Revised Common Lectionary Page for 26 February 2012 (First Sunday of Lent, Year B)

Genesis 9:8-17  •  Psalm 25:1-10  •  1 Peter 3:18-22  •  Mark 1:9-15

When I do preach this on Sunday, I’m going to preach the entire Psalm, in case anyone is wondering.  My essay here will reflect all 22 verses, not just the first ten.

This likely makes me a bad systematic theologian, but I really enjoy the fact that the Psalms are so leaky, theologically speaking.   There’s no doubt that Psalm 25 finds its home securely in stories of sin and redemption and deliverance.  But there’s little sense in the text that those categories fit into any simplistic system.  The one asking YHWH to forgive sins is also the one calling for protection from the violent.  The one rejoicing in the goodness of YHWH is also the one calling on YHWH to remember.  This is no abstract system of thought but the song of people who live lives alongside and under and before and in memory of God, and the movement from section to section implies a storied life that demands both a bold crying-out in the face of injustice and a confident rejoicing in things unseen.  In short, the Psalm is a prayer and says what prayer is like, and that often means an acknowledgement of uncomfortable complexity.

To call such an outlook uncomfortable is not the same as saying there’s no comfort to it.  On the contrary, the persona’s voice in the Psalm (I’m still ambivalent, all these years later, on how to translate l’David) speaks with a strength of personality that I can’t help but enjoy, and more often than not I read the Psalms, especially the lament Psalms, for the sake of emulating their frankness about the world.  My own tendency is to turn bad events into mere material phenomena, to ask the rhetorical, “Well what did you expect?” when a more faithful soul would call out to God not to make sense of evil (that’s all too easy) but to remember God’s promises to do good for God’s people.  But for someone like me, someone entirely too modern for his own good and too given to materialistic explanation as a defense against the unspeakability of suffering and the powerlessness of mortals in the face of our enemies, the Psalms always stand ready to teach me how to be a sinner.  And how to be the righteous man, crying out in outrage.

That the same person should be both is no mystery to the systematic-minded, of course; certainly every system of theology worth studying does something to account for the persistence of sinful desire in the hearts of the redeemed.  But the Psalms aren’t giving an account: they’re the primary materials, the experience of being sinner and saint, translated into Hebrew poetry, set forth for us to recite and upon which to meditate and to preach, and we do well to remember that the “problem” of sin’s persistence, no matter how fascinating as a mathematical conundrum, always emerges from the experience of prayer before it becomes an object of contemplation.  That’s the balance that the Psalms lend to the spiritual lives of examiners like myself.

May our hearts cry out; may our theologies always rise from the rag and bone shop of the heart.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 12 February 2012 (Sixth Sunday of Advent, Year B)

2 Kings 5:1-14  • Psalm 30  • 1 Corinthians 9:24-27  • Mark 1:40-45

2 Kings 5 begins with an assertion that YHWH has been granting victory to one of Israel’s enemies, and that should grab any reader’s attention immediately.  Aram, one of the ancestral lands of Abraham (he resided there for a while after leaving Ur, and often the sons of Abram return there to find wives), has become, by the time of King Jehoram, one of Israel’s constant threats, always threatening to absorb its fragmented neighbors.  In a theological move related to that of the prophet Isaiah, the narrator of 2 Kings attributes the particular success of this threat to God rather than buying into the prevalent ideology of the day, a picture of the world in which victorious nations had victorious gods and weaker nations were witnessing the demise of their own deities.

But the narrator of 2 Kings is seldom interested in making things simple, and despite his military victories, Namaan, not the king of Syria but one of the great city’s generals, has leprosy.  Scholars dispute whether the ancient Hebrew word involved here named only the narrow range of diseases that its Greek analogue names or whether Namaan could have had some other skin disease, but either way, his success is sullied by a disorder that makes him unclean according to the Torah, the word of the same God who has granted him victory.

