Learning the Basics with Jesus,a devotional thought

 A simple line in Mark 4 got me thinking the other day. Jesus has just finished telling his first parable (the sower and the soils, Mark 4:1-9), and while the disciples are all scratching their heads, he says, "Don't you understand this parable? Then how, also, will you know [the meaning of] all the parables?" (my rough translation).

In other words, The Sower and the Soils is like "Learning from Jesus 101," and if you can't get this simple lesson, what will you do as the parables get increasingly layered and mysterious? It's an interesting statement, especially because the parable of the Sower itself is about those who "get" the Message of the Kingdom and those who don't. Jesus seems to be saying: "Only the 'good soils' will get my message, and the first sign that you're 'good soil' is if you get this parable about the good soil, to begin with." Sounds a bit like circular reasoning, but then, when did Jesus ever bow to the man-made-rules of logic or rhetoric? He wrote the rules, after all!

But it got me thinking about the fact that, when it comes to Jesus, how we do hear determines how we will hear; how we do press into the deep truths of life with him, when the pressing in is relatively easy, will determine how we will press in, when the pressing in is fraught with obstacles and spiritual resistance. Tougher lessons than the Parable of the Sower are on their way, and only those who have cut their teeth--and their hearts--and their imaginations--on this one, will be ready for them when they do.

"If you don't get this parable, how will you understand any parable?" May Jesus make us all quick studies.

Standing in the Gap: a Reflection on Worship

A while ago, a friend of mine was reading through the Bible, cover to cover for the first time.  She did pretty well with Genesis and Exodus, but when she got to Leviticus, things started to get rocky.

“Why the sudden obsession with cleanliness and animal sacrifice?” she wondered.

While all those elaborate rituals and detailed sacrifices in Leviticus may seem strange to modern readers like us, they’re actually crucial for understanding the person and the ministry of Jesus Christ.

Because the theological vision underlying the Leviticus is that, whatever else God is, he’s transcendent.  The word transcendent means that God is completely other, absolutely unlike anything in Creation.  Like it says in one place:  “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so are my ways above your ways.”

Now, we tend to think in spatial terms, so we tend to picture it in this way—that God is “above us” or “far away.”  But in Leviticus, God is not “far away.”  He is the Creator of everything, after all, so he’s always present to the creation; and what’s more, the story of Leviticus is that God has actually come to live right in the midst of his people, in the Tabernacle that Moses made.

God’s Transcendence has to do with his nature, not his location.  God is completely holy, whereas humans sin.  God is completely eternal, whereas humans are tainted by death.  God is pure light in which there is no shadow at all, and humans are ...well, you get the picture.

This is the theological dilemma driving the Book of Leviticus: God is always right there with us, and at the same time, he’s wholly transcendent.  How do you live with a God like that?

In Leviticus the answer is through the ministry of a priest.  A priest must “go between” for the people, in the way that God prescribes, according to rituals he describes, rituals which not only “represent” God’s transcendence to us, but also “bridge it” so that we can in fact, live with him.

So ritual washing, for instance, reminds us that God’s pure and we’re unclean, but it also deals with the problem, by making us clean.  And the rituals of animal sacrifice address the fact that it would mean death for flesh-and-blood creatures like us to stand in the presence of a Holy God, but it also deals with this problem.

The whole Bible agrees with Leviticus on this one:  God is completely transcendent and yet, at the same time, always there.  And because of this, there is no way for Humans to do life-together-with-God—to worship, or pray, or celebrate him—without the work of a Mediator like this.

Someone needs to enter God’s presence on our behalf, bringing “the things of humanity to God,” and bringing the “things of God to us.”

And this is where Jesus comes in.  Because Christians, of course, while they may share the vision of God that Leviticus describes, they don’t actually observe any of the rituals it prescribes.

And this is because the writers of the New Testament kept insisting that Jesus is the fulfillment of the vision for life with God that we find in the Torah.  He is the Great High Priest, but he is also the sacrificial Lamb.  He is the Tabernacle where God’s Glory dwells, but he’s also the Perfect Mediator who enters the Tabernacle for us.

This is why the teaching that Jesus is both fully God and fully human matters so much, because only a fully-human-fully-divine saviour could bridge God’s transcendence for us, brining the things of God to us, and at the same time, bringing human being like us into the divine presence.

