Structural Racism, Systemic Racism and the Racism that Lives in Your Heart

I grew up in one of those mid-sized cities in Texas where there was an abundance of every kind of hypocrisy hiding just beneath a veneer of small city charm. There was a "black side" of town and a "mexican side" of town and it never dawned on me until much later that this was on purpose and even the result of policies (written and unwritten) meant to keep the city cordoned off like that. I also grew up in locker rooms, where a good friend recently reminded me, such divisions tend to get choked out. There were a few guys in those locker rooms who hated black people - all of them, even the ones in the locker room - but most of their vitriol was held in check by the fact that we were all trying to do something else - win football games. A largely meritocratic society developed (can you do your job?). My circle of friends, the guys I spent the most time with were from all sides of town. I attended elementary school in a school over in the "black side" of town in a program that pulled in kids from all over the city. A lot of those kids were in the locker room with me in high school.

In our current troubles we are being confronted with a smorgasbord of problems. Some of them are racial, some of them aren't. Its important to do a few things as we think and seek to act accordingly. First, we have to remember that none of these issues exist in isolation, they're all thrown in a giant bag and shaken about like those fried pizza dough balls covered in cinnamon sugar that Ernie's pizza used to have. But secondly, and here's the pickle, they have to be addressed separately otherwise we get a whole lot of confusion (or a really good cinnamon sugar ball that kind of melts in your mouth and makes you forget all about all the other troubles in the world for just a few seconds, but I digress...). One of the ways this confusion happens is by lumping a bunch of things into one phrase: "Systemic Racism." This is a problem for a number of reasons, but mostly because it leads people to believe and act as though the problem is a thing called The System, and the solution is to either change The System or burn The System down or reset The System. But the problems of racism and specifically racial animosity are far more troublesome than this. So let’s look at three different layers of the racism problem to start seeing how complicated this thing is, so we can start dreaming up ways to do the work we have to do. I'll use my own little hometown as an example.

Structural Racism

This is maybe the easiest to identify and the clearest thing to know how to fight. One of the things that made the Civil Rights movement so powerful was that it went to war with particular structural sins or evils. Jim Crow laws are an example of structural racism. Policies requiring black people to give up their bus seats for white riders are structural racism. Companies maintaining policies (both written and unwritten but the ones everybody knows not to violate) that forbid the hiring of black people or anyone on the basis of the color of their skin is structural racism. Any laws or policies that are designed around racial animosity or superiority represent structural racism. In my hometown any legal barriers or financial policies from banks or other institutions that prevented a black family from buying a house in my neighborhood on the west side of town represents structural racism. This doesn't mean that there will be a flood of racial diversity in that sprawling expansion of mostly identical houses - for there may be any number of reasons why a black person wouldn't want to live in that neighborhood. But anybody who wants to buy a house in that neighborhood and can afford to, should be legally free to. Its important to note that eliminating structural racism is not about outcomes but process. If there aren't any black people living in the sprawling metropolis of West Wichita Falls (no idea what the demographic make-up of that neighborhood is now), we should investigate why before we jump to structural conclusions. We want a free society, one that is marked by distinctive and diverse expressions, not one marked by monolithic results.

A society infected with the fermenting presence of the gospel should be in steady rebellion against structural racism. Laws should be overturned. Policies should be rewritten. Unwritten ones should be exposed and abandoned. This process takes time - and it should take time. Some of those policies and laws are buried underneath layers and layers of other policies and laws and just getting to them and understanding them is difficult and we're not dealing with some centralized System. Furthermore we're dealing with a lengthy history of this sort of thing. Those things leave a cultural legacy. Removing unjust structures remove impediments to freedom, they don't actually create free people and free communities. The movement of a society that is being transformed by the gospel should be towards freedom, biblical, God-centered freedom.

The Racism that Lives in Your Heart (or Might Live In There)

The world's rebellion against God is total. The bible describes the nature of this rebellion as the desires of the flesh, the desires of the eyes and the pride of life (1 John 2:16). We are all a nexus of disordered desires that rule us and shape our actions, our ambitions and our attitudes. We are prideful - so prideful that we'll root that pride in the dumbest and most insane things imaginable. We do so oftentimes as a bulwark to protect our pursuit of that mixed up and destructive nexus of desires. One of the rather historically pervasive out-workings of this mix of personal evil is the racism that may live in your heart. People hate other people for having a certain skin color. This isn't merely or primarily a sentiment, it is an attitude connected to a set of actions that leads people to step on those people of a different color on their way to fulfilling those disordered desires. It’s as though the Samaritan in Jesus' story was less good and rather than stopping to help, saw that the man was from Judea and kept on going. One can harbor racist animosities and oppose structural racism. It should be noted one can harbor racist animosities and adamantly defend affirmative action, the welfare state and reparations (and they often do). And, it should go without saying, someone can attain to positions of power and hold vigorously to racial animosity.

In my high school locker room there was a starting, white, and rather gifted player who held fairly evident racial animosities. But those animosities were kept in check by two things: 1) Structural freedom. The powers that be didn't care what color your skin was so long as you did your job. The locker room wasn't divided up into racial groups. No one was restricted from trying out for the team or starting and earning playing time on the basis of their skin color. Combine these factors with the reality that he wanted to play football and there were boundaries on what impact his bigotries could have, and 2) Culture. When that racial animosity came out - there was space for a man to be a bigot, but very little space for that bigotry to come out in the functioning of the team or in practice (locker room punishments could be severe and swift from diverse sources). But notice, none of these things changed the actual individual. He even had black friends on the team, but in conversations and arguments with the guy neither the diversity of the locker room nor the shame of the locker room produced any noticeable transformation in the guy's heart towards black skin generally.

We can restrict the impact of this man's bigotry, but I can't change that man's "pride of life." No policy can. No amount of shaming and cancel culture can. No external law can do the work that only the Spirit of God can do. And not just God working through some sort of gnostic magic. But God working through the real life process of a conversion and repentance and faith and discipleship to believe God and to see and live in the world under the Scriptures. And particularly through pastors and other Christians who know him and love him well enough to name his sin and call him to repent of his sin.

A lot of what is currently happening in our cultural moment is the belief that if we just shame bigotry enough or proactively find ways to make bigotry illegal then we can solve the problem tomorrow. The law has always been impotent to free us (and society) from sin (Romans 7) - in fact all it does is arouse it (both in ourselves and in our society). Godless, un-sanctified bigotries grab hold of the law and find new and exciting ways to be bigotrous (wanted to make up a new word). (And its important to note that white people can practice racial animosity and black people can practice racial animosity and its about the most condescendingly racist thing I can imagine to deny that.) I think that's happening in at least two ways right now: 1) Anti-racism is becoming the new racism. And 2) I justify my own culturally endorsed bigotries by condemning the sins of other generations rather than my own sins or I blame it all on The System.

Systemic Racism and The System

"The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular."

This line in Dostoevsky describes at least one impulse to blame The System in our current troubles. Its how violent and destructive riots can be defended and justified (when you frame a burning business in terms of The System you no longer have to consider the person(s) whose life is attached to that business). Its how we avoid the kind of long-suffering work necessary to actually see a person transformed. And as structural sins become increasingly less common, the work that must be done to become the kind of society that reflects the justice and freedom of God is the kind of work that takes generations of worship, discipleship, church discipline and faithful christian education.

