Articles – Page 14 – Religion Online

An Interview with Robert W. Jenson

How has the field of theology changed in terms of topics or method since you first entered it in the mid-20th century? What gives you hope and what discourages you?

One great change: I went to Germany to study for the doctorate because that was still where the action was. Just imagine: my rigorosum -- the sudden-death oral exam -- was conducted by Gerhard von Rad, Günther Bornkamm, Hans von Campenhausen, Peter Brunner and Edmund Schlink. Now the United States is the center.

Another: the Americanization of theology has had both good and bad consequences. A bad one is a typically American scholarly and speculative individualism; in theology diversity is often a good thing, but entrepreneurship is not.

Still another: when I began to study, the historical-critical way of reading scripture -- and indeed of reading the documents of the tradition -- reigned alone. It has finally become apparent that historical-critical reading of scripture simply cannot sustain spiritual life, and efforts are underway to recapture the figural reading of the older tradition. The question is: can this be done without jettisoning the benefits of historical-critical work? I think it can.

As to encouragement, I am greatly encouraged by the appearance of a remarkable middle generation of fine theologians and exegetes, mostly in Britain and this country.

As to discouragement, the great blockade between theology and the practice of the churches is still in place

The notion that Christians are declared righteous for the sake of Christ has been a central part of Lutheran theology and most Protestant theology. Yet with the influence of Eastern Orthodoxy on the one hand and various Anabaptist influences on the other, this ‘forensic" or "juridical" understanding of justification is being questioned. At the least, many Protestants are bringing justification and sanctification closer together. What do you make of these trends? Do Protestants need to rethink their understanding of justiflcation?

All Christian theologians teach that we are declared righteous for the sake of Christ. It is the declared that opens conflicting possibilities. Catholics and others have accused Protestants of so construing God’s declaration as to make it a judicial fiction -- in my view, with considerable reason. But the way to fix that is not, I think, by bringing justification and sanctification closer together, since making the distinction in the first place only displays the problem. At least for the initial great Protester himself, God’s declaring us holy and his making us actually holy are the same act done by the same means.

That is, I think the "Finnish school" of Luther interpretation has it right, whether or not it was materially influenced by Orthodoxy. According to Luther according to the Finns, what happens "by faith" is that Christ himself, whose oral and sacramentally enacted word is his personal presence, comes by the reception of this word so to inhabit the believer that Christ and the believer make one moral person. To repeat the Finns’ signature Luther quote, in ipsa fide Christus adest, "in faith as such Christ is just there." We are made righteous "by faith apart from works" not because God chooses to ignore the fact of missing works, but because as inhabited by Christ we in fact are already truly righteous, before we ever get around to doing works. Thus God’s declaration that we are righteous solely for Christ’s sake is a judgment rather than a legal ruling. It may be worth noting that America’s greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards, had more or less the same doctrine.

The Finnish insight’s ecumenical consequences are considerable. For the major instance so far, the Joint Declaration on Justification between the Catholic Church and world Lutheranism would probably have been rejected by Rome except for the influence on the final draft of the Lutheran bishop of Helsinki.

As for myself, through much of my life I tried to figure out Luther on the assumption that Luther interpretation on

the lines of Gerhard Ebeling was veridical. I am glad to be delivered from that sisyphean task.

In the 20th century, theologians showed a renewed interest in the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet these theologians continue to struggle with categories derived from Greek metaphysics -- an unchanging God, etc. What do you see as the main issues in articulating the Trinity for our time? How would you seek to revivify the place of the Trinity not only in theology but in Christian life?

In the wake of the earlier volumes of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics and a 1967 article by Karl Rahner, serious Western theology has rediscovered -- at least momentarily -- the centrality of the doctrine of Trinity. The doctrine is found to be nothing less than the comprehensive statement of the gospel’s most radical claims, and -- as I have often put it -- is therefore not a theological puzzle but the framework within which to deal with theological puzzles. There continues to be a flood of publication about the doctrine -- some of it good and some, to be sure, not so good. And an interior debate has developed, which sometimes gets rather heated.

The disagreement goes deep. We may describe it by reference to "Rahner’s rule," which -- except for Orthodox participants in the discussion -- nearly everyone claims to honor. Rahner asserted that the "immanent" Trinity is the "economic" Trinity and vice versa, that is, that God’s eternal triune life and his triune history with us in time are somehow one event, that God is not otherwise Father, Son and Spirit in himself than he is among us, and vice versa.

Standard Western theology, according to Rahner and others, has been led by alien philosophical maxims to posit an ontological chasm between God’s triune history in time and his eternal triune being -- so that, for instance, it has been thought that the Father or the Spirit could have become incarnate instead of the Son. Such teaching made the distinctions and relations between the eternal divine persons and the actual history of salvation mutually undetermined, and so of course made the eternal Trinity irrelevant in the life of faith.

The debate is about the somehow just above, about construal of the is in Rahner’s rule. Those on the one side of the argument accuse those on the other of so identifying God with his history among us as to make him dependent on us. Those of the latter party accuse those of the former of continuing so to construe eternity by categories alien to the biblical account of God -- for example, by "timelessness" -- as effectively to retrn us to the dead end from which Barth and Rahner called us.

I am among those accused of confusing God and creation. Two metaphysical sensibilities seem to be in play here, which perhaps cannot be resolved short of the beatific vision. For under various rubrics the same clash has recurred throughout theological history, between Alexandria -- my side -- and Antioch, East and West, Lutheran and Reformed.

As to how I would revivify trinitarian piety in the congregations, were I in position to do so I would issue two decrees. I would make the clergy take time out from administration and "prophetic" politics to read a difficult book or two. And I would for the immediate future ban all "relevant" liturgy, most of which all too blatantly verifies Raimer’s observation that trinitarian faith has little role in Western pop Christianity -- though he was of course too polite to use that last adjective.

What do you hope for and what do you foresee regarding the ecumenical movement?

I foresee continued stagnation -- abstracting of course from an uncovenanted intervention of the Spirit. The ecumenical movement is not very interesting if it is simply an apparatus for practical comity and joint political agitation; its heart must be concern for what ecumenists have called "faith and order," that is, for the theological and structural divisions that prevent fellowship at the Lord’s table, and for the possibilities of overcoming them.

Of that concern there are now few stirrings outside professional ranks; indeed, people find it hard to imagine what enthusiasm there once was in congregations and educational institutions.

That Faith and Order ecumenism is dead in the water has for some time been widely recognized. Out of that recognition, scores of American church leaders five years ago endorsed an initiative to hold a "second Oberlin." The Faith and Order movement in North America had been kindled by a 1957 conference at Oberlin College, mostly of mainline Protestants; the hope was that a similar but more broadly based conference might rekindle the movement. An independent foundation was created to carry the effort, since it was apparent that for many reasons the National Council of Churches could not. In January of this year, the foundation’s incorporating directors formally terminated the venture. It was undone by mainline Protestantism’s present indifference to and distraction from the whole matter, by evangelicalism’s unconcern about separation at the Lord’s table, and by deliberate obstruction from within the established ecumenical apparatus.

To be sure, this pessimistic assessment indeed abstracts from the unpredictable work of the Spirit. When Pope Benedict XVI was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he said on several much-quoted occasions that further major ecumenical progress depended on a new "depth of faith" worked by a new initiative of the Spirit. That can happen at any time and is what we should pray for -- and prayer is the most optimistic act a creature can perform.

What do you think will be the theological impact of global Christianity’s geographic shift away from Europe and North America and to the Southern Hemisphere and Asia? And of the rising influence of Pentecostal churches and the relative waning of churches in the historic confessional traditions?

I think that is unpredictable. As an intrinsically missionary faith, Christianity repeatedly invades geographically or historically new turf -- and it never finds that turf religiously unoccupied. In the ensuing conversation and argument, Christianity will discover both agreements with the antecedent religion and necessary disagreements. As the missionary partner, Christianity will change in some ways, whether the other does or not: it will have to address new questions and configurations of thought, and weigh liturgical and cultural practices to be adopted, adapted or rejected. A form of the church will emerge which may look and sound very different from previous forms -- as different, say, as a late-fourth-century Eucharist in Alexandria from a first-century breaking of bread in Jerusalem.

Some have thought they could so securely identify a general and repeated pattern of religious history as to predict the outcome of a particular contestation of this sort. I am tempted to such hubris but try to resist it. It is in any case too soon, in my view, to know in what ways the churches of Africa or India or China will be specifically African or Indian or Chinese a century or so from now.

