Committed Critic

This is the transcript of a sermon I preached April 27 at Brookline Church of Christ in Brookline, MA. The text (which I read aloud before the sermon) is Acts 17:16-34.

OUR SOCIETY

Paul’s sermon in Athens is unique in Acts because of how far Paul goes to relate to his Greek audience. Paul is famous for saying (in 1 Cor 9:22) that he became all things to all people in order to save some, and today’s reading is the perfect example of that: Paul would ordinarily quote the OT, but here he’s in Athens, so he quotes a Greek writer instead, to try to tap into a tradition they would listen to. Paul needs to find a place for the God of Israel that’s somehow above the Greek pantheon (of Zeus, Hera, and Athena), so he turns to one of their own altars, which is inscribed, “to an unknown god.”

The word there for unknown is “agnostic,” which I think makes it very easy to connect the story with our society. Americans, on the whole, aren’t particularly atheists or polytheists—so most of us have something in us that insists there is a God, but we don’t tend to buy into stories about different Gods with different personalities. Instead, Americans are likely to sort of half-heartedly buy into the idea of an agnostic God that’s basically like the god the Athenians built the altar for.

I think even a lot of folks who attend church are basically agnostic, which is to say they aren’t particularly confident that God is any one way rather than some other way. My sense is, it’s pretty common for American Christians to stay in the tradition they were raised in, even if they stop believing that the Bible’s description of God is particularly more accurate or more true than any other religion. In others words, if you’re an agnostic who isn’t really sure who God is, but you still want to worship God, then whatever religion is comfortable is probably as good as any other. This actually makes a lot of sense: if you’re convinced that no one religion has a particular monopoly on divine revelation, then it’s not as if you could just keep looking until you found the right one. So you either stay where you are, or else you find a church where you feel comfortable, and you go with it.

PAUL IN ATHENS

But, turning back to Paul, we find that he’s not content to leave the agnostic god unknown. So he says to the Athenians: “What you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”

Paul gave his sermon in front of a group of philosophers in Athens—some of them were probably careful thinkers, and some of them were probably sloppy, but the important thing is that they wanted to think about who God is. So a big part of what I want to deal with today is the relationship between what we think about God, and what the Bible and the Christian tradition proclaim about God. Paul is going to use people’s ideas about God, and he’s going to say they have some truth, but he’s also going to say that human ideas about God aren’t enough if we don’t also have the proclamation—something that God reveals to us. So even though I can’t prove Christianity, I can say with confidence that Paul is claiming here that God can be known, that agnostic faith is insufficient—for us and for God. My goal here is to get at what that means for us.

If we look at Paul’s short sermon, about half of what he says about God is the things we can’t know, which leaves God still looking pretty agnostic: God doesn’t live in earthly temples, God is not like hand-made idols, and the nations are left groping in the dark trying to find him.

Most of the things that Paul does say about God are very general: God made the earth, made humanity, and appointed the times and places of the course of the nations. So we might say that God is (1) the beginning of all things, and (2) the sustainer of all things—which, interestingly, are two points that the philosophers in the crowd, the Stoics and Epicureans, would have fought over. These are also two points that lots of people in our world disagree about: Did God create the world, or did it come about by chance? Does God work in the world, or are our lives left up to chance? A lot of times, this breaks down to the argument between evangelical Christians and secular humanists, although I’d guess that most everyone has some opinion on the subject. This is a debate now, and it was a debate then, and Paul probably found a lot of allies in the crowd he was preaching to — at least as long as he stayed with the usual philosophical debates that the people in Athens were accustomed to.

But then Paul gets more specific and introduces the God of Israel. This is something the people of Athens weren’t so used to, and it came with a big catch: God wasn’t just an idea to be argued about, but Paul said that God was doing something new in their own time, and making a demand on the people who heard the sermon. God was calling everyone to repent, because soon the world would be judged by Christ. And Paul goes on: we have evidence, he says, that Christ is the one who will judge: because God raised him from the dead.

The Greeks tended to believe that the human soul was immortal, but they were happy to leave the body behind after death. So the Jewish idea of bodily resurrection from the dead — of dead corpses actually climbing up out of their graves — was not plausible or appealing. This may be why Paul says in 1 Corinthians that the cross is foolishness to the Greeks, and it’s certainly why Acts 17:32 says that some of Paul’s audience in Athens scoffed at his sermon. For most of them, the idea of God raising Christ from the dead was ridiculous — not just because of some skepticism about miracles, but because the resurrection didn’t really make sense to them.

What I’m getting at is that there’s a big difference between talking in generalities about the kind of God that philosophers discuss, and talking specifically about the God who reveals himself. There is a big difference between describing how God tends to act, and describing something specific that God has done. And above all, there’s a big difference between describing the kinds of ethical demands that are consistent with a good God, and proclaiming the call for repentance that God is issuing to the world right now.

I want to start with a fairly general point Paul is making here in Acts 17, and then build on it from some of Paul’s letters and the rest of the New Testament. Paul doesn’t say much about Christ here — and in fact he doesn’t even mention him by name — but Jesus is still there at the climax of the message.

So looking at the sermon, Paul claims that he’s going to tell the Athenians who the unknown God is, and it seems to me that he makes three basic points, what we might call the beginning, the middle, and the end: God created the world, God directs the times and places of the nations, and God has appointed Christ to judge the world on the last day. So God is the beginning of all things, and God is the sustainer of all things, but Christ is the end of all things.

NEW TESTAMENT CHRISTOLOGY

This is where I want break away from Acts for awhile, and consider what it means for Christ to stand at the climax of Paul’s sermon. As a modern person trying to figure out who God is, this is what jumps out at me from the sermon: If Jews from Israel and at least some Greeks from Athens can agree that God created the world, and that God cares for creation, then Christ is the unique and surprising part of the sermon. The outline of the sermon matches Paul’s outline of history: the beginning, the middle, and the end, describe the three parts of God’s work in the world: creation, providence, and judgment. The beginning and the middle of the sermon are points that Paul could expect to find some of the philosophers in the crowd to generally agree with him about, but the mention of Christ at the end is the place where the sermon takes its own turn.

I want to expand a little bit here on who Christ is and what he teaches us, which means I’m going to spread out from our text in Acts, to Paul’s letters and the rest of the NT. One of the most important points of theology, in the NT, is that the God who was unknown to the people of Athens, makes himself known in Jesus Christ.

Some places this is very simple and explicit, like in John, when Jesus says, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” But it goes beyond that. Jesus’ ministry began and ended with the God of Israel, the things God had done for them, and the promises God had made to them.

Part of my goal here is to contrast the God of Israel with the God of the philosophers. But I also have to admit that the Jews who wrote the OT were thinkers too, even if they weren’t exactly philosophers like the Greeks. Depending on how you read it, the OT can look a lot like a book of ideas, written by people who were trying to figure out who God is, a lot like the Greeks were.

Yet at the end of the day, the prophets also have a lot of oracles which simply claim, “Thus says the Lord,” and that kind of revelation is something that goes beyond philosophical arguments. Then we come to the NT, which insists that those oracles and promises are ultimately fulfilled in Christ. That means that if we want to know the unknown God, we have to look at what God has revealed, in both the OT and the NT. The OT tells us how God revealed himself to Israel, and it also tells us the promises God gave to Israel—which are also promises for us. In the NT, we are told how Christ reveals the Father to us more fully, and also how he fulfills the promises God has already given to Israel.