I was asked recently if I believe in systemic racism. I am finding it to be an increasingly unhelpful term because I think its too vague and presents us with an unidentifiable problem while moving people away from the real essential work necessary. But I do think it exists in primarily two forms: 1) There are racists in our society's institutions whose animosities impact the institutions they are a part of, and 2) There are cultural ramifications downstream from both past institutionalized racism and relatively pervasive racial animosity. The reality though, is that these things are really hard to identify, quantify or correct. There is no The System to tear down. There is surely still work to be done in our laws. And there is an enormous amount of work to be done in the lives of actual people. But the recession of systemic racism will not come because we burned down The System, but because we went to work building churches, discipling people, practicing hospitality and building friendships, starting businesses that are generous and well managed, creative and unencumbered by wicked bigotries. It will, in the end be overcome by generations of faithfulness in neighborhoods, businesses, government, and churches. In other words, it means a deep work of Jesus over centuries in generations of people.

Some Thoughts on the Recent Troubles

I have edited this post in a few places at the behest of good friends and pastors who have helped me say things better and help avoid at least some misunderstandings. If one is going to offend people, offend them on purpose - not on accident. I have removed the statistics concerning black and white deaths in section 4 - mostly because they became an unhelpful distraction to the main point I wanted to make there and all the numbers are in dispute (the WaPo has changed their estimates several times in the past 2 weeks without explanation). That whole section needed work so I rewrote a bunch of it in an attempt to be clearer. I took some unnecessary digs at a lot of excessively-white posturing (I’ll just call it EWP) which could’ve been heard (and was) as an attack on anybody who is feeling passionately about these issues or participating in peaceful protests, etc. That wasn’t my intent. Again, I want to intentionally offend the right people and I didn’t aim well enough. Lastly, a number of folks have asked for justifications for a white pastor to say any of this. My answer has been and continues to be that I am a pastor, my white skin doesn’t avail me of the responsibility to help our people, as best I can, to think and live biblically right now.

It has been a week of deep trouble in our nation. It began with the video of the terrible death of George Floyd with his neck pressed against the pavement under a policeman's knee. Marches protesting his death were soon followed by riots, and eventually looting and the burning of Minneapolis. These horrors spilled over into more peaceful protests, followed by looting and rioting in cities all over the country - including our own. People have rushed to speak, to act, to do something in the face of all this pain and rage. With the deluge of hot takes, sweeping moral judgments and diagnoses, it is remarkably important to find space to pray, to listen, to read the bible and to think clearly and scripturally about what's happening in the world around us.

God commands us to be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger (James 1:19). On Sunday when I addressed our current troubles, the main word I wanted to speak was a word of humility. That we would be a people who turn to the Scriptures, who hear what God says, who live on the basis of those convictions and not on the basis of anxious pressures laid out for us in news alerts, twitter feeds, or other people’s expectations of us to respond in the *Right Way.

I want us to think and feel carefully about these things. I don’t speak as an expert on racial reconciliation or the history of racial relations in our country. I am mostly trying to speak as a pastor to my people about some things I hope will guide our thinking and acting as a church in this moment.

(1) It's okay to be sad and angry. The impulse to simply and unthinkingly react to pain — our own or someone else's — is an escape and doesn't properly acknowledge the pain at all. I spent a few days wanting to throw up after first seeing the video of George Floyd’s killing. I felt pain and anger and grief all at once. We prayed about it as a family. I felt a hole in my stomach. I didn’t know what to do or say.

*We had a cat when I was young that would spontaneously yelp and go racing through our house. We thought he was playing some sort of game and would cheer him on when he did so. After he died during one of these episodes we asked a vet who told us that he likely had a heart condition and was running from the pain. We often are too quick to speak and react when we should mourn, pray and think. There are times for action. But when our impulse is to move away from pain too quickly and to just start saying and doing things - particularly in anger, there is a very good chance that we will start trying to solve the wrong problems with the wrong solutions. Such things generally lead to sin and harm. A number of Christians are speaking and acting with little biblical thought or contemplation. A lot of Christians are refusing to look at the problems at all. A lot of this is us simply trying to do something with pain and with the shock of seeing another man die. Slow down. Pray. Think. Listen.

(2) We believe the Scriptures. Always. This is just another way of saying (a confessional way of saying) that we listen to and obey God. He defines the world for us. He defines words like justice and sin and judgment and peace. We don't get to define those words, our pain and longings don't get to define those terms, other people's experiences don't get to define those terms. God defines those terms. And so we must be a people who go to the Scriptures and think with the Scriptures. And, frankly we need to learn to examine our own feelings in the light of Scripture. It is not simply that our world's way of thinking is in rebellion against God; our world's ways of feeling are in rebellion against God. And so we should begin here.

The Scriptures command us to speak the truth in love. That necessarily means speaking the truth. In a culture claiming to be outraged by racist sins, one of the most remarkable elements of our current climate is our unwillingness to speak the truth. We are more concerned about saying the "right" things rather than saying true things. We are more concerned about how we might be interpreted or what sort of impression our words might make than we are about being truly helpful and truthful. We must repent of this. Much that is being touted as courage by white Christians in our day is actually cowardice of the worst kind. It is a refusal to say the hard thing and instead to say what every other voice is already saying. Instead of coming to the Scriptures first, listening and praying, and then speaking, many are simply repeating things that everyone else is already saying in order to make sure they are heard saying the right things. Say true things. So here are a few relatively simple true things:

• Murder is a sin. It is an act of rebellion against God. If it is perpetrated by a someone in a police uniform that makes it worse, not more excusable. There is clearly enough evidence in this case to charge Derek Chauvin with murder as the state has done. This is appropriate and good and as Christians thinking biblically we should want the charges, we should want a fair and public trial, and if he is convicted during such a trial we should want him to pay the full consequences for murdering someone.

• Burning down an auto parts store because you are angry is a sin. It is an act of rebellion against God. Burning down a Somalian refugee’s restaurant is a sin. It is an act of rebellion against God as well as a horrible injustice. Attacking people who had nothing to do with the actual sin you are outraged over save for some vague and secular notion of justice and oppression is sin. This is all unequivocally clear in Scripture. If you are a Christian you shouldn't hesitate to condemn what the bible condemns. While it is important to acknowledge and even seek to understand the larger picture of what’s unfolding at this time. None of these things excuse the destruction and sin that has unfolded over the past few weeks.

• Reconciliation requires repentance and forgiveness of sin. This is a powerful and foundational component to our relationships with each other and God. Sins are defined by Scripture, are concrete and namable. However, the blanket act of apologizing for being white or "privileged" or any other characteristic cheapens the deep and important work of confessing sins, grieving them, and relying on the power of Jesus to turn from them.

(3) A great deal of the New Testament is written to fight for and protect racial reconciliation. The New Testament is decidedly opposed to all forms of racism (Col. 3:1-17; Galatians 3:27-29; Romans 2:25-29). The problem for us is that the word racism as it's used in our current secular climate says both more and less than what the New Testament says. So to be clear, the New Testament is absolutely opposed to racial animosity and racial vain-glory by anyone. Malice towards someone on the basis of their skin color is sin. Thinking yourself better than your neighbor on the basis of your skin color is sin. There are white racial sins. There are black racial sins.

Our culture's thinking is dangerously muddled here. Intersectionality, identity politics and postmodern frameworks have become commonplace ways of thinking and they define all social relationships in terms of power and oppression. The bible frames the whole world, including our social relationships in terms of a distinction between creation and creature and the subsequent idea of belief or unbelief and righteousness and unrighteousness. I am created and therefore accountable to my creator. He has given me meaning, wisdom and has commanded all that is good and forbidden all that is evil. Every action, emotion and relationship I have in this world is defined by that foundation. Whatever station I find myself in, whatever power or wealth I have and use should be grounded in that soil and the subsequent narrative that scripture unfolds about the character of this Creator and his work to graciously redeem the world. Replacing this biblical model with the polarization of power and oppressor redefines all the words and therefore purposes we are to pursue. Justice is now fundamentally about power and oppression and not about obedience to God and his law and applying that law to social relationships. Love has to do with the rejection of power and the gifts of God (renamed as privilege) rather than obedience to God and pursuing the good of our neighbor with the gifts that God has given us.

