Love Opens the Door (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

A friend of mine, who is editor of Stoop Magazine, reminded me of a sermon which Martin Luther King, Jr. preached titled ‘The American Dream‘.

But be assured that we will ride you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we will win our freedom, but we will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process.” And our victory will be a double victory.

Oh yes, love is the way. (Yes) Love is the only absolute. More and more I see this. I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate myself; hate is too great a burden to bear. (You bet, Yes) I’ve seen it on the faces of too many sheriffs of the South—I’ve seen hate. In the faces and even the walk of too many Klansmen of the South, I’ve seen hate. Hate distorts the personality. Hate does something to the soul that causes one to lose his objectivity. The man who hates can’t think straight; (Amen) the man who hates can’t reason right; the man who hates can’t see right; the man who hates can’t walk right. (Yeah) And I know now that Jesus is right, (Yeah) that love is the way. And this is why John said, “God is love,” (Yes, sir) so that he who hates does not know God, but he who loves (get in the door) at that moment has the key that opens the door (Yeah) to the meaning of ultimate reality. So this morning there is so much that we have to offer to the world. (Yes, sir)

I love it, not only for the charismatic exhortations to the congregation in brackets, but because this is what the story of Jesus offers the world. Another story. A second story. The story which is the hope of the world and puts an end to the world’s violence. MLK embodies this story, and most pointedly the Sermon on the Mount. Rather than seeing the Sermon on the Mount as a ‘Christian ethic’, he sees it as the ‘Christian identity’. Jesus sermon on the mount is not list of things Christians must do (though we certainly must do them), but a description of the Kingdom that is coming as Jesus gathers his community of disciples. This is the story we belong to, one in which victims do not retaliate, one which doesn’t tell delusional stories about one’s self righteousness, and one that treats women with respect and not as a possession. To live this way is to live the story of Jesus. MLK understood this and so he was blessed because he lived the story of his blessed Lord:

“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matt 5:11–12)

The Truth and False Prophets (Matthew 7.15-20)

The philosopher Michel Foucault says that claims to know the truth are always grabs for power. You simply cannot separate truth and power. Behind any metanarrative there lurks a power play, knowledge claims are violent impositions by powerful institutions, universal truth claims are simply masks for ideology and the will to power. I think we know this to be true, and have seen this play out politically in nations and organisations.

Yet Christians believe they have been given a true story which, far from being a tool to legitimize power, ‘presents a vision of community life which resists claims to power by modelling itself on the self-giving and powerlessness of Christ.’[1] The truthfulness of this story does not make it violent. On the contrary this story is about the cross where the violent took our Lord and killed him so that those who were oppressed would be liberated.

This is part of the sermon I recently preached on Matthew 7:15-20. As you listen you will find out why I found this teaching of Jesus very confronting.

The Truth and False Prophets (Matthew 7.15-20)
MP3 | St Philips, York Street (6PM) | 4 July 2010

The Multi-Layered Story of Our Salvation (John Calvin)

John Calvin says that being a Christian is all about Jesus: ‘our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ.’ In other words, when we become part of the story of Jesus we enter into the multi-layered story of our salvation:

• our salvation— in his very name
• our untroubled expectation of judgment—in the power given to him to judge
• our protection, security, abundant supply of all blessings—in his Kingdom;
• our gifts of the Spirit—in his anointing
• our strength—in his dominion
• our purity—in his conception
• our gentleness—in his birth
• our redemption—in his passion
• our acquittal—in his condemnation
• our remission from the curse—in his cross
• our satisfaction—in his sacrifice
• our purification—in his blood
• our reconciliation—in his descent into hell;
• our mortification of flesh—in his tomb
• our newness of life—in his resurrection
• our immortality—in the same
• our inheritance of the Heavenly Kingdom—in his entrance into heaven

Calvin concludes, ‘In short, since rich store of every kind of good abounds in him, let us drink our fill from this fountain, and from no other.’[1]

Loneliness and God’s Story

Loneliness and God’s Story (Psalm 139) is a sermon I wrote a number of years ago and preached again recently at St Phillips, York Street. You can find it on my Resources page along with a number of other stuff I have shared in the past.

The Real and the Imitation Kingdom (in Revelation)

From Jesus’ Revelation to John:

Outcome

The Cross and the Christian Story

The ‘theology of the cross’ provides the Christian with a story to live in and die for. ‘The Christian story’, Stanley Hauerwas notes, ‘will not remove the challenges [of living in the world], but it holds the possibility of helping us to understand, accept, and imaginatively transform the unmanageable, ambiguous aspects of our existence’[i] as they live by cruciform faith, hope and love.

