Blue Christmas: The Cure for Christmas Melancholy

I imagine everyone has something that epitomizes their Christmas experience. It’s often a song or a movie. For me, it’s that moment in A Charlie Brown Christmas when Linus and Charlie Brown are discussing the meaning of Christmas. “Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy,” Charlie Brown complains. “I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel. I just don’t understand Christmas, I guess.” A little later, after Charlie Brown selects a scrawny little Christmas tree that drops its needles for the pageant, he laments, “Everything I do turns into a disaster. I guess I don’t really know what Christmas is all about.”

I first saw A Charlie Brown Christmas on television in 1965, when it aired on CBS. I was twelve years old at the time, and it captivated me. I loved everything about it: the music, the animation, the storyline. But most of all, I loved its honesty, because even at that young age, I had already noticed a connection between Christmas and melancholia.

A famous song, performed by just about every musical artist who has ever released a holiday album, describes Christmas as “the most wonderful time of the year” and the “hap-happiest season of all.” But many people have a different experience. Theirs is more like Charlie Brown’s. Like him, they wonder why they don’t feel the way they are supposed to feel. Their Christmas experience is tinged with longing and sadness, and they blame themselves. Or the universe. Or maybe God.

I notice it in myself, and I’ve concluded that Charlie Brown is asking the wrong question. Instead of wondering why we don’t feel the way we are supposed to feel, we ought to ask what it is about Christmas that causes us to expect to feel something remarkable to begin with. The answer to this question is more complex than you might expect. It’s not just one thing—this feeling of seasonal melancholia springs from multiple sources.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

One reason our feelings tend to fall short is that we expect Christmas to match our memory. This expectation is infused with nostalgia. I don’t think that it is an accident that the first spirit that visits Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol comes to remind him of his past:

“Who and what are you?” Scrooge demanded. “I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.” “Long Past?” inquired Scrooge observant of its dwarfish stature. “No. Your past.”[1]

This is Dickens at his best, functioning as the master psychologist. He understands that what we are is the sum of what we have been. This does not mean that we cannot change. The possibility of change is the promise that lies at the heart of his story. But the fact that the first Spirit to appear to Scrooge is the ghost of his past is a signal that change is unlikely to occur before we have understood the forces that have shaped us.

Take a careful look at your Christmas tree, and you will find that it probably says as much about your past as it does Christmas. If your tree is like mine, it is as layered as an archeological dig. Most of us aren’t just celebrating the arrival of a new holiday; we are celebrating the past. What is more, it isn’t some biblical past that moves us but our own. As Christmas draws near, the collective weight of every Christmas we have ever known bears down upon us like a demanding parent with impossible expectations. We aren’t merely trying to celebrate something; our aim is to recreate.

This is a vain hope for two reasons. First, because the conditions that made Christmas Past have dissipated. Time has moved on. The children have grown. People have moved. Some have died. Even the same ingredients, after we have measured them with meticulous accuracy, take on a slightly different flavor. Try as you might, you will only be able to reproduce an echo of what you think you remember.

All these things point to the second reason for our failure. The Christmas you recall is probably not the one you experienced. What you are feeling is nostalgia, not memory. The term comes from a compound word formed by joining the Greek noun meaning “return” with the noun meaning “pain”. In other words, to the ancient mind, nostalgia is the pain of longing to return. It is an acute case of homesickness.

Unfortunately, the vision of the past that nostalgia provides is one that has been enhanced by distance. It is a picture of our experience with the sharp edges worn down by time and forgetfulness. I am not exactly saying that it is a lie. But it is not exactly the truth either. It is a softer version. As if this version of our reality had been reproduced by that artist who called himself the “painter of light.” I don’t mean Rembrandt or Turner.

Days of Future Past

What we experience as a longing for our past actually has to do with the future. It is what C. S. Lewis has called, in The Weight of Glory, a “desire for our own far off country” and “a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience.”[2] As James K. A. Smith similarly puts it, “We are always on the way; the Christian life is a ‘refugee spirituality,’ because we are longing for a home we’ve never been to.”[3]

As Lewis and Smith describe nostalgia, the feeling is not quite a distortion. It is more of an anticipation of the life to come. We experience the ache of nostalgia as a kind of pleasant grief, the sorrow for a bygone age that will never return. But what if it is the opposite? Is it possible that this longing springs from a desire for what is yet to come? If this is the case, then our orientation is all wrong. Instead of looking backward and trying to recreate the past, the purpose of this ache is to help us face forward. It was the disposition of the patriarchs, who the writer of Hebrews says were “still living by faith when they died.” According to Hebrews 11:13: “They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.”

During the holiday season, we feel obliged to be happy. I am not talking about the kind of happiness one sometimes feels in the ordinary course of events. What I am describing is more extreme. It is a sense that it is our Christian duty to have a transcendent experience at Christmas. When I became a serious follower of Jesus shortly after I turned 19, I can recall wondering how that would change my experience of Christmas. The honest answer was that it diminished it to some degree. Learning the truth about the Nativity of Christ stripped Christmas of its gaudier aspects. The things I loved most about the holiday season had nothing at all to do with the event it is supposed to celebrate.

The Myth of Christmas Magic

Christmas cards, carols, and just about every holiday movie we have ever seen have told us that the Christmas season is supposed to be magical and transforming. Scripture does, in fact, portray the Nativity and the incarnation of Christ as something miraculous and transformative. The birth of Christ was a singular event with cosmic significance, not only for “all the people,” but for creation itself. Yet describing it as magical is something quite different.

But the effects of Christ’s Nativity are not linked to a particular season, if by “season” we mean a specific month of the year. The idea of sacred time does not originate with the church. It was an essential part of the religious landscape of the Old Testament from which the gospel sprang. Yet the arrival of Christ so altered that landscape that the apostle Paul would later call those things: “a shadow of the things that were to come” and tell the Colossians their reality is found in Christ (Col. 2:17). The Nativity was a sacred event. Christmas, as we know and celebrate it–not so much.

