Who do you say that I am

 The question Jesus asks his disciples is a central question in all of human history: "Who do you say that I am?'  The thing about that question is that we, as people, must do something with Jesus of Nazareth.  Once he has appeared in our consciousness, once we know of him, then something must be done with him.  There is no getting around it.  It's the same with everyone, of course.  Once you know of someone, then the question will always be 'who are they?'  But that question doesn't typically come with as high of stakes.

With Jesus, the question that is being asked is about not just 'who am I' in terms of his job, or his family, or that kind of thing.  Rather, who really is Jesus Christ?  And that question must be answered - is he who he says he is?  

Well, when Simon Peter answered that question, he did so by saying that there was a variety of answers, John the Baptist, Elijah, a prophet, standard stuff.  Jesus presses harder, though, saying 'not all of them, but you, who do you say that I am?'  Peter gives the correct answer: 'You are the Christ!'  That is true.

But the next question is going to be to ask what on earth is the Christ?  I mean, yes, it is the answer that Jesus was looking for, to say that he is the Christ, but what is the Christ?  Honestly, even though Jesus knows that Peter is correct, he's going to go to the effort of letting Peter know what it means to be the Christ.  The next few verses have Jesus talking about what it means to be the Christ, talking about how he is going to have to be forsaken, beaten, betrayed, abandoned, and killed.  Peter takes Jesus aside to rebuke him, letting him know that these are things that Peter finds offensive for the Christ to do 'Never, Lord, never let this happen to you!'  Sure, sure.  

What Peter was missing, though, is that criticizing Jesus on this point isn't just wrong (which it is), it is making a categorical error.  That is, Peter can't say that Jesus mustn't go to the cross, because that's the essential component of what it means to be the messiah. You can't say to Jesus that he is the Christ, the Messiah, and then say that he can't go to the cross, because you may as well say 'I want a fish that has four feet and walks on land.'  Surely, you can have that thing, but it will no longer be a fish.  Surely, you can have someone who is a great moral teacher, a leader, a preacher, an ethically good man.

But that person will not be the Messiah.

It is the province of Jesus to be the Messiah, he who bears the cross for the salvation of the world.  And to answer the question of who Jesus is without the cross is to fundamentally misunderstand who Jesus is.  And so when that question gets asked to us all, as it does, we have to view who we say Jesus is through the lens of the cross.  It honestly has to start there, because the cross is the moment around which everything else turns.  If the cross is unimportant, if it isn't a real issue, or pressing concern, then Jesus isn't anything overly special.  He isn't a unique person, a standard in the dark, a light on the hill or a fire in the darkness. He's just a man.  

But if the cross is crucial, if it is the central moment, the greatest issue in humanity, then you absolutely, fundamentally cannot have the Messiah without it. To be the Messiah is to redeem humanity.  To redeem humanity is to shed blood for it, to die for it, to leave heaven and paradise to walk the cross to Golgotha and to die upon it.  And in Lent, we get away from our desire to sanitize, to massage out the misery of the cross and death of Christ.  In Lent, we see the hideousness of the cross and his execution, and we understand that it isn't peripheral to the story of Christ, it is the story of Christ.  We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews, and folly to Gentiles, but to those of us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

That's the story right there, folks.  And in Lent, everything else simply melts away.  Every other layer that we place upon him is gone, like mist in the morning.  All our efforts to make him into something other than what he is, those efforts are exposed for what they are - the things of man not the things of God.  The things of God are to save us, which is why he takes up the cross, to save and redeem a people whom he loves.

Bound

 Boy, the reading from Genesis was a real gut punch, wasn't it?  

People, by and large, really hate this reading.  People, I don't care what religion you are, you're going to kick back against, and fight the reading where Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac.  By God.  God told Abraham "Take your son, your only son whom you love, and offer him up as a sacrifice to me."  People hear this line, and they get immediately upset.  They get angry, bothered, or any combination of negative emotions.  And this is probably the point where you'd expect me to step in and tell you that this story actually isn't about what it says it's about, and is actually very nice if you know the context.  

