Pray Hard

Every memorial service I do includes these words from a prayer from the United Methodist Book of Worship.

Help us to live as those who are prepared to die. And when our days here are accomplished, enable us to die as those who go forth to live, so that living or dying, our life may be in you, and that nothing in life or in death will be able to separate us from your great love in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Every time I say those words, I wonder: Are the people who hear those words living as those who are prepared to die? Am I?

What does it mean to live as one who is prepared to die? In the Broadway musical Zorba, Zorba the Greek recounts the time he encountered a very old man planting an almond tree, and the man explained, “I live every minute as if I would never die.” In wonder, Zorba exclaims, “I live as if I would die any minute!”

I’m not sure I know how to live that way, but I am sure that Jesus did, and part of learning to follow Jesus may be learning to live that way. It’s not a matter of living for the moment but of living in the moment – being fully present, fully committed to acting faithfully and bravely in the situation and being as loving as possible to all the people around you.

None of our anxiety can add a single moment to our lives, Jesus says. “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Matthew 6:27, 34).

I have been musing about living in the moment and related things for the last week or so, ever since I heard that Junius Dotson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Junius is head of Discipleship Ministries for the United Methodist Church. He is one of the people who crafted the plan for a peaceable separation of the church over sexuality issues. He is one of the leaders our church sorely needs to guide us to a better future.

As well as esteemed colleague, I consider him a friend. Not that we know each other well. He was going to write a jacket blurb for my Christmas book, until the publishing deadline got moved, and the last time I saw him, he signed my copy of his book, Soul Reset.

A year living under the cloud of pandemic has not led me to think about dying any more than I did before. But his diagnosis surely has. Pancreatic cancer is especially deadly because it’s sneaky as well as nasty. By the time it’s diagnosed, it’s usually too late to do much about it.

I hate this disease. A beloved aunt and two friends of mine have died from it. Chuck Davis’ friend Marc Jacobs has it; he’s been on and off our prayer list for months. You also may know someone who had it, or someone with a loved one who had it. I encourage you to include them in your prayers every day. While I’m at it, I encourage you keep your Weekly Update handy so you can pray for each of those persons on our prayer list by name at least once every day.

What good does prayer do? Understand that we are not trying to change God’s mind. God did not say, “Today I’m going to give so-and-so cancer,” so that it becomes our job to change God’s mind about that. God does not run around “giving” people cancer, OK?

I know that some people believe that God micromanages our lives, so that everything that happens is God’s will. Let me state this clearly. That is an obscene and blasphemous view of God. I really like Twila Paris’ song “God Is in Control.” But you cannot take it literally in many circumstances.

God is in charge, certainly, but God is not in control. You are not a robot or a marionette, and God is not a puppeteer twitching your strings to control your movements. Many forces – good and bad – influence you, but no force – the power of God included – determines your every move. If God’s will actually were done on earth as it is in heaven, why would we pray for that to happen whenever we recite Jesus’ model prayer?

We pray for the welfare of others because God tells us to do that. Sometimes when we pray, we are roused to action that makes the prayer come true – and that may be one of the highest forms of prayer there is. But when someone’s health is concerned, or we are separated by distance, prayer may be the most we can do because we are not in control any more than God is. Still, God has assured us that our prayers mean something. They’re not a waste of breath. In ways we can’t understand, our prayers help God act.

It’s not that we have to encourage God to act. Rather, as John Wesley once said, “God does nothing but in answer to prayer.” I am not sure of the full implications of that statement. But at least one of the implications is that we ought to be continually praying, “pray without ceasing,” as the Apostle Paul says. (1 Thessalonians 5:17, Romans 12:12)

We are never encouraged to pray for halfway measures. A teen-ager in one of my churches once suffered a serious eye injury. His mother asked me if I thought she should pray for a full recovery. “Go for it,” I said. He eventually lost sight in that eye, but his mother and others who prayed with her knew that they did all they could for him at the time.

