What the Church Sees that the World Doesn't

Tomorrow is Transfiguration Sunday in the liturgical year.  The gospel lesson consists of Matthew's account of the transfiguration.  In the story, Christ is revealed to be God's Son.  It represents a climactic moment in Matthew's gospel

The significance of the transfiguration lies in its juxtaposition with the stories that precede it concerning who witnesses the event.  The transfiguration is not only not witnessed by all 12 of the closest followers of Jesus; it is only witnessed by the inner circle of the closest followers.  This exclusion was intentional on Jesus' part.

Transfiguration Sunday ends the season of Epiphany; the season of the year when we acknowledge that God's light is present in the world.  The story of the transfiguration reveals that God's true light is not visible to the causal observer, even the casual follower of Jesus.  God's true light only becomes visible when we truly commit ourselves to following the way of the cross, traveling up the mountain where few would choose to go.

God's light is present to the invisible community of the true faithful in moments where others would only see the mundane realities of the God.  God's presence is hidden from the casual observer, who would only see an empty field where treasure is hidden.  God's presence is hidden like a gold coin is hidden and only found through passionate and perpetual search.

The transfiguration story is an important metaphor for the Church.  The Church, if it is faithful, will see God's light through cultivating holiness and seeking to live according to the example of Christ.  The Church will even see God's presence in the crucifixion, where the world saw only an absence of power and glory

Rethinking the Sermon on the Mount

The Sermon on the Mount contains admonitions that appear to be impossible to comply with.  Jesus tells his listeners that unlike the Mosaic covenant, where Israel was commanded not to kill, Jesus commanded that we not be angry with another or chastise others who we perceive to be foolish.  Jesus indicates that if we fail to fulfill these commandments, we will be punished.

God, ultimately, just wants us to live lives of peace, fulfillment, and happiness.  God doesn't want us to be angry or disparaging to our neighbor because it prevents us from living in these states of mind.  Being angry and critical prevents us from being peaceful, fulfilled, and happy.  When we live in these states of mind, we punish ourselves.  Jesus alluded to the valley in Jerusalem that was used as a garbage dump where fires constantly burned.  It was a place of ugliness.  The last place in Jerusalem that you wanted to be.  Jesus says that if we live our lives in anger and are obsessively critical of others, this is where we will live.  God doesn't need to punish us.  We have already punished ourselves.  And God wants nothing more for us to walk out of the garbage dump.  Through God's grace, we can walk out at any time and live in places of beauty, peace, and serenity.  This is all God wants

The Ecclesial Fallacy of Schism

Since the Protestant Reformation, schism has been rampant

Schism reflects a flawed understanding of the nature of the Church.  The Church is the invisible community of all those who seek to live under the Lordship of Christ.  It is thereby not only invisible, but indivisible.  Our Pauline heritage also describes the Church as holy and apostolic.

The underlying assumption of schism is that by distinguishing between right and wrong belief and practice and excluding those who demonstrate incorrect belief and practice, we can maintain or restore the Church as pristine and pure.  This is fallacious for several reasons.  Most importantly, it makes the arrogant assumption that we have the wisdom and discernment to create a community of individuals who are completely pure and pristine and an underlying theology, liturgy, and polity that is without blemish.  It also ignores one of the most fundamental purposes of the Church; to be a place where those who are truly trying to live according to the example of Christ but are in error can find redemption.  Ultimately, the Church is a hospital for sinners and not a club for saints.

The Church can be divided bureaucratically, administratively, and legally.  But it remains indivisible, holy, apostolic, and invisible.  What we attempt to accomplish by schism is thereby illusory.

Why Re-Baptism Isn't Necessary

I get requests from parishioners who have already been baptized to be baptized again.  For a long time my response was to go into a tedious recitation of the reasons why being baptized again makes absolutely no theological sense in the Wesleyan tradition.  And it doesn't.  Baptism in Methodism is sacramental.  It is a visible sign of an inward spiritual grace, representing and acknowledging that God was active in us before we were capable of speaking God's name.  It is in our profession of faith that we choose to accept Christ as Lord.

