Come Hell or No Water

Jeremiah 14:1-16

by Daniel Harrell

We’ve been on something of a trajectory so far in our water sermon series this fall. We began with the waters of creation—all of the water that will ever will exist was present at the beginning. Thanks to the hydrologic cycle of evaporation, condensation and precipitation, the same water you drank and washed with this morning was the same water that rained on Noah’s Ark. It’s the same water that parted and then collapsed on Pharaoh’s chariots in the Red Sea, the same water that Moses drew from a rock in the desert to drink, the same on which Elisha compelled an iron ax head to float. We’ve moved from total water to flooding water to drowning water to drinking water to floating water, only to arrive this morning at no water. Minnesota does need rain, but the drought experienced here in Jeremiah 14 is more akin to the one that currently cripples the Horn of Africa where tens of thousands have died. Theoretically the Earth has more than enough water for everybody—humans only use about 10 percent of the planet's available freshwater supply for all of our needs. The problem is distribution. The main reason is weather. Water’s abundance or scarcity is intensely weather and climate dependent.

Here in Jeremiah the main reason is God. He’s angry with his people and therefore takes away their water. They’ve broken covenant and they know it and they know how to fix it. Written as a psalm of lament, this morning’s passage includes a  clear confession of guilt: “Our iniquities testify against us, … our apostasies indeed are many, and we have sinned against you.” Repentance brings forgiveness. We read later in chapter 29 the Lord’s hopeful promise that his people can “seek me and find me when they seek me with all their heart.” Only here their heart doesn’t really seem to be into it. It’s like they’re just mouthing the words; going through the motions. Isn’t that enough? At least they said the words. Besides, God always responded to their cries for help. Always forgave. Always loves. He has a reputation to protect. What kind of Savior could let his chosen people suffer and still be a Savior? “Why are you acting like a stranger,” they pray, sounding rather snarky, “are you a tourist just passing through? Are you confused? A mighty warrior who doesn’t know what to do?” It’s a odd way to pray when you’ve run out of water, helpless and dying of thirst. Any contrition has given way to bad-mouthing the Lord.

Jeremiah appeared during a particularly perilous time in Israel’s history. Despite getting to witness God’s mighty deeds and words firsthand, God’s people opted to place their trust in idols instead, the handcrafted deities of their enemies that weren’t nearly as demanding as the Lord. Freed of needing to please God, they generally broke every commandment in the book. Jeremiah tried to warn them. Never the most tactful of prophets, he relentlessly railed against their treachery and infidelity. He likened them to camels in heat and to lustful wild donkeys in their pursuit of pleasure. He told them their destiny was a valley of slaughter where their carcasses would become food for dogs.

Author Kathleen Norris, in her popular book The Cloister Walk, described spending a year in a Benedictine monastery where Jeremiah was read to start each day. “Listening to Jeremiah is one heck of a way to get your blood going in the morning,” she wrote, “It puts caffeine to shame.” She noted that the Benedictine monks weren’t used to being compared to camels in heat either, but that they took it pretty well. Raised eyebrows were followed by a kind of quiet assent, as if they were thinking: well, there are days.

For the people of Judah it was every day. What’s a prophet to do? Or say, a chaplain for that matter. Navy rear admiral Barry Black is chaplain to the United States Senate where every working session has opened with prayer since 1789. Black recently opened a session by praying for the Lord to infuse Senators “with a spirit of reconciliation that will break down divisive walls, bringing harmony and cooperation. To “give them a spirit of unity and the wisdom to have respect, one for the other.” To “enable the members of this body to experience your presence, and to receive your wisdom. May they receive these blessings—aware of your counsel that to whom much is given, much is required.” We all know how well these prayers have worked lately. No sooner does Chaplain Black intone an “Amen,” than his flock launches into its acrimonious bleating, denouncing one another as “enemies of progress, abusers of the public trust, and raw sewage in the great river of American ideas.” That the rancor persists during these dire economic times disgusts many American citizens, leading to historically high disapproval ratings of somewhere around 82%. But that doesn’t seem to matter. The article I read regarding Senate chaplains suggested they mostly serve as the equivalent of a piece of parsley—mainly there for the decoration.

Granted, Senators can reap what they sow—usually in the bitter fruit of electoral defeat. Arlen Specter, the longest serving Senator in Pennsylvania history, went down to such defeat in 2010, in a primary no less. Among the various reasons may have included a passing comment he made about drinking water. Senator Specter surprisingly said, “I don’t trust tap water—if I have an opportunity to have bottled water. … I’ve supported legislation to help communities have clean drinking water. But I think there is a natural inclination for people to want to be a little extra-sure on their water. Where I can have access to bottled water, I’m going to use it.” Really? A twenty year Senate veteran with stints on judiciary and appropriations, as well as on the environment and public works committees, and he didn’t know that the United States has among the safest, most closely monitored water systems in the world? American tap water system is responsible in part for extraordinary leaps in life expectancy over the last hundred years. Let’s debunk a myth: Bottled water isn’t regulated with anything like the scrutiny and care that tap water is. If you want to run the risk of something funky in your water, drink it out of a commercially packaged plastic bottle instead of your tap.

For a United States Senator to say he didn’t trust tap water as safe to drink is outrageous. It’s as outrageous as the people of Judah suggesting that God was incompetent to quench their thirst. Jeremiah lambasted them over and over for losing trust in the Lord, but he had become a parsley prophet. So useless were his prayers for the people, that the Lord told him not to even bother anymore. He wasn’t going to answer anyway. The verses that follow this morning’s psalm of lament contain God’s troubling reply. They’re verses I chose not to have read out of respect for the Scripture readers. Even now I can feel my Wednesday night sermon group trying to wave me off. They know what’s coming.

It’s not just that God refused to answer his people’s prayers. It’s worse than that. Thus says the Lord: “Even if they fast, I will not hear their cries for help. If they give offerings I will not accept them. Instead, I will devour them through wars, famines, and plagues.” Drought’s not sufficient. The Lord will not be mocked. Israel cannot endlessly violate Yahweh and then expect mercy to be automatic. Let’s debunk another myth: Grace has its boundaries. God’s people want to chase after other gods and do as they please? Go for it. The Lord will let his people suffer the hazardous outcomes of their choices. He’ll surrender them to their enemies. The fierce Babylonians, a savage nation devoted to slaughter and conquest, would mow Judah down and cast its inhabitants into exile.

This is why Christians stay away from the Old Testament. Seriously. Take Leviticus, for instance. A man gets in a fight and in the heat of the scuffle, lets loose a cussword with God’s name in it (a violation of the third commandment). Immediately the foul-mouthed man is hauled off to Moses for blaspheming the Lord’s name. Moses waits for the Lord to pronounce sentence, which the Lord does, saying, “Whoever curses his God shall bear his sin. Whoever blasphemes the name of the lord shall be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him.” Why does blasphemy get you stoned? Because the Old Testament places blasphemy and bad-mouthing alongside murder, implying that to curse is to kill. Eye for an eye—and also why you should stick to the New Testament.

Except that when you turn to the New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, Jesus makes the same connection between bad-mouthing and murder. He says, “Anyone who angrily insults his brother or sister will be subject to judgment. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” In Leviticus, curse God and get stoned. In the Sermon on the Mount, curse anybody and burn in hell. I can see you’re really glad you came to church today.