The grace on exhibit in this story begins with the fact that Namaan first hears about a chance for salvation from the disease because he has been attacking God’s people.  Had Namaan not enslaved the Israelite girl that tells his wife of the prophet in Samaria, the text at least implies, he would have lived with the leprosy for the length of his life.  So by acting as Israel’s enemy, Namaan receives an offer of friendship from God.  (For those who would write off the Old Testament as relentlessly and thus simple-mindedly ethnocentric, stories like this one should at least temper the stereotype.)  So ultimately the king (I take this to be Jehoram, but if anyone knows better, let me know in the comments) rightly suspects that Naaman is trying to rationalize an invasion when he sends word demanding healing.  This is a general who has attacked Israel before, now demanding in writing what on its face seems impossible.  Without a doubt 2 Kings means to paint him as a simpering coward, but at the very least there’s reason to believe that he is afraid of something rather than nothing.

When Elisha shows up the real story begins.  (Such is often the case in the books of Kings–the kings themselves are often side-shows to the prophets, who are the real stars.)  Making his own bold offer to the king, he draws the focus of the story away from the palace in Samaria and to Elisha’s own house.  In a strange breach of the expectation that travelers receive hospitality, Elisha does not greet Naaman at the door.  He does not come into the presence of the great Syrian to heal him.  Instead, he sends him to the Jordan, insisting that he wash there, a command that certainly resonates with us Christians (that’s where Jesus was baptized, after all) but also would have held a particular place in the imagination of Israel (that’s where Joshua led the people into Canaan, after all).

Namaan’s reaction to that command and the subsequent response of his servants really brings the story to a compelling high point.  If the Jordan river is good for healing, he says, then any of the good Syrian rivers should be just as good.  No self-respecting Aramean should be forced to honor Israelite history to receive gifts from the gods!  Left unchecked, the general might have left without receiving anything from the strange God of the strange prophet.  But his servants impress upon him an a fortiori logic that sways his strong will: if you would have done something grand and difficult to achieve this healing, shouldn’t you be all the more willing to do something as simple as washing in a river?  That argument is enough, and Namaan receives the healing that his captive Israelite girl first set him in motion to find.

Like many stories of the prophets, this one sets on their heads some of the core expectations of how gods behave in the ancient world.  Gods are supposed to look out for their chosen tribe, yet Naaman, the great threat to Samaria’s very existence, here receives the love of God.  (Jesus, when he points this out in a synagogue in Luke 4, very nearly gets killed by an angry mob.)  And although Elisha is involved, it’s not an oracle from the prophet but some down-to-earth reasoning from some unnamed servants that persuade Naaman to receive that gift.  As with many of the Old Testament’s great narratives, this story of the Aramean commander ends abruptly, without much along the lines of commentary, inviting readers to say how it might fit in with the grand story of God’s salvation.  On this side of Christ, it’s not hard to read this as a foretaste of the gospel that goes forth to the nations, that journey outwards that Acts presents.  In its own day this story, like Ruth’s or Jonah’s, must have been one more reminder of the unconfined freedom  of YHWH, that God who reveals God’s self “beyond the wilderness” (Exodus 3).

May our devotion to the one true God always respect the wildness and the grandeur of the name we must not take in vain.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 5 February 2012 (Fifth Sunday of Epiphany, Year B)

Isaiah 40:21-31  • Psalm 147:1-11, 20c  • 1 Corinthians 9:16-23  • Mark 1:29-39

This week’s gospel reading is one that rewards attention to the story’s details.  (It’s from Mark, a book that rewards attention to detail.)  Mark shows Jesus going from public space (the Synagogue) into family space (Peter and Andrew’s house) and encountering a fever, the fire-within that threatens human well-being just as much as the unclean spirits do.  And when the setting changes, so does the reaction of the people: in the absence of Synagogue authorities to heed, the people do not make comments in their wonder; they flock to the house.

