This is a part of a much larger project but I wanted to give some biblical framing to the many Christians who may know in their heart that pursuing justice and ending white supremacy is the right thing to do but may not understand how their commitment to Jesus thoroughly informs that intuition.

Introduction

Over the past several weeks the conversation around race in America has accelerated, to say the least. Individuals, churches, even corporations are all waking up to the cries of black people (and other people of color) that began centuries before George Floyd was mercilessly suffocated by a police officer and his three accomplices on the streets of Minneapolis. A movement has emerged in America, protests filling the streets, people are trying to do years of educating themselves, like cramming for a test, in a matter of weeks.

For many white Christians, this education has taken the form of a deep-dive into many of the resources that are available to help us see how insidious white supremacy is, how subtle its machinations, and violent its grip. This is a good thing. But one area that often goes unexamined is how the Scriptures frame this cultural moment. Christians often settle for cliches in the fight for racial justice, like “Jesus says to love everyone” the spiritual equivalent, in many ways, of saying, “All lives matter” without doing the deeper work of asking the profound question what does Scripture really have to say to matters of race? What does it mean to the shape of the Gospel? These questions are often downplayed or ignored all together as people settle for half-truths.

One of my most important roles as a pastor is to help people to see that the Bible is not as one of the worst acronyms in history would suggest, the B.I.B.L.E. (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth); but rather the Bible is a framing story about God and salvation that illuminates every other story. The Scriptures don’t fragment life into different fractal shards but unify them, arraying them in stunning mosaic. What if the Gospel of King Jesus has more to say about our current conversation regarding race than you ever realized? What if being a unified church, for our day across racial lines, is not a nice additional benefit of receiving salvation but is, in fact, the very sign of that salvation?

Clearing The Ground

I want to invite you into the world of the scriptures because I think that the story of God’s redemption has everything to say to our navigation of race relations in our day. To do so, I will trace a thread that runs from the first book in the Bible to end with special emphasis on Abraham, Jesus, and the letters of Paul. This piece is a part of a much bigger project that I am working on so I am doing a lot of flyover work in this particular effort. But before we get started I need to offer two very important caveats.

First, I will use the Gentile/Jew construct to draw parallels to our modern discussions around race. These parallels are strong, as I will show, but they are not 100% analogous. The modern concept of race, based on some combination of ethnicity and skin color, is simply not a part of the ancient societal structure. The Jewish people of the ancient near east signaled a particular ethnicity that would be closer to our modern understanding of race but their distinction for non-Jews, the ethnos or goyim was a large catch-all category that included many different ethnicities. However, for Jews of the first century, the Jew/Gentile divide was the primary line, like the Berlin Wall, running through their worldview. For more on our modern understandings of race, I commend to you Willie James Jennings’ The Christian Imagination and the Origins of Race.

The second important caveat then, is that no modern race occupies the place of Jew or Gentile in the modern application of this discussion. Paul speaks of salvation being first for the Jew and then for the Gentile. I’m not suggesting that one modern race needs to understand how God has opened up the way for all the other races, that they were somehow first and that God wants them to change their hearts. The analog can be drawn not between one race being the equivalent of 1st century Jews and another being the equivalent of 1st century Gentiles, but simply in the example of that which divides culturally. White Christians, if history is any warning, would be most susceptible to seeing themselves as the center of this discussion. I am not suggesting that any race needs to “make room” at the table for another race because, as Paul points out in a different context in 1 Corinthians 10, the table belongs to Jesus. The fundamental shift in this discussion happened two-thousand years ago. I recommend David Swanson’s new release Rediscipling The White Church.

Ok, hopefully we have cleared the ground enough, now we move to the texts.

James and John…Racists?

In Luke chapter 9, Jesus and his disciples are passing through Samaria. The disciples go ahead of Jesus into a Samaritan village and ask if the village will receive Jesus to teach them. The Samaritans, suspect of Jewish people from generations of ethnic animosity, decline the visit from the Jewish rabbi. James and John, raised on the stories of Bible heroes of old remember one of their favorites and, given all that they have seen Jesus do so far, wonder, “Is now the time? Is God going to do it again?” You see, the prophet Elijah when faced with Samaritans compromised by idolatry called down fire from heaven in judgment (2 Kings 1). And James and John, the Sons of Thunder living up to their name, have an itchy trigger finger. They turn to Jesus, hopefully, “Should we call down fire upon the village?” What a question, like asking, do you want us to input the nuclear codes? Jesus, horrified, rebukes them. In some manuscripts, there is an additional,”You don’t know what spirit you are of.” James and John thought that the kingdom of God coming meant one thing for the Jewish people (glory) and another thing for everybody else (incineration), but Jesus is doing the patient, slow, work of rebuking their aspirations and awakening them to the reality of the kingdom.

Just a chapter later in Luke 10, Jesus is telling a story about those who are righteous in God’s sight, keeping the commandments. And wouldn’t you know it, who does he choose as the hero, the righteous one in his story, but a Samaritan. Jesus knows what he’s doing here. Not only is he telling a story that will address the situation at hand but he’s also talking to James and John out of the side of his mouth: “Remember those people you counted as judged and accursed, well there the one’s who get it.” Meanwhile in Jesus’ story, as it comes later to be known the story of the Good Samaritan, those who should get it—the Levite, the teacher of the law—walk along on the wrong side of the road.

When Mary, the mother of Jesus, receives the news from the angel that she will bear the child that is to redeem the world, she cannot contain the joy, she sings a deeply beautiful and theologically profound song. The conclusion of her song, sings that Jesus has come “according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and his descendants forever” (Luke 1v55). Perhaps one of the deepest gaps in the American Christian understanding of Jesus and his gospel message, is not that far off from James and John’s failure to understand their own ancestral story—what is the promise that was given to Abraham?

Father Abraham Had Many Sons [And Daughters]

Before we get to Genesis 12, we need to stop briefly in Genesis 11. The creation story, from just slightly after the beginning, has been a disaster: humanity betraying God (Genesis 3), brother killing brother (Genesis 4), God flooding the earth (Genesis 6), Noah’s family still being a mess (Genesis 9). But in Genesis 11, it seems like everything is finally going right. All the nations of the earth are together, they share one common language and they are even working on a project together. They determine to “ build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” But as God comes down an examines their work, he sees their togetherness and their ambitions not as a proud parent sees his kid’s (for once) playing peacefully together but as a threat, a declaration of war upon the heavens. At Babel, the tower they are building is not a monument but a siege tower. So is God a tormented despot, paranoid to maintain control? No, as we will see in a moment, he founded the world in blessing and his posture remains blessing towards all of the nations of the earth. But Genesis 11 shows us, as Genesis 3 first unveiled, there is no blessing outside of relationship to God. The nations need to be united, they need to share in the common project that all of humanity is called to (Genesis 1vv26-28) but this cannot happen without the blessing of God.

So, In Genesis 12, following yet another unraveling of God’s creation project, God calls a man named Abram (later changed to Abraham) and tells him:

Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

There are essentially two promises that are outlined here. First, Abraham will be made into a great nation, blessed by God. Second, all the families of the earth will be blessed through this one family. James and John basically only grasped the first of these promises. They wanted their Messiah to be a conquering king, like King David, they wanted their prophet to breathe fire on the enemies of God, like Elijah, they, as we will see later, want to be vicegerents as ethnic Israel is elevated to the status of world power, flipping the political order of their day upside down, they want to tax and oppress the Romans, and burn the villages of Samaritans. They wanted blessing on their terms which meant that, in a trickle-down economy of blessing, all the nations of the earth would be blessed when Israel was on top.

In our own day, American white evangelicals, accept the second part of this story but miss the first part. This family of Abraham, or in the parlance of our modern sociological constructs, this new race that God creates with a promise of blessing is of the utmost significance to the entirety of the biblical narrative. Jesus, as Mary resounds, comes to fulfill the promise God made to Abraham. He does not drop into the middle of the story and say, “Well, we tried the law but that was never going to work, here is grace.” Jesus is adamant throughout his life that what he is doing is “not to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished” (Matthew 5v17). But the accomplishment of the promises and the law come with a major twist: the cross.

