Who do you say that I am?

A Paper Written for Thinking Theologically, Confessing Publicly
Luther Seminary, Professor Lois Malcolm, Fall 2017

In “The Crucified God,” Jurgen Moltmann writes that there can be no suffering which has not been God’s suffering, no death which has not been God’s death, and no life, no fortune, and no joy which have not been integrated into eternal life, the eternal joy of God.[1]  When confronted with the question “who do you say that I am?” with which Jesus confronts Peter in Mark 8:29, this vision of the crucified, suffering, yet ecstatically joyful God is, for me, an answer that integrates the paradox of intense and abiding joy in tandem with overwhelming sorrow which invades a life of pastoral leadership.

            “To be a theologian of the cross, one has to learn to see things as they are.”[2]  Seeing things as they are in the life of an individual, community, or world brings a sense of incomprehensible suffering.  Through Jesus, God communicates that “there is something in God that can develop into suffering.”[3]  As we struggle and seek to understand how God’s promises of love for the world through Jesus are communicated through the bodies of Jesus Christ’s followers, we must acknowledge and accept that this love is inextricably intertwined with suffering.  Moltmann called this “The dialectic of human life: we live because and in so far as we love – and we suffer and die because and in so far as we love.  In this way we experience death and life in love.”[4]  When Peter answers Jesus, “You are the Christ” in Mark 8:29, Jesus’ response to this acknowledgement was to teach of suffering, both his own (Mark 8:31) and that of his followers. (Mark 8:34)  Richard Hayes writes that “to be Jesus’ disciple means to allow one’s own identity to be stamped by the identity of the one who died forsaken on the cross.”[5]  This identity is that of a co-sufferer.  “We cannot stand by as idle spectators speculating about things beyond.”[6]  To understand who Jesus is, we must allow the suffering of individuals, communities, and the world to invade us.  As Elaine Crawford in her essay “Womanist Christology” contends, Jesus is central and co-sufferer with the oppressed, and “continues to live and identify with the marginated of today.”[7]  Walter Kaspar exhorts us to hear in “compassion” the word “passion,” and says that we are to have a passionate response to injustice.[8]  I would extend this to having a passionate response to all suffering which fills the human soul and only finds answer at the foot of the cross – “truly this man was the Son of God.” (Mark 16:39)

            The stark result, then, of Jesus who suffers is Jesus who is crucified.  Kaspar writes, “To believe in the crucified son is to believe that love is present in the world and that it is more powerful than hate and violence, more powerful than all the evil in which human beings are entangled.”[9]  The crucified Christ is a reality that cannot “ever simply woven into the seamless metaphysical or ideological tapestry of time.”[10]  Like the veil of the temple, time is torn, and

“Jesus’ agony lasts until the end of the world; in fact, it goes right back to the beginning of the world.”[11]  Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, shows all the dichotomies of opposites in the old world resolving into unity in the new world created by Christ’s crucifixion.  Galatians chapter three describes Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, Jew and Gentile, representing the death of the Law along with the crucified Christ.  J. Louis Martyn claims that the Galatian church needed to “once again be seized by the apocalypse of Jesus Christ, the invasive disclosure of the antinomous structure of the New Creation.”[12]  But Christ crucified is not simply an abstract idea for the world, it is personal.  “Jesus’ death is not a substitution for our death, it is our death,”[13] writes Gerhard Forde, echoing Paul’s words in his letter to the Romans: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death?  Therefore, we have been buried with him by baptism into death…” (Romans 6:3-4) Luther saw baptism and the sacraments as ways for us to train ourselves to enter into this death, becoming one with Christ’s death.  He observed that death takes away all things that are seen and to meet it, we must have the help of things that are unseen and eternal – “thus, the sacrament is for us a ford, a bridge, a door, a ship, and a stretcher, by which and in which we pass from this world into eternal life.”[14]  Paul, finishing his thought, leads us to the same conclusion: “…so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:4)

            Within this newness of life is where the paradox of the ecstatically joyful Christ and our corresponding abiding joy is found.  Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, we can also say with surety, “I am in Christ, in him I know myself as a being who is raised above this sensuous, sinful, and transient world and already belongs to the transcendent; in him I am assured of resurrection, in him I am a child of God.”[15]  Jesus Christ is where we find the joyful expression of God’s love; not as a poetic metaphor but as an essential definition of God’s being.[16]  Christ’s suffering, our co-suffering, and Christ’s death within which is our own death, are all representations of the fullness of this love.  We discover our own “perichoretic union,” as Jurgen Moltmann puts it,[17] with God as well as the accompanying experience of the joy-filled Christ as we discover that “Christians do not live in themselves but in Christ and in their neighbor.”[18]

