Is God an Angry Person?

Posted on March 13, 2021 by salooper57

Is God an angry person? Someone might object that even to ask the question is to denigrate the God whom the Bible declares “is love.” Further, is it not misleading to speak of God as a person? The Bible plainly states that “God is not human.” To refer to the Deity as a “person,” someone might argue, is to use overly human terms.

This second objection needs to be answered before the first can be addressed. Christian theology, unlike pantheism, understands God to be a person; in fact, to be “the” person. Humans, unlike some other created beings, are persons precisely because they were made “in the image of God” with the intention that they should in some sense become like God.

If God is then a person – albeit more than a person – one might further ask if he is an angry person. Indeed, this is precisely what many of the new atheists have asserted about the Christian God. Richard Dawkins, for example, described God as “the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser…” He goes on like this with ten more contemptuously descriptive terms.

Before such a verbal onslaught, many of us cry, “Foul.” Dawkins descriptions ignore most of the biblical revelation and misrepresent what is left. The accusation of “bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser,” for example, is leveled because of the conquest of Canaan. There is much I do not understand about the conquest and that even causes me to shudder. However, to say the conquest is about ethnicity is simply false.

Further, the directive to conquer Canaan is given in just two of the Bible’s 1189 chapters. What about the rest? And what about the fact that God himself, throughout the Bible, commands his people to love the foreigners who live among them? To fail to reconcile these seeming contradictions – or even acknowledge them – is to play from a stacked deck.

In its other 1187 chapters, the Bible’s descriptions of God’s love tower over what it has to say about his anger. The Bible, for example, never states that “God is wrath,” but does state categorically that “God is love.” Further, the Bible affirms that God loves the world and all he has made: humans, animals, and inanimate creation.

It is patently false to describe God as an angry person, as if anger is one of his essential characteristics. We’ve all known some very loving person to express anger, but to describe him or her as an angry person would be a parody of the truth.

God is not an angry person—but that is not to say that God never expresses anger. The Bible is exceedingly clear that he does. The mistake we make is to treat God’s love as the antithesis of his anger. Love and anger are two sides of one reality; or, better yet, God’s anger is his loving response to the evil that threatens the beloved.

The idea that love and anger can be reconciled – in fact, that anger is a necessary and appropriate expression of love – is easy to understand. Imagine that a father who loves his daughter discovers that a con artist is playing on her affections in an attempt to rob her of her money. Will his love for his daughter not find expression in anger toward her abuser?

The Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, who once scorned the wrath of God, changed his mind after seeing the terrible atrocities that were committed against the people of his homeland. He wrote, “I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God … I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love. God is wrathful because God is love.”

To think that God is not angry at abuse, harassment, bigotry, indifference, murder, and self-serving lies is to think that God does not love the abused, the harassed, and the oppressed. God is always loving. He is angry only when the objects of his love are abused and injured by themselves or by others.

(First published by Gannett.)

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Committed to Christ

Posted on March 11, 2021 by salooper57

This sermon is the first of a four-part series titled, What We Are All About.

Approximately 25 minutes

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“Woke” Culture and a Righteousness of Our Own

Posted on March 9, 2021 by salooper57

In our day as in Paul’s, people try to establish a righteousness of their own. In fact, we live in what might be the most self-righteous moment in western history. So much of the impetus behind the “woke” movement is derived from the desire to be “in”. To say I am “woke” is to say I am on the inside, others are on the outside, and I am therefore more righteous than they are.

But “wokeness” is only the latest of a myriad of ways for people to establish a righteousness of their own. I belong to the right political party (the one on the right, of course) – which means I am righteous. I drink fair-trade coffee, watch PBS, and recycle—I am clearly righteous. I go to church every Sunday and I never (well, hardly ever; at least not very often) fail to give a tithe—I am righteous.

To think this way is to assume that we have the authority to claim our own right standing, to place ourselves inside the people of God. That authority is not ours. We can no more place ourselves inside the people of God than we can place ourselves in Harvard’s student body or declare ourselves a United States Marine.

Imagine going to the Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms. Somehow you get on base, find a uniform, put it on, and report for duty. It wouldn’t be long before your were tossed out on your ear. You can’t make yourself a Marine – you don’t have the authority. You have to be accepted. And even if you are accepted, your acceptance is conditional upon your profession of the oath of enlistment. Only then will you have the standing of a Marine.