Christmas as a season does not have the power to suspend the regular order (or disorder) of the fallen world. It does not possess magical powers to make all things whole. We see the evidence of this in the Scriptural accounts of Christ’s birth. Miraculous events do take place. There are signs and wonders. But, simultaneously with these remarkable events, we see that all the ordinary functions of the world, along with its failings, are also in full view in the Nativity story. Taxes must be paid. Governments rule inequitably. Joseph works away at his carpentry. The inn is so full that there is no room. The religious leaders who ought to know what has happened are puzzled. The world is indeed invested, but not with magic. It is visited by God, who has come in the form of a child. Creation itself will eventually be remade as a result, but that has not yet happened. Then, as now, “everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation” (2 Pet. 3:4).

The Great Reversal

It may sound as if my message is the gospel of “lower your expectations.” But what I have to say is really the opposite. The great hope of Christmas is that at the incarnation, God entered the broken world in human form. As a result of this act, a series of events was put into motion that have fundamentally changed us and which will remake the world. The miracle of this event was not only that God became flesh but that he also subjected himself to the brokenness of the world he entered. Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to death” (Phil. 2:8). This is what C. S. Lewis calls “the deeper magic” in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

It is a kind of unraveling and drawing in. The curse of sin is reversed and for the believer, its consequences are drawn into the sphere of grace. To quote from The Great Divorce, another work by C. S. Lewis, it is what he calls the “retrospective” power of redemption. Lewis writes: “The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven; the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,” and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”[4]

Of course, when Lewis speaks of “the good man,” he is not talking about goodness as an achievement. This is a goodness that comes to us as a gift. The theological words for this are grace and redemption. They are words that describe the great reversal that the preacher Phillips Brooks writes about in the carol O Little Town of Bethlehem:

O holy Child of Bethlehem,
descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin, and enter in,
be born in us today.

I think we sometimes misunderstand the preacher’s intent with these words. It is not Christ who is born in us. It is we who are born in Christ. To use the language of Jesus himself, we are “born again” (John 3:3, 7; See 1 Pet. 1:27). The Nativity of Christ was a singular and unrepeatable event. It may be reenacted in the Christmas pageant each season, but it can never be repeated. The new life that comes to us as a result of that act of God is something else. It is our repeated experience, but it has no season. The life we celebrate at Christmas is something that we draw upon every day and which is reproduced in others through the preaching of the gospel.

The cure for Christmas melancholia is not, as another song tells us, that we “need a little Christmas right now.” Nor is it necessarily Puritan austerity or renunciation of all observance of Christmas. The cure, strange as it may seem, is good theology. We should not expect from Christmas what Christ alone can supply. It is not a sin to look back, but we can become trapped there.

We need not fear Christmas melancholy. I think we ought to view it as a kind of signpost that points away from that which is not God and toward a life yet to come. It says, “This, not that,” and “Then, not now.” It ought to prompt us to say, “Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.”

[1] Charles Dickens, The Christmas Books, Vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1982), 69.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 1976), 29-30.

[3] James K. A. Smith, Jennifer Abe, John Swinton, Brandon Rickabaugh, and Michael Vincient Di Fuccia, “How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now” Journal of Spiritual Formation & Soul Care 16, no. 1 (2023): 90.

[4] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: HarperOne, 1980), 69.

What is Heaven Like? Discovering the Undiscovered Country

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What happens when we die? When my oldest son, Drew, was just a toddler, we had the conversation that parents dread. No, not that conversation. The other one. Something had happened that prompted him to ask us about death. We tried to answer as gently as possible, in terms a small child could understand. We shared the good news of the gospel with him. Along with it, we talked about the hope of heaven. We told him that if he died, he would be with Jesus. But his reaction was not what we expected. Rather than being reassured, he burst into tears. He wailed in sorrow. “Where will you be?” he asked. “Who will take care of me?” It was sweet, in a way. It was also a little unnerving because I could identify with his anxiety.

Much of what the Bible has to say about what heaven is like seems ambiguous. It’s almost as if Scripture speaks in code about this subject. It is, at least, expressing itself by way of images that are both strange and familiar simultaneously. We take comfort from the sight of things we know, but their juxtaposition with the strange is often unsettling. Saints cry out from under the altar. There are rivers and trees, or at least one river and one tree. The old heaven and earth pass away and are replaced by the new.

Shakespeare called death “the undiscovered country.” More precisely, Shakespeare’s Hamlet describes death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveler returns . . .” Most who travel to the undiscovered country do not come back, which is Hamlet’s point. But there have been some, like Samuel, Moses, Elijah, and Lazarus, to name a few. However, they don’t tell us what happens after death. Then, of course, there is Jesus, the one that Revelation 1:5 calls “the firstborn from the dead.” Yet, even he did not describe that place to us in the kind of detail that most of us would prefer.

In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet seems to speak more of ordinary experience than these extraordinary cases. He has just seen a ghost, and he questions his senses. Or perhaps it is that he is pondering what might lie beyond the senses. Hamlet goes on to assert, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” This is certainly true when it comes to heavenly reality.

On the one hand, the apostle Paul quotes Isaiah 64:4 when he describes the life to come and speaks of “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived,” calling them “the things God has prepared for those who love him.” Then, with his next breath, he claims, “these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit” (1 Cor. 2:9–10). What things does Paul mean? They are what the apostle elsewhere characterizes as “things above,” which he also urges us to set our hearts on, seek, and set our minds upon (Col. 3:1–2).

It’s hard to think about things we don’t know. It’s even harder to set our hearts on something that seems to be at odds with everything we have always known and experienced. This is one of the problems we face when it comes to thinking about heaven. My son couldn’t imagine being happy in a world without the people he already knew who loved and cared for him, even if it was God who was taking their place. He knew his mother. He did not know God, at least not in the same way.

