The Progressive Prophet Without Honor

Throwing Jesus Off a Cliff

This week’s lectionary reading is a strange little story detailing the auspicious start of Jesus’ ministry. Driven by the spirit, He returns home to Nazareth to preach in the synagogue. His family, childhood friends, and old neighbors anxiously await the return of the native, whose fame was spreading throughout the region. It seems this local boy finally made good on his promise to become a rabbi. 

Jesus enters the synagogue, opens the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, finds his place, and begins to read.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

So far, so good. Jesus adopts Isaiah 61 as his mission statement, proclaiming that He, acting as God’s servant, will bring freedom and restoration to the marginalized. Interestingly enough, Jesus omits reading verse two which references “the day of vengeance of our God”, figuratively taking scissors to the Bible, signifying a dramatic distinction between his merciful announcement of the Kingdom and that of his predecessor John the Baptist. No doubt, his listeners would have noticed his refusal to include the verse in his messianic announcement. Finished with the reading, Jesus sits down as “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.” Then, He offers this famous, one sentence sermon:

“Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

The lectionary does us little favors by dividing this story into two parts, because it’s what Jesus says next that causes everything to go wrong. Jesus tells two stories about two of Israel’s favorite prophets, Elijah and Elisha. The problem is that of all the accounts he could have chosen to tell, Jesus picks two scandalous tales of prophetic ministry done on behalf of and for Gentiles, honoring the dirty, sinful people this hometown crowd despises. Jesus reminds them, 

“There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when there came a great famine over all the land; and unto none of them was Elijah sent, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”

Oh snap he didn’t. 

To the horror of everyone gathered, Jesus does the unthinkable, he tweaks the message and the meaning of Isaiah’s prophecy by announcing God’s “jubilee of liberation, amnesty, and pardon” to everybody, including Israel’s enemies. Reminding us all in the process that the text is always subordinate to the infallible word made flesh. Filled with self-righteous indignation at his progressive use of Scripture, the crowd turns on Jesus and tries to murder him on the spot! A prophet has no honor with hometown crowds.

And, as much as we’d like to distance ourselves from Jesus’ friends and neighbors, we aren’t so different. Like them, we believe that our righteousness, proper sexual ethic, doctrine, skin color, and privilege constitute our place as God’s chosen people. We believe that Isaiah’s words are our words, written for our deliverance, and our deliverance alone. Israel in fact would have first heard this prophetic song during their Babylonian captivity, and now they hear it afresh as subalterns living under the jack boot of Rome. For centuries, they had waited on the fulfillment of these promises, and today in their very midst Jesus declares that the wait is over, that the Kingdom of God is being fulfilled in their midst. But that kingdom includes the very people that are socially, economically, and politically oppressing them. They were so hell bent on defending God revealed in the text, that they failed to experience the God in flesh standing in their midst. Our modern equivalent would be Jesus preaching at Liberty University, announcing that homosexuals, Muslims, democrats, and communists are entering the kingdom ahead of us. You can understand why they wanted him dead. 

Yet, in referencing these stories, Jesus resists the most dangerous idea of all, that God's love is for some people, and not for all people. Think for a minute about his ministry. He's always dragging his innocent disciples into regions where the people are spiritually oppressed: he goes to "the other side” to heal Legion, he talks openly with a Samaritan women, he restores the Syrophoenician’s daughter because of her faith, he eats with sinners and tax collectors who have defiled hands, he’s soft on whores, he drinks with drunks, he touches the unclean, and even has the audacity to make women disciples. The entirety of Jesus’ ministry can be read as unadulterated resistance to the conventional religious wisdom that God’s love is only for those who deserve it. 