In the ninth chapter of John’s Gospel, we find a story that begins this way:

“As Jesus walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned. He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.”

And Jesus heals the man. (John 9:1-3)

The first time I preached from this text, there sat in the very front row of the church, not 10 feet from where I stood, a married couple and their son who was born blind. They were faithful Christians, and they had probably heard the story before, but they had no fear that I would use the text against them. They knew they were in a church where the gospel of Jesus Christ was respected, not used as a launching pad for culture-pleasing nonsense.

Not even the words of Jesus have been able to eradicate many thousands of years of superstition that masquerades as religion. In Jesus’ day, as in our own, people tend to assume that if something bad happens, God is behind it somehow; God must be punishing someone for something. This is terrible, destructive thinking.

Some behaviors do have terrible consequences, but in general bad things don’t happen to you because you’re a worse sinner than your neighbor. Jesus says this most clearly in the opening story of Luke 13. There’s a political context here. Jews have been killed in conflicts with Roman soldiers. They were no worse sinners than any of you, Jesus says, but if you do what they did, you could die just as they did. Forty years later, hundreds of thousands of Jews would die in a disastrous revolt against Rome.

As I said earlier, you might as well go whole hog in your prayer requests. When in doubt, go for the miracle! We know almost nothing about how God processes such requests, or acts on them.

There are some obvious limits imposed by logic and propriety. Here’s a classic, listed by Rabbi Harold Kushner in his notable book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. If you’re out driving and you see a fire truck roaring into your neighborhood, you should not pray, “Please God, don’t let it be my house.” Think about what you’re asking. The fire is already burning. God can’t change whose house it is. Do you really wish this calamity on a neighbor?

A more appropriate prayer might be, “God, support the firefighters and the homeowners, whoever they are.”

Kushner concludes that there are situations where God’s hands are tied by circumstances. God can’t change some things no matter how much God might want to change them. That doesn’t mean you don’t wish that God could, or would.

About two and a half years ago, our granddaughter Rosie suffered an unavoidable brain trauma during birth. Doctors could not determine the extent of the damage for several days. For a week, we stroked her little arms and smoothed her hair and prayed for a miracle. On the seventh day of her life, she died.

I do not believe that our prayers were in vain. I do not believe that God in some way engineered the tragedy, or that God wanted Rosie to die, or refused to hear our prayers because we were worse sinners than others, or because we lacked enough faith. All of those explanations are superstitious claptrap, and any religious leader who mouths them is not speaking for God but for another spiritual force altogether.

I do not know why God could not or did not heal Rosie, or why God could not or did not heal many others I have prayed for over the years, or why so many people today are dying from COVID-19. January was the deadliest month yet in America, more than 95,000 deaths. The last time I checked, the total was more than 460,000, and it has probably jumped since then.

This, too, is not God’s doing, no matter what the obnoxious flakes on TV and radio say. It’s not God’s punishment for this or for that, whatever the political persuasion of the false prophet who claims to know God’s mind – and isn’t it surprising that God’s mind so exactly mirrors the false prophet’s mind?

The coronavirus is not God’s punishment for sin. God simply does not work that way. Still, we may be reaping the consequences of our sinful lack of preparation for such events, which scientists have been warning about for decades. God is not mocked, Paul says. You reap what you sow. (Galatians 6:7). As a society, we can act stupidly only so long before it catches up to us.

Our task today is to live wisely and to live fully and to pray. Pray for the health and welfare of others, as well as your own health and welfare. Pray for the leaders of this and other countries as well, because we’re all making this up as we go along. As has been wisely said, we make the road by walking it.

So, as the song says, walk on. Walk on, and pray every step of the way. Pray boldly. Don’t hold back. Pray hard. Give it your all. Above all, trust God. Not that you will necessarily get what you want, but trust that God hears you and that God stands with you, whatever the result.

