A Eulogy for Donna King Bohlcke

Saturday, May 11, 2024 | 10 am

Northway Christian Church | Dallas, Texas

This is the second time I’ve been asked to eulogize my friend Donna King Bohlke. The first time was six years ago. I was just about to retire as the pastor of Northway, and Donna was slipping further and further away. Don wanted to celebrate all that Donna was and all that Donna meant to us while she was still aware enough to appreciate it, and so, we had a tribute lunch for Donna here at the church, and I prepared my first Eulogy for Donna. It was a wonderful day.

A “Eulogy” is literally a “good word.” One of my father’s maxims that got deeply engrained in my thinking and being through repetition was, “If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.” Well, a Eulogy is “saying something nice” about someone who has taken their leave of us. In the book of Ecclesiasticus from the Apocrypha we have the classic eulogy in the Biblical tradition –

¹ Let us now sing the praises of famous people,
    our ancestors in their generations.
² The Lord apportioned to them great glory…

⁷  …These were honoured in their generations,
    and were the pride of their times.
⁸ Some of them have left behind a name,
    so that others declare their praise.
⁹ But of others there is no memory;…
¹⁰ But these also were godly people,
    whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten;…
¹⁴  …their name lives on generation after generation.

Last Saturday afternoon as I visited with Don and Donna’s daughters about the “good word” they wanted to hear from me about Donna today, I was given something that one of Donna’s grandchildren wrote, he called it his “eulogical (a new word he just made up) thoughts –

“You could always count on Granny to make a family gathering a true event. The eclectic food spread, the games, and making sure everyone was taken care of. She’s the most technologically savvy grandmother I knew. She had a long fulfilling life, not without heartache, but showed her love for her family and friends in so many ways.”

And we know the truth of those “eulogical” words about Donna, don’t we?

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956), the 20^th century English critic and essayist, famously observed that – “Mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.” “A guest is someone who is invulnerable, who is waited upon and showered with attention.” Bruce Larson explained. “A host is someone who puts her guests at ease and afforms their worth in a thousand different ways and makes herself vulnerable to them, giving up her privacy and providing food and lodging.” And then Bruce Larson added, “It seems to me that Jesus Christ, who is ‘the Host’ in all pf life, is calling those who believe in Him to become hosts in every situation; to become those who can be vulnerable, put other people at ease, love them, listen to them, and affirm them.”

The “eulogical” story Don told me he really needed to hear this morning was about the time when he and Donna were living at Traditions, and she was still lucid. One morning she looked over at Don at the breakfast table and asked – “So, what are we going to do today that will make a difference in somebody’s life?” That’s how “hosts” think. That’s what “hosts” do. And Donna was a “host.”

Donna and I painted icons together. You will see some of her icons on display here today. Icons are sometimes called theology in line and color, and that’s how I came to them. It was my faith seeking understanding that led me into the world of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and you can’t sojourn in that world for very long before you start bumping into icons. I came to icons by way of theology and church history. Donna came to icons by way of creativity, beauty, and generosity. She created a community through our icon painting workshops here at the church. In our icon partnership, I was the head and Donna was the heart. She was a “host.”

It’s said that the first icon an iconographer is supposed to paint is one of the Transfiguration, the way that Christ became light on a mountaintop in Galilee before His Passion. The whole point of icons is to bear witness to the way the Word who was with God, who was God, became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1;14). They are windows into the mystery of how the divine and the human cohere in Christ, and they foreshadow the way that we who bear the image of the earthy shall also bear the image of the heavenly (I Corinthians 15:49).

Iconographers paint an icon of the Transfiguration first because every icon they will ever paint will be an affirmation of the transfiguration, of the way that we are being changed into the likeness of Christ from one degree of glory to another through beholding the glory of God in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:6).

At one of our icon painting workshops here at the church, Peter Pearson, our teacher and friend, made an off-handed comment one day about how Orthodox Christians believe that when they are painting the icon of a saint that what they are really painting is an icon of Christ. It’s Christ being formed in us that you are supposed to see in the icon of a saint. Saints are “the many faces of Christ” we see, and since Biblically anyone who names Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior is a “saint,” we are supposed to be able to see Him in us and through us. As a hymn we sing on Pentecost each year just about this time puts it – “Fill with Thy Spirit till all shall see, Christ only, always living in me.”

In one of his poems, Tagore (1861 -1941), the Bengali author, said of someone in his life – “You brought the harp into my house and you brought the lamp…(and) after you had taken your leave I found God’s footprints on my floor.” In Donna’s welcome I experienced Christ’s welcome. In Donna’s care and concern I experienced Christ’s care and concern. In Donna’s generosity I experienced Christ’s abundance. And in the way Donna walked in beauty she opened my eyes and heart to the beauty of Christ. When I look, everywhere Donna was in my life, I see the footprints of Christ. I painted icons of Christ with Donna, but more important than that was the way that Donna was an icon of Christ for me.

Lord God, we’ve gathered here this morning as Donna’s family and friends to remember her life, to thank-you for the gift that she has been to us, and to comfort and encourage one other in this time of her passing. We rejoice that because Jesus Christ, your Son, our Savior, is the resurrection and the life, that even though Donna has died, yet she lives together with everyone who has ever believed in you. Give us the faith to see in death the gate to eternal life, and the kind of love that can sustain us to the end of our days and that will see us through death to the dawn the new beginning that Donna has now entered, we pray in Christ’s name and according to your promise. Amen.

“How to Get More Out of Communion”

Christian Men’s Fellowship Breakfast | Saturday, May 4, 2024

First Christian Church, Garland, Texas | Dr. Douglas Skinner

This is a Communion Token…

Most denominations begin with a flash of spiritual insight. Something that’s gotten lost or been neglected by the larger church gets discovered by a person or a group of people in the church, and as this rediscovered practice or idea becomes explosively real for them, they turn to the larger church, asking them to make room for it in their life. When these pleas go unheeded, these people separate themselves from the larger church to begin a new expression of the church, one that more prominently features the idea or the practice that they’ve recovered. What they’ve found matters enough for them to say – “We are no longer that — from now on we are this…”

Most denominations can point to the moment of spiritual courage when this happens, when their founders acted on their convictions, even though doing so immediately put them at odds with the church to which they had previously belonged.

• This is the story of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the Cathedral in Wittenberg on the errors of the church in which he himself was a priest.

• This is the story of Menno Simons rebaptizing people upon their public profession of personal faith as an act of spiritual defiance to the State Church which regarded anyone born within its borders to be members.

• This is the story of John Wesley who was excluded from preaching the Gospel from the pulpits of the Church of England of which he was a minister, and going outside to preach the Gospel from the front doorsteps of those same churches, and in the village square, and out in the middle of open fields.

• This is the story of William Seymour, a poor African American preacher, who conducted a meeting at a storefront church in Los Angeles at the turn of the last century, and midwifed the birth of the modern Pentecostal Movement – the most vibrant expression of Christianity in the world today – as the Spirit of God drew people from every race and place, filled them with power, united them with purpose, and sent them out with a message of promise and a personal experience of Christ’s indwelling presence.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) began with one of these flashes of spiritual insight and moments of spiritual courage as well, and it all had to do with this (the Communion Token).

Our Scottish Presbyterian Roots

On the family tree of churches, we are a shoot off the branch of Scottish Presbyterianism. That “X” shaped cross on the red Communion Chalice that is our denominational symbol, that’s a St. Andrew’s Cross. If you hear – “St. Andrews” – and think golf, then you’ve got it! “St. Andrews” is the oldest golf course in the world, and where is it? It’s in Scotland, in the very place where legend says that St. Andrew the Apostle preached the Gospel and planted a Church. This is why St. Andrew is the Patron Saint of Scotland.

Another tradition about St. Andrew is that he didn’t consider himself worthy to die on the same kind of cross that Jesus died on, and so just like his brother Peter who was crucified upside down, when it was time for Andrew to die for his faith, he asked to be crucified on an “X” shaped cross. That “X” shaped cross is on the national flag of Scotland (it’s on the national flag of Great Britan for that matter), and it’s part of our denominational symbol as well because we come out of Scottish Presbyterianism, and communion tokens were part of the settled practice of that church.

Communion Tokens

You see, the only way you could get a seat at the communion table in a Scottish Presbyterian church back in the day was by having one of these (a communion token), and the only way you could get one of these (a communion token) was by convincing somebody like me, an ordained minister, that you were “worthy” of a seat.  Now, as awful as that sounds to our ears, understand, their motive was good. It truly was.

In that same passage we quote every Sunday morning at the Lord’s Table about how on the night when He was betrayed, our Lord took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it, and how after supper He took a cup and said that it was the new covenant in His blood (I Corinthians 11:23-26), well, right after saying all that, Paul went on to warn his readers about eating the bread and drinking the cup in an “unworthy” manner and thereby becoming guilty of “profaning the body and blood of the Lord” (11:27), eating and drinking it to their condemnation (11:29-32).

“This is why many of you are weak and sick,” Paul told the Corinthian Christians, “and (it’s) why some have you have died” (11:30). I think this is a description of their spiritual rather than their physical condition. I think Paul was saying that some of them were spiritually weak, and spiritually sick, and spiritually dying, and the reason why was their inattentiveness to and  carelessness with the things of God, something that was evident in the way that they were approaching the Lord’s Supper. They were trifling with spiritual things. They were taking for granted God’s grace. They were presuming upon His kindness. They were profaning the body and blood of the Lord.  So, the Scottish Presbyterian Church “fenced” the Lord’s Table. They erected barriers and then policed the gates to ensure that only those people who were spiritually prepared could sit at the Table and commune, and they would have argued that it was for people’s own good that they did this.