If this is the God of the Bible, you might not want to read your Bible. Better to create your own god, like Israel did: a kinder, gentler deity who is easier to believe and obey. Package him up like bottled water and presume that will make him safer to drink, easier to take. There’s an interesting University of Chicago study that found people’s personal beliefs and moral and social stands mirror those values that they attribute to God. On the one hand this makes sense: one’s values and ethics should be informed by one’s faith. Except that when the researchers tricked subjects into changing their minds about a particular issue or stance, the subjects changed their faith too. They claimed that their new position was also the same as God’s—even if it differed from what they had claimed before. The researchers went on to run MRIs on a few brains and found that subjects’ personal convictions and those they hold about God lit up the same cerebral regions. Their conclusion was that any reliance on a deity to guide one’s decisions and judgments is little more than "spiritual sock-puppetry."

Philosophers understood this tendency long before scientists did. The term “anthropomorphism,” whereby human characteristics get ascribed to God, was coined by Xenophanes in the sixth century BC. More recently, philosophers from Rousseau to Voltaire to Mark Twain have all been credited with the line: “God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.”

We prefer to believe that God would never cause disaster to strike, or leave us poor or unhappy; that God would never have anybody suffer, or withhold forgiveness, or allow evil people to triumph—because we would never do these things to ourselves. And then disaster does strike or evil wins or suffering happens, and our hand crafted faith crumbles under the weight of it all because our faith was never in the Lord but in ourselves, in the Jesus we made up in our minds.

This is why we need Jeremiah. He debunks the myths we’ve made up about God. Judah’s made-up faith in a God obliged-to-forgive-and-to-save-no-matter-what allowed them to treat God’s grace with contempt rather than gratitude, as permission to sin rather than as incentive to live righteously—as a sprig of parsley rather than a spring of living water welling up to eternal life. But God would not be mocked. “Thus says the LORD concerning this people: Truly they have loved to stray far from me, they have not restrained their feet; therefore the LORD takes no pleasure them, now he will remember their iniquity and punish their sins.”

My Wednesday night sermon group was quick to cite Jeremiah 29:11, an endearing verse that many have committed to memory: “I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” What about that? I like Jeremiah 29:11 too. But let’s not forget that it follows Jeremiah 29:10- Thus says the Lord, “When seventy years are completed in Babylon, then I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise.” God had plans to prosper his people, but first they had to do their time.

Babylon did invade Jerusalem, destroy the Temple and take Judah captive—all in accordance with the will of God. But that was not the end of the story. The holy fire of God’s fury against sin and infidelity does not burn for the sake of destruction. Unlike its human counterfeits, divine anger refines for the sake of redemption. The devastation that one might interpret as the epilogue to Israel’s existence turned out to be the prologue to their salvation. The unquenchable fire of God’s justice made way for the thirst-quenching relief of God’s mercy. Socially, politically, militarily, individually, the unfaithful Israelites had spiraled beyond the threshold of any human resource for hope or recovery. They were as good as dead. But dead is good as far as God is concerned. It’s only those who lose their lives that ever end up finding them. Read on in Jeremiah 29 and God’s plans to prosper come with that hopeful promise alluded to earlier—one that also echoes in the Sermon on the Mount: “When you seek me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart.”

So what about my heart? How can I truly seek the Lord if my heart doesn’t really want to? Jeremiah has an answer for that. In chapter 31, the Lord promises a new covenant—a new relationship inscribed not on tablets of stone, but written on our hearts. “No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” This is the new covenant of which Jesus speaks over the communion table—a covenant made possible by his own blood shed for our sins. God promises in Jeremiah that it will be an everlasting covenant, never to be withdrawn; “I never to draw back from doing good to them,” he says, making every provision for keeping relationship with us. But at the same time, just in case, God writes something else in us too. Thus says the Lord: “I will put the fear of me in their hearts, so that they may not turn away.” This is why we need Jeremiah. Just in case.


[Information on Arlen Specter and bottled water from Charles Fishman, The BigThirst.]

I Changed My Mind: The Sermons Are Back...

For a full drink of all the sermons in this fall's water series at Colonial Church. Click here.

God Is That, But Also More

Thoughts on John Kiser's Commander of the Faithful: The Life and Times of Emir Abd el-Kader

by Daniel Harrell

Part of the Patheos Book Club Roundtable

As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 nears, Christian-Muslim relations haven't improved that much.  Immediate, stereotyped incriminations on the heels of the Al-Qaeda attack, stoked by two American Wars, find new energy from fears over what happens once the Arab Spring gives way to Summer. The somewhat tepid response of Americans to the Somali famine makes you wonder if it would be different if the famine occured in a less Muslim dominated area. Here in Minneapolis, the large Somali population is still viewed with suspicion by many, especially when women don traditional Muslim headscarves.

Where are the models for genuine interfaith connection and interreligious charity, especially in the face of conflict and discord? Emir Abd el-Kader drew high praise from Algerian Catholics as well as fellow Muslims, an American President and even his enemies. On what basis? On the basis of his faith in God as the God of all people and in the sanctity of human life as the gift of God. Nowhere was this more clearly evidenced that in his defense of Christians from attack by Muslims in Damascus in 1860. Having killed Christians earlier himself, he drew the distinction between Christians who invaded and sought to destroy Algeria, and those who merely professed strong faith in Jesus. For the latter, he had high regard, by virtue of his own strong faith. He wrote, "that which we did for the Christians, we did to be faithful to Islamic law and out of respect for human life. All creatures are part of God's family and those loved most by God are those who do the most good for his family. All the religions of the book rest on two principles--to praise God and to have compassion for his creatures. The law of Mohammed places the greatest importance on compassion and mercy, and on all that which preserves social cohesion and protects us from division" (p. 302).

Too often contemporary Christians and Muslims, trained to view each others as enemies for centuries, interpret points of convergence as threatening the purity and integrity of personal and collective (read tribal) belief. Easier to label the other as infidel or unbeliever than to seek peace and mutual tolerance. As a Christian, can't I affirm truth that is in Islam even if I do not affirm all that Islam teaches? Muslims regard Jesus as prophet even if they do not regard him as Lord. While that might not constitute full confession of faith, it certainly is enough to work with for the sake of the common good on earth. Moreover, can either say for sure what the full will of God is for the other? It's as a quote from el-Kader carried by a Catholic Sister read: "If you think that God is what the different communities believe--the Muslims, Christians, Jews, etc.--He is that, but also more. ... None of His creatures worships Him in His entirety" (p. xvii).

Letter L=LAST SERMON POST (Also CS Lewis)

This sermon blog is moving to the Colonial Church website. You will be able to find it here.


However, Daniel Harrell will continue to post here on occasion and at www.danielharrell.com


Church Fathers Starting with the Letter L: CS Lewis
Matthew 2:1-10
by Daniel Harrell

This morning concludes this year’s installment of my alphabetical Church Fathers sermon series, this summer starting with the Letter L. You’ll remember that to be a Church Father technically means you lived during the first five centuries of Christianity, but clearly I overstep that boundary. My rationale (and annual running joke) for doing so has been that, for American Protestants at least, our sense of church history only stretches back as far as CS Lewis anyway. How apropos, therefore, that arriving at Letter L we finally arrive at Lewis, on the heels of Pope Leo the Great and Martin Luther. Most contemporary Christians have enjoyed a CS Lewis encounter—he crosses all denominations. Perhaps it was a fascination with the Chronicles of Narnia as a child, an engagement with the apologetics of Mere Christianity or The Problem of Pain during college, maybe the sci-fi fantasy of his Space Trilogy, the cleverness of The Screwtape Letters, or his insights into mythology and renaissance literature expressed in essays, letters or Lewis’ own favorite work, Til We Have Faces. Despite having enjoyed little critical acclaim—especially when compared to his good friend JRR Tolkien—the popularity of Lewis continues unabated.

