Pentecost Makes a Difference for Women

Women Patron Saints *

This is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
“In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
and they shall prophesy….”

• Acts 2:16-18, NRSV

• • •

“We faithfully live out our story when we display in our practice the reality of who we are at the core of our identity. As those marked by the Spirit without regard to gender, we must also faithfully steward the gifts Christ by the Spirit has given to the church without regard to gender.” (J.R. Daniel Kirk)

One implication of living after Pentecost that a number of Pentecostal groups have long recognized, but which many other Christian traditions have missed, is the ministry of the Holy Spirit which levels distinctions within the Body of Christ. Because we all have entered the community through baptism and the Spirit, it is inappropriate to discriminate within the Church based on old creation categories such as ethnic or racial identities, social class distinctions, or gender.

As J.R. Daniel Kirk says in his fine post, “Unifying Spirit,”  — “common reception of the Spirit and common baptism into Christ disclose the gospel-denying implications of discriminating within the Body of Christ.”

Kirk points out that in Corinthians and Galatians in particular, Paul is not arguing merely about soteriology (salvation) when he stresses equality in Christ. Rather, in both epistles, the indicative truth that everyone enters Christ’s family the same way — through baptism and reception of the Spirit — leads to the imperative that we must not make distinctions about who can participate or serve based on “fleshly” differences. We should distinguish only the basis of the Spirit’s initiative, gifting, and calling (and I would add — the Spirit’s fullness in a person’s life). One need only compare Galatians 3:28 with Galatians 2:11-14 to see that the doctrine of equal salvation has immediate implications for practices of equality within the Church.

To be baptized and receive the Spirit is to be equal within the body.

Continue reading “Pentecost Makes a Difference for Women”

Savior of the Suffering (Mark)

First Things First
Restoring the Gospel to Primacy in the Church
Part Four:  Savior of the Suffering — Mark

Jesus-shaped Christianity will grow out of the soil of a Story-shaped Gospel. The more we immerse ourselves in the Story and get to know the Gospels, the greater the impact the Gospel of King Jesus will have in and through us.

That is the burden of this series, which encourages Christians and churches to make the Gospels (and Acts) the primary documents for forming our Christian identity, theology, and calling. At this point in the series we are giving brief introductions to each Gospel to prime the pump for your individual and congregational study and contemplation.

• • •

“…Mark’s task was the projection of Christian faith in a context of suffering and martyrdom. If Christians were to be strengthened and the gospel effectively proclaimed it would  be necessary to exhibit the similarity of situation faced by Jesus and the Christians of Rome. The Gospel of Mark is a pastoral response to this critical demand.”

• William L. Lane, NICNT: The Gospel of Mark

There is a consistent tradition in the early church that the second Gospel was written by John Mark, a companion and coworker of both the Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul. Evidence from the work itself suggests that it was written in the second half of the decade 60-70 AD, that its setting was Rome in the days of Nero’s persecution, and that its intended audience was made up of followers of Jesus who were undergoing severe trials in those days.

As a pastoral response to these believers who were suffering persecution and battling fear, it portrays Jesus as the Conquering Servant-King, who displayed his awesome power of the forces of sin, evil, and death by his divine words and works during his life and ministry. It also places great emphasis on the last week of his life (6/16 chapters), showing him to be the Suffering Servant-King, who revealed his true identity and the way of salvation through his death, burial, and resurrection. Mark highlights these twin themes to promote courage and hope among those suffering for their faith in Rome. It encourages them to take the way of the Cross, knowing that the One who bore it for them is the ultimate Victor.

Mark, who became Peter’s intepreter, accurately wrote, though not in order, as many of the things said and done by the Lord as he had noted.

• Papias, 120-130 AD

Continue reading “Savior of the Suffering (Mark)”

“Wisdom” and the Fog

Road to Nowhere #3, Paul Waldo

Many plans are in a man’s heart,
But the counsel of the Lord will stand.
What is desirable in a man is his kindness…

• Proverbs 19:21-22, NASB

• • •

I stand on top of a rise in the road. Before me, a valley stretches, still shrouded in fog. Behind me, the sun has burned its way clear and I can see the ways I’ve come. I can make out a few of the sharper turns, various forks and crossroads where I chose this way or that for one reason or another, spots along the way where the road disappeared into a dark wood, then emerged on scenery wholly new. Well past halfway on my journey, I’ve forgotten more than I remember, and some of what I recall I don’t trust. In some ways I’m more sure of my path, in other ways I’ve never been less able to plot my course.