I think the key to NT theology is something that Paul says in 2 Corinthians 1:20: “In Christ, every one of God’s promises is a ‘yes’” (NRSV). Paul doesn’t explain exactly what that means, but it becomes pretty clear when we start looking at the NT, and how it explains who Jesus was and what he did. As it turns out, you can pick virtually any major motif or figure from the OT, and there will be a passage somewhere in the NT that explains how it finds its fulfillment in Jesus. And just as before, this is true for beginning, middle, and end, past, present, and future. So looking at the OT, Jesus reenacts the major ways that God delivered Israel in the past, he fills every office of leader that the OT describes for the present, and he fulfills God’s promises to deliver Israel in the future.

In fact, you can basically walk through the OT looking for major themes, and each one of them has a matching NT passage that tells how Christ fulfills it:

• God creates the world? Paul tells us in Colossians that it was through Jesus that all things in heaven and on earth were created.
• Adam’s transgression brings death into the world? Paul tells us that Jesus became the New Adam, overcoming death for us.
• Abraham receives God promise to bless the world through his seed? Paul tells us that his seed was Christ, the blessing to the gentiles.
• God the Divine Warrior battles Pharaoh for the children of Israel? Revelation tells us that Christ will become the divine warrior, when he returns to bring vengeance on the wicked.
• For the first passover, the children of Israel sacrifice a lamb to protect their homes from the angel of death? Paul tells us that Christ is our Passover lamb, who has been sacrificed.
• Moses is sent by God to bring Israel out of Egypt and give them the law on Mount Sinai? In Matthew, Christ is the new Moses, who leads his people out of slavery, stands on the side of a mountain, and delivers a new law.
• In the wilderness, Israel endures 40 years of testing? The Gospels tell us that Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days, where he overcame the tests that Satan put before him.
• God sent Manna, the bread of heaven, to feed Israel in the wilderness? In John, Jesus tells us that he is the bread that comes down from heaven to feed God’s people.
• Moses lifts up a bronze serpent in the wilderness to save the people from snakebites? In John, Jesus is the one who is lifted up to give salvation.
• In the tabernacle, the High Priest of Israel makes atonement for the people in the Holy of Holies? Hebrews says that Jesus is our High Priest, who makes atonement with his own blood.
• David served as the anointed king of Israel, whose descendant would be the Messiah who would deliver Israel from its enemies? Jesus is that Messiah, who delivers Israel from their sins.
• Proverbs describes Wisdom as the first creation of God, through which he created the world? John tells us that Christ is the divine word of wisdom, who was already there with God, and through whom the world was created.
• Elijah the great signs prophet uses God’s power to heal and do miracles? Jesus becomes that kind of prophet, also healing and doing miracles.
• Isaiah and the other great preaching prophets proclaim God’s demand for social justice in Israel? Jesus defends the widows, befriends the tax collectors, and preaches the good news to the poor.
• The Suffering servant in Isaiah will take the sins of the people upon himself? 1 Peter tells us how Jesus becomes the suffering servant and submits himself to the crucifixion.
• Jeremiah and Ezekiel describe a new covenant, where God will empower his people through the Holy Spirit? Jesus seals the new covenant with his own blood, and then sends the Spirit as a guide.
• Daniel describes how one like a Son of Man will rise up to rule the nations and bring justice to the earth? Jesus is that Son of Man, who will rule and judge the nations on the last day.
• And finally, the resurrection is described in Daniel, when the righteous people who die will be raised on the last day? Jesus is the Resurrection and the life, the firstfruits from among the dead.

We see a pretty obvious pattern start to show up: like Paul said, the promises of God are “yes” in Christ. These claims are not the arguments of philosophers, even though a lot of thought obviously went in to all these NT passages. These passages are more specific than the generalities that philosophers deal with, and this promise of salvation is more than a person could figure out just by looking at the world.

CONCLUSIONS

So as a theology student, I’m torn: the grad student in me feels most comfortable talking about the philosopher’s God — which I think includes a lot of truth about God, and in fact Paul preaches in Athens that their philosophers have things partly right. The philosopher’s God is very appealing to worship, because he makes sense, and he’s attractive to outsiders when we try to give a defense for the hope we have, like our 1 Peter reading says.

But Paul refuses to stop with the philosopher’s God — it’s too general. For Paul, and throughout the NT, you don’t really know God until you see him as revealed in Jesus Christ. Our groping in the darkness can show us that God created the world, and that he works for the good of humanity, but we must turn to the Old Testament to see how God has actually acted to save his people in the past, and how God has promised to save his people in the future. This kind of salvation is not designed to be inferred by philosophers; instead, it rests on God’s faithfulness to specific promises.

Christ, according to the New Testament, reenacts the saving deeds of God from the past, he takes on the role of the Savior sent from God in the present, and his resurrection gives us assurance of God’s ultimate salvation in the future. As much as we can use philosophy and academic language to describe Jesus—and in fact, that’s my job as a grad student—what’s really important about him is not the ideas about him, but the fact of his life and the reality of what he did, and the hope he offers for what he will do.

Resurrection, for Paul, is not an idea, but an historical event—both when Jesus was raised, and when we will be raised. Repentance is not just an ethical scheme based on theological arguments; instead, it’s a direct warning from God that the world will end at an appointed time, and that we will be judged by Jesus.

So then, the Gospel of Christ is not designed just to be something we find interesting, or something we may wish to hear more about at some point in the future. The people in Athens who say this, that they want to hear more, but not right now, are missing the point if they think that Paul’s ideas are merely something new and interesting that they can think about. At least the ones who scoff show that they’ve understood Paul’s message, and they know they want to reject it. For the rest of us, we might not be convinced at the first hearing, but that shouldn’t lull us into being content in our agnosticism. Hearing the Gospel is meant to push us toward responding.

We can doubt whether the Gospel is true or not — whether or not God really did raise Jesus Christ from the dead — but the NT does everything it can to confute anyone who would claim that the time for repentance simply hasn’t come yet. If there’s one thing we are meant to learn from the New Testament, and all those examples that I listed earlier, it’s that salvation is now, present in Christ. This is why the NT tells us that Jesus is the embodiment of virtually every kind of salvation you can find in the OT and in the Jewish tradition: Salvation belongs to the Lord, and it is revealed in Christ. If you were waiting for salvation — any kind of salvation — there’s nothing else that you’ve been waiting for.

There’s a Rich Mullins song that says, “To say the time is short, just means the time is now.” The Christian claim is that all salvation is present in Jesus Christ, and the implication is that God will no longer overlook ignorance of who God really is. It’s as if God is saying, “If you don’t find salvation in Christ, then you don’t really want what I have to offer anyway.”

So philosophers can spend their time thinking, and create ideas about immortal souls if they want to, but there’s really nothing in our experience that tells us we should expect that. People might see ghosts, or they might have experiences of communicating with the dead — so it’s easy to see why people assume there is something after death, but a lot of us aren’t completely convinced those stories are true, and even if they are, they’re difficult to nail down or understand exactly — they’re not exactly the kind of thing you want to base your hope on. People might have general ideas about spirituality and morality, but those aren’t real reasons for hope. Our experience of the world is ultimately that everyone dies.