The bible, beginning from a different starting point, is actually far more nuanced. In scripture, I can have power and I can be oppressed. But just because I don't have power doesn't mean I'm oppressed and just because I have power doesn't mean I'm an oppressor. There is in scripture the righteous poor and the unrighteous poor. There are righteous rulers and unrighteous rulers. The fundamental issue is not wealth and power vs. poverty and oppression but righteousness and unrighteousness. Do I obey God's law or not? Using a power and oppression lens to decipher the world and history and people's behavior actually makes nonsense out of much of the bible and the gospel. Subsequently, it is horrifically destructive to people and to societies. It sustains divisions that the gospel destroys and it prevents gospel-wrought reconciliation even as it pursues reconciliation. It is false teaching and should be recognized, resisted and fought against.

We should hate racism, but we must hate it the way the bible hates racism, otherwise we end up treating the wrong problems with the wrong solutions and causing more harm than good.

(4) The Bible commands me to love my neighbor. It specifies what that means in the law and in Jesus' own teaching concerning the good Samaritan. A friend of mine posted recently "Black Lives Matter shouldn't be a controversial statement." I completely agree. It shouldn't be controversial to state that the lives of my black neighbors matter. And if I'm not a hypocrite, then I must care about actual black lives about when, how often and why our black neighbors are killed. Love doesn't just go about like a noisy gong shouting culturally acceptable tropes. Love does the hard work of actually pursuing the good of my neighbor.

So when I see a black man killed in the street by a police officer, I should want to know why - really, why was he killed? I should want to know possible reasons and statistical evidence. If black lives actually matter to me, then I will be concerned about the actual death of black people, actual justice, actual numbers and statistics and stories and real sins - both systemic and individual that should be confronted. Our culture is shouting a lot about systemic racism right now with little talk about the complexity of remaining racism and the cultural complexities of the troubles our black neighbors face.

When we start actually talking about real lives lost - statistics and numbers and percentages - this allows us to investigate things like bias and racism and root causes and trends and that sort of thing. When we explore the history of racism in our country government policies (some which were explicitly racist and others which weren’t and yet were extremely destructive to Black communities) and in the church, it can help us gain a great deal of context in understanding. In other words, we can start to identify real problems that can be, if not solved, worked against. If I see a series of horrific videos over the last few years of unarmed black men being killed by police officers and former police officers, and I care about loving my black neighbor I should want to learn and find out more. Why is this happening and what is actually happening? I might begin by asking how many unarmed black people were killed in the United States last year by the police. I might want to know how that compares to other unarmed deaths in the same year (to help determine if there is and what sort of racist system may be at work in law enforcement). What I'd find is that 41 unarmed human beings (of all races and genders) were killed by the police in the United States last year. (Which, if you think about the hundreds of thousands of tense, anxious interactions police engage in each year and that guns are always potentially involved, shouldn't that lead you to marvel and give thanks to God that we have such a restrained and well trained police force?) I’d also find those shootings have common contexts around any number of different issues. Some of those issues are racial, some are more oriented around poverty and have nothing or little to do with issues of black or white. This isn't to say that there aren't racist police officers. It isn't to say that there aren't problems with police practices and policies which are systemic in nature. Its just to say that the numbers alone don’t seem to support the supposition that black people are being targeted by police and killed. The problem is bigger and more complex than that.

Rather than rushing to explain all of this pain and rage in neat and packaged ways, I have to start asking more questions and relating them to my particular context and my particular neighbors. Why did Derek Chauvin not care about George Floyd's cries for help? Why did the other police officers not step in to stop Chauvin? Maybe Derek Chauvin hates black people (and this is an act of racial malice). Maybe Derek Chauvin was arrogant and powerful and afraid. Maybe he was following police protocol. There are things to oppose going on - potentially even systemic things which allow bad police officers to stay police officers, but we should make sure we are opposing the right things, especially if we're truly concerned about black lives.

Here is why all of this is relevant - If I claim to care about my black neighbors' life but I don't care about why they are actually dying, then I am a liar. These are things that can be explored and considered. Some of these things are the cultural fruits of sinful laws and practices that have decimated the black community. Some of these things have nothing to do with racial injustice at all. But if I care about the life of my black neighbor as Jesus commands me to, then I am going to do more than just rail against some vague racist system - I am going to do the work to understand the complexity of the numerous systems that surround us. If I care about my black neighbor, I am going to care about why actual black people are dying and we are going to do the rigorous and hard work of going to war on the right things and building the right things- and doing so in the right order. And frankly I have to start by caring about my actual neighbors - whether they are black, white, hispanic or whatever glorious race or nationality God has surrounding us with. I have to be concerned about actual people I see at the grocery store and in the park where I take my kids. Some of those neighbors may be black, some may be actual, real racists. And I am commanded by Jesus and empowered by Jesus to love them.

We must abandon sloganeering, prepackaged and unbiblical narratives and do the hard work of discipleship, building communities, and applying the scriptures to every part of our world. Simply shouting "Racist cops" or "Racist police system" is potentially slanderous and potentially allows us to stop doing the actual work of reconciliation and neighboring.

I remember a few years ago a panel discussion around the shooting death of Trayvon Martin and the violence suffered by black victims. Several evangelical black pastors were on a panel being moderated by a white evangelical writer. One of the pastors named Voddie Baucham kept pulling the conversation back to root causes of poverty, fatherlessness, and violence/crime within the black community as well as advocating for workable solutions. He was repeatedly shouted down and told he was missing the point (even by the white facilitator) because he was departing from the approved talking points - but he was talking about real problems with real possible (though difficult and slow) solutions. For too long this discussion has only been allowed to happen in a very well-curated space where certain talking points have been permitted and others haven’t. If we’re going to pursue the good of our neighbors - particularly in impoverished neighborhoods and parts of our city, the conversation has to include more.

(5) Lastly, a number of pastors have rightfully pointed out that the gospel is deeply concerned about justice in the world. The gospel is not about some sort of other-worldly salvation. It is God's redemption of the world. The bible tells the story of a God who is and is coming to judge the world - to put away injustice and unrighteousness and to punish sinners. It tells the story of a God who is rescuing an uncountable number of sinners by grace from that judgment through the death and resurrection of Jesus and that through those things he is remaking the world to be marked by truth, beauty and goodness where sin and death are no more. At the heart of that gospel- the very means by which God is killing all racial animosity and all other sins perpetrated by black people and white people - is a call to repentance and faith. To turn from our disobedience, our ungodly preference, and vanity to trust in Jesus our king who atoned - completely - for all our black and white sins. If we are to have racial reconciliation, if we are to see the end of black people being killed and white people being killed, this is where we must go - to repentance and faith in the work of Jesus. And our repentance must be of the kind where real sins (not vague, soft notions of power, privilege or bias, but real concrete, biblical sins) are named and forsaken. Our faith must be of the kind that really believes that all of my sins, and the sins of my Christian neighbor (both black and white) have been atoned for - they have been paid for, by Jesus. There will be justice and reconciliation nowhere else. There are no secular answers to these problems. There is no godless or Christ-less or Cross-less path to real reconciliation and justice. So we should care deeply about these things, but we must care as Christians, as people who believe the bible and think biblically about the world, and as people who seek to obey God completely.

May we pray for and love all of our neighbors. May we pray for the reign of Jesus to conquer all evil and to overcome all stubborn rebellion against his rule. May we be slow to speak, slow to anger, quick to pray, listen, and think carefully and biblically about our lives and our world.

