Tag: Sin
0 Wearing Ashes in the Soviet Safeway
Last night after the Ash Wednesday Service I ran to Safeway to procure a few (non-meat) products for my dinner. That’s right, not only am I giving up farting for Lent (see earlier, evidently inflammatory, post) my wife informed me yesterday we’re also giving up meat for Lent.
I tried to point out to Ali that my commitment to give up the latter was in direct contradiction to and would most certainly frustrate my attempts to give up the former. My wife though doesn’t just give things up for Lent each year. She’s hard core. She gives up something for Lent each year but also the things she’s given up in previous years. Thus I’m now on the hook for forty days of not farting in my wife’s vicinity while being sustained on a diet of beans, vegetables and fruit.
Anyways, I was standing in line in the small, Soviet-esque Safeway near my house, about 4 people back. I could hear the bagger and the teller whispering words like ‘what’s’ and ‘going on’ and ‘holiday’ and ‘apocalypse’ and ‘probably’ and ‘something’ and ‘in’ and ‘Revelation.’
They were staring at the black, greasy cross on my forehead.
When I got to the checkout, one of them asked me furtively: ‘So, uh, is it like a holiday or something? Or did you go to a funeral?’
Thinking that would certainly be a memorable- and probably psyche destroying funeral- I replied: ‘It’s Ash Wednesday.’
‘Oh, right!’
Long pause.
‘What’s Ash Wednesday?’
And I replied with exactly what I’d told the congregation 30 minutes earlier: ‘Ash Wednesday is the day we remember that life is a gift from God by remembering our mortality.’
Longer pause.
‘I don’t get it.’
I kind of just smiled and swiped my debit card not wanting to venture too much more into this conversation and not because there were a dozen people waiting behind me impatiently with their lunch meat, TP and Crystal Light.
I didn’t want to say much more because, in all honesty, I still hadn’t processed or recovered the night’s service.
Less than hour before, I had traced an ugly black cross on a child in my son’s class and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
Words that become jarring when spoken on to a 10 year old’s forehead.
And after her, several people back in line, I traced the same bruise-like cross on the forehead of someone whom I’ve grown to love over the past 8 years. Knowing that if I stay in this congregation for a while longer I’ll likely perform this person’s funeral, I said to this friend: ‘‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’ I fought back the sudden urge to cry.
And after that friend came another soon after, someone with whom I’ve shared many a laugh on mission teams in Guatemala. On him, I traced a brooding black cross and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
There were others like that.
Like the parishioner whose battle with cancer I’m privy to. When I marked him with the cross and said ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return’ the words rung with a painful truth.
Or the parent worried that their child will one day make good on threats to return themselves to the dust prematurely.
And then there was a handful of complete and total strangers. People who came in off the street because they saw the service announced on the sign out front. To these strangers, I drew an executioner’s tool on their forehead and basically said: ‘Remember, eventually you’re going to die.’
More so than any other holy day in the church year, Ash Wednesday affects me.
On Ash Wednesday it’s as though every one gathered in the pews becomes a walking, talking, breathing (for now) illustration of the day’s meaning: that life is fragile, tightrope experience, sometimes precious and sometimes terrifyingly awful and that, good or bad, it will one day end.
In so many ways, we’re finite. Just a part of the world God made. Like dirt.
But were it not so, our lives would cease to be gifts.
We don’t preach a sermon on Ash Wednesday largely because we don’t need to. The people in the pews are the embodiment of the message.
Here’s what I mean.
0 Wearing Ashes in the Soviet Safeway
Last night after the Ash Wednesday Service I ran to Safeway to procure a few (non-meat) products for my dinner. That’s right, not only am I giving up farting for Lent (see earlier, evidently inflammatory, post) my wife informed me yesterday we’re also giving up meat for Lent.
I tried to point out to Ali that my commitment to give up the latter was in direct contradiction to and would most certainly frustrate my attempts to give up the former. My wife though doesn’t just give things up for Lent each year. She’s hard core. She gives up something for Lent each year but also the things she’s given up in previous years. Thus I’m now on the hook for forty days of not farting in my wife’s vicinity while being sustained on a diet of beans, vegetables and fruit.