“Heaven is rhetorically anti-world,” Baylor University professor of theological ethics Jonathan Tran has observed. “Whatever we don’t like about this world, heaven promises the opposite.”[1] But our difficulty isn’t just that we have been taught to expect the opposite of all we hate about the present world in the life to come. It’s the impression we have that heaven stands against all that we know and love. While this is certainly true when it comes to sin, we have come to believe that it is also true of the more concrete aspects of earthly life that we know. To many, heaven is an amorphous realm of spirits, clouds, and gossamer wings. It is too indistinct to describe and too immaterial to look forward to.

Mark Twain, a religious skeptic, lampooned the popular stereotype of heavenly bliss by characterizing it as a place where the newly arrived expect to be fitted out with a harp, a halo, a wreath, and a hymnbook. If, as Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 15:50, flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, why does the Christian message place so much emphasis on bodily resurrection?

The heaven of Scripture is not a fantasy or a philosophy. Neither is it merely a projection of our personality, style, and individual tastes into eternity. Heaven is not an invention of the church meant to serve as the carrot that motivates its members to toe the line on this side of death. It is a real location where an embodied and resurrected Christ is seated at the right hand of God (Col. 3:1). Heaven is also an order or rule that intrudes into our earthly experience even now and will one day control it entirely.

The landscape of the undiscovered country is not as alien as we thought. Nor do we have to wait until we pass through the gates of death to catch a glimpse of its powers. In fact, if we take Scripture at its word, all those who are in Christ are already in residence there in some mysterious sense. At the same time, “we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells” (2 Pet. 3:11). What is more, those same passages that speak of the believer’s dual residency on earth and in heaven, also promise that we have begun to experience the righteousness that is characteristic of the new heaven and earth even now.

The discomfort that some Christians feel when speculating about what is to come is often not due to uncertainty about their ultimate destination but rather anxiety about what that transition will be like. After Adam’s fall, the Lord warned that the first stage of life’s journey would be marked by discomfort. God told the woman, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children” (Gen. 3:16). It is the hope of new life that enables those who suffer such pain to bear with it.

Although the Lord doesn’t mention it there, subsequent human experience showed that the final stage of life’s journey would also often be accompanied by discomfort. Perhaps Paul is alluding to this when he writes about bodily resurrection and admits that “while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Cor. 5:7). The apostle goes on to say that God has “fashioned us for this very purpose” (v. 8). God designed us for bodily life. That is what the future holds for us. One of the first confessions of faith recorded in Scripture, at least in terms of chronology, was that of Job, who declared:

“I know that my redeemerlives,
    and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
    yetin my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
    with my own eyes—I, and not another.
    How my heart yearns within me!” (Job 19:25–27)

Shakespeare was right. The country for which we yearn is still undiscovered by us. But it is not as unfamiliar as we thought. There is far more to the Christian’s heavenly hope than harps, halos, and hymnals. In fact, none of these seems to figure in it at all. The hope of the Christian is the hope of things above. That same hope is also the secret to holy living in the here and now. We are going there. But the real secret is that we have already arrived.

To learn more about John Koessler’s new book, On Things Above: The Earthly Importance of Heavenly Reality, watch the video below or click here.

[1] Jonathan Tran, “Looking to Heaven Without Looking Past Earth,” The Christian Century, September 2022, 36.

Entertaining the Strange: Conversation as an Act of Hospitality

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During this past presidential election, Joe Rogan attempted to sit down with Kamala Harris for an interview. When they were unable to come to terms, the host of the Joe Rogan Experience, often described as the world’s most successful podcaster, expressed disappointment. “I hope she does,” Rogan said. “I will talk to her like a human being. I would try to have a conversation with her.”

Whatever you may think of Rogan, he was correct in describing conversation as the art of talking to someone like a human being. Other creatures can communicate. Dogs bark. Cats yowl. Even bees dance to signal to other bees where they can find food. But humans converse. James Como has called the ability to have a conversation “the most concrete, palpable, frequent and important act of human being.”[1]

More Than Messaging

There is more to conversation than talk. The word converse comes from a Latin verb that means to dwell or keep company with. We can still find a vestige of this sense in the old King James Version, which uses the term conversation to translate a Greek word that means “way of life” (cf. Gal. 1:13). But in our day, conversation usually refers to casual communication with someone. Still, it is not the atmosphere, or what some might describe as a “chill vibe,” that transforms ordinary speech into conversation. To converse is to turn toward someone. It is to open the door and invite others to share their thoughts with us. When we converse, we entertain ideas that we might not otherwise consider. They may be notions that seem strange to us, opposed to our own, and perhaps even offensive.

Conversation is an act of hospitality. In modern parlance, hospitality is a particular form of socializing. If you invite a friend over to your house for dinner, you are showing them hospitality. Its industrial sense adds another dimension. If you work in a hotel or a motel, or even if you rent your house out to weekenders for vacation, you are a part of the hospitality industry. All of these ideas have echoes of the ancient exercise of hospitality. But in the ancient world, hospitality was something much more serious.

Three Pillars of Hospitality

Traditionally, hospitality was something extended to an outsider. By it, one offered the comfort, safety, and privileges of family to someone who was not normally a part of the household. The ancient practice of hospitality was grounded on three foundational assumptions:

In order to be genuine hospitality, that which was granted must be the actual possession of the one who offers it. This idea is reflected in the adjective Philos, the first half of φιλόξενος (philoxenos), the Greek word for hospitality. As Mary Scott explains, “Philos is used of people or things which belong to one, and with which one should be able to feel relaxed in that one is not in competition with them; so that philon is used of things or actions which are not alien, which are natural to one’s character or mood at the time.”[2] Hospitality happens when we temporarily extend the boundaries of what is ours by inviting an outsider (literally a stranger) into our circle and treating them as if they were friends or family.

