Monthly Archives: December 2009

The Kingdom of God is Coming! And it is Coming for You!

Posted by on December 24, 2009 7 comments

A Christmas Eve Sermon by Nate Kerr.

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.  This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.  All went to their own towns to be registered.  Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people:  to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.  This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”  When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. (Luke 2:1-21)

During this advent season, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about the name that is given to this one that is to be born of Mary, this Savior, this Lord.  The name is “Jesus.”  Yes, this is the name – “Jesus” – that my mind has been given to think over and over these past few weeks, not “Christ.”  (I’ll have to admit, in my own mind and thought, I haven’t been doing my part to keep “Christ” in “Christ-mas.”)  It is not that I don’t think Jesus is the Christ!  Indeed, I do!  But it is because I am convinced that Jesus — this child who grew up to be a man, this human being born of the virgin Mary, this one who was born in a town called Bethlehem and whose life really was threatened by a king named Herod in childhood, and who eventually was hounded by the religious and political powers of his day to the point of death – it is because I am convinced that it is this Jesus and this Jesus alone that is the Christ that I’ve been thinking so much about this name “Jesus.”  Specifically, I’ve wondered why it is that the story of this one’s birth culminates with giving him this name.  And so as I’ve given myself to thinking about this name “Jesus” during this advent season, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in that part of the gospel story where Mary is visited by the angel, and is told that this one to be born to her should be named “Jesus,” for “he will save his people from their sins.”  This is what Matthew tells about the importance of the name “Jesus.”  And this makes perfect sense.  For the name “Jesus” just means, after all, “the one who saves.”

But what does this mean?  Certainly, we could think of all kinds of ways in which we use the phrase “Jesus saves.”  And if we were honest with ourselves, we’d probably have to admit that more often than not the way we use that phrase has more to do with our own hopes and dreams and fuzzy warm feelings than with what Jesus’ life itself tells us about the nature of “salvation.”  So thinking about this name “Jesus” leads us immediately to ask:  What is the nature of the salvation that we are to expect from this one whose name means “the one who saves”?  And this question leads us to another passage that is at the heart of the Christmas story, that of the annunciation or the visit of the angel to Mary, which is a story that we often read early in advent season as a way of getting on to the good stuff – the birth itself.  But if “Jesus” was the name given to Mary by the angel, perhaps we should go back and consider from the beginning what Mary herself understood this name to mean.  And so we are led to Luke 1:38-55, which includes the famous “Magnificat” or “song of praise” which Mary offered up to God upon receiving the news that she will give birth to the Savior.  And these are the words that we read:

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit  and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be  a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”  And Mary  said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.  His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.  He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

It hardly needs comment; and it is rather sad that it needs saying.  But we should not just say it, we should proclaim it:  This is the gospel!  This is the good news of Christmas! This is the salvation that we speak of when we say that Jesus is the Christ, that Jesus is Lord!  Salvation means justice!  Salvation means peace!  Salvation means healing and reconciliation! In a word, salvation means liberation, freedom – freedom from the death-dealing powers of this world and freedom for a new world, a new creation in which the dead have life, the poor have hope, the sick have healing, the oppressed and captive have release!

And this is what is so important about the name “Jesus” – the name Jesus tells us a story, a story about the concrete ways in which salvation happens, about when and where Jesus’ Lordship is proclaimed and embodied.  I mean, think about this story:  To be born, God inhabits the belly of a virgin and in the form of Mary and her faithful husband walks right into the middle of Bethlehem, during tax-season, right into the middle of the worst economic oppression imaginable, where the poor get poorer and the rich get richer.  God in the form of the wise men walks right into the palace of Herod, perhaps the most blood-thirsty and power-hungry king of his time, and announces that a new King has arrived on the scene.  God in Jesus becomes an emigrant from his homeland, escaping to Egypt and eventually to Nazareth, so that upon his return to Jerusalem he might be crucified as nothing but an immigrant Jew.  This is the story of Christmas, this is the story of Jesus – in Jesus, God identifies with the economically oppressed, the poor; God identifies with an oppressed people under the rule of a tyrant government; God identifies with the immigrant and outcast, the oppressed races of an increasingly racist society.  And to these oppressed people Jesus grows up and says:  “The Kingdom of God is coming!  And it is coming for you!”