While you’re praying, include this thought:

God, help me to live as one who is prepared to die. And when my days here are accomplished, enable me to die as one who goes forth to live, so that living or dying, my life may be in you, and that nothing in life or in death will be able to separate me from your great love in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:38-9)

Amen.

This message was delivered February 7, 2021, for Edgerton United Methodist Church, from Romans 8:38-39 and other scriptures.

Get Up!

Linda went to start her car the other day, and the battery was dead. Apparently she hadn’t driven enough recently to keep it charged.

A few days earlier, I was walking up the three steps to our front porch, and I tripped on the top step, and down I went, face first. I guess that’s what happens when you’re trying to carry something while thinking about something else.

These days I consider it good if I can keep one thought in my head, let alone two or three at the same time. I mentioned the problem to one of our daughters, and I blamed it on creeping dementia. “No, Dad,” she said, “that’s pandementia.”

Pandementia – I think the word perfectly describes our current situation. After nearly a year of decidedly non-normal behavior, many of us have gone just a little bonkers trying to cope.

I told my chiropractor about falling, and she said, “You should have come to see me right away.” Don’t you hate it when people lecture you, and they’re right?

For weeks now, I’ve wanted to start a new exercise routine. Wanting is as far as I’ve gotten. The new routine would be on top of my regular routine of stretching and light exercise to help my back. I don’t remember the last time I did that.

I never figured that I would be one to fall into this sense of endless drifting. Not me, I’m too strong for that! But I have to admit that I have a major case of pandementia. What can I do to shake myself out of this mental quicksand? What can you do to shake yourself out of it?

Mindful that I always preach to myself as much as I do to you, let’s proceed under the jaunty title of “Seven Steps to Beat Pandementia.”

Let’s begin by reading Philippians 4:6-9 from the Common English Bible. The Apostle Paul writes:

Don’t be anxious about anything; rather, bring up all of your requests to God in your prayers and petitions, along with giving thanks. Then the peace of God that exceeds all understanding will keep your hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus.

From now on, brothers and sisters, if anything is excellent and if anything is admirable, focus your thoughts on these things: all that is true, all that is holy, all that is just, all that is pure, all that is lovely, and all that is worthy of praise.

Practice these things: whatever you learned, received, heard, or saw in us. The God of peace will be with you.

For many of us, those are familiar words – almost too familiar. Let’s hear them again a different way, this time from The Message by Eugene Peterson.

Don’t fret or worry. Instead of worrying, pray. Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers letting God know your concerns. Before you know it, a sense of God’s wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It’s wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the center of your life.

Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious – the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Put into practice what you learned from me, what you heard and saw and realized. Do that, and God, who makes everything work together, will work you into his most excellent harmonies.

There you have them, Paul’s seven steps to beat pandementia. Let’s count them out.

First, don’t worry. Don’t be anxious. One way or another, anxiety is always crippling. It’s a mental dis-ease that does more to harm than many physical diseases.

Henri Nouwen says that worry means our hearts are in the wrong place. We’re focused on “many things” rather than the one thing that Jesus says is necessary (Luke 10:41-42). Our lives are so fragmented that we’re “all over the place” mentally and spiritually. We’re in such spiritual crisis that we may have an address but we’re never home.

Instead of worrying, pray. That’s step two. I love this phrasing from The Message: “Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers.” Don’t hesitate to tell God all your troubles. Don’t hold back. God is a good listener. God already knows your concerns, even before you express them, but you need to put them into words to express them freely to God and to yourself. You may be surprised how much healing occurs when you hear yourself saying the words, in your head or out loud.

As you pray, always give thanks. That’s step three. As bad as some things are, other things are still good. Give thanks for the good, even if your heart is breaking over the bad.

As you praise God even in the midst of your pain, you may be surprised again at the change that can occur within you. This is step four now. As you pray, allow yourself to be filled with a sense of God’s wholeness. This is a sense that no matter how broken the world is, and how broken some parts of your life are, God is still working to mend all things. This sense is what used to be called the peace that passes all understanding. This is the peace that surpasses all we can fathom, the peace that keeps our hearts and minds safe in Christ Jesus.