And then another literary detail becomes important: they flock at sundown.  The gospel of Mark does not often set the scene with such specific time markers, so this one is worth noting.  The picture that the text paints for the reader (or the hearer) is unmistakable: as the world grows dark, the people gather around Jesus.  This is where the famous Messianic Secret comes in: although Jesus expels the unclean spirits from those who come, Jesus does not allow those spirits to name him, because the privilege of calling him Son of God will only be granted once he has shown the world what it means to be Son of God, to be nailed to the cross.  Although the people await the new Son of God (a title that had mainly royal, not biological, connotations in the Second-Temple era), Jesus makes every attempt to keep Israel from saying with certainty that the King has arrived.

Thus Simon’s statement, “Everyone is looking for you,” rings doubly ironic this side of the Resurrection: no doubt word had spread in that particular moment that a healer was in Capernaum, and no doubt people from the surrounding area were seeking him for the particular and crushing sicknesses and possessions that troubled their families; but beyond that, as Mark tells us in the opening verse of the gospel, the Son of God, the one that everyone is indeed looking for, is among them, incognito, as the moment of his glorification (I borrow that word from John, not Mark, of course) approaches.

In the meantime, Jesus is clear on what he must do: after withdrawing to pray, he sets out for the next town, then the next, playing the itinerant prophet and announcing the Reign of God to all who would hear.  Only when he comes to the city that kills prophets will he allow the voice of an occupying pagan officer to announce him as Son of God without objecting.  But for now, the signs that point to the Reign of God will continue, whether by exorcism or by healing, whether in synagogue or home, and the office of proclamation will not fall to the one who in God’s name reigns but the ones who in the King’s name proclaim His gospel.

May the God who sends the Son and gives the gift of the Spirit enliven us, that we might also be signs that point to the Reign of God.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 22 January 2012 (Third Sunday of Epiphany, Year B)

Jonah 3:1-5, 10  • Psalm 62:5-12  • 1 Corinthians 7:29-31  • Mark 1:14-20

The way I read the Bible has changed over time and with exposure to great teachers.  I can remember well the moment when, as a young college student, I first entertained the possibility that divine inspiration might actually make more sense if some books of the Bible (not all of them) might have had more than one inspired human author.  I remember in seminary the period of time when I faced and eventually embraced the possibility that the Bible is a plurality of voices not because of some defect but precisely by divine intention.  And I remember, in the years after seminary, as I caught up with the New Testament scholarship that I’d neglected while pursuing my seminary degree in Old Testament, learning the discipline of reading the New Testament against the background of imperial occupation and seeing the claims of the lordship of Jesus as genuinely political claims.  In all of these moments I changed as a reader, and the Bible made different sorts of sense to me.  I don’t know where the next big change is coming from, but I don’t doubt that it’s coming.

Another change that happened early in my career as a Bible reader was the realization that, for the New Testament, the Old Testament constitutes a world in its own right, that the text itself is sacred.  Certainly before I had a conception that the events “behind” the Old Testament’s stories were important, but shifting the focus to the text itself helped me to see that, for the gospel-writers, to fulfill the Scriptures really did mean to fulfill what is written, paying attention to the structure of the written Hebrew (and translated Greek) phrase in ways that astronomers pay attention to mathematical equations: the idea is not to impose the text (or the equation) on the world by force of will but to discover that the text (or the equation) was there all along, waiting on someone to discover the connection.  I have to think that such an ethos of discovery was part of what Nietzsche hated so much about the Christian (and the Jewish) ways of existing in the world.

In this week’s reading, the Old Testament echo is a subtle one, so much so that I considered “I will make you fish for men” a New-Testament innovation, something that Jesus made up on the spot.  Certainly such phrases exist in the canonical gospels, but this happens not to be one of them.  The image of hooking human beings has prophetic roots: in both Amos and Ezekiel, the oracles of God promise that the world powers that oppress Israel will be led out of their places of power on fish hooks, a grisly image that some speculate has roots in the brutality of the Assyrian empire.  In the oracles of judgment against Egypt and other empires, those who hear Jesus no doubt would have remembered the strong connection between men-as-fish and national liberation, and when they set out to follow Jesus, they well might have thought of themselves as a sort of avant-garde in the grand Messianic struggle for national liberation.