The only salvation there is to be had beyond the grave is resurrection in Christ, and we have a real reason to believe it: the tomb was empty, and witnesses saw Jesus show up, talk with them, and eat food. We still might doubt whether those stories is true, or whether something else could have happened to Jesus’ body, but at the end of the day, the Christian Gospel is more than just a philosophical argument — and for me, at least, that makes all the difference. Salvation is not an idea or an inference, but rather a gift that will be given on some real last day, to those who withstand judgment before Christ. This, Paul proclaims, is simply what will happen.

So what we’re faced with is fundamentally different than a set of ideas we need to consider. It’s certainly more than just a theological scheme for us to find interesting, even though the NT is full of fascinating theological ideas. But what we’re faced with is the reality of a judgment, and Paul’s sermon is not just calling us to understand or agree — it’s calling us to act, which means to repent and prepare for a real day that will come, whether we believe it or not.

Most of us here today are already Christians, but I think Paul’s sermon can challenge us to consider whether we’re still worshipping the unknown God they worshipped in Athens, or whether we’re preparing ourselves for a meeting with the living, revealed God of Israel, who we see in Jesus Christ. And as interesting as all this might be, the interesting ideas aren’t really the point. What we’re being called to should probably be the same thing that Paul was calling the Athenians to: not just to understand or believe, but to repent.

This is a sermon I preached yesterday at my church in Brookline, MA. (It took about 20 minutes to deliver.)

I’ve always been bothered by the apocalyptic passages in the New Testament –– the ones that seem to talk about the end of time. On the one hand, they’re inspiring and powerful –– God is going to show up in glory and set the world right. On the other hand, it’s been a long, long time now since those passages were written, so when exactly is God going to do all this?

In the New Testament, we get a range of answers. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul thinks it’ll be very soon, and he assumes that he’ll still be alive when Christ returns. In 1 Corinthians, he doesn’t think people should even bother getting married, apparently because he expects Christ to return before they would have time to raise kids. But as time wears on, Paul seems less confident that Jesus will return all that soon. By the time Paul writes Philippians, he’s talking about seeing Christ when Paul dies, not when Christ returns. That’s a very different notion of what the end means.

In Mark, Jesus talks as if the fall of the Temple in the year 70 will be the end of time, but then in Acts it seems as if the church is here for the long run –– though Jesus could still return at any moment.

And then time rolls on and we get 2 Peter, which seems to have been written long after Peter’s death, as if it were from Peter, like if I stood up and read a letter to the Brookline church from Alexander Campbell or some other important figure in our history. In 2 Peter, a day, for the Lord, is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day, so we shouldn’t worry if it’s taking a long time for Jesus to return. Well, maybe now we should say a day is more like 2,000 years, or longer. Why do we have to keep waiting?

We have Jesus’ promise, and so we have hope. But if we spend our time looking at the sky –– and there are lots of Christians in this country who do –– it sure seems like nothing ever happens. And it’s tempting to drift toward despair.

The choice between hope and despair is key for the Christian life, and it’s also in the background throughout the book of Jeremiah, which is where my main sermon text today comes from.

JERUSALEM UNDER SIEGE

To understand Jeremiah’s prophecy, you have to know something about the political situation of his day, in the years just before and just after 600 B.C. So these next couple of minutes will be not so much sermon, as history review.

There are three main points to get straight.

First, Israel was a small nation surrounded by superpowers who wanted to conquer them. We might imagine Afghanistan or Armenia during the rise of the Soviet Union –– it was just a matter of time till they got overwhelmed. The northern half of Israel had already been destroyed about a hundred years earlier by the Assyrian empire from the east –– a huge part of their population was deported and never heard from again.

And now a new empire –– Babylon –– had risen up, and was threatening to do the same thing to Jerusalem. We worry about terrorism today, but the people of Jerusalem were imagining vicious armies marching up to the city walls, laying siege, starving the city, and then rushing into Jerusalem and killing the men, raping the women, enslaving the children. This is how war worked, and you didn’t want to be on the losing end.

The second point is that the prophets of Israel had interpreted the fall of the northern kingdom a hundred years earlier as God’s punishment for turning their back on God’s covenant. And now Jeremiah claimed that the same thing would happen to Jerusalem for the same reasons. Jerusalem was worshipping other gods, beating down the poor, forsaking the covenant, and Jeremiah was adamant that the political situation was punishment, one of the curses for disobedience that the book of Deuteronomy describes. Meanwhile, the King was more interested in political or military solutions, and Jeremiah’s theology didn’t sound very helpful.

And then the third thing to understand about Jeremiah’s situation is that Jeremiah wasn’t the only prophet in Jerusalem, and most of the rest of them disagreed with him. Other prophets were saying that God would protect Jerusalem –– after all, it was God’s city, and God’s temple was there –– so the people should take heart. We know what it’s like to be in a war where some people say we’re going to win if we just fight hard enough, while others say we should give up now. But this was a little different, because giving up meant having your homeland occupied by foreigners. In any event, Jeremiah said that the other prophets were liars and that God would strike them dead with sword and famine.

So you have one very lonely voice preaching in Jerusalem that the city was about to be destroyed –– which looks a lot like treason, and in any case makes you lots of enemies.

So 3 points about Jeremiah’s situation: (1) the army of a superpower is marching into the country to take the people into exile; (2) Jeremiah says this is punishment from God for breaking the covenant; and (3) other prophets in Jerusalem disagree with Jeremiah and say “no”, that God will deliver Jerusalem after all.

Finally, king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon does show up, and Jerusalem gets lucky. Instead of destroying the city and the Temple, all he does is take away 10,000 of the most able-bodied people into captivity –– the king, and royal family, and everyone who knew how to govern, or fight, or make swords––anyone who could cause trouble if they were left in Jerusalem. (As a point of reference, this is when Daniel, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego ended up in the Babylonian court, because they were exiled.) The rest of the people got to stay in Jerusalem, with a new king appointed by Nebuchadnezzar. It wouldn’t be till ten years later, when that new king rebelled, that Nebuchadnezzar would come back, tear down the walls, burn all the buildings, and destroy Solomon’s temple and the city of Jerusalem completely.

In the meantime, with the Temple still standing, Jeremiah stays in Jerusalem and continues to preach. He argues the very unpopular position that God has given the land to Babylon, and that the king and the people should continue to be obedient to Babylon, or else God (using Babylon) will do something worse. Other prophets, both in Jerusalem and with the exiles in Babylon, continue to preach that God will fix the situation quickly and bring the exiles back in a couple of years.

OK, done with the history lesson; back to the sermon.

SETTLING INTO EXILE

Jeremiah writes this letter to the exiles and Babylon, which is our lectionary text for today. I’ll be reading in Jeremiah 29, starting in verse 1, and I’ll go all the way to verse 14.

These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon…Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the Lord.

For thus says the Lord: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place [that is, Jerusalem]. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

This is one of the most powerful and most quoted passages in the Old Testament, and for good reason: no matter what our circumstances, it says, God always has plans for our welfare. Paul makes a similar claim in Romans: In all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.

But there are problems with quoting this passage as if God has a specific plan for the success of every individual Israelite –– or every individual Christian. And not the least is, no one that Jeremiah is writing to will actually see the restoration God is promising. It’s only going to be 70 years later, after their whole generation has died off, that their children and grandchildren are going to return to Jerusalem. In the book of Numbers, when God killed off a generation like that, it was called punishment, not hope for a future.

