I wrote the following article for the November edition of the New Wilmington Presbyterian Church Newsletter: What's UP?

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to you! Anneli and I are grateful to God and to you for your generosity as we serve alongside you this year. However, gratitude does not come naturally, but requires serious work of the soul. As Christians we believe we are liberated by the fact that we do not have to prove ourselves as moral, upstanding people on our own steam. Instead, we live from God’s grace into a new life of gratitude and giving. Yet we need to be reminded of this liberation again and again. It is easy to think of God’s grace as a one-time event in our life. But the fact is that we are constantly in need of it, and are constantly in need of being converted by the Spirit into gracious people. Such conversion requires an awareness and confession of our sinfulness, including our false motives for giving. Our sins should never paralyze us, for sin can never be understood properly without God’s forgiveness. We have been freed from having to rely on ourselves to be gracious, grateful, giving people. Our act of giving must simply be on the basis of forgiveness if it is to be an act truly obedient to Christ. It is difficult, no doubt, for us to hear the truth about ourselves as forgiven sinners. We cannot say this word to ourselves, even on our best days. Thus it is a blessing for brethren to dwell in unity in order to hear this Word of grace from God. For this is why we continually come together in worship at New Wilmington Presbyterian Church. This is why we move from confession of sin to assurance of forgiveness to our time of offering. May we give not out of guilt or self-promotion, but out of daily gratitude for the grace of God.

Your Brother in Christ,
Chris TerryNelson

Grace: The Foundation of our Thanks and Giving
What Counts as Depth?

Our Redemption Draws Near
A Sermon by Chris TerryNelson
Delivered at New Wilmington Presbyterian Church 11/29/09

Jeremiah 33:14-16

14 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 15 In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 16 In those days Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety. And this is the name by which it will be called: “The LORD is our righteousness.”

Luke 21:25-36

25 “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26 People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27 Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. 28 Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

29 Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; 30 as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. 31 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. 32 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. 33 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

34 “Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, 35 like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. 36 Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”

Sermon:

Advent is typically a season in the Church’s life that basically acts like a countdown to Christmas. If it is done well, it is a time where we enter into the hope of Israel for its Messiah in the midst of its hopeless situation of exile. But Advent is not just a time where we build up to Christmas. We remember the birth of Jesus and celebrate it because it is the incarnation of God into human flesh. But Advent is more than a time of remembering – it is a time of waiting. If we are not waiting for Christmas, what are we waiting for as a Church? To answer this question, we must try to listen to our lectionary text for today.
Jesus is talking, not about his first coming, but his second coming. I admit that this second coming, with Jesus riding on a cloud, is not a very comfortable image. Immediately in our minds we might hear and see only tribulation and judgment. You can see why I might not want to preach on this text. It might just be better to get back to remembering with Israel, and to remember the first coming, because “baby Jesus” is a lot easier to deal with than “riding on a cloud Jesus.”

I think the reason we feel this way is that certain false teachers and preachers on TV and in books have become the supposed experts on “the end-times” and thus preaching about the tribulation and the rapture, such that when we come across any prophecy or apocalyptic imagery in the Bible we who supposedly know better decide to leave this text to the experts and to focus on other things – things we already know. We focus on remembering our past in Scripture, and we focus on knowing our present circumstances and relationships and ourselves. And so we know the Bible stories and we know our own story really well. But there is a third-tense besides past and present, and that is future tense. It is this tense which I want to reclaim today. If Advent is a time of waiting, then it means we need to know what we’re waiting for, what we’re hoping for. As Christians, we must be oriented toward God’s future – the kingdom of God.
Jesus tells us that there will be cosmic events, in the sun, moon and stars. Whatever these events are, they terrorize the people, paralyzing them with fear, making them faint. These are catastrophes on a cosmic level, which are depicted in movies like Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012. They fill not only but also our movie screens and the headlines of our news. And when they occur, they do indeed produce pain, death and destruction. According to Jesus, heaven and earth will pass away, and the deterioration of this world has already begun. Death is written into life. It seems as though the street preachers with sandwich signs are right: The end draws near!

But is this all that Jesus is saying? No, for “the end” is not an end in itself! People are so confounded that even the powers of the heavens are shaken, so that our understanding of divinity is shaken! They will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory, greater than whatever powers, divine or elemental, we assumed to know before hand. And then Jesus tells the disciples that when they see these things happening, they are to stand up and raise their heads. Why? So they can get a good look at what is really happening. He tells us that our redemption is drawing near. There is one who is truly going to make things right, who will exercise justice and righteousness in the land. When he comes in the end, he will wipe every tear from our eyes. There will be no mourning, no more pain. He will make all things new, says Revelation 21. This is what we are waiting for. This Jesus, who is our redemption, is the object of our hope. Hope is only as good as its object.