Now I realize that when a parishioner asks to be baptized again, the impetus actually has nothing to do with wanting to be baptized.  It is about wanting to start over again and be symbolically ridden of whatever guilt, shame, and remorse they are holding onto.  So now I bypass the theology of baptism and tell them that they don't need to be baptized again to start over.  All they have to do is be truly penitent, ask God for forgiveness, and in God's eyes, they have been given a new start.  What they yearn for doesn't require ceremony or ritual.  It just requires a penitent heart and a yearning to be holy.

The Universality of God's Salvation

The author of the Gospel of Luke and Acts wrote to a Church that was composed of subjects of the Roman Empire.  The Church hated Rome and believed that Rome was beyond redemption, and saw itself as a tiny remnant of purity set against Rome.

One of the overriding themes of Luke's Gospel and Acts is to challenge this manner of the Church's self-perception and perception of Rome.  God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world but to bring salvation to the world.  Rather than being called to condemn Rome, the Church was thereby called to bring peace and redemption to the world, and to Rome.

In his story of the birth of Christ, Luke proclaims that through the redemptive work of Christ, God seeks to bring peace to the entire world.  "Peace on earth" was a slogan of the Roman Empire; Rome also sought peace.  God thereby called the Church into being to bring Rome what it already wanted but did not yet know how to find.

The Church is not called to condemn the world, to be nothing more than a vehicle of hate and fear mongering.  The Church is called to proclaim peace both to itself and to the world.  The Church is not called to barricade itself within an oasis of purity, but enter into the world's suffering to bring God's salvation.

Lessons from Paul in Engaging the Cultural Wars

The recently concluded election cycle revealed deep seated animosity and hatred along lines of race, social location, and religion.  Paul's words to the Roman church in this week's epistle lesson provides good advice for how the Church should interface with these conflicts

The infant Church in Paul's generation faced similar conflicts along lines of race, social location, and religion.  There was hatred and tension between Jews and Gentiles, exacerbated by underlying cultural differences between the Jewish and Hellenistic worlds.  Paul addresses these conflicts by going back to the underlying purpose of the new covenant community that arose out of the teachings of Christ: that all those who accept Christ as Lord are called to welcome one another and show grace to one another as Christ has shown grace to them in welcoming them into the new covenant community.  As all those who live under the Lordship of Christ live under that Lordship only through grace and mercy, those who do so are called to mirror Christ's mercy in their relationship to those outside the community.

The tensions in our culture are as complicated and deep seated as those in Paul's day.  They are not easily resolved and the answers are elusive.  But we do know where to begin: we begin by mirroring the grace and mercy that Christ has demonstrated to us in our perception and interface with those who we perceive as strangers to us.

Where Discipleship Begins

In his Letter to the Romans, Paul uses the dual images of light/darkness and sleep/awakening to describe the task of discipleship.  Paul's Greek readers would have been very familiar with these images, which were used to demonstrate the duality of wisdom/ignorance.

Wisdom to Paul's readers was considered a gradual process where we discover that what we have been told is true is actually false, and that the prevailing culture around us lives in a state of perpetual ignorance.  Wisdom lies in the process of being freed from the ignorance of our prevailing cultural mindsets.

Discipleship, similarly, begins with the moment when we choose to allow Christ to work within us to free us from the darkness of sin and ignorance.  That moment does not end the process of discipleship, in the same way that the First Sunday of Advent begins, rather than ends, the liturgical year.  The moment of justification, when we accept Christ as Lord, begins the process by which we seek to walk into the light.  Discipleship begins with this yearning for the light of Christ. 

Participating in God's Eternity

In the Christian tradition, we believe that God is eternal and that we are eternal.  We do not believe that death is the end of existence, but merely a transition to another form of existence.  The very notion of "death" is a misnomer in the new covenant community, the Church.  When we hear someone talk of death as the end, we should have no idea what they are talking about.  We affirm that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; we do not affirm that God was so only in the past.