Jeremiah’s instructions are for the meantime. Reading again from verses 5-7

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Settling down in exile is completely counter-intuitive. The whole idea of exile is that you’re not at home, so why would you want to raise a family there? Surely that can’t be God’s plan for the people of Jerusalem. And yet, God’s word holds true, and a number of years later the people are allowed to return to Jerusalem, where they rebuild the walls, build a new temple, and begin sacrifices to God once again. But those who heard the promise weren’t the ones who got to see it fulfilled.

1 PETER’S EXILES

In the New Testament, Jeremiah’s message is echoed in 1 Peter, where Christians are called “exiles” in this world, but are still told to settle down, live good lives among the pagans, and do their civic duty by honoring the Roman emperor. Just like the Israelites in Babylon, Peter’s church would also end up watching their entire generation die off without seeing the fulfillment of God’s promise. Maybe their children would see it, but they had to make do in exile.

It doesn’t seem to make sense why God would leave his people in exile like that for so long, and that problem is compounded for us today. We talk about Christ’s return, but it’s a stretch to really think it’ll happen in my generation. It’s just been too long. One place in Scripture tells us that God is waiting so everyone will have a chance to repent, and yet most people don’t repent. Centuries go by of humans rejecting God’s call, and it’s not all that clear that the world is becoming a better place.

I’m sure Jeremiah’s audience didn’t really understand why they had to wait, and neither did Peter’s, and neither do we.

These passages highlight the paradox of the Christian life as something that is lived completely in this world, but also as something other-worldly.

On the one hand, this world matters, just like life in Babylon mattered to Jeremiah’s exiles. God had put them there for a reason, and he wanted them to throw themselves into that life while they were in Babylonia. And the same is true for us. We are the salt of the earth, the light of the world, as Jesus said. As God’s Holy Spirit acts through our lives, we embody the kingdom of God, helping God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

God may call different people to different roles, but on the whole there is no room in the Christian faith for ignoring the world God created by isolating ourselves from everyone else in an effort to be holy. There is no room for abusing or neglecting creation, either because we feel entitled to, or because we anticipate God destroying or recreating it at the end of time. There is no room for ignoring the physical needs of people who are hungry, sick, or homeless, even if we conclude that spiritual needs are more important in key ways. God told Israel to seek the welfare of the Babylonian city they lived in, and it seems his call to us is also to work for the welfare of our world.

So God calls us to live in this world. But the other side of the paradox is that we are still exiles here. We don’t seek the welfare of this world as if it is all we have. We pray for it, but we should never mistake it for our home. We serve those in the world around us, but we belong to God.

We must not resign ourselves to our work here as if it’s God’s final word –– as if there’s nothing more after death, so we’d better make the best of what we have here. That kind of attitude might look like hope for the future of this world, but in fact it is despair toward the promises of God.

As Christians, there’s actually quite a lot at stake in overcoming despair, since Paul says that our faith in God’s promises is wrapped up somehow in the way that God saves us. Judging just by the world around us, death seems pretty final –– we don’t see people come back from the dead. And so the only real reason we have for believing God will raise us from the dead is that we believe God raised Jesus. But then we might believe that God acted back then, and yet still doubt that God will act again. Despair is still an option. As I said, it’s been a long, long time. In light of this, having faith means holding fast to the promises of God even when it seems he may never return. We act in this world, but we hope for the next.

2 TIMOTHY AS PROMISE AND WARNING

Sometimes the difference between this world and the next is very clear, something we see especially in the life of Paul. He may have sought the welfare of his society, but they certainly didn’t seek his. Instead, he was often abused and beaten, and eventually he was thrown into prison, as we’ve seen in our lectionary readings these past two weeks.

Paul knows why someone might be tempted to despair of God’s promises, but he warns against that temptation, citing a poem that we read earlier from the lectionary. Paul calls it a trustworthy saying, and he uses it to warn Timothy and the church that they cannot give in to despair if they hope to receive God’s promise. This is 2 Timothy 2:11-13:

If we’ve died with him, we’ll also live with him.
If we endure, we’ll also reign with him.
If we deny him, he’ll also deny us.
If we are faithless, he’ll remain faithful ––
for he cannot deny himself.

The first part, “dying with Christ,” is easy. In Paul’s writings that means baptism, which most of us here have already done. So if we’ve died with him, we’ll live with him. It’s a powerful and important promise.

Next is an even better promise: If we endure, we’ll also reign with him. This is a little vague in Scripture, but apparently the plan is for Christians to have some kind of ruling role in the world to come, sitting alongside Christ to judge and govern the recreated world. Again, it’s a powerful promise, but this time it comes with a warning: if we endure. We might have Christ’s gift of life now, but reigning with him in the final resurrection requires endurance. Paul proclaims boldly that he is not ashamed of Christ, even when he’s thrown into prison for his preaching. Whether or not we face the same kind of suffering, we are called to the same kind of boldness.

Then, in the next line, Paul’s warning turns more explicit: If we deny Christ, the poem says, he’ll also deny us. Our salvation may be the work of God from start to finish, but it appears here that we can reject that salvation if we give in to despair. Christ makes no promise to vouch for those who turn away. We may be called to settle into the land of our exile, but we still have to be faithful to Christ while we’re here.

And so we settle into the paradox that Jeremiah has set up for us, of living in exile as if we are at home, yet knowing all along that we are not at home. And Paul tells us what is at stake in choosing hope –– in God’s promises –– over despair –– that we will be in exile forever. If we choose despair and deny Christ, he’ll deny us.

What remains is to say why exactly this is good news –– why this is the gospel, rather than just a contract that we have to try to live up to or else face dire consequences. And both Jeremiah and Paul give us this good news in memorable words.

In Jeremiah, it sounds like this: “Surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.”

And in 2 Timothy, it sounds like this: “If we are faithless, Christ will remain faithful––for he cannot deny himself.”

God had a plan for bringing the exiles back to Jerusalem, and of course he has a plan for our future too, whether he shows up to renew the earth during our lifetime, or whether we’ll die and have to wait for salvation beyond the grave. Our salvation is always in Christ’s hands, and that is always the reason we can have hope.

A friend of mine from seminary rejects Christian claims of exclusivity because he says it amounts to God giving humanity a multiple choice test, whose “correct” answer is essentially arbitrary, with heaven and hell on the line. With so many religions that are similar in so many ways, would God really damn us just for happening to pick the wrong one?

Now personally, I think God can do what God wants; adjusting our theology until God satisfies our sensibilities only guarantees that we’re worshiping a God we have essentially invented, so I don’t believe in ruling out these kinds of things too quickly.

Yet my friend’s question is legitimate: How is the traditional Christian belief, offering heaven to those who choose Jesus and hell to those who choose some other religion, different than an unfair multiple choice test? Is there any clear reason a person should be expected to choose Christianity over some other religion?

I don’t have a full answer, and I’ll admit at the outset that my argument will sidestep the nuances of what salvation can mean in different religions. However, I want to look at a passage from Romans where I think Paul explains why the Christian faith is a particular kind of faith and why this particular kind of faith is necessary for the kind of salvation that is promised in Christ.

The text is Romans 4:13-25:

For it was not through the law that Abraham (or his seed) received the promise that he would be heir of the world, but through the righteousness of faith. For if the heirs [were determined] through the law, then faith would be emptied and the promise would be done away with. After all, the law produces wrath. (Though where there is no law, neither is there transgression [of that law].)