Even though hospitality was widely regarded as a cultural obligation, the one to whom it was extended did not have an inherent right to what they received. The ancients did not think of hospitality as the utopian practice of an egalitarian world where everyone was free to use the possessions of another. Nor was their vision that of a possessionless society. It was instead the opposite. The virtuousness of hospitality arose from an awareness that we live in a competitive and often hostile world where others might attempt to take what is ours. But this virtue is also energized by the potential for reciprocal benefit. As Mary Scott observes further, “The relationship of xenia, hospitality or guest-friendship, is basically self-seeking.”[3] One of its aims was to create a circle of cooperative relationships. As Scott explains, “To travel in his own country and in other countries, the agathos needs a network of xenoi, guest-friends, who will provide him with the basic necessities of life.”[4] For the early church, hospitality was a means of spreading the gospel and disseminating Christian doctrine (1 Cor. 16:3; 2 Cor. 3:1).

Hospitality established boundaries that enabled those who would otherwise be competitors and enemies to relate to one another as if they were friends. These did not automatically make their differences (or even their mutual antipathy) disappear. Hospitality is a social convention, not an emotion. It imposes obligations and maintains boundaries, which result in a temporary cessation of hostilities between parties that might otherwise relate to each other as enemies. The exercise of hospitality created a temporary social structure that allowed those with strong differences to interact and perhaps even begin to understand one another better. For the ancients, hospitality was a unique category of friendship that assigned the status of ξένος to both. Consequently, in ancient Greek, the word could describe either the guest or the host since they were both strangers to one another.

Strange Conversations

All three assumptions have parallels in the practice of conversation. For example, conversation involves a kind of extension of one’s intellectual boundaries that allows us to entertain strange and perhaps even disagreeable ideas. It differs from proclaiming, which is one-sided. The gospel can still be proclaimed in a conversational mode, but when this happens, its message is expressed within a framework where there is a mutual exchange of ideas.

In the turning toward another that is at the heart of conversation, one opens the door to the thoughts, ideas, and feelings of others. Conversation implies mutual consideration. However, it does not automatically follow that one who converses abandons their convictions and positions in the process or even temporarily puts them “on the shelf.” Conversation belongs to the family of speech known as dialogue. A dialogue is a kind of encounter that involves mutual exploration and exposure. To dialogue is to talk with someone, not just at them. It is an activity that involves discussion, an exchange of reasoning, and even argument. Those who discuss do not necessarily agree. Where there are opposing ideas in play, any agreement is highly unlikely without some form of dialogue. Nor should we assume that this kind of exchange is dispassionate. Dialogue can be heated. When some came down to Antioch from Jerusalem and began to teach that it was necessary to be circumcised according to the custom of Moses to be saved, Acts 15:2 observes that this “brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them.” Dialogue was part of the toolbox of the church’s earliest evangelists. They also employed discussion and debate to refine their own understanding of the church’s doctrine. Conversation creates a safe space where new ideas can be proposed, explored, and tested. This does not mean, however, that the first messengers of the Christian faith treated everyone’s ideas as if they were as credible as their own. Rather, they employed questions, debate, and discussion in order to challenge the false thinking of their age.

In order for conversation to occur, words must be spoken and ideas exchanged. This much is clear. But what seems less obvious is that conversation also involves shared silence. As Ann Berthoff observed, “If dialogue is at the heart of conversation, at the heart of dialogue is silence.”[5] Berthoff points out that silence is necessary for the act of speech itself. As anyone who has tried to decipher a mumbled or run-on sentence can tell you, the words we say are made discernable by the spaces that the silence between words creates for them. Berthoff explains, “The polar opposition of silence is the necessary condition of speech: when we talk, the sounds are shaped and differentiated by means of silence.”[6] But it is not enough to simply hear the words or even to know their definition. Conversation is an interpretative art, and Berthoff uses the phrase “homiletical silence” to speak of the intellectual space that enables the listener to do this. Berthoff’s analogy draws on the sermonic tradition, which is also a kind of conversation between the preacher and the listener.

In the context of a sermon, homiletical silence is a three-dimensional discipline that involves listening, patient reflection, and understanding. Since most sermons take the form of a monologue, the burden for a conversational element rests primarily upon the shoulders of the preacher, who must practice a kind of “priestly advocacy.” The preacher stands between the text and the congregation and listens to the Word of God on their behalf.[7] In ordinary conversation, however, this burden is shared along with the accompanying silence, rendering the silence of conversation more than the pause that waits until it is my turn to speak. In that silent space, we entertain the strange, seeking to understand even though we may already know that it is likely that we will still be at odds when the conversation ends. After all has been said, we may remain strangers and perhaps even opponents.

Protected Spaces

Hospitality does have limits, as Jael’s story in the book of Judges bluntly reminds us (Judges 4:17–24). In the same way, some intellectual spaces are meant to be protected, especially within the confines of the church. Not all ideas should be entertained (cf. 1 Tim. 4:7). Nor is everyone allowed to give voice to their views. In 1 Timothy 1:3-4, the apostle urged Timothy to “charge some that they teach no other doctrine, nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is in faith.” Not every idea is a good idea. There are times when it is necessary to do battle with our words and, like Jael, drive a stake through the temple of an opposing argument.

The context, of course, always makes a difference. When it comes to the essential truths of the Christian faith, Scripture teaches us to set boundaries. Within the precincts of the church, the words of false teachers are not meant to have free reign. Their ideas are to be challenged and their voices silenced. Outside the church, however, it is a different matter. There, in the marketplace, anyone may say their piece. The public sphere is the realm of debate and public discourse. It is also the sphere where the art of conversation is most needed. But if the last election has taught us anything, it has reminded us that the human art of conversation is not as easy as it looks. It is not enough to open one’s mouth and let the words pour out, especially when those who engage with each other have serious differences. These are often differences not only about our views but also about the rules of engagement when talking about them.

Scripture does not provide a simple strategy to make this task easier for us. It does, however, offer a foundational rule that can create a hospitable space for those who wish to make an attempt at conversation. It is the rule of life expressed in James 1:19–20: “So then, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath; for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” The hospitality of conversation offers the combined grace of silent listening and acceptance to those whose thinking is strange to us. It is a discipline that is essential to the peace of any society where diverse and mutually exclusive world views coexist. But its practice is even more crucial for those whose aim is persuasion. Because before anyone can be persuaded that they are wrong, they must first believe that they have honestly been heard and correctly understood.