This week I will officiate the funeral of an old friend. Several years ago, our families attended the same church and we were part of the same social small group. We spent New Year’s Eves together, played cards, laughed a lot, and talked about our families and work. A simple guy, he didn’t talk much, and wasn’t much of churchgoer. We weren’t close, but I was there as a pastor and friend at some important times, and he always seemed genuinely happy to have us in his home. About my age, now he’s gone. Over the years, we’ve only seen each other rarely, and he and the family have had their struggles: finances, house problems, mental illness in the family. Last I heard he and his wife were getting divorced, he had a girlfriend, and it wasn’t pretty. Complications from a chronic health condition took his life suddenly and unexpectedly last week.

And I get to speak words of “wisdom” to comfort his family and friends at the funeral.

Continue reading ““Wisdom” and the Fog”

Let Them Preach Grace

A Moment with Frederick Buechner
“Preaching Grace”

How much preaching we hear from the lips of men and women who give us no way of knowing that they were themselves once upon a time passionately moved by the gospel, which they proclaim now with so little apparent passion. Let them preach about the moments of grace in their own lives. Let them preach about the flesh-and-blood reality of those moments and about how, even though there are many other moments when grace seems faint and far away, those moments of grace remain their richest treasure and dearest hope.

Or if for some reason they shy away from preaching about those moments — either because they seem too precious or perhaps too threadbare and elusive to tell — then at least let them preach out of them because not to speak from the heart of where their faith comes from is to risk never really touching the hearts of those of us who so hungrily listen.

from The Longing for Home
by Frederick Buechner

Is the Reformation Over? — Part One: A Modest and Growing Engagement

Is the Reformation Over? (part one)
A Modest and Growing Engagement

Is the Reformation Over?: An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism
by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom
Baker Academic (April 1, 2008)

• • •

On Sundays this summer, we will be blogging through Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom’s book, Is the Reformation Over? This work considers changes in the Roman Catholic Church since Vatican II and what they have meant for relationships between Catholics and Protestants.

Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at Notre Dame University. He specializes in the history of Christianity in the United States and Canada. In 2005 he was named by Time Magazine as one of the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America, and one of his most popular books, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, was Christianity Today’s book of the year in 1996. His coauthor, Carolyn Nystrom, has authored more than eighty books for adults and children. She holds an MA in historical theology from Wheaton College.

In the Introduction, they say this about their study:

It is intended as an evangelical assessment of contemporary Roman Catholicism, with special attention given to the dramatic changes that have taken place since the Second Vatican Council. It deals primarily with conditions in the United States but not to the exclusion of evidence from Canada, Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere in the world. In its pages we do not propose a final, universal, or dogmatic assessment of Roman Catholicism. Rather, we offer first as much helpful information as we can in a volume of modest size. Second, we also hope to provide evangelical interpretations, grounded in both classical Christian theology and the broad history of Christianity, of what we see in the contemporary Catholic Church.

In seeking to answer the question, “Is the Reformation over?” the authors state their intention of using the “classic ideals of the Protestant Reformation to measure contemporary Catholic Christianity: sola scriptura, sola fide, and the priesthood of all believers.” They acknowledge that this question, straightforward as it may sound, is not one that can be answered simply.

Today, we will consider what Noll and Nystrom tell us in chapter one: “Things Are Not the Way They Used to Be.”

Continue reading “Is the Reformation Over? — Part One: A Modest and Growing Engagement”

iMonk Classic: Has Grace Made Me Gracious?

The Unforgiving Servant, Bube

Classic iMonk Post
by Michael Spencer
from May 2009

I’m thinking about grace a lot today after a bit of a mystical experience in church Sunday.

As we were preparing for communion, I was praying. The Spirit brought to mind a series of dark incidents from my own life where God was miraculously gracious to me. I’m not talking about small matters. I am talking about incidents and character failures- most of which I’ve exiled from my mind and memories- where God alone is responsible for the fact that I was not fired, humiliated, divorced, dead or immersed in grief and suffering. Incidents that, if God had allowed them to be, would have been life defining in consequence.

These are moments and situations I know about. Only God knows the very many I don’t know about. These are crossroads moments where my life could have easily gone the route of people whose names we all know for their failures and mistakes, but God graciously intervened or overruled.

These incidents processed through my mind while I prayed, some of them embarrassing and humiliating to recall even momentarily. Others were astonishing in the new mercies revealed as I review them. How often my own failures and stupid choices should have brought about another outcome, but God’s grace had the last word.

Continue reading “iMonk Classic: Has Grace Made Me Gracious?”