Thomas Campbell (1763 – 1854)

Thomas Campbell (1763 – 1854) was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who served a congregation in Ireland. He had grown weary of the squabbling in his church over things that he thought were matters of private interpretation, things best left to the freedom of each person’s conscience. He was troubled by having to exclude people from the Lord’s Table because they had convictions that were at slight variance with the official stances of the church, often on matters that the Bible never addresses. Grieved by the divisions in his church, Thomas Campbell resigned his ministry position, and immigrated to America where he hoped that new ways would be more welcomed in the new world.

When he arrived in Philadelphia in 1807, it just so happened that the American version of his Scottish Presbyterian Church was meeting in session, and so he presented himself to them, was immediately endorsed as a minister, and was given a circuit of churches to serve in the Alleghany River Valley just outside of Pittsburgh. His primary job there was to go from church to church to celebrate Communion with them.

Since in Scottish Presbyterianism only an ordained minister could preside at the Lord’s Table, there were lots of Scottish Presbyterians in remote places on the American frontier who rarely got Communion. And so, it was Thomas Campbell’s job to ride into those out-of-the-way villages to preach, and teach, and pray with the church members there for several days to get them ready for a Communion service, all the while taking careful note of who showed up at his meetings, and assessing the state of their souls.

But because ordained ministers were far and few between in those isolated areas, other kinds of Presbyterians would invariably show up at his meetings as well. They were fellow Presbyterians who read the same Bible in the same way that Thomas Campbell did. They recited the same creed and adhered to the same Confessions as Thomas Campbell did, but because they had taken positions on some secondary matters that were at variance with the positions that Thomas Campbell’s branch of Presbyterianism had taken, he was prohibited from sharing Communion with them. “No Communion token for you!”

In one of these remote areas, during one of those Communion weeks, in a moment of real spiritual courage that was the result of, if not a flash of spiritual insight, then at least a slow burning spiritual realization, Thomas Campbell put the Communion tokens away and he opened the Lord’s Supper to any believer there who in their hearts felt spiritually prepared to meet with their Lord at His Table, who had heard Him inwardly say, “Behold I stand at the door and knock, if you open the door I will come into you, and sit with you, and sup with you” (Revelation 3:20). It wasn’t long after this that Thomas Campbell was charged with heresy by his church, tried, convicted, and stripped of his ministerial credentials. But by then, it really didn’t matter to him. He’d moved on to a new place spiritually.

Declaration and Address (1809)

This is a facsimile copy of Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” that was givento the delegates of the Centennial celebration of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) held in Pittsburgh back in 1909. It’s a real treasure. But it’s just for show. This is my working copy of this same document (a tattered book held together with a clip). This (my old, tattered copy) is what got me here. You see, I wasn’t born into this church. Just like that bumper sticker you see that says, “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here just as quickly as I could,” I made my way to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in high school.

At its heart, Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” is a set of principles, which when taken seriously, change the way we think as Christians and operate as a church. Four of them are at the very heart of “why we do what we do the way we do it” –

The church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.

Division among Christians is a horrid evil, fraught with many evils.

It’s the neglect of what the New Testament actually says and the acceptance of human opinions as our authority on matters of faith and practice that has caused every division that has ever plagued the church.

While we are all free to have our own opinions and interpretations, nothing should be made a requirement on the church’s faith and practice that is not as old as the New Testament.

You can’t say things like that, believe them, and still have things like this (Communion Token).

Alexander Campbell (1788 –1866)

It was based on the principles of Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” that the weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper became the most characteristic feature of our life together as a church. Even people who know nothing else about us can usually tell you that in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) we celebrate the Lord’s Supper every Sunday. Alexander Campbell (1788 –1866), Thomas Campbell’s firstborn son and his successor to the leadership of the Movement that his “Declaration and Address” launched, said that in the future, if we were to be “conspicuous” for anything as a church, that it be for the attention we give to the Bible and to its ordinances. Alexander Campbell called the Lord’s Supper a Gospel ordinance that’s “pregnant” with the grace of God, and he said that it was “silly” to think that somebody could be spiritually vital apart from their personal and habitual participation in the Lord’s Supper.

Not Magic

But this doesn’t just happen.

The Lord’s Supper isn’t magic.

You can’t just show up on a Sunday morning, take a bite of bread, have a sip of wine, and think that it’s going to be of any benefit to you spiritually. In that same passage where we get the words of institution that we say at the Lord’s Table every Sunday morning, Paul told the Corinthians that even though they were going through the motions of a communion service when they got together, that it was “not for the better but for the worse” (I Corinthians 11:17). He told them – “When you meet together, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat” (I Corinthians 11:20). This was the concern that our Scottish Presbyterian forebears tried to address with these (the Communion Token), and our Founders were not indifferent to this concern, they just weren’t convinced that this (the Communion Token) was the best way to address that concern, after all, hadn’t Jesus told us to “judge not, lest we be judged,” and that rather than worrying about the speck that’s in your brother’s eye, we should rather be attending to the log that’s in our own (Matthew 7:1-5)? And in Romans 14, hadn’t Paul specifically asked – “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?” – explaining, “It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Master is able to make him stand… [so] let us no more pass judgment on one another…” (14:4;10).

The way Paul told the Corinthians to address his concern for their “worthy” participation in the Lord’s Supper was not for them to stand in judgment on one another, but rather for each one of them to carefully examine themselves (I Corinthians 11:28), to “see whether they were holding to our faith, …to see if Christ was (truly) in them” (2 Corinthians 11:5).  This isn’t something that anybody else can do for you. There’s nobody with a Communion token out there somewhere who can truly know what’s going on inside you. This is only something we can do for ourselves, as Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, famously said – nobody else can do your believing for you, or your living for you, or your dying for you. So, “Let a man examine himself,” Paul told the Corinthians, “and so eat the bread and drink the cup” (I Corinthians 11:27). But, how do we do this? Where do we begin? How do we start?

Robert Milligan (1814-1875)

Right after Thomas and Alexander Campbell began the spiritual movement on the American frontier that put the Lord’s Supper at the very center of its life and mission, a Lord’s Supper to which everyone was invited and at which everyone would be welcomed, along came another early leader of our Movement, a man named Robert Milligan (1814-1875), who took the big ideas that the Campbells said about things like the Lord’s Supper, and he made them practical. There was a time that every minister in our spiritual tradition was taught from Robert Milligan’s book “The Scheme of Redemption.”  Today it’s hardly known, and in my mind, that’s telling. We’re out of touch with the spiritual discipline that our spiritual tradition said was the key to the Lord’s Supper having the kind of importance and making the sort of impact on us that it promises to.

The Campbells said that the Lord’s Supper really matters, and then Robert Milligan came along right behind them and said that there is something you have to do if you expect the Lord’s Supper to really matter to you the next time you take it.  After explaining that the bread and wine of Communion are “spiritual nourishment” for the soul in the same way that food and drink are physical nourishment to the body, and warning that any outward religious practice can become an empty, meaningless gesture if it is approached without prayer and care, Robert Milligan got specific about we need to do if the Lord’s Supper is to be a means of grace for us, a “koinonia,” a participation, a fellowship, a  sharing in the Body and Blood of Christ rather than just a bite of bread and a sip of juice.

“The means ordained by God to prevent the growth and prevalence of formalism in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, is the practice of self-examination. ‘Let a man examine himself; and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup’ (I Corinthians 11:28).  If this were properly attended to by all who profess to be followers of the Lord Jesus… what an interesting occasion every Communion [service] would be… but how few, alas, how very few, have ever learned the art and mystery of self-examination!”

For the Lord’s Supper to be the kind of spiritual nutrition that our souls require to thrive, Robert Milligan insisted that we come to the Lord’s Table “prepared,” and to do this properly, he gave four specific instructions. These are the “nuts and bolts” of the spiritual discipline of self-examination that make taking Communion such a powerful means of grace.

The First Instruction | “In the light of God’s word…”

The first instruction was that “the self-examination (before Communion) should be conducted faithfully and honestly in the light of God’s word.” This is an old fashion plumb line. When building a wall and you want it to be vertical, this and gravity will help you know if it is. In Amos 7:7-8 the prophet saw the Lord standing beside a wall with a plumb line in his hand, and the Lord told Amos, “Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people.” The Church, right from the beginning, viewed the Ten Commandments as that plumb line God uses to take our moral and spiritual measure.

I grew up in a church that read the Ten Commandments out loud to us every Sunday morning. It was the first thing we did un worship each week. We would open with a prayer about how we were coming into God’s presence with our hearts open wide, with all of our desires known, with no hidden secrets, and we would ask God cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit so that we might love God perfectly and worship God worthily. Just as soon as we prayed these words each week, our minister would read the Ten Commandments to us, and at the end of each Commandment, we would say, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.”

Each commandment took our measure, and we always came up short. That’s what the “have mercy upon us” was about. But we wanted to do better, to be better, and so we also always prayed, “incline our hearts to keep this law.” We were in church each week to tell God that we were sorry for the ways that we had done things that week that He told us not to do, and for the way that we had not always or fully done the things that He had told us to do. But we were also in church each week to tell God that it was our intention to lead a different kind of life in the coming week following His commandments and walking in His ways.

For the Lord’s Supper to be the feast of forgiveness and the means of grace that will nourish our souls to walk in newness of life, we need to come to it each week with the Word of God like a two-edged sword, cutting us to the heart, laying open our thoughts and making our desires known (Hebrews 4:11-13). As Jesus said, it’s the sick who need a doctor (Luke 5:31-32). It’s only when we know that we’re wounded that we seek to be healed. This is why Robert Milligan’s first instruction was to conduct a faithful and honest examination of oneself “in the light of God’s Word” before coming to the Lord’s Table.