But I won't.

This story is exactly what it looks like on the surface.  Exactly.

What do I mean by that?  I mean that God literally told Abraham to kill his son, Abraham told his son to carry the wood up the mountain, and Abraham tied Isaac up, and put him on the altar, and was ready to kill him.  That's literally what happened.  No apologies, no obfuscation, and no idea that God in some reason isn't doing what he's doing.  Now how do you feel?  

How do you feel that God, the God of creation, told Abraham to kill his child?  Does it bother you?  Really, it should.  It ought to trouble you deep down, it should cause you some unease.  I'd wager that you can picture the scene in your mind right now, the image of Abraham trudging up the mountain with Isaac, knowing what waits for Isaac up there, even though Isaac doesn't know.  Isaac even points that out, saying 'I see the wood, and the fire, but where is the sacrifice?' All Abraham can say is 'God himself will provide the sacrifice, my son.'

This scene is bone-chilling.  And it bothers us all.  It troubles, disturbs, and disquiets us, down to the very core of our faith.  For some reason, it bothers us far more than the story of Noah and the Ark, where almost everyone dies.  It bothers us so much because this is Isaac, the one and only son whom Abraham loves, being led up the mountain by his father, who was prepared to sacrifice him.  His father who loved him, who should have protected him, laid down his life for him, was ready to sacrifice him instead.  That should bother you, it truly should.

But it shouldn't stop there.  Folks, we're in Lent, and Lent is a season for penitence, abstinence, and reflection on the sufferings of Christ.  The thing about the sufferings of Jesus, though, is that we tend to miss the magnitude of it most of the time.  Yeah, yeah, Jesus on the cross, big surprise, right?  Of course, Jesus would be on the cross, why wouldn't he be?  Of course Jesus sheds his blood on the cross for the sins of the world, that much is obvious.  But crucifixion is ghastly.  It's horrendous.  It is, by nature, excruciating, which is a word with its root in crucifixion - pain from the cross.  That's the worst kind of pain.  We forget about it, because we are too familiar with it.  We have it blurred out of existence, and we don't think much about the reality of it.  How can you shake your head enough to get a handle on it?

Think about Isaac.

All the things that horrify you, rightly, about the almost sacrifice, you really need to think about that in relation to the story of Jesus, which you, and I, take too lightly most of the time. The story of Isaac is there to point to Christ, but not only in the sense that there is or would be a sacrifice, but also in terms of what was offered up.  Let the anger well up in you at the Old Testament reading, let yourself feel the anger that is well deserved, well justified at the potential sacrifice of a one and only son, who is loved.  And take that anger, that discomfort, and transfer that over to the death of Jesus.  Feel the anger at someone who didn't deserve to be in that situation carrying the wood up the hill to the site of his execution.  Feel the discomfort at the beloved son being placed upon the wood.  But when Abraham's knife is turned aside at the last second, think on Jesus, and the spear that went into his side.  

Lent is the time to get re-acquainted with the difficulty of the Christian faith.  This isn't a faith of moonbeams and laughter all the time.  This is a faith in which the righteous dies for the unrighteous, once for all . This is a faith where Christ took the place that Isaac was in.  In many ways, for most of the year, we get too comfy with the shocking nature of what it is that we believe in.  But in Lent, it is there, large as life, and there is no getting around it.  Instead, embrace it, understand the price that was paid when God himself provided the sacrifice, and understand that the wages of sin is death, and that death was the death that Christ died to sin, once and for all.

Happy Valentine's Day!

There were some points that I made about Valentine's day that I hope didn't go unnoticed on Sunday.

The most major of which is that I still feel as though it's a little strange that on Valentine's day, the pressure is not just to feel love towards your partner, but if you don't have a partner to spend Valentine's day with, that you should find one, in order that you may feel love towards them. Now let's pause to consider the absolute strangeness of that issue.  You're expected to feel love whether you are partnered or not.  

