Tag: apocalypse

Revelation — A lens to use to see the world fully

This is an amended version of a sermon I preached at City South Presbyterian Church in 2021. If you’d prefer to listen to this (Spotify link), or watch it on a video, you can do that. It runs for 38 minutes.

Last time round we set the scene for Revelation by looking back through the Bible at the way some of its key language ties up a big storyline thread. The idea is that we humans are either destined to become beastly, like the serpent, Satan, or beautiful, reflecting the glory of God. We saw that this choice boils down to who, or what, we worship — Jesus, and through Him, the God who created the heavens and the earth, or beastly rulers of the earth, and through them, Satan.

And we saw that this was a real and present challenge facing John’s first readers — those he wrote this strange book to. The challenge for us now is not seeing the big story this book fits into, but figuring out how to read it in our circumstances here in Brisbane, two thousand years later.

Just what sort of book is Revelation? What place does it have in our lives as followers of Jesus? What is its message for us?

The book gets its name from the first line — this opening — the ‘revelation from Jesus Christ’ (Revelation 1:1). There is a lot to unpack here as we figure out how to read it, and the first thing to note is that this word is literally ‘apocalypse.’ It is ‘the apocalypse from Jesus Christ.’

Now, we think we know what an apocalypse is, right? You have probably got an escape plan you have figured out for the Zombie apocalypse — especially after Covid — right? Or maybe that is just me.

We know an apocalypse is about the end of the world. Don’t we?

Only, that is just what we have made this word mean because of one way this book has been read, and I’m pretty convinced that is not the right way.

An apocalypse is not about the end of the world like ‘how it all falls apart,’ It might be more connected to the ‘ends of the world;’ the way philosophers talk about purpose, or like some of you might have learned, ‘the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.’ But the thing is, this word more literally means something like revelation; an unveiling. It is about truth being revealed that helps us see events around us — to see the world — the right way — and in the sense it is used in the Bible, it is like a veil pulled back moment where we see earth and its purpose — and our purpose — from the perspective of heaven.

Now, it is possible this apocalypse is all about the fire and brimstone end of the line for the earth — that it is an ancient document predicting events in the far-off future. That is one possible reading of the book. The locusts could be Apache helicopters, and the mark of the beast could be bank cards — but these are readings of the book that always put present or future generations in the audience seat, at the expense of the past.

And that can be tempting.

The Biblical scholar Michael Gorman has a book called ‘Reading Revelation Responsibly,’ which has this great graph to explain how people read the book. He reckons all of us naturally fit somewhere on this graph.

We can treat — from top to bottom — the book as though it only describes events in the past, or as though it is about the present or the future, or a thing that encompasses all points in time. On the left right axis, we can treat the vivid apocalyptic symbols as codes that describe particular phenomenon located at a certain time (the up-down axis), or we can use these symbols like a lens; a way of seeing the world, and events either everywhere on the up/down axis or in a particular spot. So we either approach the book decoding symbols to discover precise moments they correspond to in history, or see the symbols as analogies that will explain various things that might happen at any moment — giving us a language to understand reality.

You might remember how I’ve got these colour-blind lenses that allow me to see colours I did not know existed; reds and greens like never before. These lenses change the way I understand the world by revealing things I could not see without them.

I am going to suggest — like Gorman — and like a couple of other people I will reference along the way — that we should be thinking of Revelation as supplying us with a set of lenses to see the empires of the world with God’s eyes — and that this had a particular and urgent meaning in first-century Rome (where the symbols do have a coded meaning), but we can use these lenses today too.

Part of what this book does, as a lens, is it sits us in the heavenly courts — in the heavenly realm — away from the day-to-day trenches of normal life and it invites us to see that not only is that realm real, it is the one that matters — because what goes on in the heavens, in the Bible, shapes what happens on earth.

And this means we get a bunch of vivid language, and out-there pictures, to try to disconnect us — dislocate us — from earth.

But we also get earthly things described in caricatures that expose or unveil them as what they are.

There is a good analogy for this in a piece by Aussie theologian George Athas, where he talks about how Revelation and other literature like it functions like political cartoons that exaggerate certain features to expose them.

For now, let’s imagine that when John writes his revelation, his goal is to give us a lens that unveils the world for us and invites us to see it as God does. Also, it can be so easy for modern readers to think Revelation is a coded message book about evil beings and spiritual opposition and all the bad stuff that applies — that these are the focus; but Revelation points the lens somewhere else. First and foremost, and from start to finish (like the rest of the Bible), Revelation is about Jesus.

It is not just from Jesus (Revelation 1:1). The way Greek works mean this could either be a ‘from’ or an ‘of.’ You will find English translations that do this — it is an unveiling that does not just come from Jesus, but it is a book that unveils Jesus for us and invites us to see the world anew, having seen Jesus as he is.

Revelation zooms in to the throne room of God where Jesus now rules from the throne as King of Kings and the Lord of All Nations.

But that is not all John tells us, and here is one of the first reasons I think the book sits where it does on that graph. John tells us that this vision of Jesus, from Jesus, was given to him, by God, to show his servants — his people — what must soon take place (Revelation 1:1). Now, we might think that ‘soon’ applies to us; that we are the generation these words have been waiting for. But, it is much more likely that this is a letter that first applied to the present and very near future of its first readers — and that it drew on analogies and imagery from the whole Old Testament to reframe their understanding of life in Rome.

Revelation is absolutely soaked in Old Testament references or allusions — one scholar who tabled them all up — Stephen Moyise – did up this graph of the books John draws from. He found Revelation draws extensively on the whole Old Testament as it paints a vivid picture using big cosmic language.

One scholar says there are more allusions to the Old Testament in Revelation than the rest of the New Testament put together. This depends a bit on how you define an allusion, but what cannot be denied is how richly Revelation sits in that tradition and applies symbols and language from the Old Testament to a particular moment in time.

Or that the central message is the idea that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament expectation that God would reign as king.

And that is what John has come to testify — to the things he saw — and John can sum up his vision by saying that what he is testifying to — is the Word of God and the Testimony about Jesus (Revelation 1:2).

And it is this same testimony that Jesus is King, not Caesar that has John in a prison island — on Patmos. He is there because of ‘the Word of God and the Testimony about Jesus’; the same thing verse 4 says is the heart of this message he has passed on in this book (Revelation 1:4, 9).

And this book — it is not just an apocalypse — an old bloke yelling at clouds about a broken world — to nobody; it is a mix of genres. John is like an Old Testament prophet. There is a prophetic dimension to the book.

John describes himself being in the Spirit; of being taken up to see things from heaven and being told to write down what you see. This is the classic way that an Old Testament prophet, like Ezekiel, or Daniel, would introduce an apocalyptic vision or prophecy like this. John is plonking himself down in that role (Revelation 1:10).

But it is also a letter sent to particular churches at a particular time (Revelation 1:4). It is like any other New Testament letter. We have to figure out what it says to a church in its immediate context before we apply it to our moment in the sun.