Saturday Ramblings 5.26.12

Happy holiday weekend, iMonks! I always was amazed at those who could not keep their holidays straight. How could anyone confuse Memorial Day—the start of summer—with Labor Day—the end of summer? There are days of memories and days of laboring, and while often times they are one and the same, once you capitalize them, they belong on different days of the calendar. So, here is your heapin’ helpin’ of Labor Day ramblings!

And what do you do on a holiday but go to the movies? Having seen the Avengers already, now what? You could get ready for The Master, a new film that is “lightly” based on the story of L. Ron Hubbard and the Church of Scientology. Or you can anticipate Anne Rice’s Christ The Lord being made into a movie. Or, best of all, Joel Osteen’s first foray into films, a movie about Mary the mother of Jesus staring an Israeli actress I’ve never heard of. I’m sure if Joel is in charge, this will be a whiz-bang flick.

The Vatican has released a guide telling bishops and priests how to determine if an apparition of Mary is the real thing. The rules list requirements for those claiming to have witnessed a “positive” apparition, some of which include “psychological equilibrium, honesty and rectitude of moral life […] sincerity [and] healthy devotion.” Well, I won’t be submitting any claims of seeing Mary anytime soon, will I?

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God’s Strange Armour

Fridays in Ephesus (6)
God’s Strange Armour

During Eastertide on Fridays, we are reflecting on insights from Timothy Gombis’s recent book, The Drama of Ephesians: Participating in the Triumph of God.

• • •

For a long time, one of the passages Sunday School teachers have used to keep young boys interested is Ephesians 6:10-18: “Put on the whole armour of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” Knowing that many little guys like action and weapons and the drama of conflict, we let them to be “soldiers for Jesus” and try to capture their imagination and enthusiasm (and endless energy!) so they will think church is “cool” and fun.

Which is fine, I guess. The passage at the end of Paul’s epistle is one of those vivid texts that expresses spiritual truths in concrete, easily grasped terms. But, as Timothy Gombis shows in The Drama of Ephesians, we may have missed how these words work in the context of the letter and exactly how they apply to Christians.

Ephesians 6:10-18 is one of the better known passages in this letter, if not the entire New Testament. In it, Paul exhorts his readers to be strong in God’s own strength as they battle against the powers of darkness. This passage is commonly read as an exhortation to individual Christians to put on various virtues in order to engage the daily battle of the Christian life. The attacks of Satan come in the form of temptations to sin and Christians have the armor of God at their disposal to fend off the darkness. But this is not Paul’s point. This passage is a rhetorical conclusion to the entire letter, in which Paul depicts the church as intimately identified with the exalted Lord Jesus. In Ephesians 1:23, Paul says that the church is “his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” The presence of Jesus Christ fills the church by God’s Spirit so that it literally is “the body of Jesus” on earth. Just as Jesus was the presence of God in a human person, so the church is now the presence of Jesus in the world. For Paul, there is an intense unity between Jesus Christ and the church.

The “armour of God” represents God’s own virtues, as expressed in Isaiah 59 (see especially vv. 16-17). In taking this up, the Church is not merely standing for God in the world, but standing as God’s very presence in the world. He is our armour, and we stand in this world, against the powers, intimately united to God in Christ.

But more about this passage next week in our concluding study. Gombis goes to it at this point in his book because it serves to summarize the role of God’s Church as we live out Christ’s victory on earth. The section it concludes and summarizes is Ephesians 4:17-6:9. Therefore, if we want to see what it means to “stand against the wiles of the devil,” this is the part of the letter that will tell us.

When we read this section of exhortations, we discover what we have seen elsewhere in Ephesians: “doing battle” and standing in Christ’s “triumph” is not a matter of being sacred crusaders or acting triumphalistic, advancing a righteous program through militancy and might.

Instead, as Gombis notes, “the church engages in warfare against the powers in ways that defy and overturn our expectations. Our warfare involves resisting the corrupting influences of the powers. The same pressures that produce practices of exploitation, injustice and oppression in the world are at work on church communities. The church’s warfare involves resisting such influences, transforming corrupted practices and replacing them with life-giving patterns of conduct that draw on and radiate the resurrection power of God.”

In the center of this section, we find these words:

Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (4:31-5:2)

It is this kind of counter-cultural, subversive, humble and self-sacrificing way of life that points to Christ in our lives among our pagan neighbors, in our relationships within the community of faith, and in our households.

The Lord’s battle is won by loving service.