         As Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and God the Creator “exist so intimately with one another, for one another, and in one another that they constitute a single, unique, and complete unity by themselves,”[19] we too are invited into this union with God and with communities of faith.  The first epistle of John outlines this kind of community of faith which lives in abiding joy; saying that we are to love “not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” (1 John 3:18) We follow a Lord who gives his own flesh for the life of the world, so that, ultimately, all creation may be released into full joy and abundant life. 

When we answer “who do you say that I am?” we are not just affirming Jesus’ identity, we are choosing our own identity as well.[20]  Do our identities as followers of Jesus Christ and God’s promises for the world make a difference in our lives, in the lives of our neighbors, and in the life of the world?  I must persistently say “yes.”  The paradox of Christ as suffering, death, and joy is overwhelmingly present in my life as I explore my identity as a called pastor, and, in fact, more so in a magnified week of intense suffering, death, and joy.  This week  I have experienced Christ’s suffering with the world as I listened to stories of loss from two of my vocal students; one a Muslim during a conversation about faith, and the presence of God in her life as she lived through significant loss of home and cultural identity and sudden, violent death of friends and family members during the coup in Iran seven years ago and her subsequent escape; the other a young gay man struggling through grief both at the death of his father and his own estrangement from the family church due to rejection as “other” and wondering if there is a place for him with God.  I deeply love these individuals, and I am also deeply aware that it is not just my love but Christ’s love for them as he invades my life and heart.  They are who I say Jesus is.  This week I have experienced Christ’s death with the world as two significant losses have pierced the heart of my faith family and circle of close friends.  One, an elderly member of the congregation with whom I have spent considerable time this semester as I entered into pastoral care just as she entered hospice.  She was a complex and beautiful woman of faith who had led a long life and left a legacy in our faith community.  The other, a long-awaited baby to parents who have walked through an agony of infertility, miscarriages, and finally this complete joy at a pregnancy and little boy – born a month before term with vascular brain malformations and, three weeks later, taken off life support this weekend.  The only way a merciful God can answer to the family of an infant that lives only twelve minutes in his mother’s arms after being removed from medical support is that God dies with him.  He is who I say Jesus is. 

Even so, as this question moves from the pages of books and into the reality of the broken and suffering world, I stubbornly answer this question with Moltmann’s conclusion:  I say that Jesus Christ is deep and abiding joy that looks through this life and into the eternal.  This joy in our unity with Christ must be what drives us as pastoral leaders.  It makes a difference that even as we experience not only our own suffering and death but that of our neighbors, we continually affirm the goodness and significance of creation, and through emptying ourselves live God’s promises in Jesus into a desperate world.       

---

[1] Jürgen Moltmann, “The ‘Crucified God’,” in his The Crucified God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993 [1973]), 227-277 (with notes pp. 278-290).  Pg 246

[2] Forde, Gerhard O., and Martin Luther. On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections On Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, 1518. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 1997.  Pg 50

[3] Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1988. Theo-Drama : Theological Dramatic Theory. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Pg 328

[4] Moltmann, pg 253

[5] Hays, Richard B. 1996. The Moral Vision of the New Testament : Community, Cross, New Creation : A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. 1St ed. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Pg 79

[6] Forde, Gerhard O. "Seventh Locus: The Work of Christ." In Christian Dogmatics, Volume 2. Edited by Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, 5-99. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984 Pg 57

[7] Crawford, A Elaine. “Womanist Christology: Where Have We Come From and Where Are We Going?’ Review and Expositor 95, no. 3 (1998): 367-382 ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed December 18, 2017) Pg 376

[8] Kaspar, Walter. Mercy.  Paulist Press.  New Jersey 2013 Pg 17

[9] Kaspar, Pg 82

[10] Forde, Luther Pg 75

[11] Balthasar, Pg 337

[12] Martyn, J. Louis. "Apocalyptic Antinomies in Paul's Letters to the Galatians." In New Testament Studies 31, no. 3 (July 1985): 410-424.  Pg 421

[13] Forde, 58

[14] Luther, Martin, and Theodore Bachmann, Ed. Word and Sacrament.  Fortress Press, Philadelphia. 1960 pg 66

