Redemption and the Ordinary

People tend to denigrate the ordinary. The ordinary is so… so… well… ordinary. Are our lives really meaningful if we only spend them doing “ordinary” things — going to work, fixing up the house, spending time with friends and family, etc.?

Here is an interesting quote about how the ordinary is, in a sense, the aim of redemption:

“What is the heroic moment meant to do but recover the ordinary greatness that God originally intended? Deborah and Gideon are raised up by God so that everyone can return to ordinary love and life and food with freedom and without harm in their locality with God. We get rid of evil so that people can live their ordinary lives without harassment. The great triumph of a fictional Superman is to free the citizens of Metropolis from evil so that they can work, marry, live, eat, and find meaning. The great triumph of the Greatest Generation was to free the world for a time from tyranny so that people could go back to the blessing and joy of daily life. The true act of heroism in Jesus on the cross and emptying the tomb is to return us to the grace of doing life with God in a place with love for our neighbors and finding the enjoyment in that which God created for us. Heroic moments have as their aim the recovery of the ordinary.”

— Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry as a Human Being, p. 48

Preach from Your Scars

I heard a really interesting saying today: “Preach from your scars and not your wounds.”

Preach from your scars

Scars are not wounds. Scars are wounds that have healed yet have left a permanent mark. You are healed but never the same. When you preach from your scars, you can reflect on personal hardship, pain and failure in a way that shows others that God heals wounds. People are invited into your experience so they can reflect on the same sort of truth in their own lives and the way that God heals them.

Don’t preach from your wounds

Wounds are gaping holes that are bleeding and raw. They hurt! When you preach from your wounds, you can’t see clearly past your own pain to the healing that God is working. You end up talking about hurt, hardship, and failure in a way that draws attention to yourself rather than to God. People respond, “I feel so bad for you,” “I should do something to help you,” etc. You become the focus rather than a vehicle by which God can bring transformation and healing into the lives of others.

Whether we are preaching, counseling or simply encouraging others in the body, we should preach from our scars but not from our wounds.

Moses, an Egyptian, and Injustice

Many of us have been sheltered from the harsh realities of suffering and oppression. When we are exposed to them, our first reaction might be to strike out at injustice, to do something (anything) to eliminate the problem.

That’s what Moses did. He grew up as a rich kid in Pharaoh’s house. He was sheltered from what his brothers were going through. But eventually his eyes were opened:

“One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and saw their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people.” (Exodus 2:12)

Moses wanted to strike back at injustice and oppression. He looked left and right and, seeing that the coast was clear, struck down the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.

Interestingly, this approach didn’t win Moses any brownie points with the Hebrews. The next day (when Moses took another crack at using his conflict resolution skills) the Hebrews dismissed him: “Who made you a prince and judge over us?” To the Hebrews, Moses didn’t look any different than their Egyptian oppressors. He was just another person who exercised power through violence.

It is interesting to compare Moses’ reaction to Israel’s oppression with what God tells Moses from the burning bush. Remember that Moses saw the affliction of the people. But God says,

“I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land.” (Exodus 3:7-8)

Both Moses and God saw affliction. But unlike Moses, God also says “I have heard their cry” and “I know their suffering.”

In some mysterious way, God identified with Israel’s suffering in a way that Moses did not. That God heard the cries of the people and knew their suffering means that God was not spending his time in the halls of privilege and power (where Moses grew up) but in the camp with the Hebrew slaves. Wouldn’t Pharaoh’s palace be a more fitting place for the God of heaven than a slave camp? Wouldn’t a holy God draw back from cries, pain, and squalor?  But God said, “I have come down to deliver them.” He lowered himself to be with his people. God descended into the condition of the oppressed.

What was the difference between God and Moses? Moses struck out at injustice without identifying with the people he would deliver (which only created further injustice). But God entered into the suffering of his people. He was with them in suffering so that he could lead them out of it.

Here are two brief lessons I take from this:

1. Those who would be instruments of the Lord must enter into the sufferings of others. There is no real ministry without solidarity. God would eventually send Moses back to deliver the people, but only after Moses spent years as a refugee, slaving away as a shepherd in the wilderness. Moses learned to identify with his Hebrew brothers in Egypt.

2. Even more fundamentally, it is God’s character to descend into the condition of the oppressed. It is his nature to enter into the sufferings of his people. When God acts in justice and salvation, he does not exercise his power apart from identification and solidarity with those he saves. He acts in identification and solidarity. He is in the midst of the people he saves.

The author of Hebrews says, “Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death” (2:14). The God who delivers Israel is the same God we meet in the person of Jesus Christ — one who descends into the condition of those he would deliver.

Blood Brothers?

We heard an interesting sermon at the Presbytery worship service that has me rethinking my assumptions about the book of Philemon.

You often hear something like this: Philemon and Onesimus were master and slave. Onesimus committed some kind of offense and fled from his master, Philemon. Onesimus found Paul and was converted, and Paul now sends Onesimus back to Philemon with the charge that this slave be received as a brother.

