Out of Poverty

Mark 12:41-44

This familiar account of the widow’s two coins—or as the King James renders it, the widow’s mite—has become so familiar that it’s lost a lot of its power. Online you’ll find a website called theWidowsMite.net, which is a Christian jewelry store. You can purchase settings of authentic widow's mite coins excavated in Israel from the time of Jesus. Of course the jewelry goes for significantly more than the poor widow could have ever afforded, but that’s beside the point. The point, according to the website, is that: “Jewelry should mean something. When women rejoice upon receiving a beautiful diamond ring, the joy isn’t in receiving a rare crystallized form of carbon. The joy is in receiving a symbol—a symbol so powerful that a man is willing to spend a month’s salary on it to say ‘I love you.’” Without a trace of irony, the website then adds, “When you give the gift of the Widow’s Mite, you are saying to the recipient, ‘When you wear this piece of Christian Jewelry, you are connecting yourself to the poor.’” Nice. People actually fall for this shtick. I guess that buying a widow’s mite to wear is cheaper than giving all you have to God.

Giving can be an embarrassing topic. Even though from the earliest pages of Scripture, giving is how people show gratitude for God’s grace, how they express love and worship, how they acknowledge God’s place as the giver and Lord of all things, and how they acknowledge their own place as stewards rather than owners of God’s gifts. To give is to thank. To give is to love. To give is to worship. To give is to free yourself from money’s evils. Of the 500 plus references to evil in the Bible, none explicitly mention its origin save one. 1 Timothy 6:10: “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Jesus declared back in chapter 10 how it’s easier to thread a needle with a camel than to squeeze a rich man into God’s kingdom. And thus throughout Scripture, from the law to the gospels, the message is clear: let loose of your possessions. You don’t possess them anyway―they possess you, right? Give and you knock out the two greatest commandments at once. When you give to love God, you automatically love your neighbor. The money you give to the church becomes money used to reach the city and world with the gospel, to heal the sick, feed the hungry, care for the lonely, as well to teach and to train in the way of the Christ.

To give is to thank. To give is to love. To give is to worship―which is why we pass offering plates in worship. And yet at the same time so much of our giving gets run through a grid, mostly out of concern that we not give too much. We debate whether our giving should be pre- or post-tax, and whether tithing even applies anymore. “God doesn’t need our money,” we say, “what Jesus really cares about is my heart. Jesus says here that this widow’s two cents counted for more than the vast riches given by others. I put in two dollars!”

Now I’m not trying to get all televangelist on you, but the truth of the matter is that as Christians commanded to love God with all of heart, soul, mind and money, we’re pretty lousy givers. According to statistics, we each give on average about two percent of our income, significantly less than we spend on bottled water, music downloads or computer games. In recession-wracked America, where good water is free, we still spend almost 17 billion dollars on bottled. Not only would drinking from the tap be huge for the environment, but it would free up enough money to fully educate every single child in the developing world. If any of this makes you feel guilty, I told you that giving can be an embarrassing topic.

Of course at issue in tonight’s passage is not necessarily stinginess. As we read, the people putting money in the temple offering plates were putting in plenty―a good deal more than two percent I’d guess. Back then, if you loved (and feared) God at all, you tithed. This is what makes the widow’s act so odd. She had two coins―she could have kept one for herself. In fact, she could have kept both for herself. The same law that dictated God’s people give ten percent of their earnings instructed that a portion of that ten percent go to widows and orphans. We read in Deuteronomy: “The LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving them food and clothing.” And yet you’ll remember from last week that the ministers in charge of the temple offerings were “devouring widows’ houses” (verse 40), bilking poor women out of whatever dower they had inherited upon their husbands’ deaths. In chapter 13, Jesus will indict the entire Temple system, labeling it corrupt and doomed to destruction. And yet the poor widow gives to support the temple anyway because it’s supposed to be God’s house. And she doesn’t give a tenth or even half of what she has; she gives everything.

However, since two measly cents didn’t buy anymore then than it does now, skeptics might wonder why all the fuss? It wasn’t going to do her any good to hold onto it, so how hard could it have been to give it? It’s like the retiree down to her last quarter in Vegas. She might as well take one more shot at the slots. Maybe she’ll hit the jackpot. Or better, like the desperate person who figures she might as well pray to God when at the end of her ropes. What do you have to lose? God does answer those prayers. Maybe Jesus rewarded the widow’s desperate bid too. Maybe once she got back outside, she discovered a whole pocketful of change―like Jesus miraculously made appear in that fish’s mouth when he needed a coin to pay the Temple tax (see Matthew 17). Or like Christians find Jesus doing with unexpected checks in the mail for just the right amounts. If God takes care of the lilies of the field, which are here today and tomorrow thrown into the fire, surely he took care of this widow.

But the widow’s welfare is not the point of this passage. Jesus sees her humble act as motivated by neither resignation or desperation, but rather motivated by love. The widow’s gift decidedly sharpens the contrast between pretense and true piety. Unlike the shameless scribes and Pharisees, she was a poor widow who loved God wholeheartedly. As an impoverished, disenfranchised, uneducated woman, she represents the least and the last whom Jesus said would be first in God’s kingdom. As one who out of her poverty gave everything she had, the widow previews Jesus himself, who out of his own poverty—being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped—gives everything he had and more for the sake of love.

But it doesn’t stop with Jesus. Jesus did not give to release us from giving any more than Jesus died to release us from loving. To the contrary, “Christ’s love compels us,” the apostle Paul writes, “he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him.” And what does it mean to live for him? The widow is our example. The poor widow previewed Jesus’ giving, and she previews ours too. If it is the case that tithing no longer applies, it’s only because Jesus has upped the percentage from ten percent to a hundred. “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” That’s what Jesus told the rich man in chapter 10. Was Jesus just talking to rich people? Fine. Flip back to chapter 8: “If anyone would follow me you have to deny yourself and take up a cross to do it.”