Lewis is so popular in fact, that some regard his authority as almost on par with Scripture itself. For instance, many believers disturbed over author Rob Bell’s recent musings over heaven and hell were quickly assuaged once they discovered Bell got a lot of his ideas from CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce. My personal favorite is A Grief Observed which Lewis wrote following the heartbreaking death of his wife, American Joy Gresham, to whom he had been married just a few years before cancer took her. The book has helped me through the tragedies of my own life. Asking after the presence of God, as people often do in the aftermath of catastrophic loss, Lewis wrote “I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face? The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.” Lewis initially published this book under a pseudonym. Caring friends, unaware of this, gave it to him to guide him through his own grief.

Born in Belfast in 1898, Clive Stapes Lewis was known throughout his life as Jack—a name he insisted he be called at age four in memory of his dog Jacksie. Lewis possessed a rich childhood imagination, which he carried into adulthood, insisting that without it, you can’t fully understand the world. For Lewis, meaning is conveyed most powerfully through story—through the great and not-so-great narratives of history retold over and over again. Our almost four-year-old daughter Violet is currently in a phase where everyday is a recreated, detailed story involving her, our cat Briscoe and her toy bunny. They live atop hedges, scale mountains, fly airplanes and eat magic ice cream that transforms them into the color of the flavor they choose, all of which helps Violet make sense of her world. (Either that or her parents are so boring she has to jazz things up a little.) Lewis wrote, “A child is always thinking about those details in a story which a grown-up regards as indifferent. If when you first told the tale your hero was warned by three little men appearing on the left of the road, and when you tell it again you introduce one little man on the right of the road, the child protests. And the child is right. You think it makes no difference because you are not living in the story at all. If you were, you would know better.”

Lewis won a college scholarship to Oxford, which took him to England in 1916. The culture shock he experienced there was significant. “The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons,” he said. Lewis fought and was wounded in World War I, and in the trenches made a pact with a fellow soldier to care for the other’s family should either be killed. Lewis alone survived and kept his promise. He’d given up on church at an early age—“very angry at God for not existing” he said—but once he returned to Oxford as a professor, he befriended the devoutly Catholic JRR Tolkien. Tolkien eventually coaxed Lewis back to belief, though not as far as to his own Roman Catholicism. Lewis stuck with the Church of England instead, despite his misgivings about the English. In time he became the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, from whence he subsequently professed that there was no such thing as an English Renaissance.

Lewis had a lot to say about almost everything, his prolificacy was the fruit of his bounteous imagination and his many fascinations: from anthropomorphic animals to the stars in the sky. Lewis was a keen amateur astronomer who kept a telescope on the balcony of his bedroom. According to Michael Ward, a Cambridge University Chaplain and author of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis, Lewis’ favorite object in the night sky was the planet Jupiter. According to medieval cosmology, Jupiter was the ‘best planet,’ Fortuna Major. Lewis used to tell his university lecture audiences, “Those born under Jupiter are apt to be loud-voiced and red-faced.” He would then pause before adding, “It is obvious under which planet I was born.”

Lewis lectured on medieval cosmology because he thought that familiarity with the pre-Copernican cosmos was essential to a proper understanding of medieval and renaissance literature: he repeatedly encouraged his students and readers to take a stroll under the sky at night. Looking up at the heavens for moderns, he argued, is a very different experience from what it was in the Middle Ages. These days we sense that we are looking out into a trackless emptiness, a pitch-black and dead-cold space—which is what we call it: space. In the Middle Ages, we would have felt as if we were looking into a vast, lighted concavity, a dome of wondrous luminosity and even love.

“We are inveterate poets,” Lewis wrote. “When a quantity is very great we cease to regard it as a mere quantity. Our imaginations awake. Instead of mere quantity, we now have a quality—the Sublime… Men of sensibility look up to on the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid men do not. When the silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, it was Pascal’s own greatness that enabled them to do so; to be frightened by the bigness of the nebulae is, almost literally, to be frightened by our own shadow. For light years and geological periods are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myths, falls upon them. As a Christian, I do not say we are wrong to tremble at the shadow, for I believe it to be the shadow of an image of God. But if the vastness of Nature ever threatens to overthrow our spirits, we must remember that it is only Nature spiritualized by human imagination which does so.”

Our text for this morning is the familiar Christmas story about the star of Bethlehem. We read the passage every Christmas, but rarely go out in the winter night to look for traces of that star. Granted, the cold might have something to do with that, but not so for C.S. Lewis. To a friend he once confided how beautiful it was “on two or three successive nights about the Holy Time, to see Venus and Jupiter blazing at one another, once with the Moon right between them: Majesty and Love linked by Virginity—what could be more appropriate?”

Michael Ward goes on to note how Lewis’ delight in this old picture of the heavens (as opposed to space) was not confined to his professional life as a literary historian; he had a much more personal investment in it too. In The Turn of the Tide, a meditation upon the cosmic significance of Christ's Nativity, Lewis wrote how the entire universe waits in breathless expectancy about the coming event in Bethlehem—from the lowly cattle all the way up to Saturn in the outermost planetary sphere. When Christ is finally born:

Saturn laughed and lost his latter age’s frost,

His beard, Niagara-like, unfroze;

Monsters in the Sun rejoiced; the Inconstant One,

The unwedded Moon, forgot her woes.

A shiver of re-birth and deliverance on the Earth

went gliding. Her bonds were released…

So death lay in arrest. But at Bethlehem the bless'd

Nothing greater could be heard

Than a dry wind in the thorn, the cry of the One new-born,

And cattle in stall as they stirred.

Since the Copernican revolution, with earth no longer the center of things, the heavenly bodies had been steadily evacuated of spiritual significance until they were regarded as no more than large aggregations of rock or gas. Narnia readers may recall an exchange in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader during which Eustace is rebuked by Ramandu for claiming that “In our world a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” Ramandu replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.” Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy largely to rehabilitate (imaginatively, not scientifically, that is) this traditional view. For what purpose? For the purpose of meaning. Lewis considered the cosmos to be more than merely material. For him the pre-Copernican model was, in a sense, more Christian than the Newtonian or Einsteinian versions which succeeded it because it provided a spiritual reading of materiality.

Historically, religious faith, particularly Christianity, was the loom onto which the discoveries of science were woven. It was within a Christian theological framework that scientific disclosure found its transcendent meaning. Ironically, Copernicus and Newton were devout believers and saw their work not as replacements for faith, but as extensions of it. Even Einstein gave credence to some sort of divine will at work. The idea was that the best of science and the best of theology concerted to give human beings deeper insight into the character of the universe and, subsequently, into the divine character himself. Scientific discovery was received with gratitude to the Almighty for the wonder of his creation. Scientists, alongside the psalmist, would proclaim, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”

This former balance between faith and science (or reason) was struck in the Middle Ages by Thomas Aquinas, who building on Augustine, established a delicate equilibrium between theology (reasoning down from faith) and philosophy, or science (reasoning up from sensory data). Aquinas, unlike the Reformers who followed, taught that human senses and rational faculties, created by God, were competent for understanding reality, albeit from a limited viewpoint. The limits were filled in by theology. Aquinas asserted that God acted through “secondary causes,” creating the world according to his laws and then giving nature room to unfold within.