[Trinity Women] Goodness & Obedience (in the COVID-19 days)

Friends,

I know we’re all facing so much right now and as I said the other night amongst some of you, we’re in a bit of a pressure cooker - all the feelings, thoughts, circumstances are exponentially bigger ... but the same is true to the really wonderful things. The pressure cooker of goodness is exponentially greater as well:

The ways he is providing for us, the goodness in giving us family moments, the joy our kids have in days upon days to be at home, technology, health (even if we are slightly more at risk, we are living in a time of wonderful medicines, amazon prime, good sanitizer, which all are gifts from God to help you stay healthy. etc...).  God is close, joy is near, provisions are abundant, laughter is contagious, learning is around every corner!

Let the goodness of God in this time pressure cook in you:
delight in serving your family
respect for your husband
joy to be with those God has given to you
hope for tomorrow
desire to try (and possibly fail many times in the process) new things,
constant prayers that flow from our mouths,
joy in the Word,
life from music and movies that shape the heart and mind,
boisterous "Yes's" or "Great!" or "Amazing" or "let's try!", and
patience to let children make their own lunches so they grow in resourcefulness!

In order to be women who are able to see God's goodness and walk forward with thankful hearts, we have to start somewhere and that somewhere is going to God's word and doing what it says. 

In a morning briefing that came through my email this week from the NYT, the word 'duty' was used and I was delighted.  Many don't want to touch this word with a ten foot pole, but I quite love it.  I love that God has said, "Do this Brady and I promise to use it and in the doing of the things I command, we will commune, you will be changed, scripture will be made alive...".  What also stood out was that I've seen a lot of conversation around permission to not do your duty as Christian women during this time and yet, it's applauded when doctors and nurses do theirs.  Why do we applaud them and not apply it to ourselves by striving to be women who also go forth with courage and faith in the duties and callings that God has given to us through his word?  

We live in a time where many say that our feelings dictate what we do or don't do.  But biblically, while our feelings matter A LOT, they are always be rooted in what scripture says.  We DO, because we believe and have faith that God's word is true and that our actions will pull our feelings along (or maybe not but we still have to do the thing it says).  We should not wait to act obediently until we feel it or want it but rather in the doing, in being obedient to all the things we find in the word, God will do amazing things in us (and our families!). 

A case in point to help show how obedience to God's word is played out: Corrie Ten Boom recalls in her book, The Hiding Place, when she was reminded by her sister to 'thank God for their concentration camp dorm room that was infested with fleas just as their Bible reading from that morning had told them to do'. Corrie didn't 'feel like' thanking God for the fleas jumping on the pillow she was about to lay her head down on. But she did. She obeyed: Thank you God for the beds we have to sleep in and...the fleas.  Later, they found out that it was because of the fleas, which we know God placed there as the king of the fleas, so they could openly read their hidden bibles to the women in the room each night without fear of a guards entering because, well, they feared the fleas.  They again, thanked God that he went before them, using fleas, to allow them to read the scriptures daily. 

What if Corrie and her sister had not thanked God for the fleas in the first place?  I bet their attitudes would have looked a lot like the other women's attitudes as they faced death - hopeless, joyless, gloomy - and probably would not have had as much positive influence on them as they did.  But instead, Corrie and her sister thanked God, went about their grueling work with a posture of thankfulness.  As they read the word to other women each night and did what it told them to do, their obedience and the work of the Spirit bore unimaginable fruit in one of the darkest places known to mankind.

Let’s be like Corrie and do what the word says in order to be women who radiate joy and hope regardless of our circumstances.  We will see wonderful fruit come from our obedience instead of going about our day-to-day tasks with a half-hearted attitude missing opportunities for God to display his provision and grace and kindness toward us.  Let's approach the things we don't feel like doing with hope and a belief that God will change our feelings as we obey and ask God to help us walk faithfully in obedience to his word (reference Ps. 1:2 and 1 John 5:2-5 which say to delight in the law of the Lord and to keep his commandments which are not burdensome).

C.S. Lewis helps connect the dots between faith, trust, obedience, and the eternal fruit that comes out of it.  In Mere Christianity he says, “To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”

Back to the NYT article again: if the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff can fulfill the duty made clear to them based upon the occupations they work in (thank you God for their faithfulness right now!), without knowing the future and with anxious hearts and fear looming all around them...how much more can we, as Christian women/moms, who have hope and know what to do with anxiety and know where to cast our fears, be dutiful in the things God is calling us to (like making beds, email writing, paying bills, cooking dinner, reading stories, etc…)?

Women, let's let God's word pressure cook in us a joyfully obedience to ALL that it says.  Don't obey the word begrudgingly as if it offers no hope.  It should not be a burden to obey it and if it is, your faith is probably in the wrong thing, not in God himself, whom you are serving.  God will do great things through our obedience...both in us personally, in future generations, and on into eternity.   

Go to the word. 
Read what it says. 
And then do it (with joy because we're thankful God has graciously told us what to do as his children!).

Our Longings

What does it look like to live in discipleship to Jesus alongside one another? 

It’s easy to attach Christian jargon to this subject. Like trying to improve our Bible reading plans, we can buy a book that convicts us about doing a better job at ‘discipleship’, get inspired about our discoveries, but ultimately be changed very little. This can be discouraging. Yet, in severe contrast to this approach, when the Son of God declared that he has all authority and calls us to ‘make disciples’ in the entire world (Matthew 28:19), he calls us into a way of life. Today, I’ll focus on just one of the particular places in which discipleship to King Jesus kicks against the self-absorbed culture that we swim in.

The words of Paul in Romans 1 come as just one of a thousand starting places we could take. As you go forward, consider how the words of God land on your heart (i.e. how it is heard, where this rings true, what it challenges, what comes to mind).

“For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you - that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine” (Romans 1:12). 

These can be verses that we sometimes skip over, maybe we think it isn’t relevant because it doesn’t seem to offer personal instruction. It doesn’t seem like the meaty theology that we’re looking for. On the contrary, it says a lot about both Paul and ourselves.

Our relationships are never neutral: our hearts are either growing deeper roots for either good fruit or bad fruit. They communicate something about the orientation of the longings of our heart. How we function in relationships either communicates a life that looks toward God or one that looks away from him. For Paul, he longs for mutual encouragement of each other’s faith. Ask yourself, what longings do you walk around with when you are at a parish dinner? Or when you grab a drink with a close Christian friend? 

Consider whether you could be longing for relationships in any ways that are counter to what God intends:

• I long to be comfortable, by spending time around those that agree with me on politics, theology, parenting, etc.

• I long for others to approve of me.

• I long for things to go well. Maybe if I spend time with God’s people, he’ll give me what I hope for. 

• I long to feel like I’m doing the right thing.

• I long to experience a spiritual or emotional ‘high’.

Alternatively, for those of us introverts:

• I long to keep people out of what’s really going on for me.

• I might long for relationships with others at some point, when I really need Jesus to show up for me.

Most, if not all of these can be a good means to a rich life but, so often, we turn these means into the end.

“So, that’s that. Let’s just do it differently.”

Actually, before we jump to thinking we can just will ourselves into doing this differently, we need to understand where the chutzpah comes from. Paul identifies himself as a slave of Christ in the opening of the letter (Romans 1:1). Paul’s way of viewing his interpersonal relationships are informed by his master. Later on, he reminds us that we are all slaves: either to God or to our flesh (Romans 6:16, see also Matt 6:24). For whichever longings in the list above struck you, what do those longings communicate about the character of your master? Are you a ‘slave of Christ’ in your relationships? 

What is so striking about Paul’s longing in Romans 1:12 is that he is really clear on the end game. When he leaves Rome, he hopes that the way he would reminisce is in how Jim, Tom, and Sally’s faith magnifies his master. Meaning, the food at the dinner parties really was remarkable…and his even greater hope was to hear of how God’s gospel is seen through the lives of these brothers and sisters and vice versa.