The way that we live and perceive death should reflect our understanding of God's eternity and our participation in God's eternity.  Death is not something that we should fear, because to any extent that we perceive death as the end of our existence and our separation with those we love is an illusion.  Those who have gone before us are still with us and we will remain so. 

Our Perception of God and Ourselves

Jesus tells a parable in Luke's gospel about an unjust judge and a widow.  The widow demands justice, which is denied by the judge out of apathy.  The unjust judge finally relents to the demands of the widow out of exasperation and irritation.

Jesus' parable is a reflection of the way that Israel perceived God and itself.  Israel's notion of salvation history was grounded in the belief that if Israel were faithful to its covenant, God would make Israel a great nation.  Israel's perceived this in political terms, which were never fulfilled.  So Israel spent its time perpetually examining its conformity with the terms of the covenant and its hundreds of rituals and restrictions, believing that the reason why the covenant had not been fulfilled was that it was doing something incorrectly.

Israel's underlying understanding of God was that of an unjust judge who denied Israel's salvation because of some minute lack of conformity with the covenant.  And Israel perceived itself as a powerless widow whose only option was perpetual supplication.

Israel's error lay in its flawed understanding of salvation history.  God wanted Israel to be holy, to be a light to the nations.  God was not an unjust judge; Israel simply misunderstood God's notion of justice.

We do the same thing in the Christian tradition.  We have a perception that God will bring us salvation here and now in the way that we think is best.  God seeks to make us holy; to be a light to the nations.  God is not an unjust judge; we have just misunderstood God's justice.  And we are not powerless; we have just misunderstood our place in God's plan of salvation.

An Admonition About Wealth

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus is an admonition about the dangers of wealth.  Wealth is not a function of virtue.  There are virtuous poor and morally vicious poor.  There are virtuous rich and morally vicious rich.  But the accumulation of wealth creates dangers and potential pitfalls in our discipleship.

Studies consistently demonstrate that the more wealth we accumulate, the greater the propensity for narcissism, self-righteousness, and greed.  This is not to say that there are not many persons with great wealth who do not demonstrate these propensities, in the same way that there are those without wealth that demonstrate them.  By analogy, when we choose to climb a mountain, we encounter dangers that we do not encounter when we are on level ground.  Whether or not we choose to climb the mountain is up to us; but if we are going to climb it, we better be aware of the dangers and bring the right tools.

The Hidden Actor in Human Culture

The parable of the fraudulent manager in Luke's gospel is indicative of the right and wrong way to read the parables.  If we read the parable in a straightforward, moralistic way, it makes no sense.  The manager misappropriates the owner's property and assets, and then seeks to save himself by engaging in further fraud by unilaterally entering into settlement and compromise on legitimately owed debts held by the owner for his own personal capital among the locals.  The manager is corrupt.

The meaning of the parable lies in what happens by accident.  For a fleeting moment, despite the manager's self-interest and illegal conduct, there is reconciliation between the manager and owner, the owner and the peasantry, and the owner and peasantry.  In the economic and social relationships at issue in the parable, the owner was indifferent from the peasantry.  The peasantry hated the owner because of his excessive taxes.  The peasantry hated the manager because the manager acted as the agent of the foreign owner.

Now imagine the scene that follows.  The owner travels to confront the manager, and is greeted by cheering crowds, who think that the owner is the one who has compromised their debts.  The peasants cheer the manager who has acted as agent for the transactions that were actually fraudulent.  The owner is forced to accept the settlement of the debts.  All this happens despite any altruistic intent or action by anyone in the story.  Somehow reconciliation happens.

The parable is a reality check for us as we seek to be disciples.  We are and remain self-interested.  But somehow sometimes there are fleeting moments when good happens through us in the world, not because of us, but in spite of us.  This is due solely to the hidden actor both in the parable and in our own stories: the God who has created, redeemed, and sustained all things.  God is behind us, in us, and around us, going about the business of reconciliation.  Any good that happens in this world is a result of the infinite grace of the God who chose to give His life for us.  So we pray, we yearn for God's grace, we seek to do good.  But any good that arises in this world is the product of God's grace and God's grace alone.