Now, the real world doesn't work that way.  Hopefully you have understood and worked out by now that love doesn't exist on its own, but is instead an abstract concept that becomes real only when it is applied to something concrete.  It was explained best in a professor Egghead riddle:  How is a reptile like a number?  

Neither one exists.

Oh sure, you can have a pet turtle, or find a garter snake, but take away the turtle or snake, and what happens to the reptile? It ceases to exist, because it is just a concept.  Just like a number.  If you don't have six boxes, or six people, or six sacks of sugar, then what happens to the six?  Outside of real things, the six doesn't exist, not really.  It's just a concept.

Now, that's a massively big brained take for a children's riddle book, but here we are .  The usefulness of this concept is profound in Christian thought - love, as expressed in Valentine's sentiments, doesn't exist unless it is attached to something real and concrete.  This is something that probably genuinely surprises people about the Christian worldview - that it would be related almost completely to real human beings.  Jesus doesn't tell you to love, he tells you to love specific people.  And that's much harder.

It's quite straightforward to be a loving person - people do it all the time.  In fact, I'll go one better, and say that the vast majority of people who have ever lived view themselves as loving people - generous, kind, good to those who are good to them, that kind of thing. Very few people like to think of themselves as absolute grinches.  People believe, however mistakenly, that they are genuinely good and nice people, that they do their best, that they love those who are around them deeply and passionately.  Even when all evidence mounts up to the contrary.  People believe that they are truly and wonderfully loving, and they can do that because they are people who love, I suppose. They are people who like the concept of love, who believe that the concept of love is a good one, even though they do not actually apply it to the people that they know they should apply it to.  And that's the big difference, the big break. 

The Christian faith, just like a reptile or a number, doesn't allow you to have or to hold on to the concept of love as an abstract concept.  It requires you to have love as a real thing - not in word or tongue, but in deed and truth.  That is so much harder to do, because it requires you to take the concept of love, in the abstract, and to apply it to real human beings, who have warts, troubles, prickles and problems.  People who have hangups, who are stubborn and recalcitrant donkeys.  People who are pushy, who want their own way, who kick back against you and your charity, and refuse to allow you to be or to do what you please.  Those are real people, and they are hard to love.

Just like you are hard to love.

This gets brought to a head at the mount of transfiguration, where Jesus is there putting love into practice.  What do I mean?  I mean that he is there with Moses and Elijah.  Elijah makes sense, whisked off to heaven bodily as he was, taken up bodily to the skies, separated from Elisha by horses and chariots of fire, he returns to speak with Christ on the mount of Transfiguration.  But Moses?  Moses died because of his sins.  Moses was buried in the wilderness, having never entered into the promised land because of his sins.  Though he led the people of Israel faithfully through the 40 years of wandering, he did not trust in God, and was therefore buried in anonymity.  But there he is on the mount of Transfiguration, standing there with Jesus and with Elijah.  Standing there firmly in the promised land, talking face to face with God, something that he never accomplished in life, rightly barred for his sins, yet there present with the Lord face to face.

What does that tell you?  On his own, Moses was not good enough to enter the promised land.  He had sinned, he was rightly barred.  But thanks to Christ, who loved him, he stood there in the presence of the almighty, transfigured God.  Jesus is preparing to descend that mount, to take up his cross and to die. And he is prepared to live out that greatest love 'greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.'  Including Moses, sinner barred from the promised land, yet standing in it due to the grace of Christ.  What that tells us is that Christ doesn't love us because we are good.

We are good because he loves us.  

He lays down his life, the righteous for the unrighteous, the godly for the ungodly. This is the essence and core of the faith, that love must be applied to real creatures, Christ to us, and in deed, not in thought alone.  And that makes a day that is about love mean something.  You can love the unlovable, as Christ elected to love you.  If you're going to wait for people to be good before you can love them, well, you'll be waiting for a long time.  But pause, and remember that Christ didn't wait for you to be good before loving you.  And then, once  you recall that, then you can remember that we love not because others are so great and grand, but rather, we love because he first loved us.