However, if God operated mostly behind the scenes as the prime cause, then it wasn’t long before thinkers started wondering whether he was there at all. In time, reliance upon divine revelation gave way to human reason in its Enlightenment form, and soon after the supernatural was rendered superfluous. Nature, reduced down to its material properties, became disenchanted. Ward writes that “The world was emptied, first of her indwelling spirits, then of her occult sympathies and antipathies, finally of her colors, smells, and tastes. Man with his new scientific powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.” This process, slowly working, siphoned away the old imaginations, much to Lewis’ dismay.

To him, modern scientists were too naturalistic in their worldview, and thus liable to the error of removing their own minds and predilections from the big picture for the sake of a presumed objectivity. They failed to realize that imagination is required in order for the world be fully known. They needed was not only larger and better telescopes, but minds increasingly aware of their own creativity. Failure of imagination de-spiritualizes the universe, Lewis believed; a fallacy of first order because the rational mind is itself spiritual and dependent upon that animating energy that saturates the entire universe—an energy which, in turn, depends upon God himself. Lewis described a universe perceived within a solely naturalistic framework to be “all fact and no meaning.”

In recent years my own interest in the interplay between science and faith has allowed me the privilege to rub shoulders with some prominent scientists for whom faith has filled out their own comprehension of reality. Francis Collins, the imminent geneticist and now Director of the NIH, attributes CS Lewis with converting his own atheism into belief, convincing Collins that the microscopic world of organic life is not random and meaningless, but infused with significance and divine beauty. At the other end of the spectrum, astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman, Chief of the ExoPlanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA (and on tap to be our next Guelich Lecturer in 2013), argues for cosmological discovery as an instrument of worship. In the spirit of Lewis, she asserts that understanding the stars grants us a profoundly expanded view of Jesus Christ as Lord; that he is Lord of all space and time—over billions of galaxies and billions of years.

For CS Lewis, mere data could not be the determinant of the real world because the real world was a matter of data and imagination, a matter of matter and meaning—and analogically, matter and spirit. The spirit is the logos, the word who is Christ, in whom Scripture teaches “all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

However, Lewis’ goal was not to lead an observer from the cosmos to Christ. His goal was first to get them from the cosmos back into their own heads. He wrote, “The discrepancy between a movement of atoms in an astronomer’s cortex and his understanding that there must be a still unobserved planet beyond Uranus, is already so immense that the Incarnation of God Himself is, in one sense, scarcely more startling.” For Lewis, the link between mind and matter forged by human reasoning reflects the link forged between God and Man in Jesus; a link brought to light under the Star of Bethlehem, a star which was a huge ball of flaming gas—but so much more besides.

Lewis died at age 64, having refused to give the devil enough time to do as his senior demon Screwtape (likely English) instructed his apprentice Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters. Advocating for long life, Screwtape said: “seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unraveling human souls from Heaven and building up firm attachment to earth.” Lewis died firmly unattached to earth—and so he remains. “It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God,” he said, “because only the pure in heart want to.”

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter L: Martin Luther

Galatians 2:16-21

by Daniel Harrell

This morning’s look at the momentous life of Martin Luther marks the second in my annual summer sermon series on the Church Fathers (and Mothers). For fourteen summers I’ve alphabetically surveyed personalities throughout Church history who have shaped the faith as we’ve come to believe it. Now to be a genuine Church Father technically means you had to have lived during the first five centuries of Christianity. Last week I offered a brief glimpse at the fifth century’s Leo the Great, one of the most significant Popes of Christendom, which is why he’s called the Great. Almost single-handedly, Leo settled the mystery of the two natures of Jesus—his full humanity alongside his full divinity—by emphasizing Jesus’ uniqueness in this regard. Unfortunately, Leo’s success amassed considerable ecclesial and political power for the papacy in the waning days of the Roman Empire, boding badly for the years to come. Medieval Christendom during what we know as the Dark Ages was rife with papal abuses of power. Granted, had the Dark Ages not been so dark, we wouldn’t be here today talking about Martin Luther. While not technically a Church Father, living as he did in the sixteenth century, no other person had a greater impact on modern Christianity—Protestant and Catholic—than this mercurial German monk.

Minnesotans know this all too well. Lutherans comprise almost 35% of the state’s population, with Lutheran influence stretching way beyond that. An unavoidable authority on Lutheran life, Garrison Keillor, writes: “Here in the Midwest, we all have long memories of suffering and pain, because, for one thing, winter is so long, and when finally it gets warm and beautiful as it is now, we try to relieve these painful memories of cold, of neglect, of suspicion, darkness, anger, Bologna sandwiches, stupidity, and butterscotch pudding with mindless pleasure in the sun while wearing as few clothes as possible. But we were not brought up to experience pleasure. It doesn’t register on us. It’s like trying to write on glass with a pencil. We get into as few clothes as possible and the sight of ourselves depresses us. Sunlight makes us gloomy. We are not Mediterranean people. We are Lutheran people. Even the Catholics up here are Lutheran. And I don’t like to generalize about Lutherans, but one thing that’s true of every single last one of them without a single exception is that the low point of their year is their summer vacation.” (Wow, so glad we moved here!)

If this indeed is a portrait of Lutherans it’s a portrait of Luther too. Revered for his courageous confrontation of medieval church power, his standing up in the face of accusations of heresy, his establishing the authority of Scripture and then making it accessible by translating it into German, his writing some of the church’s best loved hymns—adaptations, perhaps, of the secular music in his day just like contemporary Christian music does in our own—his igniting a reformation that still burns brightly; Luther did all of this despite being a man tormented by depression, debilitating self-doubt and an almost paranoid fear of God.

It started early. Trained as a lawyer and excelling as a philosopher, Luther gave it all up at age 21. Making his way home one night through a tremendous thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning struck the ground near his path. He screamed, “Help me St. Anne I will become a monk!” And he did. Possessing what one biographer describes as “a high pressure fire hose” personality of shattering intensity, Luther plunged into monastic life—praying, fasting, going without sleep, enduring winter without blankets, flagellating himself and who knows, maybe eating mounds of butterscotch pudding: “If anyone could have earned heaven by the life of a monk,” he wrote, “It was I.”

And yet none of this diminished his paranoid fear of God’s judgment. He hated opening his Bible, and having to constantly read about God’s righteousness and realizing over and over again how he could never measure up. Ironically assigned to teach Bible at Wittenberg University, Luther gradually discovered a way through his dilemma. “At last, meditating day and night, by the mercy of God, I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that the righteous [are justified] by faith. Here I felt as if I were entirely born again and had entered paradise itself through the gates that had been flung open.”

You’re likely familiar with the rest of the story—especially if you’ve seen the movie. Granted, Luther was no nearly so good looking (as the above photo shows), yet his legacy is enormous. Every Protestant stream, including our own Congregationalist one, flows from Luther’s reservoir.