For the Christian every aspect of our life with God is really just a participation in the Priestly Ministry of Jesus, who stands as our human representative before God.  Through faith and by the Holy Spirit, our worship, our prayer, our ministry, our very lives are untied with the worship, prayer and ministry that Jesus offers the Father on our behalf.

And because it’s offered in him, it is accepted as holy: pure, perfect and pleasing to God.

By the Lakeshore with Jesus, a devotional thought

Compared to the three other Gospels, Mark comes across as brief, unpolished, even cursive at times. Yet for all this, many of his stories capture details that the other Gospels might minimize or edit out, but they leave you certain you're brushing up against the raw texture of a story remembered by those who were there.

Mark 4:1 is an example of this. I've always loved the description of Jesus sitting in a boat and teaching from the water because the crowds were so packed along the lake-shore that there was no room for him there. This is, I think, the sort of out-of-the-ordinary detail that would have lingered long in the telling and retelling of the event: "And then Jesus—get this—he was almost pushed into the water by the crowds pressing in to hear him, so he hopped in a boat and shoved off into the lake, and taught them all from there!"

When I tried to visualize this, it sort of strikes me that today the crowds aren't "practically pushing Jesus into the lake" in their enthusiasm to encounter him. Even among Christians, you don't often see this sort of falling-over-yourself eagerness not to miss a thing he has to say; sadly, Jesus has plenty of room to move about freely in most Canadian churches.

It makes you wonder.  What had those crowds at the lakeshore that day *experienced* in Jesus, that we have yet to experience, that nothing in the world was so compelling to them as standing under his teaching as he taught? But it also makes you wonder this: what if the 21st Century Canadian Church was like that lake shore: crammed so full of people there to hear Jesus that it almost felt like there was barely room left for him? I think we'd find he was filling up the place to overflowing, if it were.

Jamming with the Maestro, a thought on prayer

One of my favorite viral videos is of a violinist performing a solo piece in concert.  The audience sits enraptured as the performance reaches its majestic crescendo, and then someone’s cell phone thoughtlessly breaks the spell.

But what this maestro does with the interruption is amazing.

So: the way this maestro graciously incorporates the harsh music of that cell-phone into his performance provides us with a helpful starting point, I think, for understanding Christian prayer.

Now: it’s a basic axiom of the Christian life, that Jesus Christ acts on our behalf as our Great High Priest in Heaven, interceding for us before the Father. Our prayers always come to God in, through and with the prayers of our Mediator, the God-man Jesus Christ.

We see this principle at work in some fascinating ways in the New Testament.

Take the well known “Lord’s Prayer,” for instance.  The disciples see Jesus praying, and ask him to teach them to pray.  And the prayer he taught them goes like this: “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be thy name, Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Towards the end of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus himself is praying, in a garden called Gethsemane.  It’s right before his crucifixion, and Matthew says Jesus prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to pass from me, then thy will be done.”

Right before his obedient death on the cross, Jesus himself prays perfectly the prayer he taught his disciples to pray—that the Father’s will be done.

In Mark’s Gospel, we see the same thing from a different angle.  In Mark’s Gethsemane, Jesus prays these words:  “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you; take this cup from me, yet not what I will, but what you will.”

The word “Abba” is an Aramaic term for Father that expresses intimacy and familiarity—the word “Dad” maybe gets us close to it in English.

But in another place in the New Testament, it’s talking about our life with God, and it says this:  “We are all children of God ... who have received a Spirit of Sonship, and by the Spirit we cry out ‘Abba, Father.’”

In other words: the Holy Spirit puts Christ’s prayer in us when we pray to the Father, and by the Holy Spirit, our prayers become part of the beautiful, trusting, ‘Abba Father’ prayer he prayed in Gethsemane.

What all this means in practical terms, is that when Christians pray, our prayers are united with Jesus’s own prayers to the Father.  He gathers them all up into himself, perfects them in his own self-giving, and then offers them for us in his one glorious prayer:  “Abba, Father, Thy will be done.”

But what does this actually look like?  If Jesus prays for us, does the actual content of our individual prayers mean anything?

Well: imagine a violinist performing in the great concert hall that is heaven.  His music is sweeping and rapturous, and as he performs , sometimes-well-meaning, sometimes-thoughtless, but never especially musical ringtones break the moment.

To the extent that we never know how to pray as we ought, and even when we try, our humanness always gets in the way—in that sense our prayers are those garish ringtones.