And while the number 7 gets a fair bit of air time in Revelation as a symbol of completion or perfection — even in our passage today — these seven churches were real churches, and John names them: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergameum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. John’s vision is for them (Revelation 1:10-11).

So this apocalyptic prophecy is, first of all, a letter to real churches, in real cities living under Roman rule. It’s a mix of genres, but it’s written by a person, to other people, at a particular point in history.

Whatever we want to make of it — wherever we want to see Revelation speaking, it feels odd if we say it has nothing immediate to say to these seven churches.

I reckon this means we can’t think so much of the text as a code that speaks to the present or our future, as though what John saw corresponds directly with events still to come that had nothing to say to these churches. And yet, at the same time, John uses the number seven over and over again in the book as a number of completeness. There would’ve been stacks more churches just in the towns and cities of the provinces he mentions, but he picks seven because seven is a way to say “this is for the full church.”

It has a particular and immediate audience who received the written work, who it must be meaningful to — just like Daniel and Ezekiel were to their first readers — but also a sort of ‘universal’ audience as well.

These churches are soaked in the religious and political messaging of Rome — churches called by the bright lights of the big cities, and by the bread and circuses of Rome to worship the emperor.

Which, if you remember last post — was an empire whose “proper procedure” was, at certain points, to execute those who would not worship Caesar.

So John dips back into Old Testament imagery that is used as a lens to look at Old Testament empires and says “hey, have a look at this Roman power from God’s perspective,” but more than that, it says “have a look at Jesus from God’s perspective and choose who you’ll worship.”

And the last thing to notice from the intro is that it’s not a book that is meant to be read and atomized — primarily — into verse by verse ‘pull apart the grammar’ stuff like we modern people like to do — and one of the reasons we do this — that we have to — is that the symbols in this book all mean something to the first hearers based on how familiar they are with their own context, and with the Old Testament. We don’t have that familiarity, or that context.

But it’s a book to be experienced — to be read aloud and heard (Revelation 1:3). The symbols are meant to come thick and fast, like a good audio-visual experience; leaving us a bit breathless and overawed by what we hear.

But also hearing the message and taking it to heart, and as one more hint that John has immediate concerns, he says the time for applying this is near (Revelation 1:3).

This decision to take this unveiling to heart, to re-see the world through the lens it supplies is what leads to blessing, that’s going to be a big theme the book picks up right at the end as it returns us to a picture of a world not marked by the curse of sin and death.

Revelation — this apocalypse — is meant to do a work on its hearers reframing the way they see the world, and its rulers.

And if, as we saw last week, the presenting challenge for these first-century churches is choosing who to worship and what kingdom to serve, the apocalyptic letter opens by framing our vision by pointing the lens firmly not at Rome, but at the heavenly courts.

John is writing on behalf of the Ancient of Days — the one who was and is and is to come (Revelation 1:4-5). John uses a whole lot of different titles for God in this book, and he uses them really deliberately in patterns that help structure the book, but this is such a big way to describe God.

God isn’t just a being in creation, he is the I Am — that ancient name for God, and he always has and always will be. John plays with the I Am name in his language here to say God always is, and God the father is giving grace and peace to his church.

And so is the Holy Spirit — and here’s another time the number seven pops up in this book and most scholars see this “Seven Spirits” reference as a reference to the completeness of the Holy Spirit (Revelation 1:4), but also as a way of saying this is the Spirit at work in the seven churches, because it’s the Spirit at work in all the churches.

And John is also writing from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness and ruler of the kings of the earth (Revelation 1:5), these are hints that for John, Daniel’s vision that we saw last week has been fulfilled already.

And then John, overwhelmed by this sense of God speaking to his church, breaks out in a moment of spontaneous worship (Revelation 1:5-6). This is what some of you might know as a doxology — which is a word that means words giving glory to God.

John is giving glory to Jesus, and to the Father, because Jesus has created a kingdom; not a beastly kingdom but a priestly kingdom; a reference to what God made Israel to be in Exodus (Exodus 19) but applied to the church.

Not a kingdom of violent dominion but a kingdom of servants of God, for his glory, secured by his blood.

John grounds his vision — his unveiling of reality — in the victory of Jesus that has already happened; the victory of God over sin, and death, and Satan and all the beastly kingdoms and humans who follow the way of the serpent into beastliness.

And here’s one of those points where John just combines Old Testament references. You’ve got Daniel 7, which we looked at last week, and Zechariah chapter 12. But here is also where John starts giving us the perspective of the heavenly courtroom where the Son of Man is coming with the clouds — the ascended Jesus is taking his seat, fulfilling Daniel’s vision (Revelation 1:7).

Where God the father, the Almighty — the one who was and is and is to come — now calls himself what John called him in verse 4 and adds that he’s the Alpha and the Omega — the first and the last (Revelation 1:8). This is a big picture of the God who sits on the throne of heaven and rules all nations; the one in whom we live and breathe and have our being, who has the past, present, and future in his hands.

And so the message for God’s people is that they have to pick their king.

They have to choose a kingdom.

They have to choose between this God’s beautiful forever kingdom and the violent and beastly kingdoms of the world.

And John, as he looks into this heavenly court, doesn’t just hear God’s voice — he sees the voice coming from someone, and when he turns he sees this figure like a “son of man” among these seven lampstands (Revelation 1:12-13).

We’re told later are churches (Revelation 1:20), but this lamp imagery also comes from the temple, and a heavenly vision of the temple in Zechariah; and this speaking figure is in this cosmic temple present with the churches, and he’s dressed like a royal priest and looks like the Son of Man from Daniel’s vision.

When John describes him he says:

“The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters.”

This pulls all sorts of Old Testament imagery about God together — the ‘voice like the waters’ bit comes from Ezekiel, and there’s a throwback to Daniel here too (Daniel 7:9).

John brings Daniel’s vision of the Ancient of Days, God, together with Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man arriving, so that God and the Son of Man are brought together in this rich new way where the Son of Man is speaking as the voice or word of God.

He sees Jesus as this glorious bright glowing light. White and bright.

Just like animal skins were a code for beastliness in Genesis 3, this sort of imagery is a code for glory; for a heavenly being; we see it at a few points in the story of the Bible.

Like at the transfiguration — another unveiling — where the disciples see Jesus as he really is — one shining like the sun, and dressed in white (Matthew 17:2).

And it’s the same imagery at the resurrection, this time with an angel of the Lord whose appearance is “like lightning” and his clothes as white as snow (Matthew 28:2-3).

Hebrews talks about the son, Jesus, as the “radiance of God’s glory;” another shining word (Hebrews 1:3). John’s point with all this language is that he is the glorious ruler of the heavens and the earth — the heavenly bodies that were viewed as being divine beings in the ancient world reflect him, rather than the other way around.

John is picturing the Son of Man as this triumphant and victorious heavenly king who is glorious — shining with the light and life of God himself and who rules the heavens and the earth — the seven stars — if seven is about completeness are a picture of Jesus’ authority over the heavenly bodies as well as the earthly ones (Revelation 1:16). John tells us at the end of the chapter that they are a picture of the angels, or heavenly beings, being in Jesus’ authority.