Fifth, focus on what’s good, and shun bad thoughts. A simple way to remember this is the old Johnny Mercer song that’s as true today as it was in the 1940s.

You’ve got to accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

Don’t mess with Mister In-Between

Yeah, sometimes pop culture gets it right.

Sixth, practice what you’ve learned from role models who model Christ. You can best remember and honor those saints whom you have known by doing as they did. If you follow their good examples, the God of peace will be with you, and you will feel God’s peace within you.

The seventh and final step is a summary of all that came before. It’s a firm call to action to all of us when we feel weak and when we stumble. This message comes to us in a frequent refrain heard throughout the Bible, but especially in the New Testament.

When the Prophet Elijah falls exhausted, the messenger of the Lord comes to him and says, “Get up and eat!’’ (1 Kings 19:7)

When God commissions the prophet Jonah, God says, “Get up, and go!” (Jonah 1:2)

When King Herod threatens the life of the infant Jesus, an angel of the Lord appears to Joseph in a dream and says, “Get up and go.” (Matthew 2:13)

When a crippled man is lowered through the roof to him, Jesus says, “Get up, pick up your cot, and go home.” (Matthew 9:6)

To a man at the Bethesda pool who has been unable to walk for 38 years, Jesus says, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.” (John 5:8)

To the leper who returns to thank Jesus for healing him, Jesus says, “Get up and go. Your faith has healed you.” (Luke 17:19)

To blind Bartimaeus who calls out to Jesus for mercy, people say, “Get up, Jesus is calling you.” (Mark 10:48-49)

When the daughter of Jairus the synagogue leader dies, Jesus takes her by the hand and says, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” And she does. (Mark 5:41)

When Peter is called to the bedside of a stricken saint, he says, “Tabitha, get up!” And she does. (Acts 9:40)

After he is transfigured before them, Jesus tells his disciples, “Get up. Don’t be afraid.” (Matthew 17:7)

When he awakens his sleeping disciples in Gethsemane, he says, “Get up. My time is at hand.” (Matthew 26:46)

When Jesus accosts Saul on the road to Damascus, he says, “Get up. I have plans for you.” (Acts 9:6, 22:10, 26:16)

When God calls Ananias to help Saul, God says: “Get up and go find Saul.” (Acts 9:11)

When Peter is bound in prison, an angel appears and loosens his chains and says, “Get up quickly.” (Acts 12:6-7)

Those are just some of the “get up” commands of the Bible. Notice that we’re not told simply to “get up” but to “get up” and do something. Also notice that in these commands is an implicit promise. It takes gumption and resolve to get up when you’re down. But you never act alone. God is always with you. God is always at your side. And God may provide that extra “oomph!” to lift you up.

In these long days of pandemic, it is so easy to become bed ridden, house ridden, habit ridden, self ridden. Don’t fall into this trap. Don’t let pandementia get the best of you.

Read Philippians 4:6-9 again and again for those “Seven Ways to Beat Pandementia.” Or remember just this one.

When the battery dies, get up and recharge it. When you fall on your face, get up and get going. When it’s time for your exercises, get up and get moving. Whatever happens, always get up – and keep following Jesus, who’s always there to lead you.

Amen.

This message was delivered online January 31, 2021, to Edgerton United Methodist Church, Edgeton, Kansas, from Philippians 4:6-9.

Repairers of the Breach

When you were a kid, do you remember belonging to a club? It may have met in one corner of the front porch, or maybe in the hayloft, or maybe even in a treehouse. Your club may not have had a name, but one thing it surely had was a sign – and probably the sign said something like, “No girlz allowed.” In the comics, that’s girls with a “Z” at the end.

Probably down the lane a ways there was another clubhouse that also had a sign out front, only this sign said, “No boyz allowed.” That’s boys with a ”Z” at the end.

