Isa 55.6-13: some brief musings

Isaiah 55.6-13

What kind of God makes promises like these?

What news or whose words come with this kind of power in their proclamation;
the kind of power that provokes song from towering peaks and choruses from rolling hills;
the sort of power that rouses the forests and glens into a resounding applause?

To an exiled people, undoubtedly lacking in hope for their future, they receive this word from Isaiah. The prophet mentions that God’s word shall not be a dead word; it’s not the empty promise or trite cliché we all know so well, but it’s a word that brings forth new possibilities, new realities, new creation.

Like the rain and snow that fall from heaven to water the earth, this word from God will bring about growth and transformation in arid deserts—in places we least expect life to be sprouting and thriving.
This word of God, Isaiah promises, will bring forth new life!

And while our situation may differ from the Judeans, Isaiah’s words remain good news for us.
The good news, the gospel of this word is that God’s Word has indeed come forth;
or better, it has come down.
The Word of God comes among us and becomes a word-user, revealing to us the God whose promises are not empty words and bringing us into His presence when we least deserve it and when we least expect it.

 

Thomas Smail and A Pneumatological Theology of Suffering

“The way to Pentecost is Calvary; the Spirit comes from the cross.”

           Scottish theologian Thomas Smail centered his career around this message, and there is little wonder as to why that is: for these words were the interpretation given to him after his first public expression of the gift of tongues in the mid-1960s. [1]  Recognizing that the very shape of Pentecostal theology makes it difficult to understand this dogmatic proclamation, Smail made it a goal of his to embed this notion in a Pentecostal theology which, as a result, would be better safeguarded from shallow ‘God-talk’ or glib triumphalism—two temptations sometimes yielded to by Pentecostals.  For traditions in which the charismatic activity of the Holy Spirit is emphasized, a robust theology of the Spirit is required in order to do justice to both sides of the church’s journey: “the power and the love, the failure and the triumph, the weakness and the strength, the suffering and the healing, the dying and the rising again.”[2]

            In part one of the following essay, we will observe Smail’s attempt to do just this in his article “The Cross and the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Renewal”: develop a theology of charismatic renewal that situates itself at the foot of the cross.  By doing so, Smail makes clear that the Spirit poured out at Pentecost will necessarily be the Spirit of the crucified one, the Spirit whose power and work bear witness to the scandal of the cross—God’s power made perfect in weakness.  In part two, we will take note of Smail’s theology of suffering, which he devises from the “Paschal model” charismatic renewal, and offer a critique of certain aspects of his argument.

Part I

In the article, Smail focuses in on the close proximity of Pentecost to Golgotha and how we cannot understand the Holy Sprit if we do not perceive it through the lens of the cross.  But before stating his thesis, Smail carefully constructs an implicit premise of his argument: the charismatic renewal needs a working theology open to the Scripture’s correction in order to account for lived realities like suffering.  First, he mentions the ubiquitous “impatience with theology” amid the renewal movement.  The charismatic renewal, it might be argued, is about an “experience of God rather than thinking about God. . . . Its central contribution [is] to emphasize once again the here and now activity in his Spirit.”[3]  Originally, Smail understood this impatience.[4]  But while attending a gathering of Scottish pentecostal leaders, he was reminded that the movement would fall pray to serious problems if its leaders did not hold on to their “good theology.”

Second, Smail finds an analogue for understanding theology’s efficacy in maps and their function.  Like a map for a traveler, a robust theology is indispensable for showing a Spirit-led church where it is going and how it is going to get there.[5]  Encountering God in the Holy Spirit engages our hearts (emotions) and our minds (thoughts)—not simply the former at the expense of the latter.  And anyhow, there is no such thing as a church without a theology.  The issue lies with what kind of theology a church is utilizing.  Smail argues that “All our theological traditions need to be recognized for what they are, interpretations of the gospel that do justice to some aspects and fail to do justice to others.”[6]  Concerning the theological pedigree of the charismatic renewal, he names it as one beginning in the Protestant Reformation, altered by Pietism and the Methodist holiness movement, and most recently manifested in ‘classical’ Pentecostalism.[7]  Pentecostalism should be recognized for the ways it has turned a spotlight on aspects of Christian dogma that are largely neglected by mainline denominations in the west.  Having set up a backdrop against which to view Smail’s thesis, Smail declares it saying, “the basic structures of Pentecostal theology make it difficult to recognize the close and intimate relationship between the renewing and empowering work of the Spirit and the centre of the gospel in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”[8]  Because of this, Smail suggests that the charismatic renewal develop a deeper notion of the Holy Spirit’s relation to the cross.  “We are indeed rejuvenated and empowered at Pentecost, but we are judged, corrected and matured at the cross.”[9]

