Asking the Bible Questions

Here at Trinity we continue to encourage everybody to read their bibles. In the scope of things given by God to encourage the saints, and to build and sustain the faith of God's people I'd place bible reading and prayer second only to gathering with the church for worship each week. In other words, it's really, really important. In counseling anyone who wants to live well in the world: Worship with God's people, read the bible & pray are the soil out of which everything else should grow.

But what should we do when we open our bibles? Well, I'd begin by just reading. "Oh begin!" was John Wesley's exhortation to his fellow pastor when it came to calling him to read. God has set before us a meal to eat and be nourished by. Sometimes you have extended time, sometimes you only have a few minutes, but make coming to this meal and eating a priority. And when you come, come in faith - particularly believing that the bible describes God and the world and you "right side up." Sin individually and at a societal level has turned our understanding of the world upside down and encountering the bible's teaching about sex or gender or judgment or grace can be jarring. Let God correct you in the text. Finally, as you begin to read and listen to the scriptures, it can be helpful to be guided by a few questions. Here are some questions I've found fruitful as I read, whether I have 20 minutes or an hour:

1) What is it I'm reading? (Context, Genre)

Is this a letter or narrative or poetry? What can I know about when it was written and for what purpose? Understanding what we've picked up to read is important to understanding the meaning of what we're reading. Take a few minutes when starting a new book of the bible to get a basic lay of the land and discover what exactly it is that you are holding in your hands. Then as you progress each day, remind yourself what you're reading. We've been given a plethora of resources to aid in learning this information - study bibles, the Bible Project, commentaries. A few minutes here will help you see so much more of what the bible is saying.

2) What preceded this bit of text?

If you find yourself in Romans 11, its important to remember what was in Romans 10 (and 9 and 3 and 1). Scripture does not exist in isolation from other portions of scripture. That verse you really like is connected logically to the verses that came before and after. Take a minute to remember what's come before what you've taken up to read today.

3) Does this point me to anything else I've read in Scripture before?

The bible is always quoting and pointing forward and backward to other parts of the bible. The work God is up to in history is filled with promises and types and fulfillments that help us see numerous layers to what God is saying and doing in the bible. Think back to what you've read before - anything oddly familiar? Use those handy cross-references in the margins or at the bottom of the page- here are gifts given to us that are worth their weight in gold.

4) Are there any clear logical connections or arguments in this text that I should take note of?

The bible argues. Look for words like 'because', 'therefore'. 'in order that' and 'if...then' these help trace the logic behind the bible's arguments. Also take note of how stories are told and in what order they are told in. Look for odd details that seem out of place. This is how the bible argues. Learn to pay attention to these things as you read, and get curious.

5) What does this text tell me about God?

Be constantly asking the question: What must He be like? This is the main thing about every part of Scripture, it reveals to us the character and actions and words of God. May this question undergird all of your reading of Scripture (and frankly your whole way of viewing the world). If you are looking you'll see things that comfort you and disturb you and confront you about who He is and what he does all over the bible. See him as he actually is in the text, not as you want him to be or as you think he should be, but as he actually is. Our family asks this question every time we sit together to read the bible as a family - what does this psalm, story, letter, promise, warning, judgment tell me about the character of God -about what he loves and hates, about how he acts, about his power? This question has borne more fruit in my life than almost anything else.

6) In what ways does this text confront me or the world around me?

If the bible is right side up and often times my way of thinking or feeling or desiring is effected by sin, then I should find myself surprised and confronted when I read the bible. The same is true with our secular culture. Take note of the ways that the bible is out of sync with how I naturally feel or think or the world around me feels and thinks.

7) What surprised me about this text?

Take note of places where something surprises you in the bible. And, you should look to be surprised. Where does something happen that shocks you or offends you? Does Jesus say something that delights you, or makes you laugh? Does God do something that causes you to throw up your hands in shock or incredulity? Don't blow past these things, take note of them and think on them.

Lastly, pray. Pray before you read. Pray while you read. Pray after you read. The Spirit loves to illumine the words of God to help us see, to love, to worship, to repent. Pray that God would cause you not only to see and understand the words on the page, but also to learn how to delight in the words and the commands of God.

For Further Reading:

Theopolitan Reading, Peter Leithart

Through New Eyes, James Jordan

Reading the Bible Supernaturally, John Piper

Beholding and Becoming

G.K. Beale has written a wonderful book with a wonderful title: We Become What We Worship. His idea picked up from a variety of places throughout the Scriptures, but most explicitly in Psalm 115 and Psalm 135, is that transformation happens in the context of worship - and that our vocation of image-bearers is part and parcel of what it means to be human. In other words, you will always image what you worship. If you worship the triune God you will reflect his image, you will become like him. If you worship other gods, then you will reflect them. The secular gods will produce secular Christians. Which explains a whole bunch of what's happening to the church in our day.

Paul develops this idea a bit further in 2 Corinthians 3 and 4. There he links this becoming to beholding. In 2 Corinthians 3:18, he says, "And we all with unveiled face, beholding (or reflecting) the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness..." He goes on chapter 4 to link this "glory of the Lord" explicitly to the "face of Jesus Christ." His point is not simply that we become like what we worship, but that we become like what we look at.

Much of pastoral work is meant to be ruthlessly practical. How do we live Christianly in the world? It is about practice and life and relationships and living Godly lives under the reign of God in the world. The bible speaks in the most earthy ways imaginable to almost every human relationship and institution and when it doesn't speak directly to a thing, it lays out principles and ideas that are applicable. It is authoritative to everything it addresses, and it addresses everything.

But there is another, vital, non-negotiable aspect to pastoral work and to the life of the Christian that is easily lost or buried under the deluge of practical questions. We are called to behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. I don't think this means some sort of abstract existential "beholding." When Paul describes this process he is explicitly talking about the reading of the Scriptures in 2 Corinthians. We behold Jesus by actually looking at how the text of Scripture describes Jesus. Be it through the law and his fulfillment of it. Be it through the types that give us the meaning of his coming or even more clearly through the actual descriptions of his work and person given to us in the gospels. There is enormous value in simply looking at Jesus and discovering who he is - as he actually is. The Spirit of God takes this seeing and transforms us into Jesus' likeness. This will involve denying our imaginings of what we think Jesus is like, or who we think Jesus is like and coming to terms with the actual contours of who he really is, in the bible. We will be confronted with a Jesus who did things and said things that seem remarkably unChristlike. He was at times harsh, at times gentle - and often gentle when we expect him to be harsh and vice versa. But we will not be served if we come to the gospels with our own pre-packaged understanding of who Jesus is or what Christlikeness means. We must come as children to discover and to see who he really is.

As we head into the final weeks leading up to Good Friday and Easter, may we be compelled to go to the Scriptures and behold the One we worship again. May the stories of Jesus' final weeks surprise us and shock us. May we be fascinated again at his words and actions, scandalized by his authority and his demands, and stunned by his grace.

May God open your eyes to behold marvelous things in his word.

The Narrow Way is Expansive

I've been to Glacier National Park 3 times in the last 4 years. It's not easy to get to. It's not on the way to anywhere. I go there, and will continue to go there, because I love gasping as my heart leaps through my chest and I'm reminded of how remarkably small I am - cosmologically speaking. I've been to a handful of places in my life that caused me to stop and weep as I get about as close as imaginably possible to what C.S. Lewis said we all secretly long for: not simply to see the beauty but "to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”

I've been on a handful of hikes in the park and my favorites inevitably lead out of the trees into sweeping vistas, huge drop-offs and very narrow trails. It's always a bit disorienting as you try not to fall to your death as you resist looking down so you can keep your eyes on the scene in front of you. My first time on the Highline trail was a doozy. The trail had shrunk to about 3 feet wide with a drop of a few hundred feet and you could see mountains for miles. I found myself involuntarily whispering "My God! My God!" as a kind of overflowing prayer of gratitude while also becoming increasingly aware of how far down I was looking. Oddly enough, I didn't think, even for a second, "This trail is terribly confining - so narrow." Also, and perhaps more odd given the nature of our current age, I wasn't caught up into deep reflection on who I am and how I can finally be free to express myself and my desires. No, in that moment and in that place I was free. Free to forget about myself almost entirely and to marvel and to tremble at the sheer size and weight and color and hardness of reality as it exists completely independent of my own anxieties, lusts or insecurities.

Modern American life is obsessed with the liberated self. Selves unencumbered by nature or God or God's law. So much of our recent and ongoing arguments about equality and justice and gender and sexuality are so muddled up by false notions of liberation that we can't get anywhere. We get sucked into staring at our own navels or other people's (which gets a little weird) and find ourselves fighting in a vacuum of our own insecurities, anxieties and emotions. It is frankly like standing on that trail, closing my eyes, trying to feel something inside and move accordingly. But we are forgetting that there is a world that is simply there, with a particular order and design and beauty, that is, quite frankly, independent of what you think of it. It was made and ordered by God. He didn't make it for you. It wasn't custom designed with your preferences in mind. It's not a blank canvas on which you are to write your own story. It is a world with an order, a beauty, a morality hard-wired into it and then - grace upon grace, described and revealed by God in his book. He gives us laws fitted for this world He made. He gives us wisdom so as to help us all not be fools in this world He made. He even gives us stories and songs and promises and warnings. He has made a world and placed us in it. And it is a world designed in all kinds of ways that you are absolutely going to hate. You'll find whole bits of it designed in poor taste. Big nasty smells and poor color choices. Where he designed the trail 3 feet wide, you'll have expected 6. He likes to bring hail and rain at exactly the worst moments. But here's the thing about this world that He made.... He didn't ask for design input from you. He didn't get anyone to sign off. There were no safety or equity inspections.

Given a world like that, we are all confronted with two staggeringly different approaches. One, increasingly attempted in our current society, is to put me and my feelings- and by extension humans and humans' feelings at the center of everything. I become the measure of beauty, liberation, equality and justice. We redefine the world and ethics and beauty and sexuality and gender and justice around ourselves. At first this feels so expansive! We get what we want! It feels so free! But such a world is so terribly small. In the end I find myself alone with my tastes, my preferences, my own self-righteousness, my own desires and my own foolishness. I can only be confronted by my own conflicting desires, other people's conflicting desires and the stubborn consequences of all these desires.