2,000 years later, things aren’t much different. In fact, the church today fears this resistance against rigid orthodoxy almost as much as they are afraid of their own irrelevance.  In every religious community there exists those who believe that their mission statement is to protect God from the very people he came to save. When challenged to consider a wider view of God, their orthodoxy becomes even more uncompromising. This inflexible faith causes them to live in fear of ‘the other’, and they see it as their duty to protect God and doctrine, because it is clear that they are no longer capable of protecting themselves. Such fundamentalism “occurs wherever, in the face of the immorality of the present age, the gospel of creative love for the abandoned is replaced by the law of what is supposed to be Christian morality.” As I write this, Franklin Graham just proclaimed on Christian radio that “We have allowed the Enemy to come into our churches. I was talking to some Christians and they were talking about how they invited these gay children to come into their home and to come into the church…We have to be so careful who we let into the churches.” While Graham consistently makes himself an easy target due to his hate speech toward homosexuals and Muslims, he represents a vast majority of American evangelicals who champion the religion of fear. 

So, as the Anglican Communion threatens schism over homosexuality, as Wheaton College browbeats a tenured professor, and as conservative evangelicals continue the culture war against progressive Christians and their ‘liberal, secular agenda’, let us be reminded that Jesus himself was rejected by the religious in-crowd for standing in solidarity with outsiders, because only “someone who finds the courage to be different from others can ultimately exist for ‘others’”. 

Authentic Christianity requires our own identification with the crucified Christ, to the extent that we understand that in him “God has identified himself with the godless and those abandoned by God”. The more we identify with Christ, the more we are able to identify with others. "Scripture is filled with one person recognizing, welcoming, embracing, and releasing the strength of unfamiliar other." Therefore our commitment to be a community of inclusion is not based on cultural capitulation or social pressures, but on the “belief that the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross are a sign of the very love of God reaching out to us all.”

It seems God’s people are always learning the hard way that the thrust toward unity must find a way to include the very people we wish to exclude. Much to our discomfort, God really does work on both sides of the street. And as his followers, we can either be a people that stands with clinched fists in open opposition to those we believe are unworthy, or we can join the Jesus movement, a movement bringing good news to the poor, and release for the captives. As Bishop Michael Curry reminds us, “It may be part of our vocation to help many others to grow in a direction where we can realize and live the love that God has for all of us. And we can one day be a church where all of God’s children are fully welcomed…And so we must claim that high calling…We are part of the Jesus movement, and the cause of God’s love in this world will never stop, and will never be defeated.” Amen, and Amen. 

God and Country? Or A King and A Kingdom

Story is the currency of human contact. The stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves reveal what we really believe.[1] If you want to understand a culture’s values, listen to her stories. The prevailing American narrative consists of Godly Puritans at Plymouth Rock, Captain John Smith at Jamestown, George Washington on the Delaware and brave white settlers heading west into the sunset to claim the land God set aside for them. But, if we pause long enough to really listen to these stories, we realize that most are told from one point of view, that of the powerful. The idiom used to communicate America’s history invokes terms like ‘progress’, ‘virgin land’, ‘manifest destiny’, ‘errand into the wilderness’, ‘frontier’, ‘savage ’, ‘new world’ and ‘civilized’.  As a fledgling Ph.D. student I realized that for the first 350 years of American history, our past was told from the eyes and mouths of white males, who employed the words of empire and the spiritual sanction of the Almighty to give blessing to our national narrative.  It should be noted that the Apostle Paul urges Christians to be on guard against such timeless powers, dominions and principalities who lord over the nations, instead of colluding with them.

This is why, among a myriad of other reasons, I find it so heretical that American Christians continue to absorb Christianity into the American national identity by adapting, joining and corrupting the story of God’s Kindgom with the narrative of empire. Phrases like ‘God Bless America’, ‘Christian nation’ or ‘God and Country’ communicate an ignorant, intentional amalgamation of God’s ultimate human purposes with the goals and aims of the United States of America. In fact, a recent poll by the Public Religious Research Institute shows that 84% of evangelical Americans believe “God has granted the U.S. a special role in history” based on her goodness and virtue. Not only is this historically fallacious and myopic, but theologically untenable. I often wonder what Christians from other nations think about this fatal syncretism; this scandalous federation of gospel and government co-joining a particular and fallible earthly nation with the cause of Christ[2], personified every Sunday as the Christian flag and Old Glory stand side by side signifying the almost universally accepted spiritual and patriotic loyalties of the congregation.  As noted theologian Stanley Hauerwas explains, "It's an understandable position given our country's history, but that doesn't make it any less perverted".  In this belief system, God is relegated to the protector and patron of the State, alongside Zeus and Mars while the church is reduced to a politically impotent lobby.

