At the End of My Time: The End (#6)

From where the journey began, the end was not how I had imagined it. Indeed, I don’t think it’s how any of us really imagined it. Throughout my time, I would often run the vague scenarios in my head, as I tried to predict the circumstances of when and how I should be called away. But nothing definitive ever came to mind. Even so, I had the expectation (or at least the hope as all pastors do who rightly keep the end in mind) that there would be clarity from God on the one hand, while peace about it on the other – whatever the ‘end’ should be. As the dramatic irony of this series’ moniker makes obvious, that moment for me eventually came. And yet, while I did find the former, to my disappointment, there was hardly any peace.

There was more we were hoping to do. There was more we wanted to get done. But as my wise mother told me amidst the storm, sometimes the vision we’re given is not meant to be housed in the place we currently are. As the Lord says, “No one puts new wine into old wineskins… But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins” (Luke 5:37-38). I didn’t have much peace prior to that realization, since I wasn’t sure why God would call me to do something without also providing for it safe passage. But never the calm before the storm. When God provides clarity, never a guarantee that we will like how he does it. And indeed, I’ve never experienced so much pain in my life once that clarity came.

Everything seemed to be crumbling around me. The notes of hurt, abandonment, and derogation crescendoed louder and louder. Where did you go, Lord? Why did you remove your hand? Here I was, alone – and I didn’t want to be left alone. But then, so much of the unsolicited counsel only made me feel as if I was surrounded by the vexing company of Job’s friends, being offered the sort of simpleton piety I so detest. In which case, I would rather be alone.

Still, I was not completely void. There were those who simply stayed and wept, remained there with me in the hurt and confusion. More than I can express, thank you – to family, friends, and students – for this sustaining grace. (You know who you are). Thank you for the grace (of food, compassion, and visitation) that pulled me back to the only sure thing there is, the great promises of our God: “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the wrath of my enemies, and your right hand delivers me. The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever” (Ps. 138:7). “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18). Here I found myself being reminded of the very thing I had taught you: that God does not promise us a life without suffering; only that he will always be with us. Thank you for showing me that the Lord I AM is still here – with me, with us, near to the brokenhearted.

God’s sovereignty has been a sight to behold. As I shared with one student on our long drive down to Princeton, what a humbling experience of God’s majestic power, that works the paradoxes (i.e. ‘the struggle’ and ‘the joy’) of this experience still for the singular end of joining us further to himself. Indeed, when Jesus speaks in parables, he does so to conceal the matter to those with hardness of heart, while at the same time revealing the things of God’s kingdom to the humble and lowly. He puts the first last and repositions the last as first. He takes the evils of Joseph’s brothers and reworks it for the good of his people. He permits righteous man Job’s suffering, yet without any violation to his own justice and love. He declares that the greatest in heaven are the least of these, placing the powerless child in the center. The greatest of all: that he should suffer on the cross the defeat of death in the God-man Christ, because precisely therein lies his glorious victory. This is God’s sovereignty.

“We speak of Mystery here, the Mystery of God with us… We cannot explain this, nor subsume it into another category and class, nor defend it using earthly tools. We receive it in wonder; we praise it; we turn aside to see this great thing the Lord God has done” (Sonderegger, 79). Selah.

Thus, only because a sovereign God, who shares in our suffering and we in turn his, can do it, the end is now being transfigured towards a new beginning, pain into hope (Romans 5:3-5). Piercing into the depths of this reality, Bonhoeffer articulates better than I ever could: “It is God alone who makes a new beginning with a person, when God is pleased to do so, and not the human being who undertakes to do it with God. So a new beginning is not something one can do for oneself. One can only pray for it to happen. As long as people rely only on themselves and try to live that way, that is still the old way, the same way as in the past. Only with God is there a new way, a new beginning… But we can pray only when we have realized that there is something we cannot do for ourselves, that we have reached our limit, that someone else must be the one to begin.” Thank you for making us so helpless so as to, once again, be so dependent upon you, God of the new beginning. 

