Psalm 25 is an exercise in contrast. David is struggling, burdened by the consequences of his sin. The gravity of his guilt is like a millstone around his neck. He cries out :
Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted. Relieve the troubles of my heart, and bring me out of my distress. Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins.[1]vv. 16-18
The consequences of his decisions have laid a heavy burden upon him. Crushed under the weight of his guilt, unable to move, David remembers another way. He considers the ways of the Lord:
Be mindful of your mercy, O LORD, and of your steadfast love, for they have been from of old. Do not remember the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for your goodness’ sake, O LORD! Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in the way. He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way. All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his decrees.[2]vv.6-10
Maybe you have been here. Stuck, heavy-laden by the accumulation of your own sin. It’s an impossible place to be in. Walking through the world feels like you are walking on the ocean floor with intense pressure compressing your very soul. And its here at the moment when our soul feels the heaviest that its actually the lightest. David says:
To you, O Lord, I lift my soul.
Lifting our souls to God from the depths is not like Atlas lifting the world. In lifting our souls to God we find that the Lord is not a pallbearer struggling to hoist our unwieldy, oaken casket. Rather, his mercy makes our struggles as light as a feather. He does not downplay our rebellions or make them out to be somehow less than they are. Rather, he exhausts them by taking the weight upon his shoulders, thus emptying sin of all its weight. We can lift our souls to the Lord when we can’t even lift one foot in front of the other because he has made known to us his ways, and his way is easy and his burden is light.
Lift Your Soul
Are you weary? Are you heavy laden? Does each day feel like you carry the weight of the world? Lift your soul to the God of your salvation. Wait on him.
If you were to turn on the news, there is very little in the way of observable data that would suggest that an all-powerful, all-loving God currently presides over the world as its one true sovereign. Leave the events that the news details aside, would a loving God really suffer the inanity that floods the airwaves of the 24/7 news programs? If we were to accept the notion that there was some integrating force to the disparate, chaotic nonsense that saturates the front pages of every news website, it would seem any thoughtful person would conclude that this ruler is quite terrible at the business of actually governing the world. And yet, in the biblical narrative, almost hidden between the astounding resurrection of Christ at the end of each gospel account and the birth of the church in Acts 2 is an event that gives clarity and shape to both events, an event largely ignored by the western Church: the ascension of Jesus.
Yes, the biblical claim is that Jesus sits at the right hand of God almighty, enthroned as the world’s true Lord reigning right now. So what on earth is he doing up there? What does it mean for Jesus to be Lord in the here and now? First, let’s examine some distortions of this claim. The Epicureans were the descendants of the philosopher Epicurus. Although this perspective later came to be associated with wanton pleasure-seeking, Epicurus did not promote this sort of behavior. Epicurus merely taught that the gods, whomever they are, exist in eternal bliss and are unaffected and disinterested in the affairs of mortals. His legacy found its most influential expression in the Enlightenment in what was referred to as deism, essentially that God was an eternal watchmaker that built the timepiece, put the battery in it and left it to function however it would. Thomas Jefferson famously claimed to be an Epicurean. In a letter written late in his life to William Short, he wrote:
Epictetus and Epicurus give laws for governing ourselves, Jesus a supplement of the duties and charities we owe to others. – Thomas Jefferson, October, 1819
Notice, for Jefferson it is Epicurus who tells us how to govern ourselves, Jesus is just a nice add-on. Separation of church and state, if you will. As NT Wright often points out this is the fundamental assumption of the Enlightenment that God is the ruler of heaven and he stays up there and leaves the governance of the earth to humans. Jesus is Lord thus implies the dualism that Jesus is Lord of the heavenly realm but can hardly be bothered with intervention in the earthly sphere.
The second distortion of the claim Jesus is Lord touches less upon politics and more upon theodicy and providence. The Stoics, a philosophical school which gained prominence in the early centuries of the common era Roman Empire, share a lot of similar convictions to Christians. There are even apocryphal letters, fabrications of later history, between Seneca and Paul. For the Stoics, for women and men to allow their emotions and impulses to govern their behavior is the height of vice and results not in freedom but the debasement of what it means to be human. The stoics believed that the world was initially constructed out of divine matter (Gk. pneuma meaning “spirit”) and that eventually the world would be dissolved by the deity into primeval fire. For the stoics, all of existence was an expression of the divine will, they were pantheists for whom the divine operated in every occurrence of nature and human interaction, and thus everything truly happened “for a reason.”