Either way, you get the picture. Whoever else might be in your club, you sure didn’t want one of that other kind. Here’s it’s boys only; there it’s girls only. These are exclusive clubs, you see. They have standards.

There are still plenty of clubs like those, though the signs may now be invisible so as not to violate antidiscrimination laws. If yours is a public club, it must be open to everyone. If yours is a truly private club, it may be a somewhat different story.

You may be surprised to hear that the church is neither a public nor a private club. The church is altogether a different thing. The church is a creation of God. It is open to all God’s children.

Some churches seem to think that their members, and theirs alone, are God’s children – and all those other folks, well, presumably they’re somebody’s spawn but certainly not God’s. Let me say this plainly. These churches have it all wrong. Every human being is precious because every human being is created in the image of God. You’ve heard the saying, “God don’t make no trash.” Let me add to that. God don’t make no bastards either. Every human being is a beloved child of God.

Well, now I’ve done it. Not only have I offended some people who want to think that their church is an exclusive club. I’ve doubly offended them by using a word they think should never be said in church. But I think there are a lot worse words that should not be used in church, and those are words of exclusion and bigotry and hatred. When we use those words in church, we might as well be cursing God right to God’s face.

I have a confession I must make. It requires a little introduction. We are one of only two Reconciling Ministries churches in the Five Rivers District. That is, we publicly support the full participation of all persons in church life. As our website says, “We believe that all people are called to a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.” And all means all, right?

The Reconciling Ministries people recently decided to update their statement of inclusion. We’ll eventually have to decide as a church whether we want to sign off on the change. The new statement is not a lot different from the old one. It’s mostly just longer, because it lists more people who might be unwelcome in some churches.

It begins: “We welcome and affirm people of every gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation…”

The first time I read that, it occurred to me that the statement includes people who are transgender. For a moment, I was unsure about that. Do I want to “welcome and affirm” people who’ve changed from one sex to the other?

Then it occurred to me. First, how am I going to know? Second, what business is it of mine? I don’t think I know anyone who’s transgender. But I recall that some years ago I didn’t think I knew anyone who was gay, and God sure opened my eyes on that.

Whatever your sex or sexual orientation, you are made in the image of God, who transcends all sexual differences. Therefore, you ought to be welcome in any church that claims a relationship with God. I just can’t see it any other way.

I know some people cry, “These people are sinners!” Find me someone who’s not. “No,” some say, “These people are special sinners!” Well, what kind of special sinner are you? Do you really think your sins make you superior to anyone else?

Abraham Lincoln said it well in a speech he made in 1858 Lewistown, Illinois, during his debates with Stephen F. Douglas. He said the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence was that no person “stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.”

Friends, this is Human Relations Day. It’s a day set aside by the United Methodist Church in anticipation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday on Monday. Today we especially remember King’s dream that one day all Americans would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, and one day all Americans might be united in what he called “beloved community.”

We are as far from that ideal as ever. In recent weeks we have seen the election of a black man and a Jewish man to the Senate from Georgia, and the election of a woman of color as vice president. These are huge leaps forward in human relations, but they are leaps forward from so far back that they seem hardly measurable.

We measure such progress in inches, while every moment of every day millions of Americans are still deprived of basic rights – not just privileges but basic rights – because of the color of their skin or the country they were born in or their birth language or any of the many other idiotic ways that some people seek to enforce an advantage over others. And that’s what it’s about. It’s about some people trying to take advantage of others; robbing them of what’s theirs by birthright as children of God.

If nothing else, fairness demands that we change – fairness, and our national charter and, oh yes, the gospel of Jesus Christ, which calls us to announce grace and peace to all the world, with no exceptions.

After the assault on our nation’s Capitol on January 6, our bishop also has declared this a day of healing and hope. We are a long way from healing, but maybe there is some hope.

