Whatever that means.

I’ve never been as publicly candid about this subject as I will be here. My conversion to Catholicism was, by my metrics, rather unfortunately public: the sensation of a Baptist pastor converting to Catholicism was covered locally by the MVTimes, and it was rather impossible not to note the change on my YouTube channel, since so much of my content was theological studies. Catholic podcasts took note and interviewed me. I lost a lot of Protestant followers.

But I didn’t necessarily lose the Protestant in me.

To be sure, in 2023, I was convinced of the Catholic Church’s claims to exclusivity on some level, but with a catch. I noted the Catechism’s charitable attitude towards Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox, and the Church’s teachings on ecumenism weighed heavily in my decision to join her. To be honest, I had always been very attracted to the Eastern Orthodox Church: one of my first mentors in the Christian life was a Greek Orthodox priest, a painter who understood my dual calling to the pastoral and arts ministries. And guitar-shredding Orthodox priests seems to be a thing, like Fr. Dionysios Tabakis. Had there been an Eastern Orthodox ministry on Martha’s Vineyard, the isolated island where I live, the chances are high that that’s where I would have ended up. Maybe I’d even have been on my way to becoming an Orthodox priest by now. But for lack of one, I spent more time researching the Catholic Church, which had a parish here. Like the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church claims to truly be the “ancient faith” of the apostles. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

So in I went.

My family’s 2023 reception into the Catholic Church, Easter 2023.

No sooner had I been received into the Catholic Church than Rev. Charlotte Wright of the Chilmark Community Church invited me to be the minister of music at her church. Fr. Paul over at the Good Shepherd parish ok’d it, and also gave his blessing when Rev. Charlotte got into the habit of asking me to preach in her absence. She also had the habit of poking me back toward the pastoral ministry. After all, not everyone has a call to it, and I do — it’s rather absurd to ignore such a rare but, according to her, obvious calling. And she wasn’t the only one reminding me of this, either.

Indeed, I immediately missed the rhythm of the pastoral life: preparing Sunday sermons, meeting with and counseling my friends in the faith over coffee, meals, and outdoor walks, and leading worship with prayer and teaching on Sunday morning. I dove deeper into my online ministry, following in the footsteps of other Protestant pastor converts to Catholicism who managed to stay active like Dr. Scott Hahn and Keith Nester.

But I’d also be lying if I didn’t admit that, at first, leaving behind the pastoral ministry was a bit of a relief. In 2023, my music career was hot. I was playing a lot, perhaps too much, between music festivals on the mainland and quintuple daily shifts on the island. And my family was growing, with our second infant fresh on the scene. Even three years in, pastoring was still new to me, while performing is long-since second-nature. By comparison, pastoring was resource-intensive on my psychic and emotional reserves, especially given the unusual challenges at our small Native American-founded church, with its peculiar conflicts between church, town, and tribe.

My family band’s performance on Paste Magazine’s podcast on the heels of our date at Beach Road Weekend music festival in 2022.

I was burning out.

I was only a few months into Catholic life when Fr. Paul and I began discussing my options for ministry: whether the diaconate or even becoming a married priest. Ultimately, both options were extremely limited for a young working father on Martha’s Vineyard, since all the paths to these ministries were on the mainland. I put my head down into my music, and on the ministry side, I focused my energies on publishing my Bible studies online and cobbling together whatever in-person lay ministries I could on the island.

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Matthew 16:21-28

Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Scripture Reflection

Can you imagine rebuking Jesus, who rebuked storms and made them still with his words? Though Jesus could silence demons with his rebuke, Peter rebuked him when he began to teach about his own Suffering, Death, and Exaltation. It is very likely that Peter protested because he was horrified that Israel’s hope would be arrested, scourged, and crucified, and equally in disbelief that he could then rise again. He had other things in mind for Jesus: “human things.”

So did Satan. When the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness of temptation, Satan offered Jesus the Kingdoms of the world. This bounty is precisely what the divine oracles of the prophets said would be handed over to the Christ. It’s not that the Kingdoms of the world weren’t in store for Jesus, they were — it’s that Satan was offering a bad deal. “I will give You authority over all these kingdoms and all their glory,” he said. “For it has been relinquished to me, and I can give it to anyone I wish. So if You worship me, it will all be Yours.” (Lk. 4:6-7).

But this is not the divine way to glory, the way of the Lamb. Satan was offering the way of the beast, as we read in Revelation: “The dragon,” that old serpent, the devil, “gave the beast his power and his throne and authority.” (Rev. 13:2). Rising out of the “sea,” or the nations, this beast is that dominion which oppressed God’s people. And this beast even lent its authority to a fraudulent “Lamb,” a beast rising out of the “land,” or Israel, which “caused the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast.” (Rev. 13:12). These two beasts represented the forces which conspired to put Jesus to death, Rome and the apostate synagogue. Politics and politicized religion in lockstep with the devil.

Jesus, the true Lamb, would gain dominion over even these — but not by avoiding the fate they had planned for him. In fact, he would not come into his Kingdom by any other way than subjecting himself to their torture, as it was foretold: “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then to enter His glory?” (Lk. 24:25-26).

Peter rebuked Jesus because he wanted to see Jesus sitting on a throne in Jerusalem, ruling over the nations as Caesar did. He wanted Jesus to take the dragon’s deal, the way of the beast. Likely, he wanted the same for himself, expected it even, having heard Jesus promise, “Truly I tell you, in the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on His glorious throne, you who have followed Me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” (Mt. 19:28).

But here, Jesus radically tweaks their expectations of this. “If any want to become my followers,” he says, as if they hadn’t truly been following him up to that point, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Cross? Like crucifixion? The punishment for failed revolutionaries, hopefuls like them who had longed for the liberation of Israel? “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Is he talking about dying for him? “For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?” Didn’t the prophets promise the whole world to God’s people in the Messianic age? Why was he speaking as if one may only choose between the world and life?

And yet, he recapitulates his promise of dominion to them, “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels,” that is, his holy followers and messengers like Peter, and even you and I, “in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done.” Does he truly have the power to repay life lost for the Kingdom? “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” What is Jesus saying here? He is challenging them to martyrdom for the victory of the Kingdom, yet also suggesting they may also live to see it.

Indeed, they would live to see it. But it was far different than the “human things” Peter had in mind for Jesus and himself. The “divine things” were far more mysterious and challenging. For one cannot see the Kingdom except from Christ’s vantage point, elevated upon the Cross.

On the other side of Pentecost, Paul was able to speak of the “divine things” in “the mind of Jesus” from his vantage point in Php. 2: “He humbled Himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross,” just as he had taught. “Therefore,” that is, because of his suffering and death, “God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name above all names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Indeed, Peter and the apostles did live to see Christ enter into his paschal glory. And they received their promised thrones of judgment in his Kingdom. Long before he tasted his own death by which he also finally came into glory, glorifying God (Jn. 21:18-19), Peter received the very Spirit of Christ at Pentecost, the Spirit who reigns over all heaven and earth, and began “convicting the world with regard to sin, righteousness, and judgment” (Jn. 16:8), that is, judging the twelve tribes of Israel, and not only them but all the nations, to whom he preached.

This was glorious, but not in the human way he had first imagined. It was glorious in the divine, paschal way he witnessed in Jesus. Peter as angelic messenger of the glory of God did not come by the power of the beast, but by the power of the Lamb slain for the life of the world. Peter surrendered his life as Jesus had taught; and Jesus repaid him with his own life, the Spirit of Resurrection and eternal life, by which he subdued and gained the world. “For all things are yours” when you are Christ’s (1 Cor. 3:21-23).

Let us never forget that, to be Christ’s, we must deny ourselves and take up our crosses. That’s the only way he gave us. We should beware lest we wander away from it.

It is all well and good to preach to centurions, prefects, commanders and kings. This is our Great Commission from Jesus. But to maneuver for their power in the name of the Kingdom is the way of the Beast, and a step too far beyond our royal Lamb’s edict. This may be just me — though I wish it weren’t — but I make no distinction between an imperial Christian nationalism that sits on one side of the aisle, more concerned about controlling what people do with their bodies in their private time in the name of “holiness”, and an imperial Christian nationalism that sits on the other side, obsessed with how to control people’s money and resources in the name of “justice”. Barking viciously at each other from across the proverbial aisle, they are simply two sides of the same beastly coin.

In my humble opinion, they seek after “human things” which were never in the mind of Christ. “Get behind me, Satan!” Jesus wasn’t exalted to heaven because he waged a successful campaign of compulsion, forcing everyone to conform to him and his opinions with the full arsenal of the “vessels of wrath” — the avenging authorities of governance (Ro. 9:22, 13:1-4) — at his disposal. Rather, he emptied himself of “human things,” whether the political power which was rightfully his as King of Israel, or even life, which he gave up at the Cross at the hands of those who simply disagreed with him, and he was exalted because all that was left, after the blood drained out, was divinity, the love and will of the Father accomplished in his lifeless body broken for the life of the world.

The divine Kingdom which is gained by walking the way of the Lamb makes a mockery of all human kingdoms marching the way of the beast. Politics are, at best, self-righteousness writ large. From debates to war, it’s all the same — a fruitlessly reaching vanity, all failing to attain to the holiness and justice and glory of the Lamb. What good, indeed, is it to gain the world and forfeit his life in us, which is so simple and strong?

In Revelation, we are told that the royal Lamb made his new and heavenly Jerusalem, the Church, the capital of his glorious Kingdom in our world, by whose light all nations walk, and into which their kings bring their riches (Rev. 21:24). Which kings, and what riches? No one is called truly royal but Christ and his “royal priesthood”, his faithful (1 Pt. 2:9). As for the worldly rich, “weep and wail over the misery to come upon you. Your riches have rotted and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and consume your flesh like fire.” (Ja. 5:1-3). How vain is the beast-minded Christian who measures success and justice by either the enlargement of these “riches,” these marks of the beast, or their “just” appropriation and redistribution. These are not truly “riches” worthy of the Kingdom of God. But if you would be truly royal, “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Mt. 6:20-21).