So it is with the people of God. You cannot force your way in. You must be accepted. We talk a lot about accepting Jesus, but the biblical emphasis lies the other way around: with God accepting you. We speak of accepting Jesus into our hearts. The Bible speaks of God accepting us into his kingdom. Why should we not accept Jesus? He is perfect. Anyone in their right minds would want Jesus in their heart. But we are not perfect. We are rebels, sinners, and disingenuous frauds. It’s clear why we would want Jesus. It’s not clear why he should want us in his kingdom.

But he does. Wants us so much that God in Christ took our flesh on himself and died in pursuit of us. Tozer gave us a helpful book that describes The Pursuit of God but God gave us a more helpful book that describes his Pursuit of People.

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A Vision for the Church

Posted on March 7, 2021 by salooper57

More than 20 years ago, a group of Lockwood leaders attended a conference together in the Chicago area. One of the keynote speakers urged church leaders to write a vision statement – what their church will look like as it conforms to God’s will for them. We came home and set about working on a vision statement.

Vision statements were all the rage back then. I know a pastor who undertook the same exercise and, when he was done, had a vision of a new church building, with a beautiful fountain adorning the grounds.

We had no vision of what the church building or grounds would look like. We had no vision of staff positions or programming. I’m not saying that God doesn’t give such visions; to some congregations he might but he did not give them to us.

What we envisioned was a certain type of person and a certain type of church family. Success for us did not look like a new building or a larger attendance but like genuine faith, lively growth, and loving people. Here is what we envisioned: A people Committed: to Christ; to Christlikeness; to each other; and to the world. Today we will survey the first of the four commitments we hope to see our church family make: the commitment to Christ.

Before we start unpacking that, two clarifications are in order. First, the single word committed applies to each of the four distinctives expressed in the vision statement. Lockwood’s people are committed to Christ himself. They are committed to becoming like him. They have committed themselves to each other and to God’s mission in the world.

We are not indifferent. We are committed. We are not erratic. We are steadfast. We are not apathetic. We are all-in. At least, that is what we envision for ourselves, what God desires and what a successful spiritual life requires. A failure of commitment guarantees an unsatisfying spiritual life and a breakdown in the functioning of the church.

The second clarification is this: the order of the vision statement is not accidental. It is out of the first commitment (to Christ) that the next one (to Christlikeness) flows, and so on. Each commitment is supplied by the previous one and carries it to completion. Omitting one of the commitments is like leaving out a section of pipe in your house’s plumbing. The result is not only unsatisfactory; it is a mess.

People and even churches make the mistake of launching into one of the later commitments prior to establishing the earlier ones. For example, some churches are committed to the world – to bringing about justice, for example – but are not committed to Christ. This is like installing the faucet without connecting to the water line. Other people try to create community in the church – to be committed to each other – without being committed to Christlikeness. That kind of community quickly gets clogged with selfishness and resentments and ends in disillusionment.

What this means is that the first commitment, the one we are exploring today, the commitment to Christ, is the fountainhead of Lockwood’s vision. The commitment to Christ is first both in time and in priority. Without the commitment to Christ, the other commitments will run dry, or worse, become polluted with pride and self-centeredness.

(Excerpted from the sermon, Committed to Christ. The full sermon will be available later in the week.)

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An Eye for What Others Miss

Posted on March 6, 2021 by salooper57

The biographies of Jesus tell a fascinating story about his encounter with a man named Levi Matthew, a tax collector. The evangelist Luke makes a point of stating that Jesus “saw” him. Other people saw him too, but not in the same way.

They saw him the way motorists see the toll booth worker on the turnpike: most took no notice of him. Those who did tried to avoid him. But others looked at him with disgust. He was a tax collector. People have never cared much for the company of tax collectors – then or now. But people working for the IRS are a hundred times more welcome in our day than tax collectors were in Levi’s day.

A tax collector was a citizen of Israel who went to work for Israel’s conquerors, the Romans. He collected tax money from his people and gave it to the Romans to fund the military occupation of their own country. And he did it for money. When people looked at Levi, the more generous saw a greedy and dishonest low-level bureaucrat. Most saw a traitor. The rest just saw a loser.