But another life is possible - actually its eventually unavoidable. It looks very, very narrow. It's filled with all kinds of doctrines and ethical norms and family structures and babies and endlessly mundane days and churchy people and early mornings with loads of laundry and blisters and learning to say no to yourself (a lot!). Its a whole life where you learn to bring your appetites and feelings and thoughts into line with something outside of yourself - and that is frankly hard, painful work. Learning to believe what God says, to trust what God commands - to bring your life and your appetites and your definitions into conformity with this Word seems, at times, restrictive and confining. But, I mean wow, it is beautiful. There are these marvelous turns where you behold something other than yourself and your own hopes and dreams and desires. Here is a joy rooted in something other than the endless pursuit of your own self-actualization. Here is sanity and liberation and an expansive beauty and joy that can only be found along a narrow road.

So may we give up endless quests to discover ourselves, and learn to lift our gaze to see the God who is simply and wonderfully there. May be overwhelmed with gratitude for a world with rules and a design that is put in front of us without our consent. May we tremble at the steep drops, gasp at the prominent vistas, and learn to enjoy the cool meadows. But above everything else, may we have the gift of forgetting ourselves.

Eros, Friendship and Cultural Accommodation

In a world straining for eros we have lost the meaning of friendship and are thus in danger of losing the heart of Christianity. The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis is a wonderful and insightful book. I commend it to you if you have not read it recently. In the book, he defines the nature of eros as two people facing one another. It is a kind of delight in the person of another. It makes much of the person with whom eros is shared. I delight in your delight. I savor and enjoy the person before me. Friendship, alternatively, is imagined by Lewis to be represented as two people facing something else and walking side by side. It is a shared delight in something outside of either person. It is an ambition aimed at something beyond or greater than either of them.

Our world is drenched with a kind of explicit and yet tepid sexuality. It is a distortion of eros that has taken over everything from entertainment to advertising for potato chips. Sex is everywhere, which is to say that one (potential) expression of eros has become the dominant motif of our culture. I say potential because sex is not equivalent to eros. Sex can still be bent further in on the self and thus lose its true eroticism - its real nature, love for another. In a culture like that one, we find that other forms of love - like Lewis' notion of friendship - atrophy and even die.

Love in our day has been largely redefined as giving someone good feelings, or avoiding making someone feel bad. It is, increasingly in our day, to make much of them, to make much of their feelings. In other words, where people are condemned for being unloving, it is increasingly more about how someone else felt rather than about their objective good (I realize here that it is possible to harm someone and for them to feel it emotionally - but it is also possible to seek someone’s real good and it feel really bad emotionally). In other words, we've come to define love in almost exclusively erotic terms. For me to love you, I must magnify you, magnify how you feel, and act accordingly.

Friendship isn't like that. It is surely patient and kind and slow to anger like all real expressions of love. But it is a kind of love that is aimed supremely at something else. It is concerned mostly with a third thing, a love shared by two people that delights in something outside of either of them. It is no wonder that in a culture pervaded by sexuality, that we've lost any conception of love that does not end in making much of the self. It is no wonder that preaching in our age has, in many places, distorted the message of the bible to make the gospel largely about how God makes much of me - and this is redefined as his love. It is no wonder that calls to behold the majesty of God, to consider the wisdom of God's law, to tremble before the terrible wrath of God and to reorder our lives in accordance with these things is seen as unloving or ineffective. When love can only be experienced as a distortion of eros - as a making much of me, then the call to behold and be chiefly concerned with someone gloriously big and sovereign who is not centered on your emotional well-being or fulfillment can seem like the furthest thing from love imaginable. And yet this is what Christian discipleship and Christian worship is supposed to do. When we accommodate the message of Christianity to a world like that one, we gut it of its true power: a power that can bring sanity and beauty and goodness. A power that lay in its ability to lift the gaze of self-obsessed people.

Cultural accommodation in a world consumed with the me and how I feel will mean recasting biblical Christianity in terms that make much of me or you and fails to confront us with the infinite superiority and worth of Jesus - and such a Christianity will never be truly good news.

What are we doing here? Worship at Trinity

Trinity is publishing a series of short introductions to our church and her life together. It’s an attempt to provide at least some answer to the occasional question "Yeah, but why do you do that?". These will be available as cards on Sunday morning, but we're putting them here for safe-keeping:

Here at Trinity, we believe that the worship of the church is the most potent thing that the church is commanded to do. This worship both transforms God's people and is the vanguard in God's work to renew the whole world. The strange thing about all this renewing and transforming work that occurs in worship is that it is not fundamentally oriented to people or to the world at all. It is fundamentally oriented towards God. We gather because God has called us. We confess our sins to God. We offer our praise to God. We listen to God speak through His word. We eat bread and wine provided by God. We are sent out by God wherein we give thanks to God. Sunday worship reorients us to God and the great work of Jesus in the gospel. And it is this reorientation that provides the means by which we and the world are renewed.

If you've been around churches much, you've likely experienced a lot of different approaches to the church's worship. Worship at Trinity may seem a little different to you. We follow a formal liturgy that is scripted for us each week. At the center of our worship, each week is the bible and the sacraments. The word is sung, read, prayed, and preached and every time we gather we eat bread and drink wine together. God calls us and speaks to us and feeds us - and in this process, we renew our covenant with God each time we gather.

All of this requires our participation. God speaks and we respond. God calls and we sing. We stand and kneel and raise our hands. For many in the broader church, worship has centered on a handful of professionals who provide an experience for attendees. But worship is meant to be work for all God's people. Work that renews. Work that is the fruit of grace, to be sure. But it is the work of God's people in his presence. Sundays should involve an ongoing conversation between God and people. Sundays should involve the whole person - our bodies, our voices, our minds, and our affections. Every part of us presented to God and engaged in the act of worship.

We sing a wide range of songs. You should pick up on old hymns as well as some newer music. But at the heart of our singing, you should hear scripture and particularly the psalms. We sing the Psalms because they are the headwaters for prayer and worship given to the church in the bible. We sing hymns and other songs because they testify to the Spirit's work throughout the history of the church.

Finally, you'll notice that you might be distracted by the people sitting and standing around you. You are not sitting in a dark room looking at a screen. You are surrounded by brothers and sisters, children and their voices (and the occasional toddler's yelp). This is very much on purpose. Worship is something we do together as a community that God has brought together. The church includes her children and we don't want them hidden away when we worship God. We believe that they are learning to worship Jesus alongside us, even when it involves challenging seasons for parents. Worship not only brings us into the presence of God, but it also binds all of us together as God's covenant family. Children, parents, friends, grandparents - all of us together. Sunday worship is not supposed to be a private experience between you and God. It's a family with all our distractions and joy and crying babies and pain and clumsy worship guides standing and singing and kneeling in a very physical and human practice. We come together from a whole slew of different contexts and backgrounds to sing and read and pray and break bread together in God's presence.

Welcome to Trinity. May God meet you here, right in the middle of his enormous gifts of word and sacrament, as well as in this growing community of people who are learning to love the good reign of Jesus, to seek the welfare of the city where God has sent us, and to worship the God who is worthy of all honor.

2 Questions... for Pastors, leaders of things, and Christians generally.

I find the right questions to be remarkably valuable. They can help to clarify points of actual disagreement and agreement (one of the more important tasks in our day). They can distill issues into their essence. The wrong questions will almost always get you the wrong answers and will muck up already cloudy conversations. But the right questions can create clarity and dispel anxiety in a way that few other things can.

In a truly helpful conversation with a few pastors from other churches a series of interconnected conversations about the church and this cultural moment was distilled nicely as one of the more stately fellows summarized nicely: "Its fine to disagree about the particular placement of the line for political resistance or social offense, so long as we can agree that such lines should exist and churches need to know how to find them." There has been a lot of back and forth in these months about the actual authority and role of the magistrate, societal health concerns, and how the church is to best love her neighbor and communicate that love. This conversation has run the gamut of topics from masking, and church gathering restrictions, to broader social issues like sexuality and race. For my own part, I've had to wrestle with a great deal of confusion about how to think biblically and theologically through these different and oddly interrelated issues. It hasn't helped that for decades I was a participant in an unofficial cultural movement of pastors and Christians who approached mission and evangelism from a perspective that was firmly committed to, as best we could, covering up or softening the offensive bits of biblical teaching in order to make sure that the gospel was the main thing left to offend people or compel people. Without getting too far into the remarkable limitations with such an approach. I want to propose two questions that I think are particularly important for churches and leaders of churches to consider right now. Two questions have served me well in the last few months and I think will be helpful as Christians consider what we're up to at this moment. They certainly aren't the only questions to be asked right now. But they should be in the mix.

Before I ask them, I want to point out a historical comparison Carl Trueman has made in his wonderful book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In it he argues that the most relevant age of church history for us to learn from at this particular cultural moment is the 3rd Century. During the third century, the church existed in a tenuous relationship with Roman society. There were occasional outbreaks of violence and persecution, but nothing of the sort that the church had seen earlier or would see later. Instead, the church's beliefs and worship practices were seen by the broader society as immoral, even evil. They were considered a threat to society and the good of their neighbors. The church learned to maintain her faithful witness during this period and it eventually gave way to significant conversions and a cultural shift in society. But she had to learn how to hold fast to what was objectively good and to do so while being perceived as the bad guys. I believe that this will increasingly be the challenge we face in the west. With this in mind, here are two broad questions we are considering:

1) At what point would you be willing to say ‘No’ to the powers-that-be (be it the local magistrate, the state or the Federal government - or landlords, other pastors, denominational leadership, etc.)?

There has been an abundance of helpful reflections offered encouraging the church to defer, when possible, to the authority of the magistrate (Here is one from Steven Wedgeworth and the Gospel Coalition. While I disagreed with some of his conclusions, I do think he framed the issues helpfully). From where I sit, almost no pastors I know needed that encouragement. There were very few pastors locally, publically raising questions about the authority of the magistrate to pass the ordinances that were passed on churches. And while granting that different circumstances may dictate different responses to various government mandates or laws, as well as recognizing that wisdom is essential to discern when to apply what principles from Scripture, almost all Christians admit that there is a point at which church leaders should resist laws and orders from those who bear authority. We may disagree on whether that line is 12 weeks into this pandemic or 12 months or 18 months. We may disagree on whether the point of resistance should come with mask mandates or attendance restrictions or banning public worship altogether. Finally, we may disagree on whether a pandemic killing less than 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 or 1 in 100000 justifies such restrictions. The point is to recognize that such a point of resistance exists - that there is a point at which Jesus requires the church to say, “No.” Perhaps it will be an issue unrelated to global pandemics and will instead have to do with regulations on what can be explicitly taught or who can or can't be hired. But what is that point? What theological principles will be determinative for you, your church and your leaders? Can you imagine what that line looks like and how your church’s leadership could arrive at such a point and what it would look like to lead your people at that cultural moment? It is important, I think, to add the further circumstance of public opinion here. When the church resisted Rome’s rule in the 3rd century they did so as a community perceived to be immoral and a threat to the public good. When churches in China resist government edicts that appear so obviously anti-religious from our distance, they do so as communities perceived to be enemies of their neighbors. Do not presume that such a point of resistance will come with anyone believing that you are doing anything other than making a selfish power grab or behaving in a way that is harmful to society and your neighbors.