Whatever all this means, whether we understand the imagery or not, it is intended to be beautiful, glorious, and terrifying in its over-the-top glory. It pulls together threads of similar unveilings in the Old Testament to emphasize that Jesus, whom Christians might follow as king, is divine.

John concludes this by describing Jesus as the first and the last (Revelation 1:17-18), in the same manner he has been describing God. He connects Jesus’ victory over death, Hades, the dragon, and his curse to Jesus’ own death and resurrection. Jesus is the living one.

John’s testimony about Jesus is that the crucifixion and resurrection reveal God to us, for in them the God-man, the son of God and Son of Man, is unveiled and victorious.

When we see Jesus this way, John’s response is to fall down in awe, worship, and submission (Revelation 1:17). No other king or god commands John’s devotion through their presentation of their glory.

Remember Trajan, the emperor whom Pliny wrote to. He agreed with the notion that citizens must worship Roman gods, including the emperor, or face death. However, he offered salvation from death, a pardon, through repentance and worship.

The choice facing first-century citizens was to repent and worship Caesar and his empire to receive his pardon and life in his kingdom, or repent and worship Jesus and receive life in His kingdom.

John’s vision is the lens he wants the church, the seven churches he is writing to, and all the churches they represent, to see the world through. This lens challenges us to look beyond any other pretenders to the throne, anyone or anything else that might command our worship.

How can other empires compete with the glorious one? How can we worship anything else?

This lens is something we might want to use in our own times too, as we look at empires, agendas, and objects of worship that offer us life and call us to give ourselves up, pulling us away from God and His kingdom.

Choosing between God-kings should be easy if this is what the throne room of heaven looks like, and who the one on the throne appears to be. Jesus isn’t a distant king; He is Lord of His church.

The Jesus John sees is not just in heaven, absent from the concerns of His people. He is present with His church, operating as a priest for the church in the heavens. This is a theme we see elsewhere in the New Testament. He brings us into God’s presence, which is where the book will lead.

He is the faithful witness who shows us what God is like and what faithfulness to God in the face of beastly empires looks like, trusting God to win and bring blessing. This is where the book will go.

Jesus, the living one, was dead and is now alive, offering hope of new life and resurrection to His people. This is where the book will go. As the first and the last, he will return to make God’s victory and his kingdom absolute, bringing all other kings to their knees because God is the Most High, and Jesus is his voice and chosen ruler (Revelation 1:17-18).

He has freed us from our sins, from the curse, death, and the claws of Satan by His blood, through His death and resurrection. Like in the Exodus with Israel on the mountain, He has made us a kingdom of priests, acting as our priest before His Father (Revelation 1:5-6), even as he, himself, is God. He is the one to be worshipped and glorified, with His Father.

In doing so, we too will be clothed in glory; we too will be swept up in the beauty of God’s vision for His people (Revelation 7:9).

This vision will drive what John has to say about politics and economics — about how we live as people, as the church.

Is it your vision, your lens for looking at reality?

Does it shape your worship?

Your life?

January 12, 2024 Add Comment

The climate apocalypse is real, and here’s why we need a different sort of climate apocalypse that begins with Jesus (and us Christians)

11,000 scientists from around the globe have joined forces this week to declare a climate emergency, signing a paper warning of catastrophic threat to humanity. It’s a pretty apocalyptic sort of vision.

Are you listening?

I’m not a scientist, so I tend to leave science to scientists. Which means I am listening.

I am open to questioning the worldview or default assumptions underpinning some science — in that, as someone who is a Christian I do also believe in a supernatural realm and a God ‘in whom we live and breathe and have our being’ who ‘sustains all things by his powerful word’ and I’m skeptical of scientific overreach where conclusions are drawn about the legitimacy of such a being because of ‘science.’ As a quick tangent — science as we know it is born out of theism — Christianity specifically in the western world, and Islam in other parts of the world. For Christians, from the Bible (for eg Romans 1:20), through Augustine, the Bacons, and other pioneers of the scientific method science was a way to study the cosmos as ‘God’s second book’ — understanding God from what has been made. When we observe natural operations and order in the cosmos (like mathematics and natural laws) we are seeing God’s handiwork. Part of the problem, in the Bible, is that we can’t always get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ because we humans are so busy writing our own stories into the fabric of the universe as we build and break, but also there’s this dynamic right from the first pages of the Bible where that good order is thrown into ‘disorder’ or decay, frustration, and curse as a result of human sin. Plus, a sensitive reading of Genesis 1-2 suggests there are bits of creation that are less than perfectly ordered in that the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are meant to “cultivate and keep” this garden, so probably to expand it over the earth as they “be fruitful and multiply.” The Garden, Eden, does not yet cover the whole earth. There’s space for some chaos existing outside the garden in a plain reading of the text of Genesis.

Christians have typically understood God’s first book — the Bible — as the primary authority in a way that shapes (and underpins) the scientific endeavour. If there appears to be a conflict we’re either reading one (the Bible or the science) or both books (the Bible and the science) the wrong way. When they line up we can be pretty confident, as Christians, that there’s something to pay attention to. We don’t need to reject or be suspicious of science simply because it is ‘science’; or to conform every bit of what we believe to be true about the universe to what scientists tell us (or the conclusions that naturalistic scientists then might seek to draw from the data).

So when 11,000 scientists — and plenty of Christian scientists — tell me that the world is heading towards catastrophic change, and I can see a pretty direct link to individual and systemic sin — particularly greed or selfishness or our culture of instant gratification and taking what we want from the world rather than stewarding it sustainably as an act of love for God the creator, and our neighbour — as a cause then I’m happy to take note. I’m not, for the record, a Young Earth Creationist TM  so I’m not inclined to reject science simply because it is science, but I do take Genesis very seriously as a text that informs my position on this question. I’ve been puzzled for a while about an apparent link between young earth creationism and rejecting anthropomorphic climate change because it seems to me that a plain, literal, reading of the text of Genesis directly links the state of the planet to human action (the subsequent promise not to wipe out humanity with another flood in the Noah narrative notwithstanding). Here’s what God says to Adam about sin and the climate. The fall itself is a sinful, self-serving, grasping, pillaging approach to the created world — the taking of the fruit God had forbidden to use for Adam and Eve’s own ends.

“Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you will return.”

