Is the Evangelical’s fascination with the End Times their undoing? Could this be the apostasy?
In this video I outline my journey with End Times theology (eschatology) and share a ‘thought experiment’ that I have been doing with my Evangelical family and friends (min 8).
Watch the video and let me know what you think.
Feel free to comment below, on Youtube, or on Facebook.
Support the page here:
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/BoSanders
Paypal: paypal.me/BoCSanders
I am very excited about something that is starting tonight and wanted to let you know in case you were interested. We have several new people joining for this study. Here are the details:
Wednesday evenings at 7pm we are going to go on an interesting journey through the earliest days of the church. It is going to be fascinating looking at diversity, inclusion, change, conflict, and spiritual development.
Join us in the Zoom Room or on FB Live Bible Study every Wednesday night from 7 – 8:15pm. Email VHUMCpastor@gmail.com with any questions.
Here is the schedule:
Date Acts
Jan 13 Intro
Jan 20 1a
Jan 27 1b
Feb 3 2a
Feb 10 2b
Feb 17 3
Feb 24 4
Mar 3 5
Mar 10 6
Mar 17 7
Mar 24 8
Mar 31 9
Apr 7 10
Apr 14 11
Apr 21 12
Apr 28 13
May 5 14
May 12 15
May 19 16
May 26 17
June 2 18
June 9 19
June 16 20
June 23 21
June 30 22
July 7 23&24
July 14 25 & 26
July 21 27 & 28
July 28 Wrap Up
There is no phrase that is more misused, or more contentious, than The Word of God. We might need to take a vacation from throwing the phrase around as a tight summary until we pull it apart and clarify its multiple uses.
The Word of God, when used properly, carries three layers of meaning:
For clarity, I will now refer to the first and third meanings as ‘the word of the Lord’ and the second as the ‘Logos made flesh’.
The pitfall that some fall into is that they take this last sense (revelatory elements within scripture) and attempt to make it concrete (or foundational). Doing so is to erroneously confuse the messenger and message, the vessel with the element, the sign for the object.
Calling the Bible the Word of God is as inaccurate as it is accurate. It is not exactly true … but it is true enough that it is tempting. The problem is that it confuses the ‘curves ahead’ road sign on the mountain road for a road-map up the mountain. It is not that they are unrelated – it is that they are not equivalent or interchangeable. The map may be accurate, and trustworthy for the journey, but it is not the landscape itself.
Knowing the map well is not the same as going on the journey.
This is the important difference between a sign and symbol.
One can see the problem in legal court and in Sunday school. It is ironic to place one’s hand on a Bible and swear ‘to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God’. The irony, for those who have actually read the Bible, is that two different New Testament passages say not to do such things. We are not to swear by things but to simply let our yes be ‘yes’ and our no, ‘no’. That should be enough. We don’t need to swear by heaven or earth or anything like God. It is an odd practice. It treats the Bible like a talisman and a fetish[1] full of superstitious power.
Similarly we see things like this in the songs we learn as children:
The B-I-B-L-E,
that’s the book for me,
I stand alone on the Word of God
The Bible is not a book. It is a collection of 66 books by different authors in different centuries representing different histories, perspectives, and opinions utilizing diverse genres of writing. This is part of why you can not say ‘the Bible says’ as the late Billy Graham was fond of doing.
When we say that ‘the word of God is living and active’ or that ‘all scripture is God breathed and useful’ we are right … but we must avoid the temptation of too quickly boiling those three into down into one interchangeable phrase lest we miss the awesome power and invitation provided by the interplay between them.
Now, if we mean that because of what we learn in the Bible, we hear the word of the Lord and believe in the Logos made flesh … that would be fantastic. If, however, we mean that the Bible is equivalent to the Word of God, then we have set our children up to be confounded, frustrated and spiritually impotent.
We have given them a road sign and told them it was the adventure. The word of the Lord propels us on a journey! To walk the way of the Logos made flesh, to know the truth of that which was in the beginning – with God and was God – and to live the life of the ages (eternal life).