2) What social, ethical or theological positions would you be willing to state, with biblical clarity (being willing to state what the bible says in the way the bible says it), knowing that such claims will lead to you and your church being deemed bigoted, evil, or unloving?

We live in an age where it is increasingly common to see traditional ethical or social dividing lines between secular people and Christian people become volatile. It is no longer deemed a moral oddity that Christians believe that homosexuality is a sin or that sex is given only to a man and a woman who are married, it is seen increasingly as a societal evil. The doctrine of hell and God's judgment is morally unacceptable in our day when applied as broadly as the law of God applies it. We live in a world comfortable with Christians who can articulate a softened vision of God's love or a vision of the Kingdom filled with people from every conceivable ethnic group (seen as a reflection of secularism's inclusiveness). But we live in a world where a real call to repentance for real sins is no longer seen as a religious oddity. It is increasingly perceived as a fundamental and divisive problem with the world. So, granted that there may be disagreement on where and how the best ways to articulate these calls to repent of sin and believe in Jesus, what are the points of contention you see where love requires we call our neighbors to repent and believe? The rub here will likely come in the issue of specificity. Our neighbors will not be offended by calls to repent of generic, ambiguous idolatry. They will be offended when you actually burn the idols. The gospel proclaims that sins have been atoned for in the death of Jesus. But these are not ambiguous unnamed sins, they are real rebellions against actual commands given to us by God. Those commands are likely to get everybody in trouble someday.

A Chaotic Unity

Worship simultaneously reflects and creates cultures. 

Yesterday, the National Cathedral hosted an inauguration prayer service. It featured representatives from about as far and wide as could be imagined - at least with regards to religious traditions. Muslim Imams prayed alongside Jewish rabbis who prayed alongside liberal Protestants including a transgender pastor from Longmont. It was intended as an expression of unity in prayer to (what was called upon at the close of the inauguration) “the great name of our one shared faith.” It was an attempt to give expression to and perhaps even garner some sense of national unity at a time in which our nation is deeply divided and for whom the last 8 months have been marked by social chaos. And while the attempt was unity, the affect was chaos. Disparate voices all barely connected to their own religious traditions praying in the name of some shared faith. The worship of the people will reflect and create culture. 

If you read the Bible much, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that if you pray to Brahma among the other unnamed monotheistic gods on Sunday night you will get chaos and a Buffalo Man standing in the same spot at the Wednesday night prayer meeting. The worship of the people will both reflect and create culture. 

Religious chaos reveals cultural chaos, more than that, religious chaos creates cultural chaos. 

Paul, in Ephesians 5 pushes for a different sort of unity. He has talked about the ethics and truthfulness of unity in chapter 3. A beautiful (if difficult) combination of truthful speaking and gentle humility towards one another.  But in chapter 5 he begins to describe the practices of this unity, particularly a call to sing to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. Here the unity that the work of Jesus creates among a people redeemed by him is sustained and expressed in the practice of singing to Him and to one another. This is one of the many reasons the people of God gather to sing to Jesus every Sunday in our worship: It is an expression of and the creation of real unity. Jesus calls and saves a people who then, in his name (and not some other unnamed god), sing - this is a sort of confession of faith (that we are, despite appearances one) and the creation of that unity (we are singing together). You see, Worship both reflects and creates culture. But this isn’t simply something the church does for herself. She worships as salt and light in the midst of culture that has gone chaotic. Churches spread like salt throughout a city and a nation, calling on the Father in the name of Jesus, singing as one, and the cities and cultures are both preserved and even changed . When the church doesn’t gather, in force, to worship in the presence of God together - there is a cost to society, not just the church. 

We think this singing is so important at Trinity that we’re willing to gather together and practice. Practice doesn’t sound like fun, but we have a good and rowdy time gathered together, laughing and learning how to sing the Psalms in harmony and unity. This is both an expression of a real unity in the name of Jesus Christ, and a means by which such unity is sustained and grows. Worship both reflects and creates culture. 

Tonight we’ll be doing just that: singing psalms and learning how to do so with skill and rowdy joy. Join us for our monthly Psalm sing. 7pm in Arvada. Next month we’ll be downtown. 

You cannot use scotch tape and strip the gods of their names to pretend some national unity. You will only get chaos and madness. Choose which god you will worship. But if you worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Triune God who made heaven and earth, and who has come in Jesus to rescue us from our sins, conquer death and reign forever, you should count on something: He will not share his glory. All honor and glory and power is His and he will not share the podium with other gods. And he loves to teach us to sing together. 

Worshipping Jesus in a Storm

One of the central tasks of Jesus’ church in the midst of any culture and all the cities is to gather for worship. It is a work of fidelity to our King, but it is also a work of love for our neighbors. You see, every culture is prone towards paganism, towards abandoning what is True to follow after lies. The church gathers and gives testimony to the True and the Beautiful and the Good in Word and Song and Sacrament. We do this every week for one another, in the presence of God and for our neighbors - even the ones who don’t believe.

An interesting part of this new season for Trinity is that we are gathering to do this work about a half block from the cultural and political center of our city and state. Nearly every festival, rally, protest and riot will pass a stone’s throw away (though, please, no one throw any stones.) Tomorrow there are scheduled protests and counter-protests and we will gather nearby, united by an all-encompassing allegiance to Jesus to sing together, to eat Jesus’ meal together and to proclaim what is central and true and real together. In a culture that is currently marked by outrage and counter-outrage, lies and half-truths, we come together to celebrate what is true and beautiful and good. In a world increasingly divided into identity groups and political tribes. We come together. I don’t think there is any more important work and it has been appointed by God that we get to do this work right smack dab in the middle of it all.

May we gather, sing the songs of our King, hear him speak in his word, and feast on his body and blood. We we be reminded of what is truly true and gloriously beautiful and profoundly good for Jesus is Lord and this is a marvelous time to be a Christian.

Kill the Dragon, Get the Girl

“Kill the Dragon! Get the Girl!” 

This is the central story of Scripture. A dragon, a bride to be won, and a king who comes to accomplish this great end. It is the story of Christmas told by John in Revelation 12 with all the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse. We’ve sentimentalized the other gospel tellings with Christmas pageants and Peanuts Christmas specials, but John’s telling is strange and wonderful and terrible. 

John gives us a dragon, a woman, and a child whose birth will mean the end of the dragon. There is a flood of rage, an open earth, and angelic warfare. The whole thing is pretty marvelous. At the center is the conquering of a dragon, and this is the meaning of Christmas. 

The terror of dragons is no small thing, and the need for someone to come to rescue us from this particular dragon is great. Of all the troubles we might find in humanity, this is the root of them all. Here is our primal enemy, the serpent-dragon of the garden, the cursed one who seeks to devour and destroy.  John tells us that this dragon has been doing two things from the very beginning: Accusing God’s people day and night and deceiving all humanity.  

The dragon does not come like a bogeyman at night. He does not burn cities with fire or horde gold in mountains. No, his devouring work is done through accusations and lies. The Bible’s assessment of our troubles is far simpler and far more incisive than our current social, psychological and political assessments and solutions. Our trouble is that we have been and are still deceived, and that we stand accused. 

From the beginning the great serpent has been twisting God’s words, undermining their authority, questioning their meaning, turning men and women to distrust what God says.. To twist God’s words is to twist our very understanding of God himself. In the garden the question stood - “is that what God really said?” Did he really mean that? And so, for centuries now, humanity has disregarded God’s words, mocked God’s words, dismissed God’s words, softened God’s words and otherwise failed to simply come and receive his words - all of his words. 

This terrible deception has always had one great end, one great effect: to displace God from his place at the center of all reality, and particularly from his throne, from his authority. Man becomes the measure of all things. Men become the standard of righteousness, of justice, and of morality and love. In the past, paganism has masked this displacement with idols and Superman gods, but in our day secular humanism has made the displacement fixed and explicit. God and his religion, if he exists at all, exists to serve humanity and our ends.

Everyday this lie is told and embraced. Our great project of a humanistic utopia feels possible. With God’s standards out of the way, we might find ourselves to be righteous and moral and just. We might express love far better than some ancient religion with frightening moral judgments. So we sit in judgment on our ancestors for the deceptions they accepted, while embracing our own lies with even greater vigor. 

In addition to this great deception, the dragon has stood before the Judge of all the Earth accusing us day and night. Humanity is deceived and so humanity seeks to cast off the words of God and so the Dragon points day and night in the presence of God at our rebellion. The trouble is that we really have sinned. We really do seek to be our own gods. His accusations are accurate. We have been deceived and we have warmly embraced these deceptions which are destroying us, our world and one another. 

The story of Christmas told in Revelation 12 is that the coming of Jesus means the dragon is cast down and overcome. We feast for 12 days because the birth of this king marks the end of his deceptions and his accusations for all those who “dwell in heaven” - a code in Revelation for those who worship the Lamb. How is this dragon overcome? Two things are described as defeating the dragon’s work: The blood of this Child-King and the Testimony of God’s people. 

First, the accusations of the dragon, before the throne are silenced. His accusations are no longer heard in God’s throne room. You see, they have all been paid for, they have all been atoned for with the death of this king on the cross. The dragon is cast out of the throne room because his accusations will no longer be heard by our God. 

Secondly, the lies of the dragon are overcome by the truth-telling testimony of God’s people. When the church gathers to sing songs that are true, to confess things that are true, to hear the Word that is true, the dragon’s lies are overcome, his deceptions undone. When God’s people love God’s words and testify to God’s words and trust God’s words and obey God’s words in the midst of the nations, lies are shown to be lies. 

This is, at least one reason why the gathered worship of the church is so vital to us and to our world: Here are a people who gather to give testimony to what is true. In a world overrun with humanistic lies, here is the truth declared and loved with joy and gladness. And in this repeated testimony of the Lamb’s people, the dragon is overcome. 