Despite all the anxiety that these cosmic catastrophes might cause us, they are ordinary. They happen every day. They are just like the trees, which sprout leaves, letting you know that summer is arriving. Despite however anxious they make us feel, we come to rely on our natural ability as human beings to just bounce-back, to weather the storm. My friend Austin would always put up an away message on his computer when he was writing a final paper that said: “This too shall pass…” It’s comforting to know that our calamities, our pain and our suffering are only temporary. But is this what we should put our hope in – just trying to survive until the moment’s over? Then what? Like I said, for every terrible event that passes, a new one begins.

Another response would be an attitude of indifference, so that we come not to have hope at all, but to just expect the worst. A friend of mine had started a brand-new booming coffee shop that was really like Mugsies. It was doing so well, and then it was suddenly forced to shut down due to a sudden need to build more parking spaces in order to qualify by town standards as a food-service industry. I told her how disappointed I was, and she replied in a Jersey accent, “Eh, it is what it is.” Now, I’m sure we can all understand that reply. Perhaps she had already gotten past it, and had accepted it. But do you know people who walk through life’s disappointments and say, “it is what it is?” This is a common emotional defense mechanism, which keeps us from truly seeing the horror that’s around us.

Another response is what I like to call “cheap hope.” Have you ever had someone offer you this? Or perhaps you’ve offered it to someone? This is so easy to do to someone else, but it rarely works on our selves. It’s similar as saying “this too shall pass,” but seems more positive because its framed in spiritual terms: “Don’t worry, it’ll get better. Just have faith. God has a plan.” As some of you know, I worked at a psychiatric hospital this past summer. I had such a difficult time listening to the pain and trauma and depression of my patients at times that I would try to redirect the conversation to something more positive and more hopeful. While I thought I was doing it to help them, I was really doing it to help me. Cheap hope enables us to avoid the reality of the painful events surrounding us, especially in the lives of others.

And last but not least, the very defense mechanism that Jesus warns us about: “dissipation and drunkenness.” These are the therapeutic distractions - the drama and the gossip, the drinking and the shopping, the posturing and the competition – the short-term pleasures of this life which smother any truly spiritual awareness. These are helpfully combined with attitudes that try to wait out the terrible times.
In essence, all of these methods are ways of burying our heads in the sand. But this is not what Christ calls us to. You can’t read and interpret signs if your head is in the sand.

Friends, we must stand up in order to get a good look at the signs. We must accept the reality in front of us on the one hand, and meet death and destruction as they are. We must not pretend they are not there. But we as a Church are not called to be like the news, which tells us just how many horrible events are happening. Nor are we to preach that the end is near, and to somehow scare people into joining our religion. No, we are told to stand up and raise our heads, as people who point to Jesus coming in full power and glory, who preach that our redemption is drawing near, and who live a life of resurrection hope, because we already know it to be true. We take death seriously, but we take Jesus even more seriously. God indeed does have a plan, and that is to redeem the world. May we receive the eyes of faith, for only by the Spirit’s power can we ever look beyond catastrophe as a sign pointing to our redemption. He is coming on a cloud above all storm-clouds. Let us prepare ourselves this Advent season, and every season, for him. Let us hold up those who faint, those who are weary. Let us share the hope we have in Christ. Amen.

This was just too funny not to share:

Among those who have reviewed the preceding volumes, and those
who have attacked me in various ways without reading them, there
are some who have carried things to such a pitch that I contemplated
making a very unfriendly reply in this Preface. They ought to be
glad that they did not come up against me at an earlier period when
I had a greater taste for controversy. I have not yielded even to my
less avid taste because in this volume my concern is with the nature of
man as God created it good, whereas encounters of this kind (and their
objects) belong more to the side of chaos, and would therefore be
badly out of place in the Preface to this volume. Those concerned
may therefore remain unmolested in respect of their past or present
attacks. But I give them warning that in the next volume (amongst
other and better things) I shall have a few things to say about demons,
so that I may well have occasion to return to them (Church Dogmatics III/2, x)

A Biblical Rationale for CD III/4, 488-9

At the end of this section, Barth helpfully summarizes all four of his ecclesial assumptions through his citation of I Peter 2:9-10:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people, once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 