 

Adam McHugh: The Writer as Mystic and Madman

Note from CM: One avenue of interest that I like to explore as I write is the craft of writing itself. Today, Adam McHugh helps us think about writing as an ancient practice “that unfolds our souls and opens our hearts and minds to the God who speaks to us, with us, and through us.”

Adam blogs at Introverted Church, and is the author of Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture.

• • •

The Writer as Mystic and Madman
by Adam McHugh

I spend a lot of time reading what other writers say about writing. It’s an excellent way to procrastinate from actually writing. In reading the words of seasoned authors, who themselves are usually writing about writing in order to avoid other projects, I have discovered two recurring themes. The process of writing may very well make you crazy. And it may also make you a mystic.

Sometimes the crazy is the charming kind of crazy, like the retired journalist in my hometown who walked the streets for hours a day, waving at everything that passed by: cars, people, planes, squirrels. Philip Yancey says that the first phase of his writing process “is all psychosis. I don’t even subject my wife to it. I go to a cabin in the mountains. I don’t shave. I’ll go a week without speaking to a single person, except maybe a store clerk. I work really long hours just pounding out junk.”

But sometimes the crazy is the life-choking, relationship-poisoning kind of crazy. It doesn’t take much experience with the madness of the writing life to understand Hemingway’s routine on Key West while writing A Farewell to Arms. The alarm bells start to sound when spending the mornings writing with six-fingered cats, the afternoons getting bombed on cheap scotch, and the evenings shooting at sharks with a Tommy gun begins to sound like a viable lifestyle. Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, pondering that her greatest writing success is likely behind her, confesses “It’s enough to make you start drinking gin at 9 in the morning.” She laments that the pressures of the creative process have been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.

The writing process is an emotional roller coaster that threatens to run you right off the rails. Writing is about so much more than sitting down and typing. It’s more like a war, as you, your ideas, and your words all battle each other for supremacy. In writing, your hopes, dreams, fears and inadequacies are exposed. You learn what it is you most want in life and how incompetent you are to actually achieve it. It’s easy to see how the first casualty of this war is your sanity.

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“But” Out Of God’s Love

“God is love.”

Honestly . . . how do you react, deep down in your gut, when someone invokes that little quote from John’s first epistle? I believe most thoughtful evangelicals are like me on this, if  honest. We have a hard time trusting love, don’t we?

Whenever any kind of apologetic or doctrinal debates turn toward love, don’t we (the theologically “in” crowd) at least internally start rolling our eyes and maybe even squirming. And for us older guard, what leaps to mind immediately is the “L” word (liberal), or from the more recent decade the “P” word (postmodern), or to the latest (and already fading) scapegoat, the “E” word (emergent . . . feel the shudders). When love is appealed to, we basically nod our heads impatiently, and with a wave of the hand dismiss sentimentality as diversion, redirecting thought and word with a simple, but all too telling, “Yes, but . . .”

In our objectively absolute, modernist evangelical’s way-of-the-worldview, love is an excuse for mushy thinking and diluted theology. When it comes down to it, we suspect it’s an attempt to minimize sin and therein God’s wrath and justice. In our guts, we know the guilty are just trying to avoid their rightful come-uppance.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I know whereof I speak—because I’ve been among the greatest of evangelical sinners in this regard . . . for decades. When my atheist friend protests, “You Christians say God is love, but we’re not feeling it from the likes of you,” before the opponent can take another breath, I’m there with, “Yes, but we’re all sinners too; just saved by grace.”

Then there’s that agnostic’s furtive glance from around his newspaper, headlined “Death Toll in the Thousands,” with his particularly bitter quip, “For a God who is so loving and omnipotent, he sure has a knack for inflicting arbitrarily brutal disasters.” And perhaps with not quite so much relish, I’ll still retort, “Yes, but that’s God’s wrath upon fallen, sinful humanity.” At least I avoid tossing out for good measure the exhausted cliché, “Yes God loves sinners, but he so hates sin.”

I’m also finding these days that my rationales are not so quick to the political draw when a homeless mother on the street corner, with her marker-scrawled cardboard sign, fixes her eyes on mine and (without a word) asks, “Why me, and not you?” Or when that middle-aged, unemployed friend sitting next to me in our men’s Bible study, falters in voice mid-prayer-request and awkwardly rolls his glazing eyes away from us. Seems he can’t put into words the hopelessness of this latest installment in eighteen months of rejection. Thankfully I can’t bring myself to “yes-but-provident-God” him.

I am getting better at keeping my “yes buts” to myself . . . on these occasions, at least.

Continue reading ““But” Out Of God’s Love”