But for those who remember Jonah along with Amos and Ezekiel, perhaps later, in the shadow of the cross, the true nature of fishing for men might have become clear.  Jonah, like Amos and Ezekiel, went out to prophesy judgment, but much to his own disappointment, Jonah is never one who drags Israel’s enemies through the streets on hooks.  Instead, God shows Jonah what will be the ultimate results of man-fishing.  Nineveh repents.

In the years to come, after Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father, these disciples, like Jonah, will learn what it means for God to make fishers of men.  Jerusalem, the city that crucifies Jesus, is also the first site where the Holy Spirit proclaims the forgiveness extended to all, even those who called for the crucifixion of the Son of God.  One of the most significant early converts will himself be a centurion, an officer in the army that should have been on the hooks.  And the book of Acts itself ends with Paul in Rome, the Nineveh of his own day, not cleaning his sword after a rousing military rout but in prison yet proclaiming the gospel unhindered.  Such is the way of fishing for men.

May we remember the scandal of God’s grace and rejoice not in ignorance but in humble awareness.

Jesus > Religion on YouTube

I didn’t want to watch this video.  I certainly didn’t want to write about it.  But after it appeared for the eighth time or so on my Facebook feed (I didn’t keep an exact count), I figured I should probably weigh in.  So here I am.

Because I’m largely insufferable (just ask Michial Farmer), I got in the habit some time ago (I’m not enough of a hipster to say I did it before it became mainstream) of reversing the conventional order of the cliche and telling people that I’m “religious but not spiritual.”  I’m pretty sure I did it just to be disagreeable at first, but eventually I came to realize that, theologically speaking, it’s exactly right if someone wants to describe my existence as a creature of God and sent by Christ.  The fact of the matter is that I’m neither Moses nor Elijah, and unless the world runs really short of saints in the next couple of decades, nobody’s going to be telling the story of my amazing encounters with the divine.  Instead, I’m a regular human being, someone who would not be leading the Ark of the Covenant across the Red Sea but among the hosts following the Ark across and hoping that the Egyptian chariots wouldn’t catch up with too much of the back of the pack.  I would have seen Moses veiled, and more than likely I would have been either one of those who turned on the prophets of Ba’al to tear them apart (once Elijah’s version of the storm god won that contest) at Mount Carmel or else one of the people who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem but got the heck out of dodge when the temple guards showed up.  In short, as I tell my students all the time, if you want an exemplar, I’ll tell you about ‘em, but I promise there are better exemplars than me out there.

That’s why people like me aren’t so contemptuous of religion.  As it turns out, without religion, we don’t become saints; we forget we’re sinners.  Our lives would simply dissipate.  Since I’ve got a smattering of Latin, I know that religion’s etymology has something to do with religare, to bind together.  That’s what I need.  Left to my own undisciplined affections, I don’t doubt that, within two or three serious tests of faith, I would easily enough slip into a vague sense that there’s “something out there” but abandon the particular and the troubling Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.  Regular Eucharist and teaching and song with a local congregation bind together those faces of my life–the psychological and the social and the ethical and the domestic–that tend to drift apart when I’m on my own trying to exist.  When I keep religion, I’ve got structures there to remind me, every seven days (and more often than that, since I teach the teens on Wednesday nights and teach English at a Christian college), how one cosmic kyrios, Jesus, demands that all that I am bear witness to God’s Kingdom.  That’s not legalism, folks–I harbor no illusion that I’m a car because I walk across the parking lot.  (Is that what he said in the video?)  That’s what Calvinists call the ordinary means of grace, those orderly, recurring features of life that contend with the forces of consumerism to structure and to govern how I exist from day to day and from week to week.

Perhaps for the spiritual folks out there, “done” is enough, but for a wretch like me, the grace that amazes also comes in the form of “do”: gather around the table.  Hear the gospel proclaimed.  (Even when the proclamation comes from one’s own mouth, one hears.)  Sing praise to the LORD.  Go and make disciples.  Without the imperatives of religion, I repeat, I don’t suddenly leap from the leash and become a fierce evangelist and an open-hearted lover of all humanity.  I just read more articles on the Internet, play more video games, and otherwise become even duller a boy than the “spiritual but not religious” crowd would make me out to be.