Fortunately, thewidowsmite.net jewelry store can help you do that. Their ad reads, “Someone who wears a cross immediately associates him or herself with Jesus’ selflessness who willingly gave his life that we may live.” Take up one of their crosses and you’ll only have to deny yourself about fifty bucks.

Farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry points out two embarrassing questions that every reader of the gospels must face when confronted with the words of Jesus. First: If you had been living in Jesus’ day and heard him teaching things like “sell all your possessions” or “deny yourself,” would you have been one of his followers? Don’t be too sure, Berry cautions, “in Jesus’ lifetime even his most intimate friends could hardly be described as overconfident.” Secondly, can you be sure that you would still follow Jesus if it became excruciatingly painful to do so?

Wendell Berry goes on to recount the story of a 16th century Anabaptist in Holland named Dirk Willems. An Anabaptist was a Christian who insisted that only believers, and not infants, could be baptized. Today we call them Southern Baptists. Back then, Catholics and most Protestants considered Anabaptists to be heretics worthy of hanging, which many of them were, some right out here on Boston Common. Dirk Willems, a known Anabaptist, was fleeing arrest from the Protestant authorities, pursued by what was known as a “thief-catcher.” As one chased the other across a frozen body of water, the thief catcher fell through the ice. Without help, he would have drowned. But in addition to believers’ baptism only, Anabaptists were also stern adherents to the Sermon on the Mount, which on this day carried stern implications. Because the sermon on the mount teaches that we love our enemies and persecutors, Dirk Willems turned back, put out his hands to his pursuer and saved his life. The thief-catcher, who then of course wanted to spare his rescuer, was forced to arrest him nonetheless. Willems was brought to trial, sentenced and burned to death in a “lingering fire.”

Wendell Berry writes, “I, and I suppose you, would like to be a follower of Christ even at the cost of so much pain. But would we, in similar circumstances, turn back to offer the charity of Christ to an enemy? Again, I don’t think we ought to be too sure. We should remember that the ‘Christian’ persecutors of 1569 undoubtedly thanked God for the capture and death of their enemy, Dirk Willems the heretic.”

If you had been living in Jesus’ day and heard him teaching things like “sell all your possessions” or “deny yourself,” would you have been one of his followers? And, can you be sure that you would still follow Jesus if it became excruciatingly painful to do so? If we are honest, we cannot escape these questions. And if we are honest, Berry writes, “we cannot answer them either. We humans, as we well know, have repeatedly been surprised by what we will or won’t do under pressure. A person may come to be, as many have been, heroically faithful in great adversity. But as long as that person is alive, there is always a next time, and so the questions remain. These are questions we must live with, regarding them as unanswerable and yet profoundly influential.”

I agree with Wendell Berry that these two questions are profoundly influential, but are they unanswerable? Perhaps, but they don’t need to be. Here’s where other words of Jesus come to bear. In Matthew 11, Jesus said that “wisdom is proved right by her actions.” In Biblical parlance, a wise person is any person who loves God enough to trust him, but nobody can be said to trust God if they never do anything that requires trust. Wisdom is not the same as saying you love God or understanding that it’s good to trust God, or knowing the right thing to do. If “wisdom is proved right by her actions,” then wisdom only works when you act. Can you be sure that you would still follow Jesus if it became excruciatingly painful to do so? The only way to know is to do it.

Dawn and I have this running joke about how I’m 87% into everything. While this serves me well when playing sports (I always have something left in reserve), it’s lousy in relationships and most everywhere else. I’m continually haunted by a mentor of mine in high school who stood me in the middle of a parking lot many years ago and told me as I went off to college that if I never ended up making anything of my life, it would be because I’d learned to do so well by giving so little. “Until you hold nothing back,” she said, “you will never discover your true calling.” She was right. And while I’m still mostly 87% about too many things, those places in my life when I have gone all in have been places where I have discovered not only my calling but God’s trustworthiness and the strength that truly comes from denying myself. Dietrich Bonheoffer, the Christian martyr under Adolph Hitler, put it this way: “To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more of the road which is too hard for us… All that self denial can say is: ‘Jesus leads the way, keep close to him.’”

Which brings us back to the widow and her two cents. She was determined to stay close to God even though it cost her everything she had. Can you be sure that you would still follow Jesus if it became excruciatingly painful to do so? What if it was only mildly painful? The only way to know is to do it.

Paternity and Pretending

Mark 12:35-40

Not too many summers ago, after a particularly busy Sunday, I took advantage of my Monday off to play a round of golf. Since I’m not a good golfer, it can be somewhat relaxing to play, so I headed over to a local muni and joined a threesome of equally bad duffers—though they were the worst kind since they actually thought they were good golfers. Their delusion exhibited itself whenever they sliced or hooked a drive, shanked or chunked an approach or pushed a putt. Acting as if this was unusual, they’d let loose a string of expletives in Jesus’ name that had to make even the demons blush. Usually when I find myself in the presence of such scurrility, I refrain from revealing my vocation. It’s not that I’m embarrassed about being a minister―at least not most days―it’s just that I know how guys like this would react: first shock, then shame, then relentless, displaced ridicule at my presence for making them feel guilty. I’m all for suffering scorn for Christ’s sake, but it was my day off.

Being as bad a bunch of golfers as we were, it was inevitable that the foursome behind us would catch up. Sure enough, as we got ready to tee off on the fifth hole, the group behind us meandered over and stood behind us. Then one of them piped up: “Hi, Pastor Harrell!” It was one of you. My cover was blown. My three pagan golf partners reacted as I predicted they would. First they stared with alarm, silently tallying up all the times they had broken the Third Commandment. Then they looked down with embarrassment, only to then start compensating by starting in on me. With wry grins across their faces, they started calling me Father and wondering aloud why my God, my God had so forsaken me since I was driving my ball into the woods and missing putts too.