And while much can be said about founding documents and founding fathers aiding and abetting this spiritual and national union, the temptation for Americans with a somewhat proud religious heritage is to tell their story as if it is also God’s story, validating our national hubris; though in the telling we always drive by the dirty sections of our city on a hill, forgetting to speak of empire, subjugation and conquest. Therefore, in clinging to a distorted version of our national chronicle, we are culpable in our own deception. We bear a heavy responsibility for allowing ourselves to be lied to, and spreading those lies to promote an American version of the Gospel. “The deceptions we particularly seem to want are those that comfort, insulate, legitimate and provide ready excuses”[3] for our actions and beliefs.  This lie of American innocence has been historically nurtured and protected by the stories coming from a conveniently selective collective memory.[4] It is a myth as grand and as universally accepted as Romulus, Remus and the she-wolf. One that Ben Carson in his New York Times best-selling book “America the Beautiful” asks patriots to fight to protect and restore.  And yet, even a cursory glance into American history uncovers a past and present both glorious and disgraceful. America has never been a Christian nation, whatever that means in the first place. Quite simply, she is an empire, doing what empires do, telling the stories that empires tell.  It just so happens that her story needs a bit of divine sanction to clean it up a bit.

America’s narrative and the story of God’s coming kingdom are not synonymous. One can no longer live under the false assumption that liberal theology exists for and by liberal democracy. No geo-political entity claims divine preference over any other. God does not bless America at the expense of other nations.  Can evangelicals really be so ignorant to blatantly ignore the glaring inconsistencies between the American story and the clear instructions of King Jesus?[5] Does America still believe she is following Jesus by killing her enemies, by crushing the marginalized beneath the hoof prints of westward expansion, by enslaving and brutalizing blacks for economic gain, by exporting weapons of mass destruction, by hording and consuming vast quantities of the world’s wealth and resources, by being ardent missionaries of autonomy and capitalism while continuing to promote the lie of American exceptionalism? We must stop telling lies and resist the seductive voice of empire that needs our portion of the story as a moralizing and cleansing agent to absolve American of her national sins. 

If we are to resist the fatal syncretism of this civic and nationalized gospel, we must begin by being attentive to the use and abuse of history and theology to promote America's civic, national religion.  To do so, American Christians can first of all divorce themselves from stories of progress and conquest, and identify with the marginalized within our own national heritage.  For example, if Christians allow the American story to be told from a different perspective, we uncover the dark side of liberal democracy. Instead of the vernacular of empire, phrases like ‘widowed land’, ‘invasion’, ‘conquered’ and ‘enslaved’ enter our national dialect. And frankly, if we are going to be honest with our heritage, the historical Jesus as a poor Colonial oppressed by imperial Rome is much more similar to Powhatan, Pocahontas or King Phillip than any of our vanquishing European ancestors.  The Judeo-Christian story is one that has historically been at odds with empire, whose own plotlines are about a God who overcomes the powers of this world, who delivers his people out of Egypt on dry ground, who brings them home from Babylon singing, who defies emperors and Roman legions, who scatters and protects his holy nation in the global diaspora.  These are our stories; stories of deliverance, not domination.

The church is the place where these stories are told, where we are invited back into the grand narrative of God, his people and his coming kingdom. And, when told again and again, they create a new culture in the middle of our current one; a culture of sojourners whose sole allegiance is to a king and a kingdom.  A kingdom that is a priori to the kingdoms of this world.  And as our own imperial aspirations and attitudes gradually fade, and as the incoherence of our post-modern, secular, consumerist and increasingly nihilistic culture becomes more obvious, may we live out another story of hope, joy and fulfillment while inviting others to join us.

Perhaps it is time as American Christians to embody in the life of the church a witness to the Kingship of Christ without falling victim to the age-old trap of Christendom. May we finally see that the simplistic Neo-Constantinianism educating American attitudes toward Christianity and our nation has allowed Americans to view Rome and the ancillary ecclesiastical-political establishment existing in the Empire at the time of the crucifixion as an aberrant version of the State rather than as is the archetypical symbol of all political institutions and authorities in any time and place.[6] The church does not exist as a prop for government. She stands with skeptical suspicion within the culture in which she participates in order to distinguish the story of God from a heretical distortion of His grand narrative.  She is in, but not of the empire.