Therefore, [heirs were determined] from faith, so that [they would be determined] by grace, and so that the promise would be confirmed to every seed, not only to those of the law, but also to those of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all –– just as it is written, “I will make you father of many nations,” at which point [Abraham] put his faith in the God who brings to life those who are dead and calls the things that don’t exist as if they do.

This is the man who, with hope upon hope, had faith that he would become father of many nations according to what had been said, “Thus shall your seed be.” And he didn’t weaken in faith even though he knew [the state of] his own body, which had already died, being about a hundred years old; and he also knew that Sarah, the mother, was dead as well. But he did not waver by losing faith in the promise of God, but was strengthened by faith, giving glory to God, and being fully convinced that he was able to do what had been promised. Therefore indeed “it was reckoned to him as righteousness.”

But it was not written for him alone that “it was reckoned to him,” but also for us, to whom it would later be reckoned, to those who have faith in the one who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead –– Jesus, who was handed over for our mistakes and was raised for our righteousness.

What strikes me here is that Abraham’s faith, as Paul describes it in this passage, wasn’t just a general kind of faith that God existed, or that God is good, or even that God would keep God’s promise. It was faith in the resurrection from the dead.

Translations tend to obscure this point by translating Sarah’s condition as “barrenness,” which is surely what Paul meant but which hides the fact that the word Paul uses for her condition is simply deadness. Paul could have used the word barren easily enough, just as he could have referred to Abraham simply as old.

I think the reason he didn’t is that it wasn’t enough to say that Abraham’s faith was in a God who can overcome old age or barrenness or long odds or anything else –– except for one thing: bodily death.

Jesus wasn’t rescued from the cross; he was raised from the dead, and in order for our faith to be like Abraham’s, Paul is claiming, both our faith and Abraham’s must be faith in a God who raises the dead.

Just checking the right box?

Certain streams of Christian tradition do appear to treat faith as a box-checking exercise, but I’m arguing here that Paul would reject such a position. And he wouldn’t just reject it with the arguments we most often make today, that faith in God is a relationship rather than a religion, or anything like that.

What is key, at least in this passage, is that there is an explicit connection between what we have faith in and what we receive. The logic is not, “I believe that Jesus is the Son of God, so I will go to heaven;” instead, it is, “I believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, so God will raise me from the dead.” Whoever has faith in the one who brought about Christ’s resurrection will receive that same resurrection.

Resurrection and rebirth, in certain senses, were hardly rare ideas in the religions of antiquity. However, they typically made reference to cyclical events such as the seasons of the year. People had plenty of experience with death and new life, but there was little in their experience to make them expect a one-time resurrection of the kind Paul described, and this explains the resistance Paul is said to have met among Greeks in Acts 17:32.

People might suggest today that resurrection happens every time a new generation replaces another, but that kind of cycle just belies the finality of death: people who die have to be replaced, because they do not return from the dead, almost without exception.

And there’s the point. Paul believed that Jesus rose from the dead, in a particular place at a particular time, and many witnesses testified to it. I can’t prove that Christianity is the only true religion, but I can point (with Paul) to a very particular way in which the faith we are called to is not arbitrary, but is wrapped up in the kind of salvation we hope to receive. We will receive our resurrection because we have faith in Jesus’s.

Many will argue on naturalistic grounds that a dead person, after a certain point, simply cannot be raised. That may be the case. But for those who would deny that Jesus could have risen from the dead, I’m not quite sure what kind of God they’re worshipping or what kind of salvation beyond death they think there is to be had.

For the final segment of my series (see parts 1, 2, 3, 4), I focus on the area of congregational ministry I have the most experience with: the relationship between teens and the rest of the church. It’s my conviction that churches often approach youth ministry in ways that are counter-productive.

Youth and Adults Within the Congregation

Divisions among Christians indeed run deep, but generational alienation provides a realistic opportunity to practice reconciliation. While Warren and Kimball sidestep the issue by planting homogeneous churches for Boomers or Xers, a commitment to the church as the Body of Christ suggests another solution: learning to love those in our own churches who belong to other generations, and whom we see and ignore each week. In pursuing this goal, easing the generational divisions between teenagers and the rest of the congregation is a good way to start.

In recent decades, American parents have withdrawn from their teenagers’ lives, believing (incorrectly) that teens don’t want to spend time with them. Consequently, young people lose their connection to family, fail to develop a strong moral compass, and are forced to find their own way through life.

Many churches have taken a similar path: unsure of how to relate to teens, adults assume they will be happiest spending time with their peers, so they create a youth group where teens can be themselves.

But the goal of Christian discipleship is to develop Christlike selves, and that requires consistent personal contact with mature believers –– preferably from various generations and beginning with the teens’ parents –– whose faith they can emulate. To accomplish this goal within a youth group takes deliberate effort and hard work, because it’s always easier for a youth minister to keep parents happy by keeping their kids occupied than to connect those teens with their parents and other adults. A successful youth program can create the illusion of a single body without connecting young people to the church as a whole in any significant way.

The unintended lessons taught in isolated youth groups are subtle but destructive. Teens who grow up in a youth group that lacks strong connections with the church learn that their faith has no real connection to that of older adults, and that relationships with other generations (and anyone who is genuinely different from them) are too difficult and not worth pursuing. They learn that it’s okay to spend all their time with people who are mostly just like them (even the “different” people in the youth group are still teenagers). They aren’t expected to form relationships with adults in the church other than their parents, and as a result they don’t learn how to relate to other Christians as adults.

These teens are disappointed to find when they leave home that most churches are nothing like their youth group, so they lose interest –– unless they find a vibrant college or singles group, or a newly-planted church (following Kimball’s model) which does remind them of their youth group. If so, the cycle continues, with young people bouncing from congregation to congregation in search of a program that appeals to them at their particular time of life.

Can this really be what God intended for his Church?

What to do?

Wide-eyed idealism is no antidote for genuine differences, so this is no call for churches to scrap their youth programs and throw everyone in a room together. Young people have developmental needs which parents sometimes lack the skills to meet, and education ministries and youth ministries can help the church give young people appropriate spiritual nourishment. Such programs also remind the church to reach out to its youth rather than expect them to become adults on their own.

Still, to be an effective body, churches must resist the temptation to divide too strictly into age groups. It is of course appropriate for children and teens to have Sunday school lessons taught at their own level. However, classes and activities which can involve multiple generations should do so, and those that cannot should be balanced with focused efforts at other times to build relationships between young and old. Teachers can enlist teenagers as assistants for children’s classes; senior citizens can join young families for an evening of board games.

Many resources are available to help churches develop programs that cross generational lines. Two in particular are Mark DeVries’ Family-Based Youth Ministry and Diana Garland’s Family Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide.

But placing the burden for change on ministers and programs skirts the issue of loving one another. We should expect that God’s intention for the church depends not on the programs we devise but on the Holy Spirit manifesting itself among us in love.

Perhaps the best solution to intergenerational division is for each of us to deliberately walk up to someone in the Body to whom we don’t naturally relate, say hello, and learn who they are and how we can serve them. If we cannot bring ourselves to take that small risk, we will scarcely be prepared to face the greater challenges of racial and socio-economic division which remain before us.

This is my fourth post (of five) in a series on division within the church––not between denominations, but between different generations and different preferences for how to do church. (Also see parts one, two, and three.)