This story contains the power of God to save the world, and the power of God to change the church. Paul applies this story to the dysfunctional congregation in Corinth. They had begun to construct their own narratives, which according to Thistleton, ‘imbibed secular Corinthian culture’.[ii] These narratives became irreconcilable, and so divisions arose. The loss of the Christ narrative led not only to disunity but also sexual immorality and idolatry. With the marginalisation of Christ’s story the foundation of Christian love was demolished resulting in selfishness. In reaction Paul reminds them of the gospel he preached to them. This story should narrate their lives and produce: faith in Christ—not local narratives of power and glory; hope in the resurrection enabling them to live according to the wisdom of the cross—not the wisdom of this age; and love that builds up the church—not insistent on its own way.

Paul’s application of this story to the problems at Corinth is vastly relevant to our postmodern age which rejects the possibility of a universal story. Far from being a tool to legitimize power, Tomlin argues, the story of Christ ‘presents a vision of community life which resists claims to power by modelling itself on the self-giving and powerlessness of Christ.’[iii] Tomlin continues,

The cross operates as a counter-ideology to the uses of power current within the church, fostering a regard for love rather than knowledge, the poor rather than the wealthy, their trembling apostle rather than the rhetorical ability of any ‘rival’, mutual up-building rather than spiritual showing-off. Theology that begins at the cross is for Paul the radical antidote to any religion that is a thinly veiled copy of a power- seeking culture.[iv]

The story of the cross is The Story our church needs to live in and The Story our world needs to hear. This story ‘does not offer a resolution of life’s difficulties but it offers us something better—an adventure and struggle as together we live faithful to the reality that he is Lord of this world.’[v] In this story, ‘even death can be faced, if it is seen as an event in God’s story, rather than as the end of one’s own.’[vi] The Christian who follows Paul’s as he follows Christ’s story (11:1), will die every day. In this way the ‘theology of the cross’ stands as the image of the Christian life, or as Luther put it, ‘the Christianus must be crucianus.’^[vii]

[ii] Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: a Commentary on the Greek Text (NIGTC; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000), 33.

[iii] Graham Tomlin, The Power of the Cross: Theology and the Death of Christ in Paul, Luther and Pascal (Carlisle, Cumbria, U.K.: Paternoster, 1999), 99.

[iv] Ibid., 101.

[v] Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame, 1981), 149.

[vi] Samuel Wells and Mark Nation, Faithfulness and Fortitude: Conversations with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000), 128.

[vii] Cited in Alister E. McGrath, ‘Theology of the Cross’, DPL, 197. Christianus est crucianus: a Christian is a cross bearer.

Jesus and the Ten Commandments

I am currently reading John Frame’s The Doctrine of the Christian Life in preparation for a sermon I am giving at fixchurch (27 Sep) and Christ Church Gladesville (18 Sep) titled ‘The Desires of the Heart’. He says,

Jesus is not only a perfect law keeper, according to his humanity, but also the one we honor and worship, according to his deity, when we keep the law.[1]

That is, Jesus not only keeps each of the 10 Commandments but perfectly embodies them at every point. So,

1. Jesus is the only God we are to worship (1 Tim 2:5)
2. Jesus is the one perfect image of God (Col 1:15)
3. Jesus is the name of the God (Phil 2:10-11)
4. Jesus is our Sabbath rest (Matt 12:8)
5. Jesus is our elder brother who restores us to the Father (Jn 5:19-24; Lk 15)
6. Jesus is our life – he gave his life that we might live (Col 3:4, Mk 10:45)
7. Jesus is our bridegroom (Eph 5:22-33)
8. Jesus is the source of our inheritance (Eph 1:11)
9. Jesus is God’s truth (John 14:6)
10. Jesus is what we need – he satisfied the desires of our hearts (2 Cor 3:5)

The eucatastrophe of Man’s history

The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation — This story begins and ends in joy. (J. R. R. Tolkien)

Story

The importance of stories is undisputed. Alasdair MacIntyre writes, ‘Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.’[i] Aristotle said, ‘When the storytelling goes bad in society, the result is decadence.’ Yet one of the essences of postmodernism is that there is no overarching story that rules over all times, cultures, histories, and people. Everything is contingent on culture and perspective. Lyotard defines postmodernism simply as ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’.[ii]

In the novel, Fight Club, writer Chuck Palahniuk, through the character Tyler Durden, gives voice to a generation without a Metanarrative:

We are the middle children of history—no purpose or place. We have no great war, no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very ****** off.

In a world without a great war or great depression is left to create its own futile story. What the world needs is a story which is not only worth living for, but worth dying for. In 1 Corinthians, there is such a story. A story which has been foretold and revealed by a divine storyteller (2:10), which Paul reminds the young and troubled church in Corinth, to lead them out of decadence. Such a story, if McIntyre is correct, is eminently practical for, ‘I can only answer the question “What am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”’[iii]

[ii] Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savior (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979), 7.

[iii] MacIntyre, Virtue, 217.