What I had never noticed in the text — but picked up as it was being read even before it came up in the sermon — is that Paul says this:

“For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother—especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.” (Philemon 1:15–16 ESV)

Paul says that Philemon and Onesimus are brothers “both in the flesh and in the Lord.” He also says that this is the reason why Philemon and Onesimus are brothers in a way that Paul and Onesimus are not. In the Lord Jesus Onesimus is Paul’s beloved brother. But “how much more” for Philemon, since Onesimus is a brother “in the flesh and in the Lord.”

Were Philemon and Onesimus actual brothers? If Paul wanted to say that these two men were blood brothers, “brothers in the flesh” is the plainest way to do so.

If Philemon and Onesimus are brothers, what is going on in the book of Philemon? And why is Onesimus described as a bondservant? Here are two possible scenarios I’ve come across:

Scenario 1: Philemon and Onesimus are sons of the same parents. Maybe Philemon is the older brother who is the heir, and Onesimus is the screw-up younger brother who squanders his inheritance and sells himself into servitude (does this sound a little like the story in Luke 15?!). Onesimus is not Philemon’s slave but he has become a bondservant through his own folly and reckless living. Perhaps Philemon has to buy his brother out of servitude and bring him home for the sake of his family’s honor.

Scenario 2: Philemon and Onesimus have the same father, but Onesimus was born to a slave woman. Onesimus is Philemon’s half-brother, but because he was born to a slave woman he shares the same status as his mother. This is very close to the traditional view that Philemon is the master and Onesimus is the slave, but adds the missing element that they share a common father. In the ancient world, the child of a freeman and a slave-woman would not be acknowledged as a brother by the rest of the family (think Abraham-Hagar-Ishmael).

Whatever the case, the book of Philemon is a powerful testimony to how the gospel creates new relationships that transcend and transform natural and social relationships. This is especially the case if Philemon and Onesimus were actual blood brothers!

Know Your Friend

I came across these interesting comments on grace and repentance in a book of letters called Heart of a Servant Leader by Jack Miller. He wants to make the point that grace leads us to deeper repentance.

Miller describes two different theological emphases when it comes to sin and repentance. He says that often in the English Puritan tradition the emphasis looks like this:

1. Know your enemy — understand sin, the flesh, the devil, etc.
2. Know your personal limitations — understand your own particular fleshly characteristics and habits and temptations
3. Know your Friend — understand the grace of God in Christ and the Holy Spirit

Here’s his problem with this approach: “I find myself overwhelmed when I pick up a 320-page book by Owen and find 308 pages devoted to points 1 and 2, and only 12 pages given to point 3, grace and the gospel.” (Okay, this might not be entirely fair to poor, dead Owen but it certainly is a tendency.)

Here is the emphasis Miller prefers:

1. Know your Friend
2. Know your enemy
3. Know your personal limitations
4. Keep point 1 up front, even when you are talking about points 2 and 3

Some people might worry that emphasizing grace will lead to becoming “soft” on the seriousness of sin and the requirements of the law. Here’s Miller’s response to this objection/fear:

“I do not think that an emphasis on grace leads to a soft ministry on sin and the severe demands of the law. Actually, it seems to me that such grace teaching makes it possible for sinners like us to hear the hardest things said about our sin patterns, and that can lead into healthy sorrow which leads back to sanity, i.e., repentance.”

Minor Characters

Here are some interesting comments by one of my former OT profs, Iain Provan, on reading the Bible well and the importance of ordinary people in the Biblical story:

Iain Provan: Old Testament Foundations from Regent College on Vimeo.

The Old Testament in a Nutshell

I like how Chris Wright describes how the Old Testament sets forth a basic worldview by asking and answering four questions:

1. Where are we? What is the nature of the universe and this planet on which we live? How does it come to be here and have a future?
2. Who are we? What does it mean to be human and how, if at all, are we distinct from the rest of the living creatures we live among?
3. What’s gone wrong? What is the cause of the way things are, which we instinctively feel is not the way they should be? Why are we in such a mess?
4. What’s the solution? What, if anything, can be done to put things right? Is there hope for the future, and if so, hope in what or whom or by when?

These are all questions the Old Testament answers for us. They are also things which are expanded, elaborated upon, or assumed as background in the New Testament.

Wright says the Old Testament provides the following answers to these four questions:

1. This world is part of the good creation of the one single living God, whom we know as the LORD. It wholly belongs to this God (no part belongs to other gods), and the Lord is sovereign over all that exists ‘in heaven above, on earth below and under the earth.’
2. ‘We’ in the wider sense are human beings made in the image of the creator God, made for relationship with God and one another. ‘We’ in the narrower sense are an elect people in unique relationship with the Lord who is both our covenant God and the universal God of the nations, who through a great historical deliverance (exodus), through the covenant made at Sinai, and through the gift of the land constituted us as his own people.
3. What has gone wrong is that we human beings have rebelled against the creator God, in moral and spiritual disobedience, and this has brought evil consequences into every aspect of human life, including the individual personality, our relationships with one another, with our physical environment, and with God.
4. The solution lies with this same creator God who has addressed the problems of the nations of humanity by a historical project of redemption, beginning with the choice of Abraham (the father of our nation) and extending to include the blessing of all nations and a new creation.