All of this is to say that I ask a bit of mercy from those who enjoy Jefferson Bethke’s latest video, love it, and repost it: for the sake of those of us who aren’t all that spiritual (Billy Joel’s “River of Dreams” is in my head now), please don’t begrudge us the religion that keeps us rooted in the rhythms of the life of the Church.  For folks like me, that’s where the grace is.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 15 January 2012 (Second Sunday of Epiphany, Year B)

1 Samuel 3:1-10, (11-20)  •  Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18  • 1 Corinthians 6:12-20  • John 1:43-51

As far as I’m concerned (that’s not very far, I realize), John remains the easiest of the four gospels to translate and the hardest to teach.  Even with a decade of rust on my Koine Greek, I can still look at a passage from John, pick out the key words, and usually do something close to sight-reading, something that lies well beyond my grasp when I read Paul’s epistles, much less Luke’s gospel.  Yet, when I try to teach John (usually to an adult Sunday school class), the way that the text uses words makes interpretation incredibly difficult in places, not least when the text brings the same key word into use for several different purposes in the same run of verses.

This week’s Gospel reading does just that, using the basic verbs “to find” and “to see” over and over in a short span, each time tweaking the connotation of the verb just a little bit and making the reader ponder what it means, when Jesus comes, to find and to be found, to see and to be seen.  All four of the gospels use the contrast between sight and blindness to make points about the nature of the Kingdom (remember that Jesus performed all sorts of healings, and the written gospels could just as well have focused on the healings of internal organs rather than telling so many stories of the blind and lame), but John especially uses sight as a primary image for what Jesus is doing.  Moreover, although John is not the only of the gospels to write about being lost and being found, certainly that pair of words is another duality that forms the imagination of the one reading John, although only “found” appears in this week’s reading.

The first movement in the passage features a series of “to find” verbs: without any concern for background, Jesus simply finds Philip.  Why or even whether Jesus was looking for him remains unwritten; Philip is simply found.  When Philip becomes the finder, the object of his finding is Nathanael, someone without much of a story beyond a possible common connection to Bethsaida.  (Later writers, most notably Eusebius, would give these characters back stories, but the New Testament does not.)  When Philip finds Nathanael, though, a little bit about their character comes through: although he does not speak of any signs or wonders or other arguments for his claim, Philip does tell Nathanael that “we have found,” and his identification of Jesus as the one about whom Moses writes says that, at the least, Philip and Nathanael are familiar enough with the Torah (whether through reading themselves or, more likely, through hearing the Torah read in Synagogue) that “the one Moses wrote about” means something to them.  When Nathanael disparages Nazareth, he does not necessarily disclose a bigotry against small towns but perhaps an intensity of dedication to Moses: after all, there is no book more dedicated to Jerusalem, Palestine’s big city, than Deuteronomy.

I set up all of those “to find” verbs not to bore anyone with an academic exercise (though I might have done that) but to note that, in John, a wealth of theology can come across in the simple repetition of a verb.  Assuming that John would have pointed out irony (as he does in other places), the triple finding here points to the complexity of Christ’s relationship with the faithful: while John asserts that Jesus found Philip (but does not dare to explain how or why), the agency for finding Nathanael is not directly Jesus’s but Philip’s, and even as Philip stands as one found, he can (without the narrator’s correction) assert that “we” have “found” the figure whom the greatest of prophets promised.  John therefore opens up in its first chapter a complex of true statements about these relationships: Jesus finds the lost, the formerly-lost find friends to bring along, and those whom Jesus finds also find Jesus.  None of the three negates another, and just as the prepositions in the prayer of Jesus in John 17 make teaching that chapter nearly impossible, sorting these findings out turns out to be quite difficult in the course of teaching.

