Tag: Atonement
3 A Soldier’s Atonement: A Troubled Iraq Vet Seeks Out the Family He Harmed
The crusades usually get a bad rap. It’s hard for us to believe that Christians then got something right that we so often get wrong.During the crusades, for example, soldiers returning from the Holy Land would be expected to do penance. It was understood that even if doing their soldier’s duty was just and necessary, taking another’s life remained a sin that must be grieved over and atoned for. Such stories today are rare. We’re afraid that to suggest a soldier do penance is to suggest the cause is unjust. We’re afraid that to construe a soldier’s life in religious terms might undermine our political chest-puffing and military boosterism. The article below, from the New Yorker, shows how in our failure and fear to do so the opportunity to achieve something beautiful- and eternal- is lost.
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In the early hours one morning last September, Lu Lobello rose from his bed, switched on a light, and stared into the video camera on his computer. It was two-thirty. The light cast a yellow pall on Lobello’s unshaven face. Almost every night was like this. Lobello couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop thinking about his time in Iraq. Around San Diego, he’d see a baby—in a grocery store, in a parking lot—and the image would come back to him: the blood-soaked Iraqi infant, his mother holding him aloft by one foot. “Why did you shoot us?’’ the woman demanded over and over. Other times, Lobello would see a Mercedes—a blue or white one, especially—and he’d recall the bullet-riddled sedan in the Baghdad intersection, the dead man alongside it in the street, the elderly woman crying in broken English, “We are the peace people! We are the peace people!” He’d remember that the barrel of his machine gun was hot to the touch.
Once a wild teen-ager in Las Vegas—“I was a crazy bastard!”—Lobello had become, at thirty-one, a tormented veteran. When he came home from Iraq, he bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the weapon most like the one he had in combat, and two pistols, and kept them close at night. “You lay them on the bed, like it’s your girlfriend, and go to sleep,” he said. That had helped a little, but then he moved to California, where the gun laws were stricter, and he’d left them behind.
The marines had shot a terrible number of Iraqis that day—maybe two dozen in all. At times, as Lobello lay awake, he wondered, Whom had he killed? Who had survived? He combed the Internet for names, dates, and addresses; he pestered the members of his Marine company for details and consulted a cousin who had travelled in the region. He piled up documents. At last, the clues led him to the Facebook page of a young woman named Nora: maybe, he thought, it was the young woman he’d seen in the back seat of the Mercedes, with the bloody shoulder. And so, at two-thirty that morning, eight years after he had sprayed bullets into cars filled with Iraqi civilians, Lobello turned on his video recorder.
“It’s very hard for me to say this, Nora, but we met on April 8, 2003,’’ Lobello said. “I was with Fox Company, Second Battalion, Twenty-third Marine Regiment, and our fate crossed that night. I’m not sure if you remember, because it was so long ago now. Almost a decade.”
He turned the camera to show the documents he’d gathered. “I have been trying to learn what happened that day, I think, since that day ended,’’ he said. For nearly ten minutes, he spoke about his family and his plans for the future. He asked about Nora’s mother, whether she was alive. He talked about other marines. “Lots of the people I was with that day,’’ he said, “they don’t do too good sometimes.” At one point, he started to cry. “I’m so sorry for your loss,’’ he said, composing himself. “I just think that talking to you guys will help me out so much. I know it seems really selfish. I hope it helps you, too, but really I can’t—I can’t go on not trying to say hello to you.
“I need to talk to you, if you let me,’’ Lobello said. “I have so much to say to you. I have so much to say.”
Lobello switched off the camera and attached the video to the Facebook message. He pressed send and went back to bed.
On April 16, 2003, I was driving a rented S.U.V. through the streets of Baghdad when I spotted a crowd rushing the doors of an Iraqi hospital. Saddam’s regime had collapsed a week before, and the Iraqi capital, like most of the country, had disintegrated into bloody anarchy. Baghdad was burning; mobs were swarming government buildings; ordinary Iraqis were robbing and killing one another. I drove up to the hospital, Al Wasati, just as a doctor walked out the front door and fired a Kalashnikov into the air. The crowd backed off, but only a little.
Inside, wailing patients wandered around, clutching ravaged limbs. Doctors were treating wounded people in the hallways. There were no lights, no medicine. In the lobby, a doctor introduced himself as Yasir al-Masawi. “There is a very tragic case here, one that sticks in my mind,’’ he said. “Come, I will show you.’’ I followed him down a hallway, into a ward reeking of old bandages and festering wounds. In a corner, seated on the edge of a bed, was a young woman with blond hair, which was rare in Iraq. Her left shoulder was heavily bandaged; blood and pus had seeped through and dried in a dark-red stain. She was semi-coherent, talking one second, murmuring in a deep voice the next. In a lucid moment, she said that her name was Nora Kachadoorian.