Peter ultimately got the message. “Silver and gold I do not have,” he said to the beggar who hoped for and expected a “blessing” of “unrighteous mammon”, “but what I have I give you” — that is, Christ in his heart. (Ac. 3:1-10).

Do not be a beggar after moth-eaten riches; do not be their slave, and do not presume to make others slaves of them either. Do not let anyone convince you, nor you convince others, that the answer to life’s woes is corrosive riches, whether mammon or the type of power it buys, which will consume our flesh like fire. The Bible and history itself bear witness that these are chief among the dragon’s ruinously false promises. The beast-powers at work to compel these things are those which crucified Christ. Dare we align with the beast and rebuke the Lamb, as Peter once did before he repented? Any any rate, should we align with the Lamb, the beast-powers will certainly force us to carry our cross to Calvary. We should take comfort in this, freely following Jesus where he leads us, for there awaits our own exaltation. Let our minds be full of hope for divine rather than human things.

“From now on, stop being preoccupied with useless things: what the city has done, what the town has done, what the king has done…Look up! The time requires this of you. ‘Be still and know that I am God.’” (St. Cyril of Jerusalem, The Procatechesis 13).

Amen.

Song Meditation: “No Way Up But Down”

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Matthew 16:13-23

When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. From that time on Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and that He must be killed and on the third day be raised to life. Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him. “Far be it from You, Lord!” he said. “This shall never happen to You!” But Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to Me. For you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men.”

Scripture Reflection

During the days of Israel’s exile in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar dreamt about the Kingdom of God. It had been handed over to him by God; God would give it to another. Though God had made Nebuchadnezzar the architect of Jerusalem’s destruction, he would restore Jerusalem to glory. The Babylonian King saw that his great empire was just one of four altogether forming a great idol in the shape of a man; and he watched as “a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue” (Dn. 2:34) and reduced it to dust that was carried away by the wind. He watched as the little rock grew and became a great mountain that filled the world: the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is the body of Christ, who is the rock of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.

The Church is the body of Christ by virtue of being one flesh with him as his bride, and she is therefore “the rock”. Just as Eve, the mother of the living, arose out of the side of Adam while he slept, the Bride of Christ, the Church, arose out of the wounds in Christ’s side as he suffered to death at Calvary. As Adam and his bride Eve were one flesh, so too Christ and his bride the Church. As children of one flesh, the children of Adam and Eve are all one in Adam, who grows with every child born on earth. As children of one Spirit, the children of Christ and the Church are all one in Christ, who grows with every child born again from heaven. In this way, what began as a little rock grew into a whole mountain.

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Jesus is the rightful heir of the name “rock” — and in Matthew’s account, he gives this name to his disciple Simon son of Jonah. The Church had not yet sprung from Christ’s wounds; but he speaks of her and says that upon Peter, the little rock, he will found her. Furthermore, he speaks of the keys of the kingdom, with their authority to bind and loose in all the kingdom, and which once the sons of David gave to their prime ministers. We see this in the days of Hezekiah, when Eliakim is given “the key to the house of David. What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open.” (Is. 22:22).

What are we to make of this?

Peter himself understood himself “as a fellow elder” amongst the elders of the church (1 Pt. 5:1). He calls all the believers a “royal priesthood” (1 Pt. 5:9). Indeed, though his successors would come to regard themselves as more than this, for better or for worse, Peter himself dutifully carried out his Master’s threefold charge to feed the sheep of God (Jn. 21:15-17). He called his “fellow elders” to “be shepherds” like him in humility, “not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.” (1 Pt. 5:3). The humble shepherds will “receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.”

This is how the little rock, the one entrusted with one of Christ’s prophetic names, teaches us. Indeed, our Lord promises “a white rock with a new name on it” to all the steadfast faithful (Rev. 2:17), and in his vision, John sees that the faithful wear this name on their foreheads (Rev. 22:4) — that is, it becomes their own, just as “the little rock” became Simon’s own.

Let us not forget that when the apostles speak of Christ as a rock or stone, he is a stumbling stone. He is a “rock of offense,” rejected by the builders, and condemned to suffering (Ro. 9:32-33; 1 Pt. 2:7-8). No sooner does Christ share his “rock” name with Simon than he rebukes Satan, who denied through Simon’s mouth that the Christ should suffer and die in order to enter into his glory. It is not enough to proclaim Jesus the Christ in just any terms, for that is perhaps all that Simon did at Caesarea Philippi. Even the demons can do that. Rather, we must, with Paul, “resolve to know nothing…except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Cor. 2:2). It is the Crucified One, exalted through suffering, who is the rock of our confession and salvation. To be worthy of bearing the name of the Crucified One, then, is to suffer with him.

This is why, when he charged Simon with feeding his sheep, Jesus promised him that he too would suffer: “‘Truly, truly, I tell you, when you were young, you dressed yourself and walked where you wanted; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.’ Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.” (Jn. 21:18-19). See how Jesus calls him “Simon” when he is preparing him for martyrdom, and John calls him Peter — the Rock — when speaking of his God-glorifying passion.

We have received from tradition that one day, Peter was fleeing from persecution in Rome when he saw the Risen Lord walking past him towards the city. He asked, “Lord, where are you going?” Jesus replied, “I am going to Rome to be crucified again.” Peter, understanding and cut to the heart, returned to Rome to face his fate, and bear in his own flesh yet more of Christ’s many sufferings and crucifixions. And so he became worthy of the name “rock”.

It is in this way that we all may bear this divine name, as he told John in his vision.

As all of Adam’s children, sharing in his estate, bear Adam’s name, so also those who would bear the name of the Son of God must share in his estate: “Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” (Ro. 8:17).

This we may do by the power of the Spirit of God. As Christ was the Rock cut out without human hands, so we too are cut out as little rocks by his Word, if we obey his commandment to practice and preach the forgiveness of sins and universal love as his witnesses — which is what “martyr” means — and imitators. “For all bear the surname of ‘Rock’ who are the imitators of Christ…these bear the surname of the Rock just as Christ does…as members of Christ deriving their surname from Him they are called Christians, and from the Rock, Peters.” (Origen, Commentary of Matthew III).

My Christian friend: Thou art Peter indeed.

Amen.

Song Meditation: “No Way Up But Down”

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Romans 9:1-8; 11:1-2, 29-32

I speak the truth in Christ; I am not lying, as confirmed by my conscience in the Holy Spirit. I have deep sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my own flesh and blood, the people of Israel. Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory and the covenants; theirs the giving of the law, the temple worship, and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them proceeds the human descent of Christ, who is God over all, forever worthy of praise! Amen. It is not as though God’s word has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel. Nor because they are Abraham’s descendants are they all his children. On the contrary, “Through Isaac your offspring will be reckoned.” So it is not the children of the flesh who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as offspring…I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

Scripture Reflection

I’m a Jewish Christian, like St. Paul and all the rest of the twelve apostles. To be a Jewish Christian, particularly in 2026, is to carry a unique type of cross. My mother’s ancestors protected and sustained their Jewish identity for generations, and I’m the sorry schmuck who broke the mould.

To be fair, the mould was already cracked, much like the Liberty Bell, in America. My Jewish forebears seem to have assimilated to American culture in the early-to-mid-20th century, leaving behind the passionate Hasidism of their Galitzianer culture. All I knew of Jewish culture pertained to food — Chinese food and bagels — and self-satirizing humor with the occasional crack at the “goyim.” I knew even less of Jewish religion, occasionally celebrating Passover with my cousins before they moved away when I was very young. I lost contact with the larger body of second and third Jewish cousins around the same time due to a schismatic family feud over a grandfather clock.

In some ways, the family of Israel was in just such a state of schism by the time St. Paul wrote his 1st century Epistle to the Romans. Named after the blessed grandson of Abraham, Israel sojourned in Egypt and gathered around Moses in the wilderness, binding together in covenant with God by the laws he had received on Sinai. The nation’s existence was always precarious: her angelic constitutions (Acts 7:53) promised the children of Israel abundant life in times of fidelity, but disastrous national death in return for apostasy. As Jesus taught, Israel’s Law hanged on love of neighbor, which was the synonym for complete devotion to her God. Schism, then, was the form of covenantal infidelity which brought about Israel’s catastrophic waves of invasions and exiles. United they stood then divided they fell, until the twelve tribes of Israel had all been sundered from another, and only a remnant remained intact to inherit the traumatized homeland and embody the once-great family of Israel after half a century of exile in Babylon. Though this remnant was comprised of survivors and their children from the tribes of Levi, Benjamin, and Judah, they came to be known by the name of the latter: the Jews.

The Jews’ return to the land was foretold by the prophets, even the timing thereof. But it would not be an easy road, nor would it would fully restore the Kingdom of God to Israel. Jerusalem and her temple, which was sacked by the Babylonians, would be restored under the occupation of the subsequent Medo-Persian regime; and the prophet Daniel foresaw that these two regimes were but the first two of four who would “trample down Jerusalem” (Lk. 21:24) and hold the reins of her divine Kingdom. The Kingdom of God had been taken from Israel for a time, and God would not anoint any Kings in her for many years. It was the Medo-Persian King Cyrus, not a Jew, who, according to Isaiah, was the Lord’s “anointed one” (Is. 45:1) in his mission of rebuilding Jerusalem. It was under his edicts, and for the greatness of his kingdom, that the Jews labored.

But a time would come when once again a man of Israel would be anointed and the Kingdom restored to his people. The prophets said so. When I was a young adult, seeking to understand my Jewish roots, I spent time in Hillels and Chabads and learned of their hopeful expectation of the Messiah, and enjoyed Matisyahu’s songs that pined for his advent. But as my relationship with scripture deepened, I turned to the pages of Daniel the Prophet and saw that he foresaw the Messiah’s grand advent happening in the days of the fourth regime, half a millennium after the Babylonians first sacked Jerusalem. He said when it would happen. Half a millennium after the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon was two thousand years ago.