[1] James Como, “The Salon: Restoring Conversation,” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 22, no. 1 (2014), 33.

[2] Mary Scott, “PHILOS, PHILOTĒS AND XENIA,” Acta Classica 25 (1982): 3.

[3] Ibid., 6.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ann E. Berthoff, “Homiletic Silence and the Revival of Conversation,” The Sewanee Review 122, no. 4, (2014): 587.

[6] Ibid., 588.

[7] John Koessler, Folly, Grace, and Power: The Mysterious Act of Preaching, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 96.

Jesus and the Cult of Nice

June 25, 2021June 12, 2023 ~ John Koessler ~ 1 Comment

Every generation seems to have its own idol. Each one represents the spirit of the age, a false god who shapes the ethic of the culture at large. All too often, these idols find their way into the church. Sometimes they are brought in intentionally by those who fear that the church has become irrelevant. More often, they are introduced unwittingly by Christians who have absorbed the ethic from the culture in which they live. They do not learn it in a formal sense, by thoughtful examination and critical analysis. Rather, it comes to them through the atmosphere, the way the smell of smoke clings to one who has been near a fire even when they try to keep their distance. These spirits are never introduced to the church as idols but as scholarship or forward-thinking or some “new” and “enlightened” understanding that somehow shows that what Jesus really meant by what He taught is in line with whatever our modern prejudice happens to be.

These days the idol of the age is best represented by what I would call “the cult of nice.” Nice is a quality urged upon us by mothers, who advise us that, if we can’t say something nice about someone, we shouldn’t say anything at all. Unfortunately, those who attempt to enact this philosophy rarely opt for silence. If you have ever had the unfortunate experience of working with such people, you have discovered that they tend to be fundamentally dishonest when it comes to their assessment of others. They dismiss bad traits and inflate those they deem to be good, even when they are merely an affectation. Such people would probably find something positive to say about Satan himself if he were a member of their team.

These days the idol of the age is best represented by what

I would call “the cult of nice.”

The cult of nice is a code that shapes ethics and whose appeal springs from its disarming simplicity. The basic rule of the cult of nice can be summarized in this sentence: “Whatever does not spring from niceness is not of God.” Part of its appeal is that it has a kind of Johannine ring about it. We find several statements that sound something like this in John’s writings. For example, in 1 John 4:16, the apostle says, “Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” The cult of nice identifies itself with this principle but restates it: “Whoever is nice lives in God, and God in them.”

However, it only takes a modicum of common sense to recognize that niceness and love are not the same. To say that God is love is one thing (1 John 4:8, 16). To say that He is nice is something else. The problem is that “nice” is essentially a cultural trait. What seems nice to one may not seem nice to another. What is more, the Jesus portrayed in Scripture–the same one to whom those who worship in the cult of nice appeal so often to justify their ethic–often behaved in ways that the acolytes of nice would find abhorrent. It only takes a few examples to prove my point.

For example, Jesus used harsh language when referring to those who disagreed with His teaching. He called them “fools,” “blind guides, “snakes,” and “vipers’ (Matt. 23:16–17, 33). Jesus was also divisive. He said things that He knew would outrage those who saw matters differently from Him. When Jesus contradicted the teaching of the Pharisees, His disciples complained. “’Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?’ He replied, ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.’” (Matt. 15:12–14). In other words, Jesus wasn’t just untroubled by their outrage. He was openly dismissive of it.

Perhaps rudest of all, at least by the standards of today’s cult of nice, was Jesus’ tendency toward exclusion. One of the cardinal doctrines of the cult of nice is that to be truly Christian, we must be inclusive. Inclusion is their Ockam’s razor–the test they use to sift through traditional teachings and decide what to reject as erroneous or obsolete. Jesus was inviting but exclusive in that invitation. He said that His way was narrow instead of broad and warned that “only a few find it” (Matt. 7:14). He claimed to be the way to God to such an extent that He said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). He even taught that a brother or sister who sins and rejects the repeated appeals of other Christians to turn from their sin should be expelled from the church (Matt. 18:15–17). This is so far from the current culture of nice that even churches that agree with Jesus in principle rarely practice His teaching on this point.

Nice isn’t listed among the attributes of God, yet neither is mean. Like nice, mean is one of those fuzzy words that can be taken several ways. It came from Middle English and was initially used to speak of what two or more people held in common. It developed into a word that spoke of one who was ignoble or base. But these days, we use it mainly to refer to those who are unkind and spiteful. A common complaint of children is that someone has been mean to them.

Nice isn’t listed among the attributes of God, yet neither is mean.

There doesn’t seem to be a single biblical equivalent to the modern vernacular when it comes to mean. Like nice, mean is culturally defined. What seems mean to one person is perfectly fine to another. It is also a movable standard which we usually manipulate in our own favor. Just as those who often criticize others for not being nice fail to condemn the same behavior in themselves, mean people never seem to think that they are mean. They tend to see themselves as stern, businesslike, or no-nonsense sort of folks who are practical and refuse to suffer fools gladly. But the suggestion that their treatment of others is mean is baffling to them.

This is especially true of mean leaders, who are convinced that those who criticize their meanness are merely soft or lazy. They view those who offer such critiques as namby-pamby bleeding hearts who are overly concerned about hurting the feelings of others. More often, they take no notice of them at all. But merely plow ahead without regard for those who disagree with their agenda. They do important work informed by a grand vision. Why should they trouble themselves over such objections when they are so obviously right in their judgments? Not only do they think that they represent God’s interests in their plans, they believe they mirror His character in their actions. This conceit is equally true of those who belong to the cult of nice.

