"Tight lines" is a blessing fishermen offer each other, a wish for lines taut with the weight of good fish. May God grant that the lines written here be taut with His blessings.
Wednesday, 27 August 2008 | |||
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To Die For | |||
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My curmudgeonly ire is occasionally aroused by popular
slang. So I confess to a pretty intense dislike for the phrase "to
die for" as an expression of approbation for items like a good
chocolate cake or a cute pair of shoes. Since there actually are good
things to die for, I'm annoyed by the trivializing of the
expression. In Matthew 16:21-28, Jesus makes the remarkable claim that one important thing to die for is your own life. A venerable form of Christian spirituality is the notion that spiritual life consists in a process of "dying." One "dies" to oneself, to lesser desires, to sin, etc., so that the life of Christ might live more and more in you. This is along the lines of Paul's thought in Galatians 2:20. Yet how exactly does this dying in order to live work out practically? What form does it actually take in the way we live our lives, relate to others, etc.? If we do in fact as Christians have something to die for, how do we do it? | |||
Tuesday, 19 August 2008 | |||
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Taking Hell | |||
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Protestants always read
Matthew 16:13-20, especially verse 18, while looking over their
shoulders at Rome. Since the Reformation, we've been afraid that a pope
is going to crawl out of this text and bite us on the rear. There's a popular interpretation that illustrates the proverb that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It makes a big deal out of the fact that the Greek for Peter's name in verse 18 is petros, while the Greek for the rock on which Jesus will build His Church is petra. Then it's pointed out that petros means a little stone, while petra denotes a big rock. Thus they can't refer to the same thing and Jesus is not actually saying that He will build His Church on Peter, but on something else (on Himself, or on Peter's confession, anything except Peter!). This surprisingly frequent misunderstanding falters on the fact that the only way petra can be a masculine name in Greek is to have an os ending and on the fact that in Aramaic, the language Jesus was actually speaking, there is absolutely no difference between Cephas, Peter's name and cephas, the word for "rock." So Jesus said He was going to build His Church on Peter. That's the fact, and almost all serious Protestant and evangelical commentators agree that it's the fact. If we want to escape those papal teeth in our hindquarters, it will have to be through our theological and historical understanding of what it means for the Church to have been built on Peter, not by some half-baked, semi-Greek-literate exegesis. I've always been more intrigued by the last part of verse 18, which says that the Church founded upon Peter will be such that "the gates of Hades ("Hell" in the KJV) will not overcome it." I still remember a sermon from my boyhood which suggested that, while the promise of not being overcome pictures the Church on the defensive, the image of "gates" in front of the evil realm implies the Church is on the offensive, storming the very portals of Hell itself. Once again, some serious scholarship suggests that the interpretation is not as simple as a marching, militant Church attacking Hell's gates. It seems that the biblical usage of "gates" is simply as representative of the whole realm of Hell or Hades. The Greek word is hades, and is often taken to mean, as it did for the Greeks, the general realm of death, equivalent to sheol in the Old Testament. So one way to understand this text is that the powers of death will not overcome the Church (and that's how the RSV translates it). I confess that I still like the notion of the Church on the offense. At least one commentator allows that it's at least possible that Christ's image here is of His Church breaking down the gates of death and freeing those entrapped by it. I like that because it fits nicely with a much-ignored doctrine found in the Apostles' Creed, Christ's descent into Hell (or Hades) or "the harrowing of Hell," in a phrase I enjoy. The biblical basis is mostly Acts 2:27, 31 and I Peter 3:19-20 and 4:6. It's interesting that all those verses are written or spoken by Peter. As the Church founded on the rock of the first person to confess Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, we continue our Lord's mission to free those bound in the power of death, knowing that together, as His Church, we will not be overcome by that power. | |||
Thursday, 14 August 2008 | |||
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Dog Faith | |||
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In The Gospel According to Peanuts, among all
Schultz's cartoon characters it is Snoopy who Robert Short finds most
like Christ. Not that Snoopy represents Christ--he's too flawed for that.
But Short says the dog represents us as Christians. Very imperfect,
humble and dependent, and more or less obedient to his master. In Matthew 15:21-28, this coming Sunday we read about the dog-like faith of a Canaanite woman who had a strange interchange with Jesus. She came begging and crying for Him to help her demon-possessed daughter. Because she was not Jewish, Jesus ignored her and then told "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs." When the woman accepted the label, and argued that even dogs get the crumbs under the table, He healed her daughter. Most of us are offended at the idea that faith involves abject, dog-like bowing and scraping before God. Yet our easy sense of Jesus as our friend might need occasionally to be adjusted by remembering all the times and ways in which those in Scripture encountered Jesus and fell on their knees to acknowledge Him as Lord and Master. | |||
Thursday, 07 August 2008 | |||
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Cold Feet | |||
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When a groom (or bride) doesn't show up for the wedding, we
say he (or she) got "cold feet." It's an expression about last
moment fears that keep one from taking some major step in life, etc. We
often read
Matthew 14:22-33, Peter's stroll on the water with Jesus, as a kind
of "cold feet" case. The fact that Peter's feet might have been
literally cold in the stormy waters may have something to do with
it. For some reason, we've often made this text into a story about being willing to take initial risks with the Lord. Hence the title of John Ortberg's book, If You Want to Walk on Water, You Have to Get Out of the Boat." As much as I generally like Ortberg's stuff, the fact is that Peter was more than ready for the first big plunge. He even asked in verse 28 to be invited to step out and walk with Jesus. This text is not really about willingness to take initial steps of faith. It's about persevering once those first steps are taken. Peter got his "cold feet" a little ways out. He felt the wind and storm around him and began to lose his faith in Jesus. Yet Jesus was there to reach out a hand and rescue him. This is a story about being able to trust Jesus Christ all the way through to the end, even when the storms rage. If we go back to the marriage analogy, it's about not giving up on a relationship when the first quarrels come after a wedding. To use Jesus' own analogies, it's about not letting one's spiritual growth be choked out by the weeds of this world; it's about not looking back once you've set your hand to the plow. So in this Sunday's text, we see "cold feet" as something that can come to us anywhere along the Christian path. We want to stay faithful and trusting for the whole distance. Fortunately, the text also shows us that Jesus will be there for us, even if we do get cold feet. jjj | |||
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Profile |
I am the pastor of Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, Oregon. I love to flyfish and hike along the beautiful rivers in our area. I welcome your comments as I share sermon work in progress and occasional other thoughts.
Thank you for visiting this blog. I invite you also to visit my web page.
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