Theologia Gloriae and the Pentecostal Model of Renewal

Smail offers two possible models of charismatic renewal, a Pentecostal Model and a Paschal Model.  The distinctions between the two models’ emphases are easily discerned in the titles Smail assigns to them: the Pentecostal model emphasizes the reception of the Spirit as the goal of the Christian life, whereas the Paschal model focuses on the connection between the cross and the Spirit.  The Pentecostal model is characterized by Luther’s theologia gloriae, “the theology of glory that tried to deal with God in a way that did not take the cross fully into account.”[10]  This model bypasses Good Friday, as it were, making a b-line to the narrative of Acts 2, forty days after Easter.  In Smail’s view, this model compartmentalizes Christ’s work on the cross into a temporally prior category and the Holy Spirit’s ‘here-and-now’ work into a newer one.[11]  Smail states two key dangers with this model.  The first danger is that Christians working from this theology may articulate the Spirit’s power in ways that differ from—maybe even contradict—the gospel of the cross.  In such a case, those who have experienced baptism in the Holy Spirit are conceived of as Christians of a higher class.  As a result, the second danger is that Christian experience ceases to be normed by the cross.  “Charismatic experience can become an autonomous realm of its own,” Smail says, a realm in which the cross no longer scandalizes and calls into question our expectations and experiences.[12]  If the working theology of this model articulates the conception of a spirit who promotes triumphalism (implicit or explicit) over the cross, the model’s advocates may soon find out that this spirit, in Smail’s words, “turn[s] out to be a very unholy spirit.”[13]

Theologia Crucis and the Paschal Model of Renewal

The paschal model is, for Smail, more sustainable and theologically fertile than the Pentecostal model.  Unlike the theologia gloriae of the previous model, the paschal model is a cruciform theology with eyes affixed on the cross—a theologia crucis.  Where the Pentecostal model rushes from Luke’s narrative to Acts 2,[14] the paschal model ‘detours’ through John’s gospel before arriving in Acts and Paul.  More than Luke, the gospel of John implies a closer connection between Jesus’ passion and the coming of the Spirit. This is largely due to the unique references in John to the Holy Spirit as the paraklete, the “helper,” “comforter,” or “witness” (John 15.26).[15]  Smail also mentions that the pneuma Jesus gives up in John 19.30 may not simply be his “breath”; it may be the “Spirit.”[16]  But one need not agree with Smail on this interpretation of 19.30 to concede the larger point that John’s gospel more emphatically stresses the Spirit’s movement from the cross:

In [John’s] gospel the way of the cross and the way of the Spirit are one and the same. The Spirit leads us as he led Jesus, to glory fashioned in suffering, to victory won through defeat, to power exercised in weakness, to a throne that is the same shape as a cross.  This Spirit will never lead us away from or past the cross of Christ; rather, he will consistently bring us back to it, because it is the one source of that strange power by which God through Christ has overcome the world.[17]

This theology is by no means unique to John’s gospel.  The apostle Paul, according to Smail, evidences a cross-shaped hermeneutical through which he interprets the Holy Spirit’s work.[18]  In 1 Cor 1.22, for example, Paul reproves those seeking rational expositions (like the Greeks) or miraculous signs (Jews), “signs and wonders that manifest God’s presence in sensational and dramatic ways.”[19]  The Holy Spirit has gathered the community in Corinth and is present in the charismatic gifts they display (1 Cor 12-14), but Paul adamantly declares that the power of the Holy Spirit is power from the cross and released by the cross’ message (1 Cor 2.1-5).[20]

The Particular Power of the Spirit

Pentecostal and charismatic Christians are notorious for speaking about the Holy Spirit’s work in terms of “empowerment.”  When a theology of the Holy Spirit is divorced from the cross, though, the quality and character of the exact power imparted by the Spirit becomes elusive.  Smail fears that an undisciplined use of power language can result in the impression that God unleashes a violent, “supernatural” attack against sin and evil.  “Jesus did not attack evil by standing outside it in divine immunity and smashing it with the laser beams of supernatural force, “ he says; “he did not defeat it by violent and overwhelming assault upon it.”[21]

So what is the precise character of God’s power, given to the church through the Holy Spirit?  When we understand it by way of the cross, we are able to see that the power of Jesus, and thus the power of the Spirit, is none other than the self-giving love of the Father, the epitome of which is put on display at the Son’s crucifixion.  “Calvary love,” as Smail calls it, is that with which God “delivers, remakes, heals, frees, and saves.”[22]  Consequently, “spiritual gifts” may only be wholesome and upbuiding if they are exercised as gracious gifts of God’s love, the fullest sense of charismata (“gift”) in the New Testament.  To drive home his critique of the theologia gloriae of the Pentecostal model of renewal, Smail says, “The Spirit can use a Christian community that has begun to love even a little in the way Jesus loved on the cross far more than he can use people who may have sensational experiences and dramatic gifts in plenty, but who do not know how to love in this way.”[23]  The Holy Spirit does not lead disciples away from the cross but is rather forever turning their eyes back to it; for it is precisely through the cross that the paradoxical power of God—through Christ—has overcome the powers of this world[24]  The power of God made known in Christ, which Christ imparts to his church through the Spirit’s mediation, is the power of God’s self-giving love.  A theological model refusing to separate the Spirit from the cross and power from self-giving love provides the charismatic renewal movement—and all ecclesial traditions!—a framework willing to endure theology’s fundamental challenge: human suffering.  In the following section, I turn to critique the suggested theology of suffering that Smail puts forward with the intent of elucidating areas of his theology which are less clear and expanding areas which are too narrow.

