Matthew 3:1-3 (Again)

These three verses are worth lingering over because they are the transition from the introductory material in chapters one and two into the ministry of Jesus.  Pre-game is over.  The team is now out on the field.

And the field happens to be a desert, a wilderness.  Now, if this were a biography of Jesus of Nazareth, we would say, "OK, that's cool.  Now we know the context.  Hope Jesus took plenty of water and stayed hydrated.  What's next?"  But Matthew is not a biography; it is a gospel.  The rules are different.  Things mean things.  And they don't mean just one thing at a time.  And what they mean can change as our situation as readers changes.

Right now, it might be important for us to see "desert" as a place of simplicity, often a place of spirituality.  Faithful folks go into the desert to meditate, to find God, and/or to escape the temptations of the world.  There is no Chiang Mai Central Festival mega-shopping center, symbol of a crass capitalist economy, in the desert.  And, tomorrow or next week, it might be equally important for us to recall that in the Exodus God led Israel out of Egypt into the Wilderness, just as Jesus fled to Egypt, returned to Nazareth, and began his public ministry in the wilderness—symbolic of his being the New Israel, the vessel of God's leading and salvation.  Or again, in ancient times, the desert was also seen as a place of challenge and of transition.

In the midst of these various options, the important thing for us to understand is that Jesus' going into the wilderness  to be baptized by John was no small or incidental thing.  He didn't go there because John was there.  That's biographical thinking.  The gospel places him there to alert us to the profound significance of what was going to happen there.  Jesus is about spirituality, transitions, salvation, challenge, and the losses and gains of going into the desert.  Matthew wants us to pay attention.  We are entering special territory, hearing a different kind of story.  This is not about biography.  It is about good news.

Matthew 3:1-3

We live in three dimensions.  We are spatial, geographical creatures to our very core.  This is obviously true physically.  We "come".  We "go".  Every time we take a step, we are travelling—if only to go to the kitchen or the bathroom.  We also think spatially as well.  We "look up" to someone even if they are shorter than we are.  We describe our lives as being "a journey" that we are on.  Like the air we breathe, three-dimensional-ness is so much a part of our reality that we don't even notice it as such.  It is just "there".

These opening verses of Matthew 3 are a reminder that we also think of God geographically as well.  John proclaimed, "Turn away!"  Basically, we are called on to turn our lives around and head in a new direction.  He proclaimed, "God's Kingdom is near!"  Does that mean that God has a place where God lives?  It seems a silly question if God is the creator of the totality of the universe, because so far as we know the universe encompasses all of our reality, all of our spaces.  God is somehow Beyond time and space.  We can't even say that God is nowhere because "nowhere" is still a geographical/spatial term.

But in Matthew 3 we're told that God's Kingdom is close, apparently very close.  So, God's Kingdom is not nowhere?  It is "somewhere"?  It exists in time & space?  Most Christians would say that God is obviously in God's Kingdom, which we usually think of simply as Heaven.  God is in Heaven.  In ancient times, they literally thought of Heaven as being above the sky.  On top of all of this, John quotes the prophet Isaiah, saying that God has a road, which God travels, a road that the faithful prepare for God.

We have two seemingly contradictory things going on here.  On the one hand, there is nothing we can say about where God "is" because God isn't even a "being".  God doesn't occupy space or take up time.  On the other hand, we believe that God the Spirit is present with us; and the Bible uses three-dimensional, geographical images to describe that presence.  Is the Bible, then, just a silly attempt at doing what can't be done, i.e. talking about the presence of Something that by definition cannot be present?  No, it isn't.  Biblical images and its geographical language are valid for us so long as we remember that they are not literal.  All of our language about God, indeed, is made up of "tropes," that is words and images that are non-literal.  Even the claim that God was in Jesus of Nazareth, even the sense we express that the Spirit is moving in our lives or in our hearts—even these are tropes, non-literal ways of speaking about That, which cannot be spoken of literally.

It has to be this way.  Any time we think our words and images about God are literally true, we are trying to force God to fit into our little time and space reality.  We are trying to turn God an idol, make God over in our own three-dimensional image.  God is Beyond.  That's all we can say, and even that simple little sentence is a trope.  What we are left with is faith.  Amen.

Matthew 2:13-23

The back end of Matthew 2 is not the world most of us live in, not even on a Sunday morning.  It is full of dreams, symbols that don't mean much anymore (esp. the whole fleeing to Egypt scene, which harkens back to the Exodus), and especially the use of Old Testament prophecies to explain why things happen.