Accounts of theological and political disputes in this country often pit the religious right against mainline or liberal Protestantism. How would you describe the main features of the American religious landscape and where would you locate yourself?

Contrasting liberal or left with conservative or right yields, in my view, a map of very limited utility. For my own part, I have been labeled both ways, depending on who was disapproving of me.

At least theologically, there are two effective divisions between American Christians, One is between those for whom the gospel is itself the norm of all truth and the person of Christ therefore the founding metaphysical fact, and those for whom some other agenda or "theory" is the overriding norm. The other is between those who use "justification by faith" -- or in the especially aggravated case of Lutherans, the "law and gospel" distinction -- to fund their antinomianism, and those appalled by this. The language in which I have described the alternatives will doubtless betray on which side of each division I find myself.

Churches on the left and right often see themselves in opposition to the dominant culture -- whether they are opposing abortion rights on one side or opposing U.S. foreign policy on the other. Is Richard Niebuhr’s description of "Christ against culture" still a helpful way to speak about the church’s political stance with regard to the world?

I have long thought that Niebuhr’s book, for all its individual insights, was based on a false setting of the question. Whatever preposition you put between Christ and culture, its mere presence there marks and enforces the supposition that Christ and culture are entities different in kind. But it is of course only the risen Christ who can now have a relation to a culture, and this living Christ’s body is the church. And the church -- with its scriptures, odd rituals and peculiar forms of government -- is plainly itself a culture.

Therefore the real question is always about the relation of the church culture to some other culture with which the church’s mission involves it at a time and place. And I do not think the relation can be the same in every case. During the time of "Christendom," the culture of the church and the culture of the West were barely distinguishable. I do not think this "Constantinian settlement" was avoidable. When the empire said, "Come over and help us hold civilization together," should the bishops have just refused?

As to Christendom’s consequences for faith, some were beneficial and some were malign, as is usual with great historical configurations. During the present collapse of Christendom and its replacement by an antinomian and would-be pagan culture, confrontation must of course be more the style.

What do you make of the recent conversions to the Roman Catholic Church of some prominent Protestant theologians, such as Reinhard Hütter, Bruce Marshall, Rusty Reno and Gerald Schlabach -- theologians you yourself have been in conversation with?

One could add to the list. Those of them I know well describe their reasons differently. But I think one thing is common to all or most of them: they intend to inhabit the one, historically real church confessed by the creeds, and could no longer recognize this in their Protestant denominations. And indeed, if the church of the creeds does not, as the Second Vatican Council put it, "subsist in" the Roman Catholic Church, it is hard to think where it could.

Blanche Jenson long ago convinced me that the Western church could be renewed in faithfulness only by a fruit-basket upset of alignments, and that God must surely have something like that in mind. Perhaps this movement of theologians is part of such an upset. I lament the loss to the Protestant denominations, but I rejoice in the access of talent and energy to the church which will in future bear most of Christianity’s burden. For if present trends continue, the ecumene of the century now beginning will comprise Orthodoxy, Pentecostalist groups and predominantly the Roman Catholic Church; the Protestant denominations and territorial churches will have sunk into insignificance -- but again, present trends of course do not always continue. .

Homosexuality and the Message of Isaiah

If those in the church who are in favor of changing long-held attitudes and ordinances relating to homosexuals were merely cultural relativists with no regard for the Bible or tradition, the debate would be easier. The same would be true, of course, if those wishing to retain those attitudes and ordinances were merely diehard homophobes who used the Bible selectively to their own ends. But neither is the case. Though there may be some people who more or less fit those categories, the hard truth is that Christians of good will -- more, Christians of good faith -- for whom the Bible remains the source and norm of faith and life sincerely disagree about whether or how biblical passages regarding homosexual behavior relate to the current situation. In other words, exegesis -- important as it is -- will not solve the problem.

What then to do? There are many responsible ways to carry on this discussion. One way is to seek help from a somewhat parallel situation in the Bible itself.

The situation I have in mind is the one Israel faced following the exile. The question for Israel was how it should reconstitute itself. With all preexilic institutions shattered, what would mark the way forward? Was this the time to circle the wagons and defend past traditions in the face of the chaotic conditions that came with being a province of Persia, subject to dangerous foreign influences? Some said yes, and found solid biblical warrant for their stance in the many parts of God’s law that call for purity, holiness and separation from the world. Others thought this might be a time to welcome the stranger and open the doors to new possibilities. Those who made this argument pointed to God’s call to be a city on the hill and a blessing to the nations. Both sides could claim fidelity and find good biblical support.

Enter the prophet of Isaiah 56. Speaking for God, he announced: "Do not let the foreigner joined to the LORD say, ‘The LORD will surely separate me from his people’; and do not let the eunuch say, ‘I am just a dry tree.’ For thus says the LORD: To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths . . . I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. And the foreigners who. . . hold fast my covenant -- these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer. . .for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples" (56:1-7).

Throw open the doors, said the prophet. In saying this, he set himself against biblical legislation that clearly argued otherwise. It says in the book of Deuteronomy, "No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord" (23:1). A similar passage in Leviticus declares that "no one who has a blemish shall draw near" the sanctuary, including one with "crushed testicles" (21:18-20).

Some biblical scholars see this development in Isaiah as an Old Testament instance of the sort of radical reinterpretation or even abrogation of a previous divine word that marks Jesus’ own ministry ("You have heard . . . but l say to you. . .") How is such a thing possible?

The prophet, like Jesus, claims to speak as "one with authority" -- that is, precisely as a prophet, one who brings from God a new and life-giving word. But the old words, barring eunuchs from the assembly and limiting the access of foreigners, claimed authority too. Does the prophet simply promote chaos by urging folks to do their own thing? By no means. The promise, in its radicality, remains fully within God’s established covenant with Israel.

"Maintain justice, and do what is right," says Isaiah (56:1 -- keep the sabbath and hold fast the covenant. Foreigners and eunuchs are called to observe Torah and confess their faith just as do other Israelites. The inclusivity proclaimed in Isaiah 56:1-8 is not an ideology that simply proclaims acceptance, disallowing claims to truth and differentiation. Those eunuchs and foreigners are welcomed who confess Yahweh and give themselves to the demands of the covenant.

Further, the promise comes not by right but as gift. A conversation about human rights is always in order, to be sure -- particularly in regard to issues of human sexuality -- but Isaiah is speaking of the remarkable generosity of God, who "will give an everlasting name" to the eunuchs, precisely those who could establish no name for themselves by the normal processes of procreation.

The text moves beyond legalities and orders and speaks from the perspective of a divine grace that changes everything. It does so, in part, by seeing the present in the light of God’s future. A new salvation is on the horizon, one that, like the old, will be "good news to the oppressed" and "liberty to the captives"(61:1). New life will be possible even in the midst of unfulfilled political hopes. In Isaiah’s language, God is "about to do a new thing" (43:19) -- or, in more modern parlance, God is going where no one has gone before.

Finally, in the eyes of the prophet, it is not a matter of eunuchs and foreigners being "allowed" into a community that is whole in itself and that now condescends to let in some who, alas, are not like them. Rather, God is gathering "others" to "the outcasts of Israel" that God has "already gathered" (56:8). The people of Israel can accept the inclusion of others because they know themselves to be outcasts and sinners, welcome in God’s house because of who God is and what God has done, not because of their own righteousness. There is no "we" who magnanimously admit "them"; there is a community of outcasts who together recognize their common need of undeserved grace.

What might this mean for the present discussion about the place in the church of homosexually oriented believers? Might the contemporary church hear itself and its situation addressed by a surprising prophetic word that, in the name of God, calls previous words of God into question? That is to say, might God be calling the church to a "new thing" in which not even earlier words of God -- good and proper for their own time -- can stand in the way of the broader community God now has in mind?

An assenting response will not be universal, of course, just as it was not in the time of the prophet. Was the prophet’s new word canonical? Will the people of God now understand God to be up to something new? Time (and the Spirit) will tell, and prayer will be in order.

At the same time, the conversation about the inclusion of "others" might find a way to uphold the prophet’s insistence that all -- insiders and former outsiders alike -- are called to "maintain justice and do what is right," to "keep the sabbath" and "hold fast to the covenant." Again, "anything goes" is not the prophet’s theme.

What will it mean for homosexual unions (or heterosexual ones, in our difficult times) to "keep the sabbath"? What will it mean for both sides in this debate -- at least as it takes place among believers, in and for the church -- to move beyond political ideologies and culture wars and stand together under God’s word of law and gospel? Once more, the conclusion of such a process will hardly be foregone, but God might again do surprising things among people who give themselves to God’s living word.

