A Modest Proposal for Christ Followers on Inauguration Day

I am writing with our current political circumstances in mind, the day before a new President takes office in the U.S.  He will do so in a nation deeply divided over Presidential politics.  Many Christ following persons hold extreme opposite views from those of other brothers and sisters in Christ.  Here’s how extreme: some feel it’s “the end of the world” because Joe Biden will be inaugurated as President tomorrow; while others feel as though Biden’s election has disarmed the cataclysm that had seemed inevitable.  THAT’s how divided the nation is, and the divide characterizes the Church as well.  (By “Church” I mean the world-wide community of Jesus-followers, of which there are tens of millions living, worshipping and serving in the U.S.)

I am writing with the assumption that most within the Church agree that Jesus calls us to seek first the Kingdom he announced and made real during his ministry.  To seek his Kingdom first along with the righteousness characteristic of life within his Kingdom (Matt. 6:33).  We agree that upon Jesus’ return it is this Kingdom—his Kingdom—that will prevail over all; and that in the meantime our call is to represent His Kingdom above all else, since we are its citizens and ambassadors.

I am writing with the assumption that most within the Church have come to know the heart of God through Jesus and want to know/experience more and more of Jesus.  We’re not pursuing first or primarily a moral ordering of life, the correct list of rules/laws that assure us we won’t go wrong.  We are rather in a relationship with the most significant and decisive Person ever, who loves us and gave himself up for us, who knows what it best for us and all, and has pledged to set everything right upon His return.

I am writing with the assumption that most of us within the Church will acknowledge an ongoing need to be renewed in our minds by the Spirit of Jesus, to perceive and respond to our circumstances with the help of the Spirit who strengthens us, teaches us, and assures us as we walk in Jesus’ ways.

I am writing with the assumption that most within the Church can agree with all these assumptions and STILL disagree, even strongly, about how to assess, process and respond to any given set of circumstances, including those we now face.

With these assumptions in mind—as God’s children, brothers and sisters together in God’s Household—can we “hear” the voice of God urging The Family:

30 And do not bring sorrow to God’s Holy Spirit by the way you live. Remember, he has identified you as his own, guaranteeing that you will be saved on the day of redemption.

 31 Get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, and slander, as well as all types of evil behavior.

 32 Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you. (Eph. 4:30-32 NLT)

If, as I assume, the Church reflects the extreme and deep divisions of the larger nation, could the Church not also reflect a better way forward?  I think so.

What if we started with the many within the Church we now know and, by the power of the Spirit within us, WE get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, and slander, as well as all types of evil … and instead are kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven us?  Not just on matters relating to the politics of the moment, but on any matters now upon us and between us.  By the power of the Spirit we’ve been given, get rid of it and be … !

What if we started small with the many within the Church we now know and kept at it, and became modestly “good” at this, adept at getting rid of … in timely ways and being … when it really counts.  Suppose we started small and it grew large?

Again, what if we started with the many within the Church we now know, and then decided to focus on the many within the Church we do not know at all?  Some of them are quite different from us, but not as different as we once were from God.  So, supposing we venture so far as we can to get rid of all bitterness, rage, anger, harsh words, and slander, as well as all types of evil … and instead sought to be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven us?

[I know, we may not actually know many or perhaps any of those brothers and sisters, so it would be doubly difficult to be “kind to each other,” and all the rest.  Point well taken, but at the least we could give them the benefit of the doubt since we don’t know them well or at all.  We could give the benefit again and again.  In fact, that is what God has done for us!]

Well … what if we started, even today, in these ways?

I imagine other questions popping into mind.  Among them: what does all this have to do with deep divisions over a new President being inaugurated?  And what difference would any of this make?

On that last question, we wouldn’t “bring sorrow to God’s Holy Spirit by the way we live.”  At least, we wouldn’t grieve the Spirit in these ways.  No doubt, that would be good.  Then, if we kept at it—” getting rid of … and being kind …, “we’d develop relational habits that track well with Jesus, the One we’re following.   And, then, I suspect our differences could be seen in a different light.  Some would remain as matters of principle and conviction, while others might resolve as not worth the bother, but all of them would increase our understanding of, and respect for, one another.