How Value is Measured in God's Kingdom

Both ancient Middle Eastern and modern Western cultures are based upon hierarchies of value, status, and prestige.  The means by which we measure those values are different, but the fact that we employ methods of valuation remains the same.

Ancient Middle Eastern cultures, like virtually all ancient societies, were honor and shame culture.  One of the characteristics of an honor and shame society was that your place in the hierarchical matrices was fixed from your birth and remained constant.  If you were born into high standing, you remained there.  If you were born into the peasantry, you remained there as well.  Honor consisted not in trying to move your way up the hierarchical systems, but recognizing your place in them and being faithful to your place.

In Jesus' day, like in most Middle Eastern societies, one of the ways that this hierarchy of value was given expression was at a banquet.  People ate sitting down, and in a square formation.  At one corner was the place of highest honor, and at the opposite corner was the place of lowest honor.  The trick was predicting who was going to show up and not sitting in a place where you would be forced to move down, in humiliation, someone else showed up with greater status, forcing you to take a lower seat.

Jesus says that in God's Kingdom, there are also hierarchical matrices, but the methodology of valuation is different.  Our value is measured not by our wealth, our social status, our beauty, or our profession, but the degree to which we serve our neighbor.  The one who will be at the place of highest honor will be the one who has demonstrated the greatest propensity for serving others.

Imagine a banquet in God's Kingdom.  If the methodology of service and sacrifice is truly lived out, no one will take the highest place, because they will want their neighbor to take it.  The highest place will actually sit empty, as the only preoccupation of those at the banquet table will be to serve their neighbor.  That is an image of the infinite lavish grace that is the cornerstone of God's Kingdom. 

The Greatest Impediment to Scriptural Holiness

In Luke's gospel, the Jewish religious authorities rebuke Jesus because he healed a woman on the Sabbath, in violation of Sabbath observance.  Jesus in turn rebukes the religious authorities for ironically missing the big picture

The whole point of the synagogue, the Jewish religious establishment, and the traditions of Sabbath observance was to remind Israel of the only thing that really mattered; their covenant relationship with God that effected their liberation from oppression and the need to maintain holiness of heart and life to maintain their side of the covenant agreement.  The woman was liberated from her own oppression through healing.  The only thing that stood in the way were the religious customs that were intended to evoke and facilitate Israel's holiness that would bring about their own liberation.

The same irony is found in the Church today.  The greatest impediment to the whole point of being the Church; to make disciples of Christ and to live holy lives according to the example of Christ, is our own religious practices and institutions, both on the local and judicatory level.  In order for the Church to carry out its mission it must avoid the trap of missing the forest for the trees.  The Church must be wiling to abandon any practice or custom that does not facilitate holiness of heart and life.

The Engine that Drives Discipleship

Jesus tells a parable about a rich man who pathologically accumulates grain and dies before he has the opportunity to benefit from his work.

The rich man's fault is not immorality.  We are not told if the rich man is morally virtuous or vicious.  The rich man's fault is a lack of wisdom.  The rich man is in denial of life's transience.  He will never be able to benefit from all of the grain that he has accumulated.  He has wasted his life because he has allowed the wrong engine (i.e. accumulation of wealth) to drive him.

The rich man is drive to accumulate out of fear.  And there are plenty of things for the rich man to be afraid of, as there are plenty of things for us to be afraid of.  And there is nothing to keep any of those things from happening.  Even discipleship; being Christian is not a shield from tragedy.  Jesus said that rain falls on both the righteous and unrighteous

Discipleship is a calling to set aside our fear so that we are driven by another engine; being holy.  God needs holiness to be the engine that drives us because there are tasks that God needs us to complete in our time and place.  Our lives can only be driven by one engine.  If our lives are driven by fear we cannot be God's instruments.  We seek the intercession of God's grace not to shield us from the things that we fear, but that we might face our fears, be holy, and be God's instruments so that the Kingdom of God would be revealed on earth as it is in heaven.