Anyways, I was standing in line in the small, Soviet-esque Safeway near my house, about 4 people back. I could hear the bagger and the teller whispering words like ‘what’s’ and ‘going on’ and ‘holiday’ and ‘apocalypse’ and ‘probably’ and ‘something’ and ‘in’ and ‘Revelation.’
They were staring at the black, greasy cross on my forehead.
When I got to the checkout, one of them asked me furtively: ‘So, uh, is it like a holiday or something? Or did you go to a funeral?’
Thinking that would certainly be a memorable- and probably psyche destroying funeral- I replied: ‘It’s Ash Wednesday.’
‘Oh, right!’
Long pause.
‘What’s Ash Wednesday?’
And I replied with exactly what I’d told the congregation 30 minutes earlier: ‘Ash Wednesday is the day we remember that life is a gift from God by remembering our mortality.’
Longer pause.
‘I don’t get it.’
I kind of just smiled and swiped my debit card not wanting to venture too much more into this conversation and not because there were a dozen people waiting behind me impatiently with their lunch meat, TP and Crystal Light.
I didn’t want to say much more because, in all honesty, I still hadn’t processed or recovered the night’s service.
Less than hour before, I had traced an ugly black cross on a child in my son’s class and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
Words that become jarring when spoken on to a 10 year old’s forehead.
And after her, several people back in line, I traced the same bruise-like cross on the forehead of someone whom I’ve grown to love over the past 8 years. Knowing that if I stay in this congregation for a while longer I’ll likely perform this person’s funeral, I said to this friend: ‘‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’ I fought back the sudden urge to cry.
And after that friend came another soon after, someone with whom I’ve shared many a laugh on mission teams in Guatemala. On him, I traced a brooding black cross and said: ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return.’
There were others like that.
Like the parishioner whose battle with cancer I’m privy to. When I marked him with the cross and said ‘Remember that you are from dust and to dust you shall return’ the words rung with a painful truth.
Or the parent worried that their child will one day make good on threats to return themselves to the dust prematurely.
And then there was a handful of complete and total strangers. People who came in off the street because they saw the service announced on the sign out front. To these strangers, I drew an executioner’s tool on their forehead and basically said: ‘Remember, eventually you’re going to die.’
More so than any other holy day in the church year, Ash Wednesday affects me.
On Ash Wednesday it’s as though every one gathered in the pews becomes a walking, talking, breathing (for now) illustration of the day’s meaning: that life is fragile, tightrope experience, sometimes precious and sometimes terrifyingly awful and that, good or bad, it will one day end.
In so many ways, we’re finite. Just a part of the world God made. Like dirt.
But were it not so, our lives would cease to be gifts.
We don’t preach a sermon on Ash Wednesday largely because we don’t need to. The people in the pews are the embodiment of the message.
Here’s what I mean.
0 If We’re Made in God’s Image, Does That Mean All Will Be Saved?
This past weekend we tackled the theme of Imago Dei in worship, the belief that we are, as Genesis 1 declares, made in God’s image.
Exactly how we’re made in God’s image has been the subject of diverse interpretation through the centuries. Does it mean that every human creature looks like God? Or is it that every creature from womb to tomb is precious by virtue of having their origin in God? Is it our conscience or our soul that resembles the divine? Or how about our love? Or maybe it’s our reason or our language? Maybe we reflect God in that we have dominion over the earth just as God has dominion over us?
Through the centuries the Church has understood the imago dei in all of these ways and often such understandings owe as much to cultural assumptions as they do to the scriptural narrative.
Here’s one way to think about our being made in God’s image that you may not have heard before; in fact, it’ll surprise and maybe offend some of you.
Gregory of Nyssa, a brilliant ‘Father’ of the early Church, understood the imago dei in even strict Trinitarian terms. If God is community, Gregory believed, and if Adam and Eve metaphorically represent humanity (‘Adam’ just means ‘the man’ – see even the ancient Christians didn’t have a problem interpreting Genesis allegorically), then it’s not simply the male-female relationship that constitutes the divine image it’s the totality of the human community.