Two women stood next to the bed: her mother, Margaret, and her aunt, Dina. They told me that, as the American forces closed in, the Kachadoorian family was living in eastern Baghdad, in a neighborhood called Baladiyat. As ethnic Armenians and Christians, they had quietly prospered on the fringes of Iraqi society, running a business that sold machinery. They did not welcome the war. “We thought of leaving Baghdad, but where would we go?” Margaret said.
Just down the road from where they lived was a secret-police compound that was one of the invasion’s big targets. As the Americans began bombing, the Kachadoorians drove to a relative’s house in Zayouna, the next neighborhood over. Then a shell destroyed the relative’s house, and the Kachadoorians decided to make a dash back home. There were nine of them, piled into three vehicles: Margaret and her husband, James; their two sons, Nicolas and Edmund; Edmund’s wife, Anna, and their infant son, Sam; Nora; Dina; and a young cousin, Freddy. The Kachadoorians drove quickly, even though the explosion had shattered the windshield of one of their cars, a blue Mercedes. They’d heard shooting, but as they turned onto Baladiyat Street, they decided to keep going. “Our home was just around the corner,” Margaret said. It seemed too risky to turn back.
In their neighborhood, a company of marines was engaged in a furious gun battle with Iraqi forces in the State Security building. As the Kachadoorians turned into the intersection, the Americans opened fire. Bullets ripped through the cars, and the three drivers—James, Edmund, and Nicolas—were killed. Nora’s shoulder was shattered, and Anna and her baby were covered in blood. Nicolas, seated next to Margaret, tumbled out of the car and into the street. “Nicky is dead!” she screamed. She improvised a surrender flag, she told me, by pulling off the baby’s white undershirt and waving it above her head.
In Nora’s hospital room, an Iraqi doctor showed us an X-ray of her shoulder. On the film was a cluster of dots where shrapnel was lodged. The bone had been splintered, the shoulder dislocated. “She will be crippled, I think,’’ he said. Nora rolled her head and called out, “Mike!” It was the name of an American Navy corpsman who had bandaged her shoulder and shielded her from gunfire. For days, she’d been calling out to him. A second Iraqi doctor appeared, flanked by two orderlies, to change Nora’s bandages. The orderlies began to snip the dressings and pull them away from the skin. Nora shrieked. The doctor said he could give her something for the pain, but the wait would be long. “Please give me an anesthetic,’’ Nora pleaded, as the orderlies kept tugging. Then she shrieked again, a long, high-pitched scream that frightened everyone. The doctor winced and left the room. Not long afterward, I left, too.
Margaret had described the unit whose members shot them: Fox Company, 2nd Battalion of the 23rd Regiment of the U.S. Marines. A few hours later, I found the men camped in a field near Baladiyat Street. During the war, I sometimes asked American soldiers about dead civilians, and the reaction was almost always defensive, even angry. But these marines spoke in sombre tones about what had happened. The firefight had been intense—they’d shot five thousand rounds, and seen eleven of their comrades wounded. When the Kachadoorians came barrelling through the intersection, the marines thought they were under attack. They called to the Kachadoorians to stop, and then they opened fire. When they realized what they had done, they ran into the middle of the intersection—with the firefight still going on—to rescue the survivors. “I still have nightmares about that day,’’ their commander, Staff Sergeant John Liles, said.
I found the medic whom Nora had called for: Mike DiGaetano, a Navy corpsman from Las Vegas. He had asked for a helicopter to take the wounded Iraqis to an American field hospital, and his request was denied—the hospital wasn’t taking Iraqi civilians. The marines screamed and screamed into the radio, but the answer was no. So they patched up Nora and Anna and the others, and then sent them away. DiGaetano seemed relieved to hear that Nora was alive.
In the days that followed, I saw Margaret at her home in Baladiyat, and visited the graves of James, Nicolas, and Edmund, in the cemetery at St. Gregory’s Armenian Church. Margaret fed me lahmajun, a kind of Armenian pizza, and told me she’d majored in English literature at Al Mustansiriya University, in Baghdad. She had read Dickens, Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway, she said; her favorite book was “A Farewell to Arms.” When Margaret told me that she had a sister-in-law in Canada, I let her use my satellite phone to call. I wrote a story for the Times, which ran under the headline “FOR FAMILY IN IRAQ, 3 DEATHS FROM A MOMENT OF CONFUSION.’’
After that, I tried to stay in touch with the Kachadoorians, but our connection was lost in the violence that engulfed the country. Whenever I went to Baladiyat, I asked about them, about Nora, the Armenian Christian with the blond hair and the bad shoulder. When I left the country, in late 2006, at the height of the civil war, I made one last try. No one knew a thing.