January 6 was Epiphany, a day of revelation and unveiling of truth. Surely what we saw in Washington was a sort of epiphany. We saw clearly that day how deeply our nation needs healing and how much we need hope.

We also saw clearly that some people want vengeance rather than healing, and they place their hope in the violent destruction of their enemies. While relying on our police forces to maintain order, we have to stand firmly against the forces of disorder without resorting to violent means ourselves.

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus says (Matthew 5:6). You can tell who the peacemakers are. They’re the ones who have bruises all over their bodies because they’ve been pummeled by both sides.

The prophet Isaiah calls such people “repairers of the breach” (Isaiah 58.12). To repair the breach in our land, we cannot be ones who lamely say, “There are good people on both sides.” Because some of the people involved are not good people.

The ones who stormed the Capitol last week with weapons and other implements of destruction, who savagely beat police officers who got in their way, who randomly destroyed public property, who ransacked the quarters of legislators and carried rope and zip ties in case they encountered one – these were not good people.

Nor can we excuse the behavior of those who helped incite this insurrection by reckless rhetoric and lies about a stolen election. Was it only last week that we renewed our pledge to “resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves”? If only we’d known how timely that pledge was.

It is never easy to stand up for truth and goodness and stand against falsehood and evil. But we who are committed followers of the One who is the Way, the Truth and the Life must take this stance. And if that makes us unpopular in some quarters – well, we already know we aren’t welcome in some clubhouses, don’t we? We also know that we are welcome in that great assembly that counts the most – the great family of God.

Even then, there will inevitably be disagreements among us. I’m sure that some among you may take sharp exception to what I’ve said today, or the way I’ve said it. As I’ve said previously, you are free to disagree with me. I’ll still love you, and I hope you’ll still love me. But we must stand united in the hope of Christ because we share the love of Christ.

In the spirit of that love, I invite you to join me in a prayer that captures the gentle spirit of Saint Francis, whether he actually used these words or not. Would you pray with me?

Lord, make me a channel of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith in you.

Where there is despair, let me bring hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may never seek

so much to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

and to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

These are words of hope that remind us of our God of hope and healing.

I think my grandson Theo can instruct us today. Theo is six years old, but sometimes he shows an understanding and maturity that surpasses that of many adults.

In a phone call the other day, he remarked, “We all need to do things to make people happy.”

Theo suggests that one way to make people happy is to send them a fun box. A fun box could contain some jokes (Theo loves jokes, the cornier the better). Or it might have a puzzle in it, or a game or a book, or maybe some cookies or a plastic flower. Your biggest limit here may be your own imagination.

But there’s more. Once you receive a fun box, Theo says, you need to send one to someone else. That way, we’ll all get a fun box in the mail from someone, and we’ll all know that somebody cares for us.

I think those are splendid ideas, and not just because they come from my grandson.

In coming weeks as you pray daily for healing and hope, why don’t you try contributing to healing and hope by doing something to make another person feel loved? If not a fun box, maybe you could send just a card or a note. Keep it simple, and keep it going, for as long as you are able.

This message was delivered January 17, 2021, online to Edgerton United Methodist Church, from Isaiah 58:10-13.

——————

Isaiah 58:10-13 (NIV and NRSV)

If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.

The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.

Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.

———–

Benediction from Romans 15:13: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in faith so that you overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rewarding but Dense

Tripp Fuller can be very engaging and accessible, as he has shown many times in his “Homebrewed Christianity” podcasts and a previous book. His latest book, though, is intimidating from the start.

The cover features a stark black and white photo of a solar eclipse. Given that bleak beauty, the title seems almost ironic: DIVINE SELF-INVESTMENT: An Open and Relational Constructive Christology.

I know that Fuller can write clean and clear sentences, even punchy and memorable sentences. In fact, there are a lot of those in this book. I only wish somebody had gone through my copy and underlined them for me. Then maybe I could have just skimmed the rest.