It’s the human community that reflects the divine community. All of us. To leave someone from the human community out of the imago dei is no different then than excluding either Father, Son or Spirit from the divine community.
This is where Gregory’s thought takes a logical, if surprising turn.
Gregory’s understanding of the imago dei unfolds in a way that has unavoidable, universalist implications for any definition of salvation.
If the human community in its entirety makes up God’s image then redemption can not be accomplished unless Christ saves the entirety of the human community through his incarnation, life, cross and resurrection.
If all of us together constitute the image of God then salvation, the reversal of Sin and the healing of our nature, cannot be complete without all of us. Together.
All will be saved, Gregory speculates, because all have been made in the image of God.
0 Not Perfect But Being Perfected
For our sermon series, this weekend I’ve been thinking about Justification by Faith Alone (vs Works). There’s no way to talk about Justification without talking about Martin Luther, the catalyst of the Reformation.
Luther carried this understanding of justification one step further.
Because the Gospel is God’s declaration to us and because this is a grace that is totally outside of us to which we can only respond with trust, there is no discernible interior change in us.
God looks on us with favor. God declares the Gospel to us: ‘For the sake of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.’ And the only response possible to such a promise is trust.
What Luther understands happens in justification then is that God chooses to see Jesus when he regards us. And God always does choose to see Jesus when he looks upon us. For Luther, even after we’ve responded in trust (even after we’ve had faith for a lifetime) we never cease essentially to be sinners. The new life faith makes possible always remains, in Luther’s view, nascent. Fundamentally, sin remains our determinative attribute even after justification.
This is Luther’s doctrine ‘Simul iustus et peccator.’ It translates to ‘at once justified and a sinner.’ Properly understood (and logically) Luther does not have a doctrine of sanctification, whereby God’s grace works within us to grow us in holiness. Karl Barth, a 20th century theologian in the Reformed tradition, emphasized this point by using the term ‘vocation’ rather than ‘sanctification.’ Christians have a calling in the world even though living out that calling does not effectively change or heal our sin nature.
Thomas Aquinas (and John Wesley after him) would argue this point. While admitting our sanctification can never be complete this side of heaven and so we retain a proclivity to sin, they would argue that once we respond to God in faith we truly do begin to heal. Wesley would even make the plain point that Jesus’ teachings seem superfluous if our nature never heals sufficiently that we can live out those teachings. Jesus’ teachings, for Wesley, were attainable expectations for Christians, but for Luther-convinced of our permanent sin nature- saw such an expectation as a depressing command (‘Law’ in Luther’s terminology as opposed to ‘Gospel’) we can never meet.
To be fair to Luther, his doctrine of ‘simul iustus et peccator’ wasn’t intended to recommend Christian passivity in the face of sin. We shouldn’t just resign ourselves to our sin nature; however, many of those who followed after Luther argued precisely this perspective.
1 The Tedium of Christian Community
I spend several weeks a year in places like Guatemala and Cambodia, places where poverty is urgent and the needs are..how should I say…biblical. This is probably the main reason why I’ve got little patience for the mundane disputes and, often, first world problems that consume congregations. I know that a local church debating the color of the fellowship hall curtains is a cliche but like every cliche it bears the residue of truth. I lived that (endless) debate at my first parish. I didn’t have any patience for it then and I don’t now- though I’ve gotten better at biting my lip.
I simply don’t care for debates about carpet color or the ingredients that make for a successful coffee hour. To some ‘this is how we’ve always done it’ sounds like a compelling point. To me, aware that mainline churches are preparing for the worst of a 50 year old decline, such a perspective only sounds like a recipe for continued, inconsequential mediocrity.
A church mired in such matters is very often a church that’s lost any sense of its mission.
That I’ve got no patience for such things is NOT to say such things surprise me.
I first cut my Christian teeth on Thomas Merton’s memoir, Seven Story Mountain. Besides the prose alone, I loved how Merton revealed the inside happenings and sheer ordinariness of a cloistered monastery. Even dedicated men of the cloth can be boring, petty and vindictive.