The Cross

Even to the end of his earthly ministry, Jesus’ disciples drastically misunderstand what Jesus means by coming in his kingdom. When the cohort of soldiers come to arrest Jesus in the garden, Peter draws his sword, the sword of rebellion, of revenge and cuts the ear of Malchus. Why does Peter do this? Because even in this moment, Peter is still waiting for the fight to begin, for Jesus to say “now”, for the crowds who lined the streets welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem to be called to arms, to fashion their palm leaves into swords and to revolt against Rome. And the end of all of this, in Peter’s revolutionary imagination? God returns to the temple to dwell amongst his people (Ezek.10), Israel is exalted to her rightful place as nation among nations, and every nation looks to Zion (Isaiah 40-55) as the center of the world. So he fights, because as the soldiers approach he can see in the flicker of the torchlight, his dream dying. But Jesus, doesn’t fight, Jesus heals.

As Jesus is crucified by the collusion of the Roman Empire and the Jewish authorities, demonic forces and powers and principalities in high places, and the love of God allowing these dark forces to seemingly win the day, the disciples look on in horror. “We thought you were the one” they think; or worse yet, “You were the one, and God is just not strong enough, not able to fulfill his promises to Abraham, or David…” The disciples spend the weekend hiding, not knowing what to do and worrying the same authorities who arrested Jesus would come for them next. And while the disciples are hidden away in their rooms, Jesus is also hidden away, conquering the world, not as the disciples had hoped, by the blood of their enemies, but by his very own blood.

When Jesus, the resurrected king, appears before them on the third day, he extends to them the same blessing that has flowed forth from the heart of God since the foundation the world: peace, shalom, wholeness. The disciples are in awe, Jesus has overcome the world and the first thing that he does is ask them, “Do you have anything to eat?”

Acts

The table was a central part of the life of Jewish people, how you ate, what you ate, and more importantly who you ate with. The table became a flash point of Jesus’ earthly life because he ate with “tax collectors and sinners” and as Jesus shows with his first actions upon his resurrection, the table will remain a central symbol in the life of the new covenant community.
Acts 1 portrays the disciples still misunderstanding what Jesus is accomplishing in his resurrection. The disciples ask the risen Lord, “Lord are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1v6). But Jesus doesn’t outright tell them no, he just tells them, it is not for them to know.

When the Spirit descends at Pentecost (Acts 2), Babel is reversed. The humanist attempt to ascend the heavens, and make a name for ourselves is met with the descent of the Spirit of God. Instead of one language, the text describes Parthians, Medes Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs… all hearing the wonders of God in their own language (Acts 2vv9-11) You see, the results of Babel (diversity) were never what God placed under curse, it was the intent of Babel. Though the text notes proselytes, we are still largely within the realm of ethnic Israel. With the promise given to Abraham still ringing in the background, it would seem, here in Acts 2 that Jesus’ work on the cross has only furthered and solidified the convent with Abraham to make his people into a great nation. But what will it mean for this nation, this family, to fulfill the second part of this promise—how will God, through them, bless every nation on earth?

Tucked into the beginning of Acts is the blueprint for the narrative of Acts and the commission that the church will be called to carry out. Echoing the great commission given to the disciples at the end of Matthew’s gospel, Luke (the author of Acts) records Jesus telling the disciples: you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1v8). Still, we will see there is both a reluctance to move and misunderstanding of what this means. In Acts 8, we get a glimpse, as the Ethiopian eunuch is baptized into kingdom by Philip. But, and here’s the catch, he is a eunuch, he cannot be asked to be circumcised, because, well, uhh…yeah. So the question remains, is God fulfilling the promise to Abraham by calling more people to become effectively Jewish, practicing Jewish table restrictions and the Jewish cultural marker of circumcision? Or is something else going on here.

In Acts 10, a seismic shift, and an answer to this question begins to unfold. Acts 10 introduces us to Cornelius, devout man who fears God and gives alms to the poor, and also, a gentile. He is told to summon Peter to his house, but here’s the thing, Peter, as a good Jewish man, even on the other side of the resurrection of Jesus, wants nothing to do with going to the house of a Gentile. Peter, through a long series of preparatory visions agrees to go to Cornelius’ house and upon his arrival announces,

You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without objection. Now may I ask why you sent for me?

Cornelius explains why he summoned Peter, that the Spirit of God appeared to Cornelius. And for the first time of what would become a painfully slow process of unlearning in Peter’s life, Peter understood that “God shows no partiality but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10vv34-35). Did you catch that? Every nation. Remember the promise to Abraham? Every nation. The Spirit of God is being poured out upon the Gentiles, the family is expanding.

This brings us to Acts 15. So what does it mean for the promises of God to be available, on a massive scale, to those who are not ethnically Jewish? Acts 15v5 states the matter that confronts the early church in Jerusalem, as the earliest Jewish Christians try to put extra constraints upon the Gentile believers who have come to faith in Jesus the Messiah. They argue, it is necessary for them (Gentile Christians) to be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses.” This may seem innocuous, like oh just some strict rule followers trying to impose extra sanctions (and some pain, let’s be honest) upon these newcomers. But to miss the significance is to miss the way that the ground is shifting beneath the Jewish people of Jesus’ day. The question essentially being asked, “Do the Gentiles need to become Jews?” Or asked another way, is the promise that was given to Abraham that God would make Abraham into a great nation and would bless all the nations to be fulfilled by making all the nations Jewish? Peter speaks in the assembly, in regards to the giving of the Holy Spirit “and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us” (Acts 15v9). James then summarizes and settles the matter tracing through the Old Testament saying and concludes: therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God, but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood (Acts 15v20). Unity (no distinction between Gentiles and Jews in regards to grace, not eating foods sacrificed to idols, maintaining sexual holiness) and diversity (no circumcision).

Here, things begin to coalesce around this promise given to Abraham way back in Genesis 12: God is indeed making the nation of Israel into a great nation, more numerous than the stars, and he is indeed blessing every nation on earth through this family, but he is doing so by creating one family, Jew and Gentile, a diversity of peoples that will share the table in a way that completely confounds the wider culture. Paul is commissioned as the apostle to take the good news of Jesus to the Gentiles and to announce this bold vision that God has created a new humanity through the work on the cross of the Jewish Messiah. As it turns out, this is a vision so expansive and so counterintuitive, that will take the rest of the New Testament to truly work out.

This particular piece is part of a larger project that I am working on so a survey of the texts is going to have to do for now. But if we simply focus on the letters of Paul, we see that this Jew/Gentile motif is not cast off as ancillary to the “real gospel” of justification by faith. But rather, for Paul, this wonder of Jew and Gentile coming together as one people is inherent to living out the resurrection life. From Paul’s perspective, God has fulfilled his promises to Israel—specifically those given to Abraham, David, and to the people in exile in places like Isaiah 40-55—by making this newly reconciled people, Jew and Gentile, and their shared life together the new temple of the living God.

Paul’s Letters

Look at how Paul employs the language of the two (Jew/Gentile) becoming one in most of his letters.

Romans

Romans is written to help Jews and Gentiles coexist under the power of the Gospel. The situation the letter addresses is quite likely when the Jews, expelled from Rome after the edict of Claudius (49 AD cf. Acts 18v2) are now returning to fellowship in the Roman church. The Gentiles in that church, previously somewhat dependent upon their Jewish sisters and brothers in Christ have now ascended to the roles of leadership. The Jewish believers return to a tense situation that Paul must navigate pastorally to help merge these two groups in their newfound circumstances—two groups boasting in their prominence. Paul’s language is overt throughout Romans:

Romans 1v17:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

Much of the rest of Romans is devoted to observing both that apart from Christ, both the Romans and Gentiles are under the same yoke of slavery from sin (Romans 1-3), that because of Christ being offered as the hilasterion (“place of atonement”- Rom. 3v25) they are now co-inheritors of the promises to Abraham who is their ancestor according to faith (Rom. 4). Paul asks the obvious questions, “Ok why do the whole law thing at all?” And “What good is it to be a part of Israel if God was going to so thoroughly reimagine the whole thing?” (Rom. 7-11).