For Paul, discipleship isn’t a fuzzy phrase that’s detached from real relationships. When he says ‘you’, he refers to real people who have a real faith in this real world. He longs to be encouraged, including the person who has really long-winded conversations. Including the weird uncle. Including the person with whom we might naturally have beef.

What would it take for us to believe that encouragement of one another’s faith is a worthwhile way to spend our time? 

How could it reorder our conversations today? 

How could it change our prayer life?

Compare Paul’s relational desires with your own this week:

On your way to your parish dinner or a coffee with someone in our church, look in your own heart to see what you hope for in time together. How might God be sanctifying you?

During these times, what would it look like to be vulnerable about your own faith? What would seeking encouragement from them look like? Take the risk! Connect your faith with small talk. Ask them how they may be growing from the faith of others in the parish. Pray together.

On the ride home, ponder about where you saw God working. Could you have said more to encourage others? Where does it feel awkward? Feeling awkward doesn’t signify that it’s wrong. Learn to discern your unused muscles versus what is just plain weird. Begin again tomorrow.

I pray that God would make our longings one and the same with His. We look ahead to the day when all of our longings will come face to face with the one that they were made for (1 Cor 13:12).  

God (certainly) created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1)

Let us begin where the materialists begin. How do we make sense of all that we see? How come those mountains? Why that mouse and that bird? Whence cometh that monkey and that cow? And wine and clouds and similarly shaped skulls and frogs that look so convincingly similar while being so utterly different? How do we explain the world we live in? How do we explain where it all came from? And particularly where did all this life come from? 

Now, beginning with these questions, let us add a qualifier - a rule to the answers we provide: Make no reference to God. Appeals to the Divine are forbidden. Answer the questions but do so without doing what every other human being has done in the history of the world: Explain the world assuming you can see and sense everything that there is. Leave God to the side or abandon him on the scrapheap of silly myths. We do not need him. Explain everything without giving him any credit from the outset. 

And so, what did they come up with? What sort of answers were proposed? Unbounded libertarianism + time + chance. In other words evolution over billions of years gets us to where we find ourselves now. Billions of years + matter and you can do pretty much anything says our test-takers. A pool of chemicals can turn into a pool of single-celled swimmers. Give it enough time and they can have babies with legs and lungs and eyes. Let your children become whatever they want to be and they’ll soon be flying…. Give us time, give us a bunch of elements, throw some energy into the mix and you can grow a universe just like ours. 

 But after all this time the bio-chemists and the physicists respond with, “Actually, errr, you can’t…” The Quantum physicists come along and start in with a short explanation of why the world simply doesn’t work the way we can see it does - actually almost nothing works the way we have assumed it does, not time, not matter, not light, not movement, not really anything. Social psychologists start talking about how your brother’s anxiety problem can give you cancer. We can’t get a single protein to spontaneously transform. And suddenly we find ourselves with an absolute cultural consensus around evolution and time and the origins of the universe that is increasingly indefensible - but don’t question it in public. The theory of evolution was already full of enormous holes. Now it appears to be dissolving into sand - like so many un-relatable facts crammed together but nothing to bind them and an increasing amount of space between them. In other words there’s no way to get from one small lizard-like thing to one bird-like thing - ad infinitum.

Enter the theologians. 

We Christians have been trying our best over the past few hundred years to look respectable. No one wants to look the fool. And no one wants secular smart people to think the Bible is stupid. And as Dr. Hugh Ross thoughtfully observed of the belief in a young earth created over six days: “I cannot imagine a notion more offensive to this group…” Dr. Henri Blocher speaks of anyone who questions the received dogma of naturalistic and ancient origins as being functional kamikaze pilots - crashing into the intellectual world and offering nothing but an unjustified stumbling block to, well, the smart people. And so theologians bend over backwards to make Genesis 1 & 2 clearly not teach what Genesis 1 & 2 appear to clearly teach. Does a 6-day creation story sound stupid to you? Have no fear - that’s not what Genesis 1 says. We twist the text into convoluted knots separating the meaning of the words from the objects of those same words. Day can’t mean day. Night cannot mean night. Light cannot mean light and so on and so forth. And so in the name of scientific respect for the indefensible consensus, we rip the text to shreds doing with it what we would never do to other texts in the Bible. And this is the evangelicals. 

We say nonsensical things like, “We don’t really know what Genesis 1 and 2 is all about. Its not about how God created the universe, but rather that He created the universe.” We do this with a straight face. Ignoring the hard reality that there are real words on the page that mean things. Words like “And God Said…” Words that indicate real actions over real time “…and there was evening and there was morning the third day.” Liberal protestants are more honest than we are. But a small question in the face of these exegetical contortions: Why let the materialists set the baseline? Presupposing the non-existence of God seems a bit like preloading the answer. And why would we want to make room for any explanation that begins there? Especially when its not a very good explanation…

So, a new proposal - Same question: Explain all of this. Someone needs to. There are mountains and trees and kangaroos and rhinos. Someone said that Hippos are one of the most dangerous animals on the planet? Explain. How did everything get here? But this time, no qualifiers on what is a permissible answer and what isn’t. Make as many references to God as you like. No avoiding the Divine this time. 

Genesis 1 and following: Now here is an answer with real meat on its bones. Here is a bountifully happy God speaking and commanding and existence obeying. Here is a God speaking everything into being and I do mean everything. Not just stars and water and protein molecules. I mean speaking into existence time. I mean matter. Speaking them into existence and then ordering them and then subjecting other things to them. Creating time, ordering it into days and nights and then subjecting the earth and the sun and the moon to it. I mean a God who speaks water into existence and then moves it by commanding it by his word - and it obeys. I mean a God who takes six days  (that he just created and ordered) and speaks into existence a universe that he spreads out like a tent (stop and picture that one for a moment… and then let that answer whatever odd questions people ask about light years and light and the age of the universe). Here is every atom explained. Here is every species’ origin. Here is a world whose foundation is a God who speaks and creatures (like rocks and stars and bears and humans) who obey. Here is why disobedience isn’t simply moral, it has ontological and biological consequences. God created the heavens and the earth. How? He spoke it. He spoke for 6 days (like real days, not metaphorical ones) and then rested. And it was all very, very good. It was all very, very good, because all of it - every single atom and photon and lepton - obeyed all that God had said. 

For some highly recommended reading on these subjects, might I suggest:

Creation and Change by Douglas Kelly.

Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl by N.D. Wilson

Undeniable by Douglas Axe

Sex, Desire, and How the Commandments Work...

The 7th commandment forbids adultery. Jesus famously expanded the meaning of adultery to include forbidden desire spurred on by the eyes. This expansion has become a bit of difficulty in a world that has learned that the more closely a sneaker corporation can link their product to the image of a woman wearing said sneakers without clothes on, the higher their sales numbers will be. Desire begets desire - even without rational connections. But there it is. We live in a world that has gone to war with anything likened to norms or ordered loves and so we have sexual chaos, and more specifically,  chaotic and disordered desire.

I keep finding the commandments (which we’ve been preaching through at Trinity on Sundays) punching beyond where they seem to be aiming, and the 7th is no different. God simply understands these creatures He made called humans. His rules are well, true and wise and good. Such that when you reject that God made these creatures, and therefore treat his rules as the interesting or even well-meaning artifacts of bygone religious cultures you begin to find yourself behaving as a very serious fool. You will find your entire culture behaving as a very foolish culture. You will find that the hubris of such humans expands rather vigorously. So while we’ve been busy violating the 7th commandment for pretty much forever, we’ve now started calling said commandment stupid and even foolish. Sexually repressive. Nadia Bolz-Weber-Weber (formerly the pastor of House for All Saints and Sinners in Denver) recently refused to condemn the use of “responsibly sourced pornography.” It seems our wisdom has surpassed the wisdom of Jesus and the Ten Commandments. 