The difference, of course—and it’s the difference that makes all the difference— is that rather than seeing these ringtones as thoughtless interruptions, this maestro joyfully welcomes them.

Because he’s the consummate artist.

And he’s able not just to transform them into music, but to weave them seamlessly, effortlessly, and joyfully into his performance, so that they thrill the audience, and without ever losing their original quality, sound as if they always belonged.

This is what Jesus does with our prayers, as faltering and imperferfect as they always are, he gathers them up into his own liturgical self-giving to the Father in heaven, uniting them with his own perfect prayer and offering them with his, to the Father.

In this way our prayers become part of his glorious masterpiece: Yes, Abba Father, Thy will done, on earth as it is in Heaven!

What's in a Name, a devotional thought

I love the description of Jesus "naming" his disciples in Mark 3:16-17. It says that after he chose the 12, he gave Simon the name "Peter" (Peter is Greek for "the Rock") and he gave James and John the name "The Sons of Thunder."

I've always sort of read this in a sombre way, that Jesus is putting his finger on something truer-than-true about these men. And there's probably something to that, but this morning it struck me how playful the giving of "nicknames" actually is. In the Robin Hood legend, one of the running gags is how Robin Hood renames all the outlaws who join him (Little John was John Little before he met Robin). Or remember how Mike Myers kept adding "-meister" and other such playful suffixes to peoples names in Wayne's World? We just watched Big Hero 6, and in that movie, it's Fred, the not-a-care-in-the-world-party-guy who "gives everyone their nicknames." Oh yeah, and in the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, it's Michelangelo (the party dude) who assumes the responsibility of giving all the bad-guys their super-villain handles.

No: Jesus is not like Mike Myers or Michelangelo or Robin Hood, except in this: when his followers come to him they find themselves creatively, even playfully, renamed. In my mind's eye I could almost see the twinkle in the eye as Jesus looked at Peter and said, "from now on we'll call you The Rock." And I can only speculate what earned James and John the handle "Sons of Thunder!" (but it's pretty rewarding speculation). Two intermingled thoughts linger with me here: 1) in coming to Jesus something deep and true and essential about who we really are gets drawn out of us, and this is reflected in the renaming of people we see him doing in the Gospels; but 2) there is something profoundly good-natured and joyful and even playful in the way Jesus goes about drawing this out of us.

The meaning of worship, the meaning of life

Most Christians would agree that worship is right at the heart of a thriving life with God.  One old description of the Faith says it’s the very reason we were made: “To know God and Glorify Him forever.”

What Christians don’t tend to agree on, however, is what worship actually is.  If you were to ask a bunch of Christians to define worship, you’d probably get a range of answers.  Some would  talk about singing songs about how much they love Jesus.  Some would talk about taking part in the traditional ceremonies of the Church, like communion and baptism.  Some would describe the feelings of awe they get when they’re out in God’s creation.

So what actually is worship?

Maybe it would help if we looked at some key passages in the Bible where people actually are worshiping God, to see if we can’t detect a pattern in what’s happening.

One of the central stories in the Bible, for instance, is about how God rescued the People of Israel when they were slaves in Egypt.  Right at the start of the story, it says that God heard the people groaning in slavery, so he sends Moses to tell them that he’s going to help.  And in Exodus 4:31, it says that when the people heard that the Lord was going to help them, they bowed their heads and worshiped.

God acts, and the People respond.

In another place, after King Solomon built the Lord’s Temple and was consecrating it to the Lord, it says that the fire came down from heaven and the glory of the Lord filled the Temple, so that the priests couldn’t go in. And then it says this “When all the people saw the fire and the glory of the Lord on the temple, they bowed down and worshiped.”

Again: God acts, the people respond.

The same pattern is there in the New Testament.  In the Gospel of Luke it tells how Peter met Jesus for the first time.  Peter’s been fishing all night but caught nothing.  Along comes Jesus, who tells Peter to cast his net into the deep water, and when he does, the catch of fish is so huge that they need another boat to help them bring it in.  And then it says, when the Peter saw it, he fell on his knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord, I’m a sinful man.”

Or how about this one.  After Jesus’ resurrection, Doubting Thomas is ... well ... doubting.  And the Resurrected Jesus appears to him and tells him to put his fingers in his wounds.  And when Thomas sees the nail-holes of the cross, he says, with a voice of awed worship: “My Lord and My God.”