The Second Instruction | “Searching our Hearts”

The second instruction that Robert Milligan gave us was that our “self-examination before taking Communion should be conducted with prayer: the prayer that God would himself search our hearts, and that he would help us to search them honestly, faithfully, and thoroughly; that he would purify them. And that he would enable us to forsake every false and wicked way.”

Dan Snow is an artisan who builds walls, terraces and structures out of dry stone.  His books are wonderful reads, not just for their descriptions of his amazing work, but for the spiritual wisdom that he has discovered through the years of eating his bread by the sweat of his brow with his hands in the ground.  For instance, he begins one of his essays about building a series of retaining walls at a farm in Vermont by explaining that, “Construction begins with one stone… until there is one in place, there is nothing to inspire the selection of another… every choice is a response to the choices that have come before it.”  He’s talking about working with stones.  As people of Biblical faith, we work with stories, and the very same truth applies.

The way our Bibles are structured, the stories we read at the very beginning of the book of Genesis “set the table” for everything that follows. We are created in God’s image.  Like reflections in a mirror, we are designed to correspond to Him.  We are built for a relationship with Him. I take the story in Genesis 3 of God coming in the cool of the day to walk and talk with Adam and Eve in the Garden as the Bible’s defining picture of what our relationship with God is supposed to look like.  We are built for that kind of intimacy and immediacy with God. Of course, in Gensis 3, right after their tangle with the serpent, when God showed up for his evening stroll with Adam and Eve, they hid from His presence, prompting Him to ask two questions: “Where are you?” (3:9) and “What have you done?” (3:13).  

We don’t get the tone of words from a printed text. So, some interpreters read these two questions in Genesis 3 as the “mad” words of a deeply offended God. I tend to read them instead as the “sad” words of a brokenhearted God. It’s the two questions that God asks in Ezekiel 18:23 – “Do you think that I take any pleasure in the judgment of sinners?” and “Do you not know that I would prefer sinners to turn from their ways and live?” – that help me hear God’s questions in Genesis 3 as more anguished than angry.

In his little book “Our Faith” (1954), the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (1889 – 1966) gave voice to the what he thought was the toe of God’s questions – “As children lost in a woods, are fearful of the sinister darkness — and then, suddenly, hearing a sound from the somber blackness, a familiar voice, a loving, seeking, helping voice, their mother’s voice — so prayer is our reply to the voice from the Word of God in Jesus Christ which suddenly cries out to us in the mysterious, dark universe. It is the Father calling us out of the world’s darkness. He calls us, seeks us, wants to bring us to Himself. ‘Where are you, my child?’ Our prayers mean ‘Here I am. Father. I was afraid until you called. Since you have spoken, I am afraid no longer. Come, I am waiting for you, take me, lead me by the hand through the dark terrifying world.’”

When Robert Milligan tells us that our self-examination before Communion should be “conducted with prayer: prayer that God would himself search our hearts,” it makes a big difference whether we think that God is mad at us and is just gathering more evidence to condemn us, or if we think that what we’ve done and who we’ve become makes God very sad, and that by searching our hearts, God is looking for ways to repair what’s gone wrong and to restore what’s gotten lost.

In the healing of memories, they tell you to take the hand of Christ and to go back into your painful past with Him in tow, to show Him just exactly what was said and done that wounded you, so that He can speak peace to the hidden storms that rage inside you and to apply grace to the sources of your life’s deepest hurts, and when we ask God to search our hearts in the process of self-examination before Communion, we are, in the same way, not looking to be further shamed and condemned, but rather to be healed and helped, to be restored and repaired.

The Third Instruction | Fasting

The third instruction that Robert Milligan gave us was that our “self-examination before taking Communion should be accompanied with fasting. We’re more accustomed to feasting aren’t we? Somebody once said that in a thousand years when the archeologists dig up our churches and find the remains of church kitchens with their stainless-steel appliances and steam tables, they will wonder about what kind of strange rituals we Christians were performed there! 

This gathering here this morning was built around a meal. It’s a men’s “breakfast.” I’m not sure that as many of us would be here this morning if it had been promoted as a men’s “fast.” That doesn’t even make sense to us. But it did to Christ. When He was criticized by the Pharisees because His disciples didn’t fast like the disciples of John the Baptist did, Jesus explained – “Can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days” (Matthew 9:15; Mark 2:19-20; Luke 5:34-35). Jesus expected us to fast.

Fasting is a way of bringing focus. We choose not to do some things so that we can give our full attention to other things. When our hands are full, we can’t pick something else up. We’ve got to put some things down before we can pick something else up. If you’d stopped by Whataburger for a bag of egg and sausage burritos and eaten them in the car on your way over here this morning, my guess is that you wouldn’t have filled your plates quite as full as you did. William Berault described it well when he wrote –

“A cup must be empty before it can be filled.

If it is already full, it can’t be filled again except emptying it out.

In order to fill anything there must be a hollowed-out space.

Otherwise it can’t receive.

This is especially true of God’s word.

In order to receive it, we must be hollowed out.

We must be capable of receiving it,

emptied of the false self and its endless demands.

When Christ came, there was no room in the inn.

It was full. The inn is a symbol of the heart.

God’s word, Christ, can take root only in a hollow.”

Fasting during times of self-examination before Communion clears the field of distractions so that we can give our full attention to where we are in our relationship with God. It’s a way of saying to God nothing matters more to me than you, and because we don’t live by bread alone, fasting is a way of saying to God, I don’t desire anything more than you.

The Fourth Instruction | The “Sanctification of Time”

The final instruction that Robert Milligan gave us was that our self-examination before taking Communion should be accompanied with what he called the “sanctification of time.” Just as the fourth commandment told our Jewish mothers and fathers to “keep holy the Sabbath day” (Saturday – the last day of the week when God rested at the end of creation), so as Christians we keep holy the Lord’s Day (Sunday – the day when Christ was raised from the dead). In the book of Acts we see the first Christians meeting on the first day of the week to break bread (and bless the cup) in remembrance of Christ (Acts 20:7), and the book of Revelation opens with John “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day” (1:9).

I grew up in Southern California. I knew nothing about “blue laws” growing up. It was when my wife and I got to Texas for seminary in January of 1977 that I had my first encounter with one. We were at a grocery store in Ft. Worth on a Sunday afternoon buying some groceries and a can opener. The clerk told us that we could buy our cans of corn, beans, and soup, but that he couldn’t sell us the can opener! When we looked confused, he told us that it was against the law!

At my student church in Melissa, we were invited home for lunch with some church members one Sunday. I could feel some tension building after the table had been cleared. Finally, after some hemming and hawing, the man of the house cleared his throat and said, “Preacher, I’ve got a question for you.” I braced myself for a question about the Trinity, or maybe the substitutionary theory of the atonement, or about women in church leadership. But no, what he wanted to know was what I thought about playing dominos on Sunday afternoons. I told him that I had never played a game of dominos in my life – a fact which troubled him greatly – but that if I did, then Sunday afternoons would be a fine time for a game. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together as his wife produced a box of dominos, and so began a never phase of my education for ministry.

The “sanctification of time” – keeping “holy” a day for God – is a way of taking God seriously. In practice, its restrictions can be silly, petty, and oppressive, but its intent is good.  You can tell me that Jesus Christ is the Lord of your life, and that church is a high priority, for you. But it’s by looking at your checkbook and day planner that I will see if you really mean it. When something matters to us, we give it our undivided attention.  That’s all that the “sanctification of time” is about. It’s about creating space and clearing the decks for God. Thomas Merton said that he became a monk not because he wanted to find God, but rather because he wanted God to find him, and he knew that his life was so cluttered and crowded, that it would only by stepping into the silence and solitude of a monastery that he would find the stillness where he could be found.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine who does youth ministry sent me a picture of a youth gathering at his church. At his feet on the platform from which he spoke were the cell phones of all the students who were there. He told me that when he told them that they were going to become still to know God, he said that they spontaneously came forward one by one and laid their cell phones at the altar as their way of telling God that they were serious about what was going on there, that they were there to listen for what God wanted to say to them, and that no text or phone call was going to get in the way of that. My friend told me that this was the turning point of his ministry with them. This was when they finally got serious about knowing God and making God known. He couldn’t legislate it. No sign on the wall would about turning off their cell phones would have accomplished it. He couldn’t scold or shame them into doing it. It had to be a response of the hunger and thirst for God they felt in their hearts, and this is what Robert Milligan was talking about in his call for the “sanctification of time” as part of the way that we prepare ourselves for the encounter with God in Christ that the Lord’s Supper promises.

Conclusion

The whole point of the spiritual discipline of self-examination before Communion is not to establish our righteousness, but to diagnose our need. The Lord’s Table is not like a ride at Six Flags with a sign out front that says you must be this tall to get on. If our process of self-examination before Communion leaves like the Pharisee Jesus talked about who went up to the Temple to pray and who “stood and prayed this with himself – ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector, I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all I get’” – then we are doing it all wrong! Where it’s supposed to bring us is to our knees where just like the Publican in the story Jesus told would not even “lift his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner’” (Luke 18:9-14). It’s the stanza of an old Gospel hymn that best describes where our self-examination before Communion is supposed to bring us –

“Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless, look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Savior, or I die.”