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When Jesus of Nazareth was born, wise men of the East followed not only the stars, but Hebrew oracles such as Daniel’s, seeking the promised Messiah of God in Jerusalem. When Jesus ministered in the region, he proclaimed that the Kingdom of God had finally drawn near as promised, and he challenged everyone to recognize in his works the identifying marks of the Messiah long foretold by the Prophets. Then as now, many rejected him; St. Paul did at first. Even Jesus’ closest disciples abandoned him when he was crucified by the Judean regime, which served at the pleasure of Rome — the fourth regime to rule over the region, following after Greece. Since he so challenged their Messianic expectations, not to mention their traditional worldview and sense of identity, Jesus was rejected by many Jews, whose descendants went on to build their Jewish identity without him.

This is the Jewish identity I inherited, only a part of which consciously revolved around the rejection of Jesus. Nonetheless, from a young age, I understood that embrace of Jesus would seem to endanger my Jewish identity. For years, Jesus was never in the cards anyway: to me, he was either a fictitious figure or an exaggerated one. My chief beef was with his followers, simply because I thought they were cheesy not only to believe in a God, which I thought was unintelligent and naive, but one Incarnate at that, which I thought was ridiculous and stupid. My Jewish relatives perhaps shared these reasons for unbelief, as well as documented and very serious reasons for complaining to the Anti-Defamation League about their treatment at the hands of Christians. As I understood it, I was born a Jew in spite of the long history of Christian persecution of my people. To “join the Christians” would be an absurd and absolute betrayal of my people.

This sense of betrayal echoed down to me from St. Paul’s day. Before his conversion, he was scandalized by Christians, too. They went about proclaiming that Israel’s hope for liberation and glory was a crucified man whom they preposterously claimed was alive; and they said that they were even liberated from the Law of Moses by this man, because the blood shed at his death was a new covenant that allowed them to transcend the old covenant’s legal conditions which had accursed their people to national death. They too, like Jesus, proclaimed the Kingdom of God, but its constitution was not the Law of Moses; it was Jesus himself. They didn’t go about like the Zealots did, chasing after Messianic figures who claimed they would save Jerusalem through force; they warned that the Lord, in fact, was soon going to fulfill his tearful warning to Jerusalem that “the days will come upon you when your enemies will barricade you and surround you and hem you in on every side. They will level you to the ground—you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God…Behold, your [temple] is left to you desolate.” (Lk. 19:43-44, 13:35). These words came true within the generation. The Christians proclaimed that the Kingdom of God would no longer be exclusively local to the twelve tribes’ lands, nor exclusive to the twelve tribes themselves. The Kingdom of God would be everywhere, and her throne would not be in doomed Jerusalem: a New Jerusalem had come, a heavenly and eternal one, and they were her children (Gal. 4:26). They claimed to be in direct communion with their risen, heavenly Christ, and that he himself was, is, and forever shall be the Lord worshipped and seen by the most faithful of Israel’s prophets and patriarchs. The prized temple of Israel, they said, was not that in Jerusalem which was built by and soon to be torn down by the hands of men, but Christ, “in whom the fullness of the the Godhead dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9), and of whose mystical immortal body they claimed to be living members.

It was utterly scandalous. As my Jewish grandparents’ generation dissolved their bonds battling over a grandfather clock, so did the 1st century generation of Jews that battled over the temple — whether the temple of stone or the temple of Christ’s body (Jn. 2:21). How I wish that my family had chosen the unity of the familial body over a perishable man-made construction. Jesus, as he wept over Jerusalem all those years ago, knew that many of his Jewish family too would choose a man-made object destined for destruction over the unity of their ancestral ties — that is, faith.

And this is why Paul had such “deep sorrow and unceasing anguish” in his heart for his people. As the “Apostle to the Nations,” that is, the Gentiles, his divine mission was to welcome the world into the family of Abraham, patriarch of Israel. His former friends among the Jewish authorities insisted that this could only be done through obedience to the Law of Moses and by bearing the marks of Second Temple Judaism. That is, their view of things was that God’s chosen people were a legally constituted nation for Jews only, and any non-Jewish proselytes should become Jewish “children of Abraham” by adherence to the Law. Paul was at pains to explain to them and to all that Abraham lived long before Moses’ day, and neither he nor his children were expected to be under the Law in order to be considered God’s family. Nor was the Law Eden’s constitution. Christ had come to restore the universal unity of humanity that was purposed for Adam in the beginning, not to perpetuate the Law’s exclusivity. It was by the Law that Christ was put to death, and Paul extends this death sentence to all who are under it; but it was the Spirit who raised him from the dead, and Paul extends this glorious hope of resurrection to all. To those who receive this hope with faith, Paul gives the name “The Israel of God.” (Gal. 6:16). The Law, in other words, was never the true constitution of God’s family, but “a pedagogue to lead us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. Now that faith has come, we are no longer under a pedagogue.” Faith was always the true substance of the Law, and that by which God created his human family to be bound together: “You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise.” (Gal. 3:24-29). Even more than revealing the virtue that comes from faith rather than works of the Law (Ro. 3:21), the Incarnation had destroyed the barriers between Jews and the rest of the world (Eph. 2:14).

When I was young, I was taught that being Jewish made me different. I learned from various sources that I was one of God’s “chosen people.” I encountered various opinions on what that was supposed to mean: chosen to be a positive example, or chosen to be superior; chosen to serve, or chosen to rule. Paul explains in more lucid terms that they were chosen to be the stewards of God’s traditions not for their own glory, but for Christ’s, because it was from among them that Jesus Christ would arise and by his bearing of all the prophetic marks proclaimed to and preserved by them, he would be recognized by them first, then proclaimed by them to the world: “Theirs is the adoption as sons; theirs the divine glory and the covenants; theirs the giving of the law, the temple worship, and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them proceeds the human descent of Christ, who is God over all, forever worthy of praise!”

And this, it must not be forgotten, was all to fulfill God’s promise to Abraham that “through your seed,” Christ, “all nations shall be blessed.” When Paul says, “it is not as though God’s word has failed,” this is the word to which he is referring. The purpose of the chosen people was to bear the one who would be a blessing all humanity, and to anticipate this universal blessing by being such a blessing themselves. God’s purpose ultimately prevailed in the former mission, which was his own, while the latter challenge, the peoples’ mission, was often a failure — the story of all our lives! For Paul, “not all who are descended from” Israel or Abraham may be truly called Israel or Abraham’s children — for the lifeblood of this family is not DNA but faith in God’s promises fulfilled in Christ. And any from all nations may have this faith, and be called “Israel.” For “a man is not a Jew because he is one outwardly…No, a man is a Jew because he is one inwardly.” (Ro. 2:28-29). These words challenged my self-conception as a Jew when I first read them. But I was eager to understand what it truly meant to be Jewish, and by the time I was willing to read these words in the New Testament writings, I had begun to perceive that the promise God long ago asked my ancient ancestors to believe and preserve had been fulfilled in its forecasted time by and in Jesus Christ. I wanted more than just to be the inheritor of promises, laws, types and shadows: I wanted to step into the fulfillment of all that for which my people had longed and partake of it. I believed and was baptized.

This conversion experience just about coincided with the very last of the years for which I would have been eligible to take a “birthright trip” to the land of Israel, of which I never availed myself during my Hillel and Chabad days. It was bittersweet timing. I had once mused about traveling to Israel and claiming my right of return citizenship, as I’d heard such wonderful things about Tel Aviv’s music scene from my Israeli musician friends. Now I was keen to see the places where Jesus lived, died, and rose again. But as a new Jewish convert to Christianity, I was now disqualified by Israeli law not only from my birthright trip but from any hope of easily claiming Israeli citizenship. Non-Jewish people might have better chances of attaining Israeli citizenship than me! The irony was so striking: my natural right to citizenship in the State of Israel had been eviscerated by my supernatural citizenship in the “Israel of God.” I have been sundered from the family of the former by my joining the family of the latter, a family which is open to all.

I am blessed that my conversion to Christianity has not caused any major schisms on the Jewish side of my own family — assimilation and secularization have been gifts in that regard, speaking from a purely selfish standpoint. But I am thoroughly sympathetic to Paul’s sorrow and anguish for his people, for I often feel it myself. It is one thing for me to long to see all people know the mercy of God in Christ; it is another to have discovered what I sincerely believe to be the truth of my peculiar ethnic inheritance, and long to see my kin seize it and become its beneficiaries and champions. The Jewish tradition is a goldmine because it points to the ultimate treasure, the Kingdom of Heaven in Christ. But there is a sad difficulty in having inherited divine oracles which, if we do not recognize their timely fulfillment in Jesus, would seem to have been lame-duck. It’s an existential crisis, really, to be told that you are God’s peculiar people, and yet his promises to us have not quite been kept. If these stories are not true, then who are we? I’m half-Irish — the Irish don’t have to reckon with an origin story that claims God himself made us to be his chosen people to inherit the very Kingdom of Heaven. But this is the case with the Jewish people. With Paul I long, at the very least, for my people to know that the God of our origin story is real, has always been true, will ever be faithful, and his word never fails.

Abraham receiving the Eucharist and the blessing of Melchizedek.

Song Meditation: “Table of Grace”

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Romans 10:5-15

Moses writes concerning the righteousness that comes from the law, that “the person who does these things will live by them.” But the righteousness that comes from faith says, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’” (that is, to bring Christ down) “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say?

“The word is near you,
on your lips and in your heart”

(that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”

Scripture Reflection

God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. The Word, who in the beginning was with God, and is God, is “near you, on your lips and in your heart.”

We can go through great times of distress where this might feel like an impossible claim. We feel far from God. We can even feel as if we are in danger. Paul says, “confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead; you will be saved.” How on earth can this speak to us in our condition when we are in danger? This is when we would most like to escape into heaven, or have an angel descend into the abyss in which we’re languishing to snatch us out of it.

The secret of Paul’s saying here about the confession of the lips and the faith of the heart, which is so often reduced to an evangelical formula for initiation, is what Christian tradition calls “redemptive suffering.” This refers to our union with the suffering of Christ throughout the whole of our lives, our long walk of faith. His suffering is ours; our suffering is his.

We suffer because we are made in the image of the Suffering Servant of God.