Standing under the word in prayer while waiting for the clarification of the Spirit will satisfy neither those who argue for "justice now" nor those for whom the faith itself is at stake in this issue -- and those people will necessarily continue their professions and protestations. But such waiting might prevent rending of the body of Christ and might finally allow a contemporary understanding that, like the biblical canon, retains a place for both tradition and renewal, the old and the new.

On On the Vine (John 15:1-8)

I loved Denny Spear, my first pastor, because he knew my name and greeted me weekly. What I didn’t know was that Brother Spear, as I called him, was a man of great conviction. He had resigned from his previous church one Sunday when his members voted not to admit black worshipers. Denny and his wife had four children at that time and nowhere to go until he came to us at Dunwoody Baptist, and he wouldn’t come to us until we adopted an open membership policy.

Spear says there was no bitterness in the departure, that he resigned because he loved the church. Knowing how he loved us, I believe that. He resigned because he knew that his presence after the vote would only be disruptive. He couldn’t remain silent on the issue, but hoped that the conversation would continue without him, and that one day the church would flourish again. It did, but slowly. When he was invited back to lead a retreat 40 years later, there was one person of color in the retreat group.

Forty years later and one person of color? I think of a story about a patient Gardener who threw a little extra manure around a plant and gave it time to produce (Luke 13:6-9). This Gardener created the world in beauty and set us in the middle of a garden to till and keep it (Gen. 2:15), then called out workers like Denny Spear. I believe that this Gardener would take great delight in a small shoot growing out of a formerly dead stump -- all the more if that vine had been cut back 40 years before.

In John 15 Jesus continues that horticultural storyline. He recalls the vine, God’s beloved community, planted on a fertile hill that was carefully cleared and prepared (Isa. 5). God is the Vinegrower, the one who created the world and continues to love it even though it has become infested with briars and thorns. God is determined to see a living organism flourish and grow on the ravaged landscape of a sinful world, until it can become a source of healing for all the nations (Rev. 22:2).

"My Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit." John presents a beautiful image here -- except that as any gardener knows, there is hard work involved. The good plants are fragile, the weeds are sturdy. Dead growth must be pruned out, and healthy growth must be pruned to make way for more growth. All of this pruning is necessary to make room for God’s reign to flourish and grow.

Last year our church hosted Kingsley Perera, general secretary of the Baptist Sangamayn (Union) of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has been mostly Buddhist for 2,500 years. Christians came 500 years ago, bringing colonial rule and religious persecution with them, but since 1947 there has been general religious freedom. Now aggressive Christian missionaries are stirring up angry resistance. Hundreds of churches have been burned, and there have been attempts to outlaw Christian conversion.

Every time he told the story, somebody asked him what his church would do if Christian conversion were outlawed, and he always replied, "Suffer. Our people are prepared to suffer." Kingsley actually believes that it might be necessary for his people to suffer, that this might contribute somehow to the healing of their land, and he is prepared for it. "We believe that if we are persecuted, the church will only grow. Some nominal members might be pruned away, but that will only make us stronger. Study history, and you will see that the church always grows under persecution."

I have read that the key to church growth is parking, not pruning, but Jesus has another vision of church growth: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24). On the way to the airport I asked Kingsley if he’d ever heard a quote from the early church about the blood of martyrs being the seed of the church.

"Tertullian," he replied instantly.

A few weeks ago a trusted parishioner looked over our year-end financial statement and lamented, "We’re dying on the vine here. We’re not meeting our budget. We’re not attracting enough young families. How are we ever going to grow if we don’t attract young families?" Later that day I passed a decrepit old building that once housed a "growing" church. Members had built an addition and the church had grown wildly -- until the neighborhood changed. The young families moved to the suburbs (where my church is), leaving the church with heavy debt and high utility bills, and soon it went bankrupt and dissolved. Now a tiny new church stands on the lot.

Who knows whether we are growing or dying? Only the Vinegrower. Are we a weed that looks like the vine or are we the real thing? Only our fruit will tell. How do we bear fruit? By dying.

My home church, a big, flourishing congregation with lots of ministries, was once an old-style, small-town church. When new neighbors began to come to Dunwoody Baptist, the old members met and decided to disband. They weren’t leaving the community. They recognized that they were going to need to start over if they were to embrace their new neighbors. They disbanded one week and started over the next.

What a hopeful, courageous act. These wise church members submitted to the vinegrower’s knife, letting go of a church they must have loved to make room for people they didn’t know. It is no wonder that I first believed the gospel there. I bet that many of those members were gardeners.

Ties That Bind (1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18; Acts 4:-12)

Our church has an unwritten rule: we will never ignore a member’s basic need. Whenever our members know of a need in the church, they call me. "Is there any money in the benevolence fund? You know Johnny got cut back on his hours, and his kids need help with school supplies." The answer is always yes. We’ve yet to encounter a need we couldn’t fill. Another church I pastored hosted a church-wide garage sale to meet a medical need. So, even though it’s an unwritten rule, I believe it to be ironclad. We will not let another member go without food or medical treatment. If a young person needs help going to school, we’ll find a way. If someone’s house is unlivable, we’ll find them a new one or invite them into a spare room.

One Wednesday night, I asked those in our Bible study why we have never thought to make explicit what we all know to be true. Why not say it out loud? It seems like great news to me in an anxious age, when we live in fear of economic collapse or terrorist attack, and are just waiting for the housing bubble to pop or for oil production to peak. Why not make it official? Why not state out loud that no matter how bad it gets, we will be there for one another?

I know of a church that’s made such a statement. The Church of the Servant King in Eugene, Oregon, has a rule that no one in its membership will be in need. The members claim that this rule has freed them in surprising ways. They work fewer hours so they can spend more time with one another; they are able to afford to work less because they know they can count on each other. Their common life looks like -- well, fun.

The rest of us are busy working two jobs to a family. Our kids skip recess because they have to study for national tests. I wonder if a simple pledge never to let one another starve would loosen us up. If we knew that it’s not finally up to us to secure our future, wouldn’t that free us so we could begin to spend a little more unhurried time together and with our families?

I didn’t get an answer at the Bible study. In fact, the very mention of the subject seemed embarrassing, as if I had violated a taboo and uttered that which must not be spoken. I suspect that not only do we fear the future, we also fear each other. We are afraid that somebody will try to take advantage of us, afraid that we will have to expose ourselves at our most intimate, private level: our bank balance.

Unlike many of us, the writer of 1 John was not bashful or afraid. "How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?" Put your money where your mouth is, John says. "Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action," John says this plainly, as if it’s obvious. If you love one another, you extend help when someone is in need.

This is a highly unusual statement for both the Gospel and the Epistles of John. When we do find Jesus giving ethical instruction in the Gospel of John, he seems to be talking only about the church. "Love one another," he says, talking about other believers. If we want to expand the message, we must go elsewhere -- to Matthew if we want to learn about loving enemies, or to Luke if we want to learn about loving our neighbors.

All the more reason to pay attention when the Gospel and Epistles of John finally set theological claims aside and call us into this practice of economic sharing. To lay down one’s life for another member can mean many things, but it means no less than this: to promise, so long as you are able, never to let a brother or sister go hungry.

I do not doubt that the members of my congregation love one another; I just wanted them to say it. But voicing our commitment is risky and profoundly countercultural. Our culture runs on fear and disordered desire. If we aren’t hungry for something, we won’t buy it. If we aren’t afraid, we won’t work as hard. What happens if a little congregation breaks the rules and removes the fear by promising to care for one another?

We might reveal the risen Son of God, the Good Shepherd, the one who lays down his life for his sheep.

With a living God loose in the world, we might no longer live in fear, and no longer believe that the world runs only when people look out solely for themselves. We might start to look out for one another, and violate one of the cardinal rules of our economic order.

Easter has been known to evoke robust theological claims and rogue behavior. Peter and John annoyed the rulers and elders and were tossed in jail because they taught that in Jesus there is resurrection for those locked in the fear of death.

That’s what can happen when people believe that the future is not theirs to secure, but belongs in the keeping of a Good Shepherd. They begin to live without fear. "We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death" (1 John 3:14).

Israel’s Fences

By 2010, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promises, Israel will have a border on the east. "Convergence" -- withdrawal from the occupied territories -- is the name of the game after the end of "disengagement" Parties that do not agree to "converge" will not enter the government. It sounds convincing. Who needs the agreement of the Palestinians and the approval of the world when we Israelis alone have been determining the facts on the ground since 1967? The important thing is that the United States is on our side.