John Hunter, a 19^th century English Congregational minister, wrote one of the most widely used worship books for the churches of his day. Among its resources is an invitation to the Lord’s Table that I believe strikes exactly the “right” in tone and content –

“Come to this sacred Table,

not because you must,

but because you may:

come to testify not that you are righteous,

but that you sincerely love our Lord Jesus Christ,

and desire to be His true disciples.

Come, not because you’re strong,

but because you’re weak;

Not because you have any claim on Heaven’s rewards,

but because in your frailty and sin you stand

in constant need of Heaven’s mercy and help.”

The right inward disposition to have for a “worthy” participation in the Lord’s Supper is to come –

“Out of our bondage, sorrow and night…
Into Christ’s freedom, gladness, and light…
Out of our sickness, into His health,
Out of our want and into His wealth,
Out of our sin and into Christ’s self…                                                                                                           

Out of our shameful failure and loss…
Jesus, I come to Thee.”

I can’t do this for you, and you can’t do this for me. There’s nowhere to go for a Communion Token that will guarantee you an encounter with the living Christ or automatically provide you with an experience of saving grace. In that story Jesus told about the two men who went up to the Temple to be with God, only one of them went home in right relation with God, and that was the one who prayed: “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Our weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper as a church is the Gospel moment when –

“Upon the cross of Jesus our eyes at times can see
The very dying form of One Who suffered there for us…”

And where –

“…from our stricken hearts with tears two wonders we confess;
The wonders of redeeming love and our unworthiness.”

What the Church wants you to know when there is an unexpected death…

First, stop kidding yourself, and start expecting your death. Every year on Ash Wednesday we get smudged with ashes, a sign of penance and mortality, and we are told straight-up that we are going to die. We are numbered among the things that are passing away as the liturgy says, and spiritual wisdom comes from numbering our days (Psalm 90:12). Every unexpected death is a chance for us to wake up (Luke 13:4). [P.S. – There are no unexpected deaths…]

Second, come to terms with what it is that Christianity is about. The way our Bibles are put together helps us see how underneath and behind all its different stories, characters, ideas. and instructions, there’s a unifying theme, an organizing principle. It’s said that what’s in the Bible solves a problem and answers a question, and it is unmistakably clear to me that the question that the Bible answers, the problem that it solves is death, physical death, certainly, but especially spiritual death. The Bible opens with a warning about what causes death (Genesis 2:17). It closes with the death of death (Revelation 19:14-15), and the promise of a time when death will be no more (Revelation 21:4). And in between that opening and closing, it tells a story that climaxes with Christ dying on a cross and being raised from the dead on the third day. The center of gravity for the Christianity that I know is John 11:25 about how Christ is the resurrection and the life and how that means that we will never die, and Romans 8:31-39 about how because Christ died and was raised that nothing, not even death, will have the power to separate us from the love of God. Because of this, we can trust ourselves and our loved ones when death comes, God made us. God loves us. God holds us. God can be trusted. Christ proves it.

Third, use the fact that you are going to die to rightly order your priorities and values right now. It’s been pointed out that, “No one on his deathbed has ever said, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at work!” This popular proverb underscores the counsel of Ephesians 5:16 to “make the most of the time.” When we know that we aren’t going to be here forever, or even for very long in the grand scheme of things, it can “concentrate the mind wonderfully,” as Samuel Johnson put it. This is why Jesus talked about laying up treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21), and why Paul spelled out what it is that “endures” when everything else passes away – faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love” (I Corinthians 13:13). Cultivating the eternal perspective will invest us in the things that last. Stop thinking that you’ll get to it in time. Time is not guaranteed.

Fourth, keep your bags packed. That’s how good Pope John XXIII put it in his spiritual journal. He said that he tried to live every day knowing that it could be his last, and that he would have to give “a strict account of his thoughts, words, and actions” to the One who sets the standards for what’s good, true, and beautiful. Knowing this is why the last request in the Order for Evening Prayer that I have most often prayed is that we might be given the grace “always to live in such a state that we may never be afraid to die; so that, living and dying, we might be thine.” And this is why in the spiritual tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy, the faithful are taught to pray daily “for the completion of our lives in peace and repentance,” and “for a good account before the awesome judgment seat of Christ.”

In his little book “On the Theology of Death” (Herder and Herder, 1961), the giant 20th century Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904 – 1984), pointing to the way that the two thieves on the crosses beside Jesus died, noted that death can be extinction or fulfillment. We all run the course of our lives toward the same finish line of death, but we don’t all run towards it in the same way. Some run “protestingly,” while others run “lovingly and trustingly.” We can experience the end of life as a matter of “falling into the emptiness and the powerlessness of death as remoteness from God,” or as “a falling into the hands of the living God, who is called Father.” And what it will be for us, he said, is fixed by our free choices for or against God now. Not to think about death because it is an unsettling thought to us, is not to take “this earthly life with radical seriousness,” and that would be a terrible waste, and such a shame.

“Swearing to your own Hurt” – Matthew 5:31-37 | A Sermon preached on Sunday, February 9, 2014

I have a nephew in the Special Forces of the United States Army.  My sister and brother-in-law never know when he is going to be sent out on a mission, or what that mission is going to entail, or how long he will be away.  His life is so secretive and mysterious to us that we eagerly devour anything that might give us some insight into what he does – articles in the paper or a magazine, features on the television news shows, books and movies about the Special Forces.  And so it was that a couple of weeks ago I found myself in a darkened theater to see the movie “Lone Survivor.”

I knew what to expect.  I’d read the book.  I already knew the wrenching story of “Operation Red Wings” in Afghanistan back in 2005, and how a mission to target a Taliban leader by a 4-man reconnaissance team went badly; very, very badly.  I knew that before the story was through, that 3 of those Seals would be killed and that 16 others would die in a failed attempt to rescue them.  I was prepared for the agonizing telling of this story.  What I wasn’t prepared for was the story of the Afghan villager who took the lone survivor into his village, and in the ancient tradition of something called “Pashtunwali,” put himself in-between the Taliban fighters and this gravely wounded American serviceman.

In the mountains of Afghanistan there is a code of honor among the Pastun people that goes back for more than 2,000 years, and part of it says that a host must protect a guest even if it means risking his own life and the lives of his family and friends.  And this is exactly what happened in the debacle that was “Operation Red Wings.”  The reason why there was a “lone survivor” in this story at all was because an Afghan village took him in and then defended him with their own lives, and that decision is still costing them. That village remains a Taliban target.  They have sworn to destroy it and to kill all of its residents, and yet, when asked if they regret their decision in taking in our wounded soldier, they say that they would do it all over again.  And when asked “why?” they will tell you about how their commitments define them as a people and dictate their actions.

Take a look at the Bible verse that we used this morning for our “Word Watch.”  Every week there is a Scripture at the top of the first page of your bulletin that we’ve deliberately chosen and put there for you to meditate on before worship begins.  This week it’s from Psalm 15 –

“LORD, who may abide in Your tabernacle?  Who may dwell on Your holy hill?  He who walks with integrity… who swears to his own hurt and does not change…”

This is what the scholars call an “entrance liturgy.”  When people arrived at the Temple in Jerusalem for worship they were met by priests at the gates who asked: “Why should we let you in?” and “What makes you think that you have any right to be here?”   

Biblically, this is a question about “righteousness” – “Are you doing what’s right?” “Are you in a right relationship with God?”  And part of the answer that came back from the people who were trying to get in to worship was: “We are doing our best to live our lives with integrity.  When we say that we are going to do something, we do it even if it turns out badly for us and actually winds up costing us something.”  That’s what “swearing to your own hurt and not changing” means.

Recently the CEO of Thomas Nelson, the major American Publishing House of Bibles and popular Christian devotional books, learned that a former executive with his company had made a commitment to a third party via e-mail.

“It was obvious that he hadn’t researched the cost of his promise, nor did he get anyone else’s approval. The CEO was not even aware of the obligation until the other party brought it to his attention. And when he learned that the cost of the commitment was north of six figures, he gasped. Several rationalizations immediately popped into his head:

– The executive was no longer at the company.                                                   

– He obviously didn’t count the cost.                                                                    

 – He wasn’t authorized to make this commitment.                                           

– This project was already under water.                                                             

– This amount was not in their budget.                                                               

– He wasn’t even aware of the commitment.                                                       

– And the CFO wasn’t aware of the commitment either.

However, after a few moments, the CEO remembered that their first core value at Thomas Nelson is “Honoring God.” They amplify this by saying that “We honor God in everything we do.” They then go on to describe the behaviors that express this value, and the fourth item on that list is:

We honor our commitments, even when it is difficult, expensive, or inconvenient.”

That brought everything into clear focus for him, and he noted that this behavior was initially motivated by Psalm 15:1,4:

‘LORD, who may abide in Your tabernacle? Who may dwell in Your holy hill? … He who swears to his own hurt and does not change.’

Simply put, the CEO of Thomas Nelson concluded, this means that our word is sacred.” (Michael Hyatt)

It’s the sacredness of our words, and the commitments that lie behind them that Jesus was talking about in our Scripture lesson this morning.  Jesus expected His people to be known for their integrity, for the way that we would keep our word and do what we promised to do regardless of the cost.  This is a rare quality these days. 

We live in an age of “the path of least resistance.”  We’ll do things for as long as it’s good for us, for as long as it’s meeting our needs and makes us happy.  But if a commitment should start to inconvenience us; should it start to cost us something; should some commitment that we’ve made start to pinch and scrape us, well then we’ll start looking for a way out that allows us to keep face.   This is why that story about those Afghan villagers and that story about the decision of the CEO of a major American Publishing House who each “swore to their own hurt and did not change” are just so striking.  They behaved in unexpected ways; in ways that run counter to the prevailing cultural flow. 