What about the divisions over Presidential politics and governing the nation?  By “getting rid of … and being kind …” in the power of God’s Spirit, the Family of Jesus shines a light on the way of Jesus and illustrates how differences can be negotiated differently, with a brilliance and beauty not often even seen in this world.  Differences negotiated differently, and potentially powerfully.

Yes, it would be a small and modest thing, easy to overlook and underestimate.  As perhaps one of the smallest Kingdom-seeds ever planted.

 

 

 

Jesus Comes for Us–Precisely for All!

 

The Lord our God loves, chooses, and works with/through a people to right the wrong of their lives and world, whatever, however, whenever.

But, the Lord does so, not just for them, but for all, for as many as will …

The Lord loves his own, so that he may love all.

The Lord comes to his own, so that he may come to all.

The Lord touches, forgives, heals, transforms—saves—his own, so that he may save all.

The Lord’s people receive these amazing and abundant graces from their Lord, as part of their Lord’s plan for all.

Ponder the good news of Christmas in this light—for and through one, for all.  Imagine these words originally for one, then for some, yet somehow now for all:

17 The Lord, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness,
he will renew you in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing
18   as on a day of festival.
I will remove disaster from you,
so that you will not bear reproach for it.
19 I will deal with all your oppressors
at that time.
And I will save the lame
and gather the outcast,
and I will change their shame into praise
and renown in all the earth.
20 At that time I will bring you home,
at the time when I gather you;
for I will make you renowned and praised
among all the peoples of the earth,
when I restore your fortunes
before your eyes, says the Lord. (Zephaniah 3:17-20, NRSV)

Imagine such words for “saints” and “sinners,” for “worthy” and “unworthy,” for “insiders” and “outsiders,” for “rich” and “poor,” for “educated” and “ignorant,” for “favored” and “despised,” for “cultured” and “crude,” for “peaceful” and “violent,” for “reasonable” and “irrational,” for “preyed upon” and “perpetrators,” for “power-holders and wielders” and “powerless,” for “easterners” and “westerners” from the “north” and the “south,” once for one or some but now for all.

Imagine our Lord Jesus, Immanuel, showing up in the midst, bringing victory, delighting over, lavishing in love, removing disaster, freeing from oppressors of every kind, gathering the outcasts, infirm, and shamed—in all the ways people experience them—gathering them HOME, the place for holy cherishing, joyful celebration, and full restoration.

Imagine what in the shadows of 2020 and the dawn of 2021 appear utterly “unimaginable” and “impossible!”

THEN pray and dream, hope and dare, rise and live to make it so.

But, where and how might we begin?  Where and how to begin with promise of such immensity and grandeur?  I think in small places, in our own small places.  Small as infant-small; small as the human-heart.

Here is a beautiful Christmas anthem that speaks of the small beginnings that could lead to such immensity and grandeur in the new year and beyond: **

Lions and oxen will sleep in the hay,
leopards will join with the lambs as they play,
wolves will be pastured with cows in the glade,
blood will not darken the earth that God made.

Little child whose bed is straw,
take new lodgings in my heart.
Bring the dream Isaiah saw:
life redeemed from fang and claw.

Peace will pervade more than forest and field:
God will transfigure the Violence concealed
deep in the heart and in systems of gain,
ripe for the judgement the Lord will ordain.

Little child whose bed is straw,
take new lodgings in my heart.
Bring the dream Isaiah saw:
justice purifying law.

Nature reordered to match God’s intent,
nations obeying the call to repent,
all of creation completely restored,
filled with the knowledge and love of the Lord.

Little child whose bed is straw,
take new lodgings in my heart.
Bring the dream Isaiah saw:
knowledge, wisdom, worship, awe.