In our world, we would go see a therapist if we had all of the dreams Joseph had.  In our world, we look to economic, political, and other "real" factors for the explanation of contemporary events.  Now, we might avow that God is involved in things that happen to us, but God's involvement is limited to working through "worldly means."  We don't go back to prophecies or claim to be directed by dreams filled with heavenly messengers.

So, how do we deal with these fundamental differences between Matthew's world and ours?  Many simply avow that, "The Bible is true.  I believe it.  So, things happened just the way it says they did." That's fine, but it also makes the Bible itself an object of faith, which is OK as long as we don't confuse putting our trust in the literal (which language?) words in the Bible (which translation?) with our faith in Christ.  They are different things entirely.  If that difference is not recognized, we are in danger of falling into the trap of bibliolatry, the false worship of the Bible as an idol.

Another approach is to focus on the story line contained in Matthew rather than individual events.  We understand that it was written in a different world so that the manner in which the events are explained differs from our iPhone-world as radically in some ways as do the technologies of the 1st and 21st centuries.  But what about the story line?  Is IT something we can trust?  By that I mean, do we detect in it the presence of God's Spirit reaching out toward us?  Is it inspired?  The question is not whether or not each and every word (which language, which translation?) is inspired.  Rather, do we detect in the story God's presence, a presence that makes sense to us in 2017?

If we trust that there "is" a Divine Spirit that beyond all understanding "is" both Beyond and Present—if we have that faith, then it is not a difficult step to say that, "yes," we do sense that Holy Spirit inspiring us through the stories of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  Amen.

Matthew 2:1-12

For some reason, the East has always held a special fascination for those who live to the west.  Wisdom resides in the East.  "They" are more spiritual than "we" are.  Apparently, this was true when Jesus' was born, and the visit of the wisemen/magi/mystics from the East has a symbolic meaning that we can understand today.  Wisdom and the light of Truth sought out Jesus and worshipped him.  And all of this happened while he was still an infant, which in ancient times meant that he was supposedly an inferior, incomplete person not yet fully human.

This was the claim of the earliest church:  the country preacher from Nazareth who had been strung up by the Romans was something much more than he appeared to be.  The heavens proclaimed his birth.  Truth and Wisdom worshipped at his feet from the time of his birth.  The East sought him out in order to give him gifts of great value, gifts worthy of a king.

But just as we get all teary eyed over this wonderful little baby, politics rears its ugly head.  That word, "king," was a two-edged sword, to be sure.  The Eastern mystics said they were looking for the newborn "King of the Jews."  The reigning actual king of the day, Herod, was not happy.  And here we are again.  In the real world so-called.  The heavenly realm of the East and the mundane, political world of Palestine were actually one world, the one we still live in today.  That too was part of the proclamation of the early church.  They found and experienced the Spirit through an otherwise unassuming, real world son of a carpenter from Galilee—who woulda thought!

So Christians believe, apparently, that All that is Great and Spiritual worshipped at the feet of a lowly little kid from a nobody family.  Weird, huh?  The fancy theological word is "incarnation".  We're still trying to wrap our heads around it 2000 years later—not with a lot of success, it seems, for all of our millennia of verbiage.

Matthew 1

After we get past all of the verses of genealogy,  the first chapter of Matthew turns out to be fascinating and eye-opening.  It comes from a world very different from the 21st century, a world where the divine intersected with the "real" world in palpable ways that included dreams and virgin births.

The chapter is about mystery, miracles, purity (virginity), and the unexpected.  It launches us into an alternative reality.  It revolves around an event otherwise unimaginable, a pregnant women who never had sex.  It hinges on a message from out of time, space, and our daily lives—it hinges on a dream.  When we walk into Matthew's world, we walk out of our own.

Or, do we?  The very last verses, Matthew 1:25, contains the surprise of all surprises.  It has been made clear that Jesus' conception was a miraculous one, engineered as it were by the Holy Spirit.  Unique among all of the billions of human beings that have ever lived.  But in verse 25 there is no indication of some kind of painless birth.  His conception was miraculous.  His birth was not.  Sweat, tears, pain, blood, midwives, relatives, anxious father, umbilical cord—the whole nine yards of a typical birth.  The dangers of such a birth.  And the joys.  The first time he was suckled.  Tenderness.  Pride.  A first born son!

Matthew 1:25 leaves us in a strange, half-unimaginable, half-familiar place.  Jesus was apparently conceived in one not of this world place, born in another of this world place.  Whether or not the story is "literally true" is far, far beside the point.  For us, the far more important question is rather whether it's claim in true.  Was Jesus a child of Beyond as much he was of Here?