According to Olmert, the March 2006 elections were a referendum on his unilateral disengagement plan, and the results give him a green light to implement it. His minister of foreign affairs, Tzipi Livni, went even further, stating that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is irrelevant.

Let us assume that the plan is possible, and that it is only Israel and the Americans who determine the political reality. Let us flow with the idea. Is this going to be a regular border, that is, a clear line with walls and fences, beyond which there are no Israeli forces? Absolutely not. The very fact that according to Olmert there is no partner on the Palestinian side obliges the Israeli army and the Israeli General Security Service to be present on the other side of the convergence line.

Conclusion: it is not Israel that is converging, but the settlers. Israeli forces will be present in territories that are defined partly as "enemy territory" and partly as "hostile territory," which serve as a base for hostile actions and terrorism. The control of the territory and the gathering of intelligence on what is happening there will remain in the hands of Israel.

Olmert also declared that Israel will keep the Jordan Valley as a security strip. Thus we are speaking practically about three border lines: the one with the fences and the wall, across which there will be no settlers but only security forces; the one that separates the Palestinian population from the Jordan Valley; and the exterior one, along the Jordan River. The length of this threefold line is 929 kilometers, three times the length of Israel’s borders on the eve of the Six-Day War in June 1967.

Caught between the wall to the east and the June 4, 1967, border will be 375,000 Palestinians, including 200,000 in East Jerusalem. Only about 5,000 of them are Israeli citizens. Because of its concern to preserve a massive Jewish majority, Israelis unwilling to give full citizenship to such a big number -- indeed, more then 10 percent of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel will continue to see them at best as a hostile population that needs to be controlled. In other words, between the wall and the 1967 line Israel will continue to have a Palestinian "other."

To these main lines must be added secondary lines; the roads that link the Jordan Valley to the territory on which Olmert calls for convergence, and the roads in the Palestinian territories to be used by the forces that control the population and ensure that it does not rise in rebellion or destroy the fences and walls within which it is imprisoned. Every such road separates the Israeli force from hostile territory, and they too are a kind of border.

According to Olmert’s plan, Israel must deter about 2 million Palestinians from rebelling, press the Palestinian Authority to elect the terrorists from its midst and recruit collaborators and informers from its ranks. So it will be necessary to continue with the system of encirclement, closures, checkpoints, arrests for the purpose of intelligence gathering, night raids and assassinations of junior and senior activists.

In other words, the settlements will converge behind the fence, but the military occupation will continue outside it. A certain amount of relief will be given to the Israeli army, because its soldiers will not be obliged to escort settlers to their aerobic dance classes or to evacuate buildings in illegal outposts in the face of resistance from the settlers and their supporters. But in terms of the security burden, nothing substantial will change.

The Palestinians will not reconcile themselves to this situation for long, all the less when ruled by a Hamas government. If Hamas cannot fulfill its election slogan ("In one year of Kassam shelling we achieved what the Fatah could not achieve in ten years of talks"), very few Palestinians will remember its charity and welfare agencies and the integrity of its leaders. Since its inception, Hamas has been attentive to the desires and yearnings of the Palestinian public. It stands to reason that Hamas will continue to heed its public and not ignore Israel’s actions.

The use of advanced technological methods to control the long border lines may produce a certain economy in the manpower enforcing the occupation, but the change will not be dramatic. There will be a need for many army and General Security Service forces to enhance and enforce the occupation. Additional forces will be required to enforce the occupation on the Palestinians who find themselves between the fence and the June 4, 1967, lines, The presence of many security forces in hostile territory and the long border lines will convert every soldier, vehicle and installation into a target for the guerrilla warfare that Palestinian forces will conduct. The tunnels that were dug in the Gaza Strip and the Qassam missiles fired from there before and after the Israeli disengagement exposed the weak points in Israeli superiority. Many more such weak points can be expected in the West Bank, where the length of the border lines that Olmert proposes and the level of friction are much greater than in the Gaza Strip.

Olmert’s proposal shows that he did not learn from the experience of unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The credit column shows the achievement: Israeli soldiers and settlers are not present in the Gaza Strip. The debit column is much longer. Most Israeli and U.S. expectations did not materialize, because the withdrawal was a unilateral process. Unilateralism obliges Israel to employ force in a variety of ways, and that in itself motivates the Palestinians to respond, sometimes with terrorist attacks and sometimes through the ballot box. Thus Israel finds itself in a state of strategic fragmentation.

But it was not only the experience of the withdrawal that failed in Gaza; also the policy of assassinations was a searing failure. Israel assassinated most of the founders and leaders of Hamas and its main activists, but the Palestinian people brought Hamas to power through democratic elections. What was seared into the Palestinian consciousness was the opposite of what Israel wanted. And the U.S. strategy of containment and management of the conflict was shattered with the rise of the Hamas government. The call by Olmert’s government for a total boycott of the Hamas government and the public that elected it shows that it understands that it failed on this point. And what solution does Olmert propose? A return to the unilateral path on a much larger scale.

The U.S. faces a similar problem. Since President Clinton tried to use conflict-resolution strategy and failed, George W Bush hoped to succeed by implementing conflict-management strategy and by supporting Israel in its army operations aiming to contain the intifada flames. Instead of orienting itself to final goals, as the Clinton administration did at Camp David in 2000, the Bush administration oriented itself toward the "road map," which is no more than a process policy with a vague end. Now Bush is in trouble. Not only did the sides not begin to implement the road map, but the strategy is severely wounded by Hamas’s coming to power.

Bush’s alliance with Ariel Sharon was based on using massive force and preemptive strikes against terrorism and preferring unilateral acts with which the powerful side can impose its will without the need to negotiate compromises and concessions. In electing Hamas in free and democratic elections -- as far as elections under occupation can be free and democratic -- the Palestinians voted for a government that promised to resist any Israeli or U.S. unilateral dictate. In short, both the Israeli and Palestinian elections were a referendum on unilateralism.

Israel and the U.S. see eye to eye on the need to internationally isolate Hamas and cause its collapse. They want to achieve this by cutting off all foreign financial aid and launching a political boycott. They prefer using a stick. They do not have a political carrot in their pocket. They do not plan to encourage Hamas to change completely by showing what it can get in exchange.

Israel and the U.S. should challenge Hamas by laying down an attractive political plan. Such a plan already exists, and it enjoys the support of a Palestinian national consensus as well as that of Arab states. Abbas was elected in January 2005 on the ticket of a plan endorsed by Arab League summits -- from the April 2002 Beirut summit to the one in Khartoum in March of this year.

The principles of the plan: On the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 242, Israel will withdraw to the June 4, 1967, borders; the Palestinians will establish their independent state, with Arab Jerusalem as its capital; and an agreed-upon and just solution to 1948 Palestinian refugees problem will be found by the sides on the basis of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1949. In exchange, Israel will achieve a full and secure peace not only with Palestine but with the rest of the Arab world.

Armed with Israeli, American and Arab consent to negotiate along these lines, Abbas can approach the Palestinian people and challenge Hamas. If Hamas refuses to swallow and digest this move, it will lose its domestic and Arab support.

But both Israel and the U.S. refuse to move from unilateralism to end-game negotiations. They encourage Abbas to confront Hamas. Unfortunately, without putting in Abbas’s hands a political carrot, they ensure that he will fail, and the next Palestinian president will be a senior Hamas leader.

Inhuman Behavior

The historian Arnold Toynbee called war "an act of religious worship." Appropriately, when most people enter the cathedral of violence, their voices become hushed. This silence, this reluctance to speak, is based in part on not wishing to trivialize or jeopardize the lives of those who have been put in harm’s way. We want to support the men and women in our armed forces, whether we are crusaders, just warriors or pacifists.

Furthermore, those who interrupt this service of worship become a source of public embarrassment, if not shame. The undercurrent seems to be that dissent or critique in the midst of war is inherently unpatriotic because it violates a sacred wartime precept: support our troops.

From the standpoint of Christian faith, how do we respond? I would say that if war causes us to suppress our deepest religious, ethical and moral convictions, then we have indeed caved in to a "higher religion" called war.