Ultimately, I believe that our division of the Body into segregated generational groups constitutes a refusal to learn to love another and a refusal to be the Body of Christ in its full sense. The body imagery in Paul’s letters (Rom 12, 1Cor 12, Eph 4, Col 3:15) indicates that God has called us into churches where different kinds of people find fellowship with one another. A simple reason that we don’t act on the love we claim to have –– by welcoming those who are different into our lives –– is that it’s really difficult and we don’t know how to make it work.

Love is not positive regard but intentional action. As 1 John 3:18 urges, “let us not love with word or tongue but in deed and truth.” Building inter-generational relationships requires hard work. This can be discouraging, but our recognition of the difficulty of God’s call does not mean we can pretend he hasn’t called us. Our recognition that we do not know how to love as Christ loved us doesn’t mean we can cast aside his command and move on to more realistic tasks. A divide-and-conquer approach to evangelism (see part one) may seem to more effectively accomplish God’s mission for the church, taking the Gospel to the world. But in the process, I fear, we fail to be the church he has called to that mission.

By calling the Church the Body of Christ, God has given us an identity that is grounded in who God is. The church is not an organization of saved people who meet together; it is the Body of Christ on earth. That body is formed not only by each member’s relationship with Christ but also by our relationships with one another, which is why the greatest of all the spiritual gifts (1 Cor 13:13) is not prophecy or speaking in tongues or knowledge, but love.

If the Body is to mean anything, we must love one another with a love that extends to all its parts. Claiming that one body composed only of hands will reach one portion of the population, while another body composed only of ears will reach another, denies our identity. Claiming that all these congregations really are unified in Christ, even though many of them meet separately precisely so that they don’t have to take each other’s viewpoints and preferences into account, is simply dishonest.

At the end of the day, most of us struggle to know how to love one another; to truly love someone based on no common ground but Christ takes a level of maturity in faith that perhaps most of us lack. Furthermore, we cannot be simply willing to love others. Many Christians –– perhaps most –– would claim willingness to form relationships with people of other generations or backgrounds, and yet our churches remain divided. To turn those words into action takes great effort, and that is a key part of our calling.

The Real Call: Love One Another

Clearly, Christ has called us to love one another, but we must discern how to go about the task. It has been said that when Christ told his disciples to love one another, he was not calling them to a benign positive regard. The command, specifically, was for the disciples to show the kind of love for one another that Christ had shown and would show for them, the love of the cross (John 15:12).

When a Christian chooses her church so that she relates easily to the worship service and the preacher and the kind of people who attend there, positive regard is easy, but a part of Christian love falls by the wayside. The problem is not that we can’t love people at a church where the people are just like us; it’s just that typically we don’t have to. When I attend church every week with people who look like me, act like me, think like me, and worship like me, I can get away with effortlessly having positive regard for almost all of them and thinking I know how to love my neighbor.

Jesus said, memorably, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them…But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked” (Lk 6:32-35). In other words, love that is easy to give does not mean much on its own.

What reason could there be for us to form churches full of people just like us except that people just like us are easy to love? And what reason could there be for us to seek out people who are easy to love except that we are too frightened or too lazy to learn a deeper love which overcomes differences?

The Obstacle: Self

A recent New York Times best-seller called Quarterlife Crisis describes the struggles of upper-middle-class twenty-somethings trying to figure out what to do with their lives. The authors conducted dozens of interviews and found a generation faced with endless choices and possibilities, looking for direction. One of the people interviewed said, “I just try to do whatever will make me happier, and think of myself first (kind of self-centered, huh?) But if more people did it, they would be happier.”

Many Christians, young and old, shun such an attitude for their daily lives while using that very standard –– their own happiness –– to select a church. Part of the difficulty in loving other people involves letting go of one’s self in order to love an other. In a sense, if I love someone just like me I have done no more than love myself, and in any event I deserve little praise; after all, people like me are those who love me, who pay back what I lend them. Loving a person when he acts just the way I want doesn’t, as it were, count. While all people have something in common –– the image of God, if nothing else –– I really can only love another person to the extent that I can recognize how he is different from me. Real love must overcome differences, and in the context of, say, a worship service, the preferences of teens, young adults, Baby Boomers, and senior citizens certainly differ.

This need to respect the differences of others rather than expecting them to be like oneself is why Paul confronts division in the Philippian church with a call to humility, urging them to consider others better than themselves, to look to the interests of others rather than themselves. Humility, emptying oneself, is the one way to overcome the selfishness that prevents us from loving one another. We are called to be humble the way Christ was so that we can also learn to love the way he did, with the self-sacrificial love of the cross.

This post is building on my previous post, where I suggest that churches that try to attract one particular demographic or generation, to the relative neglect of others, fail to fulfill the biblical call for the church to be the Body of Christ.

Within the enormous Christian subculture in America, we gather into different churches based on common worship preferences, common levels of education, common race, common social classes, and common generations. The Gospel, however, calls believers to a particular kind of commonality: fellowship of the Spirit in Jesus Christ. The flaw with the plant-all-churches-for-all-people approach to ministry (that espoused by Warren and Kimball) is that it waters down God’s call for Christians to be the Body of Christ –– a body which includes all sorts of parts, often from different classes, races, and generations.

This is not to say that Christians should seek diversity at all costs; Spanish-speaking congregations will have limited fellowship with those who speak only English, and patronizing bids for the inclusion of token minorities in white churches or poor families in affluent churches only trivialize what the gospel calls us to do. Furthermore, black and white churches in the United States, for example, have an ongoing legacy of hurtful relations that must be worked through slowly and sensitively. It may yet take decades or longer for such divisions to be overcome. However, intergenerational divisions lack such a daunting legacy, and a failure to overcome them suggests not an insurmountable breach but an unwillingness of churches to accept the implications of the gospel.

The fellowship –– koinonia, “commonality” –– to which God has called us is a sharing of the body and blood of Christ (1 Cor. 10:16). The loaf of which we partake, the baptism we have received, and the Spirit we have been given to drink (1 Cor 12:13) all unite us into the Body of Christ. Therefore the fellowship to which God has called us and which we must pursue is fellowship in the Body of Christ. Paul writes,

God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. (1 Cor 12:24b-26)

Paul insists that the Corinthians who possess prestigious spiritual gifts cannot look down upon or ignore those whose gifts seem less honorable or less important. All parts of the Body are necessary.

Corinth’s divisions focused on prestige; those I’m trying to address here are generational. So in terms relevant to the question at hand, we might say that if young people seem to lack the gifts of maturity and self-control, older members cannot for that reason claim they are not part of the Body. If older people lack the gifts of energetic passion and accepting new ideas, younger members cannot for that reason claim they are not part of the Body. And even if GenXers lack the gift of humbling themselves before the wishes of older generations and accepting as brothers and sisters those who have failed to make the leap to the postmodern mind set, I cannot for that reason claim they are part of the Body.

Obviously, few Christians would officially exclude other age groups, but how effectively do we obey Paul’s command and show “equal concern” for other generations or suffer with them when they suffer? Many young ministers prefer to plant new churches rather than deal with the hang-ups of older generations of Christians. And even in existing congregations, generations often merely tolerate one another, without forming real relationships.

Our efforts maintain a superficial peace, but they fall short of God’s call.