This pattern is consistent throughout the Bible.  It always starts with God showing himself in the life of his people.  And the people see God at work.  And then they respond accordingly.

Sometimes we call this the “Revelation-and-response” pattern in worship.  Worship does not begin with us; Worship is what happens when God reveals himself to us in some way, and evokes a response from us that is appropriate to the revelation.

This revelation can happen in all sorts of ways: hearing the Story of Jesus and realizing how much God loves us; reading something in the Bible that puts its finger smack dab on something we’re going through right now; working among the poor and the marginalized and discovering the presence of Jesus there; being reminded of the awesomeness of the Creator by experiencing the beauty of his creation.

God can and does reveal himself to us through all these things and more.  But the key is that worship happens when God shows himself in our lives, and then we respond in ways that his revelation evokes in us.

It may mean raising our hands and singing our hearts out.  It may sitting in overwhelmed silence.  It may mean weeping because we realize something’s not right between us and God.  It may even mean a drastic overhaul of our lives.

But however it happens, in that response to God, we’ll be discovering the meaning of life.

Through the Roof, a devotional thought

A simple thought hit me the other day when I was reading the story in Mark 2, about the guys who lowered their paralytic friend through the roof of the house where Jesus was because they couldn't get through the crowds.  These guys were ready to do whatever it takes to get their friend to Jesus.  It talks about them digging through the roof (so, roofing in 1 Century Israel was, admittedly, a bit easier to dig through than the shingles on my house, but still, it was hardly an easy job), and then lowering the guy down on his mat (They must have had to haul him, mat and all, up to the roof in the first place, another labor of love).  

The question that emerges for me from this story is, simply: "What stops you from 'getting the guy to Jesus,' Dale?  Because it didn't seem like these friends of the paralytic were about to let anything stop them."  

And while I'm mulling that one over, a beautiful, but kind of difficult thing stands out to me.  It says: "When he saw their faith, Jesus told the man:  'Your sins are forgiven.'"  This is remarkable because of what it doesn't say.  A salvation-by-faith-alone Evangelical like me, if I were writing it down, I'd have said, "When Jesus saw his faith" (i.e. the faith of the man needing healing); but it doesn't: it says their faith.  This may include the faith of the paralytic, but it also includes the faith of the guys getting him to Jesus.  

Are you saying, Mark, that Jesus 'saved' this man from his desperate condition, because the community around him (as represented by the four friends) were so convinced you would, that they'd do anything to get him to you?  If that is what Mark's saying, then you can't help but wonder: What might Jesus start doing in our communities, if we were filled with similar faith: a faith that says, "Nothing matters more than 'getting the guy to Jesus,' and anything might happen, if we do."?

Books Read, 2016

Normally in January, I take some time to look back over my previous year in books, and identify some of the highlights, some of the low-points and some of the contenders for best-read of the year.  This last year, however, I started working on my D.Min studies at Northeastern Seminary, which meant, among other things, my reading list for the year almost tripled.  Because of this, it's a bit of an onerous task to narrow it all down to a few "best-of" picks, or to haiku my way through the whole list, like I did back in 2014.

That said, I've decided this year simply to post the whole list of books read in 2016, with a simple 10-point rating scale and no further comment.  For those interested, here are all the books that entered my brain through my eyes this year (in chronological order).

Spiritual Friendship, Wesley Hill

The Road to Missional: Journey to the Center of the Church, Michael Frost

Replenish:  Leading from a Healthy Soul, Lance Witt

The Giant Slayer, Iain Lawrence

Courage and Calling:  Embracing Your God-given Potential, Gordon Smith

A Time for a Change?  Revisioning Your Call, James Hightower

The Way of the Seal:  Think Like an Elite Warrior to Lead and Succeed, Mark Divine

What Makes Love Last?  How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal,  John Gottman

Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage, John Gottman

Personality Type in Congregations:  How to Work with Others More Effectively, Lynne Baab

Your Personality and the Spiritual Life, Reginald Johnson

Discover Your Conflict Management Style,  Speed B. Leas

Rest in the Storm:  Self-Care Strategies for Clergy and other Caregivers, Kirk Jones

Pentecostal Healing:  Models in Theology and Practice, Kimberly Alexander

Crucial Conversations:  Tools for Talking when the Stakes are High, Kerry Patterson

Over Sea, Under Stone,  Susan Cooper

The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper

Healing, Francis McNutt

Power Healing, John Wimber

The Healing Light, Agnes Sanford

The Magician's Nephew, C.S. Lewis

Miracles:  The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, Craig Keener