Part II – Theology of Suffering

With a working theological lens (the Paschal model) through which to understand the relation between cross and Sprit, Smail suggests that we understand suffering and pain by attending to the notion that God’s purpose is not always to remove us from suffering but to take us through suffering—that is, to endure it.  This observation, as Smail notes, is easily gained when one scans the pages of the New Testament:

The New Testament makes it clear that the way of the master is the way of the disciple. . . . That means we have no guarantee of immunity either from the kind of suffering that is a direct consequence of our discipleship or from the accidents, misfortunes, illnesses and disabilities that afflict other people and are as liable to afflict us as well.[25]

Smail goes on to suggest that Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” should serve as a New Testament paradigm for learning to trust that God can work in the midst of our sufferings and afflictions.  Paul experienced many “sensational spiritual experiences” that could have easily driven him to pentecostal triumphalism.  But his afflictions—i.e., his ‘thorn’—repeatedly drove him to place his trust in God (2 Tim 12.9-10).[26]  Therefore, renewal in the Spirit does not advance us beyond the cross but rather suggests to us that “the more we are filled with the Spirit, the more we shall share in both cross and resurrection.”[27]

As a corrective to the pentecostal tendency to stress a notion of God’s power that does not begin at the cross, Smail’s emphasis on the cross and the Spirit’s connection is necessary.  In fact, I find that I agree with much of what Smail says.  There are, however, a few qualifications or additions that could have substantiated his thesis.  First, nowhere does Smail clarify that a theology of suffering does not include the suggestion to actively seek pain, persecution, or any other form of suffering.  We might describe such behavior as masochistic.  Christians do not actively pursue suffering in order to be more like Christ; Christians participate in Christ by his Holy Spirit and in so doing are shaped into agents of God’s kingdom.  When this occurs, when believers begin to bear the imprint of the Son by the Holy Spirit’s empowerment, they may very well be “received” in a similar manner to how Jesus himself was received: he was rejected and suffered as a result of it.  I believe Smail would agree on this point.  But he fails to clarify this and so leaves himself open to a vapid reading of Christian suffering such as this.

Second, I think Smail’s argument that God, more often than not, desires to lead us through suffering rather than deliver us from it would be more cogent if he stressed that God’s desire to lead us through suffering manifests itself in the communion we receive from the Holy Spirit.  Writing on Karl Barth’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit as “mediator of communion, George Hunsinger says the following:

The ‘communion of the Holy Spirit’ (2 Cor 13.14) in which believers become ‘individually members of one another’ (Rom 12:5) is established as the Holy Spirit unites them with Christ by faith; at the same time, through our definite communion with Christ, as mediated by the Holy Spirit, they are also at the same time given an indirect share in the primordial communion that obtains between the Father and the Son to all eternity.[28]

The Holy Spirit unites believers with Christ, through whom they experience the communion of the Triune life by participation.  Part of this participation is that while we participate in the self-giving communion of the Holy Trinity, we are discovering and establishing communion with others.[29]  In the Christian community, therefore, there can be no such thing as a solitary sufferer; for the suffering of one is the suffering of all.  The Holy Spirit opens us outwardly to one another and thus we are enabled to wait with, endure with, and witness to those suffering in our midst.  Regardless of the shape suffering takes, an anthropology informed by the trinitarian being-in-relation helps to elucidate the disciple’s call to take up their cross—for they do not carry it alone.  In his epistle to Galatians Paul says, “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (6.2).  When the resurrection community bears the burdens of one another, the act of sharing in or interceding for one who is suffering is already a sign of the Holy Spirit’s transformation and ‘empowerment’.  The koinonia fellowship of the Spirit, which is the primary shape of the Church’s life together, is most evident in the community’s sacrifice, eschewing self-centeredness for the sake of the other.  “Our loving,” Arthur McGill says, “at least when it has the form of service, always means our dispossession.  It always involves our surrendering to another something of our own, something that secures our old identity as self-contained beings.”[30]  In other words, the spirit of sacrifice in the Spirit-led community is already a sign of the Spirit leading the community towards the cross, not away from it.  Indeed, this is Smail’s aim in the article.  And although these suggestions are not altogether in tension with Smail, framing Christian suffering within the community’s participation in the triune life is another way of arriving at Smail’s conclusion, that the Spirit cannot be divorced from the cross.  “God is not doing anything on Good Friday that’s uncharacteristic of God.”[31]  Likewise, when God unites believers to Christ by the Holy Spirit, it will not be uncharacteristic of the resurrection community to endure suffering.  For in their communion with the Holy Trinity and consequently with one another, they are witnessing to the power of self-giving love—a power misunderstood by the world and thus deemed threatening.

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[1] Tom Smail, “The Cross and the Spirit: Towards a Theology of Renewal” from Charismatic Renewal: The Search for a Theology, eds. Tom Smail, Andrew Walker and Nigel Wright (SPCK, 1993), p. 55.

[2] Ibid., p. 70.

[3] Ibid., p. 50.

[4] In the midst of his own renewal of the Spirit, Smail shelved theology, shelved thinking about God, so that he might “meet [God] and let him begin to liberate me by his Spirit” (50).