The result: The West now seems to be irretrievably confused about sex, but not just sex. It is deeply confused about desire. It is deeply confused about identity. It is deeply confused about genitalia- which is simply to say that it is deeply confused about the nature of reality. 

And much of the evangelical western church has been busy asking a vital question during this time, but we keep healing the wound lightly. The church has been busy asking with ever increasing empathy: How do we communicate God’s love in a world like ours? The more sophisticated among us change “world like ours” to “to a post Christian secular world” (because we read Charles Taylor’s immensely helpful tome The Secular Age, and picked up his language without picking up his sense.) But the Bible answer tends to be far more abrupt than our answer. The bible’s answer is the word “repent.” This means to joyfully, whilst practicing a robust and costly hospitality, tell people to stop living and thinking and philosophizing and voting and eating and sexing as if God didn’t make the world. And that they should do this because this God is merciful and kind and loves us very much and has dealt with our sins in the body and blood of Jesus. Instead of saying and embodying all of that we muddy the waters as much as possible by capitulating to much of what is simply high-handed rebellion. We often bend over backwards to create plausibility and understanding and to empathize with what amounts to attitudes and behaviors that are suicidal and blatantly sin. 

But repentance doesn’t create plausibility structures around rebellion. Love doesn’t create space for people to relish increasingly foolish and destructive confusion. Love calls people to be reconciled to God, and such reconciliation requires repentance. In other words, the way you communicate the love of God in a world like ours, is you tell people to repent. You tell them to stop believing blasphemous and suicidal lies about the universe, about sex, about what God is there or not there, and about what their lives and bodies are for. 

So the Law of God, contained in these Ten Commandments, isn’t simply an arbitrary list of religious and moral rules. They are strands that contain the whole world. Pull on one of them and the whole fabric of society starts to come unraveled.  Pull on one and families and relationships and politics and everything in your deeply personal as well as public life starts to unravel. These aren’t simply legalisms, they are the very wisdom of God. 

Authority and the House

Packed into all of the Ten Commandments is an entire worldview. Here is a whole understanding, not just for morality, but for how the entire cosmos and our own lives work. Understand this, and you won’t be able to read these commands the same way ever again. Fail to understand this and you’ll simply see a rather arbitrary-seeming list of ethical commands. 

We’ve been trained to think of the world as largely a blank canvas with biology and morality and religion and culture as simply socially and evolutionarily constructed paintings put upon that canvas.  The Bible presents a world and all of its integrative relationships as having an actual order to them. They were made a certain way, they were designed a certain way. We can submit to that order or kick against that order, but the fundamental way that the world is, well, that’s not really up for debate or transformation. Kicking against the way the world is designed is foolishness and sin. It’s sin because it rebels against God’s rule. It’s foolishness because we can’t fundamentally change the way that the world or its constitutive relationships work - they will always work that way. We can either run with the grain, living as obedient creatures and enjoying a world created, and thereby ordered by God or we can run against the grain, rebel against both what God has commanded and what God has designed and find ourselves running against the walls of His house over and over again. 

Consider that the world is a house built by God. It has walls and rooms and hallways and electrical outlets and some furniture. It isn’t a blank slate. It isn’t an empty lot. It's a house. It has walls that are already in place. God puts us in the house to live, to enjoy, and maybe to decorate the place. He tells us how to live in the house. Gives us a nice map of how things are laid out - where the walls are, where the sinks are. We do two different kinds of wrongs in this house. We disobey and we try and tear down the walls. God tells us to flush the toilet when we use it. We refuse to flush the toilet. On the other hand he puts a wall there. We don’t like that wall there. We want to move the wall. Problem is, we can’t move the wall. So we pretend it isn’t there and then proceed to run into the wall over and over and over again, blood running down our face, insisting that the wall isn’t really there. 

When people talk about tearing down the patriarchy, this is what is largely happening. There are all sorts of reasons for hating that wall, for wanting to get rid of it. There truly are really terrible men, really terrible fathers. They have authority and wield that authority in ways that are a direct insult to the God whose authority they represent. But instead of simply naming this rebellion and calling these particular fathers and husbands and senators and presidents to repentance, we say that the problem is the wall - the structure - when the real problem is the particularly bad men. On the other hand, there is such a thing as a deep hatred of God - particularly a God who is the Father. That wall is a regular reminder of the God we hate and so we meaninglessly bring sledgehammers and crow bars to beat against the wall (Why do the nations rage… He who sits in the heavens laughs… Psalm 2)

When we come to the 5th Commandment we are confronted with a command that calls us to honor a particular design feature of creation. It instructs us to live in line with the grain of the universe. And it assumes that fundamental to the structure of the world is the concept of authority. Parents, good or bad, represent that structure to us. They are the clearest most in-your-face example of how God made the world. He commands us to honor that structure. In other words, don’t run your head against the wall. And the brilliance of God in giving us this command is that it works both ways. It calls us, all of us as children, to honor authority and how it works - all the way up to our Father in Heaven. And it calls mothers and fathers to the same sort of honor- all authority is designed to reflect authority all the way up - to our Father.  We live at the long end of a rebellion against authority in all of its expressions - because we think that authority is the problem rather than sin. Which is to say, we think the Father is the problem, not us. 

We’ve been trying to remodel the house since the beginning, but God made the house good, very good. The problem isn’t the house or the walls or the placement of the electrical outlets. The problem is sinful men, sinful women, and our relationship with the Home-Owner. 

Mothers and Fathers...

The promises and purposes of God, as set forth in the Scriptures are dizzying. They describe a whole creation flooded with goodness and truth and beauty - the very presence of God. They describe all the nations of the earth discipled and brought into glad submission to His good reign over everything. They describe peace, wholeness. The absolute end of death. To discover what God is doing in history and in the world is to see a world utterly transformed. To then discover that such a purpose is given to God’s people in the world, is to see the whole course of your life redefined - re-contextualized. You find yourself in a wholly different story than you previously thought. 

I remember being intoxicated by these things during my final semester of undergrad. I was taking a class at the time on the use of the Old Testament in the New and left that class every Tuesday and Thursday night riveted. It was like waking up to an entirely different understanding of what life was for. 22 years later and I am still stunned by these things. But there is a lesson in all of that which has taken far too long for me to learn. 

Here’s that lesson: all of this glorious purpose-all of that eschatology, its getting worked out in the most mundane corners of our lives. The fifth commandment follows on the heels of some rich and sweeping theological themes in the first 4. We’ve been commanded to worship God alone. We’ve been commanded not to toy with Him by redefining who he is. We’ve been commanded not to follow him or bear his name vainly. We’ve been commanded to receive his gospel rest. High falootin’ stuff. 

Then the 5th commandment tells us to honor our parents. 

There is much to consider in the 5th commandment. It addresses the nature of authority and how that frames all of reality (more on this later in the week). But I wanted to point out the simple observation that all of this “worship of God alone” first gets worked out in the most mundane, irritating, oft-times disappointing relationships on the planet. We are to honor these relationships. That’s where God goes first. 

What does all of this have to do with eschatology and the nations? What does it have to do with all this purpose our lives have been endowed with? How does this further transform the story we now find ourselves in? Well, this is your part. This is where all of this grand purpose gets worked out. This is the lesson it took me far too long to learn. All of that eschatological glory is getting worked out in the most personal relationships we have. God is changing the world, not through sweeping political reforms or even, primarily through church planting and world missions and all of that. He’s changing the world by reconciling fathers to sons, mothers to daughters. He is flooding the world with glory through friendships, through marriages, through parents and children. All of those frustrating, mundane, anxiety-ridden relationships - all of them, that’s where the glory’s at. 