So continue your feasting and celebrating on this 5th day of Christmastide. It is one more testimony in the midst of a world that only seems dark, of what is actually true: the light has dawned. The Dragon’s accusations have been silenced. His lies are, well, lies, for look! We have eggnog, and presents and Christmas lights. A Child-King has been born, whose blood has dealt utterly with our sin and who is the True Word, spoken by the Father and sung by his people. 

Kill Children’s Church

A good sign of God’s blessing in scripture on a city is the sound of children’s laughter in the streets. For several decades now a lot of evangelical churches have been involved in a dangerous experiment wherein they sought to remove the sounds of children from their worship. It was an experiment thought up by church growth gurus who wrongly saw children as a distraction to the main event of church for parents and other attenders to the grand worship experience. It was excused because, as the thinking went, we can provide more effective ministry to these children and youth by pulling them out of worship with their parents. This experiment has been a dismal failure for parents and for children, while being wildly successful from a church-growth standpoint. 

I say experiment because past generations didn’t do this. I grew up in a church during the 80s in which kids worshipped with their parents. There was a nursery and some classes for very small children, but everything was oriented around getting the kids into worship with their parents. We had Sunday School after the service. We had youth group on Wednesday nights. But the backbone of our life as a church was the gathering of the church for worship on Sunday morning - everybody together, young and old, in God’s presence. Most churches had a similar plan. But then, sometime during the 80s and 90s a lot of really large churches began championing age-segmented Sunday mornings as a way to grow your church and serve more people. Maybe we can get more people to come to church if we offer to watch and educate their kids for an hour was how the thinking went. This has been devastating to generational discipleship and covenantal worship. 

A Barna survey released last year shocked a lot of us when we discovered that 64% of those raised in Christian churches leave the church in their 20s (https://www.barna.com/research/resilient-disciples). Organizations have surveyed the church-leavers over their reasons for leaving to try and help us all adapt to the sensitivities of these 20-somethings and their particular social and political concerns (https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/january/church-drop-out-college-young-adults-hiatus-lifeway-survey.html).  I think this is dumb for a number of reasons, but dumb in the same direction we’ve been headed for several decades now. We evangelicals love, in the name of mission, to survey people who do not love the Jesus of Scripture as to why they don’t love the Jesus of Scripture and then make sure we adequately adapt our presentation and practice of what Christianity entails. 

But the surveys don’t tell us much more than what the Bible does. Of course non-Christians or ex-Christians think a church or a religion is judgmental that maintains moral or ethical norms which fly in the face of our culture’s moral norms (or lack-of-moral norms). “Discovering” this in a survey is not a remarkable thing. If one is newly discovering that belief in Jesus and obedience to Jesus is incompatible with humanistic secularism then one probably had a remarkably thin understanding of what belief in Jesus actually meant all along. 

I want to look at a different source of all this apostasy: kids’ church, specifically, kids going to children’s ministry and not worshipping with the rest of the church on Sundays. A few qualifiers.... I don’t mean to say that there aren’t remarkable and yet anecdotal exceptions to what I’m about to say. I don’t meant to say that there aren’t wonderful, godly, well-intentioned ministers leading some of these kids’ ministries. I also believe that there are a whole slew of ways that churches and Christian schools should provide opportunities to train and educate children. I just think that removing children from the worship of God’s people is fundamentally destructive to Christian discipleship - for everybody, young and old alike. 

But kids’ church  or youth church or whatever-clever-name-one-comes-up-with church (a title that indicates we don’t have a clue what the word “church” means) is a failed experiment. Many churches have taken their children (of all ages) out of worship for the past 40 years in the name of “age-appropriate” lessons, betraying a belief that the church’s worship is merely cognitive. They’ve separated the church by generations in order to have stylistic distinctions, betraying a belief that the church’s worship is mostly about your personal taste. They’ve taken children from parents for the most formative thing in the world: the liturgy of the church and so we have kids who haven’t grown up watching their parents humbly kneel in the presence of God and confess their sins. They’ve grown up and not seen their parents raise their hands in praise and honor. They’ve grown up without eating God’s meal of bread and wine with their parents and without seeing old and young together, as God’s people singing, reading, and listening to God’s word. 

A few thoughts about all this, and the 64% of our kids who are abandoning the church and thereby abandoning the God who speaks to us in Scripture. 

1) The church is charged with giving word and sacrament to God’s people (young and old). To remove children from the place where this work is fundamentally done (the gathered worship of God’s people) is to cut them off from the means by which God intends to feed them and nourish their faith. Kids’ ministries, in an attempt to feed God’s children, have ironically cut them off from the family table and has thereby led to the malnourishment of God’s children. 

2) The primary place where your children will learn to worship God and to love his word is by watching you, their parents, worship God and love his word. The ground of all our worship in the rest of life is the gathered worship of the saints. In the name of teaching our children how to worship, kids ministries have cut them off from the fundamental place where God intends to teach his children how to worship. 

3) If your understanding of church is largely shaped by age appropriate, stylistically and generationally distinctive worship programs, it is almost impossible for you to not be shaped to believe that worship is primarily about you and what you “like.” We inadvertently ingraining our children to believe that the worship of Jesus is about finding a bunch of people like them, in their age group, singing music they like and finding a communicator whose communication resonates with them - not too preachy, not too harsh, but authentic and like me. The center of their Christianity will not be God, his holiness and his word. The center of their Christianity will be them, their feelings, and their personal tastes. 

4) We need the sounds of children in our worship. It may seem distracting, but when you recognize and learn to savor the blessings that God gives us in Scripture, then there are few sweeter sounds than an ill-timed yelp from a two year old during the sermon or prayer of confession. They are reminders of our deep and varied humanity as a people gathered for worship and most of all of God’s kindness to give his city children to do the yelping. Parents, your children are a gift to the church, even with their fussiness and discipline issues. Your work to discipline and to teach during worship is a gift to the church. 

Worshipping with a few toddlers and a newborn is incredibly hard work. Teaching a 5 year old to manage a long-winded sermon (especially one of mine) is, well, effort. But this is the labor, the work, of parenting and discipleship: Teaching our children to worship with the saints in the presence of God. Taking children out of worship for their own private lesson and music robs parents of this effort-filled joy.  It robs children of the feast of God’s people and it robs the church of one of God’s surest blessings. 

At Trinity we encourage all parents to keep their kids during worship. During most seasons we will offer some care for children up through age 5 where we essentially help prepare these kids to worship with their parents, walking through the different parts of the liturgy and teaching them how to participate. But even this is meant to be temporary. Our hope is that parents will eventually stop utilizing this resource and bring their squirrelly, yelping 2 year old into the service with them. 

We also provide a number of resources from bags filled with helps during the service, to some simple ways that you can practice as a family with your kids during the week to prepare them to worship with you on a Sunday. If it feels weird to practice for church, consider what’s at stake when we gather for worship. 

Worship is about God. Christianity is about God. The church’s life and worship is centered in the person and work of God. It is a beautiful and wonderful thing to hear the cries of toddlers mingled with the singing of grey-haired saints and teenagers together in God’s presence. Do not rob your children of this glory. Do not rob yourself of this glory. Do not rob the church of this glory. Kill kids’ church and the expectation of kids’ church. Instead train your children, teach your children, but above all else, worship with your children.

The Good Terror of Christmas

When Isaiah saw God, his first response was to say, “Woe is me! I am lost...” Not many people say such things any more. We hear him speak in the Scriptures and almost no one says, “Woe is me!” Instead we go on at length about how I feel about the text. We stand in his presence in the gathering of the church (his Temple) and almost not one trembles in fear anymore, almost no one has an immediate sense of their need for atonement, we just complain about the music, or the temperature, or the preaching). We speak horrid words, trite words, ugly words, slanderous words in jest around a table, in some self-righteous political tirade on social media or in anger while driving never considering in whose presence we said such things nor crying out, “I am a man of unclean lips!” 

Tozer once observed that there are few things more important to a person than what it is that comes to mind when they think of God (Lewis’ response to this notwithstanding). Those thoughts will either conform to reality (in other words, they will be true) or they won’t. And it is really important that they to conform to how the world actually is theologically, morally, physically. 

There are few attributes of God more centrally attested in the Bible and yet so difficult to grasp as is the issue of God’s holiness. Without it laying at the center of our conceptions of God, everything else He is and does gets reduced, or worse, distorted beyond recognition. His love is reduced to sentiment. His righteousness becomes mere politeness. Our own experiences become the center and God’s attributes become relative (he becomes a super version of us), rather than God’s character being central and our own relative to him.  

We have failed to attend to God’s holiness and this is reflected in a whole range of our current troubles. Evangelical worship has become exceedingly casual and a matter of mere religious self-expression - we have abandoned the God-instructed worship in the temple, for our own self-built high places. Or worse, we quickly abandon the worship of God in the church in the name of questionable (at best) public health policy. We unhesitatingly make calls for justice without considering the absolute nature of God’s justice and how His justice comes in both glory and horror - we treat God’s standards as a trifle.  We take to social media, quick to slander public figures with little to no pause or actual knowledge of these people - our mouths are unclean. 

God is holy. Angelic beings, before whom we would fall down as dead men, cover themselves and cry out “Holy! Holy! Holy!” In his presence. He is not like us. He is not common. He is not simply another being in the world of being. His thoughts are not in the same category as our thoughts. His words are not attempts to describe reality, they create reality. His moral judgments do not accord with some eternal, platonic and rational form, his moral judgments determine morality and rationality and are eternal.  His authority is not dependent on us. His purity and righteousness is not on some sort of subjective scale. He is holy and the appropriate universal reaction to coming into his presence is terror. The appropriate human response to God and his holiness is to cry out, “I am lost!” 

Without the terror of God’s holiness, Christmas is reduced to mere sentiment. The wonder and the trembling of the incarnation is that all of this holiness comes as a baby. Christmas is the juxtaposition of the holiness of God and a child born of a woman, come to rescue God’s people from their enemies. When God’s holiness is little considered, our ability to marvel at the grace of this season is lost. Jesus is simply a cute baby who will do some fairly marvelous things. But the glory and terror of the world was lying in a manger. The glory and terror of the world was crying and pooping and needed feeding that night. This is why Christmas is marked by glory and terror. It is why we should tremble and sing. The Holy One has come to rescue us, to conquer unbelief, to destroy our enemies, to crush the head of death. 