[5] In the Preface of Reflected Glory (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005), Smail mentions his frustration with the charismatic renewal’s inability to provide a theology capable of interpreting his new encounters with the Holy Spirit.  “One the one hand,” he says, “I was not content with the theological frameworks that were offered me for its interpretation, and on the other, I was as convinced as ever of the general soundness of the theological approach I had maintained since student days, and this book is the result of an attempt to bring the new experience and the well-tried theology together” (p. 9).

[6] “The Cross and the Spirit,” p. 53.

[7] Ibid., p. 53.

[8] Ibid., p. 54.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., p. 57.

[11] Ibid., pp. 56-7.  Smail employs the metaphor of ‘departments’ to describe this compartmentalization.  Thus the cross is relegated to the “pardon department,” where Christians begin as sinners seeking divine pardon and only return when in need of forgiveness.  On the other hand, the “power department” is overseen by the Holy Spirit and is tacitly understood as the superior department.

[12] Ibid., p. 57.  He continues, “Bolstered up by what has happened to us and by the testimonies of others, we can easily come to see ourselves as living in a world of supernatural power that leads us from triumph to triumph, where the weak, desolate sufferer of Calvary has been left far behind, or at any rate has ceased to dominate the scene.”

[13] Ibid., p. 58.

[14] On the Pentecostal model’s biblical basis in Luke-Acts, Smail says, “It is . . . true that Luke is less interested in the meaning of the cross than in the activities and experiences of the Spirit that manifest themselves in the first day of the Church and its mission.  To that extent Pentecostals are note entirely mistaken in claiming him as their best New Testament friend” (p. 58).

[15] para◊klhtoß (paraklete) appears 4x times in John: 14.16, 26; 15.26; 16.7.

[16] Raymond E. Brown articulates the exegetical rationale behind this interpretive choice well.  See The Gospel According to John (XIII-XXI), Anchor Bible, ed. William Foxwell Albright and David Noel Freedman (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 931.

[17] Ibid., pp. 59-60.

[18] I do not mean to imply that Johannine and Pauline theology are exactly the same; I am simply noting (with Smail) that both are working more from a theologia crucis than a theologia gloriae.

[19] Ibid., p. 60.

[20] Ibid., p. 59.

[21] Ibid., p. 61.

[22] Ibid., p. 62.

[23] Ibid., p. 64.

[24] Ibid., p. 60.

[25] Ibid., p. 65.

[26] Ibid., p. 67.

[27] Ibid., p. 68

[28] “The Mediator of Communion: Karl Barth’s Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,” The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 179

[29] Ibid., p. 187.

[30] Suffering: A Test of Theological Method (Philadelphia: The Geneva Press, 1982), p. 113.

[31] Jeremy Begbie, Lecture: “The Christological Narrative” (1 February 2012).

 

“it is finished”

“I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do” (John 17.4).

After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty. . . . When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit (John 19.28, 30).

 

It is finished.
Complete.
Fully Accomplished.
Carried through completely.
Brought to perfection.

Jesus’ dying words in John’s gospel are not simply an indication that his life is over. These words do not carry the same connotation that our common uses of “it is finished” do, such as “I’m finished with that book,” or “the laundry is finished.” They are instead more like the double usage of ‘finished’ in Gen 2.1-2, where YHWH completes the work of creation, which itself is the result of the Godhead’s unnecessary outpouring of divine love that is eternally given and received within the Trinity:

“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.” (Gen 2.1–2 NRSV)

What finished event is John the evangelist bringing our attention to? What no longer requires work or effort? What has been fully accomplished? Ill let Karl Barth‘s words stand in for the answer:

His last word when He died was τετέλεσται [“it is finished”]. Jesus knew what God knew in the taking place of His sacrifice. And Jesus said what God said: that what took place was not something provisional, but that which suffices to fulfil the divine will, that which is entire and perfect, that which cannot and need not be continued or repeated or added to or superseded, the new thing which was the end of the old but which will itself never become old, which can only be there and continue and shine out and have force and power as that which is new and eternal. . . .

All that can be said of us is that without this perfect action of God we would be lost; that apart from it we can have no refuge or counsel or consolation or help.But of God we have to say that this perfect action which He Himself did not need has in His merciful good pleasure taken place for us; that He willed to make it and did make it a need of His, a matter of His own glory, to do this for us, that is, to accept the perfect sacrifice, the righteousness of Jesus Christ as our righteousness, our sacrifice, and therefore as the finished work of our reconciliation. . . .

It is no longer a question of a Quidproquo, an “as if,” beyond which we still need something more perfect, a real reconciliation which has still to come. In the doctrine of the justification of man, of the reach of that which has taken place in Jesus Christ, we have to see that we are saying far too little when we use a favourite expression of the Reformers and call it an imputation of the alien righteousness of Jesus Christ. It cannot in any sense be an improper justification of man which has its basis in this happening. Otherwise how could it be a perfect happening, and how could the love of God for man realised in it be a perfect love? Rather, the alien righteousness which has been effected not in and by us but in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ does become and is always ours, so that in Him we are no longer unrighteous but righteous before God, we are the children of God, we have the forgiveness of our sins, peace with God, access to Him and freedom for Him. . . .