We expect politicians to lie to us.  We expect products to fail.  We expect relationships not to last.  We expect institutions to let us down.  But Jesus told us:  “This is not what I expect of you as My disciples.”  Let your “yes” mean “yes,” and your “no” mean “no,” Jesus said.  And then, to make His point directly, Jesus talked about one of the main areas where our commitments take daily shape – our marriages.  You see, for Jesus, integrity was not some abstract, ethereal concept; a philosophical ideal.  It was immediate and practical.  It had to do with how you treat the person with whom you are living in the most intimate relationship of all, your wife or your husband. 

Divorce is such a personal and painful experience for so many of us, that when the Scriptures talk about it, we get a little skittish; some of us might even feel like putting our hands over our ears and running away just as fast and as far as we possibly can.  I suspect we’re like this because we expect the Bible to condemn us.  We’ve got a pretty good hunch that whatever the Bible might have to say to us about divorce, that it’s only going to compound the feelings of shame and guilt that we’re already feeling.   We’re afraid that it’s just going to rough us up further.  But, if we would lower our guard just long enough to actually hear what Jesus is saying in our Scripture lesson this morning, I think that we might actually be surprised by the grace of what Jesus has to say.

Among the teachers of the Law in Jesus’ day there were some who had a rather lax view of the commitment of marriage.  They allowed a man to divorce his wife for any dissatisfaction at all that he might be experiencing with her, and this is what Jesus was opposing in what He had to say in our Scripture lesson this this morning.  The commitment of marriage was just too sacred in His eyes to be frivolously set aside by some whim of fancy or by the first whiff of difficulty.  Marriages are supposed to last. That’s the first thing that Jesus tells us in our Scripture lesson this morning.  But as we all know, not all of them do. 

Clearly, there are choices that we can make and actions that we can take that have the power to kill a marriage.  And that’s the second thing that Jesus tells us in our Scripture lesson this morning.  There’s a realism to His words.  Marriage bonds can be shattered by unfaithfulness, and it’s incredibly painful when they are.  But when this happens, we’re not finished.  Serious as it is, contrary as it may be to what God intends for us, destructive as it is to people and their highest hopes and deepest dreams, when a marriage fails, we do not come to the end of the story.  

Divorce is not the unforgivable sin. That’s the piece that’s missing in so many of the conversations about divorce that I’ve heard in the church through the years.  It seems to me that there are those who want to make divorce different from any other contradiction to God’s revealed will in which we might personally have a share.  The grace of God in Jesus Christ that promises to make us new and to give us a chance to start all over again as “new creations” apparently has an exception, and it’s divorcees. 

Even when this is not said out loud by the church – and frankly I’d be quite surprised if you ever heard it around here – it’s still heard in the hearts of so many divorcees, and that’s because divorce has this powerful and unique capacity to condemn us.  Divorce is a fundamental upheaval in our identity and intention that affects us in our deepest places. And when it happens, when there is a broken commitment, this is when we need to know that repentance, forgiveness and restoration is the pattern of the Gospel. 

When we confess our sins, “He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” John tells us in his first letter (I John 1:9).  As the refrain to an old Gospel song that makes me very happy every time I sing it puts it –

“Wonderful the matchless grace of Jesus, deeper than the mighty rolling sea; Higher than the mountain, sparkling like a fountain, All sufficient grace for even me; Broader than the scope of my transgressions, Greater far than all my sin and shame; O magnify the precious Name of Jesus, Praise His Name!“

God’s grace is broader than the scope of my transgressions, this hymn says; it’s greater than all my sin and shame.  So, just exactly what does this leave beyond the reach of God’s restoring grace?  Divorce? I hardly think so!

Of course, Jesus Christ wants us to be people of integrity as His disciples, people who keep their commitments, people whose “yes” means “yes” and whose “no” means “no.”  The reason why this matters so much to Him is because this is how He relates to us.  This is the basis of our relationship with Him.  When we keep our commitments it points to the way that God keeps His commitments to us, and that gives our lives a “question-posing” quality just like we experienced here this morning when we heard about those Afghan villagers and that Thomas Nelson CEO.  It’s unexpected behavior that cuts against the grain of culture and that leaves people who witness it wondering why – Why are they like that?  And the answer for us as Christians has got to be – because this is how God in Jesus Christ is with us.  And ironically, where this shows most powerfully is not in our stretches of faithfulness, but in our episodes of unfaithfulness.

When we don’t keep our commitments, God still keeps His.  As Paul told his young associate in ministry, Timothy – “If we are faithless, He remains faithful; for He cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13).  And this is the power of the Gospel.  We are loved by God in spite of ourselves, that’s the truth at the center of His commitment to us, and it alone has the power to change us. God’s forgiveness of our unfaithfulness when we fail to keep our commitments is an important part of God’s faithfulness to us.  And the renewal of faithfulness in us, seen in the way that we return to our commitments with even greater intensity and intentionality after we have stumbled is one of the first results of a genuine experience with God’s faithfulness.  And what Jesus Christ is telling us in our Scripture lesson this morning is that the life of faithfulness to which He is calling us is nothing more than a reflection of the kind of faithfulness that God has already shown us in Jesus Christ.  We learn how to keep our commitments by seeing how God in Jesus Christ keeps His.

Sources

Hyatt, Michael. “Keeping Your Word.” http://michaelhyatt.com

McKnight, Scot.  The Story of God Bible Commentary: The Sermon on the Mount. Zondervan. 2013.                                                                                                                                                

Pilate’s Wife

Brian Zahnd begins the eighth chapter of his book about the cross of Christ, “The Wood Between the Worlds” by writing –

“The Nicene Creed mentions three historical figures – Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and Pontius Pilate. The appearance of Jesus and Mary is obvious, but that of Pontius Pilate is startling. Unexpected as he may be, there he is, for in the creed we confess that Jesus was ‘crucified under Pontius Pilate.’ What this line does is to establish the life and death of Jesus in a particular historical context. Christianity doesn’t float above history as a timeless abstract. It was born in Judea in the fourth decade of the first century during Roman occupation. Pontius Pilate was the fifth Roman procurator of Judea, holding office from AD 26-36 during the reign of Tiberius Caesar. History has given us scant information on Pilate… Through what we know about Pilate is limited to the Gospels and a few lines from Roman historians, the governor who presided over the trail of Jesus of Nazareth has captivated the literary imagination of many a writer.”

And so has Pontius Pilates’ wife, in fact, in parts of the Eastern Church Pontius Pilate’s wife is officially a Saint! She is given a name, “Claudia Procula,” and a history beyond the bare reference to her dream and the warning she gave to her husband as a result of it as he was about to preside over the trial of Jesus – “While he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent word to him, “Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much over him today in a dream” (Matthew 27:19).

A reference to a “Claudia” in 2 Timothy 4:21 has been taken by some in the Eastern Church as a reference to Pontius Pilate’s wife and is offered as evidence of her inclusion in the earliest community of faith. It was Origen (185 – 253), the Alexandrian theologian of such great importance and controversy, who first wrote about how Pontius Pilate’s wife converted to Christianity.

“A more detailed account of the trial before Pilate, his wife’s dream, and her later life can be found in the apocryphal work, “The Letters of Claudia Procula to Fulvia”. It was written allegedly in the name of Claudia, Pontius Pilate’s wife, who shares the story of her life in Jerusalem with her friend, devoting special attention to events related to the Gospel story.” (orthochristian.com/102542.html)

But the most fascinating allusion to Pontius Pilate’s wife in litetature can be found in John Masefield’s 1925 play, “The Trial of Jesus” –

“Pilate’s wife stands with the centurion near the cross, watching Jesus slowly die. She asks the centurion at the end, ‘Do you think he is dead?’ ‘No, lady, I don’t,’ the soldier answers her. ‘Then where is he?’ ‘Let loose in the world, lady,’ the centurion declares, ‘where no one can stop His truth.’”

This is the perfect message for the day after Easter.

It’s not over.

It’s just begun.

Wayne Watson sang a story song back in the day about a carnival barker who “shut down the show” after “something happened” in his life.

“Old friends are mostly puzzled,

They don’t know what to say,

‘Cause ever since that afternoon

He’s just been that way.

It’s like the old man died,

And someone came to take his place.”

The song describes how that man took up a position on a downtown street corner after his change where all day, every day, with a great big smile on his face, he cried out to all who passed by –

“New lives for old.

Warm hearts for cold.

Have I got a deal for you today,

Come on, step right this way,

And get your new lives for old.”

Easter is about an event that happened in a borrowed tomb just outside Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, and an experience that still happens in people’s lives, relationships, and worlds right now. This is the reason why the church has always baptized people on Easter Sunday. Romans 6 connects the Easter event with the Easter experience in its discussion of baptism –

“…All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death… We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. …Our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For he who has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. …So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Excerpts of Romans 6:3-11)

The tradition that Pontius Pilate’s wife became a Christian, and then actually died for her faith is affirmed in parts of the Eastern Church where she is venerated as a Saint, and in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church both Pontius Pilate and his wife, Claudia Procula, are regarded as Saints and Martyrs. They detect the seed of saving faith in what Pontius Pilate had written on the placard that was nailed to the cross above Christ as He was crucified –

“Pilate wrote a title and put it on the cross; it read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.’ Many of the Jews read this title, for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, in Latin, and in Greek. The chief priests of the Jews then said to Pilate, ‘Do not write, ‘The King of the Jews,’ but, ‘This man said, I am King of the Jews.’ Pilate answered, ‘What I have written I have written.’” (John 19:19-22)

Is this tradition of the conversion of Pontius Pilate and his wife historically true? I don’t know, I suppose it depends in large measure on how much credit you are prepared to give to traditions that come from the early church. What I do know for sure is that this tradition bears witness to a truth that is intrinsic to the Gospel and integral to the meaning of Easter. “We are born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (I Peter 1:3). “If anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

I don’t know if Pontius Pilate and his wife actually became Christians, but the fact that the Gospel says they could have, and that the tradition of the early church is that they did, is enough for the words of the Creed that I recite each week in church – “…and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried” – to flash with promise, power, and hope.