So, you might be wondering, what does all of this have to say about how we as a church “celebrate” Christmas?  Tonight we gather in anticipation of Jesus’ coming; tomorrow we will celebrate that coming.   But listen closely to Mary’s song.  Mary does not say that Christmas is a time for us to celebrate with soothing upbeat pop songs and shiny wrapping paper, but with the scattering of the proud.  Mary does not say that Christmas is a time for us to feel good and to think “everything will be okay,” but for the powerful to be brought down and the lowly to be lifted up.  Mary does not say that Christmas is a time for those with full stomachs to fill their plates with second helpings, but a time for the hungry to be filled with good things.  Certainly, many of us will experience all of these things tomorrow – we will exchange gifts with shiny paper and bows; we will listen, sing along with, and perhaps even dance to familiar and joyful songs; we will feel good and upbeat for a few hours in the midst of what might otherwise for many of us be a most miserable and depressing time; we will eat good food and we will enjoy it shamelessly!  And this is all right and good, to the extent that in doing all of this we are celebrating the fact that indeed Jesus has come, the Kingdom has arrived, and indeed we are called to remember that we were once lost and now are found, that we were once slaves to powers from which we have been liberated!  But this celebration is only truly a celebration as long as it includes genuine anticipation – anticipation of the ways in which Jesus today, just as he did 2,000 years ago, walks into the midst of the powers of this world and brings liberation, healing, and the transformation to lost and broken lives.  And so we will only celebrate faithfully tomorrow if we celebrate in the mode of what Mary calls the “fear of the Lord.”  We will only celebrate faithfully when we recognize and remember that there are those amongst us – perhaps sitting right next to us – who will not be given presents with shiny wrappers; who will not sing songs and play games and laugh; who will not eat to fullness.  And in remembering this, we will only celebrate faithfully when we realize that this isn’t really our true Christmas celebration, that our celebration does not end here but only begins, and that our true celebration happens beyond the walls of our churches and homes.  We will be celebrating faithfully tomorrow when we remember that the church celebrates Christmas when, in the midst of an increasingly failing economy, the church understands ‘property’ as that which is to be given away rather than being hoarded for the sake of securing profit and comfort; or when, in the midst of an increasingly broken healthcare system, she attends to the broken bodies in her midst and makes sure of their healing; or when, in the face of an increasingly unjust penal system, the church visits prisoners and speaks a word of unheard of reconciliation; or when, as citizens of a country increasingly concerned with securing its borders and keeping out foreigners, she welcomes the immigrant (legal or not) into her homes and buildings; or when, or when, while as inhabitants of a political world order determined to identify its enemies in order to kill them, the church embodies the gospel truth that the only  enemies one knows are those that are to be loved and forgiven.

That is the good news of the gospel.  That is the Christian message. That is the life that this one man named “Jesus” lived.  And that is how the church, as the body of Christ, celebrates Christmas today – no matter what we may do in our homes and with our families tomorrow.   This is how the church is to celebrate Christmas:  the church itself comes to be identified by story of Jesus – in Jesus, the church identifies with the economically oppressed, the poor; in Jesus, the church identifies with oppressed people under the rule of tyrant governmental powers; in Jesus, the church identifies with the immigrant and outcast, the oppressed races of an increasingly racist society.  And to these oppressed people the church stands up and says:  “The Kingdom of God is coming!  And it is coming for you!”

Critiques of Individualism as Will to Power

Posted by on December 18, 2009 37 comments

Critiques of individualism are as legion as critiques of modernity in theological circles. But anymore I’m not even sure what a critique of individualism is supposed to do. Ostensibly authors of books lodging theological critiques of individualism are hoping to somehow reshape society or at least generate some substantive sub-cultures that don’t fall prey to being “individualistic,” however that be defined.

But what would that even look like? What makes today’s world so particularly individualistic in a way that is different from the rest of history up till now? The only thing I can think of is that today people (in the West anyway) have more power to make choices about how to live life. So a few hundred years ago most people probably didn’t have the option to pick up and change the way or place where they were living life. They were embedded in something stable, or at least hard to disturb without significant trauma on many levels. Now that level of trauma has been significantly reduced. Human bonds are more fragile, less likely to be permanent.