St. Luke says that Jesus saw Levi Matthew. He had his eye on him. He saw the things other people saw, but he saw something they didn’t see: He saw what Levi Matthew would become. Not a traitor who sold his life for money but a saint who would sacrifice his life for God; not a low-level bureaucrat but a high-level apostle; not a loser but a saint.

It is unlikely that other people saw this. Perhaps a few – Levi’s mother, his best friend – caught glimpses of it. It is improbable that Levi himself (or Matthew, as he’s more often called) saw himself in this way. But Jesus did. He has an eye for what others miss. This is not just true of apostles and evangelists, but of us. He sees what we cannot yet imagine: what he’s going to make of us.

But Matthew could not be made into the extraordinary person God intended him to be while he was sitting at his toll booth. He first had to get up and follow Jesus. This is also true of us. We want God to do something with us, something special – and he’s willing – but it’s going to mean getting up, following Jesus, and leaving old ways behind. Those who do begin making progress toward their calling. Those who don’t stall.

Many people want God to do something in their life and wonder what is taking him so long. But they are sedentary and passive, ensconced in their old life, and unmoveable. As such, they can hardly expect anything to change. God steers people’s lives when they are moving – or, to be more precise – when they are following.

One of the changes people then notice occurs in their relationships. This is clear in Matthew’s case. One of the first things he did was to throw a dinner party, with Jesus as the guest of honor and his old friends – his fellow traitors, losers, and dishonest bureaucrats – as his dinner companions.

When Matthew invited Jesus to dinner and told him who was on the guest list, I imagine he replied, “I’d love to come” – and meant it. Going to Matthew’s house for dinner was a gracious and noble thing to do, but it was not a politically savvy move. It would be like a congressional candidate accepting an invitation to speak at a Communist Party USA dinner.

Luke described the party-goers as “tax collectors and others.” Matthew himself referred to those others as “sinners.” For Jesus to accept such a dinner invitation in his culture was to communicate acceptance of the person making the invitation. To eat with “tax collectors and sinners” – traitors, losers, and dishonest bureaucrats – was tantamount to accepting them.

Jesus did not equate accepting people with approving their behaviors, and the “tax collectors and sinners” understood this perfectly. Other people did not. They had long used rejection as a tool to force such people to change. Jesus used acceptance as a tool – or better, as a context – for helping them change.

(First published by Gannett.)

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A God Veiled in Time and Space but Revealed in Christ

Posted on February 21, 2021 by salooper57

If God wants us to believe in him, why doesn’t he come out of hiding?

When I read that songwriter Michael Gungor told his wife Lisa, “I don’t believe in God anymore,” I experienced a familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the same one I’d had a couple of years before when Nick, a twenty-something leader in our church, called in a panic. He was having doubts and wanted to talk. I spent hours with him, listening as he poured out his questions and fears. Over the months that followed, I prayed God would reveal himself to Nick, but his doubts hardened into unbelief. He began telling people he was an atheist.

Nick and Gungor seem to be following a well-beaten path to atheism: cognitive dissonance over the church’s stand on sexual orientation and gender; outrage over pain and injustice; doubts regarding the authority of Scripture; and an embarrassing feeling that science has rendered belief in the Bible’s claims ridiculous. If there are reasonable explanations for these conflicts, why doesn’t God just show us? Why doesn’t he come out of hiding? Why doesn’t he come out of hiding and reveal himself to my child, to my friend? Or, if he has, to where can I point them? The various doubts that tripped my friend before he fell into atheism were all situated on the bedrock of the hiddenness of God. His thinking went like this: Christians say that God requires people to believe in him or they will be eternally condemned; God, if he is good, would assist people in forming that belief by revealing himself; God does not reveal himself; therefore, God is either not good, or he does not exist.

Michael Gungor and my friend Nick are hardly alone on this path to atheism. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, Protestantism is no longer a majority religion in the US, and 18 percent of adults raised in a religious tradition now consider themselves either atheists, agnostics, or unaffiliated—a shift driven largely by Millennials. As far as these young adults are concerned, the burden of proof is on God. If he exists, he’s going to have to prove it.

The hiddenness of God, which was once a problem for philosophers and theologians, is now a reason for Millennials and their older counterparts to reject the gospel. Christian parents and leaders can help them work through this, but they must be able to offer reasonable answers to two questions. First, why would a God who insists that we believe in him not give us more evidence—why would he hide? And second, where would he hide? One would think that the God described in the Bible would be hard to miss.