In the New Year imagine Immanuel finding fresh and deep lodgings in hearts and at the center of relationships so that there is redemption from “fang and claw”–a Redemption so that the violence of words and deeds along with the anger that fuel them is mastered by Jesus-love; so that the righteousness and justice of God’s Kingdom purifies law and the systems surrounding and supporting it; and so that wisdom from above embeds among us and leads us to serve the God revealed in Jesus-Immanuel by serving others.

Just imagine it: A Christmas that comes and stays for one and all, with communities of Jesus’ friends in the middle of it all radiating such redemption in all directions.

 

**(Thomas Troeger. For stirring hymn based on lyrics, as arranged by Glenn Rudolph in response to 9/11, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj90IkYeZaE )

 

God as Baby?!

C.S. Lewis famously noted that the greatest miracle of Christianity is not the resurrection but the incarnation. If you can accept that God became a baby, the resurrection should not be a problem. But when you held your first-born baby, or grandchild, or any infant, you probably did not think, “This is how God was!”

The biblical story tells us about a baby’s birth. During the weeks of Advent, we often read and sing from two famous passages found in the prophecy of Isaiah. At a time when the people of Judah cowered in fear over an alliance of Israel and Syria against them, the Lord gave a sign: “The virgin will conceive and bear a son, whose name will be Immanuel or ‘God with us’” (Isa. 7:14). Then, these words also:

The people who walk in darkness will see a great light. For those who live in a land of deep darkness, a light will shine.

You will enlarge the nation of Israel, and its people will rejoice. They will rejoice before you as people rejoice at the harvest and like warriors dividing the plunder.

For you will break the yoke of their slavery and lift the heavy burden from their shoulders. You will break the oppressor’s rod, just as you did when you destroyed the army of Midian.

The boots of the warrior and the uniforms bloodstained by war will all be burned. They will be fuel for the fire.

For a child is born to us, a son is given to us. The government will rest on his shoulders. And he will be called: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

His government and its peace will never end. He will rule with fairness and justice from the throne of his ancestor David for all eternity. The passionate commitment of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies will make this happen! (Isa. 9:2-7 NLT).

Clearly God as Baby!

And so, when the time was right, gospel writers Matthew and Luke tell their stories of surprise and wonder about a baby conceived and born. Likewise, in his own way, gospel writer John stresses the same wonder: “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

 

Consider the wonder of God’s redeeming plan:

To enter the subverted and perverted human story in the very same way we all do, as a baby, and from inside out to salt and leaven the world toward forgiveness, freedom, healing, restoration and renewal.

In fact, that was always the story. Even in Genesis 3, after the great disobedience and defection:

Then the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all animals, domestic and wild. You will crawl on your belly, groveling in the dust as long as you live.

And I will cause hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel(Gen. 3:14-15 NLT).

 

If our primal parents understood this as we do, perhaps they wondered whether Cain might be the One, or was it Abel? Then, after brother killed brother, perhaps they became convinced Seth would be the One. I imagine they were impatient for the great undoing of their sin, as we are so often impatient.

Then, a long time later, when the time was right, God called Abram and the people of Abram. Central to the calling was the promise of a baby, but it took a while. And so, again, when the time was right, Isaac was born, then Jacob, then… This story repeats like a long series of summer reruns.

Until, when the time was right, God did in fact send His Son, born of a woman — born under law — as Paul puts it to the Galatians (Gal. 4:4-7).  Or, as he writes elsewhere, the One who was God did not regard being God as something to cling to but … was born (Phil. 2:5-11).

 

Consider the wonder of God’s redeeming plan:

God as Baby. At the “beginning” of His life, knowing nothing. At the “end” of His life, the discovery of knowing human death. Yet the One without limits accepted life with limits — limits of life and death, temptation and agony, rejection and humiliation.

He who knew everything had to learn everything, but not everything as such. Rather, He positioned Himself as one of us and learned as we learn, yet not quite as we learn. He discerned and gained understanding from infancy onward through intimacy with people and above all intimacy with Father and Spirit.