Hence “rampant individualism”?

I kind of don’t think so. In the first place, I don’t think all that many people today are actually going to seriously argue that it is wrong and bad for people to be able to make decisions about how and where to live. The radical discomfit that people seem to have with individualism is that they don’t like the modes of life many people choose and so they start launching polemics about the horrors of individualism, often with a nostalgic reference to how things used to be more given, more stable, more solid. Romantic references to “place” and “land” tend to come up a lot here.

But, here’s the rub: those lodging this critique certainly don’t think that they should have to give up or be denied their ability to shape the course of their life. The most ardent critics of individualism are remarkably mobile and nomadic fellows from what I’ve see. They go where the university posts take them with little regard for “place” or “land” or “community.”

Now, I’m not that interested in just pointing out a potential inconsistency between some intellectuals’ published positions and their actions. My point is more basic and more important than that. It seems to me that the people who most ardently criticize individualism are people who are concerned about a loss of power to shape society (or the church) towards their understanding of the good. Put concisely, “individualism” is only scary to those who want to control the social lives of others. Honestly I don’t think it can possibly be a coincidence that the folks most virulently critical of individualism are white males who have significant university posts. Indeed I’m hard pressed to think of a single female scholar who has attacked individualism in ways akin to say Robert Bellah or Zygmunt Bauman.

It seems to me that critiques of individualism invariably come beset with a totalizing vision of “the good society” that, ostensibly should be actualized whether people like it or not (because obviously they don’t like it or they’d be doing it already). In short, I don’t know how critiques of individualism, as such, avoid the charge that they are simply instances of the will to power. They are always animated with angst, fear, and revulsion towards the current shape of social life and deeply desirous of reshaping society in accordance with their own vision. Its hard for me to image that not being ultimately fascist (Milbank is perhaps the most sophisticated example of a theological fascist writing today).

If there can be a non-ideological mode of critiquing individualism I have yet to find it. Mind you I’m not saying that I think all the modes of life that characterize modern life are all fine and dandy. I manifestly do not. But, the impulse to structurally change and shape the conditions of social life in order to bring about one’s own vision of the good society is totalitarian. All despots believe that they are doing what’s ultimately good for the populace while insisting that the choosing and interpretation of that good must be out of the hands of the people themselves. They cannot be trusted to choose it so it must be imposed on them by a stable life, rooted in a particular place where things just “are” the right way. You know, my way. They way where I have power. Because at least that’s not individualistic.

You’re not “post-” anything, so shut the hell up!

Posted by on December 17, 2009 33 comments

If there was one term I could actually effect a moratorium on I think it would have to be the phrase “post-”. But, since I can’t effect a moratorium, allow me to propose an axiom instead:

Any conceptual position (theological, philosophical, etc.) that describes itself using the modifier “post-” is never actually “post-” anything in anything other than a temporal sense (and usually that’s not the case either).

Postmetaphysical? No. Postfoundationalist? No, you were never foundationalist to start with. Postliberal? No, you’re still liberal. Postmodern? Shut the fuck up, that’s just stupid. Post-postmodern? Kneecaps, meet baseball bat.

The only possible places where I can think of the term “post-” having any real usefulness are in the realms of architecture and art history. Insofar as it gets used by philosophers and theologians its just an attempt to short circuit an argument by pretending that the views you are attacking were a developmental stage you  went through when you were young and not quite as well read as you obviously are now. To call any view “post-” anything is just a masquerade alloying one to define your adversary as wrong, arcane, and naive from the outset.

In short, adopting the language of “post-” is unforgivably cheap and masks a lack of ability to actually make good arguments against things you want to criticize.

EP Responds to Obama’s Nobel Speech

Posted by on December 17, 2009 11 comments

The Ekklesia Project has launched a new blog in response to President Obama’s recent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. I think this is a good thing. EP came into existence to call into question Christians’ complicity with violence as such and war in particular. That was something of an easy target during the Bush years and many Christians of the EP persuasion voted enthusiastically for Obama (including Stanley Hauerwas, who has a response to the speech up on the blog). At any rate, I appreciate that Obama is not being given a pass on his escalation of the war on terror by EP. He should not be given one.