This seems to be a big deal for Paul in the book of Romans, who spends a bunch of time showing that Jesus is a new Adam, who brings a new pattern for humanity (a new image of God to be conformed to), where we become the ‘children of God’ that the creation itself is longing for. Or, as Paul puts it:

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. — Romans 8:20-22

The command for humanity to ‘be fruitful and multiply, rule the earth and subdue it’ is not a command to rape and pillage the creation, but to interact with the created world as image bearers of the life giving, life creating, God who makes things good and hospitable; it’s a call to cultivate Eden across the face of the earth not strip mine it to build little palaces for ourselves that mitigate the harsh conditions we find ourselves living in. The post-fall, cursed, world is the reality we exist in and have to figure out our ethics from. We don’t pretend the creation is not cursed or frustrated as a result of the fall of God’s image bearing rulers (we’re certainly not universally pursuing fruitfulness and the sanctuary where God dwells with his people post Genesis 3). We also can’t totally pull the conditions of the new creation — described in Revelation 21-22 back into the present. We should expect fallen people to be producing cursed conditions rather than life-giving ones as they depart from bearing God’s image in the world. This is one of the things that was most beautiful about Darren Aronofsky’s Noah movie a few years ago; the way it showed how the sinfulness of the generation God wiped out in the flood expressed itself in the treatment of the world; it’s what is beautiful about Tolkien’s Middle Earth and the way that Mordor is a picture of the destruction of the planet through the idolatrous pursuit of control, wealth and power (this link is to a great piece exploring this dynamic, but also check out the Eucatastrophe’s episode on why they’re called The Eucatastrophe for more on this). Human sinfulness damages the world, and you don’t have to be an expert on ecology to know that there are cycles in nature that can be thrown into different patterns as we tinker with or destroy the natural order — it shouldn’t surprise us that pumping anything into the air that wasn’t there in the same volume before has an impact (I mean, it’s obvious with air pollution and air quality in cities right? And in water quality when we pump stuff into rivers or oceans).

The Noah promise that I’ve seen politically conservative Christians rely on to reject climate change is one piece of Biblical data pulled out of the context of the rest of the Biblical narrative. You don’t even have to leave the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, a literary unit of which Genesis and the Noah story is a part) to find evidence supporting a relationship between human sinfulness and the state of the climate. What’s going on in God’s “never again will I curse the ground” with Noah is clearly not a return to Eden, and clearly not a restoration of a universal image bearing people — the children of God — who will live rightly with creation. It doesn’t prevent human intervention in messing up the world. God’s sovereignty doesn’t ever seem to totally try to wipe out the human impact on the world except at the flood. Maybe that’s significant in our interpretation… in fact, from this point onwards, fruitful, blessed creation where the conditions for human flourishing are most present in the world (not withstanding God sending rain on the righteous and the unrighteous) are promised benefits for people living in harmony with God again — whether that’s Israel and the promised land (eg Deuteronomy 28:1-11), the promise that the land will become hostile to life if Israel becomes hostile to God (Deuteronomy 28:15-68), and restored if they return to God (Deuteronomy 30:1-11), Ezekiel’s description of the barren land produced by Israel’s profaning God’s name and subsequent exile, and the promise of a new Eden when God re-creates a new image bearing people who serve him from the heart… the conditions of the world are, from Genesis on always linked to whether or not the people living in the environment are in relationship with God or not; when they aren’t, curse and destruction follows.

The Bible’s approach to the natural world and its hospitality for life is anthropomorphic not simply about God’s sovereignty; though God’s sovereignty plays out in blessing and curse. Here’s a sample from Deuteronomy 28, which comes, of course, after the Genesis 9:11 passage that climate change skeptics love to quote. This is the sort of doom and gloom apocalyptic vision we now hear from scientists — talk about uninhabitable for human life…

“The Lord will strike you with wasting disease, with fever and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, with blight and mildew, which will plague you until you perish. The sky over your head will be bronze, the ground beneath you iron. The Lord will turn the rain of your country into dust and powder; it will come down from the skies until you are destroyed.” — Deuteronomy 28:22-24

Oh, and there’s this cheery bit in Deuteronomy 29…

“The whole land will be a burning waste of salt and sulfur—nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it. It will be like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim, which the Lord overthrew in fierce anger. All the nations will ask: “Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?”

And the answer will be: “It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the covenant he made with them when he brought them out of Egypt. They went off and worshiped other gods and bowed down to them, gods they did not know, gods he had not given them. Therefore the Lord’s anger burned against this land, so that he brought on it all the curses written in this book. In furious anger and in great wrath the Lord uprooted them from their land and thrust them into another land, as it is now.” — Deuteronomy 29:23-28

If God, in his sovereignty, says this is how he will respond to sin — and sin often expresses itself in a failure to steward creation or to seek the flourishing of others (selfishness/self-gratification/pillaging) — then who are we to insist that climate change is not a result of human behaviour and not consistent with God’s sovereignty?

Now, these curses are just promises to Israel, God’s people — and it’s not a great principle to extrapolate from such a curse to a universal principle; but nor can we use the words in Genesis 9 to establish a universal principle that Deuteronomy 28 explicitly rejects. Especially when Romans 8 seems to still see a universal frustration of creation linked to humanity not universally being Adam-like children of God who bring fruitfulness. There’s also, in Genesis 12, the promise that God’s blessing on the nations — their flourishing — is connected to Israel. We see a slice of that in Joseph’s relationship with Egypt, but more with Solomon’s international relations (not the marriage bits, their coming to him for wisdom on how to live in the natural world (you know, the world he compiled proverbs about)). But this promise to Abraham is ultimately fulfilled in Jesus (which is where Paul goes in Romans 9), so that real blessing and the real people of God who really start unravelling curse is found in those united to Jesus as the new Israel; the people of God who bring life and relate to the world differently because we have the Spirit (which is the fulfilment of the prophecies in Ezekiel that start the new Eden project).

Jesus is the new Adam, the New Israel, who is faithful — whose heart is inclined to God so that the restoration promised in the Old Testament is possible. As a cool bonus detail, in his resurrection appearance he appears as a ‘gardener’ a new Adam bringing a new image of fruitfulness and, ultimately, the liberation of creation from sin and curse (Romans 8, Revelation 21-22). His obedience means that he and the father pour out the Spirit and re-create people who are children of God.  People who are called not to conform to the patterns of this world, but to be transformed (Romans 12). People who are part of a liberating project that will ultimately be fulfilled in the return of Jesus and the complete revelation of the children of God.

Here’s a fun fact about Romans 8:19, which says “for the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.” That revealed word is ‘apocalypse’ — apocalypse just means ‘revelation’ — but creation is waiting for the apocalyptic children of God. People who will help creation meet its ‘end’ or fulfilment (as the children of God are revealed) and live in a new beginning for the created world too. The point of Romans is that the apocalypse doesn’t just arrive with the return of Jesus but with the coming of the Spirit into his people. We live in this apocalyptic, revealing, age pointing to the ultimate end (both purpose and future) for creation — and to where creation goes when we humans use it for our own godless ends.

Some Christian political visions do pretty odd stuff with Revelation as a text; Revelation is a pretty odd text. But Revelation is an ‘apocalyptic’ text (again, that word). It reveals true things about the world as it is; not just as it will be. It is a profoundly political text; a rejection of the beastly human empires that kill God’s children, including his son, Jesus, and who use God’s creation for selfish gain. It’s a text that offers a similar commentary on reality to the Lord of the Rings; especially in the first century. If you want more on this, check out Richard Bauckham’s work on Revelation. He’s got an interesting chapter on Revelation 18 and its economic/apocalyptic significance in a book called Image of Empire (though I think a better reading of Revelation than he offers has Rome as the beast, and idolatrous Israel who sold her soul to Rome and conspired with it to execute Jesus as the harlot).