Though he suffered to death, and his death was the goal of those who inflicted such violet suffering upon him, death had no hold on Jesus. The mockery that death was intended to make of him was turned upside-down by the resurrection: the Risen Lord made a mockery of death by means of his suffering. Jesus’ suffering is, in fact, the conditional means by which he entered into his exalted glory. “Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then to enter His glory?” (Lk. 24:26). Indeed it was. “He humbled Himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross. Therefore God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name above all names.” (Php. 2:8-9).

The Lord’s Passion reveals that suffering is not a mark of shame — it is the very halo of glory.

This is true for all of us: “Now if we are children, then we are heirs — heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.” (Ro. 8:17).

When we confess that the Suffering Jesus is Lord, then, we acknowledge that our suffering is the path to glorification with Jesus. When we believe that God raised him from the dead, we believe that we too will be raised with Jesus. We need not doubt the certainty of our resurrection hope. Paul says that, in fact, Christ’s resurrection was contingent on that of all mankind: “For if the dead are not raised, then not even Christ has been raised.” (1 Cor. 15:16). This is why he died for our sins: to that ensure we will all rise with him. “I, when I am lifted from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” (Jn. 12:32). The Risen Lord is the living proof of what is in store for all of us beyond this life in the “valley of tears”.

The things which would seem to diminish us magnify us; the things which seem to destroy us fortify us. Nothing that we suffer is in vain: we may rejoice that it is all our share in Christ’s glory, filling up in our own flesh what was lacking in his afflictions (Col. 1:24).

In all our suffering and trials, we are far from far from Christ — we are as near to him as can be.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: ‘For Your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Ro. 8:35-39).

For the Word of God, Jesus Christ our Crucified and Risen Lord, is always near us.

Amen.

Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas

Song Meditation: “No Way Up But Down”

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Matthew 14:13-21

Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Scripture Reflection

The miracle of the loaves and fishes, which satiated the hunger of five thousand people for one brief moment, pales in comparison to the miracle of the Word of God, which satiates the true hunger of all God’s people eternally.

The Word of God is the heavenly bread which has descended from heaven, offered to us and through us in the Body of Christ. The Word of God shall never pass away (Mt. 24:35); as the bread of God, no matter how many times it is broken and offered to the hungry, it never becomes scarce. The bread of the Word is ever multiplying, no matter how much it is consumed.

Founded upon and embodying the Word, the Church is almost like a divine multi-level marketing scheme: recruitment, or evangelism, is the product. The Gospel-Word we are commissioned to preach perpetuates the Great Commission itself: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature…in [Jesus’] name repentance and forgiveness of sins will be proclaimed to all nations.” (Mk. 16:15; Lk. 24:47). We advertise and offer training in God’s forgiveness, and commission those who believe to advertise and offer training in it as well.

Here, demand does not drive down and deplete supply; supply raises up and inspires demand. The more the Word is preached, the more it is loved, the higher it is in demand. It cannot be demanded unless it is first supplied: “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in?” — that is, the Word of God, Jesus — “And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard?” — that is, again, the Word — “And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” (Ro. 10:14).

The heart of the demand for the Word is the heart of man himself. The hidden desire of all men’s hearts is the Word of God because the Word is the good, and makes the good. How is this so if “only God is good”? (Mk. 10:18). Because “in the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God.” (Jn. 1:1). God is good; his Word is good, because he is God.

By his Word, God brought all things into being (Heb. 11:3), and planted a Garden full of fertile — that is, multiplying — seed-bearing plants and seed-bearing fruit for man’s feasting. All of these, according to the Word of God, were good, and good for food. See how the only-good God endowed his creation with his own goodness through his Word!

Yet Eve set her heart on the one forbidden fruit, desiring it not because the Word said it was good for food, beautiful to the eyes, or desirous to make one wise (Gen. 3:6) — because the Word did not tell her this — but because she believed that the forbidden fruit had all these qualities in itself. She was wrong. Mankind has been living for “the god in their bellies” (Php. 3:19) ever since, and our sensual pursuits have come under the domination of the archons of other bodily organs as well. We so often believe that the “good” may be found in so many things, as if they are good unto themselves, and we desire them more than the Word which declares what is truly good. Nonetheless, though we misplace the good for which we hunger in the creation, our disordered sense of what is good does not change the fact that in our hearts, it is always the true good for which we hunger — and that good is our Creator, the Word of God.

The Messianic Feast of the Word of God Incarnate, Christ, to which we are invited is so much more miraculous than the miracle of the loaves and fishes because it is the return to and redemption of Eden, where now everything is good for food. For by the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil — that is, death — Christ conquered death and opened the way to the Tree of Eternal Life which had been barred from us. In the divine wisdom of scripture, “food” is so much more than food. St. Peter saw a vision of the Messianic Feast, and was told to rise, kill, and eat all types of beasts which had until then been unlawful food for a Jew to eat (Acts 10:9f); not only did this divine vision show that he was released from these laws against food, but the beasts represented all of the people who had previously been barred from Divine Communion by the Law as a whole.

Since then, “everything is lawful for me,” says Paul, “but not everything is beneficial.” (1 Cor. 6:12). Our freedom is not a license for gluttony or any other form of disordered sensuality. For “the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of virtue, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” (Ro. 14:17). This is why Jesus pointed past the loaves and fishes to his Word, and Paul pointed past the bread and wine to the body and blood of the Lord, who “is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:17). Those who love and eat the Word are his spiritual Body, whose lifeblood is the Spirit. We are what we eat: the dead eat the fruit of death, the word of judgment, and the living eat the fruit of eternal life, the word of grace. For the Word is Spirit and life (Jn. 6:63). The Word of God, Christ Jesus, is the Truth which sets us free from all bondage, even to death, for he “has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” (2 Tim. 1:10).

“Food freedom” might seem a small thing beside freedom from death — but on a spiritual level, freedom from death is exactly what “food freedom” is: since we have a food, the Word of God, that sustains us to eternal life, there is no “forbidden fruit” that can truly bring death upon us. The Paschal mystery has revealed that death, in fact, is the means by which we are born into eternal life. Like the other fruits of Eden, the fruit of the tree of death was seed-bearing, and by God’s gracious provision in his economy of salvation, that seed is Christ the Word of God incarnate; he fell to the ground, died, and out of his death came the fruit of eternal life for all.

This is the truth which sets us free.

If we are now so liberated to “eat” all things, then, we can only conclude with Paul that “everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the Word of God and prayer.” (1 Tim. 4:4-5). And if everything is good and sanctified by thanksgiving — that is, Eucharist — then all is Eucharist, the Body of Christ. Let us give “thanks in every circumstance” (1 Thess. 5:18) for “in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” (Ro. 8:28). Let us “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 43:8) in all things, for “Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11). Seeing this, who dares to claim that anything in this, the renewed Eden of our cosmos reconciled in Christ, is not good for food, but leads to death? For there is now no forbidden fruit, for its deathly poison has been destroyed by Christ.

Hear Paul’s celebration of our liberation: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Ro. 8:38-39). This is the Word of Truth, our heavenly bread. If we are what we eat, imagine what we will be if we truly eat these words.

Amen.

Song Meditation: “Table of Grace”

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The term is found in the New Testament four times, all Pauline usage. It is used in its literal meaning of a measuring line or boundary — perhaps describing jurisdictions in 2 Cor. 10:13, 15, 16 — except in Gal. 6:16, where it is used more in the sense of a rule of living.

Clement of Alexandria.

Later in the Church’s life, Clement of Alexandria (2nd-3rd ct.) referred to the “ecclesiastical canon”: “the concord and harmony of the Law and Prophets in the covenant delivered at the parousia of the Lord.” (Stromata 6.15.125.3). Here, canon is inseparable from scriptural exegesis under a Christological hermeneutic (or a Christological exegesis under a scriptural hermeneutic, per Behr), and inherited from Christ at that. There is an inevitable subjectivity to this canon-as-exegetical-process: “The canon is found in the interpretive engagement with Scripture according to which Christ was preached by the apostles, an engagement in which the student of the Word is also ‘interpreted’ by the Word as he or she puts on the identity of Christ.” (Behr, The Tradition and the Canon of the Gospel According to the Scriptures).

The danger of canon’s exegetical dimension is that eisegesis can be mistaken for, and sold as, legitimate exegesis -- and therefore canon. The reckless eisegete innovates his own “Bible canon” so to speak – as Marcion did more explicitly – that turns the proverbial portrait of a king into a collage of a dog (AH 1.8.1). Canon ought therefore to have some measurable, historic apostolocity.

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The song was released in December of 1969 following the “Summer of Love” and peaked at #3 on the Billboard charts in April of 1970. Its success was not anticipated by record executives, for whom a 4 minute song was rather long for a standard single (2-3 minutes). But the song both captured and landed in a cultural moment: the Jesus Movement was growing in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, where Greenbaum lived and recorded the track. Some participants in Haight-Asbury’s counterculture had discovered that free love was costly, and so was drug use — and they weren’t finding the answers they were looking for in the anything-but-Christianity philosophies and cults they’d been experimenting with. Area preachers like Calvary Church’s Chuck Smith opened their doors to these lost hippy sheep, and some of them, like Lonnie Frisbee, became the first faces of the “Jesus Freaks,” born-again Christians who retained their hippy aesthetics — including rock and roll. Greenbaum anticipated the need that would later be met at operatic scale by Webber & Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar in October 1970 and Schwartz’ Godspell in May of 1971. But Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky beat them to it, and cashed in on the new Jesus People market.

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I’ve always loved this song. The guitar riff is just so cool. I first heard it as a youngster in the movie Wayne’s World 2, in one scene during a recurring sequence where mythical 60’s roadie Del Preston is training Wayne’s ragamuffin friends to crew an ambitious Woodstock-inspired festival. Del’s PTSD-ridden portrayal is a nod to Vietnam veterans who never “got their head out of the game,” and the scene gets its laughs in the absurdity of the measures he prescribes them — instructing them to pop cyanide pills if things go awry, etc. Spirit in the Sky is used as a period prop to support the “Vietnam vibe,” and I wouldn’t be surprised if this scene is a parody of a serious Vietnam film that used the song in a similar context. Like CCR’s Fortunate Son, the period association is so strong, you can practically hear the Huey helicopters.