For Jesus to be “Lord” in the biblical sense did not entail either of these trajectories. He was neither the Lord of heaven alone and subsequent absent landlord of earth nor the micromanager of the cosmos. Jesus’ lordship like, it seems, all of the most hallowed and beautiful Christian claims is a paradox. A paradox of distance and nearness. In the distortions of Epicureanism and Stoicism we see an overemphasis upon one element of the truth but the Gospel continually shows itself capable of holding seemingly disparate parts in concert together. Jesus’ lordship is one of distance, transcendence. His resurrection has affirmed him as the world’s true Lord, the king of kings to which all earthly authorities will give accounting for their stewardship over their peoples and resources. Paul describes this present reality in Ephesians 1:
20 God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. 22 And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Jesus is enthroned, he is the one to whom all owe allegiance. But he is not simply ruling elsewhere. I think the temptation here is to think of Jesus’ reign in terms of some of our cultural stories like Tolkien’s Return of the King where the deposed sovereign works to reoccupy their rightful throne that is currently subsumed by dark forces. For the biblical timeline, Jesus has already done the work of deposing evil on the cross, by absorbing the full weight of sin and death and exhausting their powers. The ascension is Jesus’ sabbath rest after recreating the world, he sits down at the right hand of the Father and beckons the whole world to enter into his rest. Jesus is risen and reigning, resting in the completion of his fulfillment of all righteousness. Right now.
His Lordship means transcendence, but to be truly transcendent is to transcend every distance. He is near. He is God with us, the one who will never leave us or forsake us, in the heights of heaven or the depths of sheol, he is there. There is nothing in all of creation that can separate us from his gracious presence. Jesus’ reign is not that of an austere demagogue signing executive orders from heaven but the loving shepherd leading and walking alongside his people, even in the valley of the shadow of death, even to the end of the age.
Distance and nearness. Power and pathos. As Christians we are called to live out this paradox, as witnesses to the Lordship of Christ, in the worlds that we walk in. Jesus’ has exercised his sovereignty in emptying himself fully entrusting his life in the hands of the Father. He has given us his divine Spirit to do the same. It may seem a tautology but we can live out the Lordship of Jesus because Jesus is Lord. We enact and embody his power whenever we, together as church communities, embody the alternative Kingdom, when we refuse the pragmatics of party politics and instead bear unique prophetic witness even at great cost to self. We embody his power when our we receive the grace of his rule and our lives and words announce the resurrection and reign of King Jesus. We incarnate the nearness of our God when we suffer on behalf of the world. We find strength, hope, joy, and yes, even resurrection in those places because our God, King Jesus, is with us always.
The rest of Acts bears witness to the Lordship of Jesus. The mysterious Spirit of God descends upon the people enabling them to live out this Lordship. They respond not by grasping for power but rather by bearing witness: praising God, delighting in the words of Scripture and the surprising and beautiful story they tell about Jesus, sharing their stuff, taking care of widows, healing the sick, proclaiming the reality of the resurrection, and bearing prophetic witness to the emissaries of the Roman governor that Jesus is Lord, and Caesar is not.
There are two times that Jesus is recorded weeping in the Scriptures. Once as he stands at the tomb of his good friend Lazarus, lamenting the loss of his friend and face to face with the specter of grave.[1]I preached a sermon I am particularly proud of on this text here. The second time is found upon his entry to Jerusalem. The last week before he is crucified, Jesus enters the city riding on a colt. The people welcome him as a conquering hero. You see, in their minds the fact that he’s riding a colt is a minor detail. They all have heard about this Jesus, the miracle worker who may even be God’s Messiah, the anointed one who would finally bring about the judgment of God upon the Romans. The people want bloody revolution, they want a fight and here, finally, is one who might be God’s chosen instrument in bringing victory and vindication. Sure, they’d like their king to be on a stallion, standing tall above the crowds on a stately horse, but maybe, they ventured, all he could find was a a colt. For the writers of the gospels, however, Jesus’ chosen vehicle, the colt, is not an ancillary curiosity but expresses the very point of the story. The fact that he is not on a war horse tells us everything about what he says as he stands far off from the city crying over its coming fate:
41 As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it, 42 saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.
The Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans
Approximately 40 years from Jesus’ fateful ride into Jerusalem, the war horses will come. Except they won’t be carrying the Messiah, they will be mounted by Roman generals leading legions of Roman soldiers to march upon Jerusalem. The people of Israel will gear up for war thinking this is a battle like the days of old when their own generals went by the names of Joshua and David. In days of old God would speak to the leaders of Israel before the battle, commanding them to be faithful in order to ensure victory. The problem in this instance is that God has already spoken, in fact he came himself to speak, and he what he said to the people staring down the barrel of the Roman gladius is simple, “Run, don’t fight.” But as Jesus foretold, they missed that word and thus they fight. They fight because that’s the only way they can envision conquering. They fight because they think that’s what God wants them to do.
And they lose. They lose everything. Josephus, a Jewish historian on the Roman payroll, records the horrors visited upon the Jewish people because they try to resist the Romans. What he describes is a literal hell on earth. He describes the utter desperation of the city’s inhabitants, dying of starvation, the most chilling tale being that of Mary, a woman who kills, cooks, and eats her own son.[2]See Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews Like, I said, hell.
Hell On Earth
Hell is the one place in all of the universe where God is absent. In hell, there is no love, hope, justice. As humans, we have seen the sorts of hells on earth throughout our history due to human hatred. This hatred is fueled by a myopic will to power a completed inability to see the humanity or at least a ready willingness to dismiss it. Hell is the place where nothing new can be imagined —a world that trades eyes for eyes, a world that says the answer to America’s gun problem is more and more guns.
The suggestion that we arm every corner of society to the teeth sounds, to me, like hell: a complete failure of the imagination. If all we can envision in a world fraught with violence is having more people equipped to return fire, we have lost both our minds and our way. For Christians, the notion is particularly absurd. Jesus showed us that the only way to undo violence is to exhaust its power in self-giving love. When Jesus gave his life on the cross, the devil actually thought he had won. The devil, caretaker of hell that he is, is bereft of imagination. The devil colluded with the powers of the world—human sin, religious systems, political empires—to crucify the son of God. But because he was unfamiliar with what C.S. Lewis called “the deep magic”, because he lacked imagination, he could not conceive that in giving his life completely, Jesus was making a show of these powers, disarming them, nailing them to a cross.[3]Colossians 2v14
Hell is the place where nothing new can be imagined —a world that trades eyes for eyes, a world that says the answer to America’s gun problem is more and more guns.
Sure we would be more vulnerable in a sense, but well, isn’t that kind of the point of our faith? In embracing weakness, absorbing violence, turning the other cheek, and praying for those who persecute us we are not conquered but conquer through the love of God. As John writes to the church:
For whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith.[5]1 John 5:4
We were in hell, dead in our sins, nothing new was possible until our Savior, in a profound act of imagination, liberated the world not by conquering, not by fighting, not by demanding but by laying down his life. Jesus showed us the only way to peace is a cross. He invites us to imagine our own lives completely shaped by his, carrying our crosses and following him. May we as the church imagine a new way way, grace and peace to you.
In the Old Testament, few gods other than YHWH (the name of the Israelite God) warrant mention. The Old Testament witness is univocal in its condemnation of idolatry but usually these alt-deities are lumped into categories, “gods” or “idols.” However, there are a few pagan objects of worship that warrant mention by name because of their particular allure to the covenant people. Among those specifically referenced are Baal, the chief god of Canaanite cult, Asherah, the mother goddess of Canaanite and Babylonian origin, and Molech, a Canaanite god notorious for commanding human sacrifice.[1]Mentioned by name in Lev. 18:21; 20:2-5; 1 Kings 11:7; 2 Kings 23:10; Isa. 57:9; Jer. 32:35 The nation of Israel was not like our own consumerist culture looking for the flashiest spiritual fads or the latest most “relevant” message to allow a person to be their best self. Rather, these deities were much like the political parties of the ancient world. The idols named in the Old Testament came with promises attached to them. Deities promised fertility, harvests, victory in battle, all it required was the devotion of the worshipper. For the most part, these idols were a part of a pantheon of divinity and thus did not require the sole devotion of its members. YHWH seems to be unique in this regard. The OT writers go to great lengths to display differences between the way of YHWH, the way of holiness, justice, and mercy with the way of the idols, who seek to divert Israel’s gaze away from YHWH and are powerless to bring about blessing of provision they promise. The psalmist in Ps. 106 reflects:
35 but they mingled with the nations and learned to do as they did. 36 They served their idols, which became a snare to them. 37 They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons; 38 they poured out innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with blood. 39 Thus they became unclean by their acts, and prostituted themselves in their doings.