[15] Hultgren, Arland, “Paul as Theologian” in Word & World Vol 30, Issue 4.  2010, Pg 361

[16] Johnson, Elizabeth A. "Redeeming the Name of Christ: Christology" in Freeing Theology, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993 Pg 147

[17] Moltmann, Jürgen. "Perichoresis: And Old Magic Word for a New Trinitarian Theology." In Trinity, Community, and Power: Mapping Trajectories in Wesleyan Theology. Edited by M. Douglas Meeks, 111-126. Nashville: Kingswood Books, 2000. Pg 117

[18] Luther, Martin. Luther's Spirituality. Edited and Translated by Philip D. W. Krey & Peter D. S. Krey. New York: Paulist, 2007. Pg 90
[19] Moltmann Pg 117
[20] Hays, Pg 79

Event... Pentecost Sunday Sermon... Acts 2: 1-21

Acts 2:1-21 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

The Coming of the Holy Spirit

2 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

Peter Addresses the Crowd

14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

17 ‘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.
18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
    in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
        and they shall prophesy.
19 And I will show portents in the heaven above
    and signs on the earth below,
        blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
20 The sun shall be turned to darkness
    and the moon to blood,
        before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

Good morning!

I have made an interesting discovery the last couple of weeks:  In almost ten years of intermittent preaching – more, if you count youth worship services in my distant past – I have never, ever preached on the Holy Spirit. 

Why not?  Why is this topic so hard?  I’ve preached on things that should be harder – grief and loss, sin; death, even – but never the Holy Spirit.  Yet the promise of the Holy Spirit’s presence and activity in our lives is one of the chief promises given by Jesus Christ.  So why do we sometimes shy away from talking about it? 

One author I read this week suggested that the old term of “Holy Ghost” may have been more appropriate – as is our trepidation that this specter who haunts us may pop out at unexpected times to disturb and frighten.  

Another wrote that the images of wind and fire can lead us to consider the Holy Spirit a destructive force – one best quietly tiptoed past as we pray not to be noticed.  

One thing is certain – Pentecost, and the advent of the Holy Spirit, particularly as it is described in Acts Chapter 2, is a radical, relentless, unfolding event.  The Spirit is unpredictable, goes against cultural and social power structures, and the event of Pentecost is still is unfinished today.  Through the Spirit, God promises to radically change us from who we are to who God created us to be.  The Holy Spirit promises to radically shake us, overturn us, haunt us – and save us. 

Grace and peace to you from God our Creator and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ – Amen

There are individuals and denominations that love talking about the Spirit, I admit.  They willingly call themselves “Spirit-filled,” and talk about people like me “quenching the spirit” in hushed and scandalized tones.  But one of the reasons I think I personally have shied away from preaching on the idea of asking for more of the Holy Spirit to come into our lives and into our church is that I think there are so many wrong ideas out there about what the Spirit does.  There are people of faith who truly believe that if you are living in line with the Holy Spirit that you will have success, popularity, a big house, a nice car, a great spouse and healthy children. So if that is true, what if we pray for the Holy Spirit to enter our lives and then something unexpected happens?  We lose our job?  Or are diagnosed with an illness?  Or our child gets sick or hurt?  Did God renege?  Were our prayers not good enough? 

There is much Biblical evidence that God loves to give their children good gifts – just think about all the lovely oxygen that God has freely filled this room with!  But those gifts are given to everyone – and if we start thinking that our material possessions or our health are evidence of whether the Holy Spirit is present in our lives or not, we are eventually in a lot of trouble. 

But we know this, right?  I would be pretty shocked to find that what we call “prosperity theology” had ever been preached from this pulpit. 

Maybe we are more afraid that if we earnestly and sincerely pray for the Holy Spirit to fully enter into us that it actually will. 

We know that that doesn’t look like sports cars and swimming pools – what does God actually promise will happen to us if the Spirit enters our lives? 

I think the answers to that question are all over the Scripture – but in some ways they are encapsulated right here in Acts.  Through the Spirit, God promises us radical change from who we are to who God created us to be.  Through the Spirit, God promises us radical change from who we are to who God created us to be. 

I read a book this week called “Rich in Love.”  It is by a woman named Irene Garcia.  She and her husband Diego have fostered 35 kids and adopted 16 of them.  They are now in their late fifties and there are currently eleven children and teens living in their home.  I have three children, and some people would consider that a big family – I cannot even begin to imagine the love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and self-control required to live with eleven! 