So Where Does God Hide?

Take the second question first: Where does God hide? That he does hide is clear. Jesus repeatedly referred to God as “the one in secret.” Poets and prophets agonized over this, and Isaiah exclaimed, “Truly you are a God who hides himself.” But where on earth (or elsewhere) is there a place roomy enough for God operate and yet secret enough for him to remain hidden?

Such hiding places abound. God built them into the universe when he designed it. Creation is like a palace, built by an ancient king, filled with secret rooms and moving walls. The King can stay in the palace and yet remain out of sight.

In Quantum Uncertainty

Quantum uncertainty is one of those secret rooms built into creation, and the scientists who have tried to learn all the secrets of the King’s palace have been confounded by it. David Snoke, a University of Pittsburgh physicist, says that “given our present theories of quantum mechanics, some things are absolutely unpredictable to us …. hidden behind a veil we can’t look behind.”

Snoke is thinking about a theory called observer effect. On a quantum level, the very act of measuring a system changes the system. We cannot push Snoke’s veil aside, no matter how quick or careful we are, without changing what is going on.

Even apart from observer effect, uncertainty is inherent in all quantum objects, which is to say, in all physical reality. Yuji Hasegawa, a physicist at Technische Universität Wien (TU Wien) in Austria, reminds us that “the uncertainty does not always come from the disturbing influence of the measurement, but from the quantum nature of the particle itself.” Advances in technology may someday minimize observer effect but cannot remove indeterminacy on the quantum level.

Similar hiding places exist in the macro-world. Even systems that are fully deterministic— weather systems, for example—remain unpredictable because we can never have a complete knowledge of initial conditions. Snoke points out that this kind of unpredictability holds for quantum systems as well.

In the Unknowability of the State of Matter Due to Scope

We cannot see into the smallest places dues to quantum uncertainty and observer effect, but neither can we see into the largest places. Even apart from quantum uncertainty, the universe is simply too large for us to understand. Both the initial state of any system in the universe and its current state are beyond our grasp.

According to Randy Isaac, former executive director of the American Scientific Affiliation and VP of Science and Technology at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the universe is so large and there are so many variables, we can only know it on a statistical basis. Isaac points out that one mole (a standard measurement equal to the number of chemical units found in 12 grams of Carbon-12) of a substance – that is, 6 x 1023 – “is so inconceivably vast that there is no hope of knowing the attributes of each molecule in even a minute but macroscopic amount of substance.”

If there is no hope in knowing the attributes of each molecule in a minute amount of substance, what can be said about every molecule in the known universe, which is currently estimated to be about 46 billion light years across? There are hiding places everywhere.

In Time

Perhaps time is the most mysterious hiding place of all. St. Augustine mused: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Time is a mystery that is as close as our beating hearts. We live in it (at least we think we do) but we cannot say what it is. Time – our subjective experience of it, at any rate – potentially provides massive cover for God.

Paul Davies, Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, says that before Einstein, “space and time were simply regarded as ‘there’ – an immutable eternal arena in which the great drama of nature is acted out. Einstein showed that spacetime is in fact part of the cast. Like matter, it is dynamical – it can change and move and obeys laws of motion.”

Davies goes on to say that “intervals of time can be stretched by motion or gravitation.” This is the orthodox view of time held by physicists. It tells us something about what time can do but nothing about what time is. For that we must turn to the philosophers, who have struggled to understand the nature of time since pre-Socratic days.

Bertrand Russell argued that time does not flow, it simply is. The flow of time, or our movement through it, is an illusion. His colleague at Cambridge, J.M.E. McTaggart disagreed. It is not the flow of time or our movement through it that is an illusion, it is time itself.  It does not exist. The contemporary philosopher, William Lane Craig believes Russell and McTaggart are both wrong. Craig believes there is a time that transcends time, a God-time by which all other time is measured.

The Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart argues that such a view of time leads unavoidably to an infinite regress. If we measure our time by a transcendent time, then we need yet another measuring rod against which to measure that time, and another by which to measure that time, ad infinitum. Rejecting this, Smart believes that the universal human sense that time is passing is an illusion “arising out of metaphysical confusion.”

Time, and our place in it, is a deep mystery. Philosophers cannot see into it and we can’t see through it. This makes time the perfect hiding place for God, providing him with limitless room to act while remaining perpetually out of sight.