That this is the case is the righteousness which Jesus Christ has accomplished for us, the perfection of His sacrifice which cannot be added to by anyone or anything. He has sacrificed in our name with a validity which cannot be limited and a force which cannot be diminished. What He has done He has done in order that being done by Him it may be done by us; not only acceptable to God, but already accepted; our work which is pleasing to Him; our own being as those who are dead to sin and can live to righteousness. He alone has done this, but because He has done it, in a decision which cannot be reversed, with a truth which is absolute, He has done it for us.

                                                                                    – Church Dogmatics IV/1, pp.281-283.

Jesus’ words from the cross–it is finished–speak God’s completed salvation into existence.

This is not to say that the cross is the only moment in Jesus’ life that counts. We make the same mistake that many of us protestants–especially evangelical protestants–do when we understand Christology exclusively through the lens of the cross, which is to disregard the form or shape of Jesus’ life. Rather, the cross is the culmination of the Son’s faithfulness and obedience to the Father. The shape of Jesus’ life and ministry is the manifestation of his faithfulness and obedience. In other words, it’s not our faith but Jesus’ faith[fulness] that reconciles us to God. Our faith in Christ is, as it were, secondary; primacy belongs to the Son’s obedience to the Father.

 

The result of this is that salvation is now complete. As Barth says above, we now are “the children of God, we have the forgiveness for our sins, peace with God, access to Him and freedom for Him.” I like Eugene Peterson‘s way of putting it in Tell It Slant:

We are set free for the act of obedient faith, the one human action in which we don’t get in the way but are on the way (260).

In reverence, we call this Friday good. And indeed, it is very good! (If you missed that point, read above.) And if, like myself, you go about this Friday wondering what disposition or posture to assume in order to ‘properly’ indicate the solemnity of what we observe today, I’ll make a suggestion:

Gratitude.

Gratitude for…

adoption,
the forgiveness of sin,
peace with God,
access to Him,
freedom for obedience to Him.

 

It is finished. Thanks be to  God!

 

a child’s remark concerning All Saints’ Day

“So what’s more important: Christmas Eve, or Christmas day? All Hallow’s Eve, or All Saints Day?”
David, a pastor at my church, was talking to the children at the front of the sanctuary during children’s prayer time this past Sunday. He asked them if they knew what holiday was coming up, to which most all of them responded in unison, “Halloween!”
“Yea,” David said, “Halloween is coming up; but there’s an even bigger holiday than Halloween coming up. Any guesses at what holiday that might be?”
“Christmas!” one child shouted gleefully.

“Thanksgiving!” cried another.

“Both of these holidays are indeed coming up soon,” David responded, “but the one I’m thinking of is before Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

David was telling the kids about All Saints’ Day, which the Catholic church and many Protestant churches as well celebrate today. He told them that Halloween was simply a contraction of  “All Hallows Eve,” the eve of All Saints’ Day–the day on which the church memorializes all the saints who have gone before us. And here’s where the hilarity enters.
David compared All Hallows Eve to Christmas Eve, simply to emphasize that it was a celebration the night before the actual holiday.

So he asked the children rhetorically, “So which do you think is more important: the eve of Christmas, or Christmas day? All Hallows’ Eve, or All Saints’ Day?”

To which a boisterous young boy responded without hesitation, “PIZZA!!!”

 

Dag & the Vexing Prophet

While working as a staff chaplain at Camp Don Lee this summer, I told the following story as part of a meditation/devotion I was giving in front of kids, teenagers, and adults aging  from 5- to 22-years-old. Obviously, I had the younger ones in view when I wrote it. But I ended up telling the story on more than one occasion after multiple camp staff revealed to me how much they enjoyed it. Basically my idea was to tell the story of Jonah, but do so by transforming the biblical story into a fable whose main character is the “big fish.” I presupposed that much of my audience was familiar with the biblical version, and I wanted a way to emphasize the scriptural motif of the “unlikely chose”–God’s inclusion and use of conventionally unworthy and unqualified players in carrying out God’s will. Admittedly, the story is a bit silly. That’s intentional. Admittedly, the story expounds on a “character” in the Bible about whom we are told nothing. But therein lies the fun. Remember, I wrote it for children. 

I hope you enjoy it.

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            There’s a story I once heard, supposedly a tale that has been told, re-told, and even those re-tellings have now been re-told. As it goes, there was once a whale named Dag[1] who lived with her whale family, which we call “pods,” in a Great Sea. In comparison to her numerous brothers and sisters, Dag was somewhat small. You would have never known it if you saw her by herself, though. From the tip of her mouth to the end of her tail, Dag measured 20 feet long. But her size lacked in comparison to her siblings: each of them was at least 35 feet in length. For this reason, Dag was characteristically sad and lonely most of the time. Although they meant no harm, her brothers and sisters teased her about her stunted growth. Dag’s mother constantly reminded her that her size didn’t matter, and that she was loved by her family very much. She told Dag that all of God’s creatures—the great, the small and all the in-between—were equally a part of God’s story.