The “everything” He eventually learned included the way the world was, wrecked as it was.  The world where the Enemy sought to stop His Father by pressuring the midwives to kill all the baby boys (Exodus 1:15-16), where even God’s people would long to take babies and throw them against the rocks in retaliation against their enemies (Ps. 137:9), where babies are the first to die in the siege and first to starve in the famine, where even the Baby like no other was hunted down by the king and was for the moment spared the innocents’ massacre to die another day (Matt. 2:12-15).

 

Consider the wonder of God’s redeeming plan:

To enter, to learn to live, to live to learn, to learn obedience, and then truly to learn it by suffering (Heb. 5:8) and consider the time it took — how long it took. Thirty years — then 2000. And now, how many more?

God as Baby. It tells us something about the God who is love. Something about the way love is and does. Something about God’s willingness to wait a long time for as many of the babies to be saved as possible.

Consider God as Baby inaugurating a Kingdom characterized by being childlike, innocent as doves though wise as serpents, presuming nothing but the good that love assumes until it finds otherwise, but then still hoping and enduring for the better things that will surely come when love triumphs.

God as Baby, who does not remain infantile, but does remain child-like, and refuses to adopt the brutal and failed ways of “grown-ups” who imagine they run the world, when it is the world that would run and grind them into oblivion. Consider the childlike King leading armies of the innocent, marching on, venturing out, blessing in the face of curse, rendering good in exchange for evil, on and on and on until a world gone bad in its infancy can be reborn in its old age through dying and rising.

For this we wait and for this we pray. ***

 

Excerpted from my Prayers for the Seasons,  Light and Life Publishing, 2020, pp. 11-14.

 

 

 

When the Towers Fell–A Prayer for 9/11

 

God over all,

DOUG KANTER/AFP/Getty Images)

when the towers fell it seemed our world changed. We remember where we were when we first heard,

when we saw the fearsome sight, when what we might have thought unassailable crumbled to dust. The shock and awe of those scenes haunt us still. Yet, as we draw near to you today we are sure that, if there had been a camera with the right lens, shots of that fateful day would show startling images of One whose likeness resembled the shadowy appearance of a-more-than-human figure walking, stooping, reaching, holding the injured and dying.  And, it is to this One, to You, we turn in our wounded worship.

God over all,

when the towers fell some of us felt like it must be the end of the world … because such had never happened here, in our places and spaces.  If those towers could fall, all towers must be teetering toward collapse.  Yet, as dust began to settle, our sisters and brothers elsewhere in their knowing-reach toward us demonstrated that falling towers are common across the panoramic human landscape, that our raw shock registers so regularly in some places as to rub terror-callouses on the souls of millions.  In such shadows we can see why they understood so quickly and reached so reflexively toward us.  So … when the towers fell maybe it wasn’t so much the sunset of the world, but a sad dawning of the world as it is and feels to so many others.

God over all,

when the towers fell and we’d recovered enough, some determined to rebuild better, sturdier and loftier towers, fortified by stronger and safer systems of security, monitored by keepers and watchers who never grow distracted or fatigued to slumber, backed up by mightier and more fearful defenses that make good on promises of unassailability. Yes, we determine never again … as though we could build such towers, secure such safety, and guarantee such defenses.  And in our determination we quarreled regularly with each other and more distant outsiders over most everything—over the specification of such towers, the materials out of which they might be built, over who and how might secure them, over … well, just about everything … and in the midst of the swirling dusts of our divisions if we’d looked closely we would’ve seen one face faintly smirking in the mist and Another weeping.

God over all,

after the towers fell and when others seem threatened, we struggle to remember that unless the one who is three and three who is one builds the tower, we will labor in vain; unless the one who is three and three who is one watches over us, we will never sleep well for all our anxious striving and surveilling; and it will always feel more like sunset and darkness than like the dawn of a new day.