The legendary British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle believed that God secretly acts at the indeterminate quantum level to direct the world to the future state he desires. In other words, God uses the hiding places of both time and quantum uncertainty to interact with the world.

But Why Would God Want to Hide?

But why would God want to hide? Is he just waiting to jump from his hiding place in quantum uncertainty and shout, “Surprise!”? Does he want to astonish us by the revelation that he has been here all along, working in our lives and our world, turning evil to good, and making all things serve his incomprehensible purpose?

Perhaps. God, as the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon once pointed out, loves throwing parties: “Creation is not ultimately about religion, or spirituality, or morality, or reconciliation, or any other solemn subject; it’s about God having a good time and just itching to share it.”

Yet there is more to this than God’s love of a good party. Earlier, we saw how it is impossible for humans to see what’s really going on in the world, particularly the quantum world, because of observer effect. Perhaps something like observer effect might explain why God keeps his presence a secret from us so much of the time. He cannot enter our reality without changing it. Once he pulls aside the curtain and steps into our space, we will inescapably be changed, overwhelmed, and deprived of autonomy.

C. S. Lewis addressed this dynamic in Mere Christianity: “God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. … For this time it will God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing; it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not.”

The God of the Gaps

Quantum uncertainty, the vastness of creation, and the inscrutable nature of time present unbridgeable gaps in human knowledge. They are not gaps for which God supplies a ready explanation, but gaps in which God remains an endless mystery.

Trying to find God in the gaps is problematic. If he is hiding there, we will never find him. If he is not hiding there, science will eventually close the gap, God will cease to be a credible explanation, and the faith of struggling believers will be needlessly shaken.

If humans are going to find God, it will not be where he has chosen to hide but where he has chosen to reveal himself. It is not in quantum uncertainty or statistical analysis that God is discovered. We will not find him in a gap but on a cross. It is here in the most unexpected of places that we discern, as Stanley Hauerwas has put it, “the grain on the universe.”

(First appeared in the October 19, 2018 issue on Christianity Today website.)

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What Should Christians Do About President Biden?

Posted on February 20, 2021 by salooper57

“What Should Christians Do About President Biden?” I hear that question, though perhaps in a less respectful form, regularly. It is more like, “What about Biden?” or “Did you hear what Biden’s done now?”

Most of my friends are Christians who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. In conversations about politics I, who did not vote for either of the major candidates, generally find myself on the outside. I sometimes try to reframe, or perhaps enlarge the frame, of such conversations to include God’s plans for the church and the world and Christian responsibility within those plans.

What is that responsibility? What should Christians do about Biden? The biblical answer is that they should pray for him. St. Paul urged “that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone – for kings and all those in authority…” As the Bible scholar Christopher Wright put it, “Paul commands all kinds of prayers for all kinds of rulers.”

How should we pray for rulers like President Biden? We should make requests for him – his health and his relationships, for example. We should pray for him to have wisdom and discernment, protection him from error, and from deceitful people. We should ask God to give him success in every undertaking that promotes justice and the common good.

My friends might say, “But his policies are destroying democracy.” I would counter: He is in authority and Christians are directed to pray for him. Christians were under that same directive when Donald Trump was in office. And Barak Obama. We pray for our leaders, whether we voted for them or not; it is the Christian thing to do. It is worth noting that Paul issued this directive when Nero, the persecutor of Christians, was in power.

In praying for our leaders, we can ask God to give them a “discerning heart to govern … and to distinguish between right and wrong,” as King Solomon prayed for himself. We can pray for God’s good purpose to be advanced through them, which according to the Apostle Paul, is why God “established” them in positions of authority the first place.

We can pray for leaders to have “discernment in administering justice” so that we may live “peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.” This is God’s revealed desire for rulers and the people they govern and is thus an important prayer for our country’s leaders.

There is, however, another side to all this, one which my friend’s might enter into more eagerly. We should not only pray for those in authority over us; we should pray against them when that becomes necessary. There is plenty of support for this notion in the Bible.

Christopher Wright describes Psalm 10 and other psalms like it, with their lament and protest, as “prayers in the political realm that God has actually given us in Scripture…” He adds, “I see no contradiction in both praying for our rulers and yet also praying against them.”

Consider what a prayer against our rulers might sound like if we incorporated the language of Isaiah 10: “Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.” Biblical praying for and against rulers is clearly more nuanced that an anemic and oversimplified prayer for blessing.