Healing in the History of Christianity, Amanda Porterfield

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis

The God You Have:  Politics, Religion and the First Commandment, Patrick Miller

Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope, Walter Brueggemann

The Horse and His Boy, C. S. Lewis

Discovering John:  Content, Interpretation, Reception, Ruth Edwards

Interpreting the Gospel of John:  A Practical Guide, Gary Burge

Biblical Ethics and Social Change, Stephen Mott

Complete Your Dissertation in Two Semesters or Less, Evelyn Ogden

Prince Caspian, C. S. Lewis

Sabbath Keeping:  Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest, Lynne M. Baab

Solidarity Ethics:  Transformation in a Globalized World, Rebecca Todd Peters

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis

The Cross and Gendercide:  A Theological Response to Violence against Women, Elizabeth Gerhardt

Signature Sins:  Taming Our Wayward Hearts, Michael Mangis

The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis

The Last Battle, C. S. Lewis

On knowing what you're about, a devotional thought

There's a small, almost throw-away line in Mark 1:37-38 that speaks deeply to the life of a servant of Jesus, I think. Jesus has been up all night healing the sick and casting out demons. They've brought their wounded to him where he was staying at Simon Peter's house, and from the sounds of things, there were many.

 They crowded the door, is how Mark says it.

 So in the morning, he's exhausted (I'm assuming), and heads of to a quiet place to regroup (I figure), and when his disciples come looking for him, he says, "It's time to move on." And here's the part that speaks to the heart. Because there's much, much more to be done here. Sicknesses to heal, blind eyes to open, demons to throw down for the ten-count here. And Jesus is leaving. In Luke's telling of this part of Jesus's story he draws out the struggle: "The crowds begged him not to go." But Jesus says, "I've got other cities I need to preach in, for this is the reason I came."

Every servant of Jesus (pastoral or lay, vocational or not) is going to see far more Kingdom work that needs doing, than they themselves can possibly do. Wrestle all night with anti-Kingdom demons, and there will still be crowds needing healing, crowding the door come morning. If it was true for the Son of God incarnate, how much more true for his disciples? And yet Jesus--and I can only imagine how wrenching it must have been for him--left those crowds to preach elsewhere. He knew what he was about, and why, in particular, the Father had sent him--what, in particular his Kingdom mission was--and this became the compass point for his life, allowing him to navigate his way through the sometimes overwhelming demands of ministry.

 I am learning, or trying hard to learn, from the Master's example here: to be clear on "the reason for which Jesus came into my life. Because the ability to say, with gracious humility and transparent honesty, "this is the reason he sent me," allows us also to say the much harder thing: "that's not the reason he sent me." And the freedom from self-Messiahship, and Christian-super-heroism and needing-to-be-everything-to-everyone we will find in Jesus when we can say that, I think, is a path to re-claimed joy in ministry and renewed passion for serving Him.

The Immediacy of the Gospel, a devotional thought

There's a simple word that shows up with unusual frequency in the opening chapters of the Gospel of Mark. In Greek it's euthus, which means, "immediately," or "right away." Jesus came up out of the baptism water "immediately," the Spirit led him into the desert to be tempted "immediately," the first disciples left their fishing nets to follow him "immediately." It actually appears 5 times in the first 21 verses alone (about once every 4 verses), and 42 times in the entire book (which is about 10 more times than all the other Gospels combined).

Jesus' Gospel is breaking over Mark's world with breathless urgency, and in his telling of the tales, the immediacy of the events seems to get special emphasis: things happen one after the other at such break-neck speed that the next wave's upon you before you even have time to clear the foam of the last one from your eyes.

This all stood out to me the other day as I was reading through the Gospel of Mark.   It got me wondering if I share Mark's sense of urgency about the Story of Jesus. Do I feel the same immediacy and excitement and expectation about what's happening in our midst and all around us as long as Jesus is walking among us, as Mark seems to have?

Truth be told: not really.

I sort of "spiritually saunter," most of the time in my walk with Jesus; not a peaceful stroll, mind you, but a lally-gagging shuffle, sure I'll get there eventually... So I'm trying to catch a bit of Mark's spirit these days, and feel it in my core how urgent it is, what Jesus's doing immediately, here, right in front of me, in his mission to bring the Shalom of God to the world.