One could argue that Irene and Diego are definitely living out who God created them to be.  They have answered the call to care for orphans, and done so radically. 

But they did not start their married life with the patience, kindness, self-control and other “fruits of the spirit” necessary for this work.  In fact, Irene writes in her book, they started out very, very messy.  They got pregnant at fifteen and were married because of this at sixteen.  As young married people, Diego drank and became physically abusive – when he was sober Irene retaliated with abusive words calculated to hurt and crush. 

She writes “the darker the darkness, the greater the miracle of change,” and that God is the real hero of their story.  She writes that their story was messy, and the children they adopt are a broken mess that they trust God to resurrect out of the horrors in which they began to grow up.  God has radically changed Irene and Diego Garcia into who God created them to be, and God is using them to radically change young people into who they were created to be as well.  This is the promise of the Holy Spirit. 

But God does not only promise radical change in us through the Holy Spirit, but God also promises radical change in the world.  

In Acts Chapter 2, Luke tells us, through the prophet Joel, that when God’s Spirit is poured out, Children, elderly, and slaves – both male and female – will prophesy.  This isn’t Nostradamus-style fortune telling or predicting the future.  In Biblical terms, to prophesy means to tell God’s truth. 

So – who is going to be the mouthpiece of God in this time of the Spirit?  Priests and pastors?  Rulers?  Wealthy people of power and status? 

Well, no.   Children, elderly, and slaves, both male and – lowest of the low – female. 

The implication then and now is that if we want to hear the voice of God, and the truth that God is giving to the world, that these are the groups we will need to listen to. 

Does the world we live in value these people?  Or will actively listening and accepting God’s truth from a high school student or a nursing home resident require radical changes in who we are as a culture?

And what groups of people are the modern social status equivalent of what female slaves were that day in Jerusalem?  The very bottom – not even considered a human but a usable commodity – or a used-up one that needed to be discarded…  The poor?  The homeless? The uneducated? The immigrant?  The prisoner?  Who is it in each of our lives that we look at and think, consciously or unconsciously, that that person cannot possibly be able to tell us any meaningful truth?   What about the person on the other side of a political or ethical issue?  The co-worker or family member toward whom we hold a grudge?  What if those are the very people that God wants us to rethink, to value, to listen to?

I don’t know if I want to actively pray for that kind of radical change. 

And I think – I think that God knows that.   God know that you and I can’t make these kinds of changes in ourselves, by ourselves, even if we wanted to – so what does God say next through the prophet Joel? 

In the “last days” – which is an inadequate translation for the Greek “eschaton,” since we tend to think of it as literally days when the time of humanity post-Christ could be tens of thousands of years – God promises to provide wonders and signs – specifically blood and fire and smoke. 

Do these terrifying signs match our experience of the eschaton?  Well, maybe sometimes – wars and disasters, both natural and human.  But do they match what we know of a loving God whose very NEXT words are that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved?”

What if these signs and wonders are not scary, but sacraments.  The very things that God uses week after week to change us from who we are into who God created us to be.  What if the smoke is to remind us of prayers that rise like incense – our sacrament of confession that creates a radical willingness to be transformed.  What if the fire is to remind us of baptism – in word and water and, in Jesus’ words, in the Holy Spirit and fire… a radical change of love and inclusion into God’s family.  And what if – what if – the blood is not ours but His – the blood of Jesus Christ shed for you for the radical forgiveness of sins, changing us from within as we bring the presence of Christ into our bodies week after week. 

God doesn’t leave the radical change through the Holy Spirit up to us and our prayers.  The good news is that this is God’s work in us.  All who call on the name of the Lord will be saved.  And we all cry out to God, don’t we? 

Maybe we already know what will happen when the Holy Spirit enters into our hearts and minds and lives.  We know what that gap is between who we are right now and who God created us to be.  Maybe it is an old resentment that we are holding that requires radical forgiveness.  Maybe there is a radical change to our values system that God wants to make in us that will require us to see whole groups of people differently – and as a result, see ourselves differently, too.   Maybe we know that we are too insulated, too comfortable, and God wants to shake us, make a radical change in our love for others that will result in risk and discomfort. 