One size fits all

 Have you ever noticed something about, well, all media?  It works like this:

There's a movie, and the movie could be an action movie, a comedy, a suspense movie, that kind of thing. But no matter what kind of movie it is, no matter what kind of drama or horror movie it is, there will be a love story clumsily shoehorned into it. Now, maybe it's a romantic comedy, which will, by its nature, require a romance, which is fine, but why is it that pretty much every movie, tv show, radio drama, what have you, will squeeze a romantic subplot in there?  

There may very well be a good reason, and if there is, I don't know what it is, but what it does do is to make every story into the same story. Really.  It makes every story into a romance story.  Which they don't all need to be. 

Think about the multitude of stories that have made up your life, and then think about how may of your relationships weren't romantic, and never became so.  Think about all the time you spent with people you know and love, and how not all of those were the same story over and over again.  Right.  And then think about the permanence of the romance subplot that surpasses everything else.

Now, this has been so pervasive that it infects even the scriptures.  How many times have we heard the idea, mass popularized by the now forgotten 'DaVinci Code' that Mary Magdalene was the secret bride of Jesus, and secretly had his babies, and they secretly sired a dynasty. Okay, sure.  The idea that Mary Magdalene was a romantic consort to Jesus Christ does her a disservice, you know.  It does her a far greater disservice than you think it does.  The reality of Mary Magdalene in the Holy Scriptures is the reality of her as a devoted and dedicated follower of Jesus Christ.  She is someone who learns from him, takes in his teachings, and is excited by his work.  She witnesses his resurrection, and reports on it to the disciples . Now, because we tell the same story over and over again, we feel as though we have to tell it here.  Mary follows Jesus Christ? They must be in love.  They must get married!  We're so opposed and frightened by the possibility that Mary could just, you know, love the teaching of Jesus Christ as the disciples did.  But why? Why does it bother us so much to the point that we'll force them into a relationship whether we are supposed to or not?

Well, we only tell one story.  And that one story hurts us, you know.  The presence of romantic relationships is a limiting factor for Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and it's a limiting factor for us too, you know. That one story pushes people into relationships that they don't necessarily need to be in, squeezing them into a role that they have no desire to be in, by slamming them over and over again with the weight of all of culture pressing them into a marriage because that's the story we tell. 

But Paul doesn't think so. Paul is unmarried, and so is Jesus Christ.  They're unmarried, and they have no problem being unmarried.  They're people who are dedicated to God's kingdom work, and are perfectly fulfilled in doing so.  And that's not strange, you know.  That's normal.  There is perfect fulfillment not just available but recommended by St. Paul as being something good and honorable, just and pure.  But you're not supposed to replace the marriage that you feel forced into with being ground into the gears of big capital, or in pointless hedonism.  You're supposed to dedicate yourself to the Lord. What does that mean? It means that you can find meaning outside of the grinder of social expectations.  You can find meaning, fulfillment, something altogether different but not worse than the typical path that is expected. Rather, you can find fulfillment, true fulfillment in following your Lord wherever he may lead.  

And here's the thing.  Peter is married.  We know that.  We know that, according to his mother in law being in the Gospel reading from Sunday, and according to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians in which he mentions that Peter has a believing spouse.  So, if Peter can have a believing spouse, something that is not denounced by Paul or Christ, why on earth would it be that Peter's successors as Bishops of Rome, and indeed all Roman clergy, would be forbidden to marry? Well, it's that same one size fits all approach, right?  What ends up happening is that all priests are supposed to be unmarried, to better serve the Lord, and the laity are all supposed to be married, to produce children, and that's how the story is supposed to go.  Except according to actual, you know, human experience and scriptural recommendation, it doesn't go that way at all.  Instead, Paul commends the single life as good and holy and doesn't mention it as connected to the office of ministry. And later, Paul commends to the ministers to be the husband of but one wife (that's maximum, not minimum), which seems to suggest that clergy and laity can take spouses, but don't have to.