To paraphrase a famous line – we are like children making mud-pies out of dirt in the back alley while there are real pies waiting in the kitchen.
Part of the problem is that we have tried to cram too much into the phrase ‘the word of God’ and asked more from it than can be expected from any sign or symbol.
The most helpful thing I have found to address this problem is called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. The quad is composed of 4 elements:
This quadrilateral of values provides an amazing framework for congregational vitality, personal faith, and communal discernment. It is probably the most helpful tool that we have as Methodists for spiritual/religious thinking and discussion in the 21st century. It is not only unique among religious perspectives but it is supremely fruitful for personal development, congregational discernment, cooperate life, as well as ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue.
There are three important issues to understand aboutthis Wesleyan quadrilateral that illuminate the four core elements themselves.
The first issue is related to Scripture. Wesley, being from an Anglican tradition, held to prima scriptura – scripture first. This position was in contrast to the more famous (and dominant) position help by many other Reformation protestants of sola scriptura – scripture alone. This distinction is significant for the slight change of emphasis and significant change in ethos that is evident in Wesleyan traditions in contrast to some other more fundamentalist approaches that descended from the Reformation and took root in the soil of North America.
The second issue relates to experience. Methodists, by adding ‘experience’ to their quadrilateral, depart from the inherited Anglican tripartite formulation of Scripture, tradition, and reason. This recognition of the importance of experience is a key distinction that transforms the formulation from merely a cerebral (intellectual) approach to inherited religious frameworks to a vibrant expectation of personal application and a clear recognition that community’s (or person’s) experience of the divine is a valid location for God’s revelation and our reflection. We recognize the importance of people’s concrete lived realities and not just a set of ideas or abstract speculations and theories. This is especially true when considering the underrepresented voices that have traditionally been marginalized or repressed in Christian history.
The third issue deals with sequence. The four elements of the ‘quad’ are not perfectly parallel. In fact, the formation works best when addressed in the sequence presented in the above question. We start with Scripture because it provides us a starting point and trajectory for the revelation of God’s work in the world. We don’t start with experience because Christian faith does not begin with us. There is a givenness to the faith that we have inherited. That is why we look to the tradition next. We don’t lead with reason either because ours is a faith tradition centered on incarnation – the embodied presence of the divine – and not merely ideas, concepts, and theories. The sequence is nearly as important as each of the four elements themselves! I would go as far as to say that the sequence is a fifth element and should be discussed (and debated) on its own merit.
My favorite way to present the quadrilateral is to temporarily remove each one and examine how the construct would be impoverished without its presence.
Scripture: Try to imagine a religion or faith that had tradition, experience, and reason. It might still hold together and provide communities and people with direction and connection. It would, however, be lacking something vital and central to the entire enterprise. Scripture provides us with an essential framework for our belief and practice. This is done through the use of narrative and example. The framing stories given to us in Scripture are vitally important both for the precedent that they provide us and for the trajectory they set in expectation for faithful (and faith-filled) continuation.
Tradition: Without tradition we would be left to try and read this antiquated text which has been translated into modern language and to attempt to import and apply it in our contemporary context without any framework or guidance. Tradition provides us an example of practices, behaviors, approaches, relationships, and applications that we can learn from and be enriched by. This is available to us in both the positive of what to do and the negative of what to avoid. Without tradition we are left with only trial and error and we are poorer without the exemplars of the faith.
Experience: A faith that is not experienced is an empty shell; a corpse with no life in it. The church was birthed in Pentecost and it is Holy Spirit power that animates her life still. This faith must be experienced and allowed to transform our incarnated (embodied and enacted) expressions of it. It is important both that we experience the things that we say we believe and that our experiences inform our beliefs through reflexive praxis.
Reason: We live at the far end of Christian history and know well the dangers of an unreasonable faith. Heresies, cults, and genocidal atrocities are the result. We learn a great deal from the legacy of these tragic consequences. We not want an unreasonable faith that hurts people, causes harm and dysfunction at the personal and societal levels, or contributes to the hatred, vitriol, and violence that plagues our world.
The ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’ was formulated as a construct in 1960’s based on historic Methodist teaching and practice.[2] It is notable that this development came about as a result of a period of time which saw the demise in societal certainties, stable cultural norms, and challenges to authority in every arena of life from family to government, from sexuality to religion. This loss of a centralized authority (or hierarchy) in an instructive milieu for the need to develop a tool-box like the quadrilateral that provides a dispersed set of anchor points for communal decision making. This tool facilitates communal discernment in a way that allows multiple elements for informing and empowering diverse perspectives and which honors people’s differing perspectives, insights, experiences, and backgrounds.
The danger of what has been called ‘Bibliolotry’ is not simply that it makes the Bible ‘a paper pope’ or ‘the 4th member of the trinity’ (as bad as those seem). The danger is in missing the way, the truth, and the life that is available to us by instead settling for a road-sign instead of an adventure.
[1] an inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.
[2] Albert C. Outler is generally credited with this formulation through a series of published works of Wesley.
The Quest for the Historical Jesus is a topic that I am both intrigued and frustrated by. You may dismiss this reaction up to my evangelical background but I am like a teenager in the midst of drama.
“They drive me nuts, I hate listening to them talk! … What did they say? Tell me everything.”
I am both attracted to and repelled by the work and findings of this movement. I am leery of their process, confused by their conclusions, while simultaneously fascinated their scholarship and insight.
Before we go any further, lets see how Justo L. González introduces it:
Historical Jesus: Often contrasted with “the Christ of faith,” the phrase “historical Jesus” is somewhat ambiguous, for sometimes it refers to those things about Jesus that can be proved through rigorous historical research, and sometimes it simply means the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. The phrase itself, “historical Jesus,” was popularized by the title of the English translation of a hook by Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910). In this book, Schweitzer reviewed a process, begun by Hermann S. Reimarus (1694-1768), which sought to discover the Jesus behind the Gospels by means of the newly developed tools of historical research. After reviewing this quest of almost two centuries, Schweitzer concluded that what each of the scholars involved had discovered was not in fact Jesus of Nazareth as he lived in the first century, but rather a modern image of Jesus, as much informed by modern bourgeois perspectives as by historical research itself.
Essential Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 1905-1916).
González goes on to explain that much of the quest was abandoned after Schweitzer’s findings but has recently reappeared in a minimalist expression (what are the bare facts that can be validated?).
Another person that I trust, Stan Grenz, is clear about this historical quest – that its proponents think Jesus:
All of this was “projected onto him by his disciples, the Gospel writers and the early church. The true historical Jesus, in contrast, preached a simple, largely ethical message as capsulized in the dictum of the “fatherhood of God” and the “brotherhood of humankind.”
Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 1089-1093).
A modern manifestation of this quest is seen in the Jesus Seminar.
I am deeply indebted to those in Historical Jesus research. I never knew any of this stuff (like Empire[1]) as an evangelical pastor. It has been both eye-opening and disorienting (not to mention the spiritual whiplash).
I have problems with so many of the conclusions reached but am at the same time grateful for the depth of engagement and sincerity of scholarship. My faith has been enriched and informed in ways I could never have imagined.
There is just something about the whole enterprise that gets under my skin and rubs me the wrong way. It is possible to be grateful for a pebble in your shoe as you journey?
Even as I write this I am thinking, “I don’t like where y’all take this… but I need to know what you know. I just want to draw different conclusions than you do.”
This, of course, is the danger of venturing outside your comfort zone.
Why does it get under my skin so much? My agitation stems from three areas:
First, the reductive move within enlightment rationale is pervasive in our time. You know that this mentality is being employed when the phrase “nothing but” is used. Emotion and feeling are explained away as nothing more synapsis in our brain. Sexuality is nothing more than hormones and chemicals. Religion is just the projection of our greatest hopes and fears onto the screen of the heavens.