One more thing about Pontius Pilate’s wife.

There’s just one reference to her in the Bible, Matthew 27:19 – “While Pilate was sitting in the judgment hall, his wife sent him a message: “Have nothing to do with that innocent man, because in a dream last night, I suffered much on account of him.” It’s that reference to a “dream’ that captures my imagination.

Dreams as a vehicle that the Lord uses to make His will known is a prominent feature in the story of Jesus that the Gospel of Matthew tells. It was in a dream that the Angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph as he pondered what to do about Mary, his betrothed, who was with child (Matthew 1:20). It was in a dream that the Wise Men were told to go home from Bethlehem by a different route in order to avoid additional contact with King Herod who was raging (Matthew 2:12). It was in a dream that Jospeh was told to take Mary and baby Jesus to Egypt where they lived as refugees outside the murderous reach of King Herod (Matthew 2:13), and then when King Herod died, it was in a dream that Joseph was told to pack up his family and go home again (Matthew 2:19), with an adjustment in the plan made in response to another dream (Matthew 2:22).

All of this is said against the biblical backdrop of the importance of dreams as a way that the Divine communicated with the Patriarchs in the book of Genesis, and under the promise of the new dispensation of the Spirit when “your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams, and God’s Spirit will be poured out on His menservants and maidservants” (Acts 2:17-18).

In my own life I can think of 2, maybe 3 dreams, or dream-like states by which I think God unmistakably spoke to me about decisions I was making and issues I was facing that gave me some real insight into where God was and what God was doing in my life at those moments, in those circumstances. And I can’t help but wonder how many other times God was trying to use my dreams as a way of leading me “in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake” (Psalm 23:3), but I didn’t have an expectation of this being something that God did, or the resources to make proper sense of what it was that God was doing and saying?

Well, I’m now one of those “old men” that Peter/Joel was talking about who in the new dispensation of the Spirit will “dream dreams,” and I just want to say that I’m open to whatever it might be that God needs me to know at this point in my life.

A Contemplative Approach to the Cross

I’ve been reading Brian Zahnd’s new book, “The Wood Between the Worlds” (IVP  | 2024), this Lent. He describes it as a “Poetic Theology of the Cross.”  “I want to be drawn,” Brian explains early in the book, “into a contemplative orbit around the cross.”  So do I.

The Gospel doesn’t “yield its mysteries” so much to “analytical methods as to mediation,” Brian explains. Believing that theology is more like poetry than physics, and that the things the Bible tells us about God should be approached more like a painting in an art gallery than a law book in a library, Brian wants a theology that makes him sing. He wants to move past the dispassionate academic ways he was taught to critically analyze an ancient text and be ushered instead into an encounter with the same God those ancient texts report as living, and moving, and acting in the experiences of the lives and world of the ancient Hebrews and the very first Christians. He says he wants his Bible to be a “portal into the divine mystery.” When he visited Brite Divinity School as a guest lecturer when I was a student there back in the mid-1970’s, John Westerhoff, the Christian Educator, said that there are some things about our faith as Christians that are better sung than explained, and this is the same point that Brian Zahnd is making in his new book.  Our heads can only take us so far in our journey to God, at some point our hearts have got to take over. As Catherine de Hueck Doherty said, we need to “fold the wings of the intellect to open the door of the heart.” This is easier said than done for some of us.

I am given to explanation. My faith seeks understanding.  It always has. This is my ordinary mode. Loving God “with all my mind” comes naturally to me. But just about 20 years ago I came to what I perceived to be the outer limits of that way being and believing. I could argue the case that God is good. I’d read the books, sat through the lectures, written the papers, gotten a good grade. It wasn’t enough.  I desperately needed to “taste and see” that God was good too (Psalm 34:8). I needed a faith that was less a theory and more a love affair. I needed to undertake that 12-inch journey from my head to my heart again. It’s a familiar trip for me.

Earlier trips to this boundary on the spiritual journey of my life had gotten me born-again (Evangelical), Spirit-filled (Charismatically renewed), better aware of the inner light who is the indwelling Christ (Quaker), and a heart-strangely-warmed (Pietism/Emmaus). This time I set out on that trail intending to become a contemplative, or perhaps more accurately I should say, to open myself to a more contemplative way of being and believing, for this is the work of the Spirit, and as Jesus told us (John 3:8), the Spirit is like the wind. It blows when, and where, and how it wants.

We don’t control the Spirit’s movements. We can’t schedule the Spirit’s appearances.  We don’t manage the Spirit’s work. We can’t engineer the Spirit’s effects. The most we can do is to try to be open to the Spirit’s presence and power, and to try to position ourselves in those places and practices where the Spirit has a history of showing up. The terrain I consciously pitched the tent of my soul on 20 years ago was in the space where silence, liturgy, music, and icons all intersect, and from there the wind of the Spirit blew me eastward, into the world of Orthodox Christianity. And this is where I bumped into Mary. In Eastern Christianity, Mary traverses that same ground, the terrain of silence, liturgy, music, and icons. Twenty years ago she has become my companion on the contemplative way, and my example of what it means to be a contemplative believer.

In his epic 1968 poem on Mary – “A Woman Wrapped in Silence” (Paulist Press) – author John W. Lynch zeroed in on Luke’s description of Mary quietly observing the cosmic events unfolding in her life, and in the life of her Son, and treasuring them, “reflecting on them in her heart” (Luke 2:19; 2:51). Mary is at the Cross, but she is silent. Luke tells us that she “stood at a distance” with the other women, that “she saw these things” (Luke 23:49) but said nothing.  “Here a woman wrapped in silence,” John Lynch wrote, “and the words were closed within her spacious heart for pondering.” “Through long years of pondering God’s word and cherishing the memory of these mysterious events in her heart, Mary penetrated the truths they held and her understanding of them grew.”

Every Holy Week I return to a Pastoral Prayer I wrote for the last Sunday of Lent several years ago. I don’t just want to go to church this week, I want to enter into the mystery of faith, and so I pray –

Lord, our journey to Easter has turned the corner and is heading for home.  Today we find ourselves stand on the precipice of Holy Week.  From here we can hear the shouts of “Hosanna!” From here we can taste the bread and cup of the Last Supper, feel the wounds of the cross, see the sealed tomb and smell the fear and despair of shattered expectations.  This is familiar terrain.  We know this story well.  We know how it unfolds and where it winds up. 

Save us, Lord, from familiarity and complacency; from the boredom and inertia of being old hands at all of this.  We’ve sung all of the hymns before.  We’ve heard all of the sermons before.   We’ve gone through all of the rituals before.  We’ve prayed all of the liturgies before.  Our appetites have been honed by a culture that craves the new and improved, so teach us to love the old, old story.  Send your Spirit to close the circuit between the needs of our hearts and world, and the promises of grace that you made for us in Jesus Christ. 

Help us to discover the Gospel again, Lord, not just on the pages of Scripture and in the traditions of the church, but in the twists and turns of our lives and in the hopes and hurts of the world.

On Palm Sunday, when we hear about Christ’s triumphal entry, help us to join the shout of the crowd as they cry out for salvation.  Come as Prophet, Priest and King into our hearts and into this church to be our way, our truth and our life. 

On Maundy Thursday, when we hear about the Last Supper, make room at that table for us; a place where we can love and be loved; a place where we can belong and believe.

On Good Friday, as we hear about the way of the cross, gather up our suffering, and the suffering of the whole world, and carry it to the heart of the Father. 

On Holy Saturday, when we hear about Christ in the tomb and the disciples behind closed doors, come and sit with us in our own fears and disappointments.

And on Easter Sunday, when we hear about the empty tomb and the Risen Christ, shift our gaze from then to now, giving us hope for the possibilities of the newness of life, both abundant and eternal.

We don’t need another history lesson, Lord.  We need the assurance of your presence in our lives that are filled with struggle, and we need the provision of your grace to continue to live courageously and compassionately in this very scary world of ours.  We need to know where you are and what you are doing, Lord, so bring us to Holy Week where your story and our stories can intersect and intertwine once again, and then anchor us there where we can know that “resurrection is stronger than crucifixion, that forgiveness is stronger than bitterness, that reconciliation is stronger than hatred, and that light is stronger than darkness,” we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.

The Lenses of Good Friday

More than once this week I’ve seen a meme posted online about how Jesus was crucified for standing up to the empire and not to atone for the sins of humanity, and I wonder why this is being pitched as a forced choice. Why must we divide into camps, the “redemptives” who view the cross of Christ as an atoning sacrifice in one corner, and the “politicals” who view the cross of Christ a regime-toppling act of socio-political defiance in the other corner?

Ephesians 6:12 has long been one of those reality-defining verses for me – “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” If this is true – and I think it is – then “standing up to the empire” and “atoning for the sins of humanity” are not mutually exclusive competing agendas, but part and parcel of the very same thing. Sin is personal and social. The cross is political and atoning. Salvation is spiritual and temporal. We struggle against “flesh and blood” systems and structures, and “principalities and powers in  heavenly places.”