The psalmist describes his own heritage of faith, a history of idolaters. Often in the course of its idolatry, the nation of Israel does not explicitly give up on faith in YHWH. They simply try to mix it with faith in idols. While YHWH forbids any image trying to capture the essence of who he is, the pagan cults allowed for gods that you can see. There is something alluring about an idol, about a god you can hold in your hand, a god that promises to get things done for you no matter the cost. YHWH demanded unflinching, singular devotion but the pagan idols let you have your religion a la carte—a little YHWH, a little fertility goddess. It’s all very pragmatic.
We live in a bleeding world. On the whole, America in 2018 is violent, hostile, embittered, and divided. Schools, concerts, and churches have all become shooting galleries of horror and devastation.[2]I write this in wake of the horrible devastation in Parkland but unfortunately, I know this content will be evergreen, not needing one event as its referent I am not sure if a world in the throes of sin and idolatry can evince itself as anything other. But here’s my fear. When I survey the world that is hostile to God—the world that in John 3:16, God loves so much that he gives his Son for them— and the world of the white evangelical church in America.[3]I think it is important, in this instance, to distinguish this particular segment of the larger evangelical church as the majority of our Black, Latino-American, Asian-American and Native American … Continue reading, I do not see the kind of difference I would expect. What I see, instead, is a church that is trying to combine a small understanding of devotion to God with fervent devotion to political entities and thus both literally and figuratively is sacrificing its sons and daughters at the altar of the idols. The church, in not modeling the peaceful way of Jesus is aiding and abetting the proliferation of weapons of indiscriminate murder in America. In large part, the white evangelical church has blindly supported a political agenda that, in the face of heinous acts of mass murder, essentially shrugs and says, “the blood that was shed is the price of upholding the 2nd Amendment.” Sounds a lot like sacrifice, does it not?
The loss of life is unspeakable, but as horrible as that result it, it is not the only consequence. Not only do the lives of the innocent suffer but future generations face the consequences of our lack of faithfulness. The white evangelical church in America is shrinking[4]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/08/15/white-christian-america-is-dying/?utm_term=.9aa7d1395c5f because it has forsaken its witness in the face of political pragmatism. It remains to be seen what effect that this will have on the wider church in America. I tend to think a new kind of evangelicalism will rise from the ashes, led by minority leaders and female voices that are already emerging, but that hope does not stopping me from lamenting over the church of my own cultural heritage, weeping because we do not know the things that make for peace.
The church, in not modeling the peaceful way of Jesus, is aiding and abetting the proliferation of weapons of indiscriminate murder in America.
It is possible to be love America and to love Jesus. But we can only learn to love America rightly by loving Jesus fully. Anything less than the God revealed in Jesus is an idol. Both God and the idols demand sacrifice. There will be blood. Will we continue to sacrifice the blood of the innocent to our idols of political relevance or will we cling to the blood of Jesus shed on behalf of the world to make peace? Will we give up our American rights and embrace our God-given mission of peace and mercy? Either we will sacrifice the blood of the innocent and our witness along with it or we will offer our bodies as living sacrifices, burning with the love and beauty of our God.
I write this in wake of the horrible devastation in Parkland but unfortunately, I know this content will be evergreen, not needing one event as its referent
I think it is important, in this instance, to distinguish this particular segment of the larger evangelical church as the majority of our Black, Latino-American, Asian-American and Native American sisters and brothers (to name a few) are not participating in this sort of political mixed allegiance.