There is indeed a blessed nation whose God is the Lord, but it is not defined by federal borders, she is the spectacle of the universal human family.  "The church is the one political entity in our culture that is global, transnational, transcultural."[7]  She is the aggregate of believers world-wide who have been called out of every nation as a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, as God’s special possession.  May we as Americans, as resident aliens in a strange land, humbly take our place alongside our global brothers and sisters in Christ as co-heirs in His coming kingdom.  May we re-affirm our allegiance and citizenship to Christ and His kingdom while renouncing this distorted civic religion existing solely to give absolution to empire.

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[1] McEntyre, Marilyn. Caring For Words in a Culture of Lies.

[2] Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Miller, Stuart. Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines.

[5] Mitchell, John. “July 4^th-Independence Day: A Day to Weep, Mourn and Fast.”

[6] Stringfellow, William. “Authority Over Death.”

[7] Hauerwas, Stanley. Resident Aliens.

In Pursuit Of Perfection

“They’re on the turn and Secretariat is blazing along…Secretariat is widening now, he’s moving like a tremendous machine!  Secretariat by twelve…Secretariat by fourteen lengths… He’s all alone. He’s out there almost a 1/16 of a mile away from the rest of the horses.  He’s into the stretch; he leads this field by 18 lengths.  Secretariat has opened up a 22 length lead.  He is going to be the Triple Crown winner! This most magnificent animal has today run the most sensational Belmont Stakes in the history of this race…almost unbelievable!”[i]

Somewhere in eternity, there’s a blueprint for the way God intended to make a horse, and his name is Secretariat.  Standing at 16 ½ hands and weighing 1,175 lbs. this gorgeous chestnut colt with three white socks and a narrow blaze was physically flawless.  But it was something else entirely that made him more famous than Pegasus.  Secretariat inherited the famous “x-factor” from historic racehorse Eclipse, a gene producing larger than average sized hearts.  Weighing over 22 lbs., Secretariat’s heart was two-and-three-quarters larger than any of his competitors, allowing him to process oxygen at breakneck speed.  If, according to Plato, the created is a silhouette of the divine, Secretariat broke the rule.  There are mere shadows in this world and then there are Forms, Secretariat was the later.[ii]

As a colt, Secretariat burst onto the racing scene as a two-year-old, but it was the following year when he achieved mythological status.  Winning the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, Secretariat set his sights on the Triple Crown, a feat not accomplished in twenty-five long years of horse racing.   No one knew how the young purebred would respond to such a grueling test, but when owner Penny Chenery saw him that June 9 morning, she knew something special was about to happen.  "That was the day he just felt like running"[iii], and boy did he ever.  As Secretariat broke from the gate, Jockey Ronnie Turcotte simply unbridled his horse, sat back and just let him do what he was born to do, run.  His first ¾ of a mile was the fastest recorded at Belmont Park, and that was only the beginning.  On the back stretch Secretariat hit yet another gear, widening his lead over Sham by twelve lengths and as the horses turned for home Secretariat was all alone, seemingly racing on his own track.  He won by an historic 31 lengths while setting a track record by over two seconds.  No other horse before or since has covered the 1 ½ mile track faster; his two minutes were transcendent.  “It was like the Lord was holding the reigns. Secretariat was one of His creatures and he simply whispered to him ‘Go’…and that horse really went.  It was…supernatural.”[iv] Years later, Jack Nicklaus shared with CBS commentator Haywood Hale Brown that while watching the Belmont from his living room, he was so moved that he stood and cheered, and then he wept.  Nicklaus wondered aloud to Brown at what made him cry.  In an epiphany, Hale Brown said “Jack, don’t you understand?  All of your life, in your game you’ve been striving for perfection.  At the end of the Belmont, you saw it.”[v]