Because there was an attempt on His life by King Herod when He was born “King of the Jews” (Matthew 2:1-18), and He spent three years announcing that “the Kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15), and He was tried, condemned, and ridiculed “under Pontius Pilate,” a Roman official (Matthew 27:11-231; Mark 15:1-20; Luke 23:1-25; John 18:28-19:16), and had a placard nailed to His cross above His head that read “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek (John 19:19-20), and had Roman soldiers dispatched to guard his tomb (Matthew 27:62-66), there is an unmistakable political lens through which to view the events of Good Friday. It is one of the Biblical angles through which to view the person and work of Jesus Christ.

The Empire killed Jesus. That’s abundantly clear from the Biblical witness. They killed Him because He was perceived to be a threat by them. That’s why Rome killed the two men beside Jesus on Good Friday too. But the death of Jesus means something more than just this. That’s abundantly clear from the Biblical witness as well. This is why when Pontius Pilate, the Empire’s legate in Judea, told Jesus that he had the power to release or crucify Him, Jesus relativized the boast by telling Pilate that any imagined power he thought he had had been “given to you from above” (John 19:10-11). The mechanics of the crucifixion were the work of the Empire, but the laying down of His life was something that Christ did “of His own accord” (John 10:18). “No one takes my life from me” Jesus explained, not Annas, not Caiaphas, not Herod, not Pilate. There was something more than just the struggle between political values and visions that put Jesus on the cross.

Jesus died. That’s what history tells us, and the Empire had a hand in it. That makes it a political act of violence triggered by Christ’s subversion of the “flesh and blood” agents of oppression that disregard the image of God that gives every human being dignity and worth. But Jesus died for our sins. It was the culminating act in his struggle with “the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” That’s what the Gospel tells us, and that’s makes what Christ did on the cross an atoning sacrifice.

My “progressive” friends and colleagues shake their heads at those of us who read the texts of Good Friday primarily and emphatically through redemptive lenses, and they wonder how we could be so blind to its obvious political implications.  And my “traditional” friends and colleagues shake their heads at those who read the Good Friday texts primarily and emphatically through political lenses, and point to its “eclipse of the atonement,” and to its “lack of clarity about the salvific efficacy of Christ’s suffering and death,” as examples of everything that’s wrong with the church today. 

Like children on the blacktop at recess getting up a kickball game, we’re all busy choosing up our sides. “Redemptives” over here, “politicals” over there.  The only problem is that I don’t want to play. One of the more troubling aspects of the church today is the way that we’ve stopped listening to each other.  So convinced are we of the rightness of our own positions as “redemptives” or “politicals,” that we’ve stopped listening to each other.  And the tragedy of this, again, if you ask me, is that in doing this, we’ve both settled for just half of Biblical Christianity.

It was reading E. Stanley Jones’ book “The Christ of the Mount” (Abingdon 1931) when I was a freshman in Christian College that persuaded me of the fact that Christianity has both a redemptive and an ethical side, and that “if the ethical side of our gospel is unworkable, then by that very fact the redemptive side is rendered worthless.”  To be sure, I find the redemptive side of the Gospel to be primary in my thinking and believing.  You may find the ethical side of the Gospel to be primary.  But so long as we both acknowledge that the Gospel is bigger than just what we ourselves regard as primary, that there is an ethical side to our redemptive side, or vice versa, depending on our perspective, then we’re within “hearing distance” of each other, and the possibility of the formation of a vital community of interpretation exists. But, for this to move from the potential and the possible to the actual and the experienced, then we’ve all got to act on it. “Politicals” need to show that they are just as interested in talking to “redemptives” as they are in talking to other “politicals,” and we “redemptives” have got to show that we are just as interested in talking to “politicals” as we are in talking to our fellow “redemptives.” 

As a first step, as a gesture of good will, we might begin by refusing to caricature each other, erecting stereotypes to be smugly and gleefully dismantled with our respective airs of spiritual superiority.  This is the “good faith assumption” that I find to be so missing from so much of recent theological and political rhetoric. It says that I will begin with the assumption that the person with whom I disagree is just as interested in and serious about the matter at hand as I am.  And then, as a second step, we might become more deliberate in sending signals that we are aware of the others in the interpretive community who see the texts with different lenses, and to embrace the idea that there is always more to the text than just my experience, perspective and presuppositions allow me to see. We’ve all got to stop speaking and acting as if matters of our shared faith that are held by equally faithful people in a rich variety of ways will finally sort out into a single position when everyone else truly understands it – and agree with what I think!  When I am just as committed to listening to you and your interpretation of the Gospel, as I am in trying to explain to you my interpretation of the Gospel, and to persuade you that I’m right, I believe that it is the Gospel that is actually served.  

“Thoughts & Prayers” and “Pastoral Malpratice”, Part 3

Part 3

The second crucial conversation that a commitment to “thoughts & prayers” involves us in as Christians is the one that we have with God about the things that can be shown to be what the Bible teaches. This is the third step in the process that Richard Hayes identifies as being what it means to take the Bible seriously. We’ve got to relate the truth of what the ancient texts say to the reality and demands of our contemporary circumstances and situations. As Dr. Hayes explains –

Even if we should succeed in giving some satisfactory synthetic account of the New Testament’s ethical content, we will still find ourselves perched on the edge of a daunting abyss: the temporal and cultural distance between ourselves and the text.

There’s a familiar distinction that often gets drawn between the “letter” of a Biblical text and its “spirit” based largely on John 6:63 where Jesus says – “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life,” and on 2 Corinthians 3:4 where Paul describes the new covenant that comes to us not as a written code that kills but “in the Spirit who gives life.” And while I would not want to drive too deep a wedge between the “letter” and the “spirit” of a Biblical text, I fully appreciate the difference between wanting to know the “letter” of a Biblical text so that I can be intellectually informed, and wanting to experience the “spirit” of a Biblical text so that I might be spiritually transformed.

George Whitefield (1714 – 1770), the Anglican cleric who’s powerful preaching ministry did so much to stir the fires of the 18^th century Evangelical Revival in both Great Britain and the American Colonies, explained –

I began to read the Holy Scriptures upon my knees, laying aside all other books, and praying over, if possible, every line and word. This proved meat indeed and drink indeed to my soul. I daily received fresh life, light and power from above.

In my mind this is the perfect description of the second crucial conversation that a serious commitment to “thoughts & prayers” will generate in us as Christians. Once we know what’s in the Bible, then we’ve got to come to terms with how it actually applies to us and our lives, and that involves a prayerful conversation with God about what it is that we find in the Bible.

I remember singing the James Russel Lowell lyric in the classic hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation” from the 1953 Disciple hymnal (the best one we ever produced) when I was in Christian College and serving my first few churches in the Pacific Northwest –

“New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.”

It’s not that God’s truth changes, but the contexts, both personal and social, to which those ancient truths must speak certainly do. We ask questions today that the Bible never anticipated. We face situations now that the Bible did not foresee. Go to the concordance in the back of your Bible right now and look up every reference to assault rifles, school shootings, and the Second Amendment, and you will find none. But this doesn’t mean that the Bible is devoid of wisdom to guide us, or that it is without good counsel to instruct us as we seek solutions to contemporary problems.

We may not have chapters and verses to which we can turn to settle a question, but we do have principles that are deeply informed by the weight of the Biblical witness, and that can be prayerfully discerned by paying attention to the Spirit’s promptings in our minds, and by listening to the Spirit’s small still voice whispering in our hearts. As John Robinson (1576 – 1625), the Pastor to the Pilgrims in Holland told them in his farewell address as they left for the New World – the Lord has “more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word.” And it’s the second crucial conversation that a commitment to “thoughts & prayers” generates – the one that takes place between a Christian and God about what’s in the Bible – that’s when, and where, and how we find that truth and see that light.

The idea that we can do away with serious “thoughts & prayers” in the urgency of the demand for meaningful “policy & change” is an ignorant argument at best, and a dangerous argument at worst. And for those of us who are in the “thoughts & prayers” business to give the impression that “thoughts & prayers” are unnecessary and irrelevant is foolishness at best, and unfaithfulness at worst. It’s only as we do our “thoughts & prayers” work with integrity and intentionality as people of faith that we will have anything helpful to say in the public conversation about “policy & change.” DBS +

 

Beloved

The great temptation of the church in an era of challenge and decline like the one that we currently find ourselves in is to want to pull back and take care of ourselves rather than to turn outward in Christ’s mission of extending God’s compassion to anyone and everyone who has been kicked to the curb and told that they don’t matter. And because this is just such an era of challenge and decline for churches like ours, the Jesus I believe we really need right now is the Jesus who meets us in the Gospel of Luke.

The Jesus of Matthew’s Gospel is the Messiah of God’s complete faithfulness. The Jesus of Mark’s Gospel is the Son of God’s mighty purpose and power. The Jesus of Luke’s Gospel is the Son of Man whose compassion draws the least, the last, and the lost into the embrace of God’s inclusive love.  And the Jesus of John’s Gospel is the Word of God made flesh who comes to offer us the gift of eternal life.

I know all of these Jesuses.
I believe in all of these Jesuses.
I need all of these Jesuses.

When I struggle with knowing what’s true and who it is that I can finally trust, I find that it’s the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew I really need. When the days grow dark and it feels like chaos is winning the fight, I find that it’s the Jesus of the Gospel of Mark I really need.  When loved ones die and I am confronted with the fact of my own mortality, I find that what I really need is the Jesus of the Gospel of John.  And when I am tempted to pull back into the cocoon of myself to pursue my own private interests and to seek my own selfish well-being, I find that it’s the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke I really need.  The most important thing for a church like ours to rediscover and then proclaim in a mean era when people are increasingly picking sides, drawing lines, and building barriers to keep others out is that we are God’s “beloved” — we are — all of us — God’s “beloved.” And this is precisely what the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke makes clear to me.