Because too much of the rest is written in prose so dense and convoluted that it is sometimes almost opaque. OK, this book is written for academics. I get that. But it’s hard to tell whether academic prose is carefully precise or merely gaseous.

One of Fuller’s “Homebrewed” slogans is “theology that doesn’t suck.” Merely not sucking isn’t good enough. Theology ought to sparkle. I know Fuller can write sparkling prose, and I wish he’d done more of it here.

His aim is to create “a robust constructive open and relational Christology.” That’s to fill the vacuum created by liberal theology’s “laryngitis” in constructive theology, especially where metaphysics is concerned.

For the benefit of those who aren’t sure what “open and relational” means, here’s his nifty introduction: “Open and relational theologies can take several forms, yet there are two central convictions that underlie them all; namely, that God affects the world, and the world affects God. God and the world are inextricably linked and from moment to moment, they share a life together.”

Christian faith is necessarily confessional, Fuller maintains, and he points to Simon Peter’s declaration that Jesus is the Messiah. “What Peter is doing is making a confession of his faith,” Fuller says. “It is not a conclusion, or even a verdict demanded by the evidence, but a confessional response to the God who was present in Christ.”

Fuller says his confessional Christology has to address historical, existential and metaphysical concerns – that is, what happened in Jesus’ life, how God is present for us in Jesus, and how we can best understand God today.

He begins with an enlightening exposition of the modern quest for the historical Jesus. He concludes that though the quest does give “concrete content to the faith confession,” it really can’t tell us much about who Jesus is for us. What we need is not a Christology from below, or from above, but one “as a disciple from within.”

To explore that, Fuller pairs and compares the Christologies of six theologians. Catholic theologians Roger Haight and Joseph Bracken represent “Spirit Christologies.” Post-liberal Kathryn Tanner and process theologian John Cobb represent more traditional “Logos Christologies.” Finally, he compares the work of liberal Douglas Ottati, who offers a “Christology of the heart,” and the open and relational view of Andrew Sung Park.

I found these chapters the hardest in the book to read, and I found the comparisons simply tiring. The part about Cobb seemed clearer than the others, but maybe that’s because I’m more familiar with his work.

Given Fuller’s hope to create a “robust” Christology, I was underwhelmed by his concluding chapter tying everything together. Though he says that “the incarnation can be understood as God’s intention from the beginning of Creation,” he rejects the idea that Christ was pre-existent. He also rejects kenosis theologies and the hypostatic union. I want to know more here; I also want to know more about the difference between the Galilean and Roman gospels that he suggests several times.

Still, he says some great things. Open and relational theology establishes “Jesus Christ as model, means, and promise of God.” And “Jesus’ faithfulness was much more than a model; it was God’s divine self-investment in the world.” And “the essence of God does not change. God is love. Divine love is not an occasional activity.”

Finally, the last paragraph: “The work of God is revealed in the person of Jesus – precisely in what he said, did, endured, and continues to say, do, endure, and transform through the spirit. A disciple’s confession of Jesus as the Christ is not simply an act of identification, but one of recognition. If one comes to know themselves as known and loved by God in Christ, and one can see her life as also sustained and empowered by God, they might seek to discover and share the mind of Christ in which their will comes to cohere with God’s will. It is this life together in God for which the Spirit of God has always worked and the Word of God has always beckoned in desiring a full response. The promise and hope of salvation rests in this: that the God who chose to invest Godself in creating creaturely co-creators and who was ever faithful to the covenanted people of Israel, is the God of deep solidarity who stands in need of our shared salvation.”

Good stuff here, but some tough sledding to get to some of it.

** I am reviewing this book under an agreement with Speakeasy in which I receive an electronic copy of the book but no inducement to either praise or condemn it.

You are the Beloved

Henri Nouwen is one of the most beloved Christian writers of our age. He has a way of speaking directly and deeply to the human heart, offering words of encouragement, challenge, and hope. I begin each day reading a meditation drawn from his works. After hearing Henri’s voice every morning for several years, I find it hard to wake up spiritually without it.