Biology, psychology, sociology, religion and so many other fields are reduced down to their lowest common denominator and summarily dismissed and explained away. I object to this reductive dismissal in favor of a more complicated, nuanced, and emergent exploration of areas of concern by examining the ways that the phenomenon we see are expressions of a complex set of interactions and overlapping manifestations that are mutually impacted by each other.
There is just something suspicious about trying to get behind the text in order to distill the real Jesus away from the presentation (re-presentation) of Jesus in the text of scripture. Which brings me to the second objection.
There is an odd arrogance present in historical Jesus scholarship that dismisses or explains away what we see and hear in the gospel texts. How do we know that Jesus never really said that? I am leery of importing and imposing our modern expectations on an ancient figure. Admittedly, however, the minute I start looking at the four gospels we have in the cannon of scripture I begin to see clearly that the synoptic authors (communities) had different agendas and that John’s gospel is almost entirely novel in many of its aspects. Perhaps my hesitation is because I was raised with a harmonized presentation of the gospel where they were all made to be unified and coherent as one gospel and all differences were dismissed and explained away. I have become very clear that Luke had a very different take on Jesus than Mark – whose text he certainly had and was working off of. The result is that I begin talking of ‘Luke’s Jesus’ which is very different than the image of the cosmic Christ that John is picturing.
Third, it is undeniable that the end product of historical Jesus research often creates a Jesus that is remarkably similar to us. Apparently Jesus is highly moldable depending on which threads in the tapestry of the gospels you choose to highlight and trace. You can get an imperial Jesus, a revolutionary, a capitalist, and even a Marxist one. There is a hallmark version of Jesus who told little boys and girls to be nice to each other and sage-shaman who tapped into the supernatural realm that manifested in miracles from healings to multiplying food to commanding the forces of nature.
In conclusion, work behind the text is difficult but probably necessary. We just want to do it with some humility (especially epistemic agnosticism) and we need to be careful that we don’t make Jesus in our image which seems to dabble in a form of idolatry that should be avoided. Once those three cautions are in place, we begin to engage in a vital and furtive work of excavating and renovating a powerful and important figure of history who has been buried under layers of dirt throughout history.
[1] Beyond the Spirit of Empire – Rieger, Sung, Miguez; Arrogance of Nations: Paul and Empire ; God and Empire – Crossan , Jesus and Empire – Horsley, New Testament and Empire – Carter
Genre is by far the most important thing about the Bible that many people who claim to be ‘Bible-believing’ don’t know. Nothing matters more than genre when it comes to reading the Bible.
According to Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 593-595).
“Genre: A term that refers to different types or varieties of literature or media. In the interpretation of texts, particularly the Bible, most exegetes agree that identifying the genre of the text to be interpreted is crucial and that the text must be understood in light of the common conventions that typified that genre at the time of its writing. Thus, poetry is not to be interpreted in the same manner as historical narrative, nor is prophecy properly read in the same manner as an epistle (letter).”
Simply stated, one must read a poem differently than history, prophecy differently than a gospel, a letter (epistle) differently than apocalyptic literature.
When people claim, “the Bible says …” it can be a bit of a misnomer. That would be like say ‘the library says’, or even worse, saying ‘according to the internet’.
The Bible is not one book per se but a collection of books. These 66 books were written at different times over a 600 year period by dozens of different men and women.
This is why one cannot say “The Bible says X” with any real authority.
It would be better to say “In Romans, Paul says …” or, better yet, “The epistle to the Romans says … ”.
Saying “the Bible says” is like saying “the Kindle says”.
If you said, “according to the Kindle”, one would ask ‘in which book?’ and ‘who was the author?’
We need to do the same with the Bible.
Think about it this way:
Imagine someone taking a newspaper and reading it without distinguishing between the different types of writing. They would read the weather forecast, the police report, the opinion column, and the sports section, and the comics all the same way.
Most of us know to read the different parts of the newspaper in different ways. You take the weather forecast as a prediction based on best data, the political opinions and rantings as such, the police report as an official (if not censored) story, and the comics section as satire. It is almost second nature. You would not claim that a little boy named Calvin was literally pushed by a tiger named Hobbes (as if it were in the police report) or that either the weather forecast is 100% true or else the whole newspaper cannot be trusted.