Wild as it seems, all of that glorious purpose is tied up in the conversations happening around the dinner table between sons and fathers. God is renewing everything as neighbors share a meal and friendships are reconciled and a mother teaches her daughter how to make a marvelous loaf of sourdough. It is unfolding as a father goes for a walk with his daughter. We bear witness to the kingdom of God as we sit around a table, sing the doxology with friends and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters, break open that loaf of bread, and pass the bottle of wine. 

And the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, growing up, almost indiscernibly, into a tree where birds from all the nations make their home. 

Join us Mondays on October 29th, November 5th & 12th as we explore these relationship in a seminar on Marriage and Kids. 6:30pm at 2497 Fenton Street.

Sabbath out your fingertips...

We have, all of us, become rather adept at avoiding the terrible danger of taking God seriously when He commands us to do a thing or not to do a thing. We take concrete commands and engage in remarkable gymnastics to make those concrete commands evaporate into a glorious metaphor or a misunderstood prohibition or a cultural inflection. We must, at all costs, keep religion out of the public square, out of our wallets, out of our beds, and perhaps most importantly, out of our calendars. And then the 4th commandment comes along and tells us to do something with our schedules. To be clear, God intends to give us a rather remarkable gift with this command, but it is a gift that must be received and it can only be received if we order our lives to receive it. In other words, it is a command to be obeyed, to be experienced, and received in wonderfully tangible ways (like food and drink and sleep and laughter and a nice fall walk). 

The Sabbath creates all sorts of preachable resonances. It points to the rest that God has given us in the gospel. It anticipates the end of this age, when God’s great renovation project is complete. It hopes for the end of sin and death and all the ways they invade and corrupt our work. It calls us to hope in Jesus’ work rather than our own. It does all those things. Preachers point at these things when they talk about the Sabbath. But none of those things carry much weight - real, tangible, manifestly transformative weight - if we don’t receive the weekly gift of Sabbath rest. God has given us rest from dead works, and he wants us to taste that- to receive that, with weekly rest. God has given us a feast - a celebration, a life restored, and He wants us to experience something of that glory with a weekly feast, a weekly space given to see our bodies, our relationships, our lives restored. 

The sabbath is not meant to merely be an idea of food and rest and joy. It is meant to be an experience of these things. A gift that draws us into the ever-expansive feast, a renewal that draws us into the renewal of all things. But it doesn’t work right if its just in our heads. It doesn’t do its work if its just an idea or a theological metaphor. It must be received. It must be obeyed. 

And this is precisely how the 4th commandments moves us beyond the first 3. The worship of God alone, as He is, and with our whole lives (not vainly) must come out of our fingers. It has to be made real and tangible and will lead us into a profound and joyful obedience. And it is remarkable that God, after establishing the third commandment, begins such tangible obedience with a call to rest. He doesn’t start with painful works we’re to do, rather he begins with a call to feast, to rest, to celebrate His work. But such a command is to be obeyed. Such a gift is given that we might actually receive it. God has given us a kind of obedience that must be worked out, it has to be tangible. In other words, it has to be scheduled. 

Ten Words Dissecting the Human Heart

Here at Trinity we find ourselves quickly approaching the turning point of the Ten Commandments. They have been called the two tablets of God’s law. The first tablet focused on explaining the command: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength. The second tablet focused on explaining the second great commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. But I want to take a moment and consider the brilliance of how the Ten Commandments work by looking at the sort of life the first three commands prescribe. It describes a tightening circle that understands the particular nuances of human temptation and rebellion. 

First: Worship God alone. Don’t worship anything else besides the God who created everything and redeemed us from slavery. The human heart runs to all manner of different gods. We’ll make gods out of ourselves, our race, our wealth, our comforts, our petty achievements - almost anything. And so God commands us to come and find life and meaning and morality and goodness and beauty in Him above all else. He alone is worthy of our worship. 

But what happens when we are confronted with a God who is other and who doesn’t easily conform to our ideas of what a God should be? What do we do with a God who has such rough edges? What do we do with a God who doesn’t fit with the cultural norms that surrounds us - who isn’t very cool? We make images. Oh, we say we worship God. We sing songs about Jesus. We even open our bibles. But we subtly and sometimes not so subtly start to shave off the edges, give God a set of skinny jeans and hipster social ethics. We start remaining silent about all the ways the God of the Bible makes us or our neighbors uncomfortable. We change God’s image. We make a version of God who fits our own sensibilities. And so God next confronts us with the second commandment: Don’t make an image of God that conforms to what you want or can see surrounding you. 

Israel is confronted with a God who is terrifying in His power and glory. They are afraid. So they pool their theological resources. They raise some money. They make a golden calf - a far more manageable and less frightening vision of God. Romans and Jews see a God who dies on a cross, a God who deals with sin in the most scandalous way imaginable, and they find new images of God that are more palatable. We do the same. We detest holiness or exclusivity or patriarchy or authority or such a narrow understanding of sexuality and so we form new images, cutting out the parts of Him we find embarrassing. We make an image. God says not to do that. 

The church’s history is riddled with theologians going to great intellectual lengths to change God’s image, to spin God’s words, to avoid saying what God has said.

And then when confronted with a vision of God that is glorious and gracious and offensive and holy- that you can’t alter- what temptation comes next? We empty what it means to be the people of God of all real content - to take the name of God in vain. We become a people who have some sort of superficial association with Jesus, but it is empty. We confess Jesus is Lord, but do not do what He says. We talk about the grace and mercy of God, and do not repent of sin. Where the second commandment confronts the temptation to redefine what “God” means, the third commandment confronts the temptation to retain our desire to live however we want by simply ignoring God. We don’t pray. We don’t take what He says and commands seriously. Our identity as God’s people becomes a kind of empty label, retained to appease parents or a girlfriend or, even better, a girlfriend’s parents. But we’ve never taken seriously the call of Jesus and the real cost of discipleship. 

The Ten Commandments offer us a marvelous view of God’s remarkable understanding of the human heart. He knows us. He knows our particular temptations. He knows the subtle ways we chase after our own autonomy from His reign. He calls us to Himself, as He is and His law is given to lead us there. It is powerless to actually bring us home, but it is a nice map to understand why the way seems so hard. This week we turn our attention to the 4th commandment wherein God commands us to rest, to celebrate, and where He claims ownership over time. This worship and obedience of the one true God must move into the corners of our lives. Join us Sunday as we consider the God who is a fountain, who will not be reduced, who calls us out of vanity and makes uncomfortable claims on every moment of our lives.

Set Your Minds...

The Bible treats our mind as a muscle, as something that can be moved, as something that can be set on certain things and not set on others. Paul commands Roman Christians in Romans 12 to be transformed through the “renewing of their minds.” In 1 Chronicles 22 the Israelites are told to “set their minds and hearts to see the Lord your God.” In Colossians 3, Paul commands Christians to set their minds on things that are above. This isn’t often how we approach the task of thinking. We rarely consider thinking to be a task. It’s simply something we well, we “just do.” Which is another way of saying that our minds just kind of latch onto whatever slides in front of them. Our minds are bombarded from Social Media, what pops up on the radio while we’re driving, what comes across the computer screen or television screen. We check our email addressing a question or an advertisement. A notification pops up on our phones turning our attention to twitter or facebook where we find an infuriating article written by an obscure relative in New Hampshire, which was liked by an old friend of ours who has an incredibly cute squirrel living on his tree… We rarely approach the task of thinking intentionally. We rarely set our minds on something. We more likely, trip over our own thoughts all day, like water rushing down a pre-determined path. (Given the intentionality with which advertisers and other media groups approach their work, this path is intentionally shaped by forces that are ubiquitous in our world.) But the Scriptures call us to an entirely different approach to thinking.