This series of reflections is dedicated to my students. May it help you to not forget the faithfulness of the sovereign God. See and behold all that he has done! As I now bookend these reflections, I do so on a note of thanks. Thank you for letting me be your pastor. It has been a tremendous gift, and it is one that I will cherish until the day I die. Thank you for a friendship that will carry into the rest of our lives. Through all the joys and hardships, thank you for putting up with me and for making me more than I otherwise would be. Thank you for this heart of gratitude, which you filled with joy, love, and laughter. Now God is doing something new. So let us return to the good work ahead of us, as we live by his promise: onward to eternal glory!

Epilogue (for me, now rest):

At the End of My Time: The Struggle (#5)

As I had the pleasure to discuss with some undergraduates of Yale College, we considered more closely that evening 1 John 4:20-21: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.” One observant student asked about the distinction between these terms we find in scripture. Is there a difference between ‘brother’/’sister’ and ‘neighbor’? After a few minutes of exchange, the group surmised that they were probably used interchangeably; that is, brother probably meant neighbor.

But what led to such an interpretive move? I suspect the reason why they thought so is because, theoretically at least, it doesn’t (usually) cross one’s mind that one could hate one’s own brother, someone inside our own immediate family. In the realm of possibility, that is, for good church-goers, someone we hate, if we were willing to admit as much, could only be someone for whom we don’t feel obliged to have some sort of affection for or commitment to; in other words, those we would consider to be our neighbor. But didn’t Cain murder Abel out of jealousy and spite? Didn’t Esau abhor his twin Jacob for stealing his birthright? Didn’t Absalom hunt down and slaughter Amnon to avenge poor Tamar? Jesus said after all, “Brother will betray brother to death” (Mark 13:12). Thus, as I later pointed out, not only is there a distinction between the two, but here is a reality we may not like to admit, though one we constantly experience nonetheless: that often hardest to love are members within our own family – God’s family.

Indeed, think about all the times we’ve heard from (non-)Christians, and how they’ve described other Christians as being their stumbling block to faith: hypocritical, legalistic, judgmental, selfish, unkind, exploitative, prideful. Here is a group of sinners set apart by Christ, called to reflect God’s holiness, compassion, and love. Christians are called to point one another to Christ, and yet are often the greatest impediments to their own witness. John’s point? How can we possibly hope to witness to our neighbors, when we can’t even witness amongst ourselves? What good is talk of ‘evangelism’ and ‘missions’ when you can’t even get your own house in order? How is it that you speak of welcoming in new guests when you can’t even extend hospitality to that of your own members? If anyone says they love God, but hates their brother, they are a liar. No doubt, there is a glaring incongruity between who we are and who we present ourselves to be, and it stems from the fact that we forget the church doesn’t have a mission, but rather the church is mission.

Herein lies the distinction between religion and faith, the source of much ecclesial discord. Religion is a human product (a church that believes it has its own mission, or within itself the reason for its own existence), where God only exists to shore up this product. It concerns itself with its own morality, its own beliefs, vernacular, customs and practices. It points people to align with their own arbitrary conceptions of holiness. However, in this, as Barth writes, “everything is always already complete without God. God is supposed to be good enough to carry out and crown what human beings began on their own” (Barth, Der Römerbrief, 401). Faith, on the other hand, seeks to cooperate with the God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ, and to align one’s posture with his redemptive activity (or the outworking of his mission within us). Faith is the act of surrender by which we come under Jesus’ Lordship, and take “the step beyond the own, visible, subjectively possible and probable: toward where nothing else besides God’s word holds us” (Barth, Der Römerbrief, 138). In short, faith is to be transferred from the ‘old’ of this world to the ‘new’ of God’s Kingdom.