May you consider the holiness of God as you light candles and drink eggnog and exchange gifts. May the mystery of this glory terrify you and fill you with wonder. 

Railing against Egypt whilst in Midian

You don’t hear much about Phinehas these days. We have pin the tale on the donkey games and put the nose on the cartoon mouse games, but nobody hangs a poster and plays “run the spear through the people having pagan sex during prayer” games. Yet the story of Phinehas (Numbers 25) is arguably the best story in one of the most interesting books in the whole of the Old Testament. Israel has been rescued from Egypt, they are wandering in the wilderness near Midian, unlearning the worship of the gods of Egypt, and learning to live and worship in the presence of Yahweh. They are surrounded by the local Midianites with whom they will have a rather checkered history. Now Egypt was one of the great super powers of the time with its gods and chariots and represented those deplorable people over there. Midian with their Baal worship and pagan sexuality were right here and were in fact becoming rather insidiously integrated with Israel’s own worship and culture and life (which had been the plan all along coming out of Numbers 22-24 and Balaam’s prophecies against direct warfare with Israel). As God began to bring judgment upon Israel for their whoring and compromise with the Midianite gods (the worship of false gods and the transformation of human sexuality always go together in history), the people gathered in repentance to turn away God’s anger. While they were having this gathering of repentance an Israelite man brought a Midianite woman into the camp, and they began, well, knowing one another. Phinehas takes a spear and runs them both through in one shot. God names him a priest forever for his zeal for the holiness of God’s people in the midst of strange gods and their strange sexuality. 

Now besides this story creating all sorts of problems for us modern evangelicals with its violence, sexuality and intolerance for paganism in the church, it also functions as a kind of parable for our time, and I think particularly for our place. 

Much of modern evangelicalism - particularly in its urban forms have been very outspoken about the evils of nationalism and conservative moralism. These gods have been very visible and made more so by the ways social commentators like to categorize almost any Christian morality or political theory as belonging to those two deities. That being said, the gods of nationalism and moralism are deplorable. They involve the idolatrous intermingling of Americanism with Christianity. They sustain a kind of religious, apple-pie eating moralistic self-righteousness that is quick to forget the mercy of God, the necessity of his grace and the importance of real repentance for sin. It trades the laws of God for human traditions and is fraught with a kind of wicked bigotry that forgets the mercy we have received. They are wicked gods. They are wicked gods who are largely hated in progressive, urban America where these gods are denounced and mocked, their historic hypocrisy is noted again and again, and there is a considerable amount of social pressure to make sure you aren’t one of those people. And just as there was likely a lot of misidentification of the Hebrews’ religion with Egyptian religion, a lot of secularists see biblical Christianity and the idolatry of Nationalistic Conservative Moralism as essentially the same thing. SO there is an understandable effort to distinguish the two as Christians make their home in progressive cities like Denver and Boulder. We are making our home among the Midianites having come from Egypt and we don’t want there to be any confusion or misidentification. But we also don’t want to be disliked. And herein lies the door to our own temptations as people seeking to trust in the work of Jesus and love Jesus and obey the word of Jesus when real obedience to Jesus and the real teaching of Scripture is often simply considered to be of the same fabric as hypocrisy, self-righteousness and hatred. 

The Midianites (or secular progressive humanists) see everybody who isn’t them as hated Egyptians, and in our deep desire to not simply avoid misidentification but to avoid being disliked, we rail against the gods of Egypt and forget to rail against the gods of the Midianites. We minimize the actual apostasy happening in our midst in order to make sure we aren’t confused with wretched self-righteous moralists. As one social commentator put it “Evangelicals are punching right while coddling the unbelieving left. 

Secular Progressive Humanism or Postmodern Social Justicism or The Cult of the Self (its hard to pick one name for this pantheon) are deplorable. They destroy human beings (and kill unborn babies by the millions) and call it good. They destroy the givenness of the world - that it was created and ordered and is ruled by a God with all authority over everything - to remake the world however we see fit. They demand the autonomy of the individual, while destroying the individual with intersectional identities and oppressed/oppressor tribes. They demand justice while defining justice unjustly. They demand a slavery to your own image while promising that such a suicidal life is real freedom. And then missionally sensitive evangelicals adopt much of this dogma, blend them up nicely with Christian dogma and rail against the churches doing the same thing with Egypt’s gods. We take these distortions of love and justice and goodness and beauty and then go and find the words justice and love and goodness (righteousness) and beauty (glory) in the Bible and do a nice little definition swap, trading Scripture’s meanings for those provided by the Cult of Self. We affirm this religious irreligion and naively neuter or destroy the Biblical Christianity we were commissioned to teach, believe and obey. We bring Midianite women into the camp and let them redefine the nature of Christian worship, mission and obedience - all the while careful to distinguish what we’re doing from what those Trump Lovers are doing down south in the Bible Belt. 

2020 has exposed the church’s willing enslavement to the gods who surround us. We trade, again and again, the birthright given to us in the Gospel, a glorious and God-centered freedom to serve the Lord alone, for slavery to a pantheon of deities. Leslie Newbigin once described the surprise he felt on discovering an icon of Jesus in a Hindu temple. He said he was never confused as to whether the presence of this image represented the genuine arrival of Christian faithfulness, but I fear we’ve done precisely that with our progressive religions here. 

 A plague has broken out in our midst and many don’t know the way back. We need a Phinehas with a javelin in hand. We need a restoration of worship and a rediscovery of the kind of freedom Christ has freely set upon us in the forgiveness of sins and the redemption of our lives from slavery to Egypt’s and Midian’s gods. We need a renewed commitment to let God speak clearly and sometimes painfully, from the Scriptures - and let Him say whatever it is that He has chosen to say, unencumbered by our embarrassment that we might be misunderstood.

More Singing Together

We’re continuing our foray into singing the Psalms together and in parts the Friday - Here are some more reasons why:

One of the stranger things, culturally speaking, that the church does when it gathers for worship is singing. Public singing has all but disappeared from broader life in our century with the exceptions of the strange phenomena of karaoke bars and concerts. Add to this absence the significant lack of clarity concerning what exactly the church is doing when we sing or why we sing and you have all the necessary ingredients for the church’s music to slide into entertainment and merely experiential categories. We start to evaluate the church’s music merely on the basis of how it made me feel and approach singing on Sunday less as the labor of God’s people and more as a service or product to be digested. But the singing of God’s people, when they gather for worship, is intended to be a sacrifice of God’s people. It is supposed to be, in the first place, the work of God’s people in God’s presence. In other words, it isn’t designed to entertain or to grant a certain experience. We should sing in spirit and truth - in other words, we should truly believe the stuff we sing, and the musical setting helps to align our affections with what is held out to us in the Psalms, but we can’t forget what it is we’re doing when we start singing together as God’s people. We are bringing offerings of musical labor into God’s presence - offerings of thanksgiving to the one who has redeemed us and invited us into his presence. We find joy as the byproduct of this work. We do receive marvelous gifts as the fruit of this labor. But it begins as the worshipping response of God’s people to his grace.

As David begins to develop the liturgical life of God’s people in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles, the sacrifices of God’s people are accompanied and even overshadowed by the work of music. The songs and prayers of God’s people are collected in the Psalter and a whole musical culture develops. There is some foreshadowing here. The complex and bloody sacrificial system will ultimately find its fulfillment in the blood of Jesus, the church’s covenant meal, and the liturgical music of the church. But the sacrificial system was precise, it was labor-intensive and it called on God’s people to offer their very livelihoods before God. When we gather for worship we come to offer sacrifices to God in song and in bread and wine each week. We should approach the music of the church in the same way - with intentionality and excellence. And while the lyrical content of our singing should be of great importance to us, so should the musical quality be of great importance. It involves a set of skills we should give ourselves to developing. Furthermore, we should be sure that we are using the gifts that God has given to the church for this task. While our music shouldn’t be limited to only the Psalms or the songs given to us in Scripture, these, if for no other reason than that God has explicitly given them to us, should serve as the foundations for all our other singing. 

These are some of the reasons we’re gathering again on Friday night to learn how to sing together with greater skill and to learn how to sing the Psalms. We’ll have beer and wine, and plenty of room to laugh and to make mistakes. But the goal of our gathering on these monthly Friday nights is to learn how to sing Scripture together, in parts, and with excellence and joy.  Join us Friday Night

Fight Club, the 4 Horsemen, and Seeking the Good of the City

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was one of those books that got stuck in my head for a few years. Like all of Palahniuk’s earlier books (his later books seem to indicate his story-telling abilities have been dissolved by his nihilism), he seeks to exploit some aspect of Western Culture and expose us to its troubling underbelly. Here he attacks the kind of nice-guy, consumeristic careerism (its own kind of nihilism) that has eroded any form of purposeful masculinity in our culture. He (quite literally) aims a gun at its head and seeks to kill it. He doesn’t offer any constructive alternatives (Project Mayhem’s aim was simply the destruction of civilization), but he does awaken an army of men to the idea that being the quiet, conformist nice-guys was destroying them and sustaining a soul-crushing society. 

Christians have, for far too long, been trained (and happily complied) with a kind of quiet, respectable role. We’ve had our nice-guy and consumeristic career to play in this Postmodern American Project (PAP) and we’ve played it quite well. We’ve offered little resistance to the whims of political power or social corruption or sexual deviance. We keep showing up at Christmas with the typical protests about someone using ‘X’ instead of Christ. We help out at weddings and funerals (occasionally insisting, with much made of our great courage, that we be allowed to choose which weddings we officiate). We adopt secularism’s definitions (of justice and peace and virtue and love) and then pretend that Jesus blesses all these godless projects. But we play our role of cultural chaplain, largely blessing the direction of the culture at large, some of us troubled by the speed at which the whole thing speeds along, but mostly content to play our largely decorative and irrelevant role. We do it all in the name of some refashioned love, meanwhile, the vocation of salt and light has been largely abandoned.  

But the church is called, often, to be the “bad” guys. I don’t mean the objectively “bad” guys, but I do mean the ones causing all the right kinds of trouble. There is a kind of turmoil that follows the church everywhere it goes in Scripture. Example after example is given to us in the book of Acts of the gospel being preached and the whole city getting turned upside down. The gospel was not a message of peace and love and happiness, it was a message that divided entire cities and led to all sorts of economic turmoil, violence, and preachers needing to sneak out of town in baskets. Paul and Peter aren’t killed because they were doing their best to be a blessing to the Roman Culture and her Polis. They were killed because they heralded a message about the absolute and universal authority of King Jesus and they insisted that it be believed and obeyed by everyone.