1 Peter 2:9 summarizes the first point that Barth makes – that the church is a particular people and cannot be equated “with any natural or historical segment of humanity” (488).  God chose us as “God’s own people,” and this makes the Church to be a peculiar people.  As Minear notes, there is the sense that God has created a kind of third race out of the existing peoples, when Paul describes the words of Jesus on the road to Damascus: “I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you” (Acts 26:17).   This idea of God calling people to God’s self through the act of rescue harkens back to the Shema: “I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the LORD your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians” (Exodus 6:7).  Furthermore, the image of “a holy nation” awakens the memory of God’s call on Abraham: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2-3).  It is especially important to notice that Israel was blessed by God in order to be a blessing to all nations, and this accords with Barth’s outward-focused community (his third point) that does not seek to serve itself.  Barth describes the church in his first point as those who exist “in dispersion among all nations with its special task and service” (488).  Existence in dispersion is seen 1 Pet. 2:11: “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul,” and Hebrews 11:13, which harkens back to Israel’s own history as those in exile in Egypt and in Babylon: “All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth.”
    Barth’s second assumption is that the Church is the creature of God’s Word, and not to be equated with any institutions.  All of the passages of calling attest to this fact in Scripture, of which we can only name a few.  Because the Church is called by the Living God and worships Jesus Christ, the word through whom the Heavens and Earth were made (John 1), we must avoid thinking of the Church as an institution alongside others.  Paul warned the Athenians: “The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands” (Acts 17:24).  The rules of the Christian community are similarly necessary forms and creations of the community, but these are purely for the sake of maintenance and not the cornerstone, which is “Christ Jesus himself” (Ephesians 2:20).  Paul, not once, ever made himself or his pastoral admonitions in the epistles to be the centerpiece of the Church but always witnessed to Christ.  Whereas Barth’s first point is to emphasize our antithetical being in relation to the world, his second point attests to the fact that we find true refuge in the household of God:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.  In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God (Ephesians 2:19-21).

Barth’s third point concerns the Church’s task, its agenda, which is also founded in Christ and not given by the world.  The reception of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is promised by Christ not for the sake of existential bliss, but for the sake of witness: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).  The commission given it by Jesus Christ is the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20).  This act of making disciples is done through the act of witnessing, which Barth also makes mention of.  “We speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen” (John 3:11).
    Finally, in Barth’s fourth assumption he deals with the lack of clergy-lay distinction that we see today in our churches.  As above, we see in 1 Peter 2:9 that the entire community is called “a royal priesthood” without any distinction between leaders and followers.  All are called to be witnesses.  It exists as a sinful community to be sure, for all are sinners for whom Christ died (Romans 5:8).  But this common identity in Christ’s is also common in His resurrection life, which the community bears witness to.  In the ordering of the Corinthian community, Paul attests to the body as made up of many members, all who have their specific gift: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. (1 Corinthians 12:4-6).  There are no “useful and useless” members, as Barth says (499), for “on the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect” (1 Corinthians 12:22-24). 

John Flett's new book, The Witness of God:Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community, is now available for pre-order, and will be released April 15th, 2010.

Here's the description:

The Witness of God is a constructive revision of Trinitarian missio Dei theology. In it John G. Flett argues that the neglect of mission as a theological locus has harmful consequences both for understanding the nature of God’s connection with world and the corresponding nature of the Christian community.

I wrote the following article for the October edition of the New Wilmington Presbyterian Church Newsletter: What's UP?

What Counts As Depth?
Rev. Hawkins kicked off our Stewardship Season last Sunday with a sermon on Going Deeper Into Scripture. This important theme got me thinking further about how exactly one should go about reading the Bible. In both my church bible studies and in my seminary classes the assumed approach has been to take one book at a time and listen to its particularity. For instance, I’ve been trained to ask questions of a specific biblical text – its literary, historical and theological context, its repetitive images and ideas – and then to ask the question: “What does this text have to say to me?”
This approach is important, but I find that it does not go deep enough on its own steam. In a way, this approach has monopolized our reading to the point that I’m afraid we have mistaken the forest for the trees, so to speak. It begs the question: why is this text bound with these other texts? Who put this thing called Scripture together and on what basis did they do it? Do the many texts of Scripture speak with one voice? What does this voice say?
As we commit to go deeper into Scripture as a community of faith, I believe we should begin by listening for the one thing that all these books and authors have to tell us. This one thing, which unites the prophets and apostles, is the very theme of Advent: Emmanuel, “God With Us.” As Presbyterians, we confess Scripture to be the Word of God because it points us to the One Word of God, which is Jesus Christ. To confess the Bible as the Word of God means that we read Scripture’s many voices in order to hear this Word from our Lord, and to follow after this voice which tells us that we have been redeemed.
No doubt we should lament poor biblical literacy, and seek to remember the stories and teach them to our children. But why should we do so? What makes these stories so important? I would suggest that we have taken for granted (or forgotten altogether) the grand Story of Scripture – the Story of our salvation. The Gospel, it turns out, is spoken in more than just “the gospels.” The Bible is more than the sum of its parts. To go deeper into Scripture requires not just zooming in but zooming out. As the people of God, we are called to know the stories in order that we can know the Story of God’s continual decision to be with us in Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit. It is this Story that gathers, forms, and sends us out together in New Wilmington Presbyterian Church.

Your Fellow Reader,
Chris TerryNelson