In reality, mean is merely a selfish and distorted imitation that mistakes God’s sovereignty for impassiveness and confuses arrogance with independence. Likewise, nice is an insipid distortion of grace that fails to make the essential connection between God’s compassion, grace, patience, and faithfulness with His holiness and justice (Exod. 34:5–7). A nice god might not lower the boom on you for your sin. But He wouldn’t do anything to help you out of it either. For that, you must look to a God who is more than nice. One who cares enough about you to ignore your preferences and sensitivities and who will tell you what you are really like. To find practical help with your sin, you must look to a God who will not mince words about your foolishness or the desperate state of your condition. More than this, you will need a God who is willing to go beyond words and do something about it because He knows that you can do nothing for yourself.

In short, to find any real help for your sin, you must go beyond nice to truth. You must go beyond winsome or pleasant or amiable to love. Because only love is willing to stand in your place. Only love is strong enough to bear the brunt of the whip and the weight of the cross. Only love will allow itself to be taken by wicked hands and slain. And love alone, after being laid in the grave, is able to stand up again on the third day with arms open in invitation to the ones who put it there. God is not nice. God is love.

Preaching in a Crisis

April 18, 2020June 17, 2023 ~ John Koessler ~ 6 Comments

One of my former students recently asked me how I thought the COVID-19 crisis was affecting pastoral ministry and preaching in particular. How do you preach in an environment like this? The simple answer is that you do the best you can, given the circumstances. Preaching is challenging enough under ordinary conditions. The nature of the current crisis has completely upended our normal patterns of meeting and communicating. Preachers are speaking to empty seats and recording their messages for broadcast over social media. As one popular meme observes, we are all televangelists now.

The answer to my student’s question involves more than the medium, though much could be said about that as well. The medium of delivery matters, but the content of the message is always primary. Whether we preach live or by means of a video, we are still saying something. What should we say? The Sunday school answer to this question, of course, is that we should preach the gospel. There is a sense in which preachers only have one message to deliver. Our determination, like the apostle Paul’s, is to know nothing except Jesus Christ and Him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2). Yet as true as this may be, to put it this way in answer to this particular question seems like and oversimplification. It is not.

Preaching More than the Facts

The gospel offers hope for the present life as well as for the future. It is about living as much as it is about dying. Living the Christian life is more than a matter of willpower and information. The Christian life is Spirit-driven and grace enabled. It is a life that is lived not only in response to the gospel but through the power of the gospel. Paul’s letters are proof that the saints do not need to hear a different gospel after they have believed than the one that was preached to them prior to faith. The apostle was just as eager to preach the gospel to the saints at Rome as he was to proclaim it those who had never heard Christ named (cf. Romans 1:15 with 15:20). While the saints do not need a different gospel, they do need a gospel which is explicated in terms of their experience.

This means that preaching the gospel to the saints during this season of COVID-19 demands that we do more than state the facts of the gospel. What is especially needed is gospel preaching that demonstrates priestly sensitivity. In the Old Testament priests, like prophets, exercised a ministry of God’s word (Leviticus 10:11). The priest, however, differed from the prophet because he shouldered an additional burden, serving as the people’s advocate. Priests were not only “selected from among men” but were “appointed to represent them” (Hebrews 5:1). Preachers, like the priests of the Old Testament, do not stand apart from those who hear them. The default disposition of every sermon is one of sympathy. Priestly sympathy is not pandering but a compassionate ministry that is born of shared experience. Priestly advocacy should not be confused with trite slogans, pat answers, or simplistic explanations. Unfortunately, our culture’s bent toward pragmatism makes us especially vulnerable in this area. We are too eager to come to God’s defense–too quick to fill in the silences God leaves behind and attempt to explain what he himself has not explained.

Similarly, it can be tempting for preachers to use a crisis like this to leverage their favorite rebuke. If the posts I see from pastors on social media are an indication of what we are saying in our sermons, not a few of us have seized the opportunity afforded by the pandemic to teach the church a lesson about our favorite cultural or congregational irritation. We are saying that this crisis has come upon us because of abortion or that it is God’s judgment because of homosexuality. Some suggest that God sent it to show us that we are spoiled or that He allowed the churches to be shut down because we took worship for granted. Some are saying that God has forced us out of the building so that the church could be the church. The intent of these assertions, I think, is to be prophetic. Unfortunately, such varied explanations merely gives the impression that God cannot make up His mind about why He is angry with us. He is just mad. I am not saying that God would never deal out judgment on a national or even global scale. The Scriptures show that He has done so in the past and will do so again. What troubles me is the underlying note of smugness that seems to attend so many of these kinds of statements. Perhaps before we try to call down woes upon the nation like the prophet Jeremiah, we ought to learn how to weep like him first.

Some of this comes from the pressure we feel to exonerate God. Like many others, I have had more than one person ask me what I thought God was up to by allowing such a devastating pandemic to occur. In our effort to provide an answer, we may overreach. We can make the mistake of thinking that since we speak for God, we may also speak as God. Like Moses at the rock, we speak rashly or out of spite (Numbers 20:10). We jump to conclusions about God’s intent. We make statements about God’s motives and reasoning that sound like certainties but are really only speculations. It is not wrong to address the questions that people ask. One of the preacher’s most important responsibilities is that of leading the congregation in the collective practice of theological reflection about the questions and challenges which are peculiar to their context. But they must do this with what I describe as priestly advocacy.

The key to priestly advocacy is identification (Hebrews 2:17). This means that the preacher functions as a kind of mediator, standing between the text and the congregation and listening to the word of God on their behalf. Because we stand in the place of our listeners, we ask the questions they would ask. Some of these questions are obvious. Many are mundane. If we are to be true advocates for them, we must also ask the questions our listeners would like to ask but dare not. We can give voice to the questions that plague our listeners, but we cannot always answer them. Our priestly role demands that we speak the truth, and the truth is: God does not always explain himself. Part of the priestly responsibility of preaching is to give voice to the congregation’s unspoken questions and then listen with them to the awkward silence that sometimes ensues once the words have been spoken. It is not our job to answer all the congregation’s questions. When we try to say what God has not said, we inevitably replace God’s judgment with our own.