As Paul turns to his final greetings in Romans 16, he again turns to this theme of Jew and Gentile in Romans 15vv:8-13 (quoting Isaiah 11)

For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs,
and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written,
“Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles,
and sing praises to your name”; and again he says,
“Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people”; and again,
“Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles,
and let all the peoples praise him”; and again Isaiah says,
“The root of Jesse shall come,
the one who rises to rule the Gentiles;
in him the Gentiles shall hope.”
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Again, if ethnicity doesn’t matter, and Paul is just trying to get the message of “justification by faith” (as its commonly understood in modern evangelicalism) home, why all this Jew/Gentile stuff? Isn’t it a distraction?

Ephesians

In Ephesians 1, Paul offers his often controversial statements about those who were destined for adoption in Christ (v.3). It’s controversial because it carries with it an accompanying question, are those who aren’t destined to be adopted destined to be destroyed? Calvin would say yes. But notice that Paul is talking in the first-person plural (“us”) and then in v. 13 he turns to second person plural writing:

In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit…

Who are the “you also?” This sounds awfully like a recollection of the scene with Cornelius and the gentiles receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit. It would seem that Paul is tracing the chronology of the promise given first to Jews (predestined for adoption) and then Gentiles (also predestined for adoption) under the big umbrella of the cross fulfilling the promises given to Abraham. This is made more explicit when Paul turns again to the argument that all people were bound under the slavery of sin:

First the Gentiles in Eph. 2vv1-2: You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient.

And then Paul, speaking of himself and his own people, the Jews in Eph. 2v3:

All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.

Paul then lays out the beautiful turning point of the grace of Jesus in Eph. 2vv4-6

But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,

And Eph. 2v8:
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God

And then, Paul makes it so explicit in Ephesians ch. 2 that the results of Christ’s work on the cross and in his resurrection are a renewed, reconciled humanity that it simply cannot be ignored:

Ephesian 2vv11-22 are beautiful and must be quoted in full here:

So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision”—a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands—remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God

Abolishing the law, reconciling the two groups into one body, a new humanity. We usually denote the peace that Jesus makes through his blood between humanity and God but that is not what Paul is referencing here in Eph. 2v16. He is referencing peace between Jew and Gentile. Don’t miss this, the witness to the resurrection of Jesus is an embodied people of peace, a people who otherwise at best shared an unspoken distrust of one another and at worst held outright contempt and animosity towards one another, living together in the peace of God victoriously forged by the cross of Jesus.

Again Paul says it plainly in Eph. 3vv5-6:
In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

Galatians

In Galatians—what most scholars believe is the earliest of Paul’s letters—, we already see that this bold vision, even the very specific rulings of the Jerusalem council have begun to unravel. And who is one of the leaders of the behaviors that are undermining the truth of the Gospel? Why, it’s Peter himself.

Galatians 2vv11-14:
But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction.
And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?”

Paul says of Peter, that he is undermining the very truth of the gospel. Now, since Luther and Calvin and in much popular evangelical theology, the way that Peter is undermining the gospel is by trying to earn his salvation through works of the law. Galatians is a complex, sustained argument and it is difficult to trace Paul’s to see the beauty of the tapestry Paul weaves through the winding argument but I want to propose that Paul is not condemning Peter simply for acting Jewish, but he is saying that reverting to his cultural identity because of what it suggests about the Gospel of Jesus is absolute anathema to the Gospel. At this point, you might be asking, well didn’t you say that the fulfillment to the promises to Abraham maintains diversity, isn’t Peter just living out of his former identity in a way that maintains his diversity? But this is exactly Paul’s point, and it is parallel to the instructions the Gentiles are given in Acts 15 and that are later spelled out more implicitly in regards to love of neighbor in 1 Corinthians 10 and Romans 14, when the things that you do out of your ethnic identity—for Jewish people things like imposing circumcision or not eating with Gentiles—divide the body, you are to again quote Paul, “not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel.”

Paul will through the rest of Galatians 2 and 3 turn to an argument from, you guessed it!, Abraham and then will offer this conclusion in Gal. 3vv26-29:

for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise

For Paul, here, the sign of the new family of God is that these people from all these disparate poles in society, groups that did not co-mingle socially and certainly not treat one another as equals, are all sharing the table together as one. Paul’s statement here does not obliterate these identities, this is evident in his subsequent instructions to women and slaves. However, the unity of the body, co-heirs of the promises given to Abraham, is the sign of the resurrection of Jesus.

Throughout his letters, Paul maintains this tension of grafting the Gentile people into the story of Israel without making them Jewish. And throughout his letters, Paul is insistent that this was always the point of the promises given to Abraham, that God was creating a new family and that new family would be a blessing to the entire world. This new people is to become, to again reference Ephesians 2, the holy temple of the Lord.

As N. T. Wright points out in his seminal, The New Testament and The People of God, one of the greatest apologetics for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is the church itself. If several people had not seen the risen Jesus as they hid away in the upper room on the third day, how do you explain this movement, especially the movement of faithful Jewish people towards fellowship with Gentiles? How do you explain the societal structures of antiquity being so thoroughly reshaped as slaveowners are sharing religious practice with slaves?

Moving Towards Our Moment

And just as that inexplicable reality was a sign to the 1st century world that Jesus had conquered the world, it remains a sign to our world today. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. observed over 50 years ago that, in a then extremely segregated America, Sunday morning was still the most segregated hour each week. How grieved we should be, as Christians, that it took the heinous murder of George Floyd for there to be a large-scale acknowledgment of the presence of racism in America—while the larger power of white supremacy remains largely unnamed in evangelical spaces.
For the culture of Paul’s day, Jew and Gentile, especially from the Jewish perspective was the primary ethnic division in culture. In twenty-first century America, we can break down the ethnic divisions with a far finer comb, we are Jamaican-Americans, Guatemalan-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and Liberian-Americans along with hundreds of other distinctions. And even if you were born here, unless your 100% Native American, your family came from somewhere. Sure, Paul was not talking about race in our modern construct, but he was talking about the unity of the body across every division.

So why do I care so much about race and the church? Well first of all because I just care about people I know and love, I see their pain and it moves me. But second of all, when you survey the texts, unity across lines of divisions is not somehow a nice downstream benefit of faith in Jesus but is integral to the gospel of King Jesus that all who claim his name are united in our love for one another. The sad truth is the church should not be playing catch-up on this conversation because it is at the very heart of our Scriptures but when we read the Bible, the inspired word of God written to communities individualistically, when we make them about “me and my personal Jesus” we miss the wider, world-shaking implications.

Rev. 7v9 holds out a beautiful vision of the age to come:

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands

This mosaic beauty, the fulfillment to the promises given to Abraham, a true celebration of diversity and unity under the Lordship of Jesus is our destiny, it is our promise. But the New Testament shows us that there is a struggle to submit to the Spirit of Jesus between here and there, that we have to fight for love. For the ancient near east, this fight was to overcome the animosity and cultural misunderstandings between Jew and Gentile. In our own day, this struggle is overcome that which to quote Paul’s rebuke to Peter in Gal. 2 “is not consistent with the truth of the Gospel”-the demonic force of white supremacy to atone for the Christian endorsement of chattel slavery, 3/5, Jim Crow. This is not optional work after we receive the Gospel of salvation by faith, this is Gospel.

White supremacy has been nailed to the cross of Jesus (Col. 2vv14-15), now we must take up our crosses, and lay down our lives for one another so that the world will see us, a city shining on a hill, united across lines that so starkly divide as overcoming the world by the blood of the lamb which makes for peace.

Another day, another hashtag, another black sister or brother’s picture plastered across social media. More local police dressed like they are ready to invade a medium-sized country (wonder where the riot gear was when white men were standing in state capitols across the country armed with assault rifles for their right to get a haircut?) another lynching broadcast to the world from a smart phone where it will appear in a news feed between a meme and an ad. 

More outrage, more tears.

As my dear brother texted me last night, “It never ends.” And as I thought about his words, I thought, “he’s right…” I thought I about Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin, and Philando Castile, and Botham Jean, and Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice (gosh that breaks my heart, just a boy, a little boy with a toy gun), and now Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and so, so many others. The one thing I thought about is:

I wish I never knew their names. ^[1]I feel this disclaimer is important. I say this not as a way of centering my own experience. I am referencing the way these people’s names represent larger societal sins. This is not about me … Continue reading

I say their names, I want to bear witness, if nothing else to just say to my sisters and brothers of color that I am with you, that I see you, that I will work alongside you in the Christian spaces I lead in to name and to dismantle white supremacy. But when it comes to these dear people who have been killed in the crossfire of evil, I wish I did not know their names.

