The Partnership of Christ

Like Isaiah in his vision of the temple (see Isa 6), the writer of Psalm 93 depicts God as a robed figure on a throne. He declares, “The Lord is king . . . / He has established the world; it shall never be moved; / your throne is established from of old; / you are from everlasting” (vv. 1–2). It’s an appropriate picture for this season, as this Sunday marks the culmination of the church year with the festival variously called “Christ the King” or “Reign of Christ” Sunday.

That original language of kingship reflects the royal imagery that pervades the Bible. Psalm 93 and a fair number of other selections from the Psalter depict God as a monarch enthroned either in the heavens or in the temple. So does much of the poetic language of the prophets. The idea that God is a king is practically undisputed.

The softening of this royal language, as evidenced by the alteration to “Reign of Christ,” is a response to the critique of patriarchy by feminist theologians and others who say all the kingly imagery presents a distorted picture of God. I agree, but I don’t believe this solution goes far enough. With the revised name we are still dealing with the concept of reigning, or ruling, as Christ’s (and, by extension, God’s) way of interacting with the world. “Reign of Christ” still leaves God on a throne, and that’s a problem, at least according to my understanding of God’s nature.

As you know, I have embraced process theology as my primary framework for understanding God and God’s activity in the world. The process God does not rule. God exercises “power-with” rather than “power-over.” This means God does not employ coercive force to accomplish God’s will. Instead, God uses persuasion and loving guidance to draw creation into pathways that lead to the created beings’ full flourishing. 

So what do we do with the concept of “Christ the King,” or Psalm 93’s assertion that “The Lord is king”? I think we can continue to use this language, as long as we remind ourselves that it is metaphorical and does not declare absolute truth. Kingly imagery is so deeply ingrained in our collective mind from its centuries of use that it may be futile to try to eradicate it. But as far as it is possible, I believe we ought to replace the monarchical and patriarchal language with something more egalitarian. Instead of the kingdom of God, I propose calling the content of Jesus’s proclamation the commonwealth of God. That captures the process theology notion of partnership and cooperation between God and creation much better than the older language. It speaks of equality and community and interdependence.

In this vision God is still powerful, and God’s glory remains intact. It is still accurate to echo the psalmist, who says, “More majestic than the thunders of mighty waters, / more majestic than the waves of the sea, / majestic on high is the Lord!” (v. 4). As long as we do not take “majesty” literally to mean “royal,” but rather “awesome” or “glorious,” we stay on solid theological ground. God is all-powerful, but all-powerful in love and compassion, not in unilateral compulsion.

So let me be the first to wish you a joyous “Partnership of Christ” Sunday. May God’s commonwealth come quickly, and may the nonviolent, non-coercive God be glorified!

The Necessary and the Dispensable

I heard a story once about a church with a curious practice on Sundays when they observed the Lord’s Supper. The congregation would enter the sanctuary to find the trays containing the bread and the juice (it was a Baptist church, so no wine, more’s the pity) covered by a clean white sheet. When it came to the proper time in the service, a pair of deacons would come forward and with solemn dignity very carefully lift the sheet, fold it, and set it aside. After communion, the deacons would reverently unfold the sheet and place it back over the elements.

In the course of time the church called a new pastor, and after watching this ritual a couple of times he (again, it was a Baptist church, so the pastor likely wasn’t a she) asked about it, but no one seemed to know why they did it that way. “That’s just the way we do it,” was the most common answer he got. “We assume there is a good reason for it.”

Well, there was . . . fifty years earlier. After some digging through the church archives, the pastor finally solved the mystery. It seems that in the early part of the last century, before the church installed air conditioning, they would keep the windows open during the sweltering summer months. The windows had no screens, so flies would come in by the dozens and settle on the bread and the little cups of grape juice. To contend with this problem they developed the practice of covering the elements with a sheet until it was time for the Lord’s Supper. Over time this practical expedient took on sacred overtones and became part of the liturgy on a par with the sermon and the Supper itself.

In Matthew 15 Jesus confronts the scribes and Pharisees about a more harmful tradition they have elevated to an almost sacred practice. They have just criticized Jesus for allowing his disciples to eat without going through the meticulous hand-washing practices that have developed over the centuries. Jesus knows these practices are irrelevant to one’s standing with God, so he basically ignores their criticism and levels one of his own. “Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ But you say that whoever tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is given to God,’ then that person need not honor the father. So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God” (vv. 3–6).

What he describes here is the practice of corban, by which one could dedicate part of one’s income to God—it could be used to support the priesthood and the temple operations and for no other purpose, sort like a super-tithe. But since the scribes are themselves a part of the temple hierarchy, this practice is rather self-serving. Worse, they use it as an excuse for not caring for the needs of their aging parents, which Jesus interprets as a violation of the fifth commandment. Tradition has won out over God’s intention, and some members of the community suffer as a result.