And what that means, overall, is that maybe, just maybe, the one size fits all solution of cramming everyone into romantic partnership because that's what's supposed to happen doesn't really get you very far.  Maybe just maybe you're not supposed to all follow the same path slavishly because, and this is a hot take here folks, maybe you're not all the same.  And this isn't a pride flag thing that says that maybe you're supposed to have a different sexual partnership, no, what if you're not cut out for it at all?  The culture really doesn't have much to say to you there, you know.  If you're not cut out for or interested in, or finding your health and meaning in sex and marriage, what is to be done with you? Well, there is a solution.

It seems like a one size fits all solution again, but it really isn't.  The marriage destination is a one size fits all funnel that takes all of human experience and slams it into one result, especially within the church.  But the reality of the scriptures, and the reality of, well, reality, will tell you that not everyone is going to find fulfillment in the exact same way.  But Christ doesn't bring fulfillment to everyone in the same way.  He isn't the answer to one problem that we're all expected to have.  Rather, he is the answer to all of them.  GK Chesterton talks about Jesus in that way - to the peacenick, Christ is angry and seeks swords instead of cloaks.  To the warhawk, he will talk about turning the other cheek and offering no resistance.  To the wealthy, he will insist on giving up all possessions and following him, but he will also insist on giving to the poor and the needy building them up.  To the confident, he will break through their sense of self and highlight their sins, but he will bind up the brokenhearted.  In other words, if any stick could be found to beat Christ with, then perhaps it isn't that he's wrong in all those directions, but perhaps he is right.  And if he is right, then he is the right shape to give us rest for our souls.

And that part is key.  Because Jesus Christ comes to save sinners you know, and sinners are people. We don't all sin the same, we don't all have the same hangups and problems , we don't all have the same inadequacies and difficulties, but Christ heals them all.  He promises rest for our souls, and we all need rest in individual ways, we all need to be forgiven of our sins.  We all need to be forgiven, sure, but we all need to be forgiven in individual ways.  And that's where Christ Jesus steps in, and provides us with life and peace.  We all suffer and sin in individual ways, but we are all healed and restored in the same way - by the grace flowing abundantly from the cross of Christ.  That's where we find rest for our souls.  

Author Author!

 On Sunday, I started preaching about how easy it is to lose the thread when we're talking to people through pandemic lenses.  That is, it's possible to get the wrong idea when you're talking to someone face to face, no masks, no zoom, that kind of thing.  It's possible to do that, but it's less likely than if you have to work through other media.  That is, the more barriers that go up, the easier it is to get the wrong message from the person that you're talking to.  

If there's a mask on, and you can't read facial expressions, it gets a little bit harder.  If you're meeting someone over zoom, it's harder yet, because eye contact is impossible, and all the dialogue is ever so slightly delayed; but at least you still have facial expression, tone, that kind of thing.  And if you're going to go one further, listening to someone over text message, email, or, God forbid, blog post, is harder yet.  The difficulty is going to be that all tone, nuance, and subtlety is lost, and gone.  Forget it.  And in that moment, it's very easy to get something wrong. 

That's a flaw that I have, no fooling.  I come off very poorly in emails, texts and so on.  That's a weakness of mine, that I will insist on communicating in emails the same way I would communicate in person, which comes off all kinds of wrong, given that my natural charm is lost very rapidly.  Some might say that it never existed, and that's possible too.  Either way, though, I do tend to sound awfully terse and unpleasant over emails.  Now, if people want to get a better picture of what I meant, they would hopefully contact me, and say to me 'hey, that last email that you sent, what did you mean by that?'  And I would like to hope that I'd give them a good answer.  What would be less helpful is for them to show the email to someone else, a third party, and ask them to interpret it.

I'd give a better answer, because if you're going to ask what I mean, I'd be the best person to tell you my intent.  And if you think that the nuance of an email is easy to get wrong, let's talk about words chiseled into stone from forever ago.  God gave his people some very clear commands, and then people spent the next thousand years stroking their chins, clucking their thick tongues, and asking so very delicately, 'ah yes, but what did He mean by you shall do no work?  What did he mean by saying you shall commit no murder, or you shall not commit adultery? What does it mean to say 'you shall not steal?''  Great questions all, and debate, midrash over those topics lasted for a long time, wondering what it could possibly mean to not steal, to not commit adultery, all those sorts of things.  Fine and good. 