This week I ran across this quotation in Psalm 19. Its a famous text, memorized by Sunday school children everywhere:

“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sign, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”

Here the Psalmist is making a request of God - a plea really, that the things he has set his mind on would be acceptable - pleasing to God. What sort of meditations - the setting of the mind on something please God? In Psalm 19 we see the Psalmist looking to two particular things.

First, creation itself, particularly as it reflects and declares the beauty of God. The description of the sun “running its course” day after day after day is particularly poignant. It reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s description of a child’s exuberance in discovering each day’s sunrise with “Look! He did it again!” But consider the work necessary to see these things, to meditate on these things. We barely notice the sun rising or setting. Our joy in seeing and giving thanks for the glories that surround us are often fleeting, like our attention. Our minds are not used to resting on something, like a sunset, and then meditating on its beauty, its meaning, its glory.

Secondly, the psalmist has described the glories of God’s law - its goodness and usefulness and wisdom. We Colorado dwellers have some practice in considering the mountains or the sunset. But almost none of us have fixed our attention on the words of God, to meditate on them, to consider their beauty and usefulness and wisdom. But this is what the Psalmist demonstrates for us - minds set on something remarkably complex and nuanced, historic and marvelous.

The Bible describes the life of the mind as a life of deep intentionality, of meditation. We are to hold something in our minds and consider the question again and again, “What must God be like?” The Psalmist’s meditations call us into a life of intentional consideration and seeing and then drawing all this thinking up into a consideration of the grandeur and goodness of a God who made and sustains all things by the word of His mouth.

As we continue our examination of the Ten Commandments this Sunday our goal is not only to understand the sort of life God is calling all of us into, but also to consider the character of God Himself as revealed in His law…. What must God be like?

A War of Word, Witness and Wine

Peter Leithart has written a remarkable commentary on the book of Revelation. He describes the book of Revelation as being fundamentally about the victory of the Church’s witness in the midst of the world. In describing the war imagery of Revelation 19, he says this:

The logic of the narrative seems to be this: The horns attack the Lamb and his followers; God turns that attack into his victory over the harlot city; and then the Lamb goes on the offensive against the same enemies, the “nations” that he smites (19:15). If chapter 19 is a battle scene, it is not a military operation, or, better, it is the most intensely contested, the most important and decisive form of military operation—a spiritual war, carried on by Word, Witness, Wine. Whatever fulfillment we find, it will not look like the latest news bulletin from Syria or Afghanistan. It will look like a sermon delivered at a table spread with bread and wine. It will look like a humble Christian woman refusing to renounce Jesus even when threatened with beheading. It will be a battle of Har-Magedon, a battle of the mountain of festival assembly.

Leithart, P. J. (2018). Revelation. (M. Allen & S. R. Swain, Eds.) (Vol. 2, p. 287). London; Oxford; New York; New Delhi; Sydney: Bloomsbury; Bloomsbury T&T Clark: An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

His point: There is a war being waged on the nations in chapter 19, but it is not a typical military operation. Rather, it is a battle fought and won as the word of Jesus is faithfully proclaimed, bread and wine are faithfully eaten, and as God’s people faithfully worship in the midst of the nations. This is the grand strategy of our Lord for the renewal of all things - including our city - a people joyfully committed to faithfully witnessing to the Word about Jesus in the midst of our city, in our homes around tables with wine and food, and gathered together in the midst of our liturgies. In these gloriously mundane things, Jesus rules the nations.

Considering Jesus

I remember my first trip to Colorado. I was 11. I had an old walkman and 1 cassette tape. I had listened to that tape countless times between the northern oil fields of Northwest Texas and the drive over Raton pass outside of Trinidad. And suddenly there were mountains. Real mountains. I don’t remember much about what we did during our two weeks visiting friends in Denver, but I do remember craning my neck to see the tops of the mountains. I remember standing on Mount Evans not being able to breathe. I remember marveling at the size - feeling my smallness and a sense of awe that I’d never felt before.

Perhaps the fundamental downside to raising a family in Colorado is how mundane the mountains can become to your kids. They’ve seen them almost every day of their self-conscious lives. When we drive up to Summit County or down to Ouray, I find myself trying to wrestle my kids’ attention from their books or games to stop and, well, just look! Feel Awe! Its a silly sense of urgency that we’re going to miss the grandeur, the glory, the majesty because we’re stuck on the page or the screen sitting in our laps.

Christianity is remarkably practical. It speaks to marriage, children, work, play and rest. It encompasses all of life and reorders every part of our loves and desires. It really does deal with the “page and the screen in our laps.” But at its absolute center is something that feels as impractical as it gets. We want help navigating the noise and business of life. We want practical steps. We want a life coach. The stuff of life feels so important, and then Christianity calls us to stop, to look elsewhere and to consider, to marvel at, Jesus.

Again and again, without rushing to practical application or how to’s, the Scriptures just seem to stop and invite us to see Him, to marvel at Him. It warns us not to miss the glory, the grandeur, the beauty. It commends us the glory of feeling small and inconsequential again when so much of our life feels disproportionately important.

I felt that invitation again this morning reading through Revelation 19 in preparation to preach this Sunday. Verses 11-16 are meant to communicate some marvelous and frightening truths to us concerning the church’s identity and mission, but I think first they are an invitation to, well, marvel.

To behold, and tremble and feel again how gloriously small we are and how terrifyingly strong and holy and good He is. So put your pages down, turn away from your screen (maybe this screen) and consider again the terror and wonder and beauty of who Jesus actually is:

Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.

Revelation 19:11-16

Church as Toddler. Church as Family...

One of the more fundamental confusions about the local church that plagues us these days is the unexamined belief that the church should function something like a good restaurant.  It exists primarily as the purveyor of religious goods and services and you choose one that has the stuff you like. Good service, nice French fries, delicious soufflé. This view, if unchecked, will keep any church from embodying the kind of beauty and goodness and truth that we long to see. To make matters harder, Trinity is a church plant - which means that we are a big ball of potential. Lots of raw material, everything still taking shape. We're like a little toddler, bumping into the walls, sticking our fingers in the electrical sockets, doing all the things toddlers do. So, if you come to Trinity in the way that many people come to church in the U.S., well, you'll be sorely disappointed much of the time. 

The church is described a number of different ways in the New Testament - but one of the bible's favorites is to describe the church as a family. What we do on Sunday is gather for a Sunday meal. We care for one another. We sing the praises of our good Father. He tells us, through the Bible and the liturgy what He's like, what He wants for us, and most of all, what He's done for us in Jesus. Now, admittedly, family meals can be a little awkward, and we want our friends and even strangers who don't know our Father to come and sit with us and eat with us. But this is precisely how God forms us increasingly into the image of Jesus - declaring us to be and then making us increasingly to look like sons and daughters. 

One of the implications of this biblical understanding of the church is that most of the things we long to see in our life together at Trinity require all of us to pursue together. We want family-like community with one another. That isn't something that can be programmed. There isn't a "switch" we can throw for that in a church plant. There are simply people committed to pursuing conversations and time and honesty with one another. New people who wander through our doors for our gathering won't feel welcomed by an institution. They need to actually be welcomed by people who are already gathered into this new community. 

As we approach the fall, we are trying to facilitate as many opportunities as we can for our church family to draw closer to one another and to invite neighbors and friends and well, even strangers to come and be with us - in worship on a Sunday, in homes during the week for dinner and laughter and prayer, at an event around town. But in the end, as we long to see the church grow up into greater and greater maturity, all of us have to recognize the church as a family - where everyone is at work - welcoming, inviting, singing, praying, approaching together.