God: the Problem

It is often claimed that the great doctrinal issue among Christians today is the nature and authority of the Bible.  It is a divide between literalists and non-literalists on the one hand.  Or, again, it a division that pits those hold a high regard for the scriptures versus those who have a less lofty view of the Bible.  It may well be true that the Bible is the great doctrinal issue of our time.  If so, however, the problem of God is not far behind—and probably linked.

In fact, God has always been a problem for the followers of Christ.  Almost from the beginning, we inherited two distinct traditions concerning the nature of God, one from Jewish theology and the other from Greek philosophy.  From Judaism we learned that God is intimately involved in the affairs of humanity, hears and sometimes answers prayers, appears in various guises, and speaks to us.  Yes, God is also the creator of all that is and thus far beyond us—yet the psalmist affirms that God has made us "little lower" than the messengers of heaven (Psalm 8:5).  And we Christians are convinced that Jesus in preeminently God With Us.  Our Greek heritage, however, throws all of this into doubt.  It affirms that God is Beyond all beyonds, unnamable, unimaginable, and even non-existent in the way the created universe exists.  We are warned that the moment we call anything by the name "God," that thing is not God.  We are warned that we cannot even say that, "God is love," because such a statement reduces God to human terms, puts God on a human scale.

If the Bible is the great doctrinal divide of our time, then the nature of God is the great theological divide—and long, long has been.  Stated most directly, the divide is between those who understand God to be in some sense an independent entity that is real as the universe is real and those who believe that God is not an entity in any way that we can call an entity and does not exist as we understand existence.

Like the various doctrines of scripture, so too the various theological positions on the nature of God cannot actually be so easily divided into two neat camps.  But they do represent two tendencies, one seeing God primarily as Present with us and the other understanding God to be Beyond all possible beyonds.

God's Ways

Sometimes we do dumb things, sometimes they are done to us.  Sometimes we are insenitive, sometimes we are collatoral damage of insensitivity.  Things are said that should not be said or left unsaid when they should be said.  Some things we get over in a day or two, others linger interminably.  Things happen to us that can leave deep scars, and we do things that can leave others deeply hurt.

There is usually no good way out of the situations we get ourselves into.  At least, it seems that way.  In hindsight, however, sometimes the dumb things we do and are done to us turn out to have had something more than a silver lining.  They had unintended good consequences, if we have the wit to see them.  And sometimes a prayer uttered in hurt or embarrassment or confusion is answered, and the clinging fog of life clears for a time.  Things weren't what they seemed to be.  And on occasion we have the wisdom to do or say something that brings healing into the dumb situations we find ourselves trapped within.

Without being naive about it, there are paths through the Valley of the Shadow, the Valley of the Fog.  The wrongs we do and the ones done to us—there are healing ways through them.  Unintended consequences themselves have unintended consequences, which don't exactly make things easier but do eventually bring us out of the fog into the light of day.  Embedded even in our worst are other ways, what those of us who hold a theist's faith might call God's Ways.  Our prayer is, "Lord, help me to find one of your  Ways."  Amen.

Wondering About the Facts

In our world, something is not real if it is not factual—not true if it doesn't accord with the facts.  This is so obvious that it is just plain common sense, beyond any the need to question.  We believe in facts.  They are our portal into reality.

Fair enough.  Fair enough, that is, until one starts to think about the meaning of the word, "fact."  The Free Dictionary definition of "fact" seems to be both representative of and somewhat more precise than other online definitions; and what it boils down to is that a fact is a fact because it states or describes something that is real.  It is a fact because it really happened.  It is factual because it really is the case.  It is a fact because it describes a piece of what is really real. By that same token, a scientific fact is "an observation that has been confirmed repeatedly and is accepted as true (although its truth is never final)" and, more simply, "facts learned by observing."

We normally consider facts to be transparent.  We can see through them to subsequent facts leading to the confirmation of hypotheses.  We are less often aware of factuality as a mindset, a set of values, and a prejudice.  How we define reality determines our conception of factuality, and there is no value-free, neutral, unprejudiced definition of reality, not even in the sciences.  Equally important is what we define as unreal.  In science, divine causation is considered to be not real scientifically, and the Holy Spirit  considered outside the realm of scientific reality.