Of course, Luther did not come up with justification by faith on his own. That’s always been in the Bible. It goes all the way back to Abraham. Yet just as the medieval church of Luther’s day controlled Biblical interpretation, so a group known as Judaizers tried to control things in New Testament Greece. In our text from Galatians this morning, these Judaizers—milking ancient Jewish prejudice against Gentiles—insisted that Gentile converts to Christianity be circumcised as Jews first. Though the apostle Peter (a Jew) knew better, he apparently backed out of dinner with a group of Gentile Christians so not to offend Jews who still considered eating with Gentiles to be some sort of contagion. The apostle Paul (also a Jew) was livid. He considered Peter’s actions a direct assault on the integrity of the gospel. Paul gave it to Peter in front of everyone, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? We Jews have put our faith in Christ Jesus just like the Gentiles that we too may be justified by faith in Christ and not by doing the works of the law, just like the Gentiles.”

“This is not to say that the Law is bad,” Luther explained. “Only that it is not able to justify us. … We must understand that we are merely beneficiaries and recipients of the treasures of Christ. Now, if I could perform any work acceptable to God and deserving of grace, … why should I stand in need of the grace of God and the suffering and death of Christ? Christ would be of no benefit to me. Christ’s mercy would be of no use to me. This shows how little insight the pope and the whole of his religious coterie have into spiritual matters, and how little they concern themselves with the spiritual health of their forlorn flocks. … God never yet gave to any person grace and everlasting life as a reward for merit. The opinions of the papists are the intellectual pipe-dreams of idle pates, that serve no other purpose but to draw men away from the true worship of God. The papacy is founded upon hallucinations.

“The true way of salvation is this. First, a person must realize that he is a sinner, the kind of a sinner who is congenitally unable to do any good thing. “Whatsoever is not of faith, is sin.” Those who seek to earn the grace of God by their own efforts are trying to please God with sins. They mock God, and provoke His anger. They must repent. The second part is this. God sent His only-begotten Son into the world that we may live through His merit. He was crucified and killed for us. By sacrificing His Son for us God revealed Himself to us as a merciful Father who donates remission of sins, righteousness, and life everlasting for Christ’s sake. God hands out His gifts freely unto all men. That is the praise and glory of His mercy.”

For all his fervency regarding God’s grace, Luther remained burdened by his own unworthiness of it. Despite all the assurance about which he wrote and preached, he struggled to ever feel any assurance himself. How could he? He firmly believed that grace justified the sinner, but he also believed it did nothing to change one’s sinful nature. Back and forth it went. As biographer Martin Marty writes, Luther’s life makes sense chiefly as one who wrestled obsessively with God: God present and God absent, God too near and God too far, the God of wrath and the God of love, God weak and God almighty, God real and God as illusion, God hidden and God revealed. Luther was often paralyzed by what he called Anfechtungen, an untranslatable word often defined as those spiritual assaults that keep people from finding certainty in a loving God—attacks of doubt and near-despair sent not from the devil but, quite possibly, from God himself.

I didn’t read much about Luther until I got to seminary—Congregationalists tend toward Calvin and Zwingli as our reformers of choice (though Luther had choice words for Calvin and Zwingli too). Once in seminary, given Luther’s stature, I figured I needed to read more about him. Besides, it was a class assignment. But being something of a non-conformist (which everyone considers themselves to be in seminary—don’t ask me why), I picked up a biography of Luther by a contemporary historian that was not on the recommended reading list. It was a fascinating retelling of Luther’s life, and inspiring as well as the author wrote in soaring prose of the power and brilliance of Luther’s theology. Everything was there: justification by grace through faith; the “joyful exchange” of identities with Christ; the forgiveness of sins; the authority of the Word; and the human as “sinner and at the same time justified.” But then, at the end, came a chapter on Luther’s later years and his vicious anti-Semitism. Granted, Luther was an equal-opportunity denouncer of Jews, papists, Turks, Calvinists, Anabaptists and even other Lutherans. Moreover, his anti-Semitism was not racial as much as it was religious; he welcomed Jewish converts to Christianity. But Luther believed with the world ending soon and with so many denying Christ, Jews were basically doomed.

“I write against the Jews,” Luther said, “for a Jew or a Jewish heart is a wooden, stone devil heart that can be moved by nothing.” That was Luther being kind. Most of the language he used is unspeakable in polite company. In fact, the last sermon Luther preached, three days before he died in February 1546, was an attack against Jews. He never seemed to contemplate how contradictory it might seem to see the sufferings of Christians as a sign of God’s blessing toward those God loved, while the suffering of Jews was a testimony of God’s wrath toward those he hated. Luther’s virulent railing against the Jews reflected his times to be sure; but they were still bad enough to leave a legacy of hateful consequences in Germany for centuries.

As for the contemporary biographer recording these things, Luther’s viciousness cancelled out for him all the good Luther accomplished. In the final chapter of his polemical biography, the author summarily rejected the Christian gospel and God’s grace all because of Martin Luther. As a young seminarian, I was dumbstruck by how anybody could so clearly and beautifully articulate the gospel of Jesus to which I had staked my own soul, only to then entirely dismiss it due to the words and acts of one person—and a sixteenth century person at that. If Martin Luther could cause somebody to reject the gospel and lose their faith, how many people were going to lose their faith because of me? I descended into my own bout of Anfechtungen which led me to schedule a weeklong personal retreat (at a Catholic monastery no less) where I dutifully read the biography of Luther that was on the approved reading list.

So many years since, I’ve thankfully come to realize the real question is how anyone could have expected Luther to be other than the sinful man he was. This goes for all of us. And it goes for Jesus too; inasmuch as he bore our sins on the cross. Luther argued that to truly know Christ is not to know him in the sublime, dreamed-up idealized ways we so often conceive of Him, (and wrongly imagine ourselves as able to emulate); but rather in the lowly, weak and dying ways Jesus reveals himself on the cross, where he takes on humanity in all of its sin and shame. In this Christ we see ourselves.

Through the cross, Luther wrote, God “calls humans by their real names and not by images of their attractive appearance. He does not name them as they would wish, but as they are accepted by the boundless suffering love of God. This has far-reaching consequences: religious desire for praise and might and self-affirmation are blind to suffering—their own and that of others—because they are in love with achievement and success. Their love is love for the beautiful, which is to make the one who loves beautiful himself. But in the cross and passion of Christ, faith experiences a quite different love of God, a love which loves what is quite different. God loves what is sinful, bad, foolish, weak and hateful, in order to make it beautiful and good and wise and righteous. Sinners are beautiful because they are loved by God; they are not loved because they are beautiful.”

Though too often sinful, bad, foolish, weak and hateful ourselves; God still loves us relentlessly. He makes us beautiful and good and wise and righteous by the hard edge of grace. It is all Jesus’ doing. As the apostle Paul put it here in Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live.” Whatever is beautiful or good or wise or right about me is not me, “but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” And you and Martin Luther too.

Church Fathers Starting with the Letter L: Leo the Great

Matthew 5:1-12

by Daniel Harrell

If you happen to know anything about the fifth century’s Pope Leo the Great (this morning’s Church Father Starting with the Letter L) then you may know about he single-handedly faced down the notorious barbarian Attila the Hun and saved the city of Rome from destruction (at least until a few years later). Labeled “the scourge of God” by the Romans, Attila and his savage army ransacked the rest of Italy and had their sights set on the eternal city. But Leo roared onto the battlefield and repelled the Huns—reportedly with the help of a few angels though I’m guessing some gold was probably involved too. The renaissance painter Raphael had this take on it. It hangs in the Vatican and was commissioned by Pope Julius II who chose to sit as the model for Leo.