It was funny. I laughed. My being clergy elicited no respect whatsoever―which made me glad. The last thing I wanted was respect since according to Jesus, the worst kind of pastor is one who thinks he should be revered. In tonight’s passage from Mark, Jesus lets loose himself, chastising the religious professionals of his day for parading around in fancy robes, grabbing the front seats in worship and sitting at the head table at banquets. Custom that dictated people stand and address these religious leaders as “master” or “father” had clearly gone to their heads. Worse, they had used their position to exploit the poor and bereaved. Much like the televangelist who fakes some sacred-sounding sob-story in order to milk naïve viewers out of their hard-earned money, these scribes had filched poor widows out of house and home, not even feeling bad for taking from those who couldn’t afford to give. They then covered up their deceit with long-winded prayers, pretending to be the holy people they weren’t. Jesus says that “such men will be punished most severely.” They had failed on both counts of the greatest commandment which we looked at alst time in Mark: they had despised God and their neighbor.

I’m continuing a series in Mark’s gospel tonight, stopping in those places where the ink is red in some of your Bibles, indicating that Jesus has something to say. Tonight’s passage ends what has been an on ongoing verbal conflict between Jesus and religious leaders. It’s an emphatic ending that effectively shuts the scribes up. They do take what Jesus dishes out, only they don’t let it go. The next time we hear from these religious leaders they’ll be plotting about how they can get Jesus killed.

For Mark, the conflict between Jesus and the religious establishment had everything to do with Jesus’ identity. Mark begins his gospel by declaring Jesus to be the Son of God, but no way were the religious leaders of Jesus’ day going to believe that. Who would? Any vagabond carpenter from Nazareth who hung out with tax-collectors and sinners would be rightly dismissed as delusional for claiming to be Israel’s Savior.

Many years ago I paid a hospital visit to a dear lady from this church named Bea who had suffered a recent stroke. While still as vivacious as ever, the stroke did put a dent in her memory. She recognized me as someone familiar, but couldn’t recall my name. I found her in the cafeteria having dinner where she was chatting away with other residents. She beamed when I walked up, gave me a hug and said how happy she was to see me. The woman seated next to her inquired whether I was her grandson. Bea responded not as she intended of course, but in a way that surprised me and her dinner companion both. A huge grin on her face and a gleam in her eye, she spun me to face this other woman and announced, “This is the Lord!” Naturally, the other woman, a bit taken aback, stared me up and down, managing disbelief and disdain simultaneously. Bea gathered as much, so she repeated her introduction with gusto, “This is the Lord!” At first I’d been both too startled and amused to correct her, but having regained my own composure, I quickly admitted that no, I actually wasn’t the Lord but only a minister from her church. My admission failed to wipe the disbelief and disdain from the other woman’s face. Apparently I was as unimpressive as a minister as I had been as the Lord.

Likewise with Jesus, I guess, that is until he started to teach and to heal and cast out demons. He began to attract enormous crowds and became incredibly popular, much to the religious leaders’ chagrin. Convinced Jesus was a crackpot, the leaders felt it their duty to intervene and discredit him before things got out of hand. They tried tripping him up with Old Testament trivia, but it turned out that Jesus knew they Bible better than they did. They accused him of breaking the law and tried to get him in trouble with Caesar, but that didn’t work either. All they managed to do was further embolden his fans, delighted as they were at seeing the scribes get outwitted.

Finally Jesus decides to ask them a question of his own, one that goes straight to the matter of his identity. Verse 35: “How is it that the teachers of the law say that the Christ (or the Messiah) is the son of David?” It wasn’t a very hard question. Granted, there was no explicit mention of the Christ as the Son of David in the Old Testament, but the law and the prophets, as well as psalms like the one we read to start the service tonight; these all implied that Israel’s Savior would come from King David’s family. King David was Israel’s last great king and savior, personally chosen by God to establish Israel as God’s chosen kingdom on earth. God went on to promise David that his kingdom would endure forever,” meaning that the kingdom of God would always have a descendent of David on its throne. Not that there was any kingdom at the moment. At the moment Israel was subject to Rome. But everyone knew that God would keep his promise. And so they waited. Some of the crowds had already hailed Jesus as the coming king. Back in chapter 11, Jesus helped matters along by riding into Jerusalem on a donkey colt, just like Zechariah prophesied the Messiah would.

But then came the curve. Verse 36: “David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, declared in Psalm 110 (with which we began the service tonight): ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I have made your enemies your footstool.’ Since David himself called the Messiah ‘my Lord,’ how can the Messiah be David’s son?” What’s Jesus trying to get at? Is he suggesting that the Messiah is not a descendent of David? Well, that was biologically true. Jesus’ connection to David was through Joseph, Jesus’ stepfather. But stepson’s possessed all the legal rights of natural born sons, so that couldn’t be it.

For a clue, turn to the rest of Psalm 110 where David extols the Messiah as a mighty warrior, one whose scepter God would extend to rule over his enemies. There would be willing troops on his day of battle, arrayed in holy majesty. He will crush earthly kings, judge the nations and heap up the dead. Psalms like this were why the Jews of Jesus day expected their Messiah to eventually roll out the heavy artillery. Chafing under brutal Roman oppression, the prayers of the people were for national deliverance.

The picture David paints of “his Lord” in Psalm 110 is certainly one of a military leader. But David also tags his Lord with an unexpected line―“a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.” Here’s a name that hadn’t shown up since way back in Genesis. There, Abraham had just succeed in routing a cluster of rogue rulers who had captured Abraham’s nephew Lot and looted his hometown of Sodom. Out of nowhere appears this character Melchizedek whose name means king of righteousness and whose title is King of Salem, which many take as the precursor of Jerusalem. This king is also described as priest of the most high God, unusual since individuals never held both jobs―separation of church and state applied even back then. Even more unusual was that Abraham, the greatest of all Old Testament heroes, gives Melchizedek a tenth of the recovered plunder and then allows Melchizedek to bless him instead of the other way around. The New Testament author of Hebrews makes a huge deal about this, concluding that “without doubt the lesser person is blessed by the greater.” Thus not only does Psalm 110 make the Messiah out to be greater than David, but greater than Abraham too. And the only one greater than both David and Abraham was no mere son of David, he had to be the Son of God too.