What We Can Say

What, then, can we say? We can affirm the congregation’s questions and fears. To admit that we don’t know what God is doing is not the same as saying that God is doing nothing. To acknowledge fear, grief, or uncertainty can itself be a great relief in times like these. Of course, it is crucial that we not stop here. More needs to be said. We do not want to only point at the problem. But if preaching aims to facilitate an encounter with God, a precondition must be that we face God as we truly are, with all our doubts, fears, and questions in plain sight.

If our aim in preaching really is to help our listeners meet God through His word, then the second thing we can do in the sermon is to speak of God. More particularly, we can speak of God as He has revealed Himself to us through the person and work of His Son Jesus Christ. This may sound too simple, so let me make clear what I do not mean. I am not talking about hawking God as a product by selling the audience an airbrushed version of the Christian life. Such sermons try to resolve every serious problem within a matter of minutes, much like the television dramas and commercials that so often provide contemporary pastors with their themes. This “airbrushed” portrayal of Christianity is not preaching at all but a form of sentimentalism that trivializes the gospel. Trivialized preaching is triumphalistic. Triumphalism is a perspective that grows out of our evangelical heritage of revivalism. The revival tradition of preaching emphasizes the transforming moment, when the listener’s life is forever changed. Certainly this is true of the gospel. We are forgiven in a moment. But the redemptive process takes much longer. Triumphalistic sermons give the impression that every problem can be solved in a matter of moments simply by leaving it at the altar. Undoubtedly there have been remarkable instances where this has been the case. Sinners plagued by long standing habits leave the sermon miraculously freed from bondage. Yet for many others–perhaps even most others–the experience is different. For them transformation is progressive rather than instantaneous. These believers do not skip along the pilgrim path but “toil along the winding way, with painful steps and slow.”

Directing our listeners to hope in Christ is not a platitude.

Preachers who do not acknowledge this resort instead to clichés and platitudes. Their sermon themes are flaccid and the remedies they offer mere placebos. Such sermons are unable to provide any real help to those who hear. How can they, when truism stands in the place of truth? In order to be true to our audience’s experience, preaching must reflect the reality of living in a post–Eden world in anticipation of a new heavens and earth that have not yet come to pass. Times like these, where not only our congregation but the entire globe must deal with the collateral damage that sin has wreaked upon us, are uniquely suited to such a task. Never has Paul’s statement that creation itself is in bondage to decay as a consequence of Adam’s sin been made more vivid (cf. Romans 8:21).

Directing our listeners to hope in Christ is not a platitude. The root of our fear in this current crisis is the fear of sickness and death. Some would like to promise that Jesus will protect us from all such threats. But this is not the hope that the Bible offers us. The message of the gospel is not only the story that Jesus died and rose again. It is the good news that Jesus suffered death “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone” (Hebrews 2:9). The gospel does not assure us that we will be able to avoid the experience of physical death. It tells us that Christ will meet us on the other side. This promise is no small hope.

A Distanced Congregation is Still the Church

A third thing that we can say, especially at a time when our normal community life has been so disrupted, is to remind the church that they are still a church. Some Christians seem to feel a kind of glee over the fact that the church cannot meet together during this season of social distancing. “At last,” they seem to say, “the church can finally be the church.” I find this reasoning odd. The language that the Bible uses to speak of the church implies proximity. This aspect of the church’s nature is best expressed by the phrase Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 11:18, “when you come together as a church.” The fact that the church comes together is not a weakness. It is not an indulgence. The church is, by its nature, an assembly.

I find it ironic that while some Christians seem to be celebrating the fact that the church cannot meet, the rest of the world recognizes the need for a sense connection. Nearly every commercial I see on television that mentions the pandemic also says, “We are in this together.” They assure me that “We will get through this.” What surprises me the most is how moved I am by such assurances. Those who record their sermons while preaching to empty seats need to remind the congregation that the bond they share with one another in Jesus Christ has not been diminished by physical separation. They really are in this together. The church will survive, and one day we will come together again as a church. But even though we are now separated, we continue to be “members of one body” (Ephesians 4:25).

The scope of the COVID-19 pandemic may be unusual but the experiences of fear and uncertainty are not. If you doubt this, just take note of how many times God tells His people not to be afraid in the Scriptures. Those who preach often speak to people in crisis. While not as massive as a pandemic, each individual crisis a listener faces under ordinary circumstances can be just as shattering. Pastors and teachers were not an invention of the church. Ephesians 4:11–12 says that they are Christ’s gift to God’s people. The church needs its preachers. What is true during this singular time of crisis will still be true when things return to normal. How should you preach during this season of the coronavirus? You should preach like someone whose hope is cast upon the word of God. Speak the truth with priestly sensitivity. Point your listeners to Jesus Christ. Do the best you can. You can do no more.

When Faith Fails

August 19, 2019June 17, 2023 ~ John Koessler ~ 4 Comments

Dale and Nancy had just started dating when someone who claimed to be speaking on God’s behalf told them that their relationship would “flow like a river.” They took it as a sign and got married. It didn’t take long for things to unravel. Dale was controlling and abusive. He went back to some of the habits of his pre-Christian days. Drugs, pornography, and threats of violence turned the beautiful promise they had heard into a nightmare. If you had asked Dale and Nancy why they married so quickly, I’m pretty sure they would have said that it was a simple act of faith. They believed they were supposed to be together.

People make decisions like this all the time. Someone hears a sermon about the unreached masses and quits his job to go into the ministry. An older couple decides to adopt after their own kids are grown and gone because they believe it’s what God wants. But faith decisions don’t have to be big. Sometimes they’re small. We say something to a stranger because we feel the prompting of the Spirit. We give money to a panhandler we pass on the street. Sometimes things work out. Sometimes, like Dale and Nancy, the wheels come off, and we’re left wondering whether we got it wrong. Maybe it wasn’t God’s voice after all.