The connection to war is peripheral to the song’s purpose of course, but noteworthy. Greenbaum’s lyric is in a constant state of preparation for the moment of death. And the distorted electric guitar sound in this song went on to define a genre densely populated by songs about death and war, namely, heavy metal — think Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Spirit in the Sky’s drum part, a shuffle, is by no means a military march, but then again, its era’s militaries had long ago abandoned the little drummer boy’s measured march. The sound of 20th century war is, in fact, that of heavy metal, literally: tanks, planes, choppers, bullets, bombs. History plainly tells us that the sound of 20th century heavy music only developed after this. Many point to the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter”, a 1968 fuzz-guitar song which will never shake its association with the Manson Family murders, as the first heavy metal song. But the sonic influence here was Jimi Hendrix, who wielded his innovative, overdriven guitar sounds to protest the Vietnam war with songs like “Machine Gun”, and led many musicians of his generation on much the same mission. The sound of late 60’s rock, of which Spirit in the Sky is an exemplary specimen, is rather difficult to separate from themes of death and war.

Spirit in the Sky’s lyric is quintessentially Christian, however (with a catch, to be discussed later). Greenbaum expresses certainty that when he dies, he’s “gonna go to the place that’s the best...up to the Spirit in the sky.” The second verse turns to evangelize the audience, boldly proclaiming Jesus by name: “Prepare yourself, you know it’s a must / Gotta have a friend in Jesus” so that they may have confidence that they’ll get to the Spirit in the Sky by his recommendation. So far, this is relatively conventional Christian theology, with the warning of the wages of sin — death — and the gospel of Christ’s friendly intercession.

But the catch, caught and criticized by many Christians then and since, comes in verse three: “Never been a sinner / I never sinned”. This flies in the face of Romans 3:23’s “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” To understand the “unconventional theology” behind this lyric is to gain the greatest insight into why this song exists and what it represents. As it turns out, Greenbaum was not a Christian, let alone a Jesus freak. He said he “flubbed” this lyric for complete ignorance of Christian theology. Like Bob Dylan and Keith Green, Greenbaum was Jewish — but unlike these two musicians, who joined the Jesus Freaks and wrote their anthems, Greenbaum never embraced the faith. Rather, as the story goes, he was watching The Porter Wagoner Show on TV one night, and as the show closed with a gospel tune, he thought, “Yeah, I could do that.” He sat down and wrote Spirit in the Sky in 15 minutes. He borrowed the title from a Hopi-inspired greeting card.

Modern critical theorists might cry “appropriation” at a white man nicking not only black gospel but Hopi religion, if not a Jew pantomiming Christian faith (I’ve certainly been accused of the latter in my time). But this is quintessential Americana, all the more because the inspiration came from the television, and the product generated a fortune. And while Greenbaum’s theologically questionable third verse raised concerns among Christians, nevertheless, the song was overwhelmingly embraced by the Jesus People, and many Christians since. Artists like DC Talk, and less famously myself, simply change the lyrics of the third verse to better match Romans 3:23: “If you’ve ever been a sinner / If you’ve ever sinned,” etc. The question of appropriation might be a red herring — as the Sybilline oracles were long ago enculturated into the Church, so also Spirit in the Sky in the American church.

And yet the convergence of secular culture and technology, so characteristic of Spirit of the Sky (ignorance of religion; television and greeting card inspiration; proto-”heavy metal” studio production), remains a touchy subject to this day, though the forms are ever-changing. We have moved on from the late 20th century controversies around whether or not Creed can truly be called a “Christian band” to whether or not Solomon Ray, an AI-generated “gospel artist” whose song reached #1 on the charts in 2025, can be called an “artist”, let alone “Christian”. Is the medium the message? The American people have spoken, and the answer is “no.”

What might this say about American Christianity? This is certainly not the type of high liturgical faith in which every form is carefully crafted to reflect its heavenly archetype; it’s far too freewheeling to have much in common with this. In fact, it might be all the more exciting to the American Christian when the medium does not match the message. The patterns of American Christianities have so long tended towards intentionally transgressing prior norms, and continues to this day, whether Pastor Marc Driscoll’s expletive-laden diatribes about the crisis of masculinity at his “conservative” Mars Hill Church, or Jay Bakker’s tattooed and pierced presentation at his “progressive” Revolution Church, to name relatively recent examples. Their aesthetic is as colloquial as their homiletics, and their followers reckon it to them as righteousness, while detractors find them vulgar and unqualified. The controversies around these men perpetuate the pattern associated with names like Whitefield, Finney, Graham, and in Greenbaum’s day, Frisbee, for whom aesthetic dissimilarity to conventional religion was rather a proof of the Spirit’s inspiration.

Solomon Ray’s apologists do not deny that the Spirit, blowing where it will, fills “his” music. His critics wonder if it is “music” at all, and cannot tolerate the deep-dream regurgitations of a machine (but let us muse on the comparison between Greenbaum’s method of generating a “gospel song” based on a televised, real-time reproduction of a live performance vs “Solomon Ray’s” generation of a “gospel song” based on “machine-learning” a database of millions of digital song files within a matter of seconds), no matter how close a proxy they are to other “Spirit-filled” Contemporary Christian Music hits. But these critics have their spiritual ancestry, perhaps, in those who could not tolerate a profit-driven “gospel” song by a Jew who didn’t know the first thing about Christian theology. On the other hand, Norman Greenbaum’s Christian fans, like Solomon Ray’s, are less concerned with how a song is made and more about how it makes them feel.

The American Christian compartmentalization of medium and message, of course, raises the question of whether other more fundamental elements of our faith might be compartmentalized, such as body and spirit, and driving the objectifying bifurcation of medium vs. message. If so, it would seem that those factions today who argue for the notion of America’s “Christian founding” might best cease their squabbling over whose planting this Christianity is — Calvin’s or Wesley’s — by admitting that perhaps American Christianity might be the garden of Valentinus.

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Matthew 13:24-30,36-43

Jesus put before the crowd another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

Then he left the crowds and went into the house. And his disciples approached him, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Let anyone with ears listen!”

Scripture Reflection

In the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, Jesus teaches that the enemy sows weeds of evil among the wheat of righteousness sown by God. The Righteous One instructs his gardeners not to uproot the weeds until the time of harvest. Only then, the weeds are to be separated from the wheat, and thrown into the fire.

As far as I’m aware, this is the only time “smoking weed” is a thing in the Bible.

This is a parable for the Church, and explains the incidence of evil and tomfoolery in Church history and culture — the proverbial weeds of religious evil, hypocrisy, and excess among the wheat of the Church’s many virtues and stunning works of mercy.

But the Church is also the body of Christ, whom we are called to imitate individually, so we may also understand and apply this parable at the individual level. For we in whom the word of God has been sown and is growing might indeed be ripe for the harvest of God.

There is light and darkness within each person, good and evil. What matters is that we harvest “righteousness”, if possible — but even if we harvest “evil”, it is the Lord who makes the judgment, not us. This is a call to non-judgment, and deference to Christ’s mercy.

Christ himself, though he is the light of the world, did many things which were utterly condemned as “darkness” by those around him — hence the Righteous One was “numbered with the transgressors” (Mk. 15:28) and put to death as an “Evil One”. Jesus is ultimately vindicated by God, not by the people who hate him — or even those who love him.

We should regard ourselves in the same way as we struggle in the Christian life. When it comes to our own lives, we do not always know what is good and what is evil — our thinking we can is the legacy of the Serpent’s trick in Eden — but according to Jesus, “only God is good” (Lk. 18:19), and only good at that. So we should seek his good will in prayer. Jesus shed many tears as he sought God’s good will; we can only speculate about whether or not, in his anguished prayers, he ever questioned what was right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, as Nikos Kazantzakis imagined he did in his The Last Temptation of Christ — we only know that Jesus asked our Father if the cup of suffering might pass from him, and God said no. In the end, God empowered Jesus to live through his trials without sin.

Yet the paradigm of righteousness vs. sin through which Jesus struggled as a Jew is not quite the paradigm we’ve inherited from him. Remarkably, Jesus eliminated the category of sin insofar as, thanks to him, we are not subject to the same Law he was, for he took the Law and all its charges against us and nailed it to the cross (Col. 2:14; Eph. 2:15). Adopted by his Father and brought into his glorious Kingdom restored to Israel, the Church (Gal. 6:16), we are not under sin-counting Law as servants in his household, but under infinite and merciful grace as beloved children and heirs. The Israel into which Jesus was born was fallen, but Jesus raised it up in himself, cutting its new covenant in his blood, by which people trusting in him may truly be called citizens of the Kingdom of God. Jesus as the messenger of the new covenant (Mal. 3:1) radically redefined God’s will for us: mercy, not sacrifice. Love, charity; neighborly, and even familial love if possible, for all people. Grace is a far cry from the legalism which put Jesus to death in the heart of the land of Israel before he restored God’s rule to her faithful people and radically expanded her “territory” to include all people in all places who put their faith in her King — that is, Jesus.

The weeds of legalism were deeply rooted in Israel, and even so continue to be in the Church just as they are in our hearts. The human tendency to judge others and ourselves, the seed in the fruit of Eden’s knowledge-tree sown in mankind, is at the root of all discord; Jesus only allows us to “weed” our own gardens, and he illustrates in his parable that the weeds can only be destroyed in that fire of the Holy Spirit which he came to cast on earth (Lk. 12:49). This fire might very well miraculously transfigure our weeds into wheat, for we often do the greatest good where our own sin-wounds intersect with others’ needs. This is one Biblical case where “smoking weed” is a good thing.

But without the Spirit, we weed and “smoke weed” at our own risk.

As for the weeds in others’ gardens, we may take comfort that, though we are prohibited from “weeding” them (“judge not, lest ye be judged”) — and the temptation is great, such is the state of the world, and our hearts cry out for reform—, all will be well; for had not legalism put Jesus to death, grace would never have been revealed. “Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more” (Ro. 5:20).