You see, naming is usually a joy. My wife is on the verge of giving birth to our fourth child and we have prayed and reflected on what blessing of life, what name, what word that we will speak that will give shape to the world of our son’s life. Naming is such a gift, it expresses responsibility, we get to name this child. Naming expresses blessing, it expresses solidarity, and care, naming expresses hope and a future for the child and the family.

But this endless cycle of names, names that represent daughters, sons, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children of God made in his image is calling us to read another list of names I wish I did not know: white supremacy, whiteness (not white skin but whiteness it manifests in our culture), racial difference. These powers and principalities that have taken up residence in both the American way and the white evangelical church in America.

And this sort of naming tries, it tries to expose an ongoing slavery, a demonic force that holds America and the white church in America in its grasp but we keep hushing the voice or worse yet, signing along with it. This naming sounds like condemnation but really is like the message of the Gospel of Jesus itself to embrace freedom through confession, for those who speak the name of these systemic sins under the name that is above all names it is “an aroma that brings life” but to those who silence it’s invitation to healing, it is the very “aroma of death.”(2 Cor 2)

Naming

Naming In The Beginning

From the very beginning of the story of the Scriptures, naming is portrayed as an important demonstration of responsibility and care. As God brings forth the world in delight, he blesses the world, “it is good” reaching the climax of his symphony in Genesis 1vv26-28. “Let us make people in our image, male and female, he created them and let them have dominion over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and everything that moves upon the land.” As he signs his name on creation, with his imago dei, every daughter every son a reflection of the God who made the universe, God cannot contain his joy: it was so very good. 

In Genesis 2, we get another camera angle on the creation of humanity. This time we see not simply the work of the conductor but that of the potter, the poet. God crafts Adam from the dust of the earth and breathes his very breath into his lungs. Don’t miss this, George Floyd, hand-crafted by God to reflect his image, proclaimed “very good”, was robbed of the very gift that God had given him. Do you know what we call those who try to take away God’s gifts, who set themselves up in antithesis to God’s good purposes in the world. They are anti-Christ. 

God charges Adam with naming the creatures (Genesis 2v19). God formed humanity, those made in the image of God as co-regents, stewarding and sustaining creation. So he brings to Adam each of the animals put under his care and sees what he might name them. Adam’s concern for creation is signified by his naming of that which he is charged with overseeing. Adam first names Eve with a song, “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” and even after the two have succumbed to the serpent’s lies, he names Eve, the mother of all who are living, signifying his ongoing concern and care for her. 

What’s God’s Name?

Fast forward into the future, Moses stands on the scorching sands of the wilderness, shielding his eyes from the bright blazing bush before him, he blares out the question to the voice that beckons him, “Suppose I go the leaders and they ask me who has sent me, what do I tell them?” (Exodus 3). The voice from this shrub adorned in unquenchable flame answers, “I am.” God is not being elusive here. You see, naming has its limits. The God who has no limits cannot be contained within a name, because he cannot be controlled, cannot be tamed. God doesn’t completely dodge the question and he doesn’t offer something hopelessly otherworldly and esoteric. Rather, God expresses his very nature, life, existence so affirmatively and so fluidly. God is that which is, the great I am that is always over and above the “it is what it is” of our world.

Naming The Darkness

Moving along in the story, Jesus of Nazareth as he is proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God confronts a man so overwrought with demons that the townspeople are trying to chain him up in a cave (Mark 5). But the manifestation of evil in this man is so powerful that he simply cannot be contained. This man is a terror to the town of and a danger to himself. Notice the question that Jesus asks him, “What is your name?” The myriad demons from within the man respond, “We are legion for we are many.” Jesus then casts the demons out. 

You see Jesus’ life demonstrates that naming the evil that is gripping a person’s life is another way of expressing care and concern. When Jesus names evil, he demonstrates his power over it. In contrast, throughout Mark’s Gospel the demonic forces recognize Jesus as the Son of God, not only in the earthly sense but in a cosmic sense. Jesus forbids these demons from revealing his identity, his true name. Jesus will only be named fully, in Mark’s Gospel, as he hangs on the cross. The Roman soldier, a centurion, part of a Legion no less, as he beholds Jesus on the cross remarks, “Surely this man was the Son of God.” (Mark 15v39)

Throughout the Gospels and Acts, the apprentices of Jesus are given the name of Jesus as the means of warfare with the dark forces of the world and the balm of healing (e.g. Acts 3v6). As God reveals his name to us, in the Jesus his son, we are not given power over Jesus, but relational access into his creative and generative, pro-life, anti-death ways. As Mary weeps outside the tomb of Jesus on Easter Sunday morning, Jesus speaks the first word of the new world, demonstrating his mastery over death. The word that he chooses, is a name, “Mary.” Jesus proclaims the dawning of the new world with the use of name, an expression of intimacy and relationship. 

Naming Our Sin

Our access into this relationship of peace, life, and ultimately power (though not power wielded for our own sake but for the sake of the world) is contingent upon us accepting the grace of the name of Jesus as our Savior and Lord and consequently naming our own sin. The clarion call rings throughout the Gospels, “Repent.” Repentance, metanoia, means to “change one’s mind, to make a change to principle and practice, to change the past.” Repentance is an invitation to name Jesus as Lord and ourselves as sinners not so we can endlessly beat ourselves down and belittle ourselves as hopeless, broken, worthless worms but so that we can be crowned yet again with the “Good and very good” of the God who made us in his image, so that we can know to need Jesus (the I Am) is to find life itself, and so that we might have power to live new (i.e. repented) lives. 

Every “Gospel presentation” I have ever heard in church has made it that simple by quoting from 1 John 1v9: If we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us. Confession, the greek homologeo literally to “name the same” or “use the same words.” Confession is aligning our hearts with reality, or in another way is naming that which is so that we might no longer be slaves to it. 

It is evident from the narrative of the Scriptures that that which cannot or will not be named cannot be our concern and it cannot be controlled. If the church will not speak the names of our black sisters and brothers who are victims of a systemic conspiracy against the pigmentation of their skin, then let us not for a moment pretend as if they are our concern. And if the church will not name the Legion of demons that inhabits these eruptions of centuries of accumulated idolatry, we will continue to be slaves to their power.  1 John tells us if we confess our sins, we find forgiveness and healing but the converse must also remain. If we will not name our sins, we will find no forgiveness, no healing, and no freedom. 

Dante Stewart in a gut-wrenching reflection on the circumstances surrounding the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery wrote these lines:

How long do we have to wait for progress? How many have to be brutally murdered before people believe that we are actually telling the truth? What is the cycle of violence and apathy costing us? Why are we the ones who have to believe God has a good plan for us in the future but the best plan for them in the present? How long do we have to endure these types of talks until people realize that white supremacy is not ours to solve but their problem, their children’s problem?

Dante Stewart- Ahmaud Arbery and The Trauma of Being a Black Runner

It’s “their children’s problem.” Those children, are my children and they may be some of your children. Dante Stewart names white supremacy and he names it as our problem. The question that remains for us, will we? Or will we minimize his pain, ignore his tears, will we call it by another name —”bad luck” or “let’s wait to hear the whole story” or “see he had a criminal record.

This Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, the day we remember the moment the Holy Spirit named his new creation family, the church, giving them one language, forming them as a body. The church has always been a mosaic of differents, a scandalous interweaving of strands in society that would never cross otherwise. Paul takes this metaphor of the body to the extreme (1 Cor. 12) because for him, it is the clearest picture of what the church is to be, one organic unit with Jesus as the head. Right now, our eyes are weeping as they stare through tears in trauma and shock at the wasting sickness in our arm. What’s more the great physician has named the diagnosis: white supremacy.

As Willie James Jennings says in his commentary on Pentecost:

Speak a language, speak a people. God speaks people, fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the dis-ciples of his only begotten Son to speak people fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution that the Spirit performs. Like an artist drawing on all her talent to express a new way to live, God gestures the deepest joining possible, one flesh with God, and desire made one with the Holy One.

Willie James Jennings: Acts A Theological Commentary

The question is will we ignore the the invitation to wholeness, to intimacy, to healing? Will we continue to allow this infection to spread.