Near the end of his life, Henri Nouwen said that the central moment in the public ministry of Jesus as the Christ as far as he as concerned was His baptism in the Jordan by John when He heard the voice of God say – “You are my beloved.”  The last great theme of Henri Nouwen’s long and distinguished vocation as a spiritual teacher was the development of this idea that at the very center of the spiritual life for us as Christians is hearing the words – “You are my Beloved” – in “a deep way,” and then living out this truth as a contradiction to everything that the world believes.

The world says that our worth is determined by how we look, by what we weigh, by who we vote for, by where we live, by the level of our education and income, by who we love, by where we were born, by the color of our skin, or by any one of a hundred other things. But in the world our worth is always conditional.  It always depends on something else.  It’s something we have to deserve.  It’s something we have to be worthy of.  It’s something we have to earn.  But the Biblical word for “beloved” cuts through all of this and says that our worth is something that is established by God’s own determination and declaration instead.  The Biblical word for “beloved” is variant of the Biblical word “agape,” a word that refers to God’s love – a “deep, active, self-sacrificing, and absolutely unconditional” kind of love. To be “beloved” is literally to be “agape-ed.”

Jesus heard that He was “agape-ed” ~ “beloved” when He got baptized.  Jesus was baptized in the Jordan by John to fully identify Himself with the people He came to seek and save, and so when God declared Him “Beloved” I believe that it wasn’t just a statement about Him alone, but rather it was a statement for, and about us all.  As one of the greatest theologians that the church has ever produced, a man named Athanasius (296 – 373), put it – “He [Jesus Christ] became what we are so that he might makes us what He is.” Getting into line with all those people who were being baptized was part of Jesus “becoming what we are,” and God’s declaration of Jesus as His “Beloved” child is part of Jesus “making us what He is.”

In a sermon that he preached at the Episcopal Cathedral in St. Louis at the beginning of January in 2011 [http://yourcathedral.blogspot.com/2011/01/you-are-my-beloved-sermon-for-feast-of.html] the Rev. Mike Kinman explained that the truth of “Beloved-ness” is a truth that moves in three directions at once.  First it moves inward. It’s first a word that gets spoken to each one of us individually. Once we’ve internalized this truth and feel it in our bones, then it starts to move outward.  You see, not only am I God’s beloved, but so are you, as is everyone in this beloved community we call the church.  So, in your imagination tattoo the word “Beloved” onto the forehead of every other Christian you meet – the Conservative ones and the Liberal ones, the Progressive ones and the Fundamentalist ones, the ones who are most like you and the ones who couldn’t be more different from you – and then frame every thought you have of them and every word you speak to them, or about them, by the fact that they are numbered among God’s “agape-ed.”  And once we’ve started treating each other around here, inside the four walls of the church, as “beloved,” then it’s time to open up the doors and take this show on the road.

John 3:16 doesn’t say that God so loved the church that He sent his only begotten Son, but that God so loved the world. It’s the whole world and everyone in it that’s “Beloved” by God.  There are no exceptions.  And so Rev. Kinman told his congregation that Christians are people who –

…through prayer and [Bible] study listen to God’s voice saying: “You are my beloved,” and who every day grow a little less fearful and a little more trusting that it is true. It’s being people who look at each other and see before anything else someone whom God adores. [And] Who every day try just a little bit harder to be a part of God adoring everyone else…

Jesus heard God say that He was “Beloved” while standing in the waters of His baptism.  I think that where we are most likely to hear God say that we are His “Beloved” is at the Lord’s Table where bread is broken and a cup is poured in remembrance of Christ’s saving acts and in celebration of His continuing presence.  We come to the Lord’s Table to hear God say – “You are my Beloved.” And then we go from the Lord’s Table knowing that every person we meet is God’s “Beloved” too, and understanding that we may very well be the only people in the world with the power at that moment to tell them, and to show them, who they truly are – God’s “Beloved.”  DBS +

 

This week is the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation

This week is the 500^th Anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. It was on October 31, 1517, that that the Roman Catholic priest and monk Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany. While there had been previous attempts to reform the church, and there would be more to follow, including that of our own Thomas and Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone on the American frontier in the early 1800’s (“The Reformation of the 19^th Century” – J. H. Garrison) this dramatic and providential act of Martin Luther is as good as any event to officially mark the beginning of the spiritual movement of Protestantism that changed the face of the church and the world.

The Protestant Reformation was nothing less than a Copernican revolution in theology. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 –1543) fomented his revolution in the scientific world by removing the Earth from the center of the universe around which all of the other planets, including the Sun, revolved, replacing it with the Sun at its center around which all of the other planets, including the Earth, revolved. Before the Reformation the Roman Catholic Church with its dogmas and traditions was at the center of the spiritual solar system, and every other church and spiritual movement was put into rotation around it, their places determined by how close or how far their teachings were from the official teachings of Roman Catholicism. In contrast, Protestantism put the Bible at the center of the Christian solar system, and then aligned the planets of the churches and movements around its teachings, their place determined by how close or how far from the truth of Scripture their teachings were, and this gets to the spiritual nub of the revolution that was the Protestant Reformation.

In 1521, Martin Luther was called before Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms to fully explain his views. “Diet” refers to an official meeting and “Worms” is a city south of Frankfurt.   At the end of this defense of his ideas, tradition says that Martin Luther stood before his opponents and boldly declared –

Unless I am convicted by scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of popes and councils for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me.

“Convicted by Scripture” — “my conscience a captive to the Word of God” — “here I stand, I cannot do otherwise” — this is the Reformation in a nutshell. Dr. Scott H. Hendrix, the Emeritus Professor of Reformation History and Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, explains the significance of these famous words –

Luther asserted that his conscience was captive to the Word of God and that he could not go against conscience. This was not, however, a modern plea for the supremacy of the individual conscience or for religious freedom. Though already excommunicated by Rome, Luther saw himself as a sworn teacher of Scripture who must advocate the right of all Christians to hear and live by the gospel.

One of the most important insights of the Reformation, as far as I am concerned, is that reformation is not something that is once done and forever thereafter settled, but rather, that reformation is an ongoing process for every Christian and every church in every generation. ”Ecclesia semper reformanda est” – “Reformed and always reforming” – or, in its more complete form – “The church is reformed and always [in need of] being reformed according to the Word of God” – is a familiar way for Protestants to think and talk about what the Reformation means. The “Word of God” (Incarnate in Christ, inscripturated in the Bible, and illumined in our hearts by the Holy Spirit) always confronts and corrects our thinking, feeling, and acting.  An important part of its function is to challenge us, our thinking and living.  As James Smart explained –

The Word of God has in it always elements that are congenial and elements that are uncongenial since it is at one and the same time God’s words of both judgment and grace, no grace without judgment and no judgment without grace. To eliminate the uncongenial may be to escape the judgment that makes ready to receive the grace. 

Reformation is the faithful consequence of the Word carefully taking our measure, us coming up short both individually as Christians and corporately as the church, and us rolling up our sleeves and getting to work to bring things into better conformity with the Mind of Christ as it has been revealed to us in the Word. This is why Pastor Jack Hayford says that we need to continuously “drive a nail” into the pulpit, the Lord’s Table, the pipe organ, the choir loft, and the pews of our churches today – into “any place both visible and sufficiently shocking to provide a counterpart to the ancient door at Wittenberg.”

Half a millennium ago the Church was shaken to its roots – dragged by the nape of the neck to confront the reality of God’s Word, and forced to face the fact that its forms had chained people rather than freed them. The dual truths of “justification by faith” and “the priesthood of the believer” were trumpeted forth and the true “church” – the people of God – was released through a recovery of the revelation of God’s Word.  We’re overdue for another one.

More than one Reformation historian has pointed to Jean Perrissin’s painting – “Le Temple de Paradis, Lyon” (1564) – to help visualize the spiritual Copernican revolution that the Reformation was in the life of the church and Christians.  It shows a Protestant Church in France.  At the center of this little spiritual universe is the pulpit.  The preaching and teaching of the Word is the center around which everything else that is going on in this church turns – the children waiting to be instructed in the faith, the couple waiting to get married, the businessmen dressed for work, the baptism of a newborn baby, even the dog that has made its way to worship and sits attentively under the pulpit!

The point in these details is that all these people and all these activities centered on and revolved around the proclamation of God’s Word.   They believed the Bible was God’s message for them and to tem, sufficient not only to save but also to guide one in a life godliness.  As the Word from God, therefore, it had to be proclaimed, heard, and obeyed.  Indeed, it had to have the final say. (Matthew Barrett)

Back in 2012, Darryl Dash (https://dashhouse.com) called for a new a “Copernican Revolution of the Word that puts us in our place in orbit around God and His Word in our lives, our churches, and our preaching.” Instead of positioning ourselves at the center of the universe and demanding that “the Bible spin in orbit around our lives,” Darryl argued that “it’s far better to put God and His Word at the center, and to demand that our lives spin in orbit around Him.” And I couldn’t agree more.  The Reformation is not just an event that we remember and celebrate. Reformation is a commitment we make and a continuing process to which we give ourselves.  It is said that the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther told the Renaissance scholar Erasmus – “The difference between you and me is that you sit above the Scripture and judge it, while I sit under Scripture and let it judge me.” And if you ask me, that the essence of what it means to be a Protestant.  It is to consciously “sit under Scripture.”  Drive a nail in it. DBS +