All of this is to say that ‘genre’ is an important element of any Biblical reading and is essential to any discussion regarding faith and religion in the 21st Century.
The phase “the Bible says”, is not sufficient and is not helpful in the 21st Century when readers need to be aware of and account for the nuances and differences within the Biblical text.
The books of the Bible need to be read according to the genre that they were written in.
It is by attending to the diversity of the writing styles that we hear the truth contained in them – and Christians, beyond anything else, should be lovers of the truth – wherever that truth leads.
Parables are perhaps the most clear example of this is all of scripture. Parables are tricky: parables are stories told in code in order to come in under the radar of the listener in order to ask them to question the assumptions they came in with. Parables interrogate the established order and the expectations of the listener.
Many of us have been taught to read parables as allegory where each character represents a truth or is a stand in for a bigger idea (like ‘god’ or ‘Israel’). This way of reading leads to some horrible interpretations that present god as vicious, angry, or vengeful landowner or ruler or foreman. It also leads to some odd applications that can actually be counter to the overall theme of the gospels.
A popular way of talking about parables is that they are ‘an earthly story with heavenly meaning’ but Ched Myers says that they are actually ‘earthy stories with heavy meaning’. Remember, a biblical prophet is not somebody who tells the future as much as somebody who tells the truth in creative ways (think of Amos or Hosea). In this way, Jesus by employing parables, in utilizing a prophetic voice to punch holes in the status quo and to interrogate, undermine, and subvert the assumed ‘way things are’ for his audience.
In the Gospel of Luke this often has two results:
Take Luke 16 for instance. In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in the afterlife it is noteworthy that Jesus gives the name to this beggar who would have been I nobody but Jesus does not given name to the rich man who everyone in town would’ve known his name. Jesus is not giving us a map of the afterlife he is using that as a stage to talk about god’s involvement in the drama of human life now. Jesus is telling us what God values in this life. If you were to think that Jesus is giving us the architecture of the afterlife then you would literally think that people in heaven can not only see the people being tormented in hell but that they can converse back and forth. This is not the point of the parable.
Parables are not allegory. When you read parables as allegory assigning each character in the story a corresponding person in real life, you often get the point of the parable 100% incorrect. If each time Jesus talks about someone with power and status, like a landowner, you assume that is the god character in the story then the Gospel of Luke really makes God into a monstrous, violent, and conflicted character. If however, you read the story that God is with the servants instead of the landowner, who is probably Rome in coded language, then Jesus’ parables read entirely inverted from the way most of us have been taught to interpret them.
Which brings up the next point.
We must read the Bible more slowly: if you come in thinking that you already know that point that the text is making, you can easily miss the actual thing that is being said.
In Luke 12: 38-40 we begin to see that Jesus’ teaching reads very differently if you are riding high on the hog then if you are on the underside of the beast (in this case Empire). If you have possessions like many of us in America do, the idea of a thief coming in the night causes worry and anxiety. In the context of the first century Jewish occupation by the Romans the thief coming in the night was the in breaking of the kingdom of God.
Earlier in Luke chapter 11 Jesus had talked about the need to bind a strong man if you’re going to ransack his house. And this was probably and allusion to Roman rule and Caesar would be the strong man.
Take Luke 12
4 “I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. 5 But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! 6 Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. 7 But even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.
When Jesus talks about the one it can be tempting to think he’s talking about God. But it is not God who after he is killed you has the authority to cast you into hell! That is Caesar. Jesus is speaking in code and this should probably be understood as part of the literature of the oppressed. You speak in code when you are not safe just say what you really think. We know that the One in verse 5 (who throws people in hell) is not God because in verse six Jesus name’s God as the one who care about every sparrow.
Jesus often had to speak in code, almost with a wink to his listener, and it’s easy to imagine a Roman century and standing just offscreen keeping an eye on the group that was listening to Jesus. There is so much more that could be said on this topic but I think it would benefit you greatly when you read a parable to ask if the person in power–whether that is a land owner, strongman, the one, etc. – is more likely Cesar character or God. If you make every powerful person in a parable a god character you end up creating a monstrous, even demonic, two-faced and violent character.