Since this obeisance to war is packaged in the guise of patriotism, it is well to admit to the beauty of patriotism, the beauty of unselfishness and love of country, land, community, family, friends and, yes, our system of government. But this fabulous beauty makes us appreciate all the more what Reinhold Niebuhr called the "ethical paradox in patriotism." The paradox is that patriotism can transmute individual unselfishness into national egoism. When this happens, when the critical attitude of the individual is squelched, this permits the nation, as Niebuhr observed, to use "power without moral constraint."

I believe this has been the case, particularly since 9/11, in the treatment of prisoners under U.S. custody.

We must react when our nation breaks the moral constraints and historic values contained in treaties, laws and our Constitution, as well as violating the consciences of individuals who engage in so-called "authorized" inhuman treatment. Out of an unsentimental patriotism we must say no to torture and all inhuman forms of interrogation and incarceration. It is precisely by speaking out that we can support our troops and at the same time affirm the universal values which emanate from religious faith.

A clear-cut repudiation of torture or abuse is also essential to the safety of the troops. If the life and rule of Jesus and his incarnation is to be normative in the church, then we must stand for real people, not abstractions: for soldiers, their families, congregations to which they belong, and the chaplains and pastors who minister to their needs from near and far. By "real people" we also mean that tiny percentage of the armed forces who are guards and interrogators and the commanders responsible for what individuals and units do or fail to do in treating prisoners.

Too often the topic of torture is reduced to a Hollywood drama, a theoretical scenario about a ticking time bomb and the supposed need to torture someone so the bomb can be discovered and defused in the nick of time. Real torture is what takes place in the daily interchange between guards, interrogators and prisoners, and in the everyday, unglamorous, intricate job of collecting intelligence.

U.S. troops in Iraq are fighting an insurgency. It is a battle for the "hearts and minds" of the people. Mao Zedong referred to guerrillas or insurgents as the fish and the supporting population as the water. This is an asymmetrical battle. As a weaker force, the insurgents cannot operate without the support of the people. So the classic formula for combating an insurgency is to drain the swamp -- cut the insurgents off from their life support. Both sides are trying to win the "hearts and the minds" of the people.

Imagine, then, the consequences when people learn that U.S. forces have tortured and abused captives. A strengthened and sustained insurgency means danger and death for U.S. forces. Never mind that the other side routinely tortures. It is we who lay claim to a higher morality.

Nor should we take comfort that we do not chop off heads or field suicide bombers. What we must face squarely is this: when ever we torture or mistreat prisoners, we are capitulating morally to the enemy -- in fact, adopting the terrorist ethic that the end justifies the means. And let us not deceive ourselves: torture is a form of terrorism. Never mind the never-ending debate about the distinctions between "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" and "torture." The object of all such physical and mental torment is singularly clear: to terrify prisoners so they will yield information. Whenever this happens to prisoners in U.S. control, we are handing terrorists and insurgents a priceless ideological gift, known in wartime as aid and comfort to the enemy.

As for individual guards or interrogators, whenever they are encouraged or ordered to use torture, two war crimes are committed: one against the torturer and the other against the prisoner. The torturer and the tortured are both victims, unless the torturer is a sadist or a loose cannon who needs to be court-martialed. This violation of conscience is sure to breed self-hatred, shame and mental torment for a lifetime to come.

Finally, the most obvious reason for repudiating torture and inhuman treatment is that our nation needs to claim the full protection of the Geneva Conventions on behalf of our troops when they are captured, in this or any war.

The congressional votes for and the presidential capitulation to the amendment offered by Senator John McCain prohibiting torture and inhuman treatment have to be seen as positive (despite the president’s statement in signing it, in which he claimed an exception to the rule when acting as commander in chief). But reasons for concern remain.

• The most passionate defenders of the Geneva Conventions, the judge advocate generals, the military lawyers, were completely cut off from providing input on the torture issue.

• The government has denigrated international treaties that the U.S. has signed and that constitute U.S. law regarding torture and inhuman treatment.

• The definition of torture has been reinterpreted by the Justice Department as follows: "Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

• There is no indication that the outsourcing or "rendition" of brutal treatment will cease. Is it not odd that some of the countries the US. State Department faults for torture are the very countries we utilize in outsourcing interrogations? What credence can we put in their assurances that they will not torture?

• The Justice Department has said that "there is no legal prohibition under the Convention Against Torture on cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment with respect to aliens overseas."

• A Defense Department memorandum has said that "no law banning torture or regulating interrogation can bind the president when he is operating in his role as commander in chief."

• The whole debate on torture has been soaked in euphemisms and word games. Torture and cruelty are renamed as "enhanced measures" and "creative" and "aggressive techniques" and "unique and innovative ways."

• Though there have been investigations of torture, there has never been an independent, bipartisan commission to examine U.S. practice equivalent to the 9/11 commission.

• Until the resounding congressional votes in favor of the McCain amendment, the president threatened to veto the measure.

• In Senate testimony, Senator Jack Reed (D., RI.) asked the military this question: "If you were shown a video of a United States Marine or an American citizen [under the] control of a foreign power, in a cell block, naked with a bag over their head, squatting with their arms uplifted for 45 minutes, would you describe that as a good interrogation technique or a violation of the Geneva Convention?" The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Peter Pace, answered: "I would describe it as a violation." The next question might be: Why have these and other violations of the Geneva Conventions been certified as legal when employed by the U.S.?

• The public has been dragged through a labyrinth of denials, retractions, redefinitions and tortured arguments, all designed to justify and rationalize lowered moral standards in the treatment of prisoners, not to strengthen and defend high ethical standards.

In a letter to Senator McCain, Captain Ian Fishback, a West Point graduate in the 82nd Airborne Division, said, "Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as al-Qaeda’s we should not be concerned. When did al-Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? I strongly urge you to do justice to your men and women in uniform. Give them clear standards of conduct that reflect the ideals they risk their lives for." Torture is not one of those ideals.

An important footnote to the debate on torture concerns the work of military chaplains. By regulation chaplains have a dual role as religious leaders and staff officers. They have direct access to the commander as advisers on matters of religion, morals and morale. This activity, according to Army Regulation 165-1, includes "the spiritual, ethical and moral health of the command" as well as "plans and programs related to the moral and ethical quality of leadership."

Given this definition, questions come to mind. If torture or abuse takes place, what should be the chaplain’s role? Should it be pastoral or prophetic or both? Should there be an ethical framework for interrogation and should chaplains have a part in maintaining it? We need to consult with the ministers, priests, rabbis and imams in the armed forces and respectfully learn from them how they see their role. But unless torture and inhuman treatment cease, chaplains will be placed in a lonely and untenable position -- unless they are willing to hear no evil and see no evil.

A Fair Tax

Americans are, or at least claim to be, a Christian people. Almost 80 percent of us, including President Bush, practice Christianity in some form. Bush has openly stated that Jesus is his favorite philosopher and that "we ought to love our neighbor like we love our self, as manifested in public policy." Yet the president is leading our tax policy far from God’s moral compass.

Here is a view of tax policy from the standpoint of Judeo-Christian ethics:

The book of Genesis, which teaches that God creates each person in God’s image, links a proper relationship with God to a proper relationship with all other human beings. The broad moral principles of justice in the Bible evaluate whether a community’s laws and social structures treat all human beings as bearers of the image of God. These biblical principles forbid oppression and require that all persons enjoy a reasonable opportunity to reach their divinely created potential to carry out God’s work on earth.

The biblical principle of reasonable opportunity is derived from the specific laws mandated by the Old Testament requiring gleaning rights, release of servants, debt forgiveness and land-tenure rights. The teachings of Jesus Christ raise these moral laws to higher and broader levels of social justice. Interpreted in the context of the 21st-century United States, this principle requires much more than minimum subsistence. It also requires that every citizen have access to an adequate education and job training as well as decent health care and housing.

Compulsory taxation is the only way our country can obtain a level of revenues that meets the biblical mandate of reasonable opportunity. This is because most of us will never voluntarily contribute our fair share, given our inescapable greedy tendencies resulting from the fall of humankind. Those who believe that voluntary charitable giving can be a substitute for adequate tax revenues deny the effects of the fall and our dependence on God’s grace to help us fight the sin of greed. Although giving to charity is important from a biblical view, an A+ in charity does not turn an F in justice to a C in social morality.

The Bible also morally evaluates how we allocate the burden for paying taxes. The book of Genesis, revealing God as the sole creator and ultimate owner of all the earth’s wealth and resources -- with human beings serving as God’s stewards -- along with Jesus’ "render unto Caesar" remark in the Gospel of Matthew, establishes that tax burdens are consistent with the generally recognized and respected right to private property. In balancing the indisputable right to enjoy private property with the also indisputable moral responsibilities owed to God and the community, a Judeo-Christian view of taxation requires that those enjoying greater levels of income and wealth make significant economic sacrifices.