Here’s an interesting promise, from God, about the nations and the climate… 

‘Come out of her, my people,’
    so that you will not share in her sins,
    so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
for her sins are piled up to heaven,
    and God has remembered her crimes.
Give back to her as she has given;
    pay her back double for what she has done.
    Pour her a double portion from her own cup.
Give her as much torment and grief
    as the glory and luxury she gave herself.
In her heart she boasts,
    ‘I sit enthroned as queen.
I am not a widow;
    I will never mourn.’
Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her:
    death, mourning and famine.
She will be consumed by fire,
    for mighty is the Lord God who judges her. — Revelation 18:4-8

Sound familiar? Now, people have all sorts of positions on when this will happen (or has happened) — the ‘apocalyptic times’ — but the point of Romans and Revelation is that the apocalyptic times are now. This is life now because it is life opposed to God. John in Revelation describes the cargoes of all the merchants who belong to Rome/Babylon — they get rich from the things they dig up and produce from the world; things specifically mentioned in Eden in Genesis, but also recalibrated to give glory to God in the vision of the new Eden and new temple in Revelation 21. Revelation is a condemnation of the empires that set themselves up grasping and destroying the world and living for self and self-gratification and the moment, rather than living for God with eternal fruitfulness and the kingdom of Jesus in view. The message of Revelation is that kingdoms — lives — built on pillaging and destruction and greed and the rejection of God — the kind of lives it describes as belonging to Babylon — the nation that took God’s people into exile — will not last. Lives that seek to control the frustrated creation by building human comfort through making ourselves little gods, and through the robbery and misery of others will be destroyed… and that Jesus will make all things new. Jesus will, ultimately, fix the climate. And when this is our story, the lives we live now — and our interaction with and understanding of the natural world — will look different to Babylon; and we’ll expect Babylon and its sin to have an impact on the world.

The vision that is to animate Christians against the beastly Babylonian backdrop the first Christians found themselves operating in in Rome, and that we find ourselves operating in today (which includes economic and political powers that destroy the planet); is the vision of a new Eden; a new Eden requires a world that is broken by sin and curse — by human actions and God’s punishment for our sin — a world longing to be renewed.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.” — Revelation 22:1-3

Those of us who are Christians now live in these ‘apocalyptic’ times differently. We live as those restored from exile from God — the exile that began for humanity in the loss of Eden, and for Israel in Babylon. We live as people with God’s Spirit in us; people living in the dawn of an ‘apocalyptic’ end times age. People knowing where things are going; but our neighbours don’t. And the world is still frustrated and will still be messed up by ‘Babylonian sin’ — by those exiled from God who aren’t bearing his image, but the image of the destructive idols we pursue instead. Those who don’t fruitfully multiply by cultivating the earth, but bring death and destruction by pillaging it. We live as a kingdom called to be different, with our vision of the future shaping how we live now, and the kind of solution or apocalypse we proclaim as we ‘garden’ and serve the resurrected gardener. Our apocalyptic vision is the new eden project.

When scientists say ‘we’re heading towards climate catastrophe’ and the reasons we get look a lot like us taking creation and trying to be God with it from sinful, selfish, hearts — then we Christians are pretty well positioned to say “amen” and offer a solution that isn’t just human-driven salvation, but a return from being exiled from the creator to being the image bearing gardeners we were created to be, who in partnership with God, spread the conditions of life through the planet again; that’s one way Christians might bear witness not just to the creation but to the new creation we see depicted in Revelation; where Jesus returns to make ‘all things new’ — until that happens, in a Romans 8 sense, we have the job of being ‘children of God’ who are mini pictures of the returning Jesus, being transformed into his image by the Spirit because we have faith that he is our Lord and king and the pattern for our humanity. Maybe we need to re-read or re-watch the Lord of the Rings and commit ourselves to a certain sort of heroism; maybe fantasy might help us see nature as part of a cosmic battle between God’s design and the patterns of the evil one. We can bring little pockets of life-giving liberation and resistance in those parts of creation we occupy and cultivate. We can commit ourselves to stewarding creation for our neighbours, and their children, as an act of worship. A friend of mine from church has launched a project aiming to live a carbon positive life; he’s blogging his way through it. Another friend is blogging through her own journey in stopping what I’d call ‘Babylonian’ practices and starting ‘Eden’ ones. We can do our bit to resist the systemic and individual patterns of life that bring destruction. We can do this while preaching the Gospel, proclaiming that the resurrected Jesus brings new life, and launched the new Eden project, that is the ultimate solution to human sinfulness and its impact on the world, and the end of God’s curse.

We need to embrace a different sort of apocalyptic way of life, one that sees the world and its patterns as they are, a source of death and curse, and Jesus and his patterns as they are, a source of life and blessing.

November 7, 2019

It’ll be all white in the end: on hope and love in these ‘last days’

The fires of our Christian persecution complex are being stoked this week by those who warned as all (and boy, did they tell us) that the same sex marriage vote was about more than marriage.

These fires are burning brighter with the news that the magazine, White, will be shuttering after an activist campaign saw advertisers desert their platform because the owners, a Christian couple, adopted an editorial policy consistent with their personal views.

It was a year this week since the postal survey results were announced; and the doomsday prophets have formed a line behind Lyle Shelton to announce that they ‘told us so’, because this was never just about marriage, and now we have a bona fide story of martyrdom. Here. On our shores. It’s not just bakers in the UK. There’s nothing I like more than reading think pieces beating that same ‘told you so’ drum as a ‘hot take’ on current events. So here’s mine.

I’m sure the couple in question are lovely, faithful, people – I’m sure they’ve been caught up in the modern ethical minefield, a minefield produced by the rapid shifting of the ground beneath our feet. I’m sure that you can draw a straight line between the existence of same sex marriage and the position they find themselves in. I’m sure they agonised about their editorial policy, and whether to go public in the face of pressure. I’m sure their position has caused them real pain. I’m sad for them, it seems tragic to watch the business they spent years building disintegrate. I’m not sure how I’d feel about the amount of free publicity they’ll now receive, because they’re a political football, coming after this commercial decision.

I’m not sure it’s the editorial policy I’d take, even though I share their views on the definition of marriage. I’m not sure it represents a hospitable or generous pluralism; but it is absolutely their call to make — what they do with their platform, and what they promote. I’m equally sure, that at this point, they aren’t facing legal consequences for the position they took.