Inhabit the Psalms

I just started reading N.T. Wright’s The Case for the Psalms. Wright is a leading New Testament scholar, and I suppose it is obligatory to say that no one can write as much as he does without saying things that are controversial (i.e. his views on justification). But who can disagree with this wonderful description of the psalms:

“They are full of power and passion, horrendous misery and unrestrained jubilation, tender sensitivity and powerful hope. Anyone at all whose heart is open to new dimensions of human experience, anyone who loves good writing, anyone who wants a window into the bright lights and dark corners of the human soul— anyone open to the beautiful expression of a larger vision of reality should react to these poems like someone who hasn’t had a good meal for a week or two.”

For Wright, using the psalms is not about pulling them into our world in an attempt to make them more relevant. Rather, the goal is for us to find our way into their world and begin to see things through their perspective:

“The regular praying and singing of the Psalms is transformative. It changes the way we understand some of the deepest elements of who we are, or rather, who, where, when, and what we are: we are creatures of space, time, and matter, and though we take our normal understandings of these for granted, it is my suggestion that the Psalms will gently but firmly transform our understandings of all of them. They do this in order that we may be changed, transformed, so that we look at the world, one another, and ourselves in a radically different way, which we believe to be God’s way.”

And for those who like their theology with a cheeky illustration here and there, it is hard not to enjoy Wright’s prose:

“The Psalms offer us a way of joining in a chorus of praise and prayer that has been going on for millennia and across all cultures. Not to try to inhabit them, while continuing to invent nonpsalmic “worship” based on our own feelings of the moment, risks being like a spoiled child who, taken to the summit of Table Mountain with the city and the ocean spread out before him, refuses to gaze at the view because he is playing with his Game Boy.”

If, like me, you didn’t know anything about the view from Table Mountain in Cape Town, click here.

The Meaning of Grace

I came across an interesting little story in the book Worship, Community, and the Triune God of Grace.

The most well-known controversy in the early church is Arianism. Arius was a priest in the fourth century who came into conflict with the church because he denied that Jesus was divine. One of his arguments went like this: Jesus cannot be God because Jesus prays to God. He prays on the mountain, he prays at the last supper, he prays in Gesthemene, and he prays from the cross. What could be more obvious than the fact that Jesus cannot be God (who receives prayer) if he is a man (who offers prayer)?

Athanasius, who opposed Arius, responded, “Arius, you don’t understand the meaning of grace!”

Why did Athanasius immediately point to grace? James Torrance answers:

“The God to whom we pray and with whom we commune knows we want to pray, try to pray, but cannot pray. So God comes to us as man in Jesus Christ to stand in for us, pray for us, teach us to pray and lead our prayers. God in grace gives us what he seeks from us—a life of prayer—in giving us Jesus Christ and the Spirit. So Christ is very God, the God to whom we pray. And he is very man, the man who prays for us and with us.”

That is the nature of grace. Both the divine act and the human response are given to us in Christ, and we participate in what Christ has accomplished by faith.

Life in the Shadows

God is often described as “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” But of the three, Isaac seems to get the least attention. I read an article this morning about the role and function of Isaac in Genesis, the title of which highlights Isaac’s subordinate role among the patriarchs. It was called “Life in the Shadows.”

Maybe you know what “life in the shadows” feels like. As the middle patriarch, Isaac is kind of like a middle child who is constantly overshadowed by both his older and his younger siblings. Here are a couple of things I hadn’t really noticed before:

• Abraham has 14 chapters exclusively devoted to him and Jacob has 9, Isaac only has one (Genesis 26).
• Isaac is normally defined in terms of his relationship to the other patriarchs, either as the son of Abraham or as the father of Jacob.
• In most stories, Isaac is largely passive. But even when he acts, he tends to “follow in the footsteps” of Abraham (lying about his wife, making covenant with Abimelech, etc.) or he is depicted as old and weak (as in the well-known story of the blessing of Jacob).

Isaac is hardly a larger than life figure. His significance is found not so much in what he does, but in that he receives the promises as a son of Abraham and passes them on to Jacob and to future generations. Here’s a snippet from the conclusion of the article:

“Theologically, important statements are being made about the continuity of the promises through Isaac’s life. The promises were not inherited by merit, but were won for Isaac, and future generations, by Abraham. In turn, Isaac hands the blessing on to Jacob, the recipient of the promises, who was also a child chosen by God.”

I think this ought to resonate for people who believe that by faith in Christ we are sons of Abraham (Gal 3:7,9,14, 29) and who believe that God’s covenant promises are still “for us and for our children (Acts 2:39). The promises of the covenant have been secured for us by God and we receive them through faith, despite our relative significance or insignificance in life. Moreover, real significance is found in becoming a link or bridge for passing on God’s covenant promises to a new generation. If this is “life in the shadows,” it is life lived in the shadow of the cross.