Traditions can be innocuous, like the sheet-folding in that Baptist church, but they can also become sinful when they take the place of true worship and service of God, or when they lead to the slighting or marginalization of God’s children. We need to be rigorous in examining the things we do in church and in the life of discipleship to see if we are honoring God or we have substituted an expendable tradition for an essential practice. It’s not always easy to tell the two apart, but we can do it if we try.

The church in my story, now that it knows the origin of the sheet-folding tradition, can safely retire it, as it is a non-essential element. Holy communion, on the other hand, is a core practice of Christian worship. Serving the poor is an essential practice; having a beautiful church building is inessential. Worshiping God is essential; having a pipe organ (or guitars and a drum kit) is inessential. Let us always keep our eye on the ball and not confuse the necessary with the dispensable.

The Prophet and the Widow

Elijah the prophet has just come on the scene in 1 Kings 17, and his first prophetic act is to confront the apostate king Ahab and declare that God has ordained a drought over all the land of Israel. Ahab has entered into an alliance with the Sidonian kingdom by marrying the king’s daughter, Jezebel. The new queen is apparently a more devout practitioner of her religion than Ahab is of his, and before long, under her influence, Ahab has built a temple and set up a sacred pole for the worship of the fertility goddess Asherah and her consort, Baal. The writers of the book of Kings take such offense at these actions that they pronounce that Ahab “did evil in the sight of the Lord more than all who were before him” (1 Kgs 16:30).

Under the assumption that God shares their loathing of King Ahab, the writers enlist God in a religious war with Jezebel’s Canaanite deities. Because Baal and Asherah are fertility gods, the battleground of this war will be the arable land, and the weapons will be the giving and withholding of rain. As we will find out in chapter 18, the drought will last approximately three years. The victims of this war will include, as always, innocent victims the Orwellian military spokespeople of today have learned to call “collateral damage.”

We encounter one of those victims in this passage. Elijah has been living by a wadi east of the Jordan River—hiding from the wrath of Jezebel and Ahab and being fed by ravens sent by God. After a while, however, the wadi dries up and God tells Elijah to go west, back across Israel to the town of Zarephath in Sidon. There he will be taken care of again, this time by a widow whom God has commanded to feed him.

It seems the widow didn’t get this memo, because she is none too happy to see the prophet and be put upon to provide for him. Elijah doesn’t make things any easier as he shows up and, without so much as a how-do-you-do, orders—that’s right; he doesn’t ask, he orders—the woman to bring him a drink of water. Obeying the dictates of hospitality, she goes to fetch the water, but as she’s on her way, he calls after her and says, “While you’re at it, bring me a slice of bread, too.” He’s been traveling a while, and he’s thirsty and a bit peckish, the poor dear.

That tears it for the widow. She turns on Elijah, her eyes blazing, and says, “As the Lord your God lives—” which was a more polite way of saying, “Take a flying leap, you dirty so-and-so”—“As the Lord your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die” (v. 12). Some less well-attested manuscripts add, “So buzz off, jerk!”

The widow and her young son did not choose their fate; it has been thrust upon them by the drought. They have done the best they could to survive, but now they have reached the end of their resources, and death is staring them down hard. Now along comes this prophet of the very God who is said to have caused the drought in the first place, demanding water and bread. If she thought she had the strength, she would punch him.

The passage goes on to tell how Elijah brings a miraculous deliverance from God for the widow. He says, “Thus says the Lord the God of Israel: the jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth” (v. 14). I guess we’re supposed to be impressed by this, but I can’t help thinking about all the other widows and orphans and other vulnerable people throughout the region who don’t have a prophet to come to their rescue, who face death without hope of deliverance. What of them? If we are to believe that God did indeed cause this drought, as part of some squabble with Baal and Asherah, what kind of God are we dealing with? Is that really how God works?

The answer, of course, is no. God does not work that way. God is on the side of life, not death—of justice, not corruption. When religious and political leaders in our day say that God brings natural calamities to punish “sinners,” we must raise our voices in protest. When they use fear tactics to sow division and nurture suspicion of those who are “not like us,” we must raise our voices in protest. When they parrot a distorted version of reality in order to keep the “wrong” people from voting, we must raise our voices in protest. When the spokespeople for our nation try to manipulate us by using God language to demand that we support their wars or demonize their enemies, we must raise our voices in protest.

God stands staunchly on the side of the widow—and the refugee, and the migrant farm worker, and the political prisoner, and the minimum-wage employee, and the victim of abuse, and every underdog everywhere. God stands on the side of life and justice and abundance and equity. We too must choose where we will stand.

Stories of Redemption

I have spent some time in the wilderness in my life. One might argue that the present is a wilderness time for me, considering the extended period of unemployment I am enduring and the repeated rejections I have experienced in my job search (I got another one this week). But for whatever reason, I don’t feel as though I am wandering in the wilderness at present. I have a sense of calm and assurance in spite of my circumstances. I feel confident in my status as a beloved child of God, and let me assure you that has not always been the case. I feel that I am one of the “redeemed of the Lord.”

