the passivity crucifies our pride.

            When a teenaged Charles Haddon Spurgeon stumbled into a Primitive Methodist Chapel on a stormy Sunday morning seeking rest for his soul, he heard a bad sermon preached by an uneducated layman with a thick country accent. The fellow got hold of the idea of looking in order to live and declared,

Now lookin’ don’t take a deal of pain. It ain’t liftin’ your foot or your finger; it is just, “Look.” Well, a man needn’t go to College to learn to look. You may be the biggest fool, and yet you can look. A man needn’t be worth a thousand a year to be able to look. Anyone can look; even a child can look.

            And one who was barely more than a child did look, and did live. “Like when the brazen serpent was lifted up,” Spurgeon later wrote,

the people only looked and were healed, so it was with me. I had been waiting to do fifty things, but when I heard the word, “Look!” what a charming word it seemed to me!

            “Look” is a charming word, even if the sight that meets our gaze holds no charm at all. “Look” is a charming word, even if the connection between looking and living defeats our syllogisms. “Look” is a charming word, even if it disenchants us from the charms of this world. Look and live! Look and live!

Look Out!

Doug

           

           

Count to Ten March 11, 2012 Third Sunday of Lent, Year B Exodus 20.1-17

            “I don’t like rules,” admits William F. Buckley, “but they can be liberating.”

If the sign says, “Smoking Permitted Aft of These Seats,” then it is only a matter of ascertaining which was is aft before lighting up; and nobody has a legitimate case against you.

            The Ten Commandments offer humanity a liberating set of “thou shalt not’s,” the ancient equivalent of, “Freedom Permitted Aft of These Behaviors.” Get on their good side and even God has no legitimate case against you!

            Of course, the big debate for many Christians these days is not which side of the Commandments we hang out on, but what buildings we hang them up in. To paraphrase Dallas Willard, these ten words are written on many more courtroom walls than lives. And it is ironic that Evangelicals, who howl the loudest about imposing the Decalogue on public spaces, are quickest to eight-six them from their private theology.

            We tend to view the Commandments as restrictive, a sort of failed experiment in works righteousness, the flinty dictates of a jaundiced deity whom William Parker and Elaine St. Johns dub the Marquis de God. We declare ourselves acquitted before the judgment bar of Heaven and reserve such legalism for those accused before the judgment bar of human jurisprudence.

            But to confess that we cannot keep the Law is not the same as denying that it is worth keeping. To quote Willard again, “To be sure, law is not the source of rightness, but it is forever the course of rightness.”

            I don’t like rules – no depraved sinner does – but they can be liberating. Jesus delivers me from their condemnation, but He also frees me for their benediction. I stand at the foot of the cross and read in the ancient inscription in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin the words, “Righteous Living Empowered Aft of This Sign.” And I know that even if I fail, nobody has a legitimate case against me.

Give Me Ten!

Doug