Then, this past March, I got a Facebook message from Lu Lobello, whom I’d never met: “I have been trying to get a hold of you for 10 years about. Ever since April 8th 2003.” He said that he had been a member of Fox Company. He wanted to talk about the Kachadoorians. “You could ease my PTSD,” he wrote. “Please contact me back. Please.”
As Fox Company neared Baghdad that day, Lance Corporal Lu Lobello was one of its most dedicated members. Lobello, then twenty-two, was a machine gunner in the company’s 3rd Platoon. He wasn’t especially enthusiastic about the American invasion of Iraq, and he wasn’t eager to see combat, but he took pride in his skill as a warrior, and he was determined to acquit himself well. “I was part of something big,’’ he said.
As a teen-ager at Durango High School, in Las Vegas, Lobello had done just about everything he figured he could get away with. “Drinking, smoking, doing drugs, stealing shit, getting in fights, fucking around,’’ he said. “I thought maybe I should get out of there.” The Marines transformed him, giving him discipline and purpose and a sense of loyalty to his fellow-fighters. They gave him a very big weapon, too: an M-249 machine gun, which fired a thousand rounds a minute.
Lobello had joined a reserve company, which meant that he trained and fought largely with people from the area where he lived. Fox Company’s recruits came from Salt Lake City, where many of them were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and from Las Vegas, where they had grown up around casinos and night clubs. They called themselves the Sinners and the Saints. Lobello and his buddies were mobilized after the 9/11 attacks. By the time the invasion of Iraq began, they had been training for a year.
Fox Company had crossed over from Kuwait in a blind rush, following the hasty strategy of the first part of the war. At the edge of Baghdad that day, the marines decided to leave their Humvees and trucks behind; in the more populated area, their bulky vehicles seemed a burden. They planned to walk to the big intersection just before the secret-police compound and stop there. At first, everything was calm. As they walked into Baladiyat, women offered cookies and flowers, thanking the marines for getting rid of Saddam. Some of them wore dresses, instead of burkas. Lobello spotted a woman on a balcony holding a string of rosary beads. “We were in a Christian neighborhood,’’ he said.
As the first marines of Fox Company neared the intersection, Corporal David Vidania, the radio operator, fell backward, shot in the head. There was a volley of bullets, and a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in the street. Lobello and the rest of the 3rd Platoon were a couple of streets behind and ran to catch up. When they arrived, an orange-and-white taxi sat just ahead, riddled with holes and smoking. Five roads met at the intersection, and bullets were coming from all around: from the street, from the secret-police compound, even from a mosque. Marines were getting hit, and the company commander’s radio had failed. Lobello entered an abandoned building and ran up the stairs to the second floor. At the top, he found a marine walking around in circles and screaming: “We killed a baby, Lobello! We fucking killed a baby!”
At the time, Lobello and other marines recalled, the rules of engagement, which governed when they could fire, didn’t offer much guidance about distinguishing civilians from enemy fighters. The basic rule was to spare civilians when possible, but above all to protect yourself. The way the taxi had sped across the intersection—the way it kept coming, even after the driver had been shot—led some of the marines to conclude that members of the Iraqi militia known as Fedayeen Saddam were hijacking vehicles and using them to ram the Americans’ lines. There had already been a couple of suicide attacks on American positions, and the men began to think that they were next. “We decided we had to take out any car that came into the intersection,’’ Lobello told me. He looked out the window, set up his gun, and started shooting back at the Iraqis. He saw a red Volkswagen Passat, shot through and smoldering. A Red Crescent ambulance darted across the intersection toward Fox Company’s position, and the men opened fire. “We were lighting everything up,’’ he said.
Lobello spotted a line of cars coming into the intersection a hundred yards away: a blue Mercedes sedan, a white Mercedes, a white pickup. He levelled his gun, looked down the sight. The gunfire from the Iraqi positions, Lobello recalled, was relentless. Some marines below were calling to the cars to stop, but their voices were drowned out by the shooting. No one gave an order to fire, at least not one that any of the marines could recall later. Lobello aimed at the lead car and squeezed the trigger. “I was firing at the same thing everyone else was,’’ he said.
The bullets poured into the blue Mercedes, and the driver-side door swung open. Nicolas Kachadoorian rolled into the street. His brother, James, jumped out of the white pickup and was shot dead. Then the front passenger door of the Mercedes opened. A woman leaped out. She was waving her hands and shouting, “We are the peace people!’’
A second woman emerged from the Mercedes, bleeding from the scalp, holding up a crimson baby. Lobello stopped firing, but the Iraqis kept on. A group of marines ran into the intersection. Lobello remembered seeing a third woman in the blue Mercedes, struggling to get out of the back seat. She was bleeding from the shoulder.
Click Here to read the rest.
