A Recipe for 'Greater Works'

BY THIS TIME in the church calendar, the liturgical highlights feel like they’ve slowed considerably. The excitement of Easter is gone, not to be replaced by another holy season until Advent. Pastors and parishioners, who all stayed away the week after Easter, hopefully have returned. The holy days seem to have drained away into the season of counting the weeks, depressingly named as “ordinary time.”

Ecclesially speaking, however, the holy days are amping up considerably at this point. Easter season hits a crescendo with these latter weeks. The ascension of Christ used to be marked as one of the greatest feast days of the year, up there with Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost. It signifies Christ’s rule over all things, hidden now, to be full-blown and publicly obvious to all in God’s good time. Christ himself insists that he must go away in order that the Advocate would come and, in John’s language, to enable us to do even “greater works” than Jesus ever did. Pentecost is a new outpouring of the triune God to empower the church to do those greater works. There is much here to be celebrated. A crescendo, not a tapering off.

These texts present a reign inaugurated with resurrection in which the poor eat and are satisfied. One built on friendship and common love. It suggests a God who likes getting born enough that God decided to go through the experience and told the rest of us we should go through it all over again. Is that bodily enough for you?

THE STORY OF the Ethiopian eunuch is one of our best. It is situated here in Acts, but it begins a trajectory with momentum into the approaching Pentecost season. It depicts two very different sorts of people. The eunuch is in charge of the court of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians. He has traveled all the way to Jerusalem to worship in a temple he cannot enter—one who lacks all the necessary male parts cannot enter the assembly of the Lord (Deuteronomy 23:1). Philip is an apostle, a Jew, and a Middle Easterner, and he has no access to the sort of money the eunuch does. The eunuch is reading a Bible he cannot understand, hungering for a God he knows only vaguely. By the time Philip explains the subject of Isaiah to him, the eunuch is ready: “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” (Acts 8:38). And the two men, one Ethiopian, one Middle Eastern, one poor, one rich, one Gentile, one Jew, dive together, down into the water, for baptism.

What a glimpse of the church! The church isn’t just a place that does the sorts of things Jesus does. We don’t just admire Jesus, or even just worship him. We are joined to him, vine to branches. We are organically united, one to another, so that one can no longer be understood without the other. Here is the chief sign of that union—we love. We are commanded to, but we hardly need the command, any more than a leaf needs to be told to belong to its branch. Love flows from the one to the other and back without deliberation.

The result blooms.

[ May 10 ]

Equal Friendship

Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

THERE IS AN odd relationship between faith and baptism in the book of Acts. In Acts 10, the Gentiles believe, speak in tongues, and praise God, so what can the ecclesial authorities do? They have to provide the water. Often in our churches we baptize as a matter of course, when someone reaches a certain age. (Baptists are not immune to this phenomenon.) What would it mean for our life together to be so rich that others catch the Spirit, contagion-like, and we have no choice but to baptize them too?! No wonder the seas roil and the hills clap their hands (Psalm 98:7-8).

In John 15, we must remember that one of the key philosophical commitments around friendship in the ancient world is that it can only pass between equals. A slave cannot be a friend to a king because of the vast power imbalance between them. We might follow Aristotle’s logic in this: Genuine friendship requires a balance of power, the ability to look one another in the eye as equals.

And Jesus calls his disciples “friends” (John 15:15). What this means is that human beings—lowly, mortal, time-bound, and fallible as we are—can be “friends” with God Almighty. This observation has yielded countless cheesy sermons and songs, and yet it stands true. It is an odd sort of friendship, with most of the influence running in one direction! But this friendship is the secret to why the commands given us are not burdensome. They are wisdom offered from one friend to another that makes life more fulsome, more rich, more a source of flourishing.

[ May 17 ]

All in All

Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53

SO WHERE DID Jesus go after his resurrection? If it is as bodily as the gospels insist, where is that body now?

The stories from Luke and Acts suggest an answer. Jesus’ body ascends into heaven. This feels slightly like Christianity at its most mythological. How far up does he go? Where does he land? Is heaven a physical place, that if we could fly high enough we could get to? Why up anyway? Artistic renderings of the ascension are always awkward—the bottom of feet, a cloud in the sky—and one wonders whether the actual act would have looked any less awkward.

We can say with greater confidence that his going up is a reason for rejoicing. All creation sings. He has subdued the peoples and is king over the nations.

The accent in Ephesians is on the wonderfully Pauline word “all.” Christ rules over all things, above all rule, with all under his feet; he is head of all things and is the fullness of all things who fills all in all. There is not a single godless molecule in all creation.

And that brings us back to our opening question. Theologians through the ages have noticed that the Bible speaks in multiple ways of the body of Christ. The church is that body. So too is the Lord’s Supper. This is a variegated body; there are at least three forms of it. One is inaccessible, ascended. The other two are, well, us, or in us, making us into Christ.

[ May 24 ]

Spirit Dreams

Ezekiel 37:1-14; Psalm 104:24-34, 35b; Acts 2:1-21; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

THE HOLY SPIRIT always seems to get short shrift in Christianity. By the time the Spirit comes along, the story is nearly over. Some theologians have tried to turn this into an asset. The Spirit is the “shy” person of the Trinity. The Spirit wants no self-directed attention, but rather always defers attention to Jesus. Some have spoken of the Spirit in feminine terms, exacerbating this issue. Mary Daly, feminist critic of traditional theology, recalls the church’s traditionalist response: “[You women are] included under the Holy Spirit. ‘He’ is feminine.”

These texts suggest an outsized, even exaggerated role for the Spirit. Without the Spirit, all is chaos, unformed, empty. But the Lord sends forth the Spirit and all things are created, and God renews the face of the ground. Jesus says we want him to go away, so the Advocate can come, the Spirit, who leads us into all truth. Before the coming of the Spirit, the disciples are a huddled-up band of betrayers and deniers. With the Spirit they go into all the world, baptizing, teaching, meeting violent deaths. Without the Spirit, all peoples are divided, unrelated. With the Spirit we are one body, young men and old women dreaming dreams together.

Ezekiel shows the greatest role for the Spirit, turning dry bones into living, skin-on creatures—Israel restored. So the Spirit may be deferential to Jesus, but she is not inconsequential. The Spirit is world-creating, renewing, restoring, making all things new.

[ May 31 ]

‘My Name Is Trinity’

Isaiah 6:1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17

IN JOHN 3, Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the dark. He asks basic questions. He doesn’t understand Jesus. Do any of us? Are any of us in the light, in the know?

This is a Sunday on which the church grapples with the triune nature of the God of all things. Trinity Sunday is the source of innumerable indecipherable sermons. It is not exactly on the list of parishioners’ faves. A professor of mine used to say the preacher opens a Trinity Sunday sermon apologizing for his ignorance of the subject before spending the next 20 minutes demonstrating that ignorance.

The Trinity is nothing more or less than God. We talk about this in every sermon. The voice, or word, of the Lord is powerful, stripping the forest bare, flashing flames of fire, causing trees to dance, as in Psalm 29. Some ancient Christians saw the two seraphim with the Lord in the temple, as Isaiah describes, as the Holy One and the Spirit (though later we thought this diminished their role and dropped that line of thought). Paul’s word to the Romans is the most important—the Spirit is in us, enabling us all to name God “Abba,” the way Jesus does. The Trinity is not “up there,” distant, obscure. The Trinity is in us, under us, working through us to make us daughters and sons of God.

Now the light is coming up and we, like Nicodemus, are starting to see. The Spirit blows where it will, moving strangers like you and me into saints, making all things new.