We cannot evaluate tax burdens by simply comparing the dollar amount of taxes paid by each taxpayer. The focus must be on comparing proportional tax burdens relative to income and wealth. Regressive models impose tax burdens that are proportionally larger for those with low levels of income. Flat models impose roughly the same proportional tax burden on the middle classes and the wealthy. Progressive models require the upper-middle classes and the wealthy to bear greater proportional tax burdens.

The Judeo-Christian standard of justice, which forbids oppression, condemns taxing those below the poverty line or regressively burdening the lower-middle classes. The general Judeo-Christian teaching that wealth should be held with a light grip -- combined with moral principles running throughout the Bible, particularly the Gospel of Luke -- impose greater obligations on those blessed with greater amounts of wealth. This approach deems flat models to be immoral, and therefore requires some form of progressive taxation. Well-designed flat models do not oppressively burden those who are truly too poor to pay the tax. Nevertheless, by heavily favoring those already enjoying the greatest share of God’s resources, they unacceptably emphasize preserving excess wealth and ignore the biblical message, "To whom much is given, much is required."

A Judeo-Christian moral evaluation of tax policy in no way resembles secular approaches that assume that human effort can produce utopian justice. A Christian worldview recognizes that God’s intended standards of justice will not fully materialize until Jesus comes again and completes his work. Judeo-Christian teachings do not support socialist-leaning tax policy that seeks equality of results under a steeply progressive structure reaching confiscatory levels.

On balance, Judeo-Christian ethics require that tax burdens be allocated under a moderately progressive model. When morally debating the specific level of tax revenues and the precise degree of progressivity, we must always first ask whether the wealthier and more powerful of the community are paying their fair share. This is because those enjoying higher levels of income and wealth will be tempted by greed to fight for the smallest tax burden possible without considering the moral obligations of their faith.

President Bush’s tax policy raises red flags to those who hold Judeo-Christian values. During his first term Bush made the moderately progressive federal income tax structure significantly less progressive by securing tax cuts that principally benefit the wealthiest Americans. In addition to increasing the proportional tax burden borne by the middle classes, his first-term tax cuts contributed heavily to the gigantic federal deficit that threatens the nation’s long-term stability.

Bush continues to push tax policy that overwhelmingly benefits the wealthiest Americans. This includes plans to maintain or possibly increase the tax cuts and to eliminate the estate tax, while attempting to reduce the deficit by cutting spending programs that help the neediest as well as middle-class Americans enjoy a reasonable opportunity to reach their divinely created potential.

The most appalling feature of Bush’s tax agenda is his utter lack of Judeo-Christian-based moral reflection. There is no evidence that he has ever rigorously considered whether the wealthiest Americans are paying their fair share of the tax burden. Instead he resorts to unreliable claims that tax cuts will foster economic growth -- claims that camouflage the true values driving his tax policy.

A careful look at Bush’s tax policy reveals values reflecting objectivist ethics -- a form of atheism that worships the free market and the right of individuals to personally benefit from their efforts above all other concerns. For a Christian this is disgraceful conduct.

The absence of Judeo-Christian values in tax-policy discussions is a sign that genuine faith is in deep trouble. Christianity in particular has become a low-sacrifice operation. Jesus Christ did not preach a low-sacrifice gospel. Real faith results in a transformed life characterized by a high degree of sacrificial discipleship. Real believers endure great personal sacrifice to bring God’s kingdom on earth closer to God’s kingdom in heaven even while knowing that their sacrifice cannot completely restore the fallen world.

Too many Christians, including Bush, have limited their faith-based public policy concerns to a handful of controversial issues. Although these issues may have theological significance, they involve little or no personal sacrifice. Fighting for the right to display the Ten Commandments in the public square while ignoring Judeo-Christian standards of justice amounts to idolatry. Other low-sacrifice decoy issues are gay marriage, stem cell research and euthanasia.

The narrowing of the abortion issue to its legal aspect is an especially hypocritical example of a low-sacrifice position masquerading as faith-based ethics. The moral issue of abortion cannot be separated from the high sacrifice entailed by a Judeo-Christian-guided tax policy. Embracing the dignity of life requires adequate tax revenues to ensure that all persons, especially children, have a reasonable opportunity to reach their divinely created potential.

When large numbers of people and their political and spiritual leaders use low-sacrifice issues to cover up injustice, the consequences are likely to be disastrous. The message of the Bible is that a nation that pursues the atheistic values of objectivist ethics will decline and ultimately fail.

As a Christian, President Bush has a moral obligation to insist that the nation’s tax policy embrace every person as divinely created in God’s image. The moral conversation surrounding tax policy must start to reflect the kind of sacrifice called for by Judeo-Christian values if we are to have a chance of overcoming the forces of greed.

At the Last Supper

"Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where l am going you cannot come’".... Simon Peter said to him, "Lord, where are you going?" Jesus answered, "Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you shall follow afterward. . . Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself that where l am you may be also. And you know the way where I am going." Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me."

(John 13:33,36; 14:1-6)

When Jesus sat down to eat for the last time with a handful of his closest friends, he knew it was the last time, and he didn’t have to be the Messiah to know it -- they all did. The Romans were out to get him. The Jews were out to get him. For reasons that can only be guessed at, one of his own friends was out to get him, and Jesus seems to have known that too. He knew, in other words, that his time had all but run out and that they would never all of them be together again.

It is an unforgettable scene there in that upper room -- the shadows, the stillness, the hushed voices of people speaking very carefully, very intently, because they wanted to get it all said while there was still time and to get it said right. You can only imagine the way it must have haunted them for the rest of their lives as they looked back on how they had actually sat there with him, eating and drinking and talking; and through their various accounts of it, including the above passage from John, and through all the paintings of it, like the great, half-mined da Vinci fresco in Milan, and through 2,000 years of the church’s reenactment of it in the Eucharist, it has come to haunt us too. But I think of the Last Supper as haunting in another way as well -- not just as a kind of shadowy dream of an event long past but also as a kind of foreshadowing of an event not all that far in the future, by which I mean our own last suppers, the last time you and I will sit down with a handful of our own closest friends.

It’s hard not to believe that somehow or other there’s always going to be another time with them, another day, so the chances are we won’t know ifs the last time, and therefore it won’t have the terrible sadness about it that the Last Supper of Jesus must have had. But not knowing is sad in another way because it means that we also won’t know how precious this supper is, how precious these friends are whom we will be sitting down with for the last time whether we know it or not.

Who are these friends for you, who are they for me? We have to picture them for ourselves, of course -- to see their faces, hear their voices, feel what it’s like to be with them. They are our nearest and dearest -- our husband or wife, our children, a few people we can’t imagine living without or their living without us -- and the sadness is that we have known them so long and so well that we don’t really see them anymore for who they truly are -- let alone who they truly are to us, who we truly are to them. The sadness is that we don’t see that every supper with them -- even just a bowl of cornflakes in the kitchen some night after the movies -- is precious beyond all telling because the day will come beyond which there will be no other supper with them ever again. The time will come when time will run out for us too, and once we see that, we see also that for the 18-year-old at McDonald’s as well as for the old crock in the retirement-home cafeteria, every one of our suppers points to the preciousness of life and also to the certainty of death, which makes life even more precious still and is precious in itself because under its shadow we tend to search harder and harder for light.

There in that shadowy room the disciples turned to Jesus, who was their light, with greater urgency and passion than maybe ever before because, with all hell about to break loose, they had no other place to turn. They had drunk the wine he told them was his blood and put into their mouths the bread he told them was his body, and thus with something of his courage in them they asked him a question they had never risked asking so helplessly and directly before. It was Simon Peter who asked it, and what he said was, "Lord, where are you going?"

As if they didn’t know. As if they didn’t know. As if you and I don’t know -- both where he was going and where all of us are going too. He was going down the stairs and out the door. He was going into the night. He was going to pray in a garden to the God he called Father not to let the awful thing happen to him that he knew was already happening, and the Gospels do not record that he got so much as a whisper in reply. He was going alone, and he was going against his will, and he was going scared half out of his wits. He sweated blood is the way the Gospels put it.