If you see ‘the one’ and automatically think ‘God’ you get the exact 100% wrong lesson out of this text. Jesus names god in verse 6 as one who cares about each one. Why would he not have name ‘him’ in verse 5? Because the ‘him’ in verse 5 is not god – it is a contrast to the caring God.
Conclusion:
We can do this same careful kind of reading for the genres of history, epic tales, poetry, proverbs, drama (such as Job and Jonah), prophetic writings, apocalyptic, and epistles. By honoring the genre that a work is written in and by reading slowly without assuming that we already understand the point ahead of time, we allow the text to speak in its own voice and actually negate some of the odder, uglier, and more confusing parts of the Bible that people often find so troubling and distasteful.
I could give you 50 examples of how this is true. One of my favorites is in Hebrews 9:22 (without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins) which actually is saying the exact opposite thing of the point that it is frequently quoted to mean. We could do this for the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac or the book of Revelation or more than 80% of the famous passages of scripture that we read outside of their genre.
Genre really matters when it comes to reading the Bible. Which leads perfectly into our next chapter on interpreting texts: H is for Hermeneutics.
The Gospel of Luke was a great read. Lessons from Luke: Recap
Read Slowly: there is a temptation to read the Bible quickly when you Believe that you already know the story. When you already have the plot figured out you tend to skip over some important details that actually significantly change the trajectory of the narrative.
Luke is a Quilter: the use over parallel layout of the Gospels was really helpful to see both material that Luke included that was not found in either Mark or Matthew, and was equally eye-opening to see how Luke stitched familiar stories together rearranging them and pairing them in the ways that contrasted or juxtaposed the different elements of the story.
Parables Are Tricky: parables are stories told in code in order to come in under the radar of the listener in order to ask them to question the assumptions they came in with. Parables interrogate the established order and the expectations of the listener. In the Gospel of Luke this often has to results:
Take Luke 16 for instance. In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in the afterlife it is noteworthy that Jesus gives the name to this beggar who would have been I nobody but Jesus does not given name to the rich man who everyone in town would’ve known his name. Jesus is not giving us a map of the afterlife he is using that as a stage to talk about god’s involvement in the drama of human life now. Jesus is telling us what God values in this life.
Parables are not allegory. When you read parables as allegory assigning each character in the story a corresponding person in real life, you often get the point of the parable 100% incorrect. If each time Jesus talks about someone with Power and status, like a landowner, you assume that is the god character in the story then the Gospel of Luke really makes God into a monstrous, violent, and conflicted character. If however, you read the story that God is with the servants instead of the landowner, who is probably Rome in coded language, then Jesus is parable read in entirely inverted from the way most of us have been taught to interpret them.
Which brings up the next point.
Jesus Winks: In Luke 12: 38-40 we begin to see that Jesus’ teaching reads very differently if you are riding high on the hog then if you are on the underside of the beast (in this case Empire). If you have possessions like many of us in America do, the idea of a thief coming in the night causes worry and anxiety. In the context of the first century Jewish occupation by the Romans the thief coming in the night was the in breaking of the kingdom of God.
Earlier in Luke chapter 11 Jesus had talked about the need to bind a strong man if you’re going to ransack his house. And this was probably and allusion to Roman rule and Cesar would be the strong man.
Take Luke 12
4 “I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. 5 But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority[a] to cast into hell.[b] Yes, I tell you, fear him! 6 Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. 7 But even the hairs of your head are all counted. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.
When Jesus talks about the one it can be tempting to think he’s talking about God. But it is not God who after he is killed you has the authority to cast you into hell! That is Caesar. Jesus is speaking in code and this should probably be understood as part of the literature of the oppressed. You speak in code when you are not safe just say what you really think. We know that the One in verse 5 (who throws people in hell) is not God because in verse six Jesus name’s God as the one who care about every sparrow.