The only one in Mark to see this connection between Son of David and Son of God had been a blind man, of all people. In chapter 10 a blind beggar named Bartimaeus cries out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me.” He’s the only one in the gospel who calls Jesus by this title, and Jesus doesn’t refute it. In fact, he rewards it. Jesus goes over to Bartimaeus and asks what he wants. Bartimaeus says, “Rabbi, I want to see.” Inasmuch as God was the only one with power to make the blind see, Bartimaeus believes in Jesus as a son of David greater than David. Jesus restores his sight, but not without Mark making the point that blind Bartimaeus could already see even before he got his sight back. He recognized Jesus’ true identity. Granted, Peter said it too back in chapter 9, when he called Jesus the Christ, but Peter never really saw it like Bartimaeus did. Remember, once Jesus told Peter what his being the Messiah would look like―one whom the religious rulers would actually kill―Peter freaked out like the devil.

I think what Jesus is asking the scribes here is not “How can you say that the Messiah is the Son of David?” But maybe, “How can you say that the Messiah is merely the Son of David?” when David himself, inspired by the Spirit, sees the Messiah as the Son of God? Mark intends for his readers, like blind Bartimaeus, to have the faith to see Jesus true identity. Peter would finally see it―once the Holy Spirit made its impression at Pentecost. In Acts 2, Peter preached, “God raised Jesus up from the dead, of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this Spirit which you see and hear. King David did not ascend into the heavens; but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make thy enemies a stool for thy feet.’ Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ [Son of God and Son of David], this Jesus whom you crucified.”

I had the privilege of attending a conference recently where the speaker was Jurgen Moltmann, one of the preeminent theologians of the twentieth century. Though eighty-four years old, Professor Moltmann’s mind remains sharp, and he consented to spend three days answering questions from a roomful of geeks like myself. His preeminent work is entitled The Crucified God, wherein he argues that Jesus suffers on the cross not merely to appease God’s wrath―which to many sounds like divine sanction for child abuse. Instead, he asserts that on the cross God suffers too. There is no difference between the Father and the Son, both act out of passion for human redemption. Both suffer, only they do so in different dimensions of the same event, and in this way they enter into the depth of human loss most fully. The Son suffers what it is like to die. The Father suffers what it is like to lose the beloved to death. Everything that makes death bitter to the one who dies—brutality, injustice, arbitrariness—heightens the terror and suffering of that death to the ones who remain. There is no impassive God who observes and accepts Jesus’ death. There is only the God who knows both the agony of losing one’s self at the cross as the Son and as the Father the agony of losing his beloved there. Let those who have seen the pain of a loving father and child, one dying and one living, judge which half of the broken heart is lighter.

Having grown up in a devout atheist family in Germany, Moltmann served as a Nazi soldier during World War II, drafted as a teenager into Hitler’s army. Consigned to the front as a lookout for Allied attack, he was there when the British bombed his position, killing everyone else around him. Surrounded by the carnage, the question that opened him to God was “why am I alive?” He was taken prisoner to Scotland, where for the next three years he labored in a British prison camp. It was here he learned of the Nazi atrocities against Jews, and surely expected retaliation in kind from his captors. But instead, the Scottish guards treated him with astonishing kindness. This and the ministry of the Scottish YMCA while a prisoner led him to Christ. And yet as a Christian, his horror at the violence of war only intensified. Grateful for having been spared, he still could not understand how God could allow the innocent to suffer so. He concluded that the only answer to “where is God in suffering” is in the suffering itself. Everyone suffers. Everyone dies. God saves us from neither. Instead, God suffers too. If you are looking for God? You will find him in the cross-shaped places of your life.

As to the “why” of suffering, Moltmann argues that no answer would ever suffice, which is why screaming “why?” is always met with silence. However what God does do is raise Jesus from the dead. Resurrection is God’s answer to suffering, turning the cross into the sublimely ironic emblem of hope. Jesus is both priest and king. As priest, he makes sacrifice for the sake of reconciliation. As king, he rolls out the heavy artillery. Except that the heavy artillery Jesus rolls out he aims at himself. The sacrifice he makes is his own life. He suffers and dies like everybody else, as did every other son of David. But as the Son of God, he conquers death by rising from it, establishing himself as a priest forever and king who rules over all. His enemies are made a footstool for his feet―making the horrific way of the cross into the glorious stairway to heaven.