While the book of Revelation is marvelously confusing - largely due to terrifically bad readings of it put to almost satire-level fiction in forms like The Left Behind series, it does provide a revelatory look at what the Church is commissioned to be and do in the world. It is a book that promises to reward study and I want to take just a quick bit of it (chapters 5-7, really focusing on a short section of chapter 6) to give us a better understanding of our vocation in the world, and why the church’s mission in the book of Acts (as well as in other times in history) rightly and predictably caused such a ruckus. I also hope we can learn to be the “bad” guys again. 

Revelation 5 opens with a scene that is reflected from a number of different angles throughout the bible. It is a scene packed with meaning and beauty and is worthy of much thought and probably some good songwriting. To see it from other angles read it alongside Acts 1:6-11 (where you can see how the scene starts), Daniel 7, or Psalm 24. But at the heart of the scene is a throne - with God, the one who made heaven and earth, seated on that throne and all creation worshipping this One. In the midst of this universe-wide worship a question, a problem really, arises. It is the question of who will fulfill this One’s purposes for the whole world - purposes of judgment, of glory, of redemption? Who is worthy to open the scroll (which represents all of those purposes executed in its opening)? The answer given in Revelation 5 is the Lion/Lamb of Judah, namely Jesus. As this is revealed a rather remarkable celebration breaks out and we’d be forgiven if we just sat here for a bit, but I want to press on to chapter 6 and the question of what Jesus does when he opens the scroll. In other words, how does Jesus execute his purposes for judgment and redemption in the whole world? 

As he opens the scroll he sends 4 horses of different colors into the world that, well, cause a ruckus. What happens in Acts as a reflection of these goings-on in the heavens is the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 2) to empower and send the church into the world. Peter Leithart has argued compellingly in his commentary on Revelation that these horsemen represent the Spirit-empowered ministry of the church - or at least, the visible cultural-political effects of the Spirit-empowered mission of the church. In other words, these “4 horsemen of the Apocalypse” don’t represent some far off future evil, but instead, these “bad” guys are the church, or at the very least, the intended effects of the church’s faithful ministry. 

Let’s look at the horsemen:

1st is the White Horse who comes with a bow and a crown. He comes to conquer. Here is the gospel announcement of Jesus’ reign over all the earth. Here is the message of his death, resurrection and ascension to the throne. The Church is empowered by the Spirit and sent by God into all the cities and neighborhoods and industries and nations to declare the Good News of the Reign of Jesus and to call everyone and everything to believe in him and to bow to Him. This is the message we are sent to embody and to declare - un-compromised and unapologetic.

Next is the bright red horse. Here is what this message does as it is sent into the world. It takes away peace and creates division and strife. As Jesus said concerning his own ministry - he came to turn father against son, mother against daughter - he came to bring a division that would go all the way down. The church proclaims a message that does not leave the world as it is, it is not a message that can be simply ignored or relegated to the religious or self-help section of the book store. It is a message that redivides humanity and brings division and strife. In other words, the church brings strife. It doesn’t bring strife because it sets out to physically harm people. It brings strife because it proclaims a message that requires one of two responses: faith and obedience or rebellion and suppression. 

3rd comes the black horse. Its rider carries a scale and we see how the impact of the church’s mission is not merely in the realm of ideas and theology but transforms the economics and politics of the cities and the nations. The whole economies of places are transformed by the mission of the church. In the book of Acts a number of riots are started because the growth of the church meant the collapse of certain corrupt industries (Acts 19), others began explicitly because of the jealousy of the Jews - holding onto the old bread rather than receiving the wine of the New Covenant. But the point here is the church in her Spirit-empowered ministry is not the good guys, simply reinforcing and expanding the economic and social elements of the culture. Their ministry reorders everything around the person of Jesus and belief in him. 

Lastly comes the pale horse made famous by Wyatt Earp. This horse brings death. The church brings death too. One way or another the church’s message, the message of the gospel, is a message of death. As Lewis said in his masterpiece, ’Til We Have Faces - “Die before you die, there is no chance after.” We call all people to come to the waters of baptism and die - before they die. The gospel comes as a message of grace, one which bids people die in these waters, or it comes as a message of judgment - the stench of death to those who will know only judgment (2 Cor. 2:16). We do not bring any sort of neutral message but a command from our King, who bids all men come and die and then be raised in him. This is no feel-good message that can fit nicely into a chaplain’s role to secularism. It is a message of maximum disruption. 

The result of this 4-fold ministry of the church in the book of Revelation is laid out for us in chapter 7. It’s a confusing image - 144,000 all accounted for, who are truly a number that can’t be counted. Here is a set number of people (God won’t lose any) who cannot be counted from every nation on earth. The result of this “bad” ministry is a people redeemed from every nation on earth. A people who have died before they died. A people whose lives and vocations in the world are unsettled and transformed by the rule of the Lion/Lamb. A people divided from all the others, enemies for the sake of Jesus. A people sent into the world with the gospel of our Ruling King conquering and to conquer. 

May we joyfully learn to stop behaving as if our job were to comfort unbelief and to keep the peace. Stop conforming to unbelief’s expectations regarding who the “good” guys are. Stop trying to be respectable. It might start by insisting on going to church, insisting on breaking bread and drinking wine, and insisting on giving thanks and singing loudly the songs of the Lamb. 

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” Revelation 5:12

Know This Thing

There are a rather enormous number of things I don’t know. This is one of the gifts of being “not young” anymore. Not knowing things is something that has gone from being a source of insecurity in my youth to a great comfort in my not-young-ness. A lot of you still think you know all the things… Things about a guy named Trump whom you haven’t met. Things about a guy named Biden whom you’ve never met. Things about why that person says those things that way. You even know why I said Trump first and not Biden (totally because my computer is running that Dominion Software algorithm that everybody is talking about.) You are absolutely certain about the real dangers of the Corona Virus, so much so that you are willing to abandon many of the things God has given us, like worshipping with God’s people, warm hospitality and the nearness of friends. Or, you know its all a hoax - a very complex ruse and there’s no need to risk anything.

All this knowing about all these things runs up against Romans 8:26. Here Paul does something rather mean. He calls all of us “weak.” Its not a very sensitive calling out, but it gets a bit worse. You see, he then goes on to say that we don’t even know what we should pray for. His assertion is that you and I are weak and that this weakness is clearly seen, mind you, not in the fact that we must pray and ask for God’s help. No, our weakness is seen in that we don’t even know what we’re supposed to ask God for in the first place. In other words, we’re super weak. Normal weak is recognizing that you can’t do something and getting help from someone stronger. Super weak is not even knowing what you need help with. In other words, Paul says that we don’t know what we don’t know. 

I find this to be a marvelous antidote to all our human knowing here in this Information Age. We have access to more data, more opinions, more expert testimony than any other people in the history of mankind, and we don’t know what any of it actually means or what we’re supposed to do with it. And all the unknowing can create quite a bit of insecurity and devastating, society-wide anxiety. 

Paul then counters this with a declaration of something that the people of God do know. In the midst of this terrible unknowing, immersed in data, swimming in opinions, Paul points to a rock on which Christians (those he calls “God Lovers” and “Called” - what marvelous names!) are to stand. He says that even when we have no idea what to pray for, such that the Spirit of God just groans for us, we do know something. 

We know that God is at work in all things for our good. 

Let these words stick for you just a bit….

We know…

…all things…

…for our good.

And this isn’t meant to be some sort of sentimental truism pasted onto a coffee mug. He’s writing to a people that will be burning in Nero’s garden in a few years and watching their children ripped from their arms. In other words, it is meant to be a rock on which to build a life of unshakable trust in God and faithfulness to His words no matter the dangers or questions you face. Here is a truth that should lead us not merely into quiet, private pietism, but will lead these Christians in Rome into bold and courageous witness that will cost them their lives. Here is something to know when you don’t know anything else, and not knowing enough might cost you. Here is something to know when you are overwhelmed by your unknowing. God is at work for the good of the God-Lovers. God is moving everything (sometimes in very seemingly strange ways) for the Ones Whom He Has Called. 

Paul grounds our knowledge of this wonderful fact in 5 verbs - the stupidly controversial “chain of redemption.” God has Foreknown, Predestined, Called, Justified, and Glorified us. God is the subject of these verbs in Romans 8. We are the objects of these verbs in Romans. 8. How do we know God is working in and through all these things happening around us for our good? Because God has done these things already. Here is not simply a rock on which to put our feet, but a place from which to discern and understand everything else that is happening around us and to us. Here is a description of what God has already done for us and to us so that we might worship Jesus and bear witness to Jesus and obey Jesus even in the face of a Nero and his soldiers.

May we all get really good at admitting what we don’t know. And may we cling to these things that we do know.

Oh… And go to church.

Putting up Roadblocks to Jesus

Imagine a car speeding towards a cliff - think Thelma and Louise without the suicidal element or that newish Star Trek without the one-eyed floating motorcycle policeman. I’ve often wondered where such roads-in-the-middle-of-nowhere are and why we put roads there. While driving on the Road to the Sun in Montana I wanted as many barriers, speed bumps and large, unmovable rocks between me and the cliff as possible. I want to see the view, to be sure, but I also wanted very clear obstacles to disrupt any driving into the abyss that seemed relatively easy. Now consider that these abyss(es?ees?i?) are relatively accurate representatives of where humanity is headed apart from faith in the Lordship of Jesus, his death, resurrection, reign and trusting in all that he commands. 

There has been a kind of Christianity, popular with us young kids, wherein a type of evangelism and even discipleship is adopted that seeks to remove any teachings, ethical norms, or biblical tones (that’s too harsh!) that might dissuade a young non-Christian from coming to believe in and worship Jesus. The idea is that the loving thing to do is to remove any and all obstacles to a person coming to believe in Jesus. Leave the fatal ethical constructs in place, the inhuman worldview, the incoherent secular dogmas, just get them to believe in a set of theoretical propositions or hold some sentimental feelings about Jesus. That’s the goal. That’s how to get people to become Christians. What you end up with is a really nice Christianity, relatively inoffensive, something that feels loving and which has the rather horrific side effect of allowing people to believe that they can keep any of the other stuff that the old curmudgeonly Christians called sin and unbelief, and still be good Christians. In other words this creates a nice, non-threatening neutered Christianity. It is a Christianity incapable of producing disciples who can stand in the midst a culture which rejects the ethical teaching of the Bible. It is a Christianity incapable of reigning in the overwhelming weight of our own suicidal desires. It is a Christianity incapable of producing a culture of robust truth, and rich beauty and loving, moral goodness. 