Whether glimpsed in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Michelangelo’s David, Brunelleschi’s Dome or the fury of a thoroughbred, perfection is the divine marriage of truth and beauty manifest in the natural.  We long for it, we seek it and in those rare instances, sometimes we even find it. And every time we do, we are reminded that God is very near, almost too near.  It’s as if heaven is breaking loose all around us, and as she breaches her bonds, pouring her beauty into the physical world, death, decay and dissolution are forgotten, if for just that moment. And often, that moment is enough.  It is in these rare instants that God gently reminds us that He is here, that He is real and that He is good. And yes, He even reveals himself to us through the pounding hooves of his mighty stead. “Do you give the horse his might? Do you clothe his neck with a mane? He paws in the valley and rejoices in his strength…with fierceness and rage he swallows up the ground.”[vi]

While poetry, music, art and sport display grandeur, we often meet perfection in the mundane.   Wherever love conquers hatred, there is perfection.  Whenever justice flows like a river and righteousness like a mighty stream, there is perfection.[vii]  When the old are not left alone, and the strong learn how to care for the weak, there is perfection.  When children are safe in their beds and there is no longer violence in the streets, there is perfection.[viii]  When divorce, depression and disease cease their destruction, there is perfection.  Across the board and bit by bit, God’s kingdom and character materialize as His perfect, new creation is revealed.   And in those moments, in those rare opportunities when eternity finally shows herself amid the temporal, it is altogether good that we stand and cheer, and sometimes even cry. 

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[i] Anderson, Chic.  CBS Commentator, The Belmont Stakes 1973.

[ii] Reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

[iii] Chenery, Penny. Owner of Secretariat. In an Interview with ESPN.

[iv] Lynch, Pat. New York Racing Society.  Interview with ESPN.

[v] Brown, Haywood Hale. Interview with ESPN.

[vi] Job 39: 19 and 21.

[vii] Amos 5: 24.

[viii] Mullins, Rich. Lyrics from the Song “The Maker of Noses”.

 

The World Turned Upside Down

There are a few places in the world where the past is in league with the present, creating a transcendent unification of time.   Westminster Abbey is one such place.  Standing in her nave and gazing into her Gothic vault, you are in solidarity with this thousand year old worshipping community. Benedictine monks venerated this site during the 10^th century and the present building was begun in 1245 by King Henry III.  William the Conqueror, Edward the Confessor, Richard II and Elizabeth I all left their mark on this Royal Peculiar.  It’s one of my favorite spots on the planet.  Another similar place is Yorktown, Virginia.  Several hundred years the Abbey’s younger, she still entreats her visitor to experience a different world. 

It was here on October 19, 1781, following a five-day siege by the Continentals, that General Cornwallis surrendered, effectively ending the Revolutionary War.  Burdened by pride and years of superiority, Cornwallis could not bring himself personally to surrender, sending an inferior officer out in his stead.  The officer, not wishing to lower himself by capitulating to the colonials, first tried to concede victory to the Comte de Rochambeau, who directed him to General Washington, who in turn pointed him to his subordinate, General Lincoln.  On this spot, and on that day, two worlds collided.  The old world of aristocracy, privilege, hierarchy and paternalism gave way convincingly to a new world characterized by liberty, meritocracy, economic mobility and classical republican ideology.  As Cornwallis’ Regulars marched out of Yorktown for the last time, legend has it a British band played the song, “The World Turned Upside Down”, commemorating this watershed event.

“If ponies rode men and grass ate cows,

And cats were chased into holes by the mouse…

If summer were spring and the other way round,

Then the entire world would be upside down.”[i]

What a strange world this would be.  Stranger still, the thought of heaven coming down to earth to regenerate our fallen planet.  How would such an apocalyptic event change our mundane lives?  For starters, imagine power and position used for service rather than self-promotion, picture authentic relationships built on mutual understanding and trust rather than manipulation, dream of work that fulfills and flourishes, envision economics that resist the temptation to stock pile wealth in the hands of the few, but rather divides her surplus equally, experience equality over against hierarchy and privilege,  and tables of welcome open to all who choose to join in the feast.  What a radical world this would be. 