Their experience is not an experience that religious freedom laws would protect while we also operate in a free market (and to be honest, the free market is a bigger idol than sexuality in our culture, and it’s one where most Christians are happy to participate in the temples and cultic practices of our economy, where we aren’t when it comes to the cult of sexuality, sexual identity, and expressive individualism). Exactly the same principles that give this couple the right to hold on to, and act according to their convictions — the same religious freedom, or freedom of speech, give rise to the rights of those who put pressure on their advertisers to line up with their own convictions. It seems certain that some of the ‘free speech’ directed at this couple was hateful, and crossed a line, into threats and bullying — and yet, what they’re experiencing is the cost of doing business in a fractured, pluralist, world — where each side plays a zero sum game. They were, perhaps, naive to think they could play the game in any other way — that they could continue operating according to a now obsolete status quo — that they could ignore the hashtag campaign and that it would go away. It seems to me they had three zero sum options — ‘capitulate,’ close down, or pitch for financial support from institutions and businesses who share their values (and so become a pawn in the ideologically driven culture war). If 40% of Aussies share the definition of marriage of these editors, including the religious establishment, we churches could put our money where our mouths are and take out advertising space. We could make this magazine part of our strategy for burnishing and promoting traditional ‘white’ weddings between a man and a woman so that they shine brightly among the alternatives. But we won’t. Because we have no imagination — and we prefer the alternative of sitting on the sidelines, proclaiming ourselves prophets, and distancing ourselves more and more from the hearts and minds of the average Aussie punter while participating in the culture wars. I suspect there’s a fourth — the option of hospitality, where they made their views known, consistently and editorially, but adopted an inclusive editorial policy as an act of generous pluralism that refused the ‘zero sum’ options on the table.

We’re quick to say ‘told you so’ and slow to say ‘tell you what’ — we offer no alternative vision, just an apocalypse — and we have learned nothing from the apocalyptic moments of the last few years — like the Coopers’ Brewery fiasco — when it comes to shaping our public posture. As I’ve often pointed out in these posts, the word ‘apocalypse’ really just means ‘revelation.’ And so we, again, are having not just the state of the world revealed — but the ‘hope-less’ state of the church and our engagement with the world around us.

While some see the legalisation of same sex marriage as a ‘precipice’ that we jumped from, and we’re now plummeting off wondering if we packed a parachute, I’m more inclined to challenge that narrative on two fronts — firstly, the political debate was about the political reality, so it was really about marriage — and the result of the postal survey and subsequent legalisation of same sex marriage only impacts this magazine decision because it introduced same sex weddings (and thus, a new market in the wedding industry), which is explicitly the same thing the political campaign was about. And secondly, politics is downstream from culture — and the cultural horse bolted on this issue long before the postal survey. This moment was coming with the cultural winds that saw most commercial interests in Australia line up behind the ‘yes’ vote, because before it was a political reality the hearts and minds of the average Aussie were won by the narrative of progress and equality. There’s no precipice, the marriage vote was the last domino to fall in a long line of other legal issues (that, in honesty, did need to fall — like the criminalisation of homosexuality, and the ‘gay panic’ defence for killing somebody if you thought they were gay and trying to have their way with you).

This, incidentally, is why the official ‘no’ campaign did us a terrible disservice in making it about consequences and not at all about anything positive about traditional marriage and why we’d want to keep it as a social and cultural good, and keep it exclusively for heterosexual couples. Perhaps they knew that would be an impossible sell…

So here’s a hope-full suggestion.

It’s time we Christians poured our effort into showing why our vision of marriage — God’s vision — is compelling, and not just for straight people. It’s compelling because marriage is a ‘created thing’ that reveals something about God and his love, and ultimately about his plans and love for us.

It’s time we realised that in the era of the Royal Commission, and in the wake of not just the postal survey but years of the gay community in Australia campaigning against unjust laws that were justified as ‘Judeo-Christian’ — we have no social capital.

If we’re going to burn actual capital it’s time to stop spending it trying to prop up a status quo that no longer exists; we should spend it first in making recompense for those times our institutions have failed, then we should devote our significant human and social capital to positive and hopeful contributions to the public conversation.

We should throw our weight — in volunteer hours, energy, attention, and dollar terms — into improving the lot of our LGBTIQA+ neighbours, in anti-bullying campaigns, in creating safe spaces where they can explore and develop their identity in conversation with Christians rather than across picket lines or ideological boundaries, we should spend time listening to minority voices in our community (and in our churches). This would start rebuilding some of the capital we’ve done our best to pour into the toilet, one $1 million donation to the ‘no campaign,’ or campaign against bullying programs, or letter about the right to expel gay kids and fire gay teachers at a time (not that it started with any of these).

We should invest capital in telling stories of our own — stories about marriage and what it means — not about why others are wrong, but about why God’s way is good, true, and beautiful. We should realise that making media — whether online, in print, or on television — comes at a cost; a cost proportionate with how beautiful it is. And we should start investing in a long term campaign for hearts and minds. For many years the church was a significant part of ‘the wedding industry’ in Australia; we’ve lost our monopoly, but it still raises revenue for many churches (and ministers). We could direct a proportion of that income to promoting marriage, and having good material to distribute when preparing a couple for marriage seems a no brained. White looked like it had a cracking aesthetic. We should back it; perhaps to model an inclusive conversation about love and marriage, funded by Christians, or perhaps as an ideological contribution to the public conversation funded by Christians.

We should stop writing prophetic, apocalyptic, think-pieces that offer no solutions, only commentary — and bad commentary at that — and start turning to the pages of our own divinely inspired apocalyptic text — a text all about what life looks like for faithful witnesses of king Jesus, the bridegroom, in the world that executed him on a device designed to bring maximum public humiliation. A text about our hope in the ruins. A text about a white wedding. The wedding of the lamb, whose bride is the church (Ephesians 5).

“Hallelujah!
    For our Lord God Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad
    and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
    and his bride has made herself ready.
Fine linen, bright and clean,
    was given her to wear.” — Revelation 19:6-8

We should stop saying ‘I told you so’ — stop feeling hopeless and aggrieved — stop playing the victim — stop being doomsday prophets with no map for turning back — and start living as the hopeful bride of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus. Dressed in white.

Our hope does not rest in a redirection of the public narrative, or a return to ‘Christian values’ — our hope doesn’t rest in religious freedom, or our unfettered access to the free market on a level playing field. Our hope doesn’t rest in marriage here and now. This future with Jesus is our hope. Nobody in this world can stifle it. It’s time that hope re-captured our hearts and imaginations (and that we spent less time worrying whether other people think we’re pretty enough).

November 18, 2018

The Bachelor Apocalypse: What Nick Cummins’ so-called failure teaches us about true love

Like many Aussie blokes, I watched The Bachelor this season. Nick Cummins is a hero. A professional footballer (in the wrong code), who churns out colourful metaphors with every sentence, and seems to be a genuinely great guy. He turned down a Wallabies jersey (having already played for Australia a bunch of times) to move to Japan to make money to support his dad in his battle with prostate cancer, and his two younger siblings who have cystic fibrosis. There’s class, commitment, drive, and humour attached to the Cummins name, or rather, to his nickname: ‘the honey badger’… a name he apparently picked for himself.