One of my deepest faith commitments is that God wants the church to be a unified Body made up of many different parts. This week’s post is the first section an essay I’ve written on the topic.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Young nor old didn’t make the list in Galatians 3:28, but perhaps it should have, for the sake of today’s American Church.

Our culture has a merked tendency to segregate itself generationally –– toddlers to day care, kids to classrooms, college students to dorms, “real” adults to work, older adults to home alone, everyone watching television or surfing the web to avoid interaction with whoever is around. Cell phones and email have reconnected people in important ways, but they bring their own problems. Churches, opting not to fight the cultural tide, provide Sunday school classes and social activities for every demographic. Generational alienation, not suprisingly, characterizes many churches.

Churches for the Ages

One response to this generational divide is to try to circumvent it. In The Emerging Church, a sort of guidebook for reaching Generation X with the Gospel, Dan Kimball describes a new breed of churches that draw generational lines almost intentionally. While mega-churches find greatest success with Baby Boomers, Kimball suggests strategies for developing new churches to involve and convert Generation-Xers, a group that often struggles to find a place in Boomer churches. Kimball quotes Rick Warren: “No single church can possibly reach everyone. It takes all kinds of churches to reach all kinds of people.”

In one sense, Warren’s approach is based on sound enough reasoning: churches want to grow and reach the lost, and congregations often find greater success programming for a particular demographic than integrating many different kinds of people into a single group. Commonalities, after all, bring people together. I myself for two years during seminary participated in a small group of young adults who shared weekly Bible study and Sunday lunch. The fellowship we experienced was powerful and valuable.

I question, however, whether it is the primary fellowship to which God has called the Church.

To be sure, the Warren/Kimball model has proved wildly successful in bringing about church growth and leading countless people to become Christians. Warren argues persuasively in the Purpose-Driven™ Church that churches must determine their purposes and focus their efforts only on meeting those purposes.

For Warren, finding a church’s evangelistic target –– the kind of person a particular church can best reach –– is a key to achieving the purpose of reaching the lost. And of course, evangelism does need to be tailored to its intended audience. However, I will argue that gathering all different kinds of people into one community under the fellowship of the Gospel is also one of our indispensible purposes. If so, churches must not build their programs with such a narrow target in mind.

I suggest that a biblical understanding of the Church as the Body of Christ prohibits us from planning our congregations around reaching particular “target” people. Rather, it requires us to allow the Gospel to bridge differences which normally separate people. Unfortunately, churches in the U.S. are already divided up in every way imaginable –– denominational, generational, social, racial. Most of us attend churches primarily made up of and led by one demographic of people or another. The broad task of overcoming divisions is likely to be painful and protracted, and I am hardly qualified to point the way.

I want to offer a more modest proposal, that we take preliminary steps towards bridging such gaps by crossing generational lines within each congregation to form meaningful cross-generational relationships. This means first that believers will commit themselves to building relationships within existing multi-generational churches rather than following Kimball’s model of starting new congregations tailored to a particular group.

Second, I will suggest a place where such bridging of generations is perhaps most needed. It is, ironically, an area in which well-meaning parents and ministers often intentionally accentuate the division: the relationship of teenagers to the rest of the congregation.

There is more to follow next week, but I would be very interested in whatever thoughts or questions this raises for people.

[Note: I’m hitting crunch time for finishing my semester papers, so I don’t have time to write anything new. And unfortunately, all my papers are too obscure (not to mention unfinished) to post. So, I dug up a short paper I wrote 6 years ago at ACU to reproduce, unedited. I hope y’all will indulge me.]

Jars of Clay
Abilene Christian University
BIBM 391, Intro to Ministry
Profs. Robert Oglesby, Jeanene Reese
By Scott Haile
March 1, 2000

Of all biblical virtues, humility by its very nature eludes me more completely than any other. I can work on compassion and kindness and sincerity and self-control and even patience, but humility times its exits to the moments when I most succeed in otherwise imitating Christ. As the saying goes, once you realize you’re humble, you aren’t humble anymore. Dealing with that reality forces me to admit that too much of my effort has been aimed at fulfilling duty, following rules and performing works. By such means I can manage to be a pretty good person most of the time and treat others well enough that we can all overlook most of my faults. Meanwhile I fail to do the only thing that can really bring about humility–not working hard or studying my Bible, but falling prostrate before God.

Paul’s metaphor of cheap clay jars holding a valuable treasure describes this humility as it applies to his ministry, in sharp contrast to the attitudes of those around him. In 2 Corinthians 4:6 Paul tells of the glorious light God has put in his heart that is the gospel of Christ. But in verse 7 (NIV) he says, “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” Though rabbis already taught a similar message of humility for ministry, this verse contradicted the views of many religious leaders at the time as it does the natural instincts of many of us today. Surely God has given us power so that we will use it, right? Surely a God who came to seek and save what was lost wants us to make his religion appealing to all those lost people so they can be saved?

Being raised in the church, I find Paul’s message here fairly easy to accept, and even preach to others. But figuring out where it works into my life and then actually following through present a greater challenge. Consequently, I need to keep the metaphor of the jars of clay in front of me at all times so that it will guide and shape my ministry–as indeed a potter shapes a clay pot–and keep my focus where it belongs, which is on the cross of Christ. The metaphor itself is simple, and trying to find dozens of points of connection between clay jars and Christian ministry would waste both my time and that of the reader. But the impact of that simple image on Christian ministry is incredibly profound, and that is where I will focus discussion.

First, the prevailing Christian attitude of the day apparently recognized power and prestige as signs of God’s favor. The people Paul was opposing were pretty impressive to young Christians, leading him to rather sarcastically refer to them as “super-apostles” (2 Cor 11:5). They were superior speakers (11:6) and tried to make themselves look good before men (10:12).

Jars of clay, on the other hand, are not impressive or powerful; some have referred to them as the “Tupperware” of ancient Greece–cheap, common, useful and disposable. But Paul says that God’s power is held in these vessels so that the power is indeed from Him and not from man. Savage notes two paradoxes in the metaphor: a valuable treasure is contained in a cheap vessel, and the incredible power of God is shown through a fragile vessel (165). The NIV translates the verse “to show that this…power is from God…” but the Greek text has a subjunctive “be” verb which more literally means “so that this…power might be from God…” (Savage 166) The point is that our weakness and fragility do not merely show the world that the power is from God (though it does do that) but is actually prerequisite for that power to work in us in the first place. “In other words,” Savage writes, “where there is pride and arrogance there cannot, by definition, be divine power.” (167)

OK, I’ve covered my academic bases. Now I’ll deal with why the metaphor is important to me in my ministry. First of all, my general inadequacy as a person scares me. Even if my own ability were extraordinary by worldly standards, the idea of trying to win souls from Satan by my own power would be enough to send me running. If I try to show how strong I am, I know he has the ability to knock me flat on my back. The simple fact that I have no supernatural powers at my disposal, and he does, assures me of my imminent defeat if I face him alone.

In contrast, seeing myself as a jar of clay to be filled with God’s power and broken if necessary helps conform me to the example of Christ. Following in Jesus’ steps (1 Peter 2:21) has to be my foundational theology, as it was Paul’s: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” (Phil 3:10-11) Paul wants to become like Christ in his death so he can become like him in his resurrection. I think this so-called theology of the cross is the most important part of Christian ministry because it sums up who we are. I love what Daniel Von Allmen said in one of the articles I read, that “mission is a way of discipleship; mission is following Christ on his way through suffering to death and only then to resurrection” (265). According to Fred Craddock’s Preaching, the form of a sermon should mirror its content, and that applies to ministry as well. If the content of my ministry, what I want to tell people, is Jesus’ emptying of himself, then I need to likewise empty myself in my ministry so they can learn what I teach by how I live.