At the heart of the Gospel message is this hope, and we don’t have to wait until death to experience it.  Christ mobilizes his followers to join Him in His work to redeem all of creation here and now, to take part in the flourishing of his good earth and to restore all things into right relationship with Him.  His 2,000 year old prophecy rings in our modern ears, “Behold, I am making ALL things new!”[ii]

Make no mistake, this is not the re-packaging of the doctrine of inevitable progress, that theory died on Flanders Fields and was burned in the crematoria of Auschwitz.  In its place is the belief that a new creation has already dawned with the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The Jesus event ushered in a new world, a new creation that is being fulfilled daily relationship by relationship, economy by economy, village by village and will ultimately find its completion with his parousia.  Our call is to join the disciples, not standing gazing into heaven wishing for instant kingdom culmination, but rather in their work restoring relationships, binding broken hearts, welcoming outcasts and setting the addicts free.  Wherever we find the Nazerene toiling for peace, justice and righteousness, we join him.  And in joining our lives, passions and gifts with His, we help bring the present rushing forward into the ultimate consummation of His future, when God will be all in all as the waters cover the sea.[iii] 

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[i] English Ballad, circa 1643.

[ii] Revelation 21:5.

[iii] Habakkuk 2:14.

What Shall We Compare It to?

I just made, baked and ate my very first home-made loaf of bread.  I’m very proud of myself, although the entire process was painfully simple.  3 cups of flour, 1 ½ cups of warm water, 1 teaspoon of salt and ¼ teaspoon of live yeast make up the recipe.  Combine ingredients, let sit for 18 hours, bake and eat.  It’s that easy.  And as every baker knows, the yeast does all the heavy lifting.  Though the smallest ingredient, it is the most important; working unseen in the dough, causing her to rise and be ready for baking even while I sleep.

As Jesus points out, His kingdom is altogether similar. “’What shall I compare the Kingdom of God to? It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.’”  Once the yeast beings its work, it cannot be undone, it will end by overtaking the entire lump of dough, transforming it into life giving bread. And, much like my loaf of bread, the work of Christ’s Kingdom is being done outside of my strength and effort.  Yes, I need to be faithful and honor the recipe, but the real work happens almost mysteriously, even mystically, outside of my coercive power.  Again, Jesus refers to his kingdom:

“”This is what the Kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.’”

Just like the farmer in this parable, we ‘do not know how’ His kingdom is being fulfilled; we are simply called upon to be faithful to the process, to trust the recipe.  The eternal lesson is that the means of the kingdom must never be compromised by attempting to manipulate the ends.  And yet, it is awful tempting to either force God’s hand or use the current plausibility structures of coercion and power to impose the Kingdom in the here and now. If you are like me, you very rarely see a tangible expression of God’s kingdom on earth as it now is in heaven.  Much of life is filled with broken relationships, shattered dreams and pain.  But, over against the cynicism of determinism, Jesus pits the revolutionary patience and hope of his kingdom coming very soon, but just not quite yet.  And, in case we still have little faith, he offers up one final soliloquy of hope:

“Again he said, ‘what shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.’”

No doubt, these parables helped to instill courage and hope within the small discipleship community Jesus gathered around him, especially as they lived under the scourge of Rome.  And, more than likely, they couldn’t see it either.  They lived, worked and died under Caesar’s dominion, wondering if and when Yahweh was ever going to put the earth to rights, overthrowing these monstrous pagans and establishing His reign and His righteousness by putting the rightful king upon the throne.   Like them, we too will probably die before the yeast and seed complete their work.  But this is no cause for despair.  For once planted and once kneaded into the dough, the transformational power of His work on this earth can never be overturned. 

What Time Is It?