Paul's Conversion and the Collapse of the Sacred

Paul's conversion did more than change Paul's religion from Judaism to Christianity.  It changed Paul's underlying theological orientation of who God was and how God acts.  Prior to his conversion, Paul believed that God's purposes were achieved through persecution and domination of those who proclaimed false beliefs.  In persecuting Christians, Paul believed that he was mirroring God's intention to bring about holiness in the world through the extermination of the unholy.

In his conversion experience, God in Christ tells Paul that in persecuting Christians, Paul was persecuting God.  This is typically interpreted to mean that Paul was impeding the spread of the Christian message.  Paul's theology in his epistles suggests a much broader reading.  In the act of persecution itself, Paul's methodology itself was contrary to God's purposes.  Who Paul was persecuting was incidental; the very act of persecution prevented Paul from carrying out God's intention for the world.

Paul makes this explicit in his letter to the Colossians.  Paul says that God has brought peace through the blood of the cross.  Rome's ideology was that peace was brought through crucifying.  Paul was converted to an understanding that God brought peace by being crucified; through self-giving love in dying for the world.

Paul's conversion experience represented a collapse of everything that he thought was sacred and holy.  It brought Paul to a greater and deeper understanding of who God was.

How to Deal with the Samaritans

In Luke's gospel, there is a story of Jesus and the disciples entering a Samaritan village.  The Samaritans are not receptive to the message and Jesus and the disciples are not welcomed.  The disciples want God to send fire down from the sky to consume the village, but they are rebuked by Jesus.

Israel had been in ethnic and religious tension with Samaria for hundreds of years.  Israel condemned Samaria for intermarriage with those who were not Jewish and for not complying with the Mosaic law.  TO say that Israel and Samaria did not like each other would be a vast understatement.  It is no wonder, then, that the Samaritan village was not immediately receptive to the disciples' message given all the baggage of this ethnic and religious tension.

There is ethnic and religious tension in the world today.  There always has been.  Our instinct is vengeance and annihilation of our enemies.  These instincts are born out of fear, not righteousness or holiness.  God wants salvation for Israel and Samaria and reconciliation in those dividing walls of hostility in this world that tear us apart.

We have no control over what Samaritans choose to do or not do.  We do have control over our own actions.  We can choose not to respond with fear, but with courage and a heart that seeks the salvation and redemption of all people.  In doing so, we are acting as God's agents.

People of the Way

Many ancient Christian communities did not call themselves "Christians" and they did not refer to their faith as "Christianity." They called themselves "People of the Way" and referred to their practice as "The Way."

This is a good springboard for considering the cornerstone of Paul's theology: justification by faith.  "Justification" is from the Greek "Dikaioo" (to be made righteous) and "Faith" from the Greek "Pistis" (conviction and persuasion).  We become righteous through our conviction that God has already redeemed us through the cross of Christ.  And we arrive at this knowledge by following Jesus as the original disciples were called to do.  Through our fellowship with Christ and with those who follow, we come to realize who God is and the wonder that God redeemed us before we could even speak God's name.  This is why the early followers of Jesus referred to themselves as "People of the Way." It is not a coincidence that followers of Jesus stopped referring to themselves with this term when the Church became institutionalized and made compulsory by Rome.  Christianity became just another set of abstract principles and practices that people followed in order to be identified as Christians.

In his epistle to the Galatians, which arose out of the controversy about whether you needed to follow Jewish religious practices to be a follower of Jesus, Paul is not setting Gentile Christianity against Jewish Christianity.  Rather, he is revolutionizing the very notion about what religions is.  Judaism was just used as an example of works-righteousness--the notion that you needed to do something to achieve redemption, which was shared by all religions.  Paul was questioning this underlying assumption of all religions 

We don't run around doing good works to achieve redemption.  We run around doing good works because it is the natural consequence of truly knowing that in Christ God has already redeemed us and redeemed the whole world .

Some Thoughts About Schism

Protestants are prone to schism.  It has always been one of our fundamental characteristics.  Every generation has had disagreements about Christian belief and practice, and enormous time and expense has been devoted to Christian denominations splitting, forming, and reforming.