All of a sudden, Dag sneezed! There was nothing uncommon about this sneeze, as Dag had been running a bit of a “whale cold” that week and, as a result, her blowhole was stopped up. But in that moment after a sneeze when your eyes re-open and you swallow, Dag suddenly realized something was wrong. Her throat became scratchy and sore, the feeling of something foreign sliding down her gullet. While playing with her brothers and sisters one afternoon, a great storm arose on the surface of the waters. The storm’s winds were very, very strong, and they were creating huge ocean swells, the size of which could easily break apart a large ship. As a result of the waves swirling and cycling and crashing onto the water’s surface, Dag suddenly found herself separated from the others. All the discord and disturbance of the storm on the surface of the Sea created millions of tiny bubbles underneath, and Dag, disoriented from her lack of vision, accidentally swam towards the water’s surface while the others dove deep to seek shelter from the storm.

And then she realized it: her unplanned, unwanted meal was a human! She had swallowed the person whole while her mouth was open to sneeze. Moreover, the storm had ceased, and Dag was once again able to discern the surface of the water from the deep. It all happened so quickly. Given the close temporal proximity of the one event with the other, it seemed that Dag had also swallowed the angry skies and sea along with the human.

The reality of the whole thing, though, did not reveal itself until the person inside Dag’s stomach began to cry out: “I’ve been thrown away, thrown out, out of Your sight! I’ll never again lay eyes on your Holy Temple!” Dag was perplexed by the man’s mysterious cries. You see, Dag did not know that this despairing, whaling, mess of a man was actually a Hebrew prophet commissioned by God to deliver a divine message. All she knew was that his mixture of lamentation and praise was giving her a bellyache. So, she dove. And then she dove deeper. No matter what Dag did, the man’s prayers refused to be drowned out.

Weeks later, after the hype of recent events had worn off, Dag overheard one of her brothers sharing a piece of news he had come across while breeching next to a ship earlier that morning. Her brother spoke with excitement, “Apparently, these mariners had thrown a messenger of God overboard on their way to Tarshish weeks earlier. They had done this in For three full days this persisted. The man had continued to pray fervently all the while. And then relief came. After eating a tainted squid one morning, Dag vomited up three days worth of meals. Lots of plankton, swallowed-whole fish, squid bits, and a babbling prophet. Satisfied as he was to be delivered from Dag’s stomach, Dag thought it unlikely that the man could be half as satisfied as she was to have been delivered from his incessant prayers. For the first time in three days, Dag’s stomach was at rest.

order to pacify a storm that was ripping a whole in the hull of their ship. As soon as they had done so, the storm calmed and they were saved. A week later, the mariners now on their way to Nineveh to find a famed boat mechanic that lived there, they came across a band of merchants leaving the city’s port. These merchants shared with them how a prophet of God arrived in town decrying the city’s destruction. But all living beings, humans and animals, listened to the prophet and believed his words. As a sign of their repentance, the community and its livestock fasted in rags. And seeing the disposition of their hearts, God changed his mind and spared the city any destruction! When the men heard this miraculous story of mercy, they rushed into Nineveh, hoping to catch a glimpse of the prophet whose short oracle incited repentance.”

At this point, Dag’s brother stopped narrating. The others were silent for a moment, looking back and forth at one another.

“And,” another brother said?
“And what,” the one telling the story responded.
“And . . . did they find him,” the other brother asked.
“ I don’t know,” the brother said, “I had to dive before I could hear the rest of the story.”

The premature ending to the story dissatisfied Dag’s siblings. After that, they talked among themselves for a while, filling in the blank ending with ones they came up with on their own. And all the while, Dag listened cheerfully; for Dag possessed an understanding that her brothers and sisters could not possibly possess. Her characteristic sadness was nowhere to be found. For such feelings have no place in the discovery that one really is a part of God’s redemptive story.

 

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[1] Dag is the English transliteration of the Hebrew word for “fish.” In Jonah, the Hebrew words denoting the fish are dag gadol, “large fish.” Nowhere in the Scriptures does it specify what sort of big fish it was. Thus the tendency to render the Hebrew as “whale” is a result of tradition, not the actual text.

with love from Durham…while waiting

After 1 1/2 days of driving with my parents and grandfather (he decided to come, too), I arrived at my new apartment on Wednesday afternoon. We left Tuesday afternoon and drove to Statesville, NC; we spent the night there and resumed our travels Wednesday morning. My apartment is about 2.5 miles or so from campus and is conveniently equipped with access to hiking/biking/running trails within Duke Forest.

Orientation for Divinity School begins next Wednesday, but I’ve plenty of small tasks and such to complete before that commences. Among other things I need to find a work studies job, organize and arrange the apartment, figure out the intricate nexus of roads and freeways that make up Durham, and locate the primate research facility in Duke Forest. (The latter isn’t nearly as important as the others; I’m simply intrigued by the thought of it. Think 28 Days Later.)

I’ve already begun to sense the fears, doubts and hardships inherent to such an immense change in one’s life.  I’m noticing how moving to a new place, of which one has little knowledge and experience of, consists of copious amounts of waiting: waiting to make friends, waiting to feel integrated, waiting for an appreciation of my new surroundings, and (in this case) waiting for classes to begin. But it’s good to remember in such instances that waiting doesn’t equate to passivity.