The trouble is, though, that the people back then (as well as now) viewed those laws and commands as things to be possibly kept, rather than strict moral absolutes.  That is, here in the great nation of Canada, we tend to think of laws as being no longer just if enough people break them. So, if enough people want to consume marijuana, we would adapt the laws on the books to make consumption and possession no longer criminal.  If enough people want to speed on a street, we may consider raising the speed limit.  If enough people want stores to be open on Sundays, they will be, because the laws of this nation are a legal framework, not a moral absolute.  And if you can't keep the law, and nobody can, that makes it into a bad law.  A good law would be straightforward and easy to keep.  

So, a law against murder has to define what murder is, and not all killing is murder.  Sometimes a killing is accidental, sometimes it can even be justified.  According to Canadian law, you're going to have to work out the circumstances surrounding the killing, and to work out if it can be justified, forgiven, overlooked, or punished.  But you can't legislate 'no being mean to anyone.' Because that can't be kept, can't be proven, can't be enforced.  It brings be back to the law code proposed in Stuart Little, which formed moral absolutes - "Absolutely no being mean, and nix on swiping anything." They sound great, but good luck enforcing them.  Gradually, we would ruminate on them, and work out a complex legal code to ensure that those moral absolutes, were we to enforce them, would end up codified and straightforward.  If it's about enforcing laws, you're going to have to go with something that is enforceable.  But if it's a moral absolute, then the question is not 'can the law be kept,' but rather, 'is it right?'  And here, the law of God is good and right.  To go back over the age old question, you can't just make it legal to burn down barns, as burning down barns wasn't wrong because it was illegal.  It was illegal because it was wrong.

So, the law is a moral absolute, and people found it hard to keep that moral absolute.  Which is why when Jesus came onto the scene, he taught differently - as one who had authority, not as the scribes who could only interpret the law that they had read.  Because he is the author of the law, when he speaks about it, it has, you know authority.  They were able to interpret the law to find ways around it, whereas Christ was able to address what the law meant as a totality, free from evasion or trickery.  Just the law, whether you could keep it or not.  And the great thing about the Christian faith is that you don't have to struggle to find a way to make the law fit what you're already doing. Rather, you get to rejoice that the word of God made flesh kept the law in such a way that completed it and fulfilled it, therefore his righteousness gets passed directly onto those whom he has washed clean in baptism.

But there's another way that authority is important.  And this factors into these times we're living in right now.  Right now, we are in a time of sickness and concern, of trepidation and fear.  And we are pleading with Jesus Christ for help, for healing and for hope.  And that's what he brings.  For Jesus is not just the Son of God, which he is, but he is also the Word of God. And what does the word of God do?  It creates.  It makes everything around us.  Through him everything was made, and without him nothing was made that has been made.  That's a very big deal, and that is what gives us confidence when we go to him for help.  If you look at all the miracles in the Gospels, what you have is Christ showing his authority over even the elements of creation.  He is able to change the end of the story to fit what he wants, because he is the author of creation. When they run out of wine at the wedding of Cana, and they come to Christ, he re-writes the story to say that the wedding instead has better wine than before.  When a man comes to him deaf and mute, Jesus rewrites the story for him to have his hearing again.  When Jesus is taken to the tomb of Lazarus, dead for so long that he stinketh, what does Christ do but to re-write the story so that Lazarus is alive again. This is why we appeal to him for things, you know, because it is within his ability to do something about it. Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him? This is the Word of God, the creative power of God who made heaven and earth.  Given that all of the earth is his story, it doesn't seem like too much to ask him to write the end a little bit differently.  And that's what he does at the conclusion of the story, rewriting things so that the rebellious creatures who had turned their backs on him could be saved, redeemed and brought to salvation.  Not the ending that we deserved, nor the one we should have gotten, but it is the one that is given to us through Christ.  He does this because he can make all things new.