Also does anyone else find it interesting that so many people like Hauerwas who built careers around taking down Niebuhrianism voted for Obama who is by far the most articulate exponent of Niebuhrianism to occupy the White House in decades? This came up in the comments on Hauerwas’s post and I think its quite an ironic point. But, that being said I’m glad EP is not letting go of their convictions on the basis of “Yeay, not Bush!”

Most Awkward Creation Story Ever

Posted by on December 15, 2009 16 comments

Anybody found one that tops this?

It’s from the “Hymn to Atum,” an Egyptian creation myth from the Old Kingdom (2575-2134 BCE):

When I first began to create
When I alone was planning and designing many creatures,
I had not sneezed Shu the wind,
I had not spat Tefnut the rain,
There was not a single living creature.
I planned many living creatures;
All were in my heart, and their children and their grandchildren.

Then I copulated with my own fist.
I masturbated with my own hand.
I ejaculated into my own mouth.

I sneezed to create Shu the wind,
I spat to create Tefnut the rain.
Old Man Nun reared them;

Well, the world wasn’t just gonna create itself!

Trinity and Passibility

Posted by on December 15, 2009 6 comments

Peter Leithart has an argument about the whole question of divine impassibility versus divine suffering that I think has some promise:

1) God is “pure act,” never unrealized, never anything less than wholly Himself.  Yet, within the Triune life, God acts on God.  The Father begets the Son, and in relation to the Father’s begetting, the Son is “passive.”  The Spirit is breathed out by the Father and Son, and in that breathing-out the Spirit is “passive.”  The Father eternally glorifies the Son in the Spirit, and the Son receives that glory, but the Son eternally responds by glorifying the Father through the Spirit, a glory that the Father receives “passively.”  Passibility in the sense of passivity is a dimension of the Triune life.

2) God acts on God in history.  The Father sends the Son, and having received the Spirit from the Father at His ascension, the Son sends the Spirit to us.  As incarnate, the Son does all that He does to glorify the Father, even as the Father glorifies Him.  The Triune life of gift, reception, and response is worked out in God’s work in history.

3) Here’s key point #1: God acts on God in history, using the world to act on God.  The Father sends the Son, who is incarnate by the Spirit; that’s an act of the Father in regard to the Son, but the Father employs the womb of Mary to send the Son in flesh.  The Father glorifies the Son, and part of that glory comes through the work of the Spirit who turns men to praise.  The Father glorifies the Son through creatures; human praise is a means by which the Father glorifies the Son.  Too, the Father offers the Son as a sin offering, but He does that through the mechanism of sinful man who raise wicked hands against the Son.  In all this, the Son is “passible” in both senses of the word: He is passive in relation to creation (the praise and hatred of men) and He suffers.  But this is not ultimately a matter of the Son becoming subject to the creation, or becoming any whit the less Lord in His passibility.  Rather, because the Father is acting on the Son through the creation, the Son’s “passibility” is the same passibility as His eternal passibility before the Father, though that is worked out in the incarnation in the context of a sinful world.

4) Here’s key part #2, the Reformed/Augustinian part: This construction seems to depend on a strong doctrine of divine providence, which includes a strong doctrine of concursus.  All actions of creation are predestined by God, and carried out by God.  The actions of the creatures are most deeply actions of God in creatures.  Thus, again, all of the suffering and passivity of the Persons in history is ultimately God acting on God.  God remains utterly Lord; God is at the same time vulnerable within his creation precisely because He is Lord, because the creation has no independent power of operation but only operates because it is operated upon.

5) This doesn’t remove all the difficulties, of course.  What is going on when Jesus gets hungry?  We can say that this is the Father using the creation to act through His Spirit on the Son, but what kind of action of the Father through the Spirit creates hunger?  Perhaps we could work this out by positing inter-Trinitarian eros, so that the Son’s hunger is the incarnate form of His eternal desire for the life of the Father in the Spirit.

I would add a bit more to this. While the relations of passivity are clearly not identical or symmetrical, the Father also is the recipient of the Son’s action according to the same quality of passivity. The Father receives the kingdom that the Son hands over to him (1 Cor 15:24) and judges no one leaving all judgment to the Son (John 5:22, 27). Thus there is, at the heart of the Trinity, a fundamental dynamic of receptivity and passivity which clearly involves creation being brought into the dynamic insofar as it is taken up into God’s own intertrinitarian action of active gift and passive reception.