So, one of his biographies says, it may seem strange that some of our most uplifting thoughts come from someone who suffered a lifelong struggle with feelings of inadequacy and loneliness and despair. At a time of great anguish in his life, Henri decided to start every day in solitude and contemplative prayer. The eventual result was an epiphany, a revelation of God’s presence and power. He came to a striking realization that guided him the rest of his life: “You are the Beloved of God.”

This became his life message. He writes: “All I want to say to you is ‘You are the Beloved,’ and all I hope is that you can hear these words as spoken to you with all the tenderness and force that love can hold. My only desire is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being: ‘You are the Beloved.’ ”

Henri heard these words spoken to him wordlessly in prayer. Jesus heard them spoken aloud to him by his heavenly Father, though whether they were a roar or a whisper we cannot say.

Jesus is about 30 years old when he learns that his cousin John is calling Israel to repentance and baptism. Jesus knows that it’s time for him to reveal himself to the world. So he heads for the Jordan River, where John is dunking all who come to him seeking a renewal of purpose and a new direction in life.

Jesus has no sins to confess, but he does feel the need to repent. That is, he needs a new direction; he needs to turn from one way of life to another. He needs to put the quiet life of a Nazareth craftsman behind him and stride boldly into his future.

What happens next is not visible or audible to John or to other onlookers, at least according to Mark’s version of events. That means that we can know about it only because Jesus spoke of it later. He told others about it because it’s an important moment in his life. It’s a powerful affirmation of who he is and what his mission is. It’s a personal epiphany, a fresh expression of his identity, a new way of seeing things into the future.

As he is coming up out of the water, he sees the sky ripped open. Can you imagine the immensity of it? And he sees the Spirit of God descending upon him like a dove. Can you hear the flutter of wings and imagine feeling the small feet coming to rest on you?

And he hears that voice from heaven. Maybe it’s roar. Maybe it’s a whisper. All we know is that he hears it clearly. “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”

Jesus’ baptism is a pivotal moment in his life. He remembers and cherishes this divine affirmation for the rest of his life. It’s what sustains him during three grueling years of ministry, walking, constantly walking, from one place to another, announcing the coming of God’s kingdom. It’s what sustains him during the good days as well as the bad. It’s what sustains him when he is betrayed, condemned and suffers an awful death on a cross.

He remembers the words: “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.” God’s affirmation to Jesus at his baptism echoes throughout his life.

Like Henri Nouwen, what I would like you to understand today is that when you were baptized, whether you heard it clearly or not, God said something similar to you.

What I want you to understand today is whenever you recall or renew the act of your baptism, God says it again, whether you hear it clearly or not. God says: “You are my beloved child.”

No matter what other people say about you, no matter what society says about you, no matter what other churches say about you, this is the core truth of your life. As Henri Nouwen puts it, “Your true identity is as a child of God.”

This identity sets you free, Henri says, because it “is anchored beyond all human praise and blame. You belong to God, and it is as a child of God that you are sent into the world.”

If you dare to believe this, then you realize that you were sent into this world for just a little while to discover your true identity and claim it and help every other human being do the same.

Oh, you’re a sinner, some object. Big deal. Everyone else is, too. That’s why it’s so important for you and for everyone else to realize that “sinner” is a secondary identity, an acquired identity, a false identity in the sense that it’s not your true identity, who you really are. Your core identity, who you really are, is a child of God.

You may find this hard to hear, harder to understand. If you’re still making new year’s resolutions, then your top resolution of the year should be this: Know that you are beloved of God and claim your status as a child of God.

It will change your life. It changed Henri Nouwen’s life. It even changed the life of Jesus. Let this affirmation change your life today. You are the Beloved. Amen.

This message was delivered electronically January 10, 2021, to Edgerton United Methodist Church in Edgerton, Kansas, from Mark 1:4-11.