Written over hundreds of years by a collection of named and anonymous authors, it spans genres and themes as diverse as power and money, family and sexuality. It alternates between genealogical lists and colorful histories, ritual law and love poetry, all managing to say something important about what it means to be human, the nature of the world, and God.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how the Bible is both a product and a means of God’s mission in the world. It is a witness to the things God has done in the past to shape and recreate people, and it is itself a part of the process of shaping those who read and receive it.

For instance, take the story of Nathan confronting King David (1 Samuel 12). It’s both a witness of how God was confronting and shaping David to be the king he was supposed to be. But at the same time, as we read the story and allow ourselves to live in it, the story shapes us as well, challenging us to think about how we use power, or our own tendency to cover up our sin with even more sin.

As we read stories like that, or meditate on the poetry of the prophets, or read along with the first century churches in their letters from Paul, we’re pulled into the story of God through time, and are shaped to be more like God, and less like the world.  We become gracious where the world is judgmental. We become joyful where the world is bitter, and mourn in the places where the world wants to celebrate. We become peaceful in the middle of a world at war, or we become generous in a world of selfishness.

The Bible is a strange book.

But, that’s okay.  We’re a strange people.

By God’s grace, and through God’s word, we’re becoming stranger every day.

Heschel, in his wonderful little book on the Sabbath, writes about how the Sabbath returns our attention from the arena of space towards the arena of time. Heschel argues that our imaginations have to do with space—the way we conquer and move in the world of space.  In that view, images of God necessarily depict God as existing in space, losing the dimension of God’s existence in time. However, for Israel, the Sabbath functioned as a temple in time, reminding Israel that God existed and worked in the sphere of time.

I was reading John and Heschel together, and it led me to think about how this all gets played out in the Hebrew canon, and the implications for a narrative theology. If we think about the two sides in the analogy framework, we get something like this:

Image : Space :: Story : Time

Image is to space what story is to time—Image and story are depictions of existence in the respective spheres of space and time. Interestingly, in the canonical faith of Israel, the God of Israel is freely depicted as through stories. God is depicted in time through the use of story, while the canonical tradition explicitly rejected the depiction of God in space through image. Perhaps that is just because of the nature of the written canon, but it seems also to be an affirmation of something essential about the nature of God. God is in pursuit of goals, on a mission. God works through time, across time—not cyclical, repetitive time, mind you, but historical time, in which there is progression and fluidity.

The canonical God is a storied God, because God is a personal being, expressed in story better than in a space/image, as if he were material. For Heschel, this is a reminder that we, too, exist not just as matter in the sphere of space, but also in the sphere of time, and that this is what really matters. Being a person is about existing through time.

In the prayer theology of John of the Cross, the problem with the use of too much imagination in prayer is that it prevents progression—God becomes fixed, static. The imagined God may be dependable, but it can never fully express God—God as eternal person is beyond full expression through image. When the imagination is allowed to play too heavy of a role in prayer, the prayer is prevented from developing a faith in God that can exist beyond what can be imagined.

However, the situation is different in a narrative theology that understands God as having been at work, which depicts that work through story, and understands the story to be somewhat open-ended, and continuing through the present. In that theological framework, there is a place for hopeful prayer in the midst of darkness, while God is  hidden and unseen. Indeed, such time is healthy, because it keeps us from restricting and limiting God to our image. God may be at work in new ways throughout time. Thus, waiting, praying, and living in faith (not by sight) is an affirmation of definitive hope, and yet also an exercise in provisional discernment. We live in the story we know, knowing that we don’t yet know the whole story.

Lots of people invested in Jesus while he was on earth. For some of them, it was the investment of time in trying to go hear him, or just see him pass by—Zaccheus started out like that, even though he ended up much more heavily invested by the time the story was over. Some were invested in things Jesus was opposing—the religious and political elites of Jerusalem were heavily invested in the temple, and no doubt felt that investment was threatened by the way Jesus talked about the temple and acted when he came to visit it. Others were invested in different ways: Peter talked about having left everything behind to follow Jesus, and one time Jesus told him he was going to end up with a pretty good return on that investment.