0 The Christmas Gospel (in Chairs): Audio and Video
The audio from this weekend’s sermon is now available in the iTunes Store for free. Search under ‘Tamed Cynic.’
This weekend’s sermon was more visual than usual. For that reason, the video might be more helpful if you missed it.
Click here to view the video.
1 The Christmas Gospel (In Chairs)
Sermon for 1st Advent based on 2 Corinthians 5.16-20 (my favorite scripture).
I used two chairs as props in this sermon to illustrate my point. A white folding chair (God) and a black folding chair (humanity). I’ve included the blocking cues for this to make sense in the text.
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On my blog last week I solicited questions that people have about Jesus’ birth. I promised that the best questions- at least as they’re judged by yours truly- would make their way into our sermons during Advent.
I’ve received all sorts of questions.
Some questions were from church members but many were not.
Some questions were anonymous and others were not.
One question- it wasn’t anonymous, not exactly.
The email wasn’t signed. I don’t know who it was from but the email address identified the writer as ‘emmasmommy@.com
The email said:
‘I suppose you can chalk this up to ‘kids ask the darndest questions.’ Tuesday afternoon I was driving home from Target with my daughter who’s a first grader.
We were listening to Christmas music on the Christian radio station when out of the blue my daughter asked me: ‘Why do we celebrate Christmas?’
I was about to say to her ‘Because Christmas is Jesus’ birthday,’ which is true obviously, but I stopped myself because all of a sudden that struck me as a not very meaningful answer. Think about all the Christmas carols there are- seems silly if ‘Happy Birthday to you; Happy Birthday dear Jesus’ will do the job.
So instead I said to her: ‘We celebrate Christmas because Jesus is the one who saves us.’
I should’ve known better because she came right back and asked me: ‘How does Jesus save us?’
And I answered: ‘He dies on the cross.’
That’s when I started wishing I’d just gone with the birthday answer because naturally, being a child, she had more questions.
‘Why does Jesus have to die?’ she asked me.
‘So God can forgive us’ I said, confidently, hoping that would be the end of it.
But no.
She must’ve seen me in the rearview mirror and known I was out of my depth because she pressed me: ‘Why does Jesus have to die? Why can’t God just forgive us?’
‘Because that’s just the way it works’ I told her, which by the way is the same answer I gave her when she asked me how gas makes the car go: because that’s just the way it works.
She chewed on that for a while and then she said, like she was tattling on a bully at school: ‘God doesn’t sound very nice.’
Here’s what I did not have the courage to tell her: ‘I agree.’
I should’ve just stuck with the ‘Christmas = Jesus’ Birthday’ bit, because the alternative makes Christmas seem awfully dark and it makes God seem that way too.
So there’s my Christmas question: Why Christmas? Why can’t God just forgive our sins and be done with it? Why is Jesus born just to die?
I don’t know if ‘emmasmommy’ goes to this church or not.
Even if she does, I don’t know if she’s here today.
But emmasmommy’s question is an A+ question.
In fact, I think it gets at the most important question.
But before I can answer emmasmommy’s question I need to unpack two different versions of the Gospel for you.
So what I want to do today is offer you a presentation of the Gospel in two different versions. I want to present to you the Modern, Western, Judicial version of the Gospel- the version that most of us in North America assume is the only version.
Some of you will want to argue with me that there is no other version; and you if you do, you will be wrong and I will be right 🙂
And then I want to present to you a version of the Gospel that is more ancient.
It’s the Patristic understanding of Salvation, meaning it comes from the early Church Fathers.
So what I want to do is contrast the Legal-Judicial understanding of Salvation with the Patristic understanding of Salvation, and I want to do it with chairs.
Already I can see some of you tensing up. I got this idea from a colleague who’s an Orthodox priest.
First, the Legal-Judicial understanding of Salvation. It goes like this:
In the beginning, God created man in God’s image to reflect God’s glory and to enjoy fellowship with God [chairs face each other].
But man in the Garden sinned [turn black chair away from white chair].
And as a result, man became sinful, and God, because God is holy and righteous, cannot look upon man in his sin.
And so God turns away from man [turn white chair away from black chair].
But God in his love for humanity sends his Son to occupy our place [bring black chair around to face white chair].
Jesus Christ lives as one of us, lives as we were intended to live, lives in full relationship with the Father, never turns away from the Father, trusts the Father at every juncture of his life, alway does the Father’s will.
And at the end of his life, Jesus is put to death.
In that moment, the Father does the unthinkable. He takes our sin- our personal and collective sin- and he puts it on Jesus; so that, Jesus becomes sinful and guilty [turn black chair away from white chair].
As Paul writes, ‘God made him to be sin who no sin.’
And God, because God is holy and righteous, cannot look upon sin, and so God turns away from his Son [turn white chair away from black chair].