Or will we receive the gift of a name, a name that is bigger than our sin, a name that is more just than our defensiveness, the name that is above all names.

Will we say the name of Jesus? Will we say their names?

Last week, I broke on a Zoom call. It wasn’t the incessant blue light from my screen or the ache for actual human interaction. I was listening to my friend and mentor, Michael Carrion, describe the pain of the people that he formerly served as pastor in the South Bronx. Carrion, who recently transitioned the church he founded into the capable hands of leaders that he help train, now works for Redeemer City To City. We were on a call of church planters and pastors and each of us was describing a little bit of our situation within the circumstances of the pandemic. Michael spoke of the 13,—slow down and read it again. Thirteen women and men.— 13 beautiful souls just their church, Promised Land Covenant Church, had lost to the virus. He detailed the painful realities of how people in the neighborhood where his church gathers, the South Bronx, which pandemic or no pandemic suffers an unjust amount of trauma and pain. He described how his people have been treated by the healthcare system, how the shelter in place laws have not simply been a minor inconvenience to his people confined to well-stocked and spacious homes.

And it just crushed me. I could have turned the video off, I could have hid behind the black box of my name but that didn’t seem right. So I just sat there, with my face in my small green-dot window to the world, weeping. 

American Christians—and really Americans on whole—are not well-versed in lament. Everything within our culture trains us in a lifelong propaganda campaign to deny death and minimize suffering.  But when a friend is on a Zoom call, bringing the reality that this virus is inflicting right through the walls of your comfortable shelter in place, it causes you ask anew the question, “God where are you?”

John 11

Martha

In John chapter 11, Jesus arrives at a funeral that’s already been going on for several days. Jesus’ friends, Martha and Mary, are foremost among the mourners as they are heartbroken over the loss of their dear brother, Lazarus. As Jesus approaches their house in the village of Bethany, Martha hears of his arrival and goes out to meet him. She says to him, with a mixture of faith and disappointment, “Lord, if you would have been here, my brother would not have died. Or stated another way, “Jesus, where were you?” 

Martha is trying to reason her way through this tragedy, she is looking on the bright side. Jesus tells her, “Your brother will rise again.” And Martha responds in perfect orthodoxy, “Yes, I know at the resurrection on the last day, Lazarus will live.” But she’s missing Jesus’ point. Jesus says to her, “I am the resurrection and the life.” I am, the same name that was spoken to Moses when he asked the voice in the burning bush, the name that defies boundaries, is now speaking to Martha. This word has taken on flesh in the person of Jesus, the resurrection is not a fixed point in time but is very presence of the incarnate son. 

Now I must press pause on the story because it’s quite likely that you have read this story before. Earlier on when Jesus was told that Lazarus was sick, but still alive, John 11 tells us that “though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was” (v. 6). All of this can feel a little robotic, as if Jesus is just going through the motions, “knowing the outcome.” I understand the impulse to view God’s sovereignty in the sense that he knows everything will happen. People often respond to moments of tragedy with cliches like “God wasn’t surprised” or “God has a plan.” And all of that is completely true. But, and don’t miss this, that is not the point that the biblical authors are trying to illustrate. As we go on in the story, can I invite you, to get in step with the cadence of the story? There is high drama here, This is not a foregone conclusion and Jesus will not speed the story along.

Mary

As we re-immerse ourselves in John 11. Jesus’ interaction with Martha has held the question in the background, what about Mary? Martha heard Jesus was coming and she ran to him, trying to make sense of the situation. Martha expresses her disappointment to Jesus, “Lord, if you would have been here…” but she is still able to face him. Mary, on the other hand, cannot even look at Jesus. Disappointment in God may sound like a lack of faithfulness but it truly is borne out of a profound sense of what God has done and who he has shown himself to be. Habakkuk prays as he watches his city crumble all around him, “Lord, we have heard of your great deeds, in our time do it again” (Habbakuk 3v2). Disappointment raises the question, “God we know you’re able, where are you?” And Jesus faces this deep disappointment from both Martha and Mary,

Jesus sends Martha to tell Mary that Jesus wants to see her. There is a beautiful gentleness in all of this. If you’ve ever had the sense that you have hurt someone, your impulse may be to want to rush in and fix it, but Jesus is allowing for the possibility that Mary does not want to see Jesus. So he sends Martha to invite her. Mary goes to Jesus and she falls at his feet (v. 32) and she expresses this same disappointment: “Lord if you would have been here my brother would not have died.” Remember how Jesus answered Martha? Martha was able to go and see Jesus, she still held some semblance of hope in Jesus (“even now”), even if that hope needed expanding. 

But Mary. Mary is broken. Jesus doesn’t respond to her the same way. Jesus doesn’t try to fill the great chasm of her pain with any words at all. V. 33 says: “When Jesus saw her weeping…he was greatly disturbed in spirt and deeply moved.” 

Jesus Wept.

And then, v. 35 tells us: Jesus began to weep. Jesus doesn’t fast-forward to the ending, he doesn’t assure Mary oh it’s all ok, it’s all part of some impersonal plan, he enters into her pain, he embraces his own pain (Lazarus was Jesus’ dear friend and is described in this chapter as the one he loves). Richard Hays remarks, “At Bethany, the incarnate word stood wordless.” 

As Jesus weeps, the one who gave the vast oceans of saltwater their form now forms an ocean of love, the one who brings the rain to fall on the earth now waters the soil of Bethany with his sorrow, a microcosm of the endless heart of the Father confined to a few drops of salty tears. Makoto Fujimura remarks that all the mystery and beauty of the Gospel is found in that soggy dirt as Mary’s tears merge with Jesus’ to spring rivers of life.

And then Jesus asks his own version of the question—where?— “Where have you laid him?” Echoing the call of God in the garden to his wayward children, “Where are you?” He stands before the tomb, again “deeply moved.” Martha protests any opening of the tomb, “Lord he has been dead a long time”—or stated another way, “even this is too much for you.” But Jesus responds, “Martha, did I not tell you if you believed you would see the glory of God?” 

And friends this is where this story meets ours today. Nicholas Wolterstorff in his lament for his dear son says, “It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought that meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor…Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.” We have to enter into the story, to feel the weight and the grief of this moment. NT Wright says that if Jesus was carrying the sorrows of the world on the cross then it is our call as Christians, the Church, “to express and embody the sorrow of God.” 

It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought that meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor…Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament For A Son

Lament As The Way Forward

I get the impulse people have to rewind to the old normal or to fast-forward the forging of the new normal, to embrace the missional possibilities of this moment, to distract ourselves away from the hard realities that this pandemic has revealed and accelerated. But Jesus reveals to us that the Church’s vocation is to be a people of lament. A people who enter in to the grief of our world, who weep on behalf of the loss all around us. This is not because we need be endlessly sorrowful about the world, or pessimistic, or fatalistic, or hopeless. But rather, because as the tears of Jesus show us, there is power, beauty, and life in the tears of God.

Through tear-blurred eyes, Jesus asks the question “where have you laid him.” Out of , not in spite of, Jesus’ deep anguish comes a new possibility. Many of our most brilliant and cherished artists have been people who have been intimately familiar with suffering. Vincent Van Gogh, for instance, painted Starry Night with its darkened church lights and bright night sky from the confines of an insane asylum. Artists feel the weight of the world’s existence and transfigure it into beauty, their glory from their sorrow.  The power of Jesus’ lament is that it is a light that shines in the darkness that the darkness cannot overcome. The sorrow of Jesus is endowed with the love of God, the love that can, in the imagery of David Bentley Hart, harmonize any dissonance in the melody of creation or in the words of St. Paul, the love that “no height, no depth, not angels, demons, not life, nor death can ever separate us from…” (Romans 8).

Jesus is the ultimate artist, creating beauty out of sorrow, joy from weeping, resurrection from death. But he shows us that the way to newness is not in denial, not in hurry, it is not and end-run around the anguish and disappointment of the world, moving from mountaintop to mountaintop—rather, his way, the way of the cross and the tomb, is the path forged through the valley of the shadow of death.