Leo’s bravery in the face of danger was in part what earned him the designation as “great,” only one of three Popes in church history to enjoy such acclamation. Thinking of Leo for this morning, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a similar act of bravery I witnessed during our recent family vacation. We traveled out to Yellowstone and while in Montana (courtesy of Jim and Sue Eaton’s lovely cabin there) my wife Dawn, daughter Violet and I decided to go for a short hike on Dawn’s birthday: A hike because Dawn loves to hike, and short because Violet is three. I dropped by the Visitors Center for trail suggestions, of which there were plenty, including a relatively easy one just off the highway.

Having made our choice, we were curious about the bold-typed warning printed at the bottom of the trail map: THIS IS BEAR COUNTRY. TAKE YOUR SPRAY. Take your spray? They make bear spray? Turns out they do. I asked the Visitor’s Center staff whether this was truly necessary for such a short hike so near to the highway, and they recounted how just last week a teenager was mauled by a local grizzly, albeit in the backcountry of Yellowstone. Nevertheless, they said, best to carry spray in case. And by the way, they had some on sale. Only fifty bucks a can.  it turned out, they sold Bear Spray. It cost fifty bucks a can. (Luckily, I hadn’t bought Dawn a birthday present yet. And it did come with a cool holster to carry it in.) So off we went, locked and loaded, and we made it just up to the first ridge line when hark, we heard an unfamiliar snarl. Just down in the vale we spied our own barbearian. Obviously our first impulse was to take a picture. But once the barbaric beast sensed our presence and turned toward us, action was required. Being a mama bear in her own right, my brave wife stepped up with her spray and the threat was no more. I now refer to my wife as Dawn the Great.

Fourteen years ago in Boston I began an annual sermon series during the summer on the Church Fathers, those personalities from church history who fashioned our faith and codified what we have come to embrace as orthodox Christianity. It’s managed to garner a bit of acclaim. Go to the popular religious website patheos.com, and you’ll find my weekly column “Church Father ABCs.” The ABC part is because I chose to tackle these noteworthy fathers (and mothers) a letter at a time. Of course if you know your ABCs, you’re probably wondering why 14 years only has me at the letter L. The problem was that with so many patristic heroes clustered around letter A—Ambrose, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas for instance—it took me a while to get out of there. My rationale for taking an annual peek at these people comes from my own conviction that our faith derives in no small part from the faithful personalities who’ve lived it and wrestled with it through crucial moments in church 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 the Bible alone as our sola source of authority, but interpreting and obeying the Bible necessarily stands on the interpretive and obedient shoulders of past believers.

Last year was my first foray into the Fathers here at Colonial—of great interest to some, a good reason to go to the cabin for others. Having come to Letter K, we looked at the mystic Thomas a’ Kempis and existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Now patristic scholars in the house rightly note that to include a Kempis and Kierkegaard exceedingly stretches the definition of “church father.” Technically, to be a Church Father, you had to live in the first five centuries AD. But we’re American Protestants, we get to make our own rules. I do begin this year’s installment with a bona fide Father, but something of an abomination to most Protestants inasmuch as Leo the Great set the stage for centuries of abusive power exerted by medieval pontiffs. Granted, this abuse did pave the way for the Great Protestant Church Father if there ever was one: Martin Luther himself, the patron saint of all things Minnesotan. We’ll wrap up this year’s series with the patron saint of everything Narnian, CS Lewis.

As for Leo the Great, facing down Attila the Hun earned him some serious street cred. Born of aristocratic Tuscan stock, Leo ascended to the papacy in 440 AD. Now a hero and savior to the empire as well as the church, he easily expanded his pontifical influence. His greatest theological contribution was what we know as The Tome of Leo. It’s significance was its role in helping the hotly contested theological debate of that day; namely, the dual natures of Jesus Christ.

How was it possible for a human being to be fully God? On the one hand, Jesus was clearly a flesh and blood person, just like you and me. A historical figure, he was born and walked and talked and ate and did most everything else we humans do. On the other hand, Jesus was God incarnate, and thus he did things no human ever did—talked to demons, walked on water, fed multitudes, changed the weather and raised the dead. If a man is God, is he really a man? God’s not a man. And God doesn’t sin. But what man doesn’t sin? God doesn’t die. But Jesus died. How can Jesus be God?

Early Christians offered all sorts of options for making this work, from Jesus having a split personality to his being a human body with a divine soul and even one where Jesus’ presence on earth was more like a mirage. Predictably, the debate mostly involved the various sides labeling the other heretics. The Emperor convened a congressional committee to attempt a solution—you know, with representatives from the humanity side and representatives from the divinity side—to see if they couldn’t cobble together a compromise. But the committee only perpetuated the divide. It took the Emperor falling off his horse and dying—some would say providentially—before a new committee could be formed, one which history remembers as The Council of Chalcedon. Leo asserted his judgment at this Council through his Tome which stressed the importance of Jesus’ uniqueness as the one and only person ever with two natures. It may sound strange, but no stranger than the Doctrine of Trinity that understands God as three persons with one nature. Chalcedon affirmed Leo’s Tome, and Christians have tried to believe ever since; that “our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, complete in Godhead and humanity, truly God and truly man… without confusion, without change, without separation or division.”

Leo wrote, “Lowliness is assured by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity. To pay the debt of our sinful state, a nature that is incapable of suffering was joined to one that could suffer. Thus, in keeping with the healing we needed, one and the same mediator between God and humanity, Jesus Christ, was able to die in one nature, and unable to die in the other. He who was true God was therefore born in the complete and perfect nature of a true human being, whole in his own nature, whole in ours. By our nature we mean what the Creator had fashioned in us from the beginning, and took to himself in order to restore it. For in the savior there was no trace of what the deceiver introduced, and we, being misled, allowed to enter. Jesus took our nature without the stain of sin, enlarging our humanity without diminishing his divinity…. One and the same person—this must be said over and over again—is truly the son of God and truly the son of man. He is God in virtue of the fact that ‘in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.’ He is human in virtue of the fact that the ‘the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.’”

Leo’s triumph at Chalcedon further entrenched his papal authority—an authority he claimed descended from St Peter himself. At the conclusion of the Council of Chalcedon, the bishops attending agreed. They cried out in unison: “This is the faith of the fathers … Peter has spoken thus through Leo ...” Leo’s consolidation of authority led to the migration of Christianity’s center from Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) to Italy, away from its heavy Greek influence to the influence of Latin logic. As the Roman Empire waned, a power vacuum opened up for this mighty migration to fill, such that the Christian church assumed an imperial power itself that endured for the next thousand years—an era ironically known as the Dark Ages.

Nevertheless, the later abuses of ecclesial power were not Leo’s fault. He used his great personal influence for much good. He died in 461, leaving 96 sermons and numerous letters revealing his passion for Jesus and the gospel. His 95^th sermon is based on this morning’s text from the Sermon on the Mount-twelve verses we call The Beatitudes. Jesus as the word made flesh came to earth after centuries of heavenly silence—there had been no word from the Lord in 400 years. Predictably, much of the preaching in the interim ended up emphasizing human wisdom rather than God’s action. When the Word finally returned in Christ, Leo wrote that “there were no thick clouds surrounding Him as of old, nor were the people frightened off from approaching the mountain by frightful sounds and lightning, but quietly and freely His discourse reached the ears of those who stood by: that the harshness of the law might give way before the gentleness of grace, and the spirit of adoption might dispel the terrors of bondage.”