And so …

God over all,

when the towers fall, we draw near to you. Yes, like living stones we run to the Living Stone, rejected, despised and apparently doomed, but chosen, honored, and exalted by the One and Only who counts the most. Yes, we run to the One who has become cornerstone and capstone.  We run to this One, we cast our cares upon this One, and indeed like living stones we would find ourselves taken up, positioned just so, cut and squared and re-made just right, connected and enlivened, rising tower-like into a Body that is building and a building that is Body, that pierces the darkness, and through the mists and rubble sounds clearly the praises of the glory of the goodness of earth’s Maker and Mender, and ours.

To the glory and for the pleasure of the One who is three and three who is One who determines to bless all, Amen.

The Whole Gospel—Vertical AND Horizontal

The Creator and Redeemer God passionately loves the world and all realities it entails past, present and future.  The world created supremely good, then subject to futility and corruption through human disobedience, has never escaped God’s majestic and mysterious plans.  Plans once unknown and beyond human imagining but then shockingly, powerfully and bodily manifested in Jesus.  Plans for the fulness of God’s mercy, love and grace to more than match, in fact to vastly exceed, the lethal reaches of sin, so as to re-make the human person, re-form the human community, and thus restore the world from its epic brokenness.

In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he describes these plans as originating before Creation and culminating with a cosmic coronation as “all things” find their place under the loving administration of Messiah Jesus (Eph. 1:9-10).  Clearly the whole Gospel has both vertical and horizontal impact.  If the good news centers in the cross of Jesus then it speaks to the brokenness between heaven and earth, and its relational shrapnel that pierces and tears the fabric of all things human.

 The Gospel’s Vertical Reach (Eph. 2:1-10)

The good news (gospel) is that all of us can be raised up from the dead, that is from ways of living that are actually ways of dying, through the person of Jesus.  More, all of us may be set free from the slavish habits, destructive tendencies, dogged dependencies, nagging worries, compulsive inclinations, and the endless cycles of thinking, feeling and acting that wear us down, tear us up, and leaves us wasted.  Indeed, all of us may rise to life in sync with God that brings blessing to others and the world.

Not because we somehow “have it in us,” not because there is a way to access the untapped potential within our inner core.  Rather, because God is everything we are not—alive and life-generating, potent and competent, and contending and conquering!  Because the everything that God is (and we are not) turns out to be precisely for us and the world!  We may rise-up, free and clear, to become our true selves as we were always meant to be (but never were), and then to contribute to the cosmic design and destiny of the world and its peoples.  Yes, all of this because God is rich in mercy, great in love, and generous in giving.  Once you were dead … but now you are alive … because, as Paul famously summarizes,

You are saved by grace … It’s a gift!

Not your own doing … but God’s doing

You have come to trust … and so

You are God’s new creation—made new through Jesus the Messiah …

Empowered for living well and doing the good God designed us specially to do (Eph. 2:8-10).

This is classic conversion language and teaching, core to evangelical theology and experience.  But we must note carefully three things about this teaching that stands in tension with the way it is often taught and presumably lived.

First, Paul carefully stresses that this great salvation stands quite apart from our works. Nothing we could do results in all that God has done.  Once, Paul reminds them, “you were dead” in your trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1-3, 5).  “Dead” as a result of whatever you/we did.  But then, out of sheer mercy and deep love, God made us alive.  It was nothing any of us did or could do; it was what God alone has done.  Therefore, no one can boast, since no one “saves.”  No one.  Which means there is no basis for one person or group to claim superiority over another.

Here’s the thing, however.  Though we are not saved by works, Paul goes on to say, still we are saved, made alive by grace, precisely for “good works.”  In fact, we become God’s new-creation-work in the Messiah Jesus, designed for doing good, which God planned to be our way of life from now on (Eph. 2:10). To be “saved” and “alive in Jesus Messiah” entails learning and living in ways that God calls “good.”