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter J

Jerome

Thanks to all (20 of you) who voted for tonight’s J-Father on the blog. For the past twelve years I’ve devoted my preaching turns in July to the Church Fathers, those personalities who through the early centuries of Christianity shaped and codified our faith. I’ve tackled them a letter at a time, which brings me this year to the letter J (and yes, I can count, it just took me three years to get through letter A). I’ve taken some liberties in my definition of “church father,” having included both women and later saints in my survey. But tonight, due to your vote, I’m back on safe ground as I speak not only of an indisputable father, but one of THE Eight Great Church Fathers along with Augustine, Ambrose, Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Basil and Gregories the Great and Nanzianzus. With 61% of the vote I bring you Jerome, the patron saint of librarians and scholars whose faithfulness gave us the Vulgate, the towering translation of the Hebrew and Greek Bible into Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. The Vulgate was the pew Bible in every church for more than 1000 years. Vulgate comes from the Latin word meaning vernacular or common language; the same root from which we also get the word vulgar. And Jerome could be that too. “A fat paunch never breeds fine thoughts,” he said, and “A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept” as well as “do not look a gift horse in the mouth.” Speaking of gifts, he had little tolerance for tightfisted Christians, mocking them with a takeoff on the words of St. Peter, “Faith and mercy have I none, but such as I have, silver and gold, in the name of Jesus Christ I don’t give you that either.” Likewise he mocked pretentious pastors who fancied expensive clothes and long beards, “The only thought of such men is their clothes—are they pleasantly perfumed, do their shoes fit smoothly? And if there is any holiness in a beard, nobody is holier than a goat!” Of these ministers he said, “It is bad enough to teach what you do not know, but worse to be ignorant of your ignorance. Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” Renaissance artists commonly depicted Jerome poorly cloaked in red, with a skull and crucifix nearby [ARTWORK]. An ascetic, the red denotes his being one of the great church doctors, the skull a reminder of mortality, and the crucifix the symbol of Christ’s redemptive suffering for sin. Moreover, these works always depict him hunched over his translation of the Scriptures. “Make knowledge of the Scriptures your love,” he wrote, “Live with them, meditate on them, make them the sole object of your knowledge and inquiries.” Here Jerome echoes St. Paul in Romans 15: “Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us,” verse 4, “so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” As Christians, the Scriptures are the source of our knowledge and hope in God. Park Street’s Statement of Faith, reverently receives and believes “the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired Word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” However I trust you know that the Bibles you hold in your hands are not themselves “the infallible word of God.” What I mean is that your Bibles do not contain the actual letter of Paul to the Romans, but rather an English translation which is a revision of a host of other English versions of translations, many influenced by Jerome’s Latin, based upon a Greek copy which is itself a copy of many copies of a many pieces of copies of manuscripts, the earliest piece of a manuscript, called P46, which dates from around the third century AD. We do not have Paul’s original letter to the Romans itself, which is why many Christians when speaking of an infallible Bible add the caveat “original documents” to distinguish the inspired authors’ work from those who copied and translated (sometimes erroneously) through the centuries. Jerome himself wrote, “I am not so stupid as to think that any of the Lord’s words either need correcting or are not divinely inspired, but the Latin manuscripts of the Scriptures are proved faulty by the variations which are found in all of them.” Jerome acknowledged his own fallibility and made a few translation errors himself. His most famous mistranslation had to do with Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai after meeting with God. Exodus describes Moses’ face as “radiant,” or more woodenly, that he had “rays of light” coming from his head. The Hebrew word “be radiant” can also mean “be with horns,” which is the meaning Jerome chose and why it is when you visit Saint Peter’s in Rome, Michelangelo’s famous 16th century sculpture of Moses looks like THIS. Jerome’s translation of Romans 15, our passage for tonight, is not that far off. The English version of the Vulgate, known as the Douay-Rheims (completed around 1610), renders verse 4 thusly: “For what things soever were written, were written for our learning: that through patience and the comfort of the scriptures, we might have hope.” Compare that to the King James Version, completed soon after the Douay-Rheims, and you can hear the influence of Jerome: “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.” Christened Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius, no one is sure how he came to go by “Jerome,” though most are glad that he did. By age 30 he was already considered the smartest scholar in Christendom, and remains the preeminent figure (and patron saint) of Bible translation. Born to rich parents near modern-day Slovenia in 347, he studied in Rome and was baptized there when he was 19. Getting a Roman education usually meant a lot of field trips, but what most impressed Jerome in his travels was not the Empire’s glamour, but rather the counter-cultural asceticism he witnessed in reaction to the Empire’s excesses. By Jerome’s time, Christianity had become the official religion of the Empire, which in the minds of many, only succeeded in making the formerly persecuted Christians soft. Worried that any faith legitimized by government only takes away its saltiness (as evangelicals in America are well aware), many serious Christians took off for the desert to live lives set apart from the emerging status quo. Though the desert had been the place Jesus was tempted, these early Christians viewed the desert as the only place to escape temptation. Jerome joined them, determined to become a hermit in the Holy Land. However he only made it as far as Antioch, in Greece, where he became very enamored with Greek and the classic literature of Cicero. During a near-fatal illness, Jerome experienced one of the most famous dreams in church history. Dragged before the throne of God, he was found guilty of preferring classic Greek pagan literature to the Christian gospel. “You are a follower of Cicero, not of Christ,” thundered the judge. Deeply disturbed, Jerome vowed never to read or possess pagan literature again (akin to one who burns all of his secular albums or erases them from his iTunes library―though apparently he snuck in some Cicero a few years later). Jerome departed Antioch for the Syrian desert, only to find the rigors of desert monastic life exhausting. “Though I was protected by the rampart of the lonely desert, I could not endure against the promptings of sin and the ardent heat of my