Paul's Letter to the Galatians provides a good lens through which we should perceive the question of "to schism or not to schism." Paul wrote the letter to address a major problem that had arisen in the infant Christian communities in Galatia.  Paul discovered that a false gospel was being preached there, and wrote to the Galatians to get them back on the right track.

The false gospel was not being proclaimed by someone who was evil and out to destroy the churches.  It was proclaimed by Peter.  Yes, that Peter.  The one who was the leader of the disciples, the one on whom Jesus said that the Church would be built.  The one who preached at Pentecost.  Peter and the original Jerusalem disciples took the position that you needed to practice the regulations and rules of Judaism in order to be a follower of Jesus.  This was contrary to Paul's position.

Peter was operating out of a fundamentally flawed understanding of Christian belief and practice, and was seeking to spread this understanding to Paul's communities.  And yet Peter was also a faithful disciple who remained one until his martyrdom in Rome.  Peter was, and remained an instrument through which the gospel was proclaimed.

God works through those who have a fundamentally flawed understanding of Christian belief and practice.  It doesn't make their position any less flawed.  It just means that the fact that they are in error does not obviate the truth of their calling.  And while we are at it, whenever it comes to an issue where there is disagreement, those who are right are going to be wrong about something else.  Paul was just as flawed as Peter.  Paul himself acknowledges his own flaws again and again in his epistles.

Getting Things Backwards at Pentecost

The Day of Pentecost celebrates the birth of the Church.  The Church was given birth out of the theological grounding of knowing who God is and who we are: God is our parent who has sought us out, redeemed, us, and adopted us.  We are thereby God's children, and using Paul's terminology from Romans, we are heirs of God's infinite creativity and redemptive power.

God's Spirit did not show up for the first time on the Day of Pentecost.  The Day of Pentecost was the day when the community realized who they were and who God was, recognizing that God's Spirit had always been present, was present, and always would be present, and that God's presence was deep inside the souls of every human being.

Paul says in Romans that the Church, as usual, gets things backwards.  God's Spirit does not enter us when we become God's children.  Instead, when we become conscious that we have already been adopted by God and are thereby children of God and heirs of everything that God is, we understand who we are for the first time and discern the Spirit of God that has always been in the world and inside us.

The Church universal is the invisible community of those faithful who know who God is and know who they are.  Any institutional manifestation of the Church universal is incidental and ultimately ineffectual in fully giving articulation to the wonder of what the Church truly is.

The true Church universal will be manifest by endless creativity, joy, and wonder.  As Paul reminds us in Romans, it will not be characterized by a Spirit of fear, but under-girded by the knowledge of who we are.

God's Vision for the World's 206 Sovereign Nations

There are approximately 206 sovereign nations in the world; the number is somewhat difficult to ascertain because certain nations do not recognize some and those nations that are not recognized by others don't recognize some others that are recognized by others.  Curiously, every sovereign nation, including those that others don't consider legitimate, consider themselves legitimate.

The Book of Revelation has typically been read to mean that God's plan is to destroy the "bad" nations (which never include the reader's own nation whatever it is) and to redeem the "good" nations.  This reading is inconsistent with John's vision.  First, we are told that all the nations of the world (yes, all 206 of them) have been deceived by the dragon that is present in the world.  However, we are told that the gates to the New Jerusalem are always open to everyone, and the kings of the world (and therefore their subjects) will enter their gates once they see God's light.  God's vision is for all the nations of the world, and all the citizens of the nations of the world to be redeemed.  It is both a realistic vision (recognizing that the nations of the world have been deceived) and optimistic (all the nations of the world need to be redeemed is to see God's light).

The Church exists in and for the world to bring about the world's salvation.  The Church; the faithful remnant who have been reborn into the vision that God was revealed in the one who gave his life for all humankind; is called to reveal God's light, which will cause the nations to see that they have been deceived and be drawn to the light.  The gates to the New Jerusalem are always open and the center of the city is the lamb, the very symbol of sacrificial love.  God does not seek to draw us out of the insanity of the world, but to empower us through the Spirit that we might shine God's light in the world's darkness for the redemption and salvation of the nations.  Yes, all 206 of them.