Honoring While Lamenting

Photo from Boston.com

Military holidays are difficult for me. Honestly, I'm never sure how to react. As someone who is vehemently opposed to all acts of violence, I am very much reluctant to honor those who engaged in such acts, regardless of whether it is for a "greater" cause.

Yet, I understand that not everyone feels as strongly as I do about war. Many of my family and friends believe that their service in the military was part of the calling that God placed upon their lives. They believe that protecting others via violent means is a virtue.

While I strongly disagree with their theological/ethical reasoning, I don't want to demonize them for trying to follow God in the way that they see fit. At the same time, I don't want to condone their acts of violence and glorify war as something that is God-sanctioned.

I would gladly give up my American "freedoms" if it meant the prevention of war's horrific consequences. My "freedoms" are not worth the countless lives of so many around the globe.

So how do we, who are adherents of non-violent resistance, honor without condoning? How can we celebrate while lamenting?

Easter: Resurrection

Illustration by Jim LePage

Darkness. Silence. Despair. Hope strangled and life stifled.

Then Sunday comes. Easter.

Easter is by far my favorite holiday.

This morning I breathed the cool morning air and was reminded that one day, after I am long gone and buried, I will breathe again.

Easter is not about Christ's death. Neither is it about we as Christians dying and "going to heaven." Easter is about God's vindication. It's about God's triumph over death and our subsequent triumph that will occur in the future. Christ is the first fruit of the resurrection, and we are promised to follow (1 Cor. 15). Christ's past is our future.

Many times we emphasize God's sacrificial death and focus very little on his resurrection. Honestly, Christ's death isn't enough. We in the West seem to talk a lot about the justifying nature of Christ's death, but I think that the Eastern Church gets it right. If Christ only came to die, then he could have been killed in the slaughtering of the innocents and provided atonement for our sins. No, there's more to it. The wages of sin is not just spiritual death; it's physical death.

—The spiritual consequences of sin have been undone through Christ’s death, but the physical consequences are still upon us. This is the promise of the resurrection: Christ will defeat death once and for all in his second coming. Without his return, our hope in God is futile.

Did the grass rejoice when it felt Jesus once again? Did the wind dance when God breathed again? Did they mourn when he ascended into heaven?

I miss someone I've never really even met. But my soul and my dying body eagerly anticipate my Savior's return, when both spiritual and physical death will be finally overturned.

Questions from Students: Jesus' Limitations

Illustration by RadoJavor

"So did Jesus always know that he was going to die? Or did God reveal it to him?"

Believe it or not, but there are Biblical scholars who have actually dedicated their lives to studying what it means for Jesus to be fully human/fully God. As a human, there is a strong possibility that Jesus did not know everything that was going to happen to him. It could very well be that Jesus had a limited look into the future. For example, when Jesus is awaiting his betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was said to be "distressed" about what was going to happen (Greek: ekthambeisthai). A better rendering of this word is "terrified surprise." In other words, Jesus does not really know what is going to happen.

However, when we look at his life and all the tensions he was creating with the religious leaders and Roman authorities it becomes obvious that Jesus is going to reach a climax and be at least threatened with death.

Also, if we read Jesus in light of the prophets of the Old Testament, we can safely assume that he is going to have the same fate as they did. Even if Jesus did not know exactly what was going to happen, he probably had a good idea.

I think that this actually makes Jesus even more profound. As a human, he probably didn't know all that was going to come, yet he remained faithful to his Father. He was terrified, yet he willingly chose his death, even though he could have easily done it another way.

Burnout

After twenty-five years of priesthood, I found myself praying poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people, and very much preoccupied with burning issues. Everyone was saying that I was doing well, but something inside of me was telling me that my success was putting my own soul in danger. I began to ask myself whether my lack of contemplative prayer, my loneliness, and my constantly changing involvement in what seemed most urgent were signs that the Spirit was gradually being suppressed. It was very hard for me to see clearly, and though I never spoke about hell or only jokingly so, I woke up one day with the realization that I was living in a very dark place and that the term "burnout" was a convenient psychological translation for a spiritual death.- Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, page 20

Nouwen put succinctly into words exactly what I have been feeling this semester. I am exhausted -- physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted. I am tired of feeling so much pressure from the academic arena to "succeed." I am tired of trying to impress others and of trying to appear "brilliant" or "profound."

I'm hanging my hat up and resigning from the lifestyle academia thrusts upon me. It's not worth gaining the whole world if I lose my soul in the process.

"Giving up" has such a negative connotation in my American culture. It's often analogous with defeat and failure, but maybe it shouldn't be. Surrendering is not always a bad thing.

Sometimes raising that white flag is actually the bravest thing you can do. 

The Bible and Inspiration

One of the challenges of teaching a general ed class on the entire Bible is that freshmen just aren't developmentally ready for some of the critical thinking that is required. A hurdle I have to guide the students past at the very beginning of each semester is the theories of Scripture's inspiration. Is it more divine (dictation) or human (intuition), or maybe a bit of both (dynamic)?* Of course, this raises some tough questions from the students. This semester, one student wrote:

"If the Wesleyan belief is the hybrid between the Divine and Human, how do you actually distinguish between what you do take as what is considered true and straight from God and what maybe is exactly not? Maybe that question is just a personal opinion on what one decides to believe, but i was just wondering what you thought about it."

These students keep me on my toes. There are two challenges: presenting an answer in such a way that is understandable to a 19-year-old student and quelling the panic when they realize that the Bible may have some mistakes.

Here is my carefully thought-out response:

God has a history (literally) of partnering with flawed human beings and using them for his glory. The Bible is full of examples. Even Jesus was fully human. He probably was clumsy sometimes and misspelled some words in school. Does this make him less than the perfect sacrifical Lamb that we needed? Of course not! Jesus wasn't sent into the world to be the world's best spelling bee winner. Jesus was sent to be sinless, not mistakeless. In the same way, God also partners with the Church, a body made up of both God and humans interacting together.

The things that dynamic theorists would view as "human" are inconsequential to the message the original authors were trying to convey when they wrote Scripture. In the OT world, for instance, if a woman did not bear children it was thought that it was her fault, that it was her womb that was sterile. Modern science tells us that sometimes it's not the woman, but it's the man who's actually sterile. The Biblical people did not know this. This does not make the story about Sarah untrue, because the authors were not making a scientific claim about how a woman's womb functions. The plain meaning of the story, that Elizabeth could not bear children, is still understood. This is what the authors want us to know.

It is important to note that Christians who hold to a dynamic theory of inspiration would NEVER say that Jesus never resurrected from the dead or that Moses never led the people out of Egypt. Since communicating these events were the authors' intent, we trust that they are not lying to us. The problems arise because the Israelites lived in a particular cultural and historical location. We have faults and inaccuracies in our own modern culture as well. But this does not prevent our intentions and ideas from getting across. When it all comes down to it, the Bible's intent is to communicate salvation history. Because of this, who is to say how to separate the Bible between the human and the divine? I don't think we can make that definite distinction. We thus believe that the Bible, in its entirety, is sufficient to lead us to God and salvation.

That's the beauty of the Bible -- God, in all his mercy, chose to partner with flawed creatures and to communicate his truth through a finite language. The end result is something that is both beautifully human and divine, not one or the other. It's a mistake to try to separate every part of Scripture into one category or the other.

*I recognize that these are very broad categories and some people may even fall into a hybrid category. Since this is an entry-level class, we don't go into great detail about all of the various theories of inspiration.