People are often surprised that Christian communities can be every bit as dysfunctional as any other group or family. Will Willimon says that it should be this way; after all, demons only make an appearance in scripture when Jesus is present. That sin makes an appearance in churches might be an indication that Jesus hasn’t completely jettisoned us yet.
The NY Times ran a story Sunday about the dysfunction in a lay Christian community in Washington. My only reaction to the article was one of wonderment. What did these people expect by living with other Christians? Haven’t they ever been part of a local church? Hadn’t they ever seen that episode of the X-Files where Scully and Mulder move into the planned community?
0 Watch This: Some of My Favorite Christian(?) Movies
Now, I know some of you prefer your Christian movies to be the overt type- the bathrobes and beards type of movies, usually starring Chuck Heston or Anthony Quinn, or some of you like the recent spate of faith friendly movies that all seem to be about firemen.
Not me.
A film need not be made by Mel Gibson or star Kirk Cameron (really, Kirk Cameron?) to convey something of the Gospel. The Holy Spirit is not the sole possession of the Church (or TBN); therefore, the profane can contain the sacred within it, as much if not more than the self-described religious fare. This has always been the case. Christians just seem to have forgotten it of late.
I qualify these as ‘Christian’ because none of them are explicitly religious nor, as far as I know, made by practicing Christians. This doesn’t prevent them, however, from resonating in powerful ways with aspects of our Christian confession.
Pan’s Labyrinth and Inglorious Bastards
As Walter Brueggemann argues, one of scripture’s chief attributes is how it puts forth a ‘sub-version’ to the dominant story of reality. Against the reality of empires and evil, scripture continually professes that what appears to be going on isn’t what’s really going on. By asserting this story, people of God laugh at evil and its power. This is what the prophets do. This is what Revelation is largely about.
I can think of no better film versions of this than Pan’s Labyrinth and Inglorious Bastards. One is a beautiful tale of a ‘sub-version’ of the Spanish Civil War. Another a profane, violent comedy about WWII in which Hitler is killed- what better way to spit in the eye of sin than to imagine a different fate for Hitler?
Unforgiven
It’s almost an old movie now, but in it Clint Eastwood offers the best, most concise summary of original sin and justification. The young, aspiring assassin asks Eastwood’s gunslinger, after having killed several bad guys: ‘They had it coming to them, didn’t they?’ And Eastwood replies: ‘We’ve all got it coming to us, kid.’
A History of Violence
Most violent movies either glorify violence or trivialize it. This is the only movie I have ever seen that uses traditional action movie violence to articulate its maker’s non-violent message. Its violence is visceral, almost like ballet. You’re left realizing the cost, physical and emotional to all concerned, of what we do to each other. It’s also got a great ambiguous ending- does Vigo’s family forgive him? Or are they too numbed and accommodated to our culture of violence?
Children of Men
A science fiction dystopia that got lost in the euphoria over one of the hundred Harry Potter movies. Mystery writer PD James wrote the (inferior) novel. It tells of a near future in which women are no longer able to become pregnant. The last generation of youth born to women are violent nihilists and every one else vaguely goes about living out humanity’s last days. Then, an every man, played by Clive Owen, becomes the steward of the last woman on earth to become pregnant. Earth’s last hope rests on one woman’s baby. Sound like an advent movie? It is. If you want a sense of the longing, fear and anticipation of Jesus’ birth then don’t watch the Nativity. Watch this.
It’s on Netflix so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t watch this. A single mother and her son’s life is interrupted by the arrival of her long estranged brother. It’s a warm, realistic movie. The scene where she fesses up to her (episcopal?) priest about her affair is not only the best example of pastoral care I’ve ever seen; it’s also spot-on what Christians mean by the word ‘grace.’
Even Richard Gere can make a good movis…of course this movie predates me. It’s a Terrance Mallick film that retells/reworks the story of Abraham and Sarah’s sojourn in Egypt in the 19th century American prairie. It’s the MOST BEAUTIFUL, and I mean visually, film I have ever seen. You’re left feeling that all the earth is charged with grace. Which, of course, it is.