When John’s narrative turns to seeing, the slight shifts continue to complicate.  Philip’s injunction to “Come and see” starts the series with a fairly straightforward connotation: he invites Philip to perceive Jesus visually (for reasons the text does not yet disclose) as a response to Philip’s rhetorical question about Nazareth.  Then Jesus complicates the notion of sight.  Where Philip invites Nathanael to see in order to assuage doubt, Jesus both has foresight of Nathanael (under the fig tree) and waits until he sees Nathanael to speak to him.  Again, perhaps I allegorize here, but the conjunction of mortal sight (the normal faculty to perceive by means of the eyes) and supernatural sight (the capacity to see what a mortal’s eyes cannot by nature see) immediately points to a reality there in Galilee which is both divine and human, and Nathanael rightly ascribes two Royal titles (one of which in John is also a proto-Trinitarian title) to the one who stands and looks and yet sees beyond his looking.

Yet when Jesus hears these things, rather than leaving the episode to end, he promises that sight, whether of the natural human sort or the supernatural sort, will not cease with this sort of moment: reaching back to Genesis, Jesus promises not that the Son of God will demonstrate more powers of sight but that those who are faithful to the rightful king will themselves see the sorts of things that Jacob, esteemed forefather of all Israel, saw.  And even better, the sight that Jesus promises will exceed Jacob’s, for while Jacob saw angels, Jesus promises Nathanael that he will see not only angels but also the Son of Man promised in Daniel (another book that Nathanael no doubt heard read in the Synagogue).

In this early encounter with Jesus, therefore, the promises that John relays come in simple language, used in sophisticated ways, weaving theology not with the neologisms of systematic theology (important as those are) but through Biblical allusion, careful placement of subjects and verbs and objects, and repetition.  And that’s why coming back to John, even for someone like me who’s taught the book over and over, always yields rewards to the careful reader.

May the God who found and called us, whom we find in Christ, lend us the sight of the prophets, even as God redeems us by seeing us as redeemed.

Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do

by Phillip Cary

197 pp.  Brazos Press.  $14.99.

Phillip Cary was one of the best guests ever on Homebrewed Christianity, and given the quality of the folks that Tripp and Bo bring on to that program, that’s saying something.  What I did not know when I listened to his episode was that the book on which his interview was based would become one of those “arm’s reach” books when I’m teaching my Christian college students.  But the book, which my mother gave me as a Christmas gift, is going with me when I return to the office tomorrow, and the next time I have a student worry about “finding God’s will for my life” or “letting God be in control,” I’m going to be sure that this book lands in said student’s paws.  (I’m one of those professors who lends books to students.  I might find myself regretting that some day, but so far, so good.)

What makes Cary such a Christian Humanist hero is that his book, as far as I can tell, relies almost entirely on arguments and elaborations upon arguments from sixteenth-century theological sources.  Although he does not directly quote much Luther or Calvin, those who know those good old Reformers will hear their echoes in every chapter, and Cary wields his learning lightly enough that they sound like they’re responding to Christian college girls as much as to John Tetzel.  Like some other books I’ve particularly liked lately, Cary’s argument draws on the resources of old books to address problems that have taken on new shapes.  And as anyone who listens to our podcast can attest, that’s just the sort of intellectual activity that we find compelling.

Cary names  his main target in the book “the new evangelical theology,” and it’s the sort of thing that should ring familiar with those who spend much time at all around young evangelicals (and by young I mean Baby Boomer or younger).  This is a theological phenomenon that seeks divine guidance from the inner recesses of the human heart, that calls into question even the best of human acts, wondering if they’re “really” done for selfish reasons, that looks for “God’s will in my life” and for the next great “mountaintop experience” to rejuvenate the soul.  Its sermons are heavy on “practical application,” and although its practitioners might never have read the phrase “moralistic therapeutic deism,” linking the two phenomena ain’t hard.  In short, this is the sort of mentality that too many of my own students, faced with changes of major and opportunities to study overseas, have to overcome when they drop in to my office.  Cary, a philosophy professor, encounters it mainly through assigned papers, and what he has read I’ve certainly heard.  This is a layer of guilt and anxiety overlaid onto traditional Christian confession, an obsession with the self (Cary argues this point particularly well) that renders moral responsibility and wise judgment far more difficult than they should be.