The writer of Psalm 107 says, “Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story” (v. 2), and that is pretty good advice for anyone who is going through difficult times. So here’s at least part of my story of redemption.

When I was in seventh grade I had some experiences that led me to believe that God was calling me into vocational ministry. Around the same time I was suffering some pretty severe emotional trauma at the hands of an abusive parent. It was a tale that would repeat through much of my life: the juxtaposition of God’s nurture and my own crushing self-doubt. As God was calling my name in love, my father’s hurtful words and actions were causing me to question whether I was worthy of any kind of love. I can trace the roots of the depression and spiritual turmoil that have hounded me for four decades to this period of my life.

When you are hurt by someone you should have been able to trust, it messes with not only your mind but also your soul. And because of our tendency to project our experiences with our parents onto our relationship with God, parenting that is less than healthy can distort our image of the divine in profoundly harmful ways. I have written before about the repercussions of my mental image of God as a vindictive judge more inclined to punishment than grace. It has been a lifelong struggle for me to try to find healing for that misperception of God.

I don’t want to make any premature claims to having decisively overcome that distorted understanding of God, because I know from experience just how pernicious it can be. But I can say with some confidence that my picture of God is much healthier now than it has been in the past. Perhaps that is why I have not interpreted my rejection by ever-more-numerous search committees and hiring agents as a concomitant rejection by God. I am learning to trust that God’s opinion of me does not depend on my “success.” God’s affirmation is unequivocal; it is not connected in any way to the decisions of various churches and organizations not to select me as their leader.

If I had to pinpoint the reasons for this new sense of confidence, I could name several. I could point to the good effects of my practice of centering prayer, the work I have done in psychotherapy, and my doctors’ success in settling on an effective medication regime to combat my depressive tendencies and adjust my brain chemistry. I would also give a lot of credit to the unconditional love I have received from several people in my life, most notably my wife Sarah, and the gracious support and prayers of other friends and family members. To use the language of the psalmist, however, I would have to say that the spiritual and emotional progress I have made in the past few years boils down to this: I have realized that I am one of the redeemed of the Lord.

I hope you are, too, and I encourage you to follow the advice of the psalmist and tell your story. Who knows but that it may make a big difference in somebody else’s life, not to mention your own?

Dueling Visions

The Bible, despite the protestations of many a defensive evangelical, is not always internally consistent. This is not all that surprising, considering that its books are authored by many different writers over wide stretches of time and under appreciably different circumstances. Unless one insists that God directly dictated the words of Scripture to God’s human amanuenses and therefore serves as the one and only source, there is really no controversy here. Different writers have different concerns, worldviews, and axes to grind, all of which are reflected in their writings.

We see this when we compare two readings from the Old Testament—one from the Psalter and one from Second Isaiah. Psalm 98 presents a conventional view of the role of Israel vis-à-vis the Gentile nations of the world, while Isaiah 49 evinces a more progressive attitude. If we take just one verse from each reading, we can see this contrast clearly. In verse 3 of Psalm 98, the psalmist extols God because God “has remembered [God’s] steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God.” Note that word “victory.” Turning to Isaiah 49:6, we have God declaring to a mysterious figure known as the Servant, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” In this case take note of the words “light” and “salvation.”

See the difference? The psalmist portrays God’s relationship with the Gentiles in an almost antagonistic way: Israel’s victory almost assuredly entails the other nations’ defeat. If we look back one verse we see this sentiment expressed even more blatantly; verse 2 says that God “has revealed [God’s] vindication in the sight of the nations” (emphasis added). Israel and the nations are set in an adversarial relationship. But look how the mood changes in the passage from Isaiah. Now instead of taunting the Gentiles with news of God’s victory and vindication, the prophet depicts God as one who cares enough for these non-Israelite nations to give the Servant as a light that will guide them to salvation.

In the contemporary church we see the same dynamic at work. There is a triumphalist and insular branch of the church that is happy to portray God in combative terms, always ready to wreak judgment on those who fail to toe a very narrow line. This version of God curiously seems to share this group of Christians’ prejudices and hates. On the other end of the spectrum are those Christians who have an expansive view of God and of God’s world. Instead of the scarcity and parsimony that characterize the other group, these Christians see the world as a place of abundance and recognize the prodigality of God’s grace. They prefer the prophet’s God, who wants to extend salvation “to the end of the earth” (Isa 49:6), as opposed to the psalmist’s God who exults that “all the ends of the earth have seen the victory of our God” (Ps 98:3). In one vision the nations are mere spectators, looking on, one assumes in dismay and envy, as the chosen people celebrate their chosenness. In the other they are full participants in the economy of grace, and the chosen people shine a light to help them find their way and then rejoice that God has grown the category of chosenness enough to incorporate everyone.

The question we each must answer is, which of these visions is more attractive? Which God do we choose, the tribal deity who is on our side alone or the expansive God who invites everybody to join God’s side? What kind of Christianity do we want to practice, one that is characterized by suspicion or one that is open, one that fears or one that embraces the other? The choice is ours. Let us make it wisely.