When Jesus cries out on the cross: ‘My God, why have you forsaken me,’ in this understanding of salvation, that’s Jesus experiencing the full wrath of God.
Now, if we sinners believe that God has done this and that Jesus has born the wrath of God that we deserve then we’re protected from the wrath of God. It’s like we’re born all over again and we receive the righteousness of Christ as our own [move black chair to face white chair].
As Martin Luther said: ‘We are like snow-covered crap,’ which maybe sounds better in German I don’t know.
Or, as modern preachers have put it: ‘Christ becomes our asbestos suit to protect us from the white, hot wrath of God against sinners.
Now that’s if we believe this.
If we don’t believe that Jesus has done this for us, then we remain in our sin [turn black chair away from white chair].
And God’s wrath remains against us and we remain alienated from God and eventually the sinner is condemned to everlasting Hell [turn white chair away from black chair].
Merry Christmas!
That’s the Legal or Judicial understanding of salvation.
And it’s the version assumed in the question from emmasmommy because emmasmommy assumed the problem Jesus is born to solve is our guilt and the punishment required for God to forgive us.
It’s a modern understanding in the sense that it only became a common way of thinking about salvation more than a thousand years after Jesus.
It’s sometimes called the Satisfaction understanding of salvation because it’s Jesus’ suffering and death that ‘satisfies’ God’s wrath towards us.
[turn chairs back to face listeners]
Now the Patristic version is the more ancient understanding; it’s how the early Christians understood salvation.
It’s also how John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Movement, thought about salvation.
It goes like this:
In the beginning, God created man in his image [turn black chair to face white chair].
To reflect his love and to share in the fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit. But in the Garden man sinned and turned away from God [turn black chair away from white chair].
As a result- pay attention, this is important- having turned away from God, we’re no longer fully who God created us to be.
Genesis says, literally, God created Adam and Eve to be ‘eikons’ of God, and when we turn away from God, it’s like those ‘eikons’ get cracked.
So the problem Jesus comes to solve is not our guilt and God’s wrath towards us.
Because sin isn’t so much something we’re guilty of and need to be punished for.
Sin is primarily something we’re afflicted with. By.
John Wesley said that sin is like a disease that impairs every part of our lives and only a restored relationship with God can heal us.
That’s the problem the Gospel addresses.
Now, because God loves humanity and refuses to turn his back on the creatures that turned their backs on him, God takes takes flesh. God becomes one of us.
[move white chair to face black chair].
God comes as Jesus not to judge but to restore.
And so, imagine a woman who, because she’s cracked ‘eikon’ of God, she’s gone from man to man, marriage to marriage [turn black chair away].
She’s been married five times and now she’s living with a sixth and still doesn’t have the love that she longs for.
And what happens?
[move white chair to face black chair]
God comes.
God comes and sits down beside her at a well and says ‘I am the Water of Life. I will love you.’
Picture a man [gesture to black chair].
Because he’s a cracked ‘eikon’ of God, for the sake of greed and ambition has become a tax collector, that is, he colludes with the Roman occupation. He articipates in the oppression of his own people [turn black chair away from white chair].
As a result, he’s ostracized by his people. He’s alienated from society. No one will have anything to do with him.
But what happens?
God comes [turn white around to face black chair].
God comes and sees this tax collector up in a tree and God says ‘Zaccheus, I’ll eat with you. I’ll come to your house.’
And in that moment, God says: ‘Salvation has come to this house.’
Imagine a woman [gesture to black chair].
She’s been caught in adultery. She’s guilty. She’s another cracked ‘eikon’ of God [turn black chair away from white chair].
The religious establishment has condemned her and now they want to stone her.
But what happens?
God comes [bring white chair around to face black chair].
God comes and when this woman is brought before God and thrown down at his feet, God kneels down beside her and says: ‘Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.’
And then he says to the woman: ‘I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more.’
Here is a young man, who because he’s a broken ‘eikon,’ out of greed and resentment, wishes his father dead [turn black chair away from white chair].
He demands his inheritance. And the young man takes the money and leaves to spend his father’s fortune.
But what happens?
When that man’s broke and desperate and returns home, his father does what no fathers in the ancient world ever did [bring white chair around to face black chair].
His father runs up to him and embraces him and throws a feast to welcome him home.
And God says: ‘That’s what I’m like.’
And when humanity [turn black chair away from white chair] is driven by fear and power, takes God and betrays him and spits upon him and scourges him and mocks him and condemns him and crucifies him, what does God say?
[bring white chair around to face black chair]
‘I forgive you.’
And when humanity falls away into death to be forever separated from God [lay black chair down on the floor].
God says: ‘Love is greater than the grave and stronger than Death and, though you make your bed in Sheol, I am there.’
And God joins humanity in Death [lay white chair down on the floor beside black chair].