This is why Jesus had more scathing words for the religious establishment than towards anyone else. The Scribes and Pharisees, namely, the religious folk, could not get past their pride and idolatry. They could not get past their own blindness. They were wedded to their religion, their ways of doing things, their rehearsed scripts, and the sense of safety, not to mention the power, it brought them. They had fallen in love with the little kingdom they had built for themselves. Everything pointed back to them as the final measuring line of what counts and does not count. So, too, for the church of religion, the priority is not to make people look more like Christ, as much as it is to make people look more like them. No wonder they despised Jesus! He simply would not fall in line. He refused to comport with religious convention; he broke the old categories. And no wonder why we despise the brethren when they fail to conform, when they fail to fit into our molds of ‘Christian’ propriety – including the shepherds.

For instance, during Barth’s parish ministry in Safenwil, Christiane Tietz recounts in her magisterial biography the time when a handful of Pastor Barth’s affluent church and community members revolted against him. Mainly comprised of poor farmers and textile workers, Barth was exceedingly dismayed by his church members’ poor working conditions. Thus, Barth spoke out against capitalism and the greed that funded their plight, contrasting these kinds of practices with those of God’s kingdom. Not long after, factory owners wrote with their response against Barth’s “agitating speech”, and his attempts to “sow discord between employers and employees.” To which, he later responded, “You have the wish for me to be a false prophet… The false prophet is the pastor who pleases the people.”

Christians claim to love the one who claims to be the Truth (John 14:6). But usually, the fatal error of American Christians is when they divorce truth from the love that God is (1 John 4:8), thereby idolizing love as a mere, abstracted sentiment as a way to legitimize their religion and worldly/cultural values. Brother hates brother, as a result, for exposing this brittle foundation: God is not here to confirm what you already are without him; he is here to justify you unto a new plane of existence. Understanding this, therefore, those who love God are tasked with the heavy burden of tending to the very household of God, where love has been domesticated and truth compromised. Which they have done not so much out of ignorance, but out of the fear in knowing the difference the word makes. In the visible church, the faithful contend against the sort of religion that subjugates Jesus for the ends of the religious person’s own ideals. And in faith, the Christian responds with obedience, each day and afresh, to the terrible yet wonderful truth the living God speaks. Indeed, Jesus wasn’t killed because he was nice. He was killed because he loved by speaking the truth: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days” (John 2:19). For which, “they hated me without cause” (John 15:25).

Christians, this is the cross we’ve been called to bear as well: to love the religious members of our spiritual family. We have been saved by the truth of God’s word, a word, don’t forget, that calls everything into question. A word that unsettles and destroys (Prov. 10:29; Ps. 37:28). A word that agitates. A word that tears down the old ways of human-devising, so as to join in the Spirit’s work of building the new. As I have taught you my students, to be saved means your lives have not only been constituted by the truth, but therefore to live a saved existence as those who will tell and embody the truth – in faith, hope, and love – as you do what is right, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8). I am convinced such witness is needed now more than ever. But I’ve also learned how such witness is rarely received; in fact, how it is often met with ridicule, hostility, and condescension. Thus, in the pattern of our Lord, surely, the struggle is to love those who reject it, who take offense at it (Matt. 11:6); even so, to lay your lives down for those who go on to accuse you of sowing discord. And at the same time, to bear these forms of hurt and hatred – of slander and false accusations, silent complicity and abandonment – that come from our own no less. “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first” (John 15:18). Still, for them, Christ prayed, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:24).

Such a life is not easy. Loving Christians, particularly the religious, is just about the hardest thing there is. It takes both courage and humility, conviction and patience, hope and sobriety. But I believe such a life shows us something more of God’s own heart – and how he dealt with us even while we walked in the shadow of sin and death. For he places us within the church-community so gathered, so that in loving like him we may come to look more like him. For those of faith, take heart. Hope in Christ. Pray for God’s people always. Repent often, as you account for the plank in your own eye. And as you join in Christ’s sufferings, my prayer for you shall be this: that your love may rejoice in the truth always (1 Cor. 13:6), even as you struggle to show grace to those who may hate you for doing so.