It’s not easy.  We respond to God’s saving love for us by being willing to undergo radical changes that can be difficult and painful—turning us into people of radical forgiveness, radical love, and sometimes radical action from that love – and we literally ask for our old selves to die in these radical changes. 

But the good news is that through that death we have radical life.  Wild, unpredictable, tongues of flame, raging wind, resurrection from the grave life.  When the Holy Spirit changes us from who we are to who we were created to be, we participate in the ongoing Pentecost event that overturns the world and brings all people into the saving love of Jesus Christ.  It’s not history.  It’s not controlled or encapsulated.  It is real and happening and ours.  Happy Pentecost. 

A Pause and a Call

In a season over-filled with theological writing, the irony does not escape me that I have completely ignored my "God-blog."

Regardless, this year has been one of the best seasons of my life.  I entered Luther Seminary in the fall and have been entranced as a candidate for ordination in the ELCA.  I'm headed for ordination somewhere around 2020 or 2021, depending on internship.

I have now spent time in classes with people whose theological writings I've been reading for years -- Steven Paulson, Lois Malcolm -- and have had my mind exploded with original Greek and incredible postmodern theologians like David Frederickson.

Even better, I have found pastoral ministry, even at the small levels I'm able to provide while still in school, to be the "why" of my life -- it always has been, for children, youth, my students -- but making it more purposeful is pretty incredible.

I've also been reminded of how very much I love academia -- and how competitive I am at it, but that's just some side enjoyment!

I have spent my adult life in ministry of one form or another -- but there is a why this, why now? question even so.  Really, getting to candidacy has been a 25 year journey, ever since God became real to me when I was a choir conductor at Trinity Lutheran in Lewiston Idaho.  I have served in music ministry, youth and children's ministry, as a study and small group leader, and have always been eager to share the difference in my life because of the love of Jesus Christ.

Seven years ago, I reached the biggest crossroad since conversion.  My Pastor at Christ Lutheran Visalia, Brian Malison, asked me to be part of the preaching team that would cover for him while he was on sabbatical.  I barely let him finish saying “think about it and let me know” before I almost shouted “YES.”  I actually do not have a remarkable memory for events, which has been more of a blessing than a curse in my life, but that conversation is etched in stone – outside, in between the sanctuary and the Christian Life Center, three minutes that wildly altered my life.  No other activity has ever brought me the deep joy that preaching does.  Nothing could have prepared me for the amount of love I would develop for this congregation through it. 

Last summer Pastor Brian the Catalyst stepped in again and asked me if I’d consider being part of the presiding ministry team.   This time I actually agreed to talk to Lim about it since it would take me off praise band those weeks – but I couldn’t restrain myself past the other side of worship that day. 

When I served communion to members of the congregation a few weeks later it was as if God reached in through my back, grabbed my heart, started shaking it, and didn’t stop.  I don’t know how I made it through work and life the rest of that day and week.  I didn’t sleep for several days.  I have always read theology for fun, but it was more like I was starving for it.  I sat up at night and read for I don’t know how many days straight and then, when I doubtless had crazy eyes and knew I was in a lot of trouble, called Brian and asked to meet.  He was supposed to talk me out of the next step.  He didn’t.  But I can sleep again.  At least I think I could, if I didn’t have so much seminary work to do!

In all of this God is incredibly real to me in a million different ways.  And ever since I lost the final argument, it is as if I have finally woken up.  I am seeing theology in everything around me, God’s beloved creation in people that used to annoy the living daylights out of me, and new meaning to everything I have always loved in worship. 

 

Entering into some pastoral care situations has also brought God’s broken outpouring love for God’s people home to me in a myriad of different ways.  Sometimes I see people, hear their stories, and think that only God could be the reason any restoration is possible and I am profoundly moved to even be able to witness it. 

I don’t have any idea what direction God is leading me in next, but I am grateful for the ways God has opened up ministry opportunities to me – at CLC particularly, as I deeply love my church and congregation, but also still using music as a springboard for ministry and reconciliation both in my professional life and with other Luther students; and at St. James in Hanford right now as well, where I have a strange but God-given shift from learner to leader as I provide pulpit support for this church without a pastor.  

Next week I head back to St. Paul and to Luther for June intensives -- and to continue to question and challenge and discover how the uniqueness of ELCA Lutheran Christianity is relevant and important to the world we now live in.  I deeply believe that what we have to offer is desperately needed in the Postmodern world and I am determined to spend the rest of my life bringing the real Gospel to as many people as I can.