The Last Supper not only prefigures our own last suppers wherever and whenever they are to be. It also is our last supper. You cannot read the account of it without in some measure being there, and the table where he sits with his friends is our table, and as they drew close to the light of him, we too try to draw close as if maybe in the last analysis he is the one who is our nearest and dearest -- or our farthest and dearest because he is always just too far away to see very well, to take hold of, too far away to be sure he sees us. If we have any hope at all, he is our hope, and when Peter asks him, "Lord, where are you going?" the question within his question is "Are you going anywhere at all or just going out, like a light," and that is also our question both about him and about ourselves. When time runs out, does life run out? Did Jesus’ life run out? Do you and I run out?

"You will seek me," Jesus says, and no word he ever spoke hits closer to home. We seek for answers to our questions -- questions about life and about death, questions about what is right and what is wrong, questions about the unspeakable things that go on in the world. We seek for strength, for peace, for a path through the forest, but Christians are people who maybe more than for anything else seek for Christ, and from the shabbiest little jerry-built meeting house in the middle of nowhere to the greatest cathedrals, all churches everywhere were erected by people like us in the wild hope that in them, if nowhere else, the one we seek might finally somehow be found.

A friend of mine told me about a Christmas pageant he took part in once as the rector of an Episcopal church somewhere. The manger was down in front at the chancel steps where it always is. Mary was there in a blue mantle and Joseph in a cotton beard. The wise men were there with a handful of shepherds, and of course in the midst of them all the Christ child was there, lying in the straw. The nativity story was read aloud by my friend with carols sung at the appropriate places, and all went like clockwork until it came time for the arrival of the angels of the heavenly host as represented by the children of the congregation, who were robed in white and scattered throughout the pews with their parents.

At the right moment they were supposed to come forward and gather around the manger saying. "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will among men, and that is just what they did except there were so many of them that there was a fair amount of crowding and jockeying for position, with the result that one particular angel, a girl about nine years old who was smaller than most of them, ended up so far out on the fringes of things that not even by craning her neck and standing on tiptoe could she see what was going on. "Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will among men," they all sang on cue, and then in the momentary pause that followed, the small girl electrified the entire church by crying out in a voice shrill with irritation and frustration and enormous sadness at having her view blocked, "Let Jesus show!"

There was a lot of the service still to go, but my friend the rector said that one of the best things he ever did in his life was to end everything precisely there. "Let Jesus show!" the child cried out, and while the congregation was still sitting in stunned silence, he pronounced the benediction, and everybody filed out of the church with those unforgettable words ringing in their ears.

There is so much for all of us that hides Jesus from us -- the church itself hides him, all the hoopla of church with ministers as lost in the thick of it as everybody else so that the holiness of it somehow vanishes away to the point where services of worship run the risk of becoming only a kind of performance -- on some Sundays better, on some Sundays worse -- and only on the rarest occasions does anything strike to the quick the way that little girl’s cry did with every last person who heard her realizing that Jesus didn’t show for any of them -- the mystery and miracle of Jesus with all his extraordinary demands upon us, all his extraordinary promises.

Let Jesus show in these churches we have built for him then -- not just Jesus as we cut him down to size in our sermons and hymns and stained-glass windows, but Jesus as he sat there among his friends while with wine on his breath and crumbs in his beard and his heart in his mouth he spoke about his death and ours in words that even the nine-year-old angel would have understood. "Let not your hearts be troubled," he said in the midst of his own terrible troubles. Take it easy. Take it easy. Take heart. "Believe in God," he said. "Believe also in me.

Well, we are believers, you and I, that’s why we’re here -- at least would-be believers, part-time believers, believers with our fingers crossed. Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him such as that he was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.

"Lord, where are you going?" Peter asked from where he was sitting, and Jesus answered, "I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am you may be also." Can we put our money on that? Are we children enough to hear with the ears of a child? Are we believers enough to believe what only a child can believe?

Three years ago, not long after my only brother, Jamie, died, I found myself one summer afternoon missing him so much, needing him so much, that I decided to call up his empty New York apartment. I knew perfectly well there wasn’t anybody there to answer and yet of course I couldn’t know it for sure because nothing, nothing, is for sure in this world, and who could say that at least some echo of him mightn’t be there, and I would hear him again, hear the sound of his voice again, the sound of his marvelous laugh. So I sat there in the Vermont sunshine -- this skeptical old believer, this believing old skeptic, who you would have thought had better sense -- and let the phone ring, let it ring, let it ring.

Did Jamie answer it? How wonderful to be able to say that by some miracle he did and that I heard his voice again, but of course he didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t, and all I heard was the silence of his absence. Yet who knows? Who can ever know anything for sure about the mystery of things? "In my Father’s house are many rooms," Jesus said, and I would bet my bottom dollar that in one of those many rooms that phone rang and rang true and was heard. I believe that in some sense my brother’s voice was in the ringing itself, and that Jesus’ voice was in it too.

Jesus said, "I go to prepare a place for you..., that where I am you may be also," speaking about death because that is what was uppermost in his mind as it was uppermost in the minds of all of them that last time they had supper together. and as I suspect it is uppermost in our minds too more often than we let on. He says he is not just going out like a light. He says he is going on. He says he is going ahead. He says we will go there too when our time comes. And who can resist giving our hearts to him as he says it?

"You know the way where I am going," he says, and then Thomas speaks out for every one of us in a voice that my guess is had all the irritation and frustration and sadness of the little girl’s. "Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?"

If I were as brave as the rector at that Christmas pageant, I would stop talking precisely here with those starkly honest words. When it comes to the mystery of death, like the mystery of life, how can any of us know anything? If there is a realm of being beyond where we now are that has to do somehow with who Jesus is, and is for us, and is for all the world, then how can we know the way that will take us there?

"I am the way, and the truth, and the life," is how he answers. He does not say the church is the way. He does not say his teachings are the way, or what people for centuries have taught about him. He does not say religion is the way, not even the religion that bears his name. He says he himself is the way. And he says that the truth is not words, neither his words nor anyone else’s words. It is the truth of being truly human as he was truly human and thus at the same time truly God’s. And the life we are dazzled by in him, haunted by in him, nourished by in him is a life so full of aliveness and light that not even the darkness of death could prevail against it.

How do we go where he is? How do we who have a hard enough time just finding our way home in the night find the way that is his way, the way that is he? Who of us can say, and yet who of us doesn’t search for the answer in our deepest places?

As for me, I think what we are to do is to keep on ringing and ringing and ringing, because that ringing -- and the longing, the faith, the intuition that keeps us at it -- is the music of the truth trying to come true even in us. I think that what we are to do is to try to draw near to him and to each other any way we can because that is the last thing he asked of us. "Love one another as I have loved you" (John 15:12) is the way he said it, and that is exactly what the little girl asked too on that Christmas Day. By believing against all odds and loving against all odds, that is how we are to let Jesus show in the world and to transform the world.

Groping in Darkness (I John 1:1-2:2)

I shudder when I’m reminded that it is painful for someone with dark skin to hear that "God is light, and in God there is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5). Being legally blind, I know firsthand that to walk in the light (1 John 1:7) often hurts. I wear sunglasses both to darken my world so that I can function and to protect my eyes from the light.

Scholars say that everyone in the ancient world agreed that God is light. But this premise plays differently to people for whom the light of day does not automatically bring safety and the darkness of night does not automatically signal danger. Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus in John 3 gets flipped as preachers commend "Nick at Nite" as a spiritual role model, saying that nighttime is the right time to bring our biggest questions and deepest concerns to Jesus. Rather than providing a cloak of secrecy that covers fear, the dark of night brings clarity and calm as our lives slow and our most important questions surface. In this case something that was obvious to the ancients is ambiguous to us. Left unaddressed, all this talk of darkness and light may confuse us instead of proclaiming new life.

Fortunately, the author of I John does not leave "God is light" unaddressed. Later in the letter, "the message that we received . . . and proclaim to you" is further defined. The message heard from the beginning is that "we should love one another" (3:11), and the author asserts that God is love (4:8, 16). In Jesus, God is revealed as light and as love, and this revelation includes the commandment to love one another. To say that God is light is to say that God is love. To walk in the light is to love one another.

We walk in the light when we love one another enough to allow the power of Christ’s resurrection to breathe new life into well-established theological words like darkness and light. I am troubled that writers are criticized for their lack of respect for Webster’s when they avoid the masculine pronoun for God, using the term Godself. One person described the term as laughable and another said it is silly, since Godself does not appear in any reputable dictionary. I cannot help thinking that what is laughable for some is liberating and life-giving for others. Perhaps part of loving one another involves putting up with some silliness for the other’s sake. I wonder how, if we cannot trust the risen Christ with our language, we will ever trust the risen Christ with our lives, our church and our world.