Whether in others’ gardens or our own, we go a-weeding at the risk of uprooting the desirable wheat before the proper time of harvest. We should simply rely wholeheartedly on our Father and obey the promptings of his Spirit within us, who alone has the power to “smoke the weed”. We should be on our guard that the spirit of legalism doesn’t do the smoking for us. Nonetheless, we should always take heart — Jesus’ fate reveals that, in God’s providence, life may be harvested from death, if we leave the harvest to Him.

Amen.

Song Meditation: “Case Closed”

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Matthew 13:1-9,18-23

Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen!”

“Hear then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

Scripture Reflection

In these parables, the seed of the word is sown among many different people of many different dispositions and life circumstances. Jesus guides us to self-knowledge, and to understanding our capacity to truly grasp his teaching, and to follow it. This is to help us “count the cost of discipleship” (Lk. 14:28). As we meditate upon this parable, let us recognize ourselves in it.

The seed sown on the path.

Jesus says that the word here is heard, sown in the heart, but not understood by the mind. This teaches us that our minds can derail and overpower our best-intentioned hearts, whether due to our own lack of knowledge or even an overabundance of superficial knowledge.

The “birds” that gobble up the seed are the powers and principalities of the air, whose prince is Satan (Eph. 2:2). They are like the “monkey-brain”-inducing, impish army of Mara in Buddhist teaching: the source of those chattering, distracting thought-forms which we find so compelling that our hearts become more infatuated with them than in love with the holy word of God.

The “path” is a place well-worn by the worldly; in our worldliness, our minds might be eager for the distraction of novelty, whether news, gossip, entertainment, or work. We might just as easily be distracted by the dramas we script around our preferences, opinions, and sense of self when they are appeased or challenged by our neighbors. A “worldly” mind is not inclined towards spiritual understanding.

The “path” is paved with the “banality of evil”, and Jesus warns us against the automatic, mechanistic way of life to which worldly life on this “path” leads. Our hearts might welcome the good word, but our minds can reject it. As the Eastern fathers often emphasize, we must “put the mind into the heart” and bring these two powerful parts of ourselves into alignment.

The seed sown on rocky ground.

Here, the heart is a mess of overpowering emotions and their inevitable contradictions. It is overjoyed at receiving the word of God, as a bride receiving her bridegroom — but this bride is unfaithful. The person with such a heart has no “root”: no conviction, no courage, especially in the face of persecution. The marital vow the “bride” so eagerly made in her unstable affections — “in good times and bad, sickness and in health, ’til death do us part” — will not be kept. It was made in self-willed haste, fueled by shallow over-enthusiasm. The imprudent, impulse-driven mind has weakened the heart, whose passion is chasing fantasies.

The Christian life is indeed a marriage, with Christ as the Church’s bridegroom: bad times come and we ask “Why does God let bad things happen to good people?”; sickness of the body intervenes and we ask “Why is God allowing me to suffer?”; sickness of the soul comes and we ask “Where is God at all?”; and even the threat of death might come because of our faith, and we ask “Is this confession of faith worth my life?”. The great heroes of the faith endured great persecution; physical and mental illness, and demonic assaults on their souls; and many were martyred for their faith, like St. Stephen in Acts 7 — the first of many. These all proved that their grounded faith was rooted in conviction, and their “ground” was not at all rocky.

Rocky ground is far from fecund soil, and we find it in a desert place where life is scarce. Where are the great trees that might give protective shade to little sprouts in such a hostile environment? This is an image of solitude: no Christian community, no elders in the faith who, like trees, have grown tall and fruitful, and can shelter the newborn faithful from the scorching sun of temptations with encouragement and instruction.

It is very difficult to “go it alone” — the great Desert Fathers were keenly aware of this, and often abandoned their Plan A of solitary life to form monastic communities — and like trees in a well-soiled forest, our roots are strongest in deep community. With such a root, one may “kill [the] emotion” that in turbulence destabilizes the heart and, in its place, “cultivate feeling,” which Anthony of Sourozh says is the necessary preparation for the spiritual life.

The seed sown among thorns.

This heart is tormented in her abundant preoccupations, by which she is held in brutal captivity. In this prison, there is no vacancy at all for the word.

The mind is likewise overpowered by the life of the senses, its awareness completely disconnected from the needs of the heart, which would otherwise be “overjoyed” to receive the word. The mind does not at all know the language of the heart, and its string of thoughts is a barbed-wire of thorns imprisoning the heart.

The “thorns” are aspects of the rose of life, of course. In this case, the rose might perhaps be wild, as it is uncultivated roses which become the thorniest of briar-bushes. Surrounded by predators, the thorns grow as a self-defense mechanism — in such a “thorny” person, the heart is not open, the skin is too thick. No vulnerability.

Perhaps bad company has indeed corrupted good behavior. “The cares of the world and the lure of wealth” have choked the word — but children are not born with such cares. These cares are taught by parents, relatives, teachers, friends, and peers. The person choked by such cares cannot be spiritually fruitful, and “yields nothing”.

Such a person must unlearn “the cares of the world” and learn instead to “yield” — to let go. Otherwise, they will never recognize the word of God for what it is, no matter how many times they have the opportunity to hear it.

The seed sown in good soil.

The word in this case is heard and understood. The mind has grasped the teaching, and since the “mind is in the heart”, it is rooted. Being rooted, such a person “bears fruit”, and indeed “yields” to the Spirit of Life (Ro. 8:2; Rev. 11:11) — for the words of Christ are spirit and life (Jn. 6:53).

The quantity of spiritual fruit does not seem to make a big difference to Jesus — he comes off as nonchalant, cavalier, about whether one yields “a hundredfold, sixty, or thirty” at the harvest. It is the life-bearing quality, perhaps, that matters more than the quantity harvested.

The thing about good soil is that it has much death and decomposition hidden within it — dead plant material, bugs, creatures, waste, etc. Fertile soil reveals to us the mystery of how the new creation springs forth from the de-creation of the old — this is true not only of the springing forth of the New Covenant from the Old, but also of the new man arising forth from the old as wheat from a seed fallen dead to the ground (Jn. 12:25).

Paul calls us fools if we fail to grasp that “what you sow does not come to life unless it dies” (1 Cor. 15:36). If the word of God is the seed, our hearts must be the soil in which the word alone grows. We must deaden everything in our heart toward anything else seeking to live therein — it is this mortification which allows all that is hostile and inhospitable to the Word to die, decompose, and transform our hearts into fertile soil for the holy seed of the Word.

Similarly, a faithful community of Christians who are far along in this process of mortification make fertile soil for anyone whose faith is as new as a seed. Jesus of course explicitly interprets the “seed” to be the Word of God. But we might go further to understand ourselves, bearing the image of Christ the Word of God, as “seed” also. We, after all, are children of faith and therefore “Abraham’s seed” (Gal. 3:29).

Likewise, the Kingdom of God is the Father’s vineyard; he is the vinedresser, Christ is the vine, and we are the branches — not only does the vine grow from a seed, but the fruits borne by the branches contain seeds. We who consider ourselves fruitful in our faith should be very concerned with the fertility of the soil around us, that is, the domain in which we minister, so that when our seed-bearing fruits — the works of mercy — fall to the ground and “die”, life may sprout.

This is a call to discernment. As heralds of the word of the Gospel, we should be mindful where we sow, lest we sow on the path, on rocky ground, or among the thorns. By no means does this entail that we “preach to the converted” only, but that we should recognize that “good soil” among those to whom Christ preached in his time was not found among the righteous and healthy, but those sin-sick in need of a physician: “for I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Lk. 5:32). And we all share in this condition.

May we recognize, then, that fertile soil may be found everywhere by the discerning spiritual gardener.

Amen.

Song Meditation: “You”

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Romans 7:15-25a

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Scripture Reflection

Could you imagine Paul’s testimony here flying in a court of law? It almost sounds like an insanity plea. No doubt such language might call our own sanity into doubt if we use it as a moral defense when we steal the cookies from the cookie jar, or worse.

As a plea of innocence, it would be slime-ball territory. “The devil made me do it.” But this is not a plea or defense of innocence — it is, in fact, a guilty plea. Paul wants to do good, and even delights in virtue when he thinks about it; but no such good dwells in him — “nothing good” at all.

“Wretched man that I am!”

Paul writes these words to the Christian community in Rome as its former would-be persecutor. He had been tightly entangled with the murder of protomartyr Stephen, a deacon of the Jerusalem church. Saul had set out gleefully for Damascus to spread his reign of terror abroad. Before Paul’s zeal drove him to Rome as a Christian apostle, Saul’s zeal might very well have taken his crusade there as an antichrist if the Lord had not intervened on the Road to Damascus and re-centered his zeal on Christ. Surely this crossed the minds of those in the Roman church.

Paul doesn’t apologize to them for his former life. An apology — in the proper sense of the word, making an explanation of one’s actions — is a form of moral self-justification, or self-righteousness. Paul doesn’t do this. The world surely demanded it of him, just as our world surely makes such demands on us left and right. But he doesn’t engage with this type of thinking.

Nor does Paul owe his life and ministry as a moral debt to those whom he wronged in the past; he considers that debt paid by God’s grace in Christ, by whom all debtors to divine justice are released from their debts. However, the Jewish religious authorities certainly wished to exact such debts from Paul because they were scandalized by his message of Grace’s triumph over Law. According to the book of Acts, Paul was pressured to circumcise his mentee Timothy, and to sponsor Nazirite monks, in order to show his debt of fealty to the Law. This Paul carried out, but defiantly — not in the name of the Law, but to “turn the other cheek” as Christ taught, and to demonstrate Christ’s willingness in him to be humiliated and abused for the sake of God’s grace. “To the Jews I became like a Jew to win the Jews…I became everything to everyone..for the sake of the Gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.” (1 Cor. 9:20-23). And so he made a mockery of those who put him to this, and their so-called “moral” priorities — to share and glorify the Gospel in the scandal of the Cross.

All of this is far from capitulation or apology. Paul does not justify himself in these actions; nor does he present himself as having any capacity to pay back any moral debts, whether to man or God. For Paul, man has no such capacity in either case, having “nothing good” in him at all, and to pretend otherwise is not only a stumbling block to the Gospel, it is the heart of man’s fallen condition — his love of the forbidden fruit of judgment.

