A Prayer to Remember the Last Supper

Artist’s rendering of a triclinium, the table Jesus and his disciples would have used to celebrate the Passover Seder. Da Vinci was way off.

I wrote the following prayer to open the service today, as we began a series based on Adam Hamilton’s 24 Hours That Changed the World:

Gracious God,
Who fills our plates with good food
and our cups to overflowing:

We thank you that your Son eats with sinners, even those like Peter
who deny him
and like Thomas
who doubt him
and like Judas
who betray him.

We thank you that Jesus still prepares a feast for people like us.
Help us to take our place at his table now,
that we may feast at the great banquet to come. Amen.

It also occurred to me (and I’m probably not the first to notice this, though I haven’t heard it before myself) that this event recorded in the gospels is misnamed.  If it were actually the “last” supper, then we would not be worshiping Jesus as the Christ and the Second Person of the Trinity.  Jesus conquered death and went on eating and drinking; in fact, the disciples didn’t recognize him until he broke the bread (Emmaus).

We look forward to what John the Revelator calls “the marriage supper of the lamb,” in which the bride of Christ shall rejoice to see her savior face-to-face in unbroken communion in that Kingdom which is breaking in even now.  Amen.

Spiritual Formation With Johnny Cash and Willy Nelson

I used the above song as the entryway into today’s sermon, which primarily drew on Deuteronomy 6.  After the Shema, we find this exhortation:

“Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. ” (vv. 6-9)

In many American families of yesteryear, it was a tradition to have a family Bible.  Usually this was a large, high-quality, beautifully decorated Bible that doubled as a place to record family history.  At the front would be a genealogy chart, tracking births and deaths, baptisms, confirmations, and marriages.  They were commonly passed down as both a sacred book and a place to record family history.  My parents have one for our family.

Family Bibles were often ornate affairs, signifying their value and place in the home

Family Bibles are still sold today but the tradition is not as widespread.  You can even buy antique ones for a more authentic feel.  I came across this ad on the internet:  “No writings, complete Bible. Very clean pages. Very minor wear for its age. Corners are somewhat rubbed. Restored family pages, with the marriage certificate engraved. A very well preserved antique family heirloom!” (Emphasis added)

How did we get to place where Bibles are mere heirlooms?  In Almost Christian, Kenda Dean writes persuasively that the vast majority of youth Christian formation is done via outsourcing.  We drop kids off at youth or Sunday school, we take them to a see Christian band, or we send them on a “mission trip” for a week.  Little of this, if any, is reinforced at home.  While this is the norm in Mainline Protestant and perhaps Catholic homes, it is not so in Mormonism.  Members of the LDS church know that it is the responsibility of every adult in the community, especially parents, to raise up young people in the faith.  Most Mormon teenagers will get up at the crack of down five days a week during high school to attend ‘seminary’, a rigorous exploration of Mormon history, values, and theology.

Speaking from my own (ecclesial) house, Methodist family life can rarely compare to this kind of intentional formation.  How many of us treat our Bibles as heirlooms?  Often Bibles serve as little more than decoration for a shelf or coffee table, pristine and untouched like museum displays.  How do we reclaim, for our own time, the tradition of the family Bible?  For those of us in the Mainline there will be no spiritual revival unless we reclaim the family as the primary locus of Christian education, a place where spiritual formation (.e. prayer, Bible reading, God-talk) is prominent.

How do we do that?

Noah on Film?

Russell Crowe is set to play Noah in a film by Darren Aronofsky, whose recent successes include The Wrestler and Black Swan.

First look at Crowe as Noah here.  Should be an interesting take, though I doubt that the evangelical marketing machine will get behind this one.   According to the LA Times,

Be warned, though: Aronofsky’s Noah might be a bit different from the bearded boat-builder most remember from the Bible. Aronofsky told us back then that he sees Noah as the “first environmentalist,” a man tormented by survivor’s guilt after living through the flood.

Not at all shocking that a Hollywood account would take a ‘green’ twist.  After all, environmentalism is the closest many come to any kind of faith now.  At least this means it will look nothing like this:

Songs for Aurora: The Psalms Versus the Cult of Positivity

I’ve been preaching on the Psalms recently, using Walter Brueggemann’s three-fold typology (orientation, disorientation, new orientation) to order my preaching and teaching of the Bible’s great prayer book.  Little did I know that, unfortunately, the Sunday I had planned to preach about the Psalms of disorientation would be all too close to one of the worst mass killings in recent American history.

I do a double cringe every time a horrific act like the shootings in Aurora takes place.  The first is for the evil act itself, for the victims and their loved ones, for the communities shattered, for families torn apart.  The second cringe follows closely, though: the gut feeling in my stomach that all around the country (and the world) Christians are going to start saying stupid things in the face of cruelty and grief.  Case[s] in point here and here.

Too much popular Christianity is so inoculated by the cult of positivity, so intent on existing only in easy victory, on the mountaintop, that such actions literally do not compute with their comfortable, simple worldview.  So they result to familiar yet ultimately grotesque platitudes: God has a plan; every cloud has a silver lining; only the good die young, etc.  The most common refrain in these – often Reformed, whether acknowledged or not – churches is that somehow this (any and every this) fits into God’s purpose and will for the world.  Ugh.