In his pursuit of restoring relationship with us, God is willing to go all the way down in to Death.
But God also says ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life. I died and am alive for evermore and I hold the keys of Hell and Death. Because I live so shall you live.’
[pick up both chairs so that they’re facing each other]
To those who respond to God’s love with love then God’s love is experienced as a radiant Light and over time as we live in God’s grace we’re restored to who God intended us to be from the very beginning.
We’re saved, healed.
That’s what the word ‘salvation’ means in Greek: healing.
John Wesley said that as our relationship with God is restored and we grow in grace we really do recover the image God intended for us; we can become perfect in love- as Jesus was.
St Athanasius put it this way: God became like us so that we might become like God.
But to those who reject God’s love, who refuse fellowship with God, then that same Light feels unbearable and is experienced as wrath [turn black chair away from white chair].
You see, it’s not that God is angry and wrathful.
Rather that’s what we experience and perceive when we turn our backs on God.
As Paul said, to someone who rejects God’s love, God’s love feels like burning coals upon his head, but it doesn’t mean God’s love is not upon him.
All he ever has to do is turn to God and say: ‘I will love you’ and what had felt like a torment will feel like grace.
That’s the Patristic understanding of salvation.
That’s what you need to have in mind for my reply to emmasmommy to make sense.
Dear Emma’s Mommy,
Thanks for your questions.
As far as answers go, first, keep in mind two core convictions of Christianity:
1) God is immutable, which means God doesn’t change. Ever.
2) God is perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ.
That’s the incarnation. That’s Christmas.
Jesus does not come at Christmas in order to change how the Father feels about us.
God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus.
There’s never been a time when God wasn’t like Jesus.
That’s what’s revealed to us at Christmas.
The Apostle Paul says: ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.’
He doesn’t say: God was in Christ reconciling himself to the world.
It’s not the Father who needed to be reconciled to the world; it’s the world that needed to be restored to the Father.
And so the problem isn’t how God feels about us.
The problem is how we feel about God. We turn our backs on God. All the time.
And that can be like an illness that impairs everything about our lives.
That’s what we call sin.
To your second question, forgiveness doesn’t just begin with the cross.
It begins at Christmas.
In fact, you could say it starts the second Adam and Eve step out of the Garden. Because God never turns away from us.
Like I said, God is perfectly revealed in Jesus.
When do you ever see Jesus turning away from a sinner and saying ‘I am too holy to have anything to do with you?’
Jesus never did anything like that. The Pharisees did.
And maybe it sounds simple and obvious, but I think we can get confused at Christmastime and so I’ll just say it: God is like Jesus not like a Pharisee.
The Pharisees weren’t very nice. But tell your daughter that God is nice because Jesus is.
Lastly, I have no idea how to explain this to a first-grader so that parts up to you, but here goes:
‘Salvation’ isn’t just something that happens on the cross.
And it definitely isn’t just something that happened once upon a time.
In the Gospels, salvation means ‘healing.’
To be saved means to be healed, restored to who God created us to be.
And our relationship with God- that’s the medicine that makes that healing possible.
And that’s why its such a big deal, it’s such good news, that at Christmas we realize that even though we are determined to live our lives without God, God is determined not to be God with out us.
Merry Christmas!
Jason
1 Do We Need to Make the Gospel Understandable to Modern Culture?
And are United Methodists now reaping the bitter fruit of having done so a century ago?
I’ve been reading Tim Keller’s new book, Center Church, the past week. In it, Keller gives much attention to the task/question of contextualization; that is, how we do communicate our message to the given context in which we live.
Keller notes that it’s not really a question of whether or not we should contextualize.
We can’t avoid contextualization unless we’re willing to avoid communication altogether. Every time we paraphrase a scripture passage, every time we extrapolate a point or a meaning, every time we settle upon what we think is the ‘plain sense’ of scripture we’re contextualizing BECAUSE, after all, we’re also a part of the culture and formed by it in ways we don’t always know.
Just ask Harrison Ford in Witness, Christians can’t avoid being in the world and we never really cease to be of the world either.
Preaching, then, is just a simpler term for contextualization.
So the question isn’t if we should translate the Gospel to culture but how.
Keller argues that Mainline (liberal) Christianity in the early 20th century sought to make Christianity palatable to the modern world by redefining orthodox Christian doctrine in naturalistic terms– terms stripped of a reliance upon revelation and the supernatural.
The result was a Christianity redefined thus:
The Bible is filled with divine wisdom, but this doesn’t mean it’s inerrant. It’s a human document containing errors and contradictions.
Jesus is the Son of God but this doesn’t mean he was preexistent or divine. He was instead a great man infused with God’s Spirit.