Often the first step in walking in the light by loving one another is to grope in the darkness of resurrection. When the risen Christ resurrects the phrase "God is light," for example, we may at first find ourselves plunged into holy darkness as former things pass away. But we will experience God in the darkness, as surely as Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was (Exod. 20:21). With the psalmist, we discover that darkness is not the absence of God, but God’s secret place. Groping in the darkness of resurrection, we come to know that asserting that God’s nature is light may not be wrong, but it is as limiting as asserting that God’s nature is masculine. In fact, rather than describing that nature of God at all, "God is light" is one way of describing God’s loving relationship with humanity, as revealed in God’s saving action in Jesus Christ.

Experiencing God as darkness makes determining how to walk in the light less certain than we might suspect or desire. Since to walk in the light is to love one another, any prescription that absolutizes light as good and darkness as evil walks away from love rather than walking in it. Instead of prompting us to cling to the certainty of the light that we know, Christ’s resurrection sets us to the holy work of groping in the darkness of resurrection. Perhaps this is why Isaiah praises those who walk in darkness by trusting in and relying on God rather than lights of their own.

Instead of offering lights to guide us, 1 John declares "what we have seen and heard." To grope in the darkness of resurrection is to confess our sin, the reality of our human nature. To confess our sin is to publicly and specifically acknowledge our need of God, revealed in Jesus Christ, and not merely to assent to a state of sinfulness. To deny the reality of our sin is to deny God’s saving action in Christ and the love of God that sent Christ into the world. To deny our sin is to deny that God is love. Groping in the darkness of resurrection leads us to acknowledge that in matters as silly as language and those as serious as our planet’s future we need God to raise us to new life.

We confess our sin because whether we use light or darkness to describe God, we know that God’s nature is to love and forgive us. We hear, see and touch God’s love and forgiveness in the person of Jesus and in one another. Just as God’s love was revealed in Jesus, so the power of Christ’s resurrection, the transformation brought on by our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, finds concrete expression in the way we live each day as we love one another.

Walking in the light is distinctive because of loving behavior which often appears to others as groping in the darkness. Thankfully, we neither walk in the light nor grope in the darkness of resurrection alone. God’s message to love one another blesses us with others whom we can love, others with whom we learn how to walk in the light.

Biker Wedding

"The early Christians were not people of standing, but they had a secret power among them, and the secret power resulted from the way in which they were members of one another." -- Elton Trueblood

I’ve performed more wedding ceremonies than I can count, but there is one wedding that I will never forget. A woman who was not connected to our church had begged me to officiate at her wedding. She was six feet tall, with spiked hair, and thighs like a professional football player’s. "Please," she pleaded. "It’s going to be a small ceremony, just friends and family at our house."

When I showed up on the day of the ceremony, dozens of "choppers" were parked in the front yard. Men with long handlebar moustaches wore black leather jackets covered with leather straps, and German-style helmets with spikes on top. The women with them looked as if they’d been picked up from a Las Vegas showgirl convention. People streamed into the house with a case of beer in one hand and a food dish in the other.

Inside I was greeted by heavy-metal music and a haze of cigarette smoke. A woman noticed that I was the only one wearing a suit and screamed over the music, "You must be the pastor. Take a seat, and we’ll start in a moment!" I looked around for a chair, avoiding the couple that was making Out on the couch. Soon after I sat down, the best man stumbled into the chair next to me and passed Out.

Forty minutes and five beers later, the bride’s sister called everyone into the living room. A few guys propped the best man up against the wall and someone hit the tape player -- "Misty Mountain Hop," by Led Zeppelin. As the bride walked into the room, the guys hollered to one another. The lace of the wedding dress covered her massive arms but couldn’t hide the tattoos that stretched from her wrists up to her shoulders. I quickly delivered my standard wedding sermon and pronounced the couple husband and wife. Then someone screamed, "Let’s party!"

Within seconds everyone in the room swarmed the couple with smiles, hugs and kisses. I waited my turn in line to congratulate them and then explained that I needed to leave. But the father of the bride overheard me, grabbed my arm and yelled, "Let’s make a toast!" Someone handed out bottles of vodka and wine.

The bride said, "I want to make a toast myself. I want to toast you guys. You are just like family to me." She looked over at her maid of honor and said, "Jackie, you are just like a sister."

Jackie immediately stopped her and said, "No, you’ve always been like a sister to me." With her arms around the bride’s neck, she sobbed, "Do you remember when I lost my baby three years ago? I wouldn’t have made it without you." Then she turned to the group and said, "Or without all of you. I wanted to die. You gave me a reason to live."

The bride continued. "Richard, when my brother passed away, you were there for me. You were driving a rig cross-country at the time, but you still came over every weekend."

Someone interrupted her. "You’ve been there for us too. When I lost my job, you brought groceries over to my house and bought school clothes for my kids. I’ll never forget that."

This went on for ten minutes. People shared stories of friends in the group who helped them buy cars when they couldn’t get to work, who watched their children when they were in a pinch. One man told how two guys in the room picked him up from jail and let him live with them until he was able to afford his own place. After everyone finished, the bride looked around the room as she lifted her beer and said, "To friends." I looked around the room and thought, church should be like this.

Most Christians don’t view the church as a place to go when tough times hit. They become so disappointed with a church’s lack of response to their needs that they stop reaching out. They sign up for Christianity expecting to find authentic caring relationships like those I witnessed with the group of bikers, but over time they settle for superficial handshakes and "thinking about you" cards.

People yearn to be part of something real and life-giving, and I believe that they can rediscover and help create this in a church. First, I would remind them what the church should look like. When the community of Jesus’ followers is operating the way he dreamed it could be, there’s nothing like it in the world. It is truly miraculous. What I saw in the living room at the biker wedding can’t compare with the power and beauty of the church when it is working the way Jesus intended.

Second, I believe that people can create, or re-create, this kind of experience in their own churches. But it requires their decision to do so. It requires that they take a risk. And it requires that they stick to one church for the long haul.

The apostle Paul compared the church to a human body: "If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it" (1 Cor. 12:26). He points out that when we followers of Jesus become spiritually intimate with one another, it is as if our souls grow together and we begin to share spiritual nerve endings. If something happens to you, I can’t help being affected by it. We are connected soul to soul. In the same way that a twisted ankle affects every part of a human body, the hurt that one church member feels touches everyone else in that community. In a healthy, functioning community of Jesus followers, people are deeply connected to one another.

The other thing you find in a healthy church is people inspiring each other by the way they handle the tough circumstances of life. In one church that I served, I became friends with Bill Clift. Bill isn’t a spiritual celebrity. He’s never preached before thousands or written a best-selling book. Bill is a regular guy -- a former industrial arts teacher who was forced to go on disability because of a degenerating hip. I never saw Bill walk without a cane, and when he walked his hips wobbled side to side with each step he took. Yet Bill was always the last one to leave worship and hobble out to his car.

Bill had an amazing gift of empathy. When someone in our church went into the hospital to have surgery, Bill would arrive first, greet that individual as he or she came in, pray with the patient and wait with the family. Many times I arrived at the hospital only to see Bill with an entire family standing around him holding hands in prayer. I picture Bill hobbling around with his cane, and am reminded of theologian Kosuke Koyama reflecting on his days in the tranquil rice fields of Thailand:

Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. . . . It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.

Bill and God had a lot in common. Bill kept me going through dark days, and that’s what I love about the church. When it is working the way Jesus intended, there is always a Bill we can look to for inspiration. Whenever I shared a problem with Bill, he would pinch his lips together, look down at the ground and shake his head. "Brian," he’d say, "we’re just going to have to trust God on this. He’ll take care of us." Trust God? Take care of this? Coming from a man who, if surgery were an Olympic sport, would always be the gold-medal favorite?

That’s what happens in a healthy church. There are always two kinds of people to keep us going: those who rally around us when times get tough, and those who inspire us as they walk ahead, clearing the brush and pointing the way Without either group of people, the church just isn’t the church.

I’ve noticed a severe "go it alone" approach among Christians dealing with pain. They will read a book, pray, read the Bible, meditate or journal -- all in an attempt to work through their struggles by themselves. These things are fine, but none of them can replace authentic community with other followers of Jesus.

We need the church. Christianity is not a solo activity. We come up with endless reasons why we can’t or won’t or shouldn’t reach out to others in Christian community. We must ignore those rationalizations and decide to step out, take a risk and seek authentic community with other followers of Jesus.