But is it really possible to pray for and against our leaders? The Bible gives us an example to follow. The prophet Daniel was exiled to Babylon, where he eventually became a high-ranking government official, seeking “the peace and prosperity” of the land to which he had been deported.

It is obvious from Daniel’s writings that he understood the evil nature of the kingdom he served, and yet his personal communications with the king show that he wished him well and wanted him to prosper. I think there can be no question that Daniel, who was well-known as a man of prayer, both prayed for the king’s good and against his wrongdoing and injustices.

That is an example we should follow.

(Here is a resource about which I have just become aware: The Presidential Prayer Team. It looks pretty good and may be a help for those of us who obey Paul’s command to pray for those in authority. Hope you will check it out.)

(First published by Gannett.)

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When it Comes to Love: Know the Operating Specs

Posted on February 17, 2021 by salooper57

(An excerpt from the sermon, What Goes Up, based on 1 Cor. 13:4-8a)

We often assume that 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a is telling us what we are ordered to do – or at least what we should do. But read it for yourself: There are no commands here—not a single imperative (or even subjunctive) mood verb in this entire section. Paul is not ordering us to love; he is describing love to us. The 15 active voice verbs in this section provide us with love’s operating specs, which we can then use in our own lives. This is intensely practical stuff.

Look at the first spec: love is patient. That lets us know that if we are living in love, we will be seeing patience. But what if we see impatience instead? That is also helpful. It means an adjustment is necessary – not that we need to try harder but that we need to come to God in trust and possibly repentance, so that love can start flowing again.

The same thing works for each of these actions listed. Love acts kindly. That is an operating spec. If I am living in love as I was designed to do, I can expect kindness to be part of my life. On the other hand, if I am easily angered or am keeping a record of the wrongs, that is an indication that I have moved out of love and adjustments need to be made.

Can you see how helpful this could be? When I see patience in my life, I can rejoice in the love of God, which has brought me to this place, and I’ll trust him even more. But when I see envy in my life or realize I have been maneuvering for respect, I know that I need to come back in line with God and his Spirit.

Perhaps, as in verse 6, I am happy that something bad has happened to a person I don’t like. That is an indication that I am not operating according to spec. It’s like seeing the check engine light on your dash. It means something is wrong. Time to go to God and get that straightened out so that love can flow again.

If I discover a lack of kindness in my life, the answer is not to try and be more kind. That divides me and leads into hypocrisy. The answer is to turn to God and enter his love, which makes me whole. “Lord, I know you love this person more than life itself, because you gave your life for him on the cross. I want to enter your love for him and have your love for him enter me. Love him through me—my thoughts, my actions, my attitudes.”

Sometimes people say they tried that but it didn’t work. What they usually mean is that they didn’t feel any different after they prayed. But love does not begin with feelings and Paul doesn’t describe it that way. Instead, he describes it with action verbs, tells us what love does, not how it feels. If we are always searching for the feeling of love, we will wander from love itself because feelings are a consequence, not a cause, of love.

Watch the sermon, What Goes Up… (1 Corinthians 13)
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Love: It’s not a Matter of Trying Harder

Posted on February 15, 2021 by salooper57

(An excerpt from the sermon, What Goes Up, from 1 Corinthians 13. Click below to watch the entire sermon.)

What Goes Up (! Cor. 13)

People often read the love chapter [1 Corinthians 13] as if the apostle is telling them they must try harder to love. “You were impatient with that person. You should try harder to be patient. You were not kind. You should try harder to be kind. You really should do better.”

That way follows a well-worn path to hypocrisy and apathy. 1 Corinthians 13 is not about what we should be doing. There is no “should” about it.

Grammarians describe “should,” “would,” and “could” words as subjunctive mood verbs. In verses one through three, where Paul describes the lengths to which someone might go to be an honorable person, there are ten subjunctive mood verbs. This is the try harder section. But where that leads – to the conviction (verse 2) that “I am nothing” and, (verse 3) that “I gain nothing” is not where we want to go.

In the next section, which runs from verse 4 through verse 8 and contains a description of love, there is not a single subjunctive mood verb. What does that mean? It means that here Paul is not telling us what we should do but what love does do. When we read this as if Paul is telling us to dig deep and be more patient, be more kind, less envious, less angry, we only succeed in frustrating ourselves—and frustrated people do not love well.