I know what a lot of you think about Woody Allen. Whatever, he’s a genius. Picasso was a freak too, no one quibbles about his art. Crimes and Misdemeanors is a Job-like meditation on whether God sees what we do in this life. The question is asked by Martin Landau, who’s done a few things that make him hope the answer is no. He asks the question to his eye doctor, a faithful practicing Jew. What’s the answer? Well, let’s just say the eye doctor (spoiler) is losing his eye sight.
Tree of Life
This movie took a lot of s$%^ last year when it came out. It’s by Terrance Malick too. Dinosaurs. Meditations on Nature vs Grace. Sean Penn and Brad Pitt. CGI Creation Story. Stunning Photography and Legit Philosophy. What’s not to like?
If the movie suffers or is imperfect it is so because of its ginormous ambition. When comparing it to, say, Superbad, just consider the degree of difficulty.
0 Was Ayn Rand a Slave?
I’m not exactly sure how or when Ayn Rand (Ayn is Russian for ‘worst fiction writer ever’) became a prized philosopher. Or, for that matter, I’m not sure when she even qualified to be considered a philosopher as such.
While the recent terrible film version of Atlas Shrugged demonstrated Rand’s limits for plot, character and pathos, her work as a philosopher continues to receive praise and self-serious examination.
What’s even more troubling is to see how her unembarrassed espousal of self-interest has been adopted by self-avowed Christians. It seems more than a little obvious that the world seen through Rand’s eyes could not be more divergent than the one seen through Jesus’ eyes. That the previous sentence might be interpreted as a partisan attack only proves how far Christians have gone in forgetting their core story or, perhaps, in being able to apply that story to the world around them.
It’s one thing to agree to a free-market as a means for our common life together. It’s another to treat it as an end in and of itself, a move a Christian should not agree to make.
For that statement to make sense, though, requires a reminder of just what Christians mean by the word ‘sin.’
The church’s way of thinking about sin is a function of how it thinks about creation and evil.
We are creatures made to desire an end (telos).
God and God’s Kingdom is the End to which we’re properly oriented; that’s how God made us.
Because we’re end-driven creatures, human freedom is different than how we typically define it in modern America. Culturally, civically and economically we tend to think of freedom in the negative; that is, freedom is the absence of coercion. Thus, the ‘free market’ is a market without any external controls or values imposed upon it.
Freedom, in such a context, is not directed to any End, or rather it’s directed to whatever End the individual decides.
For Christians, however, freedom isn’t defined negatively as something that exists in the absence of coercion.
Freedom isn’t freedom from something; freedom is freedom for something.
Freedom is freedom for the Kingdom.
In other words, as telos-driven creatures we are free only when we are directed towards and participating in the Kingdom, only when we’re wrapped up in God’s will.
Freedom then, as Paul describes it, isn’t independence itself but dependence on God. When we try to live- or shop- without acknowledging our dependence on God, our loves become disordered, directed towards some other end but God. A Paul says of his own pre-Christ life, the freedom he thought he enjoyed was actually slavery.
Augustine says famously that ‘our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee (God).’
Question:
Why is it that the pursuit of, say, material happiness so often leads to sensations of emptiness and meaninglessness? Even nothingness?
Here’s why, according to Augustine.
Because creation is given as a gracious gift, the goodness of creation is only ‘good’ insofar as it participates and points back to God’s greater goodness. Wine is good, for example, because its a sign of the graciousness of what God has made.
However, when you’re no longer directed towards or participating in God’s End, the Kingdom, you effectively strip the material things in creation from God’s goodness. They no longer have the purpose for which God gave them. They no longer have any meaning.
Think of the pervasive sin of consumerism.
As William Cavanaugh says:
“All such loves are disordered loves, loves looking for something worth loving that is not just arbitrarily chosen. A person buys something- anything- trying to fill the hole that is the empty shrine (by which he means our having been created to desire the Kingdom). And once the shopper purchases the thing, it turns into a nothing and he has to head back to the mall to continue the search. With no objective End to guide the search, his search is literally endless.”
In this way, the ‘free market’ as we tend to think about it isn’t free at all. In the words of Paul, it’s slavery. Or, put the other way round, only someone who loves God can participate in the market without becoming a slave.
Sorry Ayn.
Here’s a good story from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the rise of Rand.