Our definitions of reality by which we determine factuality are all human definitions based on what we think is real.  When theists absolutize their definitions, we are justly criticized for doing so.  Scientists often escapes criticism for absolutizing their definitions because they supposedly have a handle on what is really, really real.  The trouble is, of course, that they don't.  All human definitions of reality are limited ones, incomplete and open to criticism—all of them.  Facts are ultimately human creations.  Vast numbers of what people take to be "facts" do not in fact accord with actual realities.  Scientific "facts" turn out not to be factual.

The point is a simple one: we put too much trust in factuality.

Jerry Kill as Big Ten Coach of the Year?

Minnesota Gophers head football coach, Jerry Kill, has been named Big Ten Coach of the Year.  Those of us who are Gopher's fans are quite happy with his selection.  It seems warranted.  Some folks in Ohio, however, are not happy.  Urban Meyer, head coach at Ohio State, seems to them a much worthier choice.  Their case has two points.  First, in spite of Ohio State's continued football success over the last twenty years (one losing season, numerous ten win seasons), no head coach has won the coach of the year award.  It is incredible to them that this should be the case.

Second, OSU's record this year is in every sense superior to Minnesota's.  OSU won their head to head clash in Minneapolis.  OSU has defeated several highly considered opponents including Michigan State.  The Buckeyes regularly recruit at a higher level than Minnesota.  Meyer has had to contend with a number of serious problems including losing one of the best quarterbacks in the country for the season.  (It turned out that the replacement QB is arguably even better).  In every regard, these arguments are compelling.

Yet, there is a compelling argument for Kill as well.  Looking at the Gopher's record over the twenty years tells the story: one ten win season, few winning seasons—in short a marked lack of success and prominence most of the time esp. when compared to Ohio State.  That is, Urban Meyer's unarguable success continues the long-standing success of OSU football.  Kill's putting together back-to-back eight win seasons in Minnesota, on the other hand, stands in marked contrast to the team's past when that has happened only once.  Indeed, going back to 1960, Minnesota has had eight-win seasons only seven times including the two under Coach Kill.  Going back just to 1994, OSU has had 17 eight-win seasons or better.

Meyer's accomplishments represent an admirable continuation of the OSU winning tradition built on a superior football culture.  Not every coach can come into a winning situation and keep it going.  Kill's seemingly more modest accomplishments in Minnesota, on the other hand, stand in marked contrast to what has gone before.  He inherited a mess, and he has thus far turned things around in a remarkable fashion.

The question is, in sum, what is the measure of coaching success that would lead to being named coach of the year in the Big Ten?  Is it superior success continuing a tradition of superior success?  Is it measurably improved success turning around a tradition of mediocrity?  Honestly, a case could be made in either direction, but making that choice requires deciding on the measure of coaching success.  The judges this year chose the return of Minnesota to relevance in the Big Ten after two generations largely of irrelevance their standard for 2014.  Gopher fans are glad they did.  We're still not used to winning things like this.

It's the Culture, Stupid

While many mainline churches are healthy, most are not.  They are in decline.  They share in a culture of decline that is marked not only by statistical decline but also by avoiding talking about their decline.  In a strange sort of way, they are acquiescing to their own decline and eventual demise.  Pastors play a large contributing role in all of this, but it is the churches themselves that play the major role.

Hold that thought.  When recently asked (here) why he has been so successful in turning around the football program at the University of Minnesota, head coach Jerry Kill answered, "I guess the No. 1 thing is the culture, trying to get everybody on the same page...That was difficult. It always is, by the way, when you take a new job.”  Football success wasn't possible without a change in culture.  That change didn't guarantee that the Golden Gophers would suddenly become a relevant program, but without the change in culture there was also no possibility that it would becoming a winning team.  One key cultural change Kill identified, for example, was improving the players' grades.

Returning to the church, it is clear that declining local mainline churches require a change in culture.  It is, unfortunately, far more difficult to sell that need to congregations than it is to young football players who want to win football games.  Churches are prone to actively resist such change.  They are frequently committed to the proposition that they can overcome decline by continuing to do what they are doing, but only better.  There is a reason.  Change might accelerate decline.  Better the devil you know than the one you don't.

Nonetheless, it is all about changing the culture of decline.  The problem with all of the how-to manuals and books and audio cassettes and websites dedicated to that change is that culture is a profoundly local thing, even the culture of decline.  What works in one place may well not work at all in another.  The one constant is the need to change the local church's culture of decline.  And one crucial place to begin is to talk about it.  Not talking means not changing.  Changing a church's culture also requires finding leverage points, which are easier to change and will promote changes in other places—such as introducing a small group ministry into the church.

In any event, it is all about the culture.