Of course, Leithart’s argument runs into the problem of turning the human violence against Christ in the passion into the active violence of the Father himself against the Son. Clearly that issue merits some further investigation. At least.

Culinarity

Posted by on December 10, 2009 11 comments

As some of you know for the occasional random posts I’ve done, I love to cook in many forms and have over the last year developed an interest in mixology. In the interest of not cluttering this blog with my every culinary whim, my best friend Andrew and I have started our own blog to log our culinary adventures. If you’re interested in that sort of stuff, check it out.

Minarets and Crucifixes

Posted by on December 8, 2009 31 comments

Robert Wilken has a post arguing that the Swiss ban on minarets is not a curtailment of religious freedom since its really just about preserving culture and tradition:

For the Swiss, erection of minarets taller than church steeples would alter the skyline of cities and towns, visibly severing links to the past. The construction of minarets was seen as an assault on memory and memory is attached to things. Without memory a people have no sense of who they are. In Italy the assault on memory had to do with the central Christian symbol in the west. In a historic Christian culture wrote Barbieri, “the symbol of a naked, suffering, unjustly condemned man in whom all that is good and worthy of worship and respect . . . is centered, is buried deep in their souls.” In Italy even atheists and Communists respect the Crucifix “because it means so much about the condition and value of a man.”

The issue is not human rights or religious freedom, but respect for cultural traditions and fealty to those who have gone before. There is no reason to think that prohibiting the erection of minarets in Swiss cities will jeopardize the rights of Muslims to practice their religion. But if a society loses all memory of its Christian traditions, there is a real question whether those things that make western civilization unique, e.g. human rights, freedom of religion, will endure.

So presumably this would mean that if a historically Muslim country voted to band the construction of cathedrals that would also not be a matter of religious freedom and rights, but merely the preservation of a culture? Anyone else smell the bullshit?

This post strikes me as yet another display of a common presupposition among many of the First Thingers: that Christianity is inalienably tied to “Western culture” which should thus be propagated, maintained, and extended throughout the world without regard for other cultures or forms of peoplehood.

One Irish Priest

Posted by on December 6, 2009 5 comments

In response to the inquiries about the routine cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, one Irish priest had this to say:

There is no good in saying other than the truth. The church at this state has no credibility, no standing and no moral authority. The issue is now one of trust, and that is why it will take the rest of my lifetime as a priest to build up that trust again, because the trust and confidence in the church has been broken on a fundamental level.

Truth-telling always deserves promotion. I will pray for Fr Michael Canny, of the Derry Diocese of Ireland that he will not grow wearing in speaking the truth and trying to do what is right on behalf of those who have suffered.

He is certainly right that there is no good in saying anything other than the truth. Ecclesial faithfulness can mean nothing less than this.

Accursed they were not here!

Posted by on December 1, 2009 38 comments

My post on the Manhatten Declaration has elicited the enthusaistic support of many, the ire of an angry few, and the well-deserved chastening of my much-beloved loyal opposition for whom I am more grateful than I can ever express.

Therefore, and nevertheless, this recent treatment deserves mention for its rhetorical brilliance and right-on-the-money beingness. Here’s just one snippet:

And at one level it’s impossible to view these pretentious peacocks, these Malvolios grimacing and strutting in their yellow stockings, without succumbing to the derisive laughter they deserve. Such self-inflation demands deflation. And anyway it can’t be helped. I mean, just listen to them:

We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.

The whole thing is like that — like a bad parody of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. Except of course that Henry was outnumbered. Here instead we have a group of powerful elites, men at the center of political, cultural, academic and ecclesiastical privilege bemoaning their oppression at the hands of the homosexuals and religious minorities they claim run the world. They are overlords posing as underdogs. (It’s hard out there for a pope.)

And while that’s ridiculous, it’s not really funny. The claim of oppression is laughably bogus, but the blood on their hands is all too real. A parody of the St. Crispin’s Day speech has comic potential, but a parody of the St. Crispin’s Day speech as delivered by the pilot of the Enola Gay is too bitterly callous even for my bleak taste in comedy.

Mine too, hence my speech, as overly-incendiary and unwieldy as it may often be.

Switch to our mobile site