When, later in this letter, Paul tells the Corinthians to “Do everything in love” (1 Cor. 16:14), he is not saying, “Be more loving!” He is telling them to enter into love and do what they do from there. When he tells the Galatians to “serve one another in love” (Gal. 5:13), it’s the same kind of thing. It is not, “Try harder to be loving,” as if we can manufacture love, but “Keep yourselves in the love of God” (Jude 1:21). Since “love comes from God” (I John 4:7) and not from us, “digging deep” usually only leaves us in a hole. We need to go to the source of love. We need to go to God.

That is why, in the very beginning of the next chapter, Paul tells us to “follow the way of” – or, literally, pursue – “love,” which is quite different from pursuing self-improvement. The harder we try to do loving things, the harder we’ll find loving things are to do. But the more we enter into love (and it enters into us), the more we will find that loving things happen through our lives.

Let me put a question to you: Is it hard to love people? For example, when Jesus loved the men who nailed him to the cross by forgiving them, was that hard for him? I don’t think so because he was in love. Not “in love” in the way that phrase is commonly used; no, he lived in love, moved in it, and had his being in it. It wasn’t hard for Jesus to forgive those men but it would have been hard for him to call down curses on them because he was in love and love was in him.[1]

We must keep this in mind. Paul is not telling us to do these things; he is telling us that love does these things. What we have here is neither a lovely sentiment (as some people take it) nor a grinding demand (as others take it) but a helpful description. The 15 action verbs Paul lists – 7 positive and 8 negative – reveal how love acts and does not act. That is valuable information for anyone serious about living the Christian life; that is, about entering the life of love, for it’s the same thing.

The upshot (14:1) is that we need to pursue love. And since “love comes from God,” guess where we will find it? With him. When we enter love, when it enters us, when we “keep ourselves in the love of God,” as Jude says, love ceases to be hard. In fact, our love become downright indiscriminate. We love the cashier. We love our neighbor. We love our neighbor’s petulant kid. We love our enemy. We love the person nailing us to a cross. We don’t need to try harder. We need to draw closer to the God who is love.

[1] Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, p. 183.

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The Uncommon Politic

Posted on February 14, 2021 by salooper57

(This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for The Common Politic. The entire article is available here.)

According to the political scientist Eiten Hersh, of Tufts University, “politics is for power.” In his book by the same name, Hersh, who self-identifies as a political liberal, complains that Americans have lost sight of this obvious truth. This is especially true of the left who, in recent years, has engaged in what he describes as “political hobbyism … emoting and arguing and debating, almost all of this from behind screens.”

Whether Hersh is right or not depends, it seems to me, on two things: (1) whether power is a means or a goal and (2) what type of power is being considered.

If in politics the use of power is seen as a means to an end and that end is the common good of a people, then the acquisition of power is not only a legitimate pursuit, but also a necessary one. However, power is dangerous even when it is legitimate. And it is dangerous, in part, because it is addictive.

The American Church, particularly its more conservative wing, has suffered from this addiction. In the 1970s and 1980s, under the leadership of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Sr., conservative Christians began seeking power in both politics and the media. The Moral Majority flexed its muscle to oust liberals from Congress and “The Teletubbies” from the airwaves.

The power conservative Christians wielded grew. Politicians began courting them. For a decade or two, a presidential candidate needed to identify as a born again Christian if he were to have any hope of winning an election. I can recall George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot all answering the question, “Are you a born again Christian?” in the affirmative. From the content of their responses, I doubted whether any of them understood the question.

Conservative Christians’ power faded during the Clinton administration, then declined rapidly over the Obama years, and it frightened them. Like an addict suffering from withdrawal symptoms, they began looking for another fix. They found a supplier in Donald Trump, who promised them another round of power in exchange for their votes.

Mr. Trump followed through on his promise. Conservative Christians, especially evangelicals, were consulted. They were given influence over the selection of Supreme Court Justices and the setting of abortion limits. They were granted protections from government overreach into religious practices.

It felt good to have power again. And that’s the problem. The acquisition of power had become an end in itself for many conservative Christians, who needed power in order to feel secure. When that power was threatened, they responded with anger and even violence, which is what addicts do when their stash is pilfered.