One of my pastors in Birmingham, Mike, gave a sermon last month on Matthew 14.22-33 (Jesus walking on water) entitled “Boat Lessons.” During it, he said that our waiting is full of hope instead of passivity. As Christians, we should know something about what it means to wait; after all, the motif of waiting finds itself deeply rooted in the Church’s two most important seasons–Advent and Lent. If our waiting is full of hope, instead of the oft-felt feeling of purposelessness incited by passivity and inactivity, then we can rest confidently in God’s promise that we shall not be overcome. As Mike reminded us, God didn’t reveal himself in order that we might always be comfortable. He did however offer us a role in his Kingdom, as well as his ceaseless presence. In these things we find our hope.

I think there are a few of you who want to keep up with me as I assimilate into a new community and school, and I’m going to try my best to blog through my experiences and undertakings at Duke Divinity School and in Durham. Consider this my first of [hopefully] many updates and meditations on life in a new setting.

ode to a coffee shop

Goodbye, Starbucks.

Goodbye, emblematic green apron.

Goodbye, disorderly morning shifts and humdrum night shifts.

Goodbye, free-whenever-I-want-it coffee and espresso. (You’ll be dearly missed.)

Goodbye, free pound of coffee per week. (Friends and family—in particular my mother—will especially miss you.)

To the morning female customer who ordered tall vanilla lattes with 12 extra pumps of vanilla syrup, as well as that late-afternoon guy with tattoos and a cell phone attached to his ear who ordered quad venti vanilla bean frappuccinos with an inch of caramel sauce in the bottom of the cup—farewell to you both.

To all of those dry cappuccinos ordered: I never liked you. Never.

So long, female security officer with your venti 14-shot latte with whip cream and no lid.

Goodbye, Vivanno smoothies. I never liked you either.

Goodbye to all the customers who ordered those Vivanno smoothies from Starbucks, a coffee shop, when they could have gone next door to Planet Smoothie, a smoothie shop, and ordered one from there.

Goodbye, sugar-free, non-fat lattes with whip cream. You persistently served me my daily dose of non-sequitor.

Goodbye, zealous fans of Alabama football, most of whom deemed it necessary to bestow me the salutation “roll tide” when coming and going from the store.*

Goodbye to the man who, during the fall and winter, orders a grande (16 oz.) pumpkin spice latte with 8 oz. of sugar, accompanied by a venti (20 oz.) cup of whip cream and sprinkles. (Hyperbole absent. I am not joking.)

Farewell, loquacious, obscene, unabashed young male whose every story began with, “Dude, so check it out—last night…”, and usually involved inordinate amounts of alcohol or hallucinogens or weed or a combination of all, coupled with other kinds of illicit activities. I’ll miss your stories, even though I never knew whether to believe you or not.

Goodbye.

*Certain alabamians have taken the liberty of replacing more common greetings, such as ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’, with “roll tide!”. Don’t be alarmed if you encounter this; they’re just being cordial in their own esoteric way. Just don’t mention that you’re a Florida fan.

living mindfully…every moment

I feel an urgency at this stage in my life to name the human expressions and vivid manifestations of our life in the Spirit. I believe that nothing human is foreign to the Spirit, that the Spirit embraces all. Our mundane experiences contain all the stuff of holiness and of human growth in grace. Our world is rife with messages and signatures of the Spirit. Our encounters with one another are potential sites of the awakening and energizing that characterize the Spirit. But so much goes unnoticed. We fail so often to recognize the light that shines through the tiny chinks and the dusty panes of our daily lives. We are too busy to name the event that is blessed in its ordinariness, holy in its uniqueness, and grace-filled in its underlying challenge.

From Every Bush Is Burning, by Joan Puls

I could read this once a day for the rest of my life, and I would probably still need to be reminded of this quote’s content. If you’re anything like me, cultivating habits of everyday mindfulness is an arduous undertaking, especially when so much of our time each day is given to seemingly meaningless and futile doings.

My prayer this morning is that simple reminders, such as the assurance of God’s presence with us and that to exist at all, to have being, is a gift, would allow me to purge all thoughts of uselessness, regardless of what I find myself involved in at the moment.

divine motherhood

On this day when we commemorate the women in our lives to whom we owe most everything (i.e., our mothers!), we should not forget the motherly properties of God. A lot of us Christians address God as “Father” in our prayers, and there is a tremendous amount of metaphors in Scripture that refer to God as Father and intimate fatherly characteristics. I think it’s proper to address God as such if one feels so inclined. But there are a number of other biblical metaphors for God and God’s relation to us: father, lover, friend, redeemer, rock, shield, defender, shepherd and, yes, mother.

How often have I desired to gather [Jerusalem’s] children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! (Matt 23.37)

As an eagle stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young; as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions, YHWH alone guided him; no foreign god was with him. (Deut 32.11-12)

This, indubitably, is imagery evoking the maternal qualities of God’s love for us. God’s nurture for us creatures is akin to a mother bird’s care for her chicks. Just as God is fatherly, so too is God motherly.