But I don’t know if anybody was more invested in Jesus than John the Baptist. It seems like John could have had pretty good life following the priestly calling that he was in line for. But instead he spent most of his life in the wilderness—Luke tells us that he was living there even before he started preaching (1:80), and if anything the Bible says about John is to be believed, it was anything but a plush, cushy lifestyle. Jesus says as much here in Matthew 11—John lived the prophet’s lifestyle in the desert, far from the fine robes people would have found if they had gone looking in the palaces. He was out in the wilderness, living a life of denial, decked out in rough looking clothes, eating locusts and wild honey, and all of it was investment in the kingdom of God.

John was ready for a new king, and believed that a new king was coming, and that his work was to prepare the way for that king. Everything he did has to be read against that backdrop, from where he located himself in the wilderness on the other side of the Jordan, (a place that was home to many revolutionary movements) to his practice of calling people to repentance, and symbolically cleansing them in baptism, so that God would graciously forgive the people and send the true king to bring in the new age that Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah and the other prophets had promised. John believed that in all this work, he was preparing the people for God’s true king, the messiah—and he believed that Jesus was that messiah. With John’s prophecies against Herod, he was totally invested in God’s kingdom, but even more specifically, he was totally and fully invested in Jesus.

John went all in for the sake of the kingdom, pushing all his chips to the center of the table by calling out the current king of the land. Herod had the stamp of approval from Rome, but John proclaimed that there was a higher authority that either Herod or Caesar. Herod was living against the law, and thus against God—he was not the true king. And, believing that in Jesus the time had come for Herod to be replaced, John spoke out openly against Herod. Herod took that prophetic word for what it was—not simple moral exhortation, but a treasonous rejection of his kingly authority, which was a dangerous sort of thing for a popular prophet to be saying. And so John sat in prison in a place called Machaerus, with his execution looming ahead of him.

So, you can understand John’s confusion at this point in the story. There he is in prison, shackled by the king he believes Jesus will replace, and yet…no sign of when Jesus will make his move.  Who knows what John really expected, whether to be freed by Jesus and his followers as they seized Judea, or to have his death vindicated by Jesus as he took power, or something else entirely, but there’s no question about this: John was fully invested in Jesus. He hadn’t hedged his bets, or held anything back.  Either Jesus was the real deal, or John had gone way out of his way to waste his life. The ascetic lifestyle, the hard prophetic ministry, his imprisonment and impending execution—if Jesus wasn’t really the messiah, it was all a waste.

So you can understand the question. You can understand how he would want to know, and would send messengers to make the journey to Jesus to ask, “Are you the one? Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Some people don’t like this story. They think it’s awkward for John, a spirit-filled prophet if there ever was one, to have doubts about Jesus. I suppose it is a little strange.  In the end though, John’s role wasn’t to know the whole story, or every detail of how things would work out, but to prepare the way for God to act. In the end, John had done the work God had given him. John had played his prophetic part, and the rest was beyond him. I suppose he was okay with that; after all, he doesn’t ask Jesus for a detailed battle plan, or a missionary prospectus. Still, he wanted to know, was it all for naught? “Are you really the one, or not?”

Jesus answers with a collection of images from Isaiah, “the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news brought to them.” I suppose a simple yes would have done the trick, but Jesus wants John to know that indeed, God was at work, fulfilling a plan that had been around a long time before John walked out into the desert. John may have been more invested in Jesus than anyone on earth, but God had been planning and investing in this mission for a long time. 

God began investing in the mission in creation, and continued to invest after the fall. God invested in his mission of redemption when he made the covenant with Abraham, and through the lives of Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. God invested in his mission in Egypt at the Exodus, at Sinai, and in the same wilderness where John went to work. God had invested during the times of Joshua and the Judges, and continued to stick with his investment during the lives of Saul, David, and Solomon. God continued to invest in the kingdom by sending prophets to proclaim justice and judgment, holiness and hope. Now, in the work of Jesus, in the ministry of Jesus and of course in his eventual death and resurrection, God would become as invested as possible in the project of redeeming the world. Through the spirit at work in the church, God has continued to invest in mission, and even as we gather here this morning, God’s spirit is at work. John may have been the most invested person on earth in Jesus’s mission, but the truth is, God had been investing in that mission for a long time. Even when it feels like we have everything on the line for God’s mission, we do well to remember that God’s been investing in it a lot longer than we have, and is more deeply committed to the redemption of the world than we could ever be—even at our best.

