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.

Psalm 28 is not a psalm that was written in one sitting. It is a psalm that slowly took its form like the way the sunrise defeats the darkness—there is a spark of hope that pierces the dark, irrevocably breaking its hold, but it takes time for the light to diffuse, permeating the starry dome, finger painting with the clouds. David begins, bearing witness to his own pleas. He is essentially saying, “I am doing it all right, I am trusting in you, I am bringing my needs before you, don’t ignore me.” 

David then turns his attention to those who ignore God’s ways. He describes those with long careers in rebellion against God. Eugene Peterson calls them “full-time employees of evil.” It seems kind of out of place at this point in the psalm. But sometimes, if we’re honest even with our less flattering emotions before God, we compare ourselves to others. We go on detours to the rough side of town, driving through with the windows up and the doors locked, harboring a sense of superiority. Is David’s judgmental attitude right, is it just? He would think so but but the answer is “probably not.” But that’s not really the question is it? The question that the psalms are asking is will you live your whole life before God? Will you bring every ounce of action, emotion, circumstance, fear, and triumph before the Lord? Will we open the inner sanctum of our lives to the holy of holies where God resides?

The psalm finishes with a joyful flourish. Time has elapsed, the ordeal has turned a corner. David rejoices:

Blessed be God—
He proved he’s on my side;
 he heard me praying.
I’ve thrown my lot in with him.
Now I’m jumping for joy,
 and shouting and singing my thanks to him.

David now speaks from the other side of the chasm, God hears, he is faithful. David responds in exuberant praise. He’s been proven to have chosen the winning team. He now holds both ends of the ordeal in his hands and can tie them into a bow, mark them down as another chapter in the story of God’s faithfulness. 

Perhaps the message of this psalm is the brief glimpse we get into the in-between, the point between the petition and the praise. In that time, David doesn’t lose his head, he doesn’t become somebody he’s not. David doesn’t become one of those who “moonlights for the Devil.” For the time being, he maintains his identity and thus holds onto the promises of God. This is reinforced by David’s ending praise.

Pain has a way of teaching us who God is and who we are. The hard-won fruit of this suffering is that David sees his identity clearly and he sees even more clearly who God is— David is the leader of God’s people and God is the salvation and refuge for all, leader and layperson alike. David’s task as a leader, in leading them to godliness, blessing, and safety then becomes clear: follow God, the shepherd and stay true to his own God-given identity.

In honor of the life and legacy of Eugene Peterson, I will be using the Message version of the psalms as our text. Psalm 26 sounds, on its face, like the self-righteous protestations of a deluded legalist. Is David really placing wagers on his own integrity (v. 1) in the presence of a holy, all-seeing God? He even invites God to perform open-heart surgery on him, examining the hidden caverns of his life (v. 2). So what are we to do with a psalm that most of us would never claim is true of our own experience? How do we pray this along with David with a straight face?

What David expresses here is a visceral, unflinching trust. It may sound as though he is unwilling to confess his own sinfulness but that misses the point. This psalm is not about who David is, this psalm is about who God is. The steadfast love of God is the branch that David clings to, holding fast in the rushing currents of falsehood and idolatry. Left to his own devices, David would be swept along with the sinners, the devious, the frauds. But David’s life is not defined merely by his own actions, his life flows from a deep river of confession, worship, and prayer.

I scrub my hands with purest soap,
then join hands with the others in the great circle,
dancing around your altar, God,
Singing God-songs at the top of my lungs,
telling God-stories.
God, I love living with you;
your house glows with your glory. 

The Message, vv.6-8

He expresses his trust in the means that God has provided for purification. He recalls rapturous times of worship in the presence of God and the community. His life is shaped by story and song both of what God has done and his own experience with God. Everything for him starts from a deep and personal encounter with God.

David invites us to a faith that is embraced in momentary acts of faithfulness, where the words of our mouths and the state of our hearts are constantly presented to God for examination. God’s presence is a fire, engulfing and purifying every corner of his life. We can trust that God’s presence will not simply rubber stamp our agendas, or provide us with good feelings to get us through the day, but it will provide a way forward, a way of openness, of integrity, of transformation.

David beautifully conveys the meaning of life: God, I love living with you. David’s life before God expresses the poles of this life: exuberant displays of abandon in the congregation where everything is in its right place and a life of contemplative nearness in the midst of ambiguity and brokenness, a life lived up close to God. Openness, vulnerability, this is the life that is oriented to God’s presence. Trust is the foundation of this life, a trust that says God is exactly who he has shown himself to be, abundant steadfast love and thus, I can trust that I am exactly who he says I am: beloved.