Jesus often had to speak in code, almost with a wink to his listener, and it’s easy to imagine a Roman century and standing just offscreen keeping an eye on the group that was listening to Jesus. There is so much more that could be said on this topic but I think it would benefit you greatly when you read a parable to ask if the person in power–whether that is a land owner, strongman, the one, etc. – is more likely Cesar character or God. If you make every powerful person in a parable a god character you end up creating a monstrous, even demonic, two-faced and violent character.
Bread Is Important: Luke uses more stories about meals and food, specifically bread, then the rest of the Gospels. It comes up all the time. It can be used as an object lesson. It often involves Women being central to the story. Food plays an important part in the Gospel of Luke.
In fact, if you were to ask me what is the big point, the takeaway, from the Gospel of Luke I would say that it is found at the end of gospel in chapter 24.
35 And they told about the things that had happened on the road, and how He was known to them in the breaking of bread.
It may surprise you, it’s certainly surprised me, that the major point of Luke’s Gospel maybe that Christ is known in the breaking of bread. I Been thinking about this a lot in the past month. It was ironic to me that we were not able to celebrate our normal tradition of having a meal together after we wrap up Reading a book of the Bible. In the absence of eating meals together because of social distancing and quarantine, it has become clear to me how often Christ is reveled in the breaking of Bread.
Jordan Peterson is a controversial figure. I have written about him before.
I found this fascinating YouTube clip where he is at Liberty University (another controversial topic) and he is responding to a question about the resurrection of Christ.
I loved how he wrestled with it. Watch this clip and listen to how he addresses it through the lens of mystery, metaphysics, and symbolism.
Of course Falwell’s smug jest at the end wreaks of certainty – but that is all the more contrast to what Peterson had just said.
Two years ago, Easter was on April 1st and I preached a message called ‘Easter Fools’ and I said:
It is not about physics. It is not about verification of historical accounts. That is the wrong kind of foolish.
Easter fools are people who live into hope, possibility, justice, imagination, and second chances.
This is the fascinating and troubling thing to me. We live in an either/or world. Nearly every topic gets broken down into ‘this or that’ categories. [examples]
Easter has been affected too. Every year I hear people (and especially preachers) talk about a physical vs. a spiritual resurrection. Did Jesus’ corpse get resuscitated or did his spirit just manifest which is why the disciples thought he was gardener or a pilgrim and it took a while to recognize him and figure out who he was.
The truth is that both of these positions are to miss the point!!! The reality is that neither is a good option. The problem is that one starts with science and then reads that back onto the narrative – the other starts with history and the imposes that on the text.
But if you actually look at the gospel accounts of Easter, you get a very different picture. The better option might be a third way called “glorified”.
Listen to the Peterson clip and let me know what you think.
a 6 minute sermon about Palm Sunday – a very dangerous story.
Transcript below the video. I talk about the financial, military, political, and religious layers of the narrative. It is a well known script that we rehearse every year.
If I were to tell you a story about a little girl named Liberty and the story was set in Philadelphia in 1776, you would probably have a head start on what was going on in the story.
Or similarly, if I told you a story about a police officer in Ferguson Missouri in 2014 you might have a clue as to what that story was going to be about.
Today we are celebrating Palm Sunday and it is a story that has layers and layers of the buried meaning that we have to dig through as a 21st-century audience if we want to uncover.
Palm Sunday is doubly distracting because there’s not only is there a cute little colt that Jesus rides in on but there are actual children waving palm fronds. Don’t be deceived however–this story is saturated with dangerous ingredients.
Jesus rides in to town and makes his triumphal entry in what appears to be an unassuming and non- threatening sort of a way. But just keep in mind, there had to be more going on in the story then first appears because he will not make it out of this week alive. Whatever he was up to was perceived by the authorities to be such a threat that he would be terminated before the week’s end.
So what exactly what’s going on that was so threatening and dangerous? I just want to pull on three threads that are woven into the fabric of the story for our time together this morning.