“Why do you call me good? Only God is good.” (Mk. 10:18). If sinless Christ spoke these words, how much more so sinful Paul, who as a Christian refused to concede that he himself could render any good, whether for reparation or charity. He had “nothing good” in himself. His material riches were as dross; his religious and moral accomplishments were a net loss. All that mattered to Paul was whether his deeds would magnify the grace of Christ and bring it into crisp, revelatory focus for those whom he encountered; thereby not he but the Spirit of God in him might glorify Christ and reconcile the world to his love.

For “only God is good.”

And yet we are often ensnared by the temptation to consider ourselves moral agents capable of, and even responsible for, such good. This is the poison of the poorly-chosen forbidden fruit of Eden: goaded on by the serpentine Accuser, we presume the moral authority of good and evil and we appoint ourselves, rather than the Holy Spirit, to be our own Advocate. We become debt-collectors, bargaining for virtue with the sacrificial bribery of shame and blame, compounding the interest of condemnation.

Where is God in all this, who judges no one in these terms; who hates sacrifice; who so loved the world that he sent his Son to be a propitiation for the sins that we have turned into tradable assets in an usurious economy of moral debt?

The Cross reveals that this game of usurious moral “Monopoly” is not God’s justice. All are equally captive and humiliated under the law of sin, and should we hypocritically appeal to it, we truly have no right to apologize or demand apology — for there is “nothing good” in us that may be traded in this farcical moral economy.

Such is the Catch-22 paradox of morality: “For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you.” (Mt. 7:2).

But the Cruciform spectacle of the failure of morality does not mean that Jesus left us without a clear social teaching. Of course, one cannot read Paul’s passionate privileging of Grace over the Law without at least considering, if not conceding, that the Gospel might very well be antinomian; but the Social Teaching of Christ is not lawlessness, it is, precisely, Grace, which fulfills all reasonable laws and transcends them.

The usurious moral economy’s courts are the center stage where we make our appeal to Grace in Satan’s strongholds — and these courts take many forms in our lives. We all recognize them in our hearts when the hour of trial comes upon us.

When we are so tried, let us testify with Paul that good cannot be found in ourselves, and instead preach the goodness of God in his love for all people — whether they be lovable or unlovable by the Accuser’s measure — and his desire that all be saved in the knowledge of this truth (1 Tim. 2:4). Put plainly in the Gospel, forgiveness is the knowledge of salvation, reaching out to all, which is taken in hand by all who abandon the Satanic morality for merciful non-judgment. It cannot be known otherwise.

“Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Amen.

Song Meditation: “Whether We’re Awake or Asleep”

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Matthew 10:40-42

Jesus said, “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple-- truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”

Scripture Reflection

You’ve heard it said before that Jesus died in our place. This doctrine is called vicarious atonement.

But I say today, what if we live in Jesus’ place?

In fact, that’s precisely what he has called us to do.

When you were baptized into the name of Christ, you took his name. More than that, St. Paul speaks of our “putting on” Christ like a garment. Even more than that, he speaks of Christ living his life through us, and us living Christ’s life rather than our own.

This is what I mean by living in Jesus’ place.

In theology, it is common to speak of “vicarious atonement” in terms of Christ dying in our place to shield us from wrath and secure the bounty of grace — and this for the sake of the whole world, since “God so loved the world that he gave his Son.” (Jn. 3:16)

Since this atonement pertains to the whole world, or cosmos (1 Jn. 2:2), it is therefore worth exploring its cosmic dimension. Scripture reveals that the Cross was an act of divine justice (Jn. 12:31-33); but we should not envision the scales of justice with Jesus on one plate and the people of the world on the other. In fact, opposite the plate of the enemy’s accusations and condemnation, we are weighed together with Jesus, since on the Cross, he drew every man to himself (Jn. 12:32).

And together, we are justified, not found wanting.

It is not that Jesus “took our place” in substitution so much as he took his place among us in solidarity, sanctifying us with his divine presence. His Passion reveals precisely the nature of holiness in that God willed his Son’s total devotion to humanity — that is, solidarity — unto death.

We are called to follow this example. The voice that beckons us to solidarity is the Holy Spirit; the Spirit empowers us to live it out; the Spirit suffuses and seals the living community of solidarity, the “communion of the saints”. Though the Cross reveals that this communion is invisibly universal, it is made visible in the fruits it bears, and those who bear fruit together for the sake of this divinely-ordained solidarity are called the “Church”, which is comprised of “Christians” — little Christs.

We “little Christs” are called to imitate our eldest brother Jesus Christ (Heb. 2:11), even in his work of “vicarious atonement”. To act vicariously is not to be a substitute. No one can substitute for Christ. To act vicariously is to be a vicar; to be, as St. Paul called us, ambassadors of Christ and ministers of the reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18-20) of which his life, death, and resurrection are the ultimate testimony.

The radical solidarity Jesus offers to the world is such that one may regard a work of mercy as being a gift that is both given as well as received by Christ himself. “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me...‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me.’” (Mt. 10:40, 25:4). This is vicarious atonement in action, where benefactor and beneficiary are both vicars of Christ. The life of charity, in fact, is lived to the end that this truth might become manifest to those from whom it is hidden.

The mystery of vicarious atonement is not exhausted by what Christ has done for us, but is completed in what he now longs to do through us. By living in his place — bearing his name, wearing his mercy like a garment, and living his life in solidarity with the least and the lost — we become vicars of the reconciling Divine Love that triumphed on the Cross. Every cup of cold water given, every stranger welcomed, every act of mercy offered in his name is another echo of that cosmic welcome by which God drew together all humanity in Christ.

May we therefore go forth not merely as beneficiaries of his grace, but as his benefactors — his vicars in the world: little Christs who make visible the invisible communion, revealing the face of the One who sent him in every welcome given and received.

Amen.

Song Meditation: “Table of Grace”

Inspiration has struck!

This Holy Week I found myself writing and recording companion songs for the journey, from the Triumphal Entry to the Resurrection. You can find all these brand new songs here:

ICYMI: New Album “Hymns & Homilies” Out Now

I invite you to download and listen to my album, out now: “Hymns & Homilies” — an eclectic collection of songs for worship and musical sermons. This is not your grandaddy’s Christian music. Name your price — your support for my work of music ministry is a blessing!

Upcoming Appearances:

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Romans 5:20-6:22

The law came in so that the trespass would increase; but where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. For whoever has died is freed from sin. But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Scripture Reflection

When I first encountered this passage years ago, I was more familiar with the language of Zen Buddhism than Judeo-Christianity. The idea that we have a “body of sin” struck me as a familiar idea. The Buddha taught that the “self” is illusory, a composite experience comprised of five aggregates (skandhas) formed by karma — a Sanskrit term not unlike in meaning to its Greek etymological cousin, hamartia, which is translated “sin”. The five aggregates are: form, feeling, perception, mental formations, and consciousness. One of these karmically-produced aggregates, mental formations, also produces karma — just as St. James taught that sin is produced when a person is tempted by the thought-forms of desire. When sin matures, it leads to death (James 1:14-15), just as karma leads to death according to Buddhist teaching.

The goal of Buddhist practice is to clearly discern that there is no “self” beyond its five aggregates, and realize that the true nature here is Buddha-nature (tathagatagarbha) — the highest attainment, nirvana (not just a great band), isn’t far away from this realization. The Zen approach emphasizes not making too big a deal out of this process, the goal, or the goal-setter: “If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him.” (Rinzai).

And here in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, I thought I saw a similar pattern: a connection between the “body of sin”, the body of the wisdom teacher — in this case, Christ — and the death of the teacher, all to the end of realizing the communion between teacher and student by the latter’s attainment to the goal of the teaching.

But Paul speaks of something Buddha did not: resurrection from the dead. He teaches that those who die in communion with Christ also rise with him in resurrection. And he speaks of this dying and rising as if it is something we can actually do with our time here on earth.

As a student of Zen, I was struck by this as if it were a koan — a Zen riddle whose contemplation leads to spontaneous enlightenment, or “sudden insight” as it is also called. Contemplating the death and resurrection of Christ affected me in this way; it is why I chose the Christian path, or rather, it chose me.

In this passage, St. Paul presents sin and grace as the respective counterparts of death and life — not just any life, but eternal life. The Resurrection and eternal life of Christ reveals God’s boundless grace — so much so that Paul entertains the idea that one may sin all the more so that grace might abound.

He does not deny that one may; only that one should. I’ll return to this controversial statement.

First: what is grace, that it might be antithetical and even antidotal to sin in the same way that the resurrection answers death?

As a Buddhist, I was familiar with the idea that the Buddha-nature, though ineffable and inessential in essence (“form is emptiness, and emptiness is form” — so goes the impoverished English translation of the Heart Sutra), is ideally manifest in a constellation of “perfections” or virtues (paramitas). The realm of existence itself (dharmadatu) is permeated with Buddha-nature — and yet finds its highest expression in the virtues of the virtuous person. The “energy” quickening the paramitas is prajna — wisdom.

In Christian mysticism, the analogue to the paramitas are the virtues; the divine energies, particularly as embodied in sophia (the Christian East’s name for wisdom), might correspond to Buddhism’s prajna. And for Eastern Christians, the divine energies are exactly what grace is.

So much can be, and has been, written about the esoteric dimensions of these concepts. As a student of Zen, however, I was trained to take it at face value and keep it simple: in the Zen school, all these ideas taken together yield the ethos that a life of drunken foolishness is no less blessed than a life of monkish austerity, for all is resolved perfectly together in the “unborn” Buddha-nature (Bankei). This is the secret of prajna, wisdom, which leads to true virtue.

St. Paul is saying the same thing: a life of sin is perfectly resolved in God’s grace revealed in Christ. “Shall we sin so that grace shall abound all the more?”

Again, he does not deny that we may, only that we should.