“These documentaries would come on about this fearless little mongrel; just charging around, 40ks a day it’d do, 40ks… get around, eat everything, attack anything… You’ve all seen that one where it got bitten by that cobra or whatever, and after a while the venom gets too much, so she just keels over for a while, has a bit of a kip, and then she sparks back up, and keeps eating the bloody cobra. That’s how I want to live life.”

The Bachelor hasn’t exactly been known for class, commitment, or humour, and yet, somehow the producers lined Nick up, because a guy like this is bound to be a ratings hit. The Badgelor was born. And it was a ride. Right up until the wheels fell off…

I’m fascinated by this show like I’m fascinated by car accidents when I’m driving along the highway; there’s that ‘rubbernecking’ impulse that means you can’t look away, but you know what you’re looking at is a mangled mess. The concept of the Bachelor, for those who’ve managed to keep their eyes fixed on the road, is that one man enters a house with around 20 women. They’re all looking for love. Each episode features a group date, a single date (with one ‘lucky’ girl), and a rose ceremony, where the Bachelor decides who he wants to keep around by handing out a rose. The numbers get whittled down until the finale, where the Bachelor has to decide between the two women he’s kept around for the longest.

Last night the Honey Badger chose nobody.

And he’s being condemned on social media, and in the mainstream media stories that now just consist of sharing what people are saying, because, you know, Vox Populi, Vox Dei (two things: One. This could well be the only review of The Bachelor season finale that uses Latin? Two. That means ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God,’ in journalism a ‘vox pop’ is a bit of content produced just by asking people their opinion, suddenly, in journalism, all stories are ‘vox pops’ because we are, more than ever, the gods of the media. The media just exists now to reflect our image back to us like a magic mirror telling us how beautiful and wise we are).

Now, I know you’re not meant to take shows like The Bachelor too seriously; you’re not meant to shed revealing light on how ‘everyone knows’ the mechanics of this sort of show aren’t realistic and don’t produce real love (despite the consistent narrative that lots of successful couples started on this program)… it’s like a magician unpacking his best trick… we want the magic. We want to believe. It’s even worse to try to use a show like this to ‘shed light’ on the culture that produces it… but the Bachelor is revealing, apocalyptic even, in that an ‘apocalypse’ actually just shows things the way they really are by using ‘fantasy’ (technically). The Bachelor is fantasy, and it is revealing about our modern story — and our modern gods — so it is apocalyptic.

The headline FoxSports is running on the finale is ‘Honey Badger roasted over Bachelor fail‘… calling it a ‘disappointing finish’. Nick then had to face Lisa Wilkinson in a ‘tell all’ interview that will air on Sunday (so we have to wait for days, in this outrage), and in the news.com.au story anticipating this interview we’re told that Nick, the man who sacrificed the fame of a Wallabies jersey for the fortunes of his family, has “a lot of work to do to salvage his reputation which is in tatters after last night’s shocking finale.” His reputation is being savaged online by fans taking to “social media to share their outrage at his decision with one viewer labelling the Honey Badger a “coward.”” These reactions reveal more about us than they do about Nick; about how much is at stake for us in the sort of ‘love story’ The Bachelor offers for us to escape into; at the same time that the story reflects and reinforces what we think about love with the trappings of ‘fantasy’…

Nick, an earnest sort of fella, seemed to go into this arrangement in good faith. Perhaps with too much faith in the process. And it did a number on him. A bloke isn’t meant to pursue love while simultaneously dating twenty women, or four, or three, or even two. In the last couple of episodes you could see, and hear, Nick starting to realise this — that the artificial environment had done a number on his head. That he was being asked to do the impossible. That the fantasy wasn’t going to deliver a fairy tale ‘happy ending’ but unless he changed the game and refused to play by its rules, was going to end in tragedy.

How is a bloke meant to decide ‘who he has feelings for’ when it’s clear he has feelings for all of them? In not choosing either girl at the end, Nick didn’t reveal so much about his character, but plenty about the character of the show — it’s a horrific circus, about those who watch it, and about what people think love is — including the contestants. To come to the end of a circus without being able to say ‘I love you’ to one of the two women willing to say ‘I love you’ to him isn’t a character fail on Nick’s part; it’s a failure for a culture that no longer knows what love is. Nick shared a bunch of ‘hot dates’ and ‘steamy kisses’ with plenty of these women. What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he commit? Why couldn’t he say “I love you”?

Here’s why. As a culture, we’ve decoupled sex and intimacy from love, so that love now comes after sex, which is what it is… “Love is love,” after all, which is a meaningless platitude that has somehow become a definition for a ‘feeling’ we find hard to define, but we’re apparently able to recognise it when it is there, or not yet there… But we’ve also made ‘love’ more a noun than a verb — a feeling rather than a decision.

I’m marrying a couple this afternoon (as in conducting their wedding), and one of the beautiful things about their story is that they understand that love isn’t just a thing you feel and then say, it’s a thing you say and then do. This isn’t to say feelings aren’t important. They are. But that posture of love and commitment — being on a journey together when life gets hard, being on a journey through more than just orchestrated ‘perfect dates’ with cameras rolling — that’s what love looks like. I’m utterly unsurprised that Nick, who seems to have a pretty level head on his shoulders, was ‘confused’ and ‘cloudy’ and unable to commit in an environment that is totally artificial. Last night was a triumph because he was able to see through the fog clearly enough — to shed enough light — that he realised the whole thing was artificial. That he couldn’t succeed if success is determined by that ‘story’ he was taking part in. Can Nick’s apocalypse prompt an apocalypse for us? His moment of clarity and revelation? The very artificiality, the artifice, of the Bachelor — where relationships unfold in ‘perfect environments’ — starting with ‘the Mansion’ and ending in New Caledonia — sets the relationships up for failure. Relationships are forged through hard times — even the drama in the show is created artificially, the drama of group dates and women competing for the attention of one man. That’s not ‘through sickness and health’…

But it’s not just The Bachelor that is broken, it’s our cultural narrative (which produces it as a ‘fantasy’) — the idea of ‘the one’ who is out there who will complete me, such that all my life (and relationships) are experiments in pursuit of that ‘one’ — is broken. The problem with Nick’s narrative last night was that he wanted to find a woman he liked enough to say ‘I love you’ to; there’s a nobility there, to taking love seriously… but given his ‘connection’ to several of these women he could’ve simply picked any one of them to make that commitment to, and then to start that journey. That’s what love is.

We got the couple whose marriage I’m conducting today to read Tim and Kathy Keller’s The Meaning Of Marriage. It’s a good book that unloads on some of the cultural narratives that The Bachelor imbibes and perpetuates. They quote Stanley Hauerwas to make the point that no two people are ever ‘truly compatible’ because the very nature of being on a journey of life together, ‘life partners’ as Nick called it, is that life changes us. Hauerwas says ‘we always marry the wrong person’ and that the challenge of marriage, of working through life is ‘learning how to love and care for the stranger to whom you find yourself married.’ The Kellers say:

“Modern people make the painfulness of marriage even greater than it has to be, because they crush it under the weight of their almost cosmically impossible expectations.”