Second, to be made alive does not mean we “have a life.”  That is, God’s new-creation design for our lives does not lead us automatically to live that way.  Therefore, the gift of life must be received, nurtured, learned and practiced.  The gift of new-creation-life is the gift of opportunity—life from death, and of capacity—life empowered and sustained.  Aliveness in Jesus may be the gift of a moment, but the gift is a life to be learned and lived “into the ages,” (Eph. 2:7).

Third, Paul tells the conversion story of his readers in terms that are personal but also communal.  Certainly, God’s mercy and love reach toward each one of us and make us alive; each one of us has been shown mercy and loved from death to life; and each one of us will be the continuing recipient of unending grace.  And yet the personal and individual experience of each one of us is the common experience of all of us.  We were all once dead, but now God has made us alive.  And this “aliveness” is a life shared with one another as well as with God.  We were made alive, raised up, and seated with Christ together Paul stresses (2:5-6, all the verbs stress this togetherness).  Which anticipates how Paul continues.

 

The Gospel’s Horizontal Reach (Eph. 2:11-22)

The gospel conversion story Paul has told thus far is not yet the whole gospel.  Just as we celebrate and embrace the vertical reach of the gospel—from God’s heart to ours, so we celebrate and embrace the horizontal reach of the gospel.  As we do, and only as we do, we celebrate and embrace the whole gospel.  It is important and timely for us to grasp this.

Once, Paul reminds them, not only were you dead in sin, you were “gentiles,” (2:11).  Remarkably, Paul is writing to his mostly ethnically non-Jewish readers.  He reminds them: You were “gentiles;” You were uncircumcised—as gentiles usually were; And you were labelled by the circumcised—ethnically Jewish people—as pagan heathens.

Once, Paul reminds them, not only were you dead in sin, you were alienated and estranged from God’s people.  More, you were hostile toward them, and they were hostile toward you.  In a word, you and they were enemies (2:14,16).

Once, Paul reminds them, you were outside God’s people as alien-enemies to Israel, unaware and excluded from the covenant promises God had made to Israel for her blessing and the world’s.  And, as a result, you lived in the world without hope and apart from God.  Your “vertical” deadness toward God manifested “horizontally” as estrangement and alien status toward God’s people, promises, and provisions (2:12).

But now, because God is rich in mercy and generous in love you are alive, raised up and seated together in Jesus the Messiah.  Now, you are in the Messiah.  Therefore, though you were far away now you have been brought near; though you were outsiders now you are insiders; though you were enemies now you are comrades and friends.  More than that, you are now sisters and brothers together.  More still, you and they are one in the Messiah (2:13, 15-16).

How on earth can this be?  In a word “Jesus.”  In another word “Messiah.”  Jesus Messiah, Paul says, is himself “our peace,” (2:14).  The weight of the word “our” here overloads the mind.  Jesus establishes himself as peace-maker, peace-bringer, and peace-sustainer for the most divided, splintered, and scattered groups of human beings, whose children have been rendered twisted and distorted by the splintering from one generation to another.

How on earth can this be?  Paul says: It was by the blood of the Messiah which drew those far away near (2:13);  It was by the flesh  of the Messiah that destroyed the walls that divided them from us and that killed the enmity between them and us (2:14); And it was through the cross—where the Messiah’s blood was shed and Messiah’s flesh died—that God created one new humanity from both them and us, putting hostility to death, reconciling the enemies, and making peace (2:15-16).

How on earth can this be?  Paul sums it up this way: Jesus came proclaiming good news of peace to you gentiles ethnically who were far away and to those who were near, who are Jews ethnically (2:17).  As a result, the two become one new kind of humanity (literally, “one new human,” 2:15) and both—now one and at peace—have access in one spirit (or Spirit) to the Father (2:18).  In other words, Jesus came to share the gospel which made people alive, made them one, and gave them both alike the same access into the holy presence of God.