Jesus’ death is not a cosmic even that propitiates God’s wrath at Sin. It’s an example of sacrificial love that changes us by moving our hearts to follow his example.
Becoming a Christian, then, doesn’t entail the supernatural act of new birth (conversion prompted by grace). It means to follow the example of Jesus, follow the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.
You can agree or not with Keller’s point of view, but there’s no question the breakdown above quite simply IS the dominant articulation of Christianity among most United Methodist (and other mainline traditions) churches and clergy.
This is what makes most mainline Christians ‘liberal’ even if they think of themselves as conservative politically.
Here’s Keller contention:
You can’t make such adaptations to what scripture is, who Jesus is, what the Cross does and how you become a Christian without creating a religion that is entirely new and alien to Christianity.
The Mainline/Liberal effort to reconcile Christianity to the modern world of the 20th century (the naturalistic world), Keller says, results not in an adaptation of Christianity but in an entirely new religion that contradicts orthodox Christianity.
Even if you would quibble with Keller’s characterization, his next question remains TNT:
By adapting the faith to the norms of the ‘modern early 20th century world’ did Mainline/Liberal Christianity back the wrong horse?
Mainline Christians a century ago assumed that what was ‘modern’ for them would remain so- that those who clung to a revelation-based, supernatural understanding of the faith would be judged to be on the wrong side of history.
Keller says this was a category mistake.
Late modernity and postmodernity, he notes, has rejected modernism’s confidence that science and reason can ultimately answer all our important questions and that technology can solve all our problems.
In other words, 100 years removed from Methodism’s capitulation to culture, that culture has shifted out from under the Church.
In other words, Mainline Christianity wedded itself to what is now a fading, obsolete view.
And since adapting its faith claims to the culture a century ago, Mainline Christianity has experienced steep decline; meanwhile, Pentecostalism (the least modern- Enlightenment based- form of Christianity) and Eastern Orthodox Christianity have grown exponentially in the past hundred years.
So its a cautionary tale.
The how of contextualization should refer more to our mode of communication than to the content of our confession.
0 Some Jesus Thoughts on Yom Kippur
Today at sundown Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, begins. It’s been my experience that Christians know very much about Passover, since the links to the Passion story are explicit in the Gospels, but know very little about Yom Kippur (or the other Jewish Holy Days) and how they interact with and inform what the Gospel writers were attempting to convey.
Another reason why Christians don’t know much about Yom Kippur is that it’s outlined in the Book of Leviticus, probably the most neglected book of the Old Testament by Christians. Recovering the connection is key, though, because many Christians believe Jesus suffered God’s wrath towards us on the Cross in his body. But Yom Kippur isn’t about suffering wrath, it’s about removing sin.
The ancient church fathers believed the Book of Hebrews was originally one long sermon on Leviticus 16, which would make it longer even than one of Dennis’ sermons.
Leviticus 16 details God’s instructions to Moses for the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur revolves around the high priest. The person who represents all of God’s people, the only person who can ever venture beyond the temple veil and into the Holy of Holies, where the ark and the presence of God reside, and ask God to remove his people’s sins.
Remember, in the Hebrew Bible God is a consuming, refining fire.
And as much as God loves us and as much as we love God, in the Hebrew Bible no one can come near God’s presence.
And live.
So when the high priest enters the Holy of Holies, he risks his life.
And because of that, every detail of every ritual matters.
The high priest must bath the right way.
The high priest must dress the proper way.
The high priest must make prescribed sacrifices for his sin and his family sin.
When he’s done with the preparation, the high priest is brought two goats.
Lots are cast so that God’s will would be done.
One goat is sacrificed to cleanse the temple of sin. The second goat is brought to him alive. The high priest lays both his hands on the head of the goat and then confesses onto it all the iniquities of the people of Israel. The priest removes all the people’s sins and places them on the goat. And after the priest’s work was finished, the goat would bear the people’s sin away in to the wilderness.
The wilderness symbolized exile and forsakenness and death.
The high priest transfers the sins of the people onto the goat and then the goat is sent away to where the wild things are. You see, Yom Kippur isn’t about God wanting to punish you for your sin.
Yom Kippur’s about God wanting to remove your sin.
The Day of Atonement is not about appeasing an angry, petty God. It’s about God removing that which separates us from God and from each other and sending it away so that it’s not here anymore.
While the high priest prayed over the goat, the king of the Jews would undergo a ritual humiliation to repent of his people’s sins: he’d be struck, his clothes would be torn, the king would ask God to forgive his people for they know not what they do.
When the high priest’s work is done, the goat’s loaded with all the sins of the people. Chances are, you wouldn’t want to volunteer to lead that goat out into the wilderness. So the man appointed for the task would be a Gentile. Someone with no connection to the people of Israel. Someone who might not even realize that what they’re doing is a dirty job. That Gentile would lead the goat away with a red cord wrapped around its head- red that symbolized sin.