Cary’s goals in the book progress through stages: after he deals with those ideas that diminish the Christian’s responsibility to take the talents given and make something of them (he returns to that parable quite a bit), he gives the reader permission not to be anxious about self-examination (one should only do so after the fact, in a spirit of repentance, Cary suggests), and he finishes the book examining the structure of “the new evangelical theology” and noting its parasitism on nineteenth-century German liberalism and encouraging pastors and teachers to note just how well liberal Protestantism has been doing of late.  This relatively brief book, in other words, is at turns pastoral, hard-nosed, and interesting intellectually, something that’s not easy to do even in a much longer book.  And with his repeated (and very sixteenth-century) insistence that the Bible should be the foremost and the governing source of revelation for the Christian, Cary nicely highlights the central irony of “the new evangelical theology”: although it pretends to transform the soul, in reality, because it’s a function of consumerism rather than an outgrowth of a true theology of divine gift, such theology can only increase anxiety and guilt, never bring the assurance of divine forgiveness.

In short, I can recommend this book to anyone who works with young evangelicals (see previous aside) and thinks that the sixteenth century might yet say something to the twenty-first.  Whether Cary sets the doctrine of Scripture over against individualism or the preached Word over against self-help sermonizing, this book is a breath of fresh air, a clearly written and compelling case against some of the more irritating developments in evangelicalism in my own lifetime.

If you discern that it’s God’s will to pick this up, then let God be in control, and read it! (That was a joke, folks.)

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 8 January 2012 (First Sunday of Epiphany, Year B)

Genesis 1:1-5  • Psalm 29  • Acts 19:1-7  • Mark 1:4-11

“He found disciples” is the most fascinating sentence in this week’s Acts reading.  I’ve argued before that Luke-Acts tells the stories of John the Baptist, of Jesus, and of the Apostles with a strong literary continuity, and the identification of these John-followers as “disciples” is a passage that I’d forgotten for some time that confirms that argument.  For Luke-Acts, the movement of the Spirit is unpredictable, never nullifying expectations for people to relate to the new community of the Way but also appearing out ahead of the Apostles, surprising the Apostles, and otherwise stealing the show at every turn.  So when Paul encounters this group of people, a crew who does not even seem to have a concept of Holy Spirit, the narrative voice calls them disciples without any finger-crossing and fully expecting that, once they hear what they once did not know, they immediately respond by submitting to baptism into the name of Jesus, and after the laying-on of hands, about twelve of them (they’re just about like apostles now!) are prepared to proclaim the gospel, by word and by sign, in Asia Minor.

Before anyone goes pitying my hermeneutical naivete, I recognize that Luke-Acts is a narrative that aims to be normative.  And that’s precisely the point: because the story that this text tells is nothing like the world of sectarian and denominational bickering over baptism that I’ve known in my career as a Stone-Campbell Christian in an conservative-evangelical world, it stands as a paradigm, an alternative to the soft ecumenism and the borderline isolationism that have defined the boundaries of the discussion in my own experience.  In the Acts version, those Paul finds are already disciples, and he invites them into a new baptism.  Nobody ever thinks either of refusing fellowship or refusing baptism, and there’s never any sense that “they” have to become like “us” in order to be faithful to Christ: the way that Acts tells it, everyone is figuring this out, as faithfully and obediently as they can manage, in every moment of the story.

Again, just in case some of you still pity the poor blogger, I don’t think that every writer, constructing a story of the first-generation Church, would have told this story.  If anything, Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and the Corinthians and even the Romans indicate that Paul himself sees the faithful in those places as needing more instruction, still floundering and lapsing either into exclusion or libertinism (or, in Corinth, both, but that’s Corinth).  But to fault Acts for presenting the Church at its best is to miss the point of Acts: this is the book that ends with the gospel proclaimed, unhindered.  This is the book where disputes whose outcome will define the future of Christianity come to a very civil settlement at Jerusalem, where Jacobus (James, for those with no Latin or Greek) says “I say that we will,” and that’s the end of it.  This is not the world of the “realist” who refuses to believe in even the horizon of harmony but a series of exemplary stories, told with an emphasis on the work of the Spirit so that future generations might see what Spirit looks like.