We humans invest. And when we’ve invested in something, whether it be a project, a person, or plans for profit, we’re typically looking to get something out of it. We have investment expectations. Over the years, many have invested in God’s kingdom, and I know many of you have too, and that’s a beautiful thing, but it comes with a danger. When we invest in something, we want to have some control over it, and the more we’re invested, the more control we want to have. Sometimes, because of things that we see at work, or because we’ve gotten a good hard, honest look at a piece of scripture we hadn’t paid attention to before, we find that our expectations are at odds with God’s mission. And in that time, something very, very important happens. We have the opportunity to rethink, to revise, our understanding of God’s mission. We have the opportunity to ask, “Whose mission am I really invested in?”

I see that, and I agree that it’s definitely a problem. I’ve been thinking lately that it affects us in a surprising way.

See, when right and wrong get diluted, then it leaves us ripe to elevate our opinions further than we normally would. In place of moral consensus, we emphasize our own hunches about the way the world ought to be. It’s not just the moral void that’s the problem—our own tendency to fill that void by elevating our own opinions that wreaks havoc on the formation of our character. The result is we live in an age of not just pervasive relativity, but pervasive negativity as well. This is the age of cynicism.

In a world where nobody has the final say about whether or not what I do is good or not, everybody has a say in whether they like it or not—people from every stage of life, young and old, now excel at cynicism in every arena of life. Negative judgmental critiques have become our highest rated form of entertainment—the bold and aggressive cynic is indeed the true American Idol.

It seems that even in the church, people eagerly voice their judgments and shamelessly gossip their critiques of their neighbors. Gone is any hint that the critiqued man, woman or child is a creature who somehow bears the image of God, gone is any impression of their value, gone is the spirit of love that compels us to see the face of Christ on our neighbors. In the place is only what we see and judge by the standards of what we like and what we don’t, what conveniences or annoys us.

We who believe in revelation must be better than that. What we have received from God certainly forms in us boundaries of what we may morally approve, but it is just as true that it should form a boundary of what we freely critique. Just as we must freely testify that Jesus is Lord indeed, we must also give testimony that we are not lords of the universe ourselves. Our witness to what God does say cannot be diluted by assertions of our own will and judgment. In the age of cynics, may the church instead choose to be something else:

May we choose to be prophets.

Prophets who speak the word of the Lord, but who bite our tongues before they spill the poison of cynical, negative gossip.

And then, here in chapter ten, there is a startling turning point in the gospel. Like a skilled filmmaker who suddenly changes the focus of a lens, bringing what was blurred in the background of the shot into clear focus, Matthew reveals that he is not simply telling the story about Jesus, but about his disciples. They’ve been there the whole time—following Jesus from synagogue to synagogue, town to town, house to house. They’ve been watching him teach, hearing him proclaim the good news of the kingdom of heaven, and then they’ve watched him act out that sermon by healing the sick, casting out demons, and offering forgiveness. They’ve been here the whole time, but always in the background. But now, Matthew twists the lens, and they suddenly jump from the background to the front of the story.

It’s one of those moments that makes you go back and rethink the movie. Everything Jesus has been doing now becomes a rehearsal for what he’s calling them to do. Notice what he tells them in verses 7-8: “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons.” It sounds a lot like what Matthew’s been telling us Jesus did, doesn’t it? It’s a radical turning point in the story—the disciples are not just to watch Jesus or even to merely go on learning from him, but are to go out and replicate his ministry to others. The last few chapters have been a barrage of stories that demonstrate that Jesus has authority—now he gives it away. “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority…”

This provokes a new, different kind of faith question. Up until now, all the stories have been about what people believed Jesus could do for them:

“Do you believe that I am teaching you the truth?”
“Do you believe I can heal your servant?”
“Do you believe I can protect you from this storm?”
“Do you believe I can forgive you?”