Neither Buddhist nor Christian sages recommend vice; they rather insist that the one enlightened by wisdom cannot help but be wisdom’s lover, and bear the fruit of wisdom. “Wisdom is justified of her children,” said Christ, posturing himself as wisdom’s spouse. And he too taught about wisdom’s moral paradox: God in his loving wisdom sends the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust, judging no one.

Jesus died for sinners to reveal this truth.

To “die” with Christ, then, is to reveal the same truth: the non-judgment of God, and his boundless grace for all, austere religious and drunken fools alike. This non-judgment is the nature of grace. It is the divine precedent of God’s mercy which triumphs over the divine judgment proclaimed by Christ: “men love the darkness more than the light” (Jn. 3:19); nonetheless, God gives the light in greater abundance than the darkness, which cannot overcome the light.

My Zen studies helped me understand what Paul was saying here about the virtues and the life of virtue: neither can be attained for their own sake. The discriminatory attitude which yields to desiring good over evil is legalistic; it leans on one’s own understanding; and necessarily has its roots in the primordial tree of the knowledge of good and evil, what Buddhists might call dualism. The “virtues” thus conceived are illusory, and they are the stuff of Law, apart from which we might otherwise live — but when such a “commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died.” (Rom. 7:9).

The Law is holy; the commandment is holy, righteous and good (Ro. 7:12). But it does not bring life, only death — specifically, the “sentence” of death for the convicted sinner. This is true of all of our cherished opinions about what is right, what is wrong, what is good, and what is evil. All such opinions are condemnations; condemnation is death.

Life, however, comes from grace. Grace does not discriminate between sinner and saint. This is the secret of wisdom, from which true virtue arises.

Therefore, as hard as it may be to believe, the life of virtue cannot begin without forgoing our concepts of virtue, even as we cannot live by grace, but only, rather, fall from it, when we seek to be justified by the Law (Gal. 5:4). We must therefore not miss St. Paul’s bold teaching that, though a life of sin is not recommended, grace does indeed abound all the more in sinfulness.

This is no anecdotal aside; this is the heart of the Gospel of grace.

That Christ died “under the Law” reveals how we too must “die in Christ”: he was sentenced to die as a convicted sinner. We too are called to have this relationship with the Law — we should not consider ourselves above it, but convicted by it.

To invoke good and evil, in other words, is to immediately become guilty.

This is the nature of discrimination, and discrimination is the operative principle of our cosmos of multiplicity, beginning with duality: “The Tao begets One. One begets Two. Two begets Three. Three begets the ten thousand things.” (Tao Te Ching 42). We cannot escape this mode of existence. Should we strive for the justification of virtue, therefore, discrimination swallows us up all the more. Buddhists call this the cycle of rebirth — that is, the endless regeneration of multiplicities stemming from one’s own acts of discrimination.

Hence, we are, as Paul taught, “dead to sin”. It is not a choice; it is a fact we either accept or not. St. John of the Cross minced no words describing acceptance of this fact as “the dark night of the soul.”

We cannot pretend, then, that resolving the duality of life entails a triumph of good over evil. It doesn’t. That is the koan of the death and resurrection of Christ. We must instead live with and within the tensions between “good and evil” because they are the myriad threads of the web of life with which we are bound up; we are all sentenced to death, and will die convicted by this accusatory web of endlessly interconnected cause and effect.

It is not us who can be called “good” in this arrangement, “unloveably evil” as we are and without exception loving darkness more than light, according to the reckoning of Christ (Jn. 3:19) — and the Buddha as well, perhaps. It is God who is good because he loves the unloveable.

The more unloveable the world is, the greater his Love is revealed to be. This is the meaning of “where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.”

We need not fight to overcome this, or bewail how unfair it is. Fairness pertains to justice; divine revelation teaches us that though justice will prevail over injustice, it will not prevail over mercy. Mercy is that blessedly “unfair” hope hidden in the infernal “unfairness” of death — the hope of the resurrection.

Mercy is the realm of the Resurrection; love is the Resurrection’s substance in a very real and Biblically explicit way: to be resurrected is to be born again; is to be born of the Spirit; everything born of Spirit is Spirit; God is Spirit; and God is Love.

In short, to be resurrected is to be love.

This profound doctrine stretched the limits of everything I’d ever learned from Zen Buddhism. It struck me as infinitely more sublime than the Buddhist formulation of nirvana.

Am I saying that the goals of Buddhism and Christianity are different? I can’t say that; I can only say that how the Buddha articulated the goal of his teaching, or at least my understanding of it, paled in comparison to the insight that leapt out of the Bible at me as I drank in its mystagogical words.

My personal experience has led me to endlessly advocate that any sincere student of Zen or eastern wisdom might seriously consider whether the Gospel of the death & resurrection of Christ just might be the ultimate Zen koan.

It was for me.

Song Meditation: “You”

Inspiration has struck!

This Holy Week I found myself writing and recording companion songs for the journey, from the Triumphal Entry to the Resurrection. You can find all these brand new songs here:

ICYMI: New Album “Hymns & Homilies” Out Now

I invite you to download and listen to my album, out now: “Hymns & Homilies” — an eclectic collection of songs for worship and musical sermons. This is not your grandaddy’s Christian music. Name your price — your support for my work of music ministry is a blessing!

Upcoming Appearances:

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Mt. 9:35-38

Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness. When He saw the crowds, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.

Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into His harvest.”

Scripture Reflection

According to Matthew, the Lord spoke in parables to the masses, but he explained them all to his disciples, unveiling the mysteries of the Kingdom to them. Hence, when Jesus speaks to his disciples of the “harvest”, he is opening up his harvest parables to them. Explaining these parables to them, he identifies the harvest as the consummation of the world, and the harvesters as both his disciples and angels.

Friends, I want to highlight this peculiar Biblical mystery: that to be a disciple of Christ is to be an angel.

Perhaps we are accustomed to thinking of “angels” as a term for a spiritual species; this is not quite the case. Angels, which means “messengers”, are missionaries: “Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?” (Heb. 1:14). In the Bible, there are many species of heavenly beings acting as angels: seraphim, cherubim, etc.

But angels also appear in the Bible as “men”, such as the angels who appear to Abraham by the Oaks of Mamre (Gen. 19); the one with whom Jacob wrestled until dawn (Gen. 32:24–30); the commander of the Lord’s army, sword drawn, met by Joshua (Josh. 5:13–15); the angel who appears to Samson’s parents (Judg. 13). When the women came to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning, the angels there were also “men”; and at his Ascension, it was “men” who asked, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking at the sky?”

St. Paul tells us that hospitable people may entertain “angels unaware” (Heb. 13:2) among the strangers they take in. This need not be taken only to mean that angels masquerade as men. Men may also appear as angels. John the Baptist identifies himself as the angel of Mal. 3:1; in the story of St. Stephen’s martyrdom, he is described as having the face of an angel (Ac. 6:15); in one of the earliest commentaries on Revelation, St. Epiphanius of Salamis taught that the “angels” of the seven churches were in fact the churches’ human pastors.

We can allow this “angelic” language to mystify us, or we can allow it to enlighten us and bring us closer to the heart of the Gospel. For there, we find the promise of resurrection, and here is the key to this “angelic” mystery: Jesus taught that in the Resurrection, humans are “like angels in heaven”. We attain to the resurrection through the baptism of the Holy Spirit, by whom we are born again. Jesus taught that “that which is born of Spirit is Spirit” — hence, the born-again Christian as an “ambassador of Christ” and herald of his Gospel is in fact “a ministering spirit sent to serve those who will inherit salvation” through his or her witness.

The Harvest, then, is the Great Commission; Jesus is the Lord of the Harvest, and we are his angelic harvesters, gathering together the nations under the discipleship of Christ.

This is Christ’s vision of the consummation of the world. His parables’ dramatic imagery of the sky rent by angels who descend upon the world and judge it is no mere bait and switch beside the Great Commission; it serves to vividly illustrate just how cosmic is the depth and degree to which the Great Commission transfigures the cosmos, if only we had eyes to see it. Worldly eyes see homely discipleship: Sunday morning worship and coffee hour fellowship; daily prayers; household drudgery, family life in all its glory and conflict; community potlucks; soup kitchens and open pantries; Bible studies; humble hymns and songs of praise; laughter and tears — all the quaint touchstones of the “Mere Christianity” which the world, and sometimes even Christians of the elite bent, find trite and kitschy.

All this, together of course with the cries of those oppressed for Christ’s sake and the blood of his martyrs, precisely rend the heavens, for they are the very fiery life and activities of the Holy Spirit striking down on earth like a lightning bolt. The natural eye is equipped to see neither the glory of Christ’s humility, nor the glory of the modest Christian life to which he calls his disciples — and yet glorious they are. It this harvest of humble virtue among God’s spiritual people that the world ascends to its teleological apex in consummation.

In the disciples of Christ, the world is indeed entertaining angels unaware.

Amen.

Song Meditation: “You”

Inspiration has struck!

This Holy Week I found myself writing and recording companion songs for the journey, from the Triumphal Entry to the Resurrection. You can find all these brand new songs here:

ICYMI: New Album “Hymns & Homilies” Out Now

I invite you to download and listen to my album, out now: “Hymns & Homilies” — an eclectic collection of songs for worship and musical sermons. This is not your grandaddy’s Christian music. Name your price — your support for my work of music ministry is a blessing!

Upcoming Appearances:

Subscribe now

For Melito, the revelation of the Gospel is the Hebrew Passover’s true antitype, subsisting fully in the person of the suffering Christ. Early in Peri Pascha, he proclaims that what was “old with respect to law” is also “new with respect to the word” (Peri Pascha 3). He therefore prepares his hearers, or at least his readers, for the newness and vitality of the word with a dense exposition of Hebrew traditional types and their fulfillment in Christ, the Word of God. The work crescendoes into a stunning — unconventional by modern standards — prophetic outburst in which Christ speaks in the first person through Melito. What better dramatic climax for this hymn to Christ as telos and eschaton of the Law than that the Word of God should reveal himself from heaven in the speaker of the word?

With its emphasis on revelation, Peri Pascha may certainly be understood as a kind of apocalypse. When Melito speaks in the first person as Christ, the apocalypse turns Christophany.

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