Where we used to look to God for satisfaction and a sense of where we sit in the universe, now we place that expectation squarely on the shoulders of ‘the one’… There was plenty of language about being ‘completed’ in the finale last night, because sex and love now occupy the place of God. And people can’t shoulder that weight. The Kellers say there’s a secret to not crushing each other with these modern expectations — a secret that frees us to commit, and to love, but also that teaches us what love is.

“This is the secret — that the gospel of Jesus and marriage explain one another. That when God invented marriage, he already had the saving work of Jesus in mind.”

Their summary of the Gospel is:

“We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope. This is the only kind of relationship that will really transform us.”

If we bring that understanding of ourself, and each other, to marriage — without the God stuff — it stops us pinning unrealistic hope for our relationship and the ‘one’, so that we’re always looking elsewhere, and the realistic picture of ourself, and the other, helps us to forgive and forbear. It helps us stick with each other on the journey. The God stuff matters because it gives us somewhere else – somewhere right — to pin those hopes and expectations.

At this wedding this afternoon I’m giving the ‘words of counsel’ from Ephesians 5, a passage that has unfortunately been abused in bad marriages over the years because it uses the word ‘submit’, and people miss that the posture of submission is mutual, and that submission (and love) means sacrificing strength for the other, and that for marriage to do something Paul, who wrote Ephesians, says is ‘mysterious’ — for it to teach us about God’s love for us, the call on the husband, to sacrifice, is even bigger than the call on the wife.

Paul says, at the start of chapter 5, to:

“Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

This ‘way of love’ is the way of self-sacrifice, it’s a path you walk together having made a commitment to do that… that’s what love is. An action, not a feeling. That’s what The Bachelor gets wrong in elevating feelings, sex, and romance, components of that journey, to ‘love’ — but it’s not just them, it’s our whole modern narrative, and the Bachelor (and the twitter commentary around it) throws open the curtains to reveal just how small and hollow this picture of love is, and how hollow we are if we think ‘not finding love’ on a TV show is a shattering failure rather than the start of a journey towards something true.

 

October 5, 2018

What if you were not quite the last man on earth?

This made me laugh the three times I’ve watched it. So it must be funny. Right?

The Last Man On Earth from Peter Atencio on Vimeo.

December 3, 2012

Apocalypse Now? Or not yet

Six days later debate still rages (though slower now) on the Friendly Atheist thread (I even scored a second post about my comments that was actually quite flattering… check it out)… here’s a testimonial from the author of the original post – it probably gives a more balanced view than the quotes I mined here.

First of all, I want to thank Nathan for his continued patience and politeness in comments. Yes, we disagree with him – vehemently on some issues – but I’m impressed that the comments have stayed mostly productive and substantive.

Fellow commenter, Wayne, has raised an interesting interpretation of the mission of Jesus and the kingdom he proclaimed. His comments alone make that thread worth reading. He is singularly the most interesting commenter I’ve ever come across there. He is prepared, it seems, to not completely dismiss the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ teaching. He just interprets them in an interesting way.

He introduced his views like this:

You comment that you follow the teachings of Jesus. I assume that, like most Christians, you consider him the Son of God. I submit to you that, on the contrary, he was a human being who was an apocalypticist who was preaching that God was about to arrive in his kingdom and that the people must prepare themselves. In Mark 9:1, Jesus states “Truly I tell you, some of you standing here will not taste death before they have seen the Kingdom of God having come in power. And Mark 13:30 Truly I tell you, this generation (i.e., presumably, the one he was addressing) will not pass away before all these things take place. In Mark 14:62 Truly I tell you, You will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven. In Mathew 16:27-28 For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels: and then he shall reward every man according to his works.
…
I am a former Christian who had questions that religion could not answer, such as why Jesus would be preaching fervently for the people to prepare themselves for the coming Kingdom when it wasn’t supposed to happen for millenniums later. It simply made no sense. I’ve since realize the problem after much research from non religious sources, that it was actually supposed to happen back then, but it didn’t, which blew Christianity out of the water for me.

Then he brought up this theory on the promise to David…

Here is something to cogitate over. Yahweh made a covenant with the House of David that David’s descendants would hold the reigns of power over Israel for ever. Let me remind you that this is from a god who is all knowing. Well, the leader of a nation, I forget which, removed the ruling Davidian and replaced him with a nonDavidian. So much for an all knowing god.

Like most Christians I think Jesus was talking about his kingdom coming at the crucifixion (and resurrection). I’m a 2 Corinthians 1:20 man myself…

For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.

One thing I hate in these arguments – and it’s similar to Ben’s disdain for experts – is when people quote “scholars” as though an issue is decided. Like this quote from Wayne (who really did have an interesting hermeneutic, and one I hadn’t really encountered before. I knew it existed, I’d just never met anybody who bought it):

“How can we look at the Old Testament and take it seriously? Scholars have determined that Abraham was simply a legend and didn’t exist. Also, the book of Joshua tells a powerful tale of conquest, supported by a God who showed no respect for most of the Holy Land’s existing inhabitants, however scholars have determined it is not history and it never was.”

Oh yeah, and anything in the Bible that contradicts his interpretations of other bits of the Bible is invalid…

Unfortunately, scholars are convinced that Paul did not write the books of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (called the “Pastoral” epistles, because they deal with how these pastors should oversee their churches.) So this passage you quoted has no validity.

When I objected to his “scholars”, I got this response:

When it comes to religion, I will pick the majority of scholars over the majority of Christians anytime, especially when their interpretation makes more sense.

I decided that Wayne had been pretty heavily influenced by the previously featured Bart Erhman… I found, and posted, this quote from a scholar about Ehrman’s “scholarship”…

A criticism of Erhman from an NT lecturer:

It is mystifying however why he would attempt to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted which frankly reflect no in-depth interaction at all with exegetes, theologians, and even most historians of the NT period of whatever faith or no faith at all. A quick perusal of the footnotes to this book, reveal mostly cross-references to Ehrman’s earlier popular works, with a few exceptions sprinkled in—for example Raymond Brown and E.P Sanders, the former long dead, the latter long retired. What is especially telling and odd about this is Bart does not much reflect a knowledge of the exegetical or historical study of the text in the last thirty years. It’s as if he is basing his judgments on things he read whilst in Princeton Seminary. And that was a long time ago frankly.

Then another commenter took me to task for bringing Ehrman into the discussion. How dare I be so presumptuous. And Wayne linked me to this friend of his, where he’d commented with similar views (almost word for word) in the past… and credited Erhman. Priceless.

“I was originally Christian, but had too many questions like why did Jesus preach back then that you must prepare yourself for the coming Kingdom if it wasn’t going to happen until millenniums later. Or why did Jesus tell his disciples that some of them would still be standing when his Father would arrive in glory in his kingdom, if it wasn’t supposed to happen then? Ministers could never give me an answer, but Bart Erhman did.”

Perhaps this post will be enough to bring Wayne here to continue this discussion. Lets see. It’s certainly the rambliest thing I’ve posted for a while.

January 13, 2010