You know you’ve encountered such a neutered Christianity in a church when the only courageous stands you hear from the pulpit or in a church’s teaching has to do with what everybody in unbelieving mainstream culture already believes. This has its more nationalist-conservative versions and its more secular-liberal versions. It pops up in Texas looking one way and it pops up in Denver looking another, but wherever it pops up it creates a whole community of people who believe that they are Christians because they either have warm thoughts about Jesus or they’ve believed a set of isolated theoretical principles about who Jesus is, you know, way up in the sky somewhere. Neither version pushes into he corners of a person’s life. It never touches the ground. It never confronts with real-time cultural sins being committed right now. Its never concrete. 

It fails to produce real disciples of Jesus, disciples who repent of sin and unbelief, whose lives are growing in conformity to the teachings of Scripture and the good demands of Jesus. It produces Christians who largely look and act and believe just like their secularist neighbors. 

If a person can come to believe in Jesus without some of their deepest-held beliefs and desires and behaviors being confronted, then there is a very good chance that this person has not really come to Jesus. If real repentance from real sin is not pressed - if a person believes they can keep having sex with whomever they want (with consent of course) and that belief and behavior isn’t confronted in the process of coming to believe in Jesus, then they aren’t coming to Jesus. If a person’s financial habits are never confronted, their way of talking to or about people, their work ethic, how they treat their family or love their wife or discipline their children - then the things the Bible actually speaks to aren’t being addressed, and that should smell really fishy to us. The Jesus we meet in Scripture made demands, remarkable demands. He refused to serve anyone else’s agenda. He confronted those who would follow him in the most pointed and personal ways. Demanding a rich man sell everything to follow him in one place, demanding another leave his parents behind in another. Jesus made it hard to follow Jesus. Who are we to make it any easier?

This kind of Christian evangelism and mission is almost the complete opposite of older forms of Christianity, where the Law’s confrontation of our particular sins was essential to repentance and faith. Where does the Law condemn me? Where does the Law declare me guilty on account of the way I am living? It is precisely here that my need for the grace of God, and the kindness of God is made clear. It is here where the necessity of the cross is made plain. It is here where I can see the cost of believing in and following Jesus. The Law does not confront humans in abstract ways calling us to warmer feelings about Jesus. No, through the Law, God names, confronts and condemns our actual sins. The things we love and do. This never feels good, and is almost never considered loving in a culture like ours. But God saves us through the work of Jesus and calls us to repentance from sins and to faith in the person and work of Jesus. 

Conversion to Christianity happens when a person hits a roadblock and turns. They are driving into an abyss, and in the mercy of God the law of God comes like a big set of flashing lights and railing to call you to turn. Sure they’re annoying. They are in the way. The ministry of the church must be a ministry of putting things in the way - disruptive things, oftentimes painful things, but if coming to Jesus is easy - if it isn’t costly, then there is a very good change we’ve simply mislabeled the abyss and misunderstood the mission of God given to the church. This is, of course quite risky. Its how Christianity gets a bad reputation among the cool kids. But it is the remarkably devastating message that Jesus has given to the church- a message about his authority over all things, his death for our terrible sins, and his conquering of death - the penalty for all those sins. So church, do the work of the gospel: Put up roadblocks. 

What to Do When Everybody's Hair is on Fire...

Everyone seems to have set their hair on fire. The word “unprecedented” has been used so often in the past 8 months as to cause a great deal of confusion about what “precedented” is supposed to be. We have an “unprecedented” pandemic (it increasingly looks like it follows several other historic precedents- but I get it.) We have an “unprecedented” election (that one may be true). We have unprecedented social unrest. We had an unprecedented dinner the other night when a friend made some sort of sourdough pancake/bread/English muffin magical item which I didn’t know existed. When everything is unprecedented, Christians might be tempted to just float through the chaos, being tossed by every rapid, slamming into every rock, but there is supposed to be something steadying about what we say we believe. There is supposed to be something rock-like in what we sing and pray and confess.  

When everything is unprecedented, what is the church to do? 

The author of Hebrews is writing to Christians surrounded by chaos and groaning and very serious times. These Christians were being tempted to turn back from their faith in Jesus in order to avoid persecution. Some were simply avoiding the gathering of God’s people in order to keep up appearances. But there were all sorts of questions about when and how to worship in the light of the coming of Jesus and in the midst of societal chaos and difficulties. In chapter 10:19-25 the author says this:

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

- Hebrews 10:19-25

Now this little passage is chalk full of wonderful reminders and encouragement. But I want to focus on the exhorting at the end: 

Hold fast the confession 

Stir one another to love and good works

Do not neglect to gather together

Encourage one another. 

The book of Hebrews is very concerned with the worship of the Church- how the liturgy of the church has replaced the worship of the tabernacle and temple. In other words, Hebrews is about the life and worship of the church as much, if not more than it is concerned about mere individuals. This is a book concerned with the question of What is the church to do? The church is to hold fast our confession - our hope. Here is a hope anchored somewhere outside electoral results. Here is a confession about Jesus and his work that is unshaken by viruses and doesn’t depend on the magistrate for salvation or for freedom. Here are clean bodies and purified consciences - not made clean by distances, masks, lots of hand sanitizer or anything of the like, but made clean by God. I hope you caught that because there are a lot of people doing a lot of things to try and make their consciences clean. Rushdoony (in Politics of Guilt and Shame) believed it explained most of our political disagreements. Your body and your conscience can only be washed clean by God…. by God.

So what is the church to do in these days?: 

Gather for worship. Hold to our confession in hope. Stir one another up to fulfill the vocations God has given us towards love and fruitfulness. Encourage one another. In other words, the church is to do what the church is always supposed to do. 

We are not to do unprecedented things. We are to do precedented things. Things that the church has always done, has always been called to do. We do not react, we persevere in the works that God has called us to - calling all men and women to come, to repent of their sins, to eat bread and to drink wine, and to hope in God. 

A Statement to All You Feisty Maskers and Anti-Maskers at Trinity

Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. - 2 Timothy 2:23

Trinity Church,

Every Sunday as we worship together we say the Apostle’s Creed. This 1700 year old confession marks the church’s unity. In a world of divided allegiances and controversies, we gather each week to confess and to be reminded that we are united in our confession of the Triune God instead of being divided by the various factions that mark our world.

Our society, over this past year, has been catechizing us to turn every division into a political division and every division into a division between love and liberty. We have even taken a thing like a piece of cloth over ones’ nose and mouth and made it a thing of heated moral division in our culture. I am concerned that such divisions have made their way into our young community. As a church body we have taken the position that we will not have a position on mask-wearing or anti-mask-wearing. We believe it to be an issue of conscience left to each household to decide how to approach this issue. We do not enforce mask-wearing in our gathered worship and people are free to wear a mask at our services or not. We provide different worship spaces (the balcony maintains more space between households, we offer audio outside on the lawn, and transmit the service via radio for those wishing to remain in their cars) for those who want or need more space or isolation and everyone is free to wear a mask if they choose.

But more importantly this is an issue which we will not be divided over. And to that end I want to speak to both groups in our church community:

To those of you who have been convinced that masks are not wise or good: There are those among us, godly members of this church who do not believe what you believe about masks. They have any number of reasons for believing that mask wearing is an urgent health need in our day. There are good medical professionals and scientists, many of whom are committed to the Scriptures and the authority of Jesus, who back this claim and believe that mask wearing in our society is best right now. Please do not assume that mask-wearers are simply enslaved lemmings. Do not assume that they are terrorized by some irrational fear. Your temptation during these times will be towards a kind of scoffing pride. Do not do this. Such pride could harm you and our church for whom Christ died. Your commitment to liberty is a good thing, after all Paul tells us that it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. But do not let your liberty be an excuse to look down on your brother and sister for whom Christ died. They likely have very good reasons for wearing their masks.

To those of you who are convinced that wearing masks are the best way right now: There are godly members of this church who do not believe what you believe about masks. There are good medical professionals and scientists, many of whom are Christians who believe that for the majority of our society masks are an unwise way to proceed and cause more harm to us and our neighbors than good. Please do not assume that those not wearing masks, particularly in this community, simply don’t love their neighbor or care about your well-being. Your temptation will be to elevate extra-biblical standards to define love. Do not do this. Such self-righteousness could destroy you and harm this community for whom Christ died. Your commitment to love your neighbors is good, after all Jesus has commanded us to love our neighbors, but do not use your good intentions as an opportunity to sin against your non-mask-wearing brothers and sisters. They likely have very good reasons for not wearing masks.

I want to say as forcefully as I can- We will not be divided over mask-wearing. Do research, trust to God’s providence and care, and then let each of you do what is best. The Bible calls us to all kinds of commands on how to pursue liberty and love together without adding the dividing mark of mask wearing or anti-mask-wearing. In a society that is totalizing narratives about masks - telling stories about love and liberty, our refusal to be divided over such a thing is a necessary form of resistance. If you are afraid, the Word of God gently confronts you with the wonderful command: Do not be afraid. If you are reckless in your freedom, the Word of God gently confronts you with the wonderful command: Love your brother and sister.

May we be eager to obey the numerous ways that Scripture teaches us to pursue liberty and to practice love. And may our liberty and love be expressed not in masking or unmasking, but in our confession of the absolute authority of Jesus over all things, even our faces and certainly our fears.

Lastly, one of the clearest commands given to us in Scripture is to not “forsake the gathering together” (Hebrews 10:23-25) of God’s people. In addition to learning new divisions in this time, God’s people are inadvertently learning to disobey this command from our Lord. We want to encourage all of you to be dligent to resist temptations to forsake the gathering of God’s people in worship. This is not about asserting some abstract principle of rights, but about honoring our King and attending to the means of grace given to us in being together to receive Word and Sacrament. So, in short, come to church.

The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people. But avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. As for the person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned. - Titus 3:4-11

Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. - 2 Timothy 2:23

I appeal to you brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught; avoid them. - Romans 16:17

I appeal to you brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. - 1 Cor. 1:10

For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part. - 1 Cor. 11:18

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is one, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Jesus Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit. Let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. - Galatians 5:19-25

It is these who cause divisions, worldly people, devoid of the Spirit. - Jude 19

Painting a Car with a Hammer

“This is the most important election of our lifetime”

Probably not, but maybe. 