Tributaries

I have cried many tears these past few weeks. I cry every Sunday morning, just sad that we cannot gather, sing, hug, share communion, and prayer. I cry when I think about our friends in places like Haiti. I cry when I hear the stories of my NYC pastor friends and the pain they are dealing with. I cry when I look to the future and consider all that we may be losing in this season. My tears feel so inadequate, so powerless. Maybe I’m like Martha and Mary, I just wish God would have been here and would have done something about it. But perhaps, like Martha and Mary also, I kneel in the shadow of one who loves this world, who loves my family and friends, who loves me more than I could ever love. Perhaps my tears are not the source but are merely the tributaries of the sorrow of God. Perhaps out of this sorrow new life will come forth. 

Perhaps my tears are not the source but are merely the tributaries of the sorrow of God. Perhaps out of this sorrow new life will come forth. 

The beauty of Lazarus raised to life is borne out of the sorrow of Jesus. Jesus can stand at the tomb of Lazarus and call out his name because he feels the weight of the tragedy and is not overwhelmed by it. We all want the latter, to stand firm and confident in the face of crisis, pain, and loss, but I think we often miss that the gateway to hope and joy, to resurrection and life is do be deeply moved by the pain of our world. The church will create new beauty and hope out of the depths of this pandemic, but only to the extent to which we are willing to enter into the pain of this moment. 

Jesus wept. We should too.

It would be too strong to say I hate digital church. It’s not that I hate it, I am grateful for the technology and the sliver of connectedness it affords us in this socially distanced world of coronavirus. But still, I have seen the real thing, the body of Christ assembled in varying numbers singing their hearts out. I’ve looked through my own tears upon people that I love and pastor as I proclaim to them the hope they have. I have tried to concentrate on one single conversation in a bustling lobby after a gathering, feeling the potential energy and harmony as the body of Christ is sent out into the world to be the hands and feet of Jesus, to go be present, to go inhabit, to go incarnate.

And now. Now, I stare into a camera with no understanding of how my words are landing—though to be fair, I get about the same reaction to my jokes. Now, I end the service not by sending the people as the blessed ambassadors of resurrection hope into a world teeming with stories to be written, the Spirit of God hovering over us as it hovered over the young, unformed oceans. No, now I tell them, stay home.

To be the church right now, a socially distanced virtual body, is antithetical to everything that I have ever known or loved about church. The early Christians were known for their presence in plagues. In the first centuries of the church, several plagues afflicted the Roman Empire and the church responded by staying, binding the wounds of the ailing, and embodying the presence of Jesus often at the cost of their lives^[1]Bishop Dionysius, 3rd century bishop of Alexandria reports: Most of our brother-Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of … Continue reading. There were priests during the Bubonic plague that administered last rites knowing that it would lead to their own final confessions ^[2]In The Great Mortality, John Kelly says that the mortality for priests during The Black Death was “42 to 45 percent” (p.224), which is higher than the overall mortality rates seem to be for the … Continue reading But this, this we are told is different. In this moment, we are told that the best way to love our neighbors is to withdraw. How can there be a body of Christ without a people to embody it?

What might God be up to?

The People Of God Quarantined

As I survey the story of the Scriptures, it’s astonishing to see how the most profound moves of God often happen as a result of the people of God being in a sense, quarantined, locked away. Bear with me, I really want this to not read like one of those cheesy posters you see in a Sunday school classroom.

Old Testament

Noah is adrift in an arc, Isaac is bound to the altar, Joseph is imprisoned, Moses wanders a wilderness alight with a blazing bush, the Israelites place blood over their doors, Caleb crouches as he surveils the land, David hides in a cave from his pursuers, Elijah goes to Mt. Horeb, Jonah and his message of scandalous mercy is swallowed whole by a giant fish, Daniel is thrust into a den of lions, his friends are locked in a blazing furnace.

The word of God goes dormant for some four-hundred years before the word that brought the world to life sings out again.

Jesus

Jesus grows in his mother’s womb for nine months, is born to a no-name family in a backwater town, he flees to Egypt as a refugee, spends 30 years in obscurity, is driven to the wilderness to wrestle with his own desires and with Satan, John the Baptist is imprisoned and executed, Lazarus is bound in grave clothes, Jesus locks himself away in an upper room on the last week of his life, and then retreats for one last prayer time in the garden. And then, seemingly, the ultimate closed door.

Jesus is crucified, the anguish of human sin carried upon his shoulders. The tomb is sealed.

And in the depths of that darkness, the perfect love of God breaks every power of sin and death, the Spirit speaks a new, fresh word, life dawns anew under the reign of King Jesus.

New Testament

And even still in the afterglow of that resurrection light, the people of God are locked in a room waiting in fear and uncertainty, God breaks in and pours out his Spirit. John and Peter are imprisoned, Stephen is stoned to death, Saul is blinded until the healing touch comes from Ananias, Paul is shipwrecked, his letters are passed through prison bars, and John the revelator is exiled on Patmos.

To be locked away, hidden, fleeing, to have nothing to rely upon but the presence and power of God is a part of the operating system of the kingdom of God. Out of these moments flow promise, salvation, a renewed sense of God being near, and ultimately resurrection.

Wait On The Lord

So what might God be up to in these moments as the church doors are locked, the body of Christ’s hands and feet are replaced by one’s and zero’s, and much is being lost? The truth is, I have no idea. But if the story of Scripture tells us anything it’s that the kingdom comes in seed form, that which grows and provides life for the world is cultivated by being buried in the ground. What will bloom, what will blossom? Life. Grace. Promise. And yes, resurrection, a new beginning, a new heart, and a new body, right here in this world.

Psalm 27vv13-14 has been my prayer and it captures this beautifully. We long to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living (v.13), right here on these streets, in these bodies, in our time and place. And the way, in this moment is as it has been in so many of the pivotal moments throughout the story of God and his people: wait on the Lord, Take courage, and wait with hope (v. 14).

What choice do we have? Locked away, quarantined, and isolated, it feels like the world has come to an end. But we are an Easter people. It’s dark now, and how great the darkness. But dawn is coming, and how much greater will that light shine. And so now, we wait.

The end of the Good Place was the saddest ending to a TV show I have ever experienced. But not for the reasons you might think.

NBC recently concluded The Good Place, a witty, thoughtful, and heartfelt comedy about demons, angels, philosophy, and the afterlife. I thoroughly enjoyed this show, it had all the devastatingly funny smarts of 30 Rock with the warmth of The Office or Parks and Rec. The degree of difficulty of making jokes out of Kant is not to be underestimated. But even more, I found myself watching the show as a sort of a cultural commentary. What does a post-truth culture have so say about heaven and eternal life?^[1]At this point I want to offer a huge caveat. I am not critiquing the show itself. I loved the show, I thought the characters were brilliantly conceived—especially Sean, the head demon, who in the … Continue reading

Turns out, not much. I don’t say this critically or dismissively. But the show ends as each of the four main characters reaches a state of contentment in their eternal state and essentially euthanize their soul in a way suggestive of Buddhism, emptying one’s self of desire to the point where there’s nothing else to live for. The conclusion had all the tear-filled warmth of the endings of the best stories, minus the “happily ever after.”

In the penultimate episode of the show, we arrive at an eternal cocktail party where the residents of the Good Place are slowly evaporating into mindless pleasure zombies. They have lived in such lavish luxury with no conflict, sickness, or pain that all of the meaning has been ever so slowly emptied out of existence. This malaise is embodied by the Neoplatonist Hypatia of Alexandria, who studied philosophy and astronomy in the 3rd-4th centuries—Chidi even drops an amazing “I love her in a Neo-Platonic” way that though, it kills, is not enough to break the hypnosis of this aimless ‘Good Place.” The show’s solution to this problem: there has to be an end. It’s death, the writers conclude, that gives life meaning. So, in the trajectory of the show, even eternal life has to have an end.

In the last episode we see each of the main characters pray the prayer of annihilation, welcoming their own personal relationship with Nirvana, where they have done all there is to do, eaten all that there is to eat, seen everywhere there is to see. They reach this “inner peace” that clues them into the call to walk across the threshold of existence to non-being. We are supposed to see the nobility and peace of their contentment but watching each character reach this climactic moment to end all moments, I found myself not deeply moved at their nobility of spirit or rejoicing with them as they reached contentment but indignant at the smallness of the story.