Christian faith is not neurotic dependency but childlike trust. We do not have a God who forever indulges our whims but a God whom we trust with our destinies.” -Eugene Peterson

Some men are less than their works, some are more. To have known the man would have been enough; to know his books is enough. [He was] the same man in his life and in his writings.^[1]T. S. Eliot on Charles Williams. Feels appropriate for Eugene as well.

I suspect my story is not unusual. I was languishing in self-doubt, self-loathing, and self-absorption. I was a pastor, in title, not in practice. I was given a title and a job description but not a vision for doing God’s work that actually cultivated an awareness of God’s presence. Church work seemed like the least Christian work I could imagine. Five years into pastoring, I had made up my mind that I wanted to be more where the action was, where the power of the Gospel was manifested in ways I could touch, and where I frankly felt a little more useful. I was going to study law.

And then I met Eugene Peterson.

Up until that point, I was aware of Eugene Peterson but wrote him off as the author of a “popular” Bible translation—my two semesters of Greek encouraged me to use this word, “popular,” pejoratively…little did I know at that point that Peterson was a Semitic languages scholar whose translation, The Message, was a pastoral attempt to help his congregants better hear and read Scripture, it was not the first or the last time Eugene taught me a lesson in humility and listening. I picked up the book “Working The Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity.” This was my second conversion.

For the first time, a light was beginning to shine on what it meant to pastor not simply as a job but as a vocation. It would not be long before I had read every book I could find by Peterson. Eugene was drawing me into a deep life of doing for God that flowed from a being with God, a way of “saving souls” while finding my own. Eugene wrote as an artisan, a tradesman who crafted pictures out of words. Eugene was a storyteller in the heritage of Jesus himself, drawing people into the expansive world of Scripture and making its world seem not so distant from our own.

Before I met Eugene, people would ask me what I did for a living in different social situations and I would always respond “teacher.” I told myself that I did not want to push people away who might have reservations about the idea of talking to a pastor but really I am just not sure I believed in what I did—really, I am not sure I knew what it meant to be a pastor.  Eugene’s wise words and contemplative faith saved my own faith. Not my faith in Jesus, or in the power of the gospel, but my faith in pastoring— in doing thousands of seemingly irrelevant tasks faithfully, of committing to Scripture and prayer above all else, of discerning a vocation of deep spirituality in the midst of a demanding job description. Eugene Peterson awakened me to the reality that it is a profound and fearful thing to call one’s self a pastor. It is now a title I wear with great pride and even greater humility.

In an interview recently, Eugene said his hope for life’s work was simple, “I hope I can be part of changing the pastoral imagination of pastors in America.” To that prayer, I know the Lord has answered “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Eugene was my pastor. And by judging from my own experiences with my colleagues, Eugene was a pastor to thousands of other pastors and thus his congregation is in the millions. Though I never met Eugene, I apprenticed myself to him, acquainting myself with his generous mastery.He gave me a trade, he passed down tools of Word, gospel, prayer, and poetry, he invited me into the kind of work that dignifies a man, that makes him grateful for a hard day’s labor. He made me want to be a better pastor and a better man. He writes, “A life of congruence. It is the best word I can come up with to designate what I am after…”^[2]From Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places

I am not only grateful for Eugene’s life but forever shaped by it. I have great joy in the thought that at this very moment, Eugene is beholding and smiling at the face of the Savior he loved so dearly—I hope that Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Karl Barth, and John of Patmos are there for the first brunch by the lake as well.

Thank you, Eugene. You have been my companion in finding my way as a pastor, it is lonely work, and I needed you. ^[3]From Eugene Peterson’s The Pastor. The afterword is a “Letter to a Young Pastor”

To those with minds whose imaginations paint with every color until the canvas is stained with streaks of brown and black.

To those who write scripts of loneliness, abandonment, and failure.

To those who only remember songs of lament, even on a bright and warm autumn day.

To those whose breathing grows shallow, whose chest feels heavy, whose shoulders ache from unseen burdens.

To those who are well-acquainted with the harrowing darkness of the middle of the night.

We have too many testimonies of anguished brothers and sisters who lived with the pain day in and day out to say that there is any formula for healing. For most of us, life is not linear, some days go up and others go down. But just because there is no formula does not mean the promise is void. The promise proclaims to us no matter the darkness, the light will break through. No matter the swells of the waves, they obey the command to be still. No matter the grave, life will rise up.No matter the depth of despair, there is hope.

We need hope, we need it to sing over us, to bring our distorted realities into focus, to repair our broken imaginations, and to lift our heads. Hope often connotes something in the future. Hope is not simply that it will all work out in the end. It will. But what does it hope look like right here, right now?  For those mired in the struggle of mental health, what hope is there? As C.S. Lewis writes achingly, “I need Christ, not something that resembles him.” We need hope, not something that resembles it. Hope is not an outcome, it is the very presence of Jesus. Jesus knocks at the door, he comes in and he sits down to a meal with us. He says to us simply and without qualification or prerequisite, “I am.” I am here, I have overcome, I care for you, I have healed you, I am healing you, and I will heal you. I am.