It’s a radical turning point in the story—the disciples are not just to watch Jesus or even to merely learn from him, but are to go out and replicate his ministry to others. As somebody in our small group said last week when we read those words, and were imagining what it was like to be sent on that mission by Jesus, “These are life-changing words.” Now, all of a sudden, the question for the disciples is not “What do we believe Jesus can do for us?” but “What what do we believe Jesus will do through us?” That is a tremendous difference.

But even while we recognize the difference, it’s important to recognize that even though this is a different kind of question, it’s still a faith question. It’s not a question of what the disciples are capable of in and of themselves. Jesus can’t give them authority unless he truly has it himself. There isn’t even a question of the gospel beginning at this point—this moment depends on their faith in everything that’s happened before this. Matthew doesn’t begin in chapter ten, (and there’s no Acts without Luke). Christian mission is never about what we are capable of or not—it’s about what God is capable of. It exists in the tension between what God is at work doing and what we are at work doing. But both of those work together—God is at work through us.

The challenge implicit in all of this is: “Are we ready to be agents of the gospels?” Are we willing to take on the mantle of what Jesus was doing, and take his mission to be our own? Are we content to be recipients of the gospel, or are we ready to become participants of the gospel?

That’s an important question in the gospel, one that I think is implicit in this story. And normally, this is the point in the sermon when I would dramatically hold out my hands and ask you to seriously consider that challenge…but not this week. At this point in the gospel, in chapter ten, we’re still not ready for it. This story, where Jesus sends his disciples out to replicate his ministry, is incomplete. Sure, the mission as it is would be enough to keep their hands full, and it’s full of the gospel—but it’s still an incomplete gospel. After all, the story Matthew is telling doesn’t end here, but ends in another sending story, what we call the great commission. Matthew is a tale of two commissions, or two sendings, and what happens between the two is incredibly important.

So far, Jesus’s disciples have learned about his power, but they have not yet seen him become powerless. They’ve seen him in strength, but not yet in weakness. Between the two commissions, stands the truth of Jesus’s suffering. Before they can receive the great commission, they have to follow Jesus on the road to the cross—and so do we. Because it’s on that road that we finally can  experience the full gospel of Jesus in his life, death, and resurrection—the gospel that we are called not only to receive, but to participate in.

Here’s a preview for the sermon this Sunday.  (January 29, 2012)

Faith in the Passive Voice

On one hand, our faith is the result of God working in us. It comes as a result of God breaking into the world with a revelation, the imposition of the divine into exposition. By the Spirit, God sustains and extends the work of the initial revelation, sending the Word to us that brings conviction, hope, and the word that recreates us, just as it is working towards the recreation of the world. As that Word does its work in us, we are drawn into the story of God, formed into the image of Jesus, and are utilized in God’s redemptive mission for the world.

But enough with vagaries—this really does mean stuff in the actual world. It means that when I pray, I depend on the work of God’s spirit. If I grow through prayer, it is not because of some automatic exchange, as though I followed a formula and that just yielded a spiritual result. When I serve my neighbor, I believe that the Lord is at work in the service, that God’s spirit will work in me to create a servants heart.  When I preach, I speak believing that the Lord will speak through the sermon, that God is at work in the text and in the act of the sermon, that people may, by the work of the spirit, hear a word from the Lord. When we think about the church’s mission, we are really talking about the Lord’s mission, and discerning what God is doing through and in the Church.

Faith in Active Voice

But on the other hand, I believe that there is a very real sense in which we choose to join God and participate in his working, or not. We actually have to take on activity, we really become agents in God’s work. I actually do take physical action, string words together, and place myself in contexts in which I believe God will work.

Though it will be the Lord who makes the prayer effectual, we still pray. Though the Lord will be the one who uses service to refine us, we still choose to serve, and we still work hard while we’re doing it. Though the Lord speaks through the sermon, I still have to work hard to develop and deliver it. Though it is the Lord that is at work in the church’s ministry, the church must choose to join the Lord, must choose to participate in God’s mission or to pursue its own.

Ultimately, the tension between the two is real, but not destructive. We have to learn to speak in both voices. The passive voice of faith reminds me that I am not all on my own, that is not all up to me. However, there is also an active voice of faith, one that may never speak on its own, without being coupled with a passive voice, but which is still essential to how God’s purposes become fulfilled in the world. God chooses to work with us, to partner with us, and we must choose as well.