However, having grown accustomed to relying on human wisdom, Jesus’ beatitudes generally have gotten interpreted as more of the same. The pure in heart get to see God? OK, be pure. The meek inherit the earth? Be humble then. Easy enough—to say that is, but not so easy to do—even when we want to do it. By contrast, Colonial’s own Robert Guelich, in his Sermon on the Mount commentary, argued that the Beatitudes should not be viewed as wisdom teachings stressing human responsibility, but rather prophetic teaching stressing divine deliverance. You’re not blessed because you mourn. You’re blessed because God comforts you. You’re not blessed because you’re hungry for righteousness and justice. You’re blessed because God fills you up. You’re not blessed because you’re persecuted. You’re blessed because God bestows his riches on persecuted people.

Leo preached that “The blessedness of seeing God is justly promised to the pure in heart. For the eye that is unclean would not be able to see the brightness of the true light, and what would be happiness to clear minds would be a torment to those that are defiled. Therefore, let the mists of worldly vanities be dispelled [by the Lord], and the inner eye be cleansed of all filth of wickedness, so that the soul’s gaze may feast serenely upon the great vision of God.” Leo employs the passive voice here to emphasize how the purity of heart is God’s doing. It is God who enables us to see Him.

And yet that God does this does not render us passive. On the contrary, God’s grace empowers us to live Christ-shaped lives. God’s Spirit in us shapes us and leads us to follow Jesus; to be devoted to the kingdom of God and to his righteousness.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled,” Jesus said. Leo preached, “This hunger is not for any bodily food, this thirst is not for any earthly drink: it is a longing to be blessed with righteousness, and, by penetrating the secret of all mysteries, to be filled with the Lord himself. Happy is the soul that longs for the food of righteousness and thirsts for this kind of drink; it would not seek such things if it had not already savored their delight. When the soul hears the voice of the Spirit saying it to the prophet: ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good,’ it has already received a portion of God’s goodness, and is on fire with love, the love that gives joy of the utmost purity. It counts as nothing all that belongs to time, it is entirely consumed with desire to eat and drink the food of righteousness. The soul lays hold of the true meaning of the first and great commandment: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole mind and your whole strength,’ for to love God is nothing else than to love righteousness.”

Righteousness is a word that gets twisted up a bit in our individualistic culture. The tendency is to confuse righteousness with something I possess for myself—something that the Scriptures actually condemn as self-righteousness. Godly righteousness, as Leo intimates, is God’s possession. To be filled with righteousness is to belong to God—and not so much individually as collectively—as the people of God, the body of Christ, the holy catholic (little c) church. Righteousness is not a state of being, but a way of living modeled after Jesus. To do right by each other, to give and love and serve, is to demonstrate our own citizenship in God’s kingdom, and that indeed his Spirit does dwell in our midst.

Therefore, Leo preached, “Let believers examine their own state of mind and carefully scrutinize the sentiments of their heart. If they find some fruit of charity in their conscious self, let them have no doubt that God is in them. And that they may become more and more able to welcome so great a guest, let them persevere and grow in mercy which expresses itself in acts of love. If God is love, charity ought not to know any limits, for nothing that is limited can contain the fullness of the Spirit, who is God Himself.”

What About Him?

John 21:20-23
by Daniel Harrell

This is my last look at Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in John’s gospel. You’ll remember from my last look, before this last look, how our Lord magnanimously restored Peter the black sheep into Peter the able shepherd. The passage crescendoed with Jesus’ imperative: “Follow me!” Because of this imperative, and others like it, many Christians have taken to calling themselves “Christ-followers” instead of Christians. It also has something to do with the perception that the noun Christian has become trivialized and besmirched due to negative associations and many believers’ bad behavior. To be a “Christ-follower” erases any ambiguity as to one’s primary allegiance. To be a “Christ-follower” is to take seriously one’s commitments to the counter-cultural commands of gospel and practice all that it preaches. To follow Christ is to trust the Lord wherever he leads, no matter the road, whatever the cost, no turning back, no turning back.

This is why I’d rather just call myself a Christian. I’m not opposed to a little ambiguity. The gospels paint a daunting picture of what following Christ looks like. A man comes up to Jesus and says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” To whit Jesus replies, “Are you sure about that? Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” Somebody else says, “I’m in Lord, but first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus says, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” To the rich man Jesus says, “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor in exchange for treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” And then to everybody, “If you want to follow me, you must deny yourself and take up your cross to do it.”  For the original hearers, taking up a cross was not some metaphor for bearing life’s difficulties. Jesus said, “…you’ll be handed over to be tortured, and will be put to death and hated by all because of my name.” Jesus said that only those who lose their lives will find their lives. By which he did mean losing your life—a reality he made clear in predicting Peter’s own martyrdom.

However, according to this morning’s passage, following Christ need not always mean losing your life to martyrdom. Peter would be executed for his faith, but apparently John would live to a ripe old age—at least long enough to write his gospel. Both were faithful in their following. Not that this makes things any easier. In fact if you live a long time, it may make things harder. The admired Catholic author Henri Nouwen once wrote, “The movement from illusion to [truly following Christ] is hard to make since it leads us from false certainties to true uncertainties, from an easy support system to a risky surrender….” Nouwen’s faith forced a dramatic surrender later in his life. He gave up an acclaimed career as an Ivy League lecturer, best-selling author and counselor to the powerful in order to take up residence at a community for people with mental disabilities in Toronto. He devoted the remainder of his life in relatively quiet service to those with great need. It was a move many admired, but few emulated. Following Christ is hard to do.

Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor tells the story of a grocery store cashier in small town Georgia who wore a Roman’s 1:16 tie to work: I’m not ashamed of the Gospel was writ large all across it. (It was a necktie I presume.) You’d push your cart into line where he’d greet you with a wide, generous grin and then, showing genuine interest in how you were doing, he’d chew the fat while scanning your groceries (in big contrast to typical grocery clerks who mostly just chew their gum). After he’d totaled your bill and figured your change without the computer’s help, he’d bag your groceries, reach into his pocket and hand you a singularly wrapped lifesaver candy. Then he’d say with a wink and a tug on his tie: “You know who your lifesaver is, don’t you?”

Barbara Brown Taylor recalled how the clerk was dear, how he was earnest and how the next time she went back to the store—he was gone. She wrote, “I’m pretty sure that no one asked him to renounce his faith. The store manager probably just asked him to keep it to himself, or to save it for church where people couldn’t become so irritated by it. The man was not a threat, only an embarrassment. The tie, the lifesavers, even the unusual cheerfulness—these were too much for people who just wanted to get through the line and get home. A man who is not ashamed of the Gospel is out there somewhere looking for work which I imagine he’s done a lot of in his life. His following Christ, such as it is, takes the form of chronic unemployment.”