nature,” he later wrote. “I tried to crush them by frequent fasting, but my mind was always in a turmoil of imagination.” The desert didn’t do it for him, so he eventually returned to Antioch where he studied under the Gregories Nanzianzus and Nyssa (letter G). He learned Hebrew, was ordained a priest, and eventually returned to Rome to become secretary to Pope Damasus. At the Pope’s urging, Jerome plunged himself into continued Biblical scholarship and translation. Concerned for the state of Biblical accuracy, the Pope told Jerome, “If we are to pin our faith to the Latin texts, it is for our opponents to tell us which, for there are almost as many forms as there are copies. If, on the other hand, we are to glean the truth from a comparison of many, why not go back to the original Greek and correct the mistakes introduced by inaccurate translators, and the blundering captionerations of confident but ignorant critics, and, further, all that has been inserted or changed by copyists more asleep than awake?” Jerome agreed and set to work on the Vulgate. But as any recent seminary graduate can tell you, diving so seriously into Scripture study can sometimes result in an ironic kind of self-righteousness. Jerome became a harsh critic of the clergy around him, sarcastically castigating what he saw as their shortcomings. He managed to offend so many people that when Pope Damasus died, Jerome was run out of Rome. Shaking the dust off his feet on the way out, Jerome called Rome the Babylonian Harlot and set his face anew for the Holy Land. Once there, he set up shop in a monastery a former student built for him in Bethlehem, improved his Hebrew and finished the Vulgate. All told it took him twenty-three years to do it. At first, Jerome worked only from the Greek texts of both New and Old Testaments (the Greek text of the Old Testament is called the Septuagint). But he later decided that for greater accuracy, he would have to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew. The Vulgate became so widely received and revered that in 1546, the Council of Trent (famous for taking on the Protestant Reformation) declared the Vulgate the only authentic text of the Bible. The Vulgate became so firmly ensconced that Latin remained the language of Roman Catholic worship long after Latin was no longer the language anyone spoke anymore—precisely the opposite of Jerome's original intention. Latin remained the language of the Roman Catholic liturgy up until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The Vulgate’s supremacy meant that no one attempted a translation from Hebrew or Greek again until the Reformation. By now, of course, the Bible has been translated into almost every known language and dialect. Wycliffe Bible Translators reports that only around 2000 dialects, mostly minor, remain. (Wycliffe, by the way, is named for John Wycliffe who was an early advocate for translating the Bible into the vernacular. He himself translated the Bible into the common English of his day from the Vulgate, in 1382.) Currently, Park Street missionaries are at work translating in Central Asia, Thailand, Cameroon and Mozambique. My wife Dawn’s aunt and uncle recently completed their Philippine translation of the Bible in Kagayanen, a project they began on the island of Palawan in 1976. My own first foray into missions was with bible translation in the Philippines back in 1981. I was sent by Intervarsity to illustrate literacy primers that were being prepared and used in the upper reaches of Luzon, the large northern island of the Philippines. The only challenge was getting there. Because the missionary plane was down, my itinerary included a jeepney (a souped-up World War II jeep with as many chickens and goats on board as people), a motorcycle that came within inches of going over a cliff after catching a tree limb in the road, a long solitary hike along a mountainous, robber-infested road until a passerby offered to accompany me, who could have been a robber for all I knew, but turned out to be a Christian sent by God who led me across a river I had to ford carrying all my luggage on my head, only to lose my balance and get swept downstream until rescued by this Christian guide who dove into the river and pulled me ashore. Jerome was right. Translation is fraught with peril. I doubt I could ever pull off that stunt again. As Jerome wrote, “Nearly everything that is excellent about the body changes with age, and while wisdom alone increases, other things decline. Young people endure many struggles with their bodies; just as fire is stifled by green fuel, so also when youth is stifled by the enticements of vice and the titillations of flesh, it cannot display its own brilliance. But certainly those who were taught about honorable pursuits during their youth and who meditate on the law of the Lord day and night become more learned with age, more experienced with practice, wiser with the passage of time, and in old age reap the sweetest fruits from past pursuits.” Jerome died in 419, leaving behind a legacy of scholarship that still inspires all who study and translate Scripture. While we do not possess the original letters of Paul or the gospel of Mark, because of the work of faithful translators like Jerome, we can approximate a text that is as close as humanly possible to what the originals would have looked like. Moreover, the wealth of translation we enjoy as English readers enables us to mine the meaning of Scripture in ways Jerome could have only dreamed. Because the Bible is for us the revelation of God, it is mandatory that we not only be able to read it but to understand it, and not only to understand it, but to put it into practice. In the end, the word of God is not ink on a page, but etched on our hearts and acted out in our lives as the incarnation of Jesus, the body of Christ on earth. “There is a mysterious and hidden wisdom of God,” Jerome wrote. “God planned it before all ages for our glory. And this wisdom of God is Christ; he is the power of God and the wisdom of God. In fact, in the Son are found all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge; he himself hidden in mystery, was destined from of old, before the ages, predestined and prefigured in the law and the prophets… So tell me, to live in the atmosphere of these Scriptures, to think about them constantly, neither to know nor to look for anything beside them, is this not to live the kingdom of heaven already, here on earth? And do not be put off, in the Scriptures, by the simplicity and bluntness of language which may be the translator’s fault or even intentional. They are always set forth in such a way that whoever comes along can find instruction so that, in one and the same sentence, both the learned and the ignorant can find the plain meaning. I am not by any means making so wild and foolish a claim as to flatter myself that I understand everything in the Scriptures. This would be like trying to gather fruit from trees whose roots are fixed in heaven. But I confess that I long to understand and I am pressing on with my endeavor. So here on earth let us study these things, the full understanding of which is laid up for us in heaven.” O God who gave St. Jerome delight in his study of holy scripture; may your people find in your word the food of salvation and the fountain of life. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter J