The Good Place has no room for eternity, no room for individualism (a profound irony in a Western story about heaven), and ultimately, no room for love. The show is content to let philosophy and ethics be a guide for mapping the good life rather than love. Philosophy has historically questioned what is a good life and preparation, as Cicero says, for “learning how to die.”

But love, love teaches us how to live. Love makes us fully our authentic selves. The Bible bears witness to not just an everlasting God, an eternal being who not only exists without beginning or end but whose disposition towards the world at large and individuals made in his image is unfailing love (Jer. 31v3). Jesus came to earth to remove the sickness of sin from our hearts which like a wasting disease slowly eroded our bodies and souls. His death on the cross and resurrection to his reign unending declare to one and all that though it seems that entropy and ending are the ways of the universe, there is a grace that is stronger than the grave.


The Good places essentially portrays the main characters consuming life. Over the eons of multidimensional time, or as the Good Place hilariously labels them, Jeremy Bearimy’s, the characters visit every magnificent city, every time period, eat at every great restaurant, and even play the perfect game of Madden (BORTTLLLES!). At the end, there is nothing left to do but to surrender one’s soul to the ether. Life has been consumed. But the Bible tells a different story, of a love that never fails, a love that can never be consumed (Romans 8). But even more, that this love is so magnificent that it will always evoke our desire, always divulge deeper depths, always make us more creative, more exploratory, more loving, more ourselves.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 declares that God has placed eternity in the human heart. The great philosopher Augustine (to my recollection completely ignored by The Good Place) says of our longings even in heaven that we “will be insatiably satisfied, without growing weary. We will always be hungering, and always being filled.” ^[2]Augustine, Sermon

The impulse to say that it’s arrogant that we should think that we as individuals should live forever may sound noble in its humility, but its the humility born of, to channel Lewis, thinking less of ourselves, rather than thinking of ourselves less. Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest who works with at-risk and gang-affiliated young people in in Los Angeles reminds us, “Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little.” The Good Place is a settlement built upon a small story. But we were created for more.

This world with all of its pain, all of its suffering, all of its beauty aches for more. We long for justice, love, peace, community, to be fully known, and ultimately, we long for love. Perhaps we need an eternity that cannot exhaust our longings but an eternity that forever, in the paradoxical way that all the best things work, both fills our deepest longings and creates them. The love of God never fails, through life, death, and every Jeremy Bearimy, we shall never cease to hang on every word that comes from the mouth of God.^[3]Hans urs Von Balthasar

Psalm 36 is an exercise in contrast. David lays out two paths, when set side by side, it is clear which one is so much more appealing but we need the light of the more beautiful way to see the utter darkness of the lesser path. He starts with a simple observation, which may strike our modern sensibilities as hopelessly judgmental. He even claims divine origin for the “message in” his “heart” (v. 1). His conclusion, these “wicked” people are so lovestruck by gazing at their own reflections that they cannot see the wasting sickness that is their own sin, their mouths are so full of hatred and slander that they are its as if they are speaking with a mouth full of food, that which flows from their lives is neither wise or good, and on their beds, even their imaginative faculties are spent on self-serving courses of hedonism and idolatry. (vv. 2-4). David offers a thorough, scathing review of the “wicked.” 

Who are the wicked? Well, you have to remember, David doesn’t live in a cosmopolitan society, he’s not a 21st century New Yorker living at the intersection of every culture, ethnicity, and perspective in the world. He lives among a nation with a common ancestry and heritage. His neighbors are supposed to have one solitary devotion: faithfulness to Yahweh, the God of Israel.

What all this means is that David is not looking with judgmental disdain at the ignorant and uninitiated. He is talking about people that should know better. He then moves to a contemplation of the beauty of God. As thorough as the brokenness of his neighbors and compatriots who have rejected the God who formed them as a people, so much more is God brimming with life, love, justice. The human ingenuity towards sinfulness, destructive as it is, is nothing compared with the beauty of God:

 5 Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens,
 your faithfulness to the skies.
6  Your righteousness is like the highest mountains,
your justice like the great deep.
You, Lord, preserve both people and animals.
7  How priceless is your unfailing love, O God!

And while the bed of the wicked is a place for a cartography of selfishness, the table of the Lord is a refuge and feast for all, a river of abundance flowing to every nation:

7b People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
8 They feast on the abundance of your house;
 you give them drink from your river of delights.

And this picture of the Lord is not a glimpse of heaven, a snapshot of the transcendent that we long to immerse ourselves in fully. This gospel that God is beautiful on a scale that dwarfs the depths of of the deep, and the heights of Everest is an invitation to a life animated by God’s vision and vitality. David writes:

9 For with you is the fountain of life;
 in your light we see light.

His love is a fountain, a never-ending artesian spring cultivating an oasis of Eden in the midst of the foolish, the proud, and the wicked. His light illuminates the good, true, and the beautiful that stubbornly breaks the concrete of sin-hardened world. The deep life of God calls to the deep in us, let your fountains be found in him.

If you’ve ever felt like the world is aligned in a conspiracy against you, Psalm 35 is for you. David doesn’t so much write as he shouts protests:

7 They hid their net for me without cause
    and without cause dug a pit for me,
8 may ruin overtake them by surprise—
    may the net they hid entangle them,
    may they fall into the pit, to their ruin.

For many of us, we read Psalm 35 and feel like telling David, “Look, man, you’re just having a bad day, the lady who told you you need two forms of verified ID at the DMV is not a cosmic enemy plotting alongside Satan to ruin your life.” Our modern way of naming enemies is by establishing who’s in our camp and who’s not. The people on the other side of the spectrum are the bad, nefarious people while those within our state borders are given the benefit of good faith and good intentions.

Psalm 35 affirms our suspicions that enemies are a part of life. David doesn’t call role, naming these individuals but he identifies them by their injustice and their glee when troubles befall him:

11Ruthless witnesses come forward;
    they question me on things I know nothing about.
12 They repay me evil for good
    and leave me like one bereaved.

David promises that he will delight in the Lord and rejoice in his salvation (v. 9), but these unnamed enemies glean their joy from sorrow in David’s life (v. 15). They are mockers, slanderers, engaging in the verbal pornography of gossip and secretly fist-pumping when they get a report that something ill or painful has befallen David (vv.15-16).

You may or may not be able to name people in your life who fit this description. Psalm 35 is acknowledging that this is the way of the world, a way of conflict and alienation. This leads us to the second way that Psalm 35 bears witness to us in how we are to live and move in a world fraught with enemies.

Notice how David responds to the presence of his enemies. He does not lash out in anger and righteous retribution. He goes to great length to describe his own innocence, even noting how when he got updates on those who now mock him, when he heard that they were in anguish, he mourned alongside them, as if he were grieving the loss of his own mother (vv. 13-14). We love nothing more in our society and in our stories than when a person, a people, or an entity get what’s coming to them. We say yes and amen to vindicating vengeance either by the law or other means. But David doesn’t become a vigilante for his own victimhood.

Rather, David prays to God. He acknowledges that God is his judge and deliverer. David opens with the plea:

Contend, Lord, with those who contend with me;
    fight against those who fight against me. 
Take up shield and armor;
    arise and come to my aid. 
Brandish spear and javelin
    against those who pursue me.
Say to me,
    “I am your salvation.”

David knows that he is imperiled because of his enemies but he also knows that only the Lord can release him from their snares. He foreshadows what the apostle Paul will instruct the Roman church to do in Romans 12vv17-19:

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. 18 If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. 19 Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.

Jesus will tell those listening that they are not simply to refrain from vengeance, they are to love their enemies. Psalm 35 is a long way from the way Jesus will unmask our true enemies (sin and death) but it gives us a way to live in the world that is often contentious, where people wittingly and unwittingly often live as our enemies.

But in light of Jesus’ teachings, Psalm 35 leaves us with a much more haunting question. Jesus says, don’t look at the speck of sawdust in your neighbor’s eye while ignoring that there is a 2 X 4 sticking out of your own eye (Matthew 7). Jesus compels us to reread Psalm 35 asking ourselves not simply how have we been wronged by others, but how have we, ourselves, been an enemy to others? You see, we live our lives as both offended and offender, and the witness of Jesus declares to all, there is grace for both—forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us (also, providentially, Matthew 7).