Brueggemann, in his masterpiece The Message of the Psalms, points out the problem with churches that preach and sing nothing but a well-ordered, rational universe:

Life is not like that.  Life is also savagely marked by disequilibrium, incoherence, and unrelieved asymmetry.  In our time – perhaps any time – that needs no argument or documentation.

Certainly, in the face of the Aurora massacre, no one can doubt life’s “incoherence.”  Denial won’t cut it.  The Bible does not deny agony and distress, and we see this most acutely in the Psalms.  Nowhere does the Bible say, as evangelical leader Jerry Newcombe wrote, “If a Christian dies early, if a Christian dies young, it seems tragic, but really it is not tragic because they are going to a wonderful place.” (emphasis added)

Some might suggest that going on as if the world is well ordered and sensible in the face of counterfactuals is an act of gospel rebellion, of faith unmixed with doubt, just as Jesus would have us exhibit.  Bruggemann is suspicious:

It is my judgment that this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more  frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life…a church that goes on singing “happy songs” in the face of raw reality is doing something very different from what the Bible itself does.” (The Message of the Psalms [Minneapolis: Augsburg 1984], 51-52.)

The questions that come at times like this are all legitimate.  In the Psalms, everything is on the table: God is asked to show up, to be the God of deliverance, the God of hope; God is accused of silence and abandonment; God’s own holiness and righteousness is invoked against what looks like his insufficiency in the face of evil.  Jesus cries one such Psalm on the cross in Matthew and Mark: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1)

The legitimacy of the questions does not equate to easy answers, though.  The Bible doesn’t give us those.  Job learned that the hard way.  The Psalms are no better.  “There is no rhetorical answer to all these questions in the Psalms any more than in the New Testament.  The only real answer is Jesus Christ.” (Bonhoeffer, Prayerbook of the Bible [Minneapolis: Fortress Press 2005], 170.)

This is how the Bible deals with the disorientation, the darkness, the madness of life: by addressing it all to God, the good and bad, the gore and the glory:

Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs,
and an impious people reviles your name.
Do not deliver the soul of your dove to the wild animals;
do not forget the life of your poor for ever.

Have regard for your covenant,
for the dark places of the land are full of the haunts of violence.
Do not let the downtrodden be put to shame;
let the poor and needy praise your name.
Rise up, O God, plead your cause;
remember how the impious scoff at you all day long.
Do not forget the clamor of your foes,
the uproar of your adversaries that goes up continually.

Psalm 74:18-23

On Loving Luke Timothy Johnson

I just remembered why I love LTJ (cue awesome nickname) so much.  There are many reasons, of course.  His wit.  His unapologetic Catholicism (I mean really, how often do you meet a Catholic who isn’t apologizing for it?).  His teaching at a Methodist seminary (Candler at Emory).  His great little book The Creed, which I read for my theology class and still love.

But the main reason I love LTJ: this lecture, in which he skewers the Jesus Seminar.  Like many religion undergrads over the last 20 years or so, I was presented Jesus Seminar scholarship as if it was the latest and (by definition) greatest take on Jesus.  I smelled a rat but I couldn’t articulate it until Johnson ripped them a new one in a loving, scholarly, Christian way.  I first encountered that lecture early in seminary and I still love it.

On my viewing tonight, I noticed something that hadn’t struck me before: LTJ has serious issues with N.T. Wright’s scholarship.  This I did not know.  My own primary interest is not NT studies, and while I like N.T. Wright (and got to see him speak last year!) I can’t claim to have read any of his substantial works.

The debate seems to involve the nature of the historical discipline.  In this lecture, given at the National Cathedral a while back, Johnson indicates that he finds the Jesus Seminar less offensive than Wright.  While the Jesus seminar may be doing poor history, he says, the good Bishop does not “rise to the level of history.”  Interesting.  If only I had more time to read!

Watch the video and leave your thoughts below!

P.S. I almost forgot – LTJ’s Teaching Company courses are great too!

Edgar Allen Poe and Jeremiah 8:22

Many folks have argued, rightly, that a basic understanding of Scripture is necessary for an appreciation of the cultural and intellectual heritage of the West.  Stephen Prothero, author of the remarkable American Jesus, makes a similar argument in Religious Literacy.  Like it or not, Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are simply part of how we communicate.  From “eye for an eye”  to “turn the other cheek,” our literature and our everyday language are bathed in biblical images and phrases.  See, for instance, this stanza from Poe’s “The Raven”:

`Prophet!’ said I, `thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil! -
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by horror haunted – tell me truly, I implore -
Is there – is there balm in Gilead? – tell me – tell me, I implore!’
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.’

This stanza is, of course, nonsensical unless one has at least become aware of the cry of Jeremiah/God* in chapter 8.  Until I was researching for Sunday’s sermon, I actually had no idea that Poe referenced Jeremiah.  I suppose that means that, while I am not totally biblically illiterate, I am poorly read!

We must also remember, however, that Poe’s raven was wrong.  There is a balm in Gilead!

*Many scholars have noted that the line between the prophetic voice and the divine voice is, in Jeremiah, much less pronounced than in other prophets.  I first came across this in Gerhard Von Rad’s The Message of the Prophets, but I’ve noticed in in many other commentaries as well.  The Old Testament lection for this coming Sunday (Jeremiah 8:18-9:1) is a prime example of this mixing and mingling of voices.  I suppose this could be exegetically troubling, but I prefer to think it is theologically hopeful.  As we see in the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God is capable both of mourning His own and of creating a different future for His wounded and broken people.