Justin Martyr

I spent the Fourth of July week at the Cornerstone festival in rural Illinois. Cornerstone is a huge music extravaganza that features some 500 bands, mostly of the thrasher metal variety with explicitly Christian undertones despite names like The Dark Romantics, Manic Drive, Gasoline Heart and The Classic Crime. Though I’d never heard of any of the bands, I did like mewithoutyou, All The Day Holiday and Becoming the Archetype—though I couldn’t understand everything they screamed or sang or even said. The Cornerstone Festival started 26 years ago and is still run by its founders, the Jesus People USA,a delightful group of 70’s holdover hippie types (with plenty of new folks) who apparently didn’t want the attendees at Woodstock to have all the fun. Also not wanting their festival to only about music, the Jesus People invite Jesus speakers each year to discuss a variety of topics, which is how I got on the docket. One of them had read my book of evolution inspiring faith and thought that would make for some lively discussion (which it did). However, in the course of issuing my invitation, the Jesus People also noticed from our website that I like to talk about the Church Fathers, so they wondered whether I would lead a seminar series on that topic too. The Church Fathers at Cornerstone. As you can see, the Church Fathers rock.

Twelve years ago I embarked on an annual sermon series during July concerning those personalities from the early centuries of church history who fashioned our faith and codified what we have come to embrace as orthodox Christianity. As there have been numerous noteworthy Church Fathers (and Mothers) it seemed sensible to tackle them a letter at a time. However, since many of the patristic heroes cluster around the letter A—Ambrose, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas—I’m only this year getting to Letter J. For those keeping track, I have looked at the Venerable Bede, Benedict of Nursia, Bernard of Clairveaux, John Chrysostom, Catherine of Siena, John Calvin and the baroque painter, Carravagio. Then followed Dionysisus the Areopagite, Dominic and Dante; Jonathan Edwards, Meister Eckhart, and the 20th century poet, T.S. Eliot. Letter F featured the third century African slave girl Felicitas, Francis of Assisi and Charles Finney, with an all-Gregory-all-the-time series under letter G: Gregory Thaumaturgus, Gregory of Nanzianzus, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory the Great. Letter H brought Hippolytus, Handel, Hildegard and the poetry of George Herbert; while last year’s I-List included Irenaeus, Ignatius of Antioch and Ignatius of Loyola.

Patristic scholars in the house rightly note that I have exceedingly stretched the definition of “church father.” Technically, to be a Church Father, you had to live in the first five centuries AD. But hey, we’re mostly evangelical Protestants here, our church history doesn’t go back a whole lot further than Joni whom we welcomed last Sunday (whose name does start with the letter J). Since I have only one Sunday left between now and my August vacation, I have a bit of a dilemma I’d like your help with again this year. I need to decide for next Sunday whether to introduce you to Jerome, considered one of the eight great “doctors” of the early church. Or Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century English mystic. To help me decide, I invite you up to the church blog to vote. I’m also open to write-in candidates, having already been chastised for not including the 16^th century St. John of the Cross, famous for his Dark Night of the Soul, a perfect way to celebrate summer. You have until Wednesday and I’ll preach the winner.

My rationale for taking an annual look at church history in the first place comes from my own conviction that our own faith derives in no small part from the faithful personalities who’ve lived it and wrestled with it through crucial moments in world history. While we Protestants may not venerate these important people as saints, we cannot separate their contributions from our own doctrines and practice. We may hold to sola Scriptura (the Bible alone as source of authority), but interpreting and obeying the Bible necessarily stands on the interpretive and obedient shoulders of past believers and thinkers. Tradition is the memory of the church. And as Augustine argued, we are who we are only through our memories.

Did you know that church tradition is actually older than the Bible you hold in your hand? The writings of the first fathers, such as Justin Martyr (tonight’s J-Father), precede the coalescing of the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments into a single authorized canon. This is not to say that Justin Martyr predates the Biblical authors, but his writing did contribute to the church’s affirming the books it did, while rejecting those books deemed heretical. We have the Bible we have in part due to the inspired discernment of the early church fathers.

Justin Martyr is so named for obvious reasons―he was executed for believing in Jesus. Among the earliest of the fathers from whom we have documentation, Justin was about as far from Jesus in history as we are from Abraham Lincoln. Born in Palestine to very pagan parents, his growing up in Palestine did make for a greater appreciation for Christianity’s Jewish background. An inquisitive lad, Justin sought meaning in life the way so many did in his day—through the discipline of Greek philosophy. Due to a variety of disappointments in his search, he was particularly open to an old man he met one day who wanted to know what Justin thought about God. Following some spirited back and forth, the old man began to explain to Justin his own faith in God as revealed in Jesus, a faith that had been foretold by the ancient Hebrew prophets. Justin wrote how “a fire was suddenly kindled in my soul. I fell in love with the prophets and these men who had loved Christ; I reflected on all their words and lives and found that this philosophy alone was true and profitable. And I wish that everyone felt the same way that I do.” Justin, like every philosopher in his day, took this newfound knowledge to the streets to share it. His adventure resulted in a text we possess called his Dialogue with Trypho.

Justin later moved to Rome and founded a Christian school―no small feat given that Christianity was a capital crime in Rome. Refusing to shy away from his faith, he wrote two bold apologies for it and sent them to Emperor himself. Far from saying you’re sorry, an apology is a fervent and rational defense of belief designed to address the hard questions and issues that Christian faith presents. As the apostle Peter famously wrote, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” Apologetics were big in the ancient world, as they have been at various points throughout Christian history. I remember attending rigorous debates in college between atheists and Christians with each side putting forward logical appeals as to why their particular worldview trumped the other. The point was to get to the actual truth, an unassailable right answer as to the existence of God or the validity of the gospel (though that rarely actually happened). In our own postmodern and pluralistic days, the very concept of actual truth is itself up for debate, though those debates rarely accomplish much either. The reason, I think, is as Augustine and Anselm asserted: We do not understand in order to believe in God. On the contrary, we must believe in order to understand. As Jeffery Pugh, Professor of Religious Studies at Elon College explains, the fact that we cannot think of God except as the very thought that lies at the outer limit of our understanding, means that reason detached from faith cannot achieve understanding [about God].”

This was Paul’s experience in his own apologetic before King Herod Agrippa and Festus the Procurator in Acts 26. Though Paul’s faith was substantially boosted by his direct encounter with the risen Jesus, his testimony of this encounter only succeeded in convincing Festus that Paul was crazy. Agrippa wasn’t persuaded either. In the end, Paul knew that only by faith could Agrippa understand, and only by prayer could Agrippa have faith. You can’t argue anyone into the kingdom of God. And yet, words still matter. But more than words. In verse 20 Paul said to Agrippa, “I preached that people should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds.” Rather than arguments won on the basis of their coherence and rationality, a genuine Christian apology of the gospel requires evidence of lives changed by it. Peter agreed. Be prepared to give reason for the hope you have, but do so “with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.”

