Everything is dying

The lectionary took me into Luke 8 this morning, and the account of the raising of Jairus's daughter.  I was struck again, as I have been before, by the drama of the story: the urgent pleading from Jairus which surely any parent can imagine; the nightmare delay as Jesus looks around for a sick woman who has touched him in the midst of the crowd; the messenger with his news of death and despair; the outrageous call from Jesus to believe in the face of death that all will be well; the mourners, whose wailing turns to mocking laughter when Jesus declares that the girl is not dead in spite of the clear evidence; the direct address to the corpse, calling life back in; and even the little detail that she was given something to eat.

But what I really took away from this morning was this: how we need the God of the resurrection.

It is, perhaps, a sign of my temperament that even in the midst of spring, with the evidence of new life all around, I still find myself thinking about the fact that everything is dying.  It is a fact, after all.  I don't mean this in the sense of the more alarmist ecologists of our culture - though I suspect those people might be worth listening to, at least a bit, and sometimes what passes for alarmism is just realism coming into contact with a lethargic and dismissive culture.  No, I don't mean that, I just mean the simple fact: everything that lives dies, and as far as we know the universe as a whole is also on track for (a very slow) death.

This is why gods who are bound up with the creation are no good to us.  Gods who exists within the cycle of life and death - which is in fact not a cycle, but a spiral downwards - won't suit our need.  Even gods of healing alone are not enough.

We need a God who can enable us to look death in the face and to hear his voice saying: do not be afraid; only believe.  And we need a God who has demonstrated that even at the utter end of everything - even in death - he is able to reach out a hand and recall us to life.

We need the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God of the resurrection.

Neglect of the ascension

A late thought for Ascension Day...

I have wondered lately whether the neglect of the ascension in evangelical circles might not be responsible for other striking gaps in evangelical thinking.  The thought is not entirely processed yet, so here it is in what is probably the form of caricature, with more chewing over needed before I can add the necessary nuance.

Evangelicals stress the once-and-for-all nature of the work of Christ; we are right to do so, there is a Scriptural mandate for this, and indeed the doctrine of the ascension potentially helps us here.  The emphasis therefore falls on what Jesus has done.  No complaints about this.  But do we have enough to say about what Jesus is doing?  The ascension teaches us that the Jesus who lived and walked on earth lives now in heaven, as the exact person he was.  But does it mean very much for us that he lives now, over and above the admittedly very important fact that it demonstrates the success and acceptance of what he did in his earthly ministry?

I wonder whether the right emphasis on the 'once-for-all-ness', the completeness, makes it difficult for us to see and understand the ongoing work of Christ.  Take, for example, the eucharist.  The evangelical emphasis on the completed work - which is, let me say again, absolutely right - can easily mean that the eucharist is only a backward-looking ordinance; it directs our attention to something that happened, 2000 years ago.  It does do this, of course ('on the night he was betrayed...' is a pretty clear historical marker), but is there another aspect that is neglected?  With a proper emphasis on the ascension, might we not be able to see and understand a vertical dimension, a relationship in the eating and drinking to the Lord Jesus who lives and is with us in the here and now?

Mutatis mutandis, similar points could be made about our worship (is it just about the horizontal ministering the word to one another?) and our preaching (is it just commentary on the biblical witness - Bible teaching! - or is God speaking here and now as the Scripture is expounded to show Christ?)

The ascension can help to deliver us from our fear that any talk about things really happening in the here and now detracts from the completed, once-for-all work.  That fear is not unjustified.  An emphasis on receiving Christ in the eucharist, for example, can indeed slide into making that reception a work, in the sense of something that must be added to Christ's work.  But the ascension reminds us that the Christ who went up and now lives and ministers to us is the same person who suffered and rose; there is no conflict between his completed work then and there and his application of that work here and now.  It is all him, and insofar as we maintain the focus on him we are safe.

My sense is that we need a greater emphasis on the ascension, and the fact that the head of the church is now in heaven, and is now ministering to us and through us, out of the great fulness of his once-for-all completed work.

On the connection between theology and sin

When a teacher or Christian leader falls into sin, or is revealed to have sinned, it is reasonable to look at their expressed theology and ask whether there is anything in it that might have led them to be vulnerable.  It is not reasonable - because it is simply logically fallacious - to move directly from 'this person sinned' to 'therefore their theology must be wrong'.  That is just incorrect.  A person can have good theology, in the sense that what they think and say is orthodox and biblical, and still sin.  We all know that, I hope.

There is a discussion to be had over the best way to understand the relationship between sin and temptation, and whether there is perhaps a category for disordered desire that is best understood as neither sin nor temptation, but the result of sinfulness in a different way.  That we all have such disordered desires is evident to anyone who is not self-deceived.  It is not at all evident, to me at least, that there is an obvious and orthodox way to understand and talk about these desires, though there are certainly some ways that are obviously heretical.  It would be foolish in the extreme to judge any serious attempt to understand and express these things purely on the basis of any one exponent's sin.  Let me say it again, this sort of ad hominem argument is fallacious.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a conversation to be had about whether there is a better way to understand and express our fallen state, with all its attendant guilt.  There almost certainly is.  Nor is it to rule out of court the question of whether ideas and beliefs have consequences; of course they do, and so it is sensible to carefully and cautiously ask whether there is a connection between a person's theology and their sin.  But that can't be presumed, and rarely is it as self-evident as some people seem to make out.

I wonder sometimes (and now is one of those times) whether the way some Christians write and speak about others, particularly others who have fallen into sin, is not in itself expressive of disordered desire - not, of course, in the sexual realm.  The good desire to be right twisted into the wrong desire for others to be shown to be wrong.  The joy in seeing people we disagree with cast down.  I am not pointing fingers at anyone in particular.  I am just dismayed by tone; perhaps I am really just dismayed by the internet.

Anyway, all this is apropos of nothing in particular.  Just be careful out there, okay?