The clay jars metaphor also has a great practical strength, namely that it works. First, as I noted above, Paul seems to suggest that God only works through weakness. If this is the case, then living as jars of clay is not just preferable but necessary to Christian ministry, at least if God is to be involved in any active kind of way. Second, Allen says that our own weakness, or “the fragility of the clay pots” can witness to the world concerning the power of God (287). Again, how we teach can convert people as effectively as what we teach.

This metaphor can cause problems if someone interprets it in an unhealthy way. First, a person’s excessive focus on his own weakness and inability could lead him to the conclusion that he cannot do anything for God. Consequently, he probably won’t do anything for God but instead will walk around in fear of making a mistake and awaiting a voice from heaven to instruct him on exactly what he needs to do. The other major pitfall which I foresee brings me back to where I started, to the difficulty of learning humility. The easiest thing in the world for me to do, once I find myself working by God’s power rather than mine, is to look down on all those around me whom I perceive work by their own strength. At that point, my humility has obviously yielded to spiritual arrogance.

I don’t think humility can be taught by or deliberately learned by a human. There isn’t a person alive whom I could not find fault with if I looked, and that always allows me a loophole, it always allows me to write a person off if I don’t like what he says. God reserves the right to humble us when we need it, because like Job we can’t really answer him at all when it come right down to it. This really convicts me as I consider my call to ministry. If God calls me to do his work, I know he will give me the preparation I need, and so I trust that he will teach me humility in light of his holiness. Before sending Paul, God knocked him on his back so that he would serve in holy reverence. But if I decide for myself to go into ministry for him, I don’t know that I can count on that preparation. In the meantime I need to seek God so that I can learn who he is and wait for the day–or decade–when he confronts me and shows me what I’m made of.

Bibliography

Allen, Ronald J. “Between Text and Sermon: 2 Corinthians 4:7-18.” Interpretation 52 (1998): 286-289.

Barnett, Paul. The Message of 2 Corinthians. The Bible Speaks Today. Ed. John R. Stott. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1988. 86-87.

Craddock, Fred B. Preaching. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1985.

Kistemaker, Simon J. II Corinthians. New Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House Co, 1997. 146-147.

Savage, Timothy B. Power through weakness: Paul’s understanding of the Christian ministry in 2 Corinthians. Paradise Valley, Arizona: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 164-169.

Von Allmen, Daniel. “The Treasure in Clay Pots.” International Review of Mission 77 (1988): 265-271.

I’m not saying anything here that hasn’t been argued by any number of commentators, but I want to posit that reading Romans 7 (”I do not do what I want to do”) as a comforting passage reflecting Paul’s ongoing struggle with sin, with which we should identify, is simply wrong.

It’s very enticing to identify with its struggle, because we’ve all had a common experience: trying to do what we know is right, sometimes succeeding but perhaps more often failing.

Problem is, as far as I can tell, in Romans 7 there’s no sometimes. There is indeed a struggle based on an inner desire to do what is good, but there’s no mixed bag of success and failure. The speaker is simply, frankly, unable to do good. Not sometimes, but ever.

Try to find where the passage leaves open the possibility of success (I’m using my translation, which at some points is more idiomatic than NIV, at others more literal; note the NIV butchers the passage as a whole):

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am fleshly, sold under sin. I don’t understand what I do. For it’s not what I want that I do, but what I hate––that’s what I do. Now if what I don’t want to do is what I actually do, I agree with the law that it’s good [i.e., I have to admit the law had it right, even though I can’t do it]. But at that point, it’s no longer I who am doing the deed, but sin dwelling within me.For good certainly isn’t dwelling within me––in my flesh, I mean. For the wanting to do what’s good is right beside me, but the actual doing of good is not. For it’s not what I want to do (good) that I do, but what I don’t want to do (bad), that’s what I do. But if I do what I don’t want to do, again, it’s no longer I who am doing the deed, but the sin dwelling within me.

So I find a certain “law” at work: When what I want is to do something good, the bad is right beside me. I agree with God’s law as far as my inner self in concerned, but I see another “law” among my members, warring against the “law” of my mind and taking me captive by the “law” of sin which is within my members.

I am a wretched mortal––who will rescue me from this deathly body? Thank be to God, through Jesus Christ our lord.

So then, I am in my mind a slave to the law of God, but in my flesh a slave to the “law” of sin.

Typically, protestants like to read this and say, “Ah, we are indeed depraved––but thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, for forgiving all our sins so that we aren’t condemned even though we sin all the time.”

And yet:

• Romans 6:2: “We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?”
• Romans 6:6: “For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the sinful body might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin…”
• Romans 6:11: “Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
• Romans 6:17: “But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were handed over. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.”
• Romans 6:22: “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life.”

I’m not one to insist that Paul never contradicts himself, but none of these is compatible with reading 7:14 (quoted above: “I am fleshly, sold under sin”) as describing the life of a Christian. “Sold,” following the dicussion of chapter 6, implies slavery, which Paul has said more than once is abolished at baptism.

Instead, the struggle of chapter 7 sounds more like what Paul describes as a pre-Christian state (6:20): “When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness.”

Chapter 7, then, is not at all about any ongoing struggle within the believer. (We may experience such a struggle, but it is only because we go against the work of the spirit and Paul’s good advice and choose to do bad, not because we are unable to do good.) Rather, the desperate situation that Paul describes is before you’re a believer, when you’re still a slave to sin. Everything within you might want to do what is good, but you can’t.

I should note, we can debate how to apply this last point practically. I assume most of us wouldn’t claim that an unbeliever never does a good deed, but I don’t think that’s the point. Paul’s theological focus is on every person, apart from Christ, standing condemned as a sinner before God, unable to justify himself or herself (Rom 3:19).

Some people don’t like this interpretation of Romans 7 because they prefer the one that seems to match their experience. However, the result of the Gospel as Paul envisions it is not merely a sort of back-handed good news, such that we’ll feel wretched our entire lives but take comfort in our forgiveness by Jesus. That may correspond to our experience, but it’s not what Paul was saying.

But that would be a poor comfort anyway. Instead, we receive a word that is far better. God has assured us that he’s set us free from our old bond through baptism, and the gift of the Holy Spirit which accompanies our conversion gives us good news on several counts: it lives within us (8:9), it teaches us how to live (8:4), it helps us put to death the deeds of the body (8:13), it gives us life and peace (8:6), it testifies that we are God’s children (8:16), it helps us pray (8:26), it intercedes for us before God (8:27), and it will accomplish the resurrection of our mortal bodies after we die (8:11).

It turns out Romans isn’t really much of a comfort to a neurotic like Martin Luther: Paul makes abundantly clear that God is not content for us to go on sinning (6:1, 15), but then he won’t go to the other extreme and say God is harsh so we can admit our condemnation and go about our business.

But if we do have any doubts as to where we stand, Paul hits us with perhaps the most wildly celebratory passage of his corpus. Read it as a blessing (NRSV):

“What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword (as it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered”)?No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Amen.