The first thing we need to do is look at what was going on and the other side of town. It is not difficult to imagine the profound contrast of the Roman appointed ruler riding in to town on an actual stallion with actual soldiers in an actual military parade complete with trumpets.
Jesus was no military general and that was no war-horse with battle armor. So what we call the triumphal entry was really more of a low budget pantomime or charade. It would have looked more like a satire or lampoon than an actual threat.
But let’s keep digging.
What were those palm leaves about anyway? Well it turns out that they were a very subversive dog-whistle of sorts that harkened back to it time when the Jewish people were not occupied by a military oppressor and actually had their own currency. Archaeologists and Biblical scholars pointer coins that had Palm fronds on them as a sign of independence and liberation.
Let’s be honest, compared to the swords of the Roman centurions, those palm branches were no threat to anyone. Especially in the hands of little children you wouldn’t think that they were to be feared. But here is the thing: they were a reminder of a time when the people were free and the nation was sovereign. These palm branches we’re not just subversive but a secret-song to incite revolt. Even in the hands of little children they were full of violence.
It is in to this powder-keg that Jesus, named for his ancestor Joshua whose name means ‘salvation’, comes riding into town with the crowds shouting, ”Hosanna – Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”. This can easily be heard as a cry for liberation, a freedom song that people who have been under the heavy boot of military occupation and both political and religious oppression sing when they are longing to throw off the yoke of their oppressor.
So we have talked about an economic layer with the coins, the military layer with the swords in contrast to the palm branches, a political layer, and even a historical layer with his Jewish ancestry and even illusions to a messianic expectation of deliverance, salvation, and liberation.
What is the religious layer?
When Jesus rides in, what he offers to ushers in is not just a new kingdom to replace the old Kingdom. It’s not a simple switch from Caesar’s reign to God’s reign. What Jesus is ushering in is an invitation to an entirely different way of being in the world. This is the tragic thing that gets lost in the shifting sands of history.
Jesus’ is vision of the kingdom of heaven (or the kingdom of God) isn’t a Caesar style Kingdom or empire at all! It is a counter kingdom, and un-kingdom, an upside down inside out insurrection of the established order and the status quo. It’s not a revolution or a military coup just so that Jesus can sit on Caesar’s throne–it is instead a vision of an entirely different way of relating to the divine order, your neighbor, and your enemy alike.
Whether the rulers knew it or even the people lining the parade route that day knew it – what road into town that day was of vision of a different way of being in the world: call it a revolution of love, a divine economy, or the kin-dom where all of God’s children can flourish and prosper without fear.
This is the sub-plot of our yearly drama. Every year on this Sunday we rehearse the pageantry of the palms and we have our children process as we enact the narrative of the Prince of Peace humbling riding in on an unassuming donkey.
That is all fun. Just don’t be under the impression that it is tame, or cute, or non-threatening. Embedded in the narrative is a menacing sub-plot. It is an invitation for you and I to imagine the world being a different way. It is chance for us to rehearse a different way of being in the world.
Underneath the well-rehearsed script of the familiar play is imbedded a subversive invitation to wake from our slumber, break out of our routine, and begin to participate in the inbreaking kin-dom of connection and care that undermines the assumed and entrenched ruts of this world in order to rupture the concrete reality of our daily existence.
We are in an unprecedented time in our society. We are caught up in a global pause of social isolation.
Our question for this Palm Sunday is this: when we hit the ‘play’ button again, how do we want things to be different? Can we imagine the world a different way? Maybe ‘getting things back to normal’ isn’t our only option. Maybe there is a different way of being in the world.
Reading the Bible through a progressive lens is so much fun! I recorded a video about what we have been learning by reading through the Gospel of Mark.
Join us this Wednesday at 7pm for a lively (and irreverent) time of reading the gospel.
It is not your average Bible study! Join the zoom here: https://zoom.us/j/585770550
The 4 layers of our ‘surplus of meaning’ and 3 surprises from the Gospel of Luke.
We ask the text 4 Layers of Questions:
Three themes that emerged in Luke:
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 