For those brothers and sisters fighting, clawing, despairing because your own brains are double agents, betraying you, isolating you. There is hope for you, there is healing for you. It doesn’t depend on you, saying the right words or performing the right rituals.  1 Peter 5:7 invites us to cast all of our anxieties upon him because he cares for us. The Greek form of the verb translated “cast” (epirito) does not designate a period of time (past, present, or future) it simply acknowledges it as a fact. Essentially, Peter is saying, “Jesus does not tire of your wrestling with mental health, he does not grow weary, or heavy-laden by anxieties past, present, or future. He will take them, he will carry them. Every single time, every single day. He will never fail.”

You are welcomed as a beloved child. Jesus will always come to you. There is hope now and forevermore. Cast your anxieties upon him, every moment if you need to, he cares for you. Grace and peace to you.

I cried today. Honestly, the reason why feels thoroughly foolish and hypocritical. If I were truly integral in my faith in Jesus, the one who welcomes the outcast, the lonely, the refugee, and the little children, I would cry everyday at the things that happen in our world. But I cried today not because of the plight of an ever-growing number of the Syrian diaspora, or because my own government is both ignoring United States citizens in Puerto Rico and separating families at the southern border in an act that is both cruel and demonic. No, today I cried because Anthony Bourdain decided to end his life.

Just last night my wife and I were watching as Bourdain shared a cold beer and some spicy noodles with Barack Obama at a hole in the wall in Hanoi. Parts Unknown became for Courtney and I, a periscope to a world beyond, a no-cost way to satisfy our own curiosity and wanderlust in the decidedly grounded stage of life that is having three young kids. I find myself always attracted to people like Bourdain—grumpy, smarmy, and cynical and yet radically compassionate, humble, and wise. I would assume from the show that Bourdain and I share  different worldviews but I also know, if we could sit down to a cold beer in a sweaty taqueria in Guatemala, we would find ourselves not all too dissimilar.

Bourdain said in a previous episode of Parts Unknown that he spent over 200 days a year traveling, exploring, and filming for his show. Christian thinker Mark Sayers in his book, The Road Trip That Saved The World, illuminates the Jack Kerouac-saturated world that we all live in. For Kerouac, life was not a destination, to be rooted was to be restricted, repressed. For Kerouac, and for subsequent generations of people, life is a journey. Sayers writes:

So why do we choose to view life as a journey? How did Kerouac’s image of the road become so applicable to how we live and think? Well, modern life is a confusing business. The culture of home, in which everyone subscribed to one worldview, has disappeared. Now, every moment of our lives we are faced with countless decisions.^[1]p. 39

The chains of a mundane existence could only be broken “on the road.” Bourdain lived his life as a disciple of Kerouac—complete with an accompanying battle with addictive substances. For many of us, we may forsake the drugs but embrace Kerouac’s ideals. Travel, adventure, freedom, youth. We live an Instagram-filtered life of which Bourdain is the prototype, the veritable “Most Interesting Man In The World”. Perhaps one last time, in his grievous pain, he is beckoning us to a different perspective, saying, “Pay attention, things may not be as they appear.”

I would not presume to know anything about Bourdain’s life other than what he revealed to us on camera.  From everything I have read, it seems that he was a man who had quite a lot going for him: a beautiful daughter, an exciting, fulfilling career, and a great reputation as a friend and advocate. Much will certainly be written on how we should never seek our satisfaction in those things. Whatever his demons were, I simply want to offer a prayer for a man who inspired me to want to live more gratefully in the individual moments of my life, to seek to be delightfully surprised while well outside my comfort zones, and to just shut up and try new things. I pray that Anthony, maybe for the first time, would know what it means to be home.

Anthony Bourdain was a luminary in the modern world, somebody who not only reminded us that life is a journey but that to journey requires humility, a readiness to ask questions, to ask a question, take a big bite of something delicious, and listen. And in living out the modern ideals of freedom and exploration in a way that most of us could only dream (which is why we so readily lived vicariously through him), Bourdain gave us all a quite unexpected gift. I pray that just as he gave so many of us a lens to see places that we would never otherwise see that his life and death would illuminate the world that we see everyday, in all its mundane glory, in a fresh way. He showed us that though our passports may not be stamped full of exotic locales, the most beautiful and interesting things about life truly are universally local. Whenever we share a good meal, cold drinks, laughter and curiosity, we share our lives. We share what it means to be human in the truest sense of the word. Most of all we share a glimpse of what Jesus wants to offer every person. What  it means for us to be at rest, what it means when our striving ceases, what it means to be home.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Rest in peace, brother Anthony.

Read Psalm 25

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.