Psalm 34 is the testimony of a weathered, God-facing life. Its fine-wine wisdom, aged and oaken, each note bearing witness to years, disappointments, but ultimately the triumph of a long and loving obedience in the same direction. David begins with his resolution:

I will bless the Lord at all times (v. 3).

This seems like the naive proclamations of over-eager youth. But as we will see, this promise has gray hair and experience. This is not a decision that has been made in a fleeting moment but the accumulated awareness of what it means to live life looking to God with radiant, expectant, unashamed eyes (v. 5). This proclamation is not a conversation that David began, it’s an answering word, a response to steadfast and unfailing love, of a man who knows that God not only can save him but also actually enjoys being in his company.

David then recounts his past:

I sought the Lord and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears (v. 4).

David’s not recalling one isolated incident. Think of how fear works. It labors endlessly, it’s never far and its work is never done. But David is here to tell us, as often as the fear comes knocking, as often as the pain of this world shows up with its very real terror and its false gospel of doom and despair, the Lord is always near to the brokenhearted (v. 17). When your spirit is crushed under the agony of anxiety, even if all you can muster is a faint groan, a longing too deep for words and too broken for articulation, the Lord will answer your cry (v. 17).

David doesn’t discount the reality of the fears that faces us. Many of them are venomous, injecting the most bitter poisons of loss, bitterness, and disillusionment. But what he suggests is that those fears are real in the same way a black hole is real. In black holes, gravity accelerates at such a pace that no particles or light can escape. Fear does this too. It traps us in its vortex of nothingness.

But what David proclaims is Gospel. Salvation. God is present even in the places where nothing escapes, he can hear our cry because he is not beyond the black hole of despair, he is right there with us. 

David then teaches us a “holy fear” a fear with actual weight to it: the fear of the Lord. The first invitation David offers is simply a practice of the presence of God. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (v. 8). Like any good thing we taste, it perpetuates a longing for more. Fear of the Lord is not a fear that alienates us from God, it aligns us with the rhythms of grace. David then shows us more by offering his second invitation, “Depart from evil, do good, seek peace and pursue it” (v. 14). Fear of the Lord is being remade again in his image, excavating the goodness of the architecture of our world, turning from the ways of figs and leaves, of shame and fear, to the abundance of shalom. David says, here, in this way is life. And I know because I’ve seen it all.

Finally, David offers one stern warning and one resounding promise. As David writes, “Evil brings death to the wicked, and those who hate righteousness will be condemned.” It’s not that God is up in some far-off heaven with his eternal ledger—as we’ve already seen he’s near to the brokenhearted. God is life. His ways are the only way to sustain life. Any way opposed to his is to choose death. Any other way than God’s way folds in on itself. But for those who serve the Lord, who seek his face, and take refuge in his grace, the Lord will redeem your life, there is no condemnation (v.22)

The apostle Paul will later pick up on this echo in his letter to the Romans. In Romans 8, he will write, “Now there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. (Rom. 8:1) and nothing that can ever separate us from his love (Rom. 8vv38-39). 

Yes hardship, pain, fear, loss, and ultimately death will come to us all in this life. But David stands as a docent in the museum of grace: in every circumstance, even at our darkest hour, the Lord hears and he rescues (v. 17). Selah.

Psalm 33 is like turning your eyes to look at the sun. There is just so much radiance that it overwhelms us. The psalmist reflects on the power and majesty of God:

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and all their host by the breath of his mouth.
He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle;
he put the deep in storehouses.

This same word that brought the world to life continues as his relation to the world. He did not just speak forth creation, he communicates his presence and his word is true and powerful to accomplish his will as he “works in faithfulness” (v. 4). As the voice of God comes into focus we hear his character communicated, the Lord “loves righteousness and justice” (v. 5a). And he pours himself into the world, filling the earth to the brim with “steadfast love” (v. 5b).

Two responses are enjoined to the faithful congregation. The first is participation—pick up an instrument, lift your voices, make a joyful noise (v.1, 3). The native tongue of the Kingdom of God is praise and thanksgiving (v. 2). The second response, is not contradictory but is like a rest placed into the clef of music. The psalmist tells us to “stand in awe” (v. 8) and to feel the otherworldly magnitude of his presence. This God spoke the world into existence so all of our words should start with a mouth agape, in awesome wonder of his beauty.

He is the Lord’s true king, all the governments and the nations make their plans, they draw their battle lines, but they are puppet states (vv.10-11). They act as if they will remain forever, that they are the architects of the future with their political slogans and their empty promises of greatness but they cannot deliver (v 11b). The only nation that remains forever is the eternal kingdom of God, the people called out by him (v. 12).

The psalmist then paints the Lord, seated on the vast heights, overlooking the world. The author writes that he sees all mankind (vv. 13-14) and it can feel like his vision is like our own when we look at a large crowd. Yes, we can “see” the people in totality but we cannot possibly know the stories of each individual person. And again, considering the scale of this majestic God, it almost makes sense. How could a God so endowed with power, majesty, and so responsible for the managing of the world get caught up in the minutiae of mundane human existence?

But this psalm will not leave us to our illusions of an aloof sovereign, distant and seated on high, removed from the pain and moments of our everyday lives. The psalmist tells us that God knows every human heart because he has made each one of them (v. 15) and he sees each individual (v. 18). Apparently, part of the greatness of this God is the ability to concern himself with the smallness of our world. Psalm 33 tosses us into the current of God’s raging strength and then shows us the deep spring that feeds this river: the steadfast love of God that delivers our souls from death and provides for our daily needs (vv.18-19).

The last stanza of the prayer paints our current reality:

Our soul waits for the Lord;
he is our help and shield.
Our heart is glad in him,
because we trust in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us,
even as we hope in you. (vv. 20-22)

We cannot long stare at greatness of this magnitude without being blinded. But what we find is that the glory of this God is not just great, not just awesome, or strong; it is good, kind, compassionate. Our world is awash in the warm sunlight of God’s love and—to channel Lewis—by its light we see everything else.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment depicts the descent into madness of a murderer who thinks he has committed the perfect crime. Eventually, he’s found out by his own conscience, overwhelmed with hysterical agony and the paranoia of guilt. Sentenced to life in the work camps in Siberia, the main character, Raskolinov has become a hollow man, broken by the weight of his own decisions and the ensuing spiral of darkness. But, Sonya, a prostitute, who is Raskolinov’s only meaningful human interaction, keeps showing up in his life. Even after he is convicted, she brings him a New Testament, she visits him in prison, she hears his confession. Through his relationship with Sonya, through the power of confession, Raskolinov is healed, he is brought back from the dead. The consequences of his actions remain, but his soul is redeemed.

Psalm 32 describes the torture of unconfessed sin and the joy of bringing our brokenness into the light. David writes,

When I kept silence, my body wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Selah

We are not disembodied souls. The guilt from our hearts is circulated into our bones. We feel the weight of our sin not just psychologically but physiologically. David vividly portrays this wasting sickness, like a cancer slowly spreading. Our natural reaction when we know that we have done wrong, is to try to hide in our shame. This truly is the most insidious thing about sin, it doesn’t just break us once, it fractures our hearts and then shackles us to that moment, convincing us that we are forever defined by this one act. Paul will later describe sin as a slave master (Romans 6), a power that uses fear and propaganda to keep us in bondage.

But the witness of Psalm 32 voices its testimony from the other side. There is a cure for sin, there is a healer, a great physician that will take away our ills. He runs to us, he is near, all we have to do is turn to him. Although, understanding this is like scaling the highest mountain of shame. Sin tries to convince us that the last thing we can ever do is confess. But the Scriptures tell a different story. Look how quickly things turn upon the hinge of confession:

Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,”
and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Selah

David melting heart, heavy bones and all simply acknowledges his sin and he finds not a harsh “how dare you,” not abandonment, or disowning, but wholeness, restoration.

God is not a hoarder of grace, he doesn’t offer it like a trap to get us to come out into the light so he can snap it shut. He has made a way. Even in our rebellion against him he is our refuge (v. 6). Instead of hiding in our shame, we can make his light our hiding place (v. 7).

What is it that’s keeping you in the dark? What’s it that’s telling you there’s no way forward, that no one can know, and that God is done with you? He’s not. He’s faithful. Do you need mercy? We all do. Let steadfast love surround you. Let it go.

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered. (v. 1)

His love conquers all sin. Even yours. Even mine.