So I call on Christians to look to Acts not because it’s the only way to tell the early Church’s story but because it’s one way to tell that story, a way that has in its sights the souls of those who read and the good of the Church for whom Acts will become Scripture.  1 Corinthians will always be there if we get tempted to triumphalism, but when we need direction for our desires, an image to which we can aspire, give me Acts any old day of the week.

May the Scriptures enliven our imaginations so that we can proclaim boldly the gospel of our Lord Jesus, the Messiah.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 1 January 2012 (First Sunday after Christmas, Year B)

Isaiah 61:10-62:3  • Psalm 148  • Galatians 4:4-7  • Luke 2:22-40

When people tell their own stories, we always do so in relationship to models: we can depart from them or model our own on them, but we’re always in relationship.  When conservative Christians tell our stories of faith, our models, whether we’ve read the originals or not, tend to follow the patterns of Augustine or of C.S. Lewis.  (The latter, of course, largely patterns his own story after the former’s, but that’s just another exhibit that supports my claim.)  And the two of those, as anyone who has read them knows, tell their own stories in decidedly Pauline tones.  The story is not an unfamiliar one: for intellectual reasons or for want of purpose in life, the young person rejects the faith, coming at a vital point in life to the realization (it need not always involve a miraculous light that knocks one off of one’s steed) that the Christian faith is the true way, and after that dramatic moment of turning, life does not proceed without difficulty but always has a sense of purpose.

Paul’s, of course, is not the only story that the New Testament presents: if we look for stories to which we can relate, there’s Peter’s tale of rash promise, failed promise, and restored promise.  There’s Cornelius, the one who sought truth and found his reward when the faith he seeks transforms before him.  There are the sons of Zebedee, the masses at Jerusalem, Barnabas, and Apollos.  And in this week’s reading, there’s Simeon, the man who spends his whole life waiting for something, something that certainly, in his advanced age, he had an idea of, yet something which surprises him when the Spirit leads him to enter the temple.

Simeon sings the joy of one who has heard the voice of the Spirit for a long time but who has only in the moment discovered the form of the Spirit’s movement in the world: although he has no sense of Cross or Resurrection, Simeon knows that, by some means, this will be the one who brings to fulfillment the grand promises that God made to Abraham in the earliest days of Israel’s story, the one who will teach all the nations the way of the LORD and who will bring those who elevate themselves crashing down.  Because the Spirit leads him, he knows what he sees, even if his sight only sees what happens on the far side of Jesus’s dark demise.

Simeon also sees that this child will be a revealer, one who discloses the secrets of people’s hearts.  No longer, when the salvation that Simeon sings comes to completion, will the hypocrisy that characterizes power at all levels stand in the world.  No longer will those who lord it over others be able to call themselves benefactors without their true intentions coming to the light.  No longer will those who use the name of God as a cynical strategy for control be able to keep the light from shining.

When the prophetess Anna begins to tell everyone about the child at the end of this passage, many years and many mysteries lie between Israel and the salvation of the Resurrection, but the word has come.  Many folks I’ve talked to have lived the same story: surrounded by the culture of Midwestern or Southern Protestantism, nonetheless they can name a day when God showed up, perhaps not revealing all that lay before them, the crosses and the sorrows and the friends’ deaths that would mark their stories, but certainly knowing that salvation had become present.  For those who can remember such a day, just as much as for those who can remember a road to Damascus, the salvation of Jesus the Messiah has come, and in this season of Christmastide, such is great and good news.

May our stories be stories of deliverance, and may our prayers be prayers for the Kingdom.

Check back in the next couple days for this week’s Lectionary post. Christmas celebrations have delayed but not canceled it.