Jennifer and I are home-schooling our kiddos, and by that I mean she is the teacher, principal and counselor while I am at best the bald janitor.  It works well this way.  Jennifer is incorporating the concept of history into the curriculum and asked for my help to visually capture the concept of time and human history.  I was pumped as only a wannabe historian could be. Stealing away to the basement, I began my masterpiece.  Four hours and several large sheets of drawing paper later, I emerged with my magnum opus, a historical timeline that wrapped the walls of our basement, starting with Ancient Mesopotamia in 3000 B.C. and moving forward into the modern age.  It was a thing of beauty.  Well, it was until I ran out of the cool gold permanent marker and had to go old-school with a No. 2 pencil.  But, creating it was a blast.  What I enjoy about a timeline is its ability to pinpoint a specific moment in history, whether it is in the distant past or right now in our shared present.  Each moment of history is plotted, weaving together a seemingly insignificant conglomeration of stories into one metanarrative.  Timelines display that fact that each historical epoch's political, social, artistic and philosophical expressions are built upon their predecessor, creating a visual manifestation of the Hegelian dialectic.

The whole process got me thinking; where are we on the grand timeline of human existence?  If history and time truly had a beginning, and will one day come to an end as we currently know it, then where are we presently sitting in this copious drama? According to the Biblical narrative, there was a time when time began; we understand this to be the beginning of the universe.  By studying the expansion rate of the universe, the “background radiation” and Big Bang Cosmology, most Christian scientists worth their salt believe the universe began millions of years ago.  Since this beginning, western man has only been able to trace his past to the Tigris and Euphrates and the rise of western culture.  From this cradle of civilization, an entire culture grew up to overtake most of the globe through empire, abstract thought and the cult of individuality.  This 5,000 year old story is categorized by historians as The Pax Romana, The Dark Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrialism and finally Modernism, just to name a few pinpoints along the narrative. And yet, 14 million years of life leads us to this particular point in time, today to be exact.  This age, our post-modern pluralistic age is categorized by technology, uncertainty, apathy, narcissism and hope.  So, what time is it exactly?  Where are we on the cosmological timeline and why does it even matter?

Much like precise epochs of the past, I believe we inhabit a very specific and significant moment in time.  As one theologian recently put it, we live between the ascension and appearing of Jesus Christ.  Living between the ascension of Jesus into heaven after his resurrection, and his ultimate appearing again marks a very unique moment in the grand narrative of human existence; a moment that is building to a second climax, not just the denouement of an already figured out drama.  The resurrection of Jesus in 30-36 AD is the climax of human existence, but His appearing ain’t gonna be to shabby.  So, what do we first mean by this second coming, or “appearing” of Jesus of Nazareth and how does this bookend event affect the present?

The Apostle Paul uses the Greek word “parousia” to describe Jesus’ second coming.  In the first century, the word had two distinct meanings that Paul seems to systematically draw upon to make his point crystal clear.  First, parousia was used to describe a supernatural event when people became aware of the presence of a god or divinity, primarily through an act of healing.  The Jewish historian Josephus used the word when describing Yahweh’s coming to rescue the people of Israel. Secondarily, parousia was used in Hellenic culture to denote a visitation from the rightful king to his vassal state, particularly denoting a king's visit to one of his ruled colonies.[i]  Through the use of such a specific vernacular, Paul is making his case very clear; Jesus of Nazareth is very near in spirit and will one day be present in bodily form, visible for the whole world to see.  And, for Paul, this risen Jesus is the rightful king and ruler of the world, though his rule is masked at the moment.  When this parousia ultimately happens, the world as we know it will finally be completely transformed through His presence.

And yet, we live in the interim, a period of history where the world’s true Lord is still waiting His final consummation and vindication, when His reign will take full and complete effect on earth as it now is in heaven.  This temporary point along the historical timeline finds us living under the thumb of sham Caesars requiring our political, social, and spiritual allegiance.  But, we must remember where our loyalties lie: “our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.[ii]

With this as the final act of history, how now shall we live?  St. John the Divine reminds us to “abide in Him; so that, when he appears, we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his presence (parousia)…Beloved, we are now God’s children; and it has not yet appeared what we shall be; but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him just as he is.”[iii]

May living between ascension and appearing find us being about our Father's business, stewarding his good creation, joining his call to radical discipleship and  ushering in his kingdom on earth as it now is in heaven through peacemaking, justice, grace and mercy while joining the thousands of saints before us praying "come quickly Lord Jesus."





[i] Wright, N.T. Surprised By Hope.

[ii] Philippians 3: 20-21

[iii] I John 2:28 and 3:2

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