Justin’s first apology to Emperor Antonius Pius insisted that the Christians Rome executed for refusing to worship the Emperor were the type of model citizens whose good behavior Rome should welcome. Abiding by the ethics of Jesus, Christians were honest in business, generous to the needy, responsible taxpayers and peacemakers. “For if those who learn the truth do not do what is right,” Justin wrote, “they have no defense before God. So we ask that the actions of those who are denounced to you be investigated in order that whoever is convicted may be punished as a criminal, but not as a Christian, and that whoever is shown to be innocent may be freed, committing no crime by being a Christian. Those who are found not living as Jesus taught should know that they are not really Christians, even if his teaching is on their lips, for he said that not those who merely profess but those who also do the works will be saved. … So we ask that you should punish those who do not live in accordance with Christ’s teachings, but merely say that they are Christians. We have been taught that only those who live close to God in holiness and virtue attain to immortality, and we believe that those who live unjustly and do not reform will be punished in eternal fire.”

However, in obedience to Jesus’ command to love our enemies, Justin also added, “We shall not ask you to punish our accusers, for they suffer enough for their own wickedness and their ignorance of the good.”

For Justin it was not enough to believe that Jesus died for your sins. Your life had to look like Jesus died for your sins. Such a life exhibits both a personal morality―freed from greed, lust, envy, hatred and the like―as well as the expression of virtues such as gratitude, hope, joy, justice and love. And in those moments when these virtues fail, sorrow and remorse taps into the power of grace to do better. Most profoundly, the Christian virtues of gratitude, goodness, hope, joy, justice and love display themselves amidst hardship and trial, as we witnessed last Sunday in Joni’s own story.

Justin wrote, “Christians learned true worship of God from the law and word that went out from Jerusalem through the apostles of Jesus and have fled for refuge to the God of Jacob and of Israel. Although we were full of war, of killing one another and of every evil, each one of us over all the earth has refashioned his instruments of warfare—swords into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks. We cultivate goodness, righteousness, kindness, faith and hope, which come from the Father himself through the Crucified One. It is evident that there is no one who can terrify or enslave those of us who have believed in Jesus. Although beheaded, crucified, thrown to wild beasts, placed in chains, fire and all other tortures, it is plain that we do not abandon our confession.”

The gospel rightly believed is the gospel rightly lived. Gratitude, hope, joy and love and the rest are not lofty theological ideals but earthy, ethical practicalities. Justin wrote, “Anyone who does not believe that God cares about [goodness and joy and justice] either manages to profess that he does not believe God exists, or makes out that God exists but approves of evil or remains unaffected like a stone and that virtue and vice are not realities, but that men consider things good or bad by opinion alone—this is the height of impiety and injustice. For we are firmly convinced that we can suffer no evil unless we are proved to be evildoers or shown to be criminals. You can kill us, but you cannot do us any real harm.”

Justin’s apology, like Paul’s before Festus and Agrippa, failed to turn the Emperor’s heart. Along with six other friends, he was beheaded for refusing to renounce his allegiance to Jesus. “You hear that we [Christians] look for a kingdom,” Justin wrote, “and you rashly suppose that we mean something merely human. But we speak of a kingdom with God, as is clear from our confessing Christ when you bring us to trial, though we know that death is the penalty for this confession. For if we looked for a human kingdom, we would deny it in order to save our lives, and would remain in hiding in order to obtain the things we hope for. But since we do not place our hopes on the present order we are not troubled with being put to death, since we all have to die sometime.” We call Justin, Justin Martyr, due to his death, but remember that martyr is merely the Greek word for witness. Martyr describes any genuine follower of Jesus who genuinely follows Jesus. The martyrs’ reward in heaven is not for their fatality, but due to their obedience to Christ. Martyrs don’t go around looking for ways to die. They just faithfully follow Jesus wherever he leads. The rest is out of their hands.

This goes for the persecution we sometimes suffer, but it goes for evangelism too. In college I remember talking and talking to a my pagan fraternity brothers about my Christian faith, but in the end none of it ever seemed to make much of a difference. However on the day before I graduated, I remember one of the wildest guys in the house, Jeff Shank, stepping into my room to thank me for trying. Not my trying to persuade him, mind you, but my trying to live by what I believed. He watched (as well as made sport). But somehow, my willingness to take it made an impact. In the end, to witness to Jesus is to speak truth and live truth as grace gives us the power to do it. The rest is out of our hands and in God’s hands, which is where it needs to be anyway.

Though Justin died, he was part of a collective witness that eventually succeeded. “Although beheaded, crucified, thrown to wild beasts, placed in chains, fire and all other tortures, it is plain that we do not abandon our confession,” he wrote. “As much as these things happen, by so much more do many others become believers and worshipers of God through the name of Jesus. It is like pruning the fruit-bearing branches of the vine in order to make other branches sprout, which become flourishing and fruitful. The same thing happens with us. For the vine, planted by God and Christ the Savior, is his people.”In time the Roman Empire would fall but Christianity would remain and grow.

Justin’s first apology remains best known for the picture it paints of early Christian worship. “On the day called Sunday there is a gathering together in the same place of all who live in a given city or rural district. The memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits. Then when the reader ceases, the leader in a discourse admonishes and urges the imitation of these good things. Next we all rise together and send up prayers. When we cease from our prayer, bread is presented and wine and water. The leader in the same manner sends up prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people sing out their assent, saying the ‘Amen.’ Those who have means and are willing, each according to his own choice, gives what he wills, and what is collected is deposited with the leader. He provides for the orphans and widows, those who are in need on account of sickness or some other cause, those who are in bonds, strangers who are sojourning, and in a word he becomes the protector of all who are in need.”

Almighty and everlasting God, who found your martyr Justin Wandering from teacher to teacher, seeking the true God, and revealed to him the sublime wisdom of your eternal Word: Grant that all who seek you, or a deeper knowledge of you, may find and be found by you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever.