We’re going to start our look at Paul’s soteriology by reading Galatians 2:15-3:18 and looking at Bruce Epperly’s fourth lesson in Galatians: A Participatory Study Guide, “The Dynamics of Grace.” Here’s a quote:
Three key words are present in Galatians – grace, justification, and faith. Put simply, grace is God’s love embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The cross of Christ is victorious over sin and liberates us to live freely through God’s Spirit. Grace can’t be earned, but is God’s loving gift for all who have gone astray. Earning God’s love by following the law ends up separating us from the grace of God. God gives us everything, but we want to justify ourselves as if the cross and resurrection never occurred. We can’t nullify God’s grace by our dependence on Jewish law; but we can diminish our experience of grace. (p. 34)
Tonight I’m going to talk about some views of what salvation is, what we are saved from, what we are saved to, and how this is accomplished.
Because you have been graciously given this on behalf of Christ:
not only in Him to believe,
but also for Him to suffer. (Philippians 1:29, excessively literally)
I’ve been meditating on two texts as the new year begins, Philippians 1:27-30, and Ephesians 5:1-2. I’ve been kind of ignoring this suffering thing so far. But last night listening to music in worship at Freedom Church Pensacola, it suddenly struck me to think: Do we have any songs in which we actually praise or thank God for suffering? There may well be, but I don’t recall one off-hand.
This is certainly not a criticism of the church I was in at the time I thought it. I don’t recall this sort of thing anywhere. We don’t talk about it in the way Paul does here. In fact, we don’t really want to acknowledge the reality of suffering. Often our singing, praying, preaching, and indeed our living presents the pretense that nothing ever can or will go wrong. Have you ever heard anyone say in church, when a testimony is called for, that they have had a horrible week and just don’t know how they can go on? No! That’s a sign that they’re crazy. The intelligent and sane ones pretend.
I don’t think Paul is saying here that suffering is wonderful and good in itself. I think the privilege is that the suffering that will come—and despite our desires, it will—is not vain and of no worth, but rather it is suffering on behalf of the kingdom. It’s not cheering that there is pain, but rather cheering from the pain that whatever happens is not in vain.
This reminds me of the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the frequent change of the line “as He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free” to “as He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.” (You can find more on this here.) Those who have served in the military know that dying may be necessary. It’s not what you live for, but many people have faced death for their nation. Many Christians have faced or are now facing death for their faith. It’s a reality, but just as we change the line in the song, we’d rather not talk about it. Certainly, we don’t want to sing about it.
Conducting ourselves in a way that is worthy of the gospel (Philippians 1:27) may involve annoyance, discomfort, suffering, and even death. God’s gift is that we do it in, with, and through Jesus Christ.
For it was appropriate for
him,
for whom everything exists
and
through whom everything exists,
in bringing many children to glory,
the pioneer of their salvation
to perfect
through suffering
(Hebrews 2:10, very literal)
I wouldn’t suggest that any Greek students translate the way I just did, or your Greek teacher may suggest you learn English. I’m trying to bring the focus onto certain things and it’s sometimes hard to gauge what this is going to do for readers of the English text that results.
I think this text is one of those that we tend to discount, because what it’s actually saying is a bit startling. In his commentary, Luke Timothy Johnson points out that this text forms a sort of envelope with 2:18, and that the verses between are a carefully structured argument. I quite agree, but I want to just bring your attention to the stark initial statement. Johnson emphasizes how outrageous this concept would be in the Greek world. I would suggest it would sound outrageous just about anywhere. When a Bible writer says something that sounds outrageous we have our defensive mechanisms: Discounting (take 20% or 30% off the rough edges), find a balancing text so we can believe that one instead, or just move on to something more edifying.
In this case I think we tend to focus on the suffering, since we have heard the story of the cross so many times. That was something shocking to those who first heard it, but it has become routine now, not that when we’re called to suffer as Christ did, we take that very seriously. We tend to think we’re suffering for Jesus every time we have a bad day. No, we’re just living in the world. Some days just aren’t as nice as others!
But the idea that the Son, described in such majestic terms in Hebrews 1:1-4 is to be made perfect, or perhaps complete, through suffering is a little bit more difficult. Luke 2:52 notwithstanding, we tend to think of Jesus in majesty all the way through. Just look at all the halos around the baby Jesus in art. I suspect not so much halo spotting by Mary. In Hebrews, we’ll hear this theme many times, one of the key ones is 5:9, where “having been made complete he became the means of eternal salvation.
I’d suggest two points here that we avoid, and we need to affirm and absorb instead:
God is much more involve in and impacted by our lives and situation. The incarnation may have been an event in history, but it’s also an eternal reality. God is much more involved. We sometimes wobble between transcendence and immanence. God has no problem with both.
The suffering and death of Jesus was a necessary part of atonement, in different ways. I do not affirm penal substitutionary atonement as the singular theory expressing the truth of the atonement. It is, in my view, just one metaphor that helps us think about our salvation. But if we think incarnation, to be complete it must be real, and, well, complete. Becoming human and then not facing death would be to become something other than human; rather, it would be a contradiction. So Jesus became complete as the means of our salvation by living and dying as we do.
As difficult as it is sometimes to keep this in focus, salvation requires both the glory and the suffering. And when we are called to suffer, or even given the gift both of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him (Philippians 1:29).
I don’t know about you, but I suspect that could involve more than some mild annoyances.
Preachers and teachers, myself included, frequently talk about how all that you own belongs to God, but most commonly it is in the context of getting more money for a particular church or ministry. Having led a non-profit ministry, I understand the pressures here.
So: What if we talked about stewardship not less often, but more often, but did so in other contexts, such as:
Using and investing your money wisely so that you can carry out God’s mission to your family
The needs of other ministries
Concern that the way we produce wealth is consistent with being followers of Jesus
The realization that this planet and this universe belong to God just as we do
Care for those outside our church or ministry
Concern for the needs of someone else’s ministry, one that isn’t involved in paying my salary or increasing my prestige.
Just some thoughts. I believe everything belongs to God and we should use what we have and who we are as God guides. But that is a 365/24/7 topic, not in the nature of a fund drive.
A good book review is not one that says nice things about the book, although nice is nice, so to speak. I occasionally read a positive review that makes me wonder whether the reviewer read the book. There are likewise negative reviews that make one wonder. As a publisher, I must take all these in stride.
A really good review, however, is one that shows the reader read the book and also got from it something the author and publisher had hoped to get across.
Thus a review of Running My Race (David Alan Black) on The Tired Blog. I was feeling fairly tired today, and then I read this review. It really cheered me up. If I can publish a few books each year that make readers uncomfortable, then I’m doing my job.
Of course, as publisher I’d also like to note that Running My Race is a good book! 🙂
On a variety of subjects I regularly hear about how people ignore the plain teaching of scripture. I’d like to take away the phrases “the Bible clearly teaches” and “the plain teaching of scripture” from conservatives, while taking “we don’t take that literally” away from liberals. Then maybe we could get around to discussing the nuances and appropriate social contexts for some biblical materials.
But one thing that I hear about much more rarely is the sin of greed, surely one of the things Jesus talked about very frequently in a number of different ways. I’d like to nominate “committing all that I possess to God” as a pretty clear teaching of Jesus.
Nobody is really saying “greed is good” using the word. Instead, we justify greedy actions by ourselves and others. I’d be very shocked to learn that more than a couple of percent of the possessions of the Christians in the United States was committed to God (or the church), and of what’s committed to the church, a significant amount is used in a self-centered manner.
Perhaps this would be an important topic on which to make a new commitment as we observe commercialism and greed used as a way to celebrate the birth of Jesus, who had no place to lay his head.
That was all launched as I was looking back through Christmas stories from my fiction blop (The Jevlir Caravansary), and found How Scrooge Got It All Wrong.
You see, what Scrooge really needed was some good, modern business advice!
Each year I’m saddened and yes, annoyed, by the supposed war on Christmas and responses to it. Every time someone can’t set up a manger scene on public land, or is even forced to share the public space with other groups, there’s an outcry. It’s a war on Christmas! Never mind that there are, in almost every case, plenty of churches nearby, where such a scene could be placed with at least as much visibility.
Or someone is wished “Happy Holidays!” at the store, and is offended that it’s not “Merry Christmas!” Oh the agony! And yes, it’s quite possible that the checkout person at your grocery store was instructed by management to say “Happy Holidays!” Having worked in retail, I know that I was constantly instructed in what I was to say when answering the phone, greeting customers, and most especially when taking their money following the sale. Some of the stuff I had to say was really annoying, too.
But businessmen make these rules for their employees based on their perception of customer service. They are not religious decisions, and they are not actually doing you harm. You can say Merry Christmas all you want, but “he who has the gold makes the rules,” so if you work for the company, you follow the rules.
If I owned a retail outlet, I would instruct my employees that unless they know who they’re talking to, Happy Holidays would be the appropriate greeting, and I would ask—and expect—them to be sensitive to each customer. This is not because I don’t believe in public witnessing or prayer. Just yesterday I encountered a lady in Walmart who needed my help getting a large back of cat food off the shelf. We chatted for a few minutes, and then we prayed together right there in the aisle. Nobody stopped us, because we were the customers. I knew before I suggested it that she would be open to prayer simply because I listened to her first. So we prayed in the aisle beside the cat food.
Shoving a Merry Christmas in someone’s face is not likely to do much for witnessing. Here in the United States people already know this is a majority Christian nation. The form of your holiday greeting doesn’t make you special. If, on the other hand, you make a scene about what sort of greeting you receive at the store, you provide a very bad witness.
When you take on the title “Christian,” you bear the name of Jesus, the anointed one. You are to be Christ, the presence of God, in the world. When you make a scene over not getting your way, you do not provide a good witness to the anointed One. Rather, you make Him seem small, selfish, petty, and rude. You may, in fact, be taking God’s name in vain. Rather than making someone more interested in the Jesus you serve, you may well be driving them away. The clerk in that store may herself be a Christian who is merely following the rules of her job as she should. And you’re going to make her life more difficult because of that? Really? Do you think the one who was led as a lamb to the slaughter yet didn’t open his mouth is pleased with that?
The problem is that there is a difference between witnessing to Christ and witnessing to our own importance. What is the one thing that having a creche on the grounds of city hall does that having one in front of our church does not? It demonstrates our power. They would both witness to the story, always assuming that the right message is conveyed. But the one on the grounds of city hall tells people that we’re in charge and can do things the way we want to.
There is a way in which Christians should be involved in the culture war. That is by living in a Christlike manner and bearing the name of Jesus as we do it. That is a gospel proclamation, by word, deed, and sign. Our importance, our position, and our pleasures would take a back seat to loving each person and making sure that’s evident.
The original story of Christmas was one of giving, giving up rank and privileges, giving up power, becoming subject to the worst of the worst, and then loving, loving, and loving some more. I’m afraid there has been a real war on Christmas, but it’s all over.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking a great deal about strategy in connection with Christian living. It started when I was invited to preach the Sunday after Veterans Day, which was also the Sunday after the election. I used the first chapter of Colossians to talk about our identity and the means that we, as Christians, have to impact our culture. We have an identity in Christ, an authority in Christ, and a mission in Christ. The key is “in Christ.”
There are some keys to thinking strategically about anything. First, you have to know what it is you are trying to accomplish. Second, you need to know what resources are available. Third, you have to know what limitations there are in how those resources are applied. Use of resources without reference to purpose is largely waste. Anything accomplished is random.
I’ve noted over the years that one can tell whether a church is alive and active by asking a couple of members what the mission of the church is. This can apply both generally (the Christian mission of the Gospel Commission), and specifically (what is the mission of this church). Tactics is more specific and local. Individual tactics can be successful in a strategic failure. This usually results from improperly planned overall strategy. To see some excellent application of tactics in a mission that was a strategic failure, watch the movie A Bridge Too Far. In my sermon I quoted Gen. Robert H. Barrow, commandant of the Marine Corps from 1979-1983 who said, “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.”
Here’s some tactical thinking about worship:
We had good attendance today for our special service. We should do that more often.
Lots of people complimented me on my sermon after the service. I must have done something right.
Some people walked out. We need to fix it.
If you didn’t like the service, it’s probably your attitude.
Worship’s about God, not about you. Forget about your desires.
I realize that nobody remembers what I say in my sermons even until next week, but I’m still preparing for the same sort of sermon next week.
I know the second to the last statement, “worship is about God” is repeatedly stated with great piety. I disagree however. Worship is certainly all about God, but it’s all about the worshipers as well, in that 100%-100% sense that orthodox theology brings. Usually “it’s all about God” is used as an excuse by people who are putting on a worship service (and I use putting on, in the sense of a performance intentionally), and doing so badly. It’s there excuse for leaving the worshipers behind. I don’t like “I have to be fed” or “I need music that I like” any better. All of these are narrowly focused and frequently selfish in orientation. In all cases they’re very much tactical. Did we get what we wanted out of this week’s service?
Our starting point for worship must be to ask what worship is. Let me quote Alexander Schmemann in For the Life of the World:
… But this [cultic] is not the original meaning of the Greek word leitourgia. It means an action by which a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals–a whole greater than the sum of its parts. It means also a function or “ministry” of a man or of a group on behalf of and in the interest of the whole community. (p. 21, Nook edition)
There is a function of the gathering of the saints in worship, but worship does not occur exclusively in this “worship service.” There is a purpose in our gathering, which is to constitute and reconstitute ourselves as a community ready to be Christ in the world (our identity in Christ), to understand the reality of what Christ has done through his death and resurrection and how we are incorporated in that (our authority in Christ), and the empowering and impetus to carry that result back out into the world. (I highly commend Alexander Schmemann’s work, whether or not you are a fan of Orthodox theology. For the Life of the World is a powerful little book. I may develop some of these ideas further on this blog, but for now I’m just assuming them due to space limitations.)
So at the starting point of our search for a strategy of worship is to realize that it is not a teaching event, or a singing event, nor is it necessarily a ritual event. It may be partly all of those things, but as long as we don’t consider what our real goals are, why we gather for this event, we may carry out every worship service over “a bridge too far.”
Here are some things to consider, I think:
How do we gather the people together? Questions of music, format, buildings, PowerPoint presentations, pews, advertising, and so far can occur at this point, but all must be subordinated to the overall purpose. And we might want to ask a more important question: Have the people who gather in the church experienced becoming the church? Have the experienced the presence of God? Have they sensed the reality of that community? If they experience none of these things, I believe that in time no matter how entertaining you may make the time, it will still be a failure.
What do we do to make people a community? Schmemann works through the meaning of the liturgy, and I find his interpretation powerful. Yet I don’t think what he outlines is the only approach that can be authentic and successful.
What do we do to engage people as a community with God? This would require many words. I’ll just leave the question open.
What do we do that helps us leave empowered to be Christ in the world?
If we aren’t accomplishing these things I question whether we are truly engaged in full Christian worship. We may be taking stabs at it. We may be doing a great job getting across the bridge that’s in front of us, but are we becoming the body of Christ?
I think our general failure is made evident by the way in which we depend on Caesar’s methods to accomplish cultural goals. We sense that our witness to Jesus Christ is not accomplishing what we believe we need to see. Perhaps we need to reconsider whether our witness to Jesus as the Anointed One is genuine and whether our activities on a Sunday morning are more about keeping the church calendar moving than about being Christ in the world.