As it is with all metaphors, we must remember that biblical metaphors for God contain an “is” as well as an “is not.” God is like a mother bird, and God is not like a mother bird. God is father, and God is not father. To quote from Sally McFague’s Metaphorical Theology, “…Seeing one thing as something else, pretending ‘this’ is ‘that’ because we do not know how to think or talk about ‘this’, so we use ‘that’ as a way of saying something about it.”

For the sake of clarification, I think God transcends gender and sexuality. For me, this is a simple reminder that Scripture, the primary source of God’s revelation to us, should be recognized as part of God’s grace. For now, we shall not know God in full. But God’s disclosure in Jesus, the man from Nazareth, provides us all the knowledge of God’s Being necessary for knowing, trusting, and placing our hope in him (Jesus).

Following A Rejected Messiah

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

Mark 8. 31

In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us that suffering and rejection are two separate experiences. Had he only suffered in the crucifixion, Jesus might have still been lauded as the Messiah for whom the Jews hoped. But Jesus suffered more than torture and agonizing pain that Friday morning: he suffered rejection. Most of us cannot begin to imagine the physical torment of the cross, and we need certainly to hold fast to this part of the story lest our understanding of Christ’s humanity become docetic. (Docetism is the notion that Christ’s body only appeared human, which implies that his suffering was only apparent.) But what do we make of the psychological torment Christ endured from rejection? I think we often forget this part. Christ did not die the death of a hero. Bonhoeffer says, “…In the passion Jesus is a rejected Messiah. His rejection robs the passion of its halo of glory. It must be a passion without honour. Suffering and rejection sum up the whole cross of Jesus.”

At work this morning a customer came to the counter and greeted me with a smile: “Happy Good Friday!,” she said.
Before I had time to respond, she corrected herself: “Well, I guess it’s not that happy at all, really. Or good. Why d0 we call it that, anyway?”
Having overheard what she was saying, a coworker of mine said, “Yea, it should be called Sad Friday. Although, I guess he comes back to life a couple of days later, so that’s good.”

There seems to be an understanding within some Christian camps that Good Friday, although sad, can be overlooked for the most part in order to focus on Easter Sunday. “Make haste, Sunday, for we worship a risen Christ!,” they might say. And they are more or less right. The cross is not the end of the story (thanks be to God!). Christ has risen and, indeed, lives. But we must not maintain that because Christ is alive in the the resurrection, we as believers are not required to “unite [ourselves] to this One in the very hour of his suffering when he most intimately bound himself to ours,” as Thomas Howard says. There is a connection between Jesus’ suffering and rejection in death, and our daily lives as his followers. But this connection exists only if we are indeed followers of his, for we shall never share in the crucifixion if we do not follow him.  The New Testament is replete with verses that communicate to us the requirements of discipleship through images and metaphors of the cross and the sufferings intrinsic to it:

• And whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 10.38-39)
• He called to the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” (Mark 8.34)
• In the same way, my friends, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God. (Romans 7.4)
• But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed… Yet if any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear his name. (I Peter 4. 13, 16)

Christ tells audiences that they must deny themselves in order to follow him. To deny oneself is to focus entirely on Christ; as a horse wearing blinders walks only straight ahead, so a person whose attention is Christ alone will follow in his footsteps. Paul calls the Church the body of Christ. In that Jesus’ physical body suffered pain and rejection while hanging on the cross, so his Church, which has been his Body on earth ever since his ascension, will often suffer pain and rejection. (I Peter 2.4 – we are ‘living stones’ making up a ‘spiritual house’,i.e., The Body of Christ.) The Church most pointedly reveals herself for exactly who she is when she endures suffering and rejection: the physical Body of the gloried Christ.

Mark 8.31, which I quoted above,  is positioned between Peter’s proclamation that Jesus is the Messiah, and the moment when Christ refers to him as “Satan.” Jesus explains to his disciples that he is to undergo great suffering and rejection, and Peter later rebukes him for saying these things. Christ says to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Drawing on Jesus’ words to Peter, Bonhoeffer states that suffering and rejection are placed upon Jesus as a “divine necessity.” “Every attempt to prevent it is the work of the devil, especially when it comes from his own disciples–for it is an attempt to prevent Jesus from being the Christ.”

Good Friday is not simply an efficient cause of the Resurrection; it is a reminder of what it means to follow a rejected Messiah. When Christ carries the wooden cross out of Jerusalem and up to Golgotha, he carries the weight of the world’s sin. As the soldiers with their hammers drive nails into his extremities, as he is lifted up between heaven and earth, so to the sin of the world is pierced and lifted up with him. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”–herein lies the mission of the Church: Forgiveness. As followers of his, we bear the sins of the world, the sins of others. We are incapable of doing this by ourselves, but Christ’s suffering and rejection on the cross empower us to carry the weight of others’ sin. Bonhoeffer says it best:

…The Church knows that the world is still seeking for someone to bear its sufferings, and so, as it follows Christ, suffering becomes the Church’s lot too and bearing it, it is borne up by Christ. As it follows him beneath the cross, the Church stands before God as the representative of the world.

For God is a God who bears. The Son of God bore our flesh, he bore the cross, he bore our sins, thus making atonement for us. In the same way his followers are also called upon to bear, and that is precisely what it means to be a Christian.