But even if it is, its likely not as important as you think and definitely not important in the way you think. 

Nero’s early empire ruling in Rome was a pretty great time for most everybody. The theater was opened up again. Games returned. Christians were largely left alone and the Jews could start returning to Rome. Everything seemed to be headed in a mostly decent direction. Nero’s “second term” was a different thing altogether (a good reminder is that killing your mother has significant consequences for ones’ leadership). Pretty soon impaled Christians  are being used as torches for garden parties, Nero is forcing renovation projects to significant parts of the city by starting large, devastating fires, and well the whole political machine had went a bit mad. We get some of the best bits of the New Testament as Paul, John and Peter tried to prepare the church for navigating the fiery end of Nero’s “Make Rome Great Again” projects. 

I’m not offering any prophetic insight into what’s coming through either an extended Trump presidency or a Biden one, but I do want to ask everybody (myself included) to take a nice, deep breath and chuckle at ourselves a bit. It can be easy to get enraged or laugh at the other side of this coming election. But I think we need some good universal Christian laughter, the kind of laughter grounded in a healthy view of God as the author of history.  If you find yourself wound up at the latest outrage posted on Facebook by that girl you never really trusted after middle school, I would argue that you’re forgetting a few key things about politics and God. What happens next week in the election (let alone on your facebook feed) matters far less than you probably think it does. And it matters differently than you think it does. Don’t misunderstand me, the election certainly matters. Our elected officials fulfilling their rightly ordained vocations is important for the peace of society. But I think we generally forget some things and over sell some things when we think about who is going to be elected President or who’s running for any other government (be it local, state, or federal) office. 

Firstly - a thing we forget.

God draws straight with crooked lines. The Bible is absolutely clear, God is going to get us where He wants to get us. But he doesn’t usually take the route you’d have taken if you were in charge of the roadtrip map. As the drivers in our family have doubled in the last year, so have the opinions about which route is the best/safest/fastest/prettiest to most everywhere. God loves curveballs, knuckleballs, and taking “wrong” turns (I know, I’m mixing metaphors here, but that’s part of what God likes to do as well.) He is generally doing a million things in a situation where we are primarily concerned about only 1 or 2. We’re really hoping for an A on our Physics test, while God is moving the universe around and hoping we see the sun peaking through the clouds in that slim little window that looks out over the park from our classroom. We’re often playing baseball when God is doing something far more interesting - like nuclear physics brain surgery. 

God was acting through the good and the terrible parts of Nero’s reign. It wasn’t his work the first few years and then something out of control the last part. God was strategically acting in all of it. Now it is important to note, that there is such a thing as a norm by which we can assess the good parts and the terrible parts as being good or terrible. But God wasn’t bound in his work by Nero. Nero was a means for God’s good purposes whatever his particular actions and policies. 

At whatever point the election is finalized next week (hopefully!), what we can be sure of is that God has given us what we have. This isn’t to short change anyone’s responsibilities to vote thoughtfully and Christianly, but it is  to say that God is doing something on purpose whomever ends up waking up in the White House this Spring. 

Secondly - Remember what the Magistrate is for. 

In the opening episode of Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom McKenzie asks Jeff Daniels’ character a question loaded with a common and problematic assumption in our day.  She asks, “Is government a force for good or is it every man for himself?” She’s in the middle of a great little monologue that exposes where and how our hope lay for a better world. Both the Right and Left are tempted terribly by the idea that government and politics are tools for the building of their vision of what the world should be. We start with very different visions of the good, the beautiful and true for society, and then we expect a government who will give us that. We subtly begin to believe that the magistrate is the fundamental tool for achieving human flourishing. This is a poisonous religious belief. And it leads directly to the kinds of incoherent and screeching discourse that we find in our politics today. 

The government - whatever its particular design, is incapable of creating human virtue.  It is not made for cultivating love. It will never be very effective at sustaining faith and its attendant obedience to God - necessary conditions for the long-term thriving of humanity as a whole. Economic flourishing can not be created by a government. Neither can social flourishing or real, positive goodness. The sort of generosity where people give of their very lives to one another and where business owners give of their very profits for the further thriving of their employees - neither of these can be created or sustained by governments. Joy-filled, faithful and healthy families cannot be built by the government, even though you cannot have a sound economy or healthy human beings without them. We can try to use government to prop up a society that lacks these things, but very soon such an arrangement will lead to increasingly serious problems. 

There is a subtle belief on the Right, that I witnessed living in various places throughout the U.S. that somehow we can create a good and noble society. We can make families strong. We can end the pervasiveness of pornography and its attendant lusts. We can improve hunting season and make Christmas better. All of this if we can only get the right people into office. This isn’t (obviously) universal, but it is a real temptation and it is founded on a belief that the government can do things that it was never designed by God to do. 

There is a belief on the Left, that I encounter daily living here in Colorado. It is the belief that we can build a good and equitable society by political means. We can end poverty. We can make it so no one feels excluded and everybody is safe - from viruses, from narrow people, and from any future apocalyptic environmental catastrophes. And all of this can be so if we can simply get the right people and policies into the right governmental spot. This isn’t universal, but I will say it is a temptation and a prevalent one on the left. A vision for an activist government virtually requires a belief that government can give us the society that we think we want. 

But this is like painting a car with a hammer. You might smear some paint on there, but your doing the wrong thing. God gave us the magistrate for some fairly specific purposes (to punish evil, protect the innocent, and to protect space wherein liberty and righteousness might flourish) and it was never designed to do the job that the church and the family was made to do. Sorkin’s dichotomy was a false one. In the world that God has made, it is never every man for himself, but neither should we look to the government as our source for the growth of good. 

For far too long we have demanded of our politicians (and they have been eager to oblige) that they promise to create the great society. We demand that they give us hope. We ask them to transform the tattered fabric of our cities, to overcome what amounts to collective sin.  Look at the two campaign slogans on offer from our current candidates: “Battle for the soul of the nation” and “Make America Great Again!” - these are both breathtaking claims. When the magistrate takes up such projects, it never goes well. They cannot do this and we should stop asking them to, in fact we should be far more suspect when they start making those kinds of claims. 

This isn’t to say that Tuesday’s election doesn’t matter for the promotion of a just and good society. Its just to say that it doesn’t matter that way. We should elect magistrates who will do the job that’s been entrusted to them by God, and outlined quite satisfactorily in the Constitution. We should expect of them that they will do the job they’ve been given faithfully. And then we should get busy doing the rather mundane work of raising families, hard work with our minds and hands in the places where God has given us work to do, and learning to live as Christian men and women who love their neighbors and who worship and obey the triune God.  And we should keep doing those things regardless of who wins the presidential election on Tuesday. We should keep pursuing those things no matter what policies or laws or newfangled attempts at transforming society into some utopian and disease-free dream come down the pike. God is on his throne, the president and everybody else answer to him. May we get on with the great work of seeing the world filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. 

Singing Different

On Friday evening we’re going to start a new monthly (at least) practice around Trinity wherein we are going to begin gathering to learn how to sing together - particularly learning some hymns, psalms and other songs taken directly from Scripture. And while getting together to sing may not be particularly strange for a church to do, what we hope to learn to do is how to sing beautifully together by learning to sing different musical parts together. You see, what normally happens when the church gathers to sing on a Sunday is that a few skilled musicians perform the music up front, and the congregation listens or joins in by singing in unison with the primary vocalist leading the music. The benefit of the church performing her music this way is its simplicity. It allows the church to adopt popular musical styles and allows what we think of as non-musicians (the vast majority of us) to participate in the church’s music without having to learn any new skills (other than lyrics and generally easily mimicked tunes). But when compared to the way much of the church has sung in the past, these gains come with some significant losses.  We want to start learning how to do something a bit older and quite a bit different than our normal practice on Sunday mornings and so we’re going to start learning this old way on Friday evening. 

The development of music and singing in Scripture provides some wonderful insight into its purpose in the church’s worship. Without launching into a full blown biblical theology of singing and music I want to point to a few things that are, for me at least, newish thoughts:

1 - Singing specifically, and musical development more generally is attached quite remarkably to the coming and enthronement of kings throughout the New and Old Testaments. Saul’s coronation is preceded by a band of singing prophets.  David establishes royal and priestly musicians and singers upon his own enthronement as king. One of the great scenes (of many) in Revelation is the commissioning of the Lamb at the Throne in Revelation 5. Here the elders and all the heavenly host and eventually all of creation itself sings in celebration of the One on the throne and the Lamb who is commissioned by God to conquer the nations. 

2 - This imagery and the event that corresponds to it (namely Jesus’ own ascension at the beginning of Acts (and described in Daniel 7) points us to another link with the singing of God’s people that clues us into its purpose.  It is often attached to the military - or God’s hosts, which is simply our nice way of saying God’s army. The armies of Israel are led into battle by the Levites singing God’s songs. The Lamb who is the Son of Man is commissioned to conquer the nations in Revelation 5 and sends out his horsemen in Revelation 6 and they are accompanied by song. The singing of God’s songs by God’s people marks their commissioning by their King into and among the nations. It is the music of a host, an army, a people sent by their king. 

3 - Lastly (though there is a lot more that should be said), you can trace a development from the music established by David throughout the history Old Testament worship (and reaching its pinnacle in the New) as the blood sacrifices are first accompanied by and then slowly replaced by the sacrifices of song (along with the atoning blood of Jesus.) In other words, as central and particular as the sacrifices of Tabernacle and Temple worship were, so also should the church’s music be in its own worship in God’s presence. Our singing should accompany our full hearted belief and allegiance to our King. Our singing should have a militancy about it - it marks us as a sent people. And our singing should be as central to our worship and as intentionally done as many of the offerings were to Israel’s own worship. These realities should shape not only our concern for the lyrical truthfulness of our singing, but also our concern for style and skill and congregational involvement. 

Our prayer is that as we all learn some new skills (how to read musical lines, learning to sing different harmonies together, learning to sing Scripture) we will grow as a congregation both in our ability to sing, but also in being formed in some new and enriched ways by the music we sing. Our hope is that soon music will fill every part of our church’s life- whether gathered in a living room or on a Sunday, that we will learn to sing skillfully and with all our hearts together whether there is someone there to play guitar or not.