Therefore, Paul declares, you are no longer foreigners or refugees, but you are compatriots, full citizens with the saints, in the household of God, constructed upon on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Messiah Jesus himself being the capstone.  You now belong to the household of God, a community of Jews and gentiles formed into a new expression of humanity and family, growing together into a holy temple, where God dwells in the Spirit (2:19-22).

 

Vertical AND Horizontal

We see here the whole gospel reaching horizontally as well as vertically.  When Paul says we were made alive, raised up and seated with the Messiah together (2:5-6) he was celebrating the holistic healing and renewing of humanity.  Their oneness with God in the Messiah includes oneness with others, even if they once had been the bitterest of enemies. For several reasons Paul’s account of what the gospel does has timely relevance just now.

Paul stresses that in Jesus we are made alive and given a life. Although we were dead, entirely through our own doing (our lethal trespasses and sins), God’s mercy and love breathed new life into us, raised us from all manner of dead-end living, and empowered us to live well, to do good as God originally planned from creation onward.

And Jesus accomplishes such gracious wonders in my life and yours, along with countless others, Paul insists, together.  In Jesus Messiah we are each “brought back from the dead,” and in Jesus Messiah we are inducted into the new creation, for through Messiah “God takes the two (or how many ever there may be) and makes them one new humanity.”  Just as the old “passes away” in terms of our past lives individually, so the old “passes away” in terms of the interpersonal, familial, and social relationships between people.  Just as Messiah Jesus forgives, liberates and brings flourishing to our personal lives, so the Messiah Jesus draws together a fragmented humanity, bridging the gaps, collapsing the walls, and reconciling families, clans, tribes, and people-groups.

Some make a distinction between the gospel itself (as they might put it) which addresses the problem of sin and its damage in the personal lives of people—salvation proper—and the consequences or the relational implications of “salvation” that followers of Jesus work out in relation to other people and the world more generally.  But that is not the way Paul describes “salvation.”

One of the most telling indications of this is that when Paul describes the new humanity created by the Messiah Jesus, he uses the terms and concepts we often reserve for personal salvation.  Paul says Jesus evangelized (proclaimed as good news) peace to gentiles and Jews when they were bitterly divided.  He says that it was Jesus’ blood and flesh and cross that destroyed the hostility and enmity between Jews and gentiles.  In fact, when Jesus died on the cross he demolished the walls of separation, reconciled each group to the other, and transformed them together into a new humanity.

On the strength of such “evangelization” Jesus Messiah does what no other faith, philosophy, social program, or political ideology could do: He names the brokenness of the human family, lays the flesh of his body down, offers the blood of his body up, and dies on a cross.  In so doing, he establishes peace for those near and far from God and each other.  In so doing, he takes them and us into the fellowship of God’s Beloved.  That is, he pronounced peace, and there was peace.

I cannot help but conclude:

  • That the whole gospel is both personal and social, with both horizontal and vertical reach.
  • Since Jesus proclaimed personal and communal peace, and gave his life for it, to heal and restore individuals and people groups, we should preach, teach, pray and practice “the peace.”
  • The one place on earth where people of all places, cultures and backgrounds can be one is within the community of Jesus that participates in new creation and becomes a new humanity.
  • If Jesus prioritized such peace-making, we should too—bridging the divides on the strength of the gospel.
  • If we are saved individually to a life of good works, then pursuing social and relational justice expresses at least some of the good works central to the life God intends us to live.
  • In societies like ours where individuals and groups may shape the governing structures and systems of the land, followers of Jesus will humbly recognize the value of every person and group of persons and will eagerly welcome and facilitate the contributions each may offer in every sphere and sector of society possible.
  • The church, in her ministries of word and deed, showcase the power of the whole gospel to draw people into the new creation and the new humanity Jesus brings. Her members, the People of God, live as envoys and agents of the Messiah’s peace.  They demonstrate the accomplishments of Jesus Messiah in the cosmic plan of God.  In time, all things are to be made one under the Lord Jesus.  Before the time, both the possibility and the actuality of this plan is mirrored when, in the Messiah, former enemies become friends, siblings, and one people of God.