Granted, it’s not exactly what Jesus warned us about when he said, “you’ll be handed over to be tortured, and will be put to death and hated by all because of my name.” That would be in a place like Syria, where hundreds have given their life in opposition to the oppressive regime of President Bashar Assad. Up to this point, many Christians have been hesitant to enter the fray. While they oppose the ruthlessness of the Syrian government, they fear that the police state will be replaced by an Islamic state. They worry about a repeat of Iraq, where the Christian community has basically disappeared as a result of both persecution and exile. And yet, as one Syrian Christian has put it, “To follow Christ, to be a good Christian you have to side with the oppressed and not with the oppressors. It is scary,” but obedience often is.

Of course she and other Syrian Christians could simply deny their faith. Forsake Jesus and save their necks. Like Peter did so shamefully as Jesus stood trial and was sentenced to die, in effect double-crossing his crucified Lord. On the other hand what was Peter supposed to do? Jesus was convicted of crimes. He didn’t defend himself or refute any of the charges. Though we was able to change the weather and defeat the devil, he nevertheless let government authorities string him up. He acted as if he were guilty! He did say that once he rose from the dead they’d meet up again in Galilee, but what was Peter supposed to do with that? Rising from the dead is crazy talk. Which may explain Peter’s denials. Maybe he thought Jesus had lost his mind.

But then Jesus gets raised from the dead. And he meets Peter in Galilee. He has breakfast with him on the beach and finally gets around to discussing those denials, a topic Peter surely knew was coming. Risen and vindicated, Jesus confronted Peter with the obvious: “Do you really love me?” he asked, not once, but three times so that Peter couldn’t miss the connection. Peter replied in the affirmative each time, the third time grievously so, knowing his word meant little when his behavior hadn’t matched up. But Jesus gave him another chance. He always does. He said to Peter: “Follow me!”

Yet even on the heels of this most amazing grace delivered in a most amazing fashion, Christ’s call to follow still shook Peter a bit. It probably had something to do with Jesus predicting Peter’s own crucifixion. It is much easier to be on the receiving end of Christ’s mercy than it is to live out its implications. Peter turned and saw the beloved disciple whom tradition identifies as John nearby. “Lord,” Peter asked, “what about him?”

Scholars split over Peter’s intent. Some, pointing out how Peter and John were intimate friends, attribute anxiety to Peter over John’s prognosis. Since following Jesus would prove deadly for Peter, he naturally was concerned for his friend. That’s why he asked Jesus about him. The problem is the sharp nature of Jesus’ reply: “What’s that to you?” he said to Peter. “You follow me!” Such a rebuke presumes a different set of motives. Did Peter feel unfairly singled out? Did he want to make sure he wasn’t the only one having to sacrifice his life? Was he afraid?

Whatever it was—whether chafed at being set apart or just plain old scared—we can all relate. It is much easier to be on the receiving end of Christ’s mercy than it is to live out its implications. To follow Jesus is to trust the Lord wherever he leads, no matter the road, whatever the cost. It means losing your life—be that your literal life or your literal lifestyle. It is a move from false certainties to true uncertainties, from easy support systems to risky surrender. Henri Nouwen was right. It’s hard to do—even when you do it.

Soon after arriving in Toronto, Henri Nouwen wrote a book entitled In the Name of Jesus which focused on Jesus’ restoration of Peter in John’s gospel. Transformed by the community he served, Nouwen wrote, “The first thing that struck me when I came to live in a house with mentally handicapped people was that their liking or disliking of me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then. Since nobody could read my books, my books could not impress anyone, and since most of them never went to school, my twenty years at Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard did not provide a significant introduction.… Not being able to use any of the skills that had proved so practical in the past was a real source of anxiety. I was suddenly faced with my naked self, open for affirmations and rejections, hugs and punches, smiles and tears, all dependent on how I was perceived at the moment. In a way, it seemed as though I was starting my life all over again. Relationships, connections, reputations could no longer be counted upon. This experience was and, in many ways, is the most important experience of my new life because it forced me to rediscover my true identity. These broken, wounded and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self—the self that can do things, show things, prove things, build things—and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.” This love, Nouwen wrote, was none other than the love of God in the name of Jesus.

While out at a pastor’s conference in San Diego several years back, I heard the late Mike Yaconelli describe how his life and ministry to teenagers was deeply influenced by Nouwen’s writing, especially this book, In the Name of Jesus. Yaconelli had this cheeky practice of tracking down authors who had impressionable impacts on his spiritual life (if they were still living) and paying them a personal visit to say thank you. So he located Henri Nouwen at his Toronto residence and made an appointment. Unfortunately, Yaconelli’s flight was delayed, he missed a connection, and was unable to let Nouwen know he’d be late—something to do with misplacing a phone number or something. He arrived at Nouwen’s home three hours late.

Having read many of Nouwen’s other books, Yaconelli was fairly familiar with what he could expect as he approached Nouwen’s door. Henri Nouwen’s grace and magnanimous love were legendary—I experienced it myself in a class I took with Nouwen in seminary. Though a class of 400, he took time to meet with each of us individually. Yaconelli would have rather been on time, but at least this way he’d get to see Nouwen’s godly love in action. Yaconelli knocked, not really expecting that Nouwen had waited around. But it turned out that he had. Toward the door came a dramatic stomping followed by a violent ripping open of the door that revealed not the love of God but the wrath of Henri. Irate, Nouwen lit into Yaconelli without mercy, without worry, without even asking what happened: “Where have you been!? Why didn’t you call?! Don’t you know you’re three hours late?! Have you no respect of others’ schedules?” A shocked Yaconelli could only yell back, “HEY BUDDY, IN THE NAME OF JESUS! OK?”

Nouwen fans will be relieved to know that he apologized and went on to share a memorable visit. But for Mike Yaconelli, it was that initial, stressful encounter that proved most memorable. Not because it tarnished Nouwen’s reputation, but rather because it reinforced how hard following Christ truly is—even when you’re doing it.

I bought a pair of shoes a month not so long ago that I thought fit but didn’t. I wore them a few times thinking I could break them in, but they were just too small. I was so frustrated because I’d paid $40 for shoes that retailed for $60 but were now going cost me $80. The store wouldn’t take back shoes I’d already worn, so I’d have to buy a second pair. I went back to the store, one of those big box shoe warehouses where the shoes are strewn all over everywhere, and found a replacement pair that fit just right. I put them on my feet and put the ill-fitting pair in the new shoebox the others had just come out of. I sat there for a moment and said to myself, “You know, these ones I’ve worn don’t look that bad. I’ve only worn them a few times. What’s really wrong with just putting them back on the shelf and calling it even?” But then my other self said, “You can’t leave them here and walk out! You’re a Christian for Christ’s sake! Go pay for the shoes!”

So I halfheartedly walked up to the cashier and told her what happened. She said, “Wow, this means you’ll be paying $80 for a pair of shoes that only costs $40. You know you didn’t have to tell me you’d worn these other ones. They don’t look that bad. Besides, nobody ever checks.” I wish I’d had a lifesaver in my pocket.

It is much easier to be on the receiving end of Christ’s mercy than it is to live out its implications. To follow Jesus is to trust the Lord wherever he leads, to the point of losing your life—or losing a measly 40 bucks. It is a move from false certainties to true uncertainties, from easy support systems to risky surrender. Following Christ is hard to do even as we do it. So why do we do it? Jesus wondered himself. Earlier in John’s gospel, after many had abandoned him because of his difficult demands, Jesus asked his disciples, “Wouldn’t you all rather go away too?” To which Peter replied, “Lord, to whom would we go? We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God. You have the words of eternal life.”