When the acquisition and preservation of power becomes an end in itself, the results will be predictable—and ugly. But even when power is sought and preserved for the purpose of accomplishing just goals, the type of power that is in play is important. Social scientists have identified various kinds of power.

There is legitimate power. This is power that is conferred and exercised through proper and even legal means. Elected officials have such power. So do employers.

There is expert power. This is the kind of power an airplane pilot exercises. He flies the plane because he knows how and others do not. His knowledge enables him to choose where his passengers go—to exercise power over them.

There is the power of recompence. This kind of power exercises control through the promise of reward or the threat of punishment. The categories of reward and punishment include monetary (think pay raises and cuts), position (think promotions and demotions) and recognition (think prestige and shame).

There is referent power. Referent power is given to a leader by followers who respect her character and wisdom. The leader’s power comes from the admiration that followers have for her. Because they trust her, they follow her.

Each of these types of power can be appropriate, even the power of recompence. The teacher who gives a fifth grader an A or an F possesses this kind of power and the student can benefit from its wise use. The boss who fires (or promotes) an employee is exercising this kind of power and can do so for the good of both the employee and the company.

However, when the power of recompence becomes the chief form of power used in a system – whether a school, home, or government – something is seriously wrong. People cannot thrive under these circumstances. It seems to me that Mr. Trump, who achieved stardom with the words, “You’re Fired!” relied too much on this type of power. His administration – think of the extraordinary turnover it experienced – suffered from its overuse.

This brings us back to Eitan Hersh. He believes that politics is for power. I tentatively agree with him, as long as the various types of power are appropriately balanced and the purpose they serve is the common good. But even when this is so, the use of such power is addictive and potentially corrupting. And further, even when power is well used, it is destined to change hands sooner or later. The pendulum swings, gains are reversed, and a status quo is maintained.

The politic of power is the common politic, politics as generally understood. It is time for an uncommon politic, one that does not rely on the acquisition and preservation of power, one practiced by Christians in their relations with each other and those outside the church.

The uncommon politic does not seek to control others but to release them. It does not endlessly rearrange the political pieces on the board but plays a different game altogether. The uncommon politic is the politic of forgiveness.

It is uncommon. Today I read both that Democratic leaders are strategizing their revenge on Donald Trump and that Donald Trump is plotting revenge on both Democrats and those within his own party who failed to support him. This is where the unbalanced power of politics leads. And it doesn’t stop there.

Our nation is more deeply divided than it has been since the time of the Civil War generation. Hostility exists between racial, political, and religious groups. There is animosity between the sexes. Urban and rural dwellers mistrust and despise each other. The college educated have disdain for those without degrees and vice versa.

In many cases, these angry divisions are in reaction to real and egregious offences—sins. Witness the stomach-turning evils exposed by the Me Too movement or consider the unjust killings of black men. The politic of power has not been able to mend the divisions or heal the wounds. It has, in fact, widened the divisions and aggravated the wounds.

Into this setting, Christians can bring the uncommon politic of forgiveness. This involves both: (1) Confession and seeking forgiveness; and (2) releasing and offering forgiveness. Each is controversial. This is not the place to go into the issues involved, but consider the controversy each has generated. The call for reparations, for example, has evoked howls of protests from whites, who label it unjust and wrongheaded. The declaration of forgiveness toward white supremacist Dylan Roof by the members of Mother Emmanuel Church evoked similar protests from blacks who were outraged by the act.

I believe an underlying reason that people are loath to seek and grant forgiveness is that both actions are thought to bring about a loss of power. People see relationships (both personal and communal) in terms of a balance of power. Nothing unbalances the scales of power like forgiveness. People cling to unforgiveness in part because it gives them a feeling of power. People avoid seeking forgiveness because it threatens a loss of power. The cognitive substructure of these ideas is the belief that power must be retained or security will be lost.

Christians are well placed to challenge these ideas and the belief that underlies them because we know that we do not secure ourselves by our own power – whatever form it might take. Because it is God who makes us secure – the biblical support for this belief is overwhelming – we can dare to forgive and seek forgiveness.

The disciples of Jesus practice the politic of forgiveness. They are to forgive each other (Matthew 18:21-22), seek forgiveness from each other (Matthew 5:23-24), and forgive everyone else (Matthew 6:12-15). Forgiveness is one of the most recognizable marks of Jesus’s people.

(Read the entire article at The Common Politic.)

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