The name for the goat is ahzahzel. It’s where we get the word ‘scapegoat.’
Ahzahzel means ‘taking away.’
The Gentile would lead the scapegoat into exile while the people shouted ‘ahzahzel.’
Take it away. Take our sin away.
So that it’s not here anymore.
The Gospels all say Jesus dies during the Passover Feast not Yom Kippur.
But I’m not sure it’s as simple as that.
Because the Gospels tell you the calendar says Passover, but what they show you looks an awful lot like the Day of Atonement.
The Gospels show you Jesus being arrested and brought to whom?
The high priest.
The Gospels show you the high priests accusing Jesus of blasphemy, placing what they say is guilt and sin upon him when in reality all they’re doing is transferring their own guilt onto him.
The Gospels show you Pilate’s men ritually humiliating this ‘King of the Jews.’ Mocking him. Casting lots before him. Tearing his clothes off him.
And then wrapping a branch of thorns around his head until a cord of red blood circles it.
The Gospels tell you that the calendar says Passover, but what they show you is Pilate holding Jesus out to the crowd and Pilate asks the crowd what to do with Jesus.
And what do the crowds shout? Not ‘Crucify him!’ Not at first.
First, the crowds shout ‘Take him away!’
Then they shout ‘Crucify him!’ (John 19.15)
The Gospels tell you that the calendar says Passover, but what they show then is Jesus being led away, like an animal, with a red ring around his head, with shouts of ‘ahzahzel’ ringing in the air- led away from the city by Gentiles to Golgotha.
A garbage dump.
A barren place where some of his last words will be ‘My God why have you forsaken me?’
The Gospels tell you its Passover, but what they show you isn’t a Passover Lamb but a Scapegoat.
This is what the Gospels show you when Jesus breathes his last and the veil of the temple- the entrance to the Holy of Holies- is torn in two, from top to bottom.
This is what the Gospels show you when they quote the prophet Isaiah:
‘He has born our grief.’
‘He has carried our sorrow.’
‘Laid on him is the iniquity of us all.’ Those are all references to Leviticus.
This is what the Gospel shows you at the very beginning right after the Christmas story when John the Baptist points to Jesus and says he’s the one who ‘ahzahzels the sins of the world.’
This is what St Paul alludes to when he says that because of Jesus Christ ‘nothing can now separate us from God.’
The Gospels tell you the calendar says Passover, but what they show you is a Day of Atonement.
Unlike any other.
5 Does Being ‘Biblical’= Being Pauline?
Does Being ‘Biblical’= Being Pauline?
I’ve started reading NT Wright’s book, How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels. In some ways it’s a continuation of his work in Simply Jesus.
Wright’s overarching premise is how Christianity in the West has largely forgotten what the Gospels are about. Christians of all traditions and across the theological spectrum tend to read the Gospels episodically or we read them to buttress theological perspectives we bring to the texts. We do not- and haven’t since the ancient church, Wright contends- read the Gospels, asking the question: ‘What overall story does this Gospel think its telling?’
Wright argues that Christians, especially since the Reformation, have construed the ‘gospel’ in terms of atonement and justification; meanwhile, the story the Gospels attempt to tell is how God in Christ is King of the Earth as in Heaven. The extent to which Jesus’ ascension has become a neglected text and holy day supports Wright’s assertions, and just on a literary level it’s a good charge to level. There are no other narratives we could read where how the authors constructed the beginning, middle and end are incidental to the authorial ‘point.’ It’s not a trivial detail that the Gospels conclude with Jesus’ enthronement nor is it of little consequence that Luke ends the Gospel with Jesus’ ascension and then Luke’s Acts picks up with the disciples living in the form of this new Kingdom, on earth as in heaven.
Whatever one’s theology, Wright thinks it problematic that most Christians can articulate a definition of the gospel that need not make any reference to the actual Gospels. Our definitions of the Gospel center on terms like atonement and justification, terms that feature prominently in Paul but are not in the Gospels themselves and are certainly not their main theme. In the same way, Wright notes a commonly observed problem with the creeds; namely, that they skip from Jesus’ birth to his death and resurrection and leave out the bulk of the Gospel story.
Instead of shaping our definition of ‘gospel’ by asking what story the Gospels are attempting to tell, we use the Gospels, Wright says, to illustrate arguments derived from Paul. By doing so, Christians have lost the plot…of the Gospels. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Wright doesn’t ask the question but it’s there in his argument: Shouldn’t our reading of Paul be in submission to and in service of the Gospels rather than vice versa?
Is it the case, Wright wonders, that when we claim to be biblical we’re really being Pauline instead? And by neglecting the narrative arc of the Gospels are we actually being something profoundly less than biblical?