Simple or Simplistic Faith?

When I was a new believer, we used to talk a lot about having a simple “childlike” faith. But looking back on some of the things we did, what we practiced was not faith but naiveté. Our faith wasn’t simple; it was simplistic. At times, maybe even childish. One Saturday night a bunch of us piled into a car and drove down into the city of Detroit. We had no real destination in mind. We expected to be “led” by the Holy Spirit, stopping to pray at every intersection before deciding which way to turn. We ended up in a bad part of town, where we stumbled on a drunken man lying in a doorway. “He must be the reason God sent us here,” Ron said. Ron, a shifty-eyed prophet with a receding hairline and a penchant for falling into the folding chairs whenever the Spirit came upon him, was one of the self-appointed leaders of our little group. Ron thought we should take the stranger with us, but the man only wanted a few dollars to buy another drink. Despite his protests, we pulled him to his feet, bundled him into the car, and drove back to the suburbs.

Our faith wasn’t simple; it was simplistic. At times, maybe even childish.

The next day Ron brought our new friend to church and asked the pastor to take a special offering. The pastor politely declined. Maybe the pastor was suspicious. Perhaps he didn’t think it was the best way to help the man. Whatever the reason, Ron didn’t take the refusal well. He stood up in the church service, and in a prophetic tone declared, “I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.” Then he and the stranger walked out, followed by several chagrined church members who offered him money.

In a day or two, the stranger disappeared. Ron didn’t know where he had gone. Some hinted that he might not have been a man at all but an angel that we had entertained “unawares.” But I suspected that the poor fellow had made his way back to the doorway where we first found him. The whole affair bothered me. Was it really God who had guided us? Or had we merely gone downtown on a whim? Was ours a bold act of faith or a naive exercise of middle-class guilt? It is tempting to think that the answer these questions is in the outcome. If God had been in it, the man would have stayed, and his life would have turned around. But the stranger might have gone back to his old ways, even if God had prompted us to rescue him. Would things have been any different for my friends Dale and Nancy, if they had waited longer and gone through a traditional courtship? Perhaps. But there are plenty of people who have taken the long path only to call it quits in the end. Joshua Harris comes to mind.

Sincerity Instead of Faith

Sometimes, what we think of as faith is merely sincerity. We are convinced that we are doing the right thing. We think we are acting in God’s interest and at His prompting, but we are mistaken. Not only do we misunderstand what God wants from us, we misinterpret our motives. Like James and John, who wanted to call down fire upon the Samaritan village that refused to welcome Jesus, we think we are doing God’s will (Luke 9:51-56). In reality, we don’t know what kind of spirit we are of. James and John had sincerity enough to spare. What they lacked was self-awareness

In the past few months, we have seen a flurry of notable church leaders turn their back on the things they once believed. We want to know how such a thing can happen. How can people whose faith once seemed so prominent suddenly throw it away? Many conclude that such people were never really Christians to begin with. They “went out from us” because “were not of us” (1 John 2:19). Perhaps this is true. The Bible has many warnings about those who profess the faith but are imposters (1 Tim. 4:1).

But I wonder if some of those who have walked away believe that it is God who has broken faith. They have turned their backs because the Christianity they embraced did not deliver on its promise. In most cases, as far as I can tell from the outside, it was not the gospel promise itself that has disappointed them but something else. It is more a vision of what their lives would be like if they only believed that has failed them. They are like those that Linda Kay Klein profiles in her book Pure, a blistering critique of the purity movement of the 1980s. Many in the movement seemed to believe that if they followed the rules and pursued sexual purity with a passion, they would live happily ever after. Klein describes the reaction of Muriel, one of the subjects she interviewed, this way: “How could she believe anything evangelicalism taught her if the one thing they said was most important–remain pure before marriage and you will have a blissful sexual life after marriage and be supported by the larger community–wasn’t true.”

The Game is Rigged

Of course, it doesn’t have to be sex. The promise we believe might be something else. Maybe it is the expectation that the church’s leaders will behave like shepherds and care for the church. Maybe it is the conviction that if I put Jesus first, I will succeed. I’ll get the job I want. My ministry will grow and expand. Life will go the way I want. Sometimes the things that shake the foundations of our faith are embarrassingly small, but the basic reasoning is always the same. I have believed, so why aren’t things working out better for me? I am following Jesus, so why isn’t He doing more for me? Why aren’t things easier?

I am following Jesus, so why isn’t He doing more for me? Why aren’t things easier?

These kinds of questions aren’t asked just by apostates and people who have been taken in by the prosperity gospel. They are more common among people of genuine faith than you might think. This is the sort of questioning the Psalmist describes in Psalm 73: “Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold. For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (Psalm 73:1-3). The Old Testament patriarch Job also had questions for God. Job’s questions are the obverse of Asaph’s. Job doesn’t ask, “Why do the wicked prosper?” but instead “Why do the righteous suffer?” In each of these cases, the frame is a narrow one. The circumstances that cause us to question God’s goodness, and sometimes even our faith, are not always as noble as theirs. Our disappointments aren’t great disappointments like those of Asaph or Job. Too often, they are petty and self-absorbed. But for some reason that doesn’t make them easier for us to bear.

To the person who struggles with such questions there only seems to be two possible answers. Either there is something wrong with us, or there is something wrong with God. Of course, anyone who has spent time in the realm of faith knows that the latter possibility is not really on the table. The game is rigged, and the odds always favor the house. God is never wrong. The problem is always us. But the thing that is wrong with us may not be what we think. We thought the problem was in our execution. We weren’t playing the game the right way. If we just tried a little harder–if we followed the rules–we could make it work for us. When it doesn’t, we are tempted to give up not only on ourselves but on God. We are tempted to give up on God so the fault won’t be with us.

We are tempted to give up on God so the fault won’t be with us.

When my oldest son was about to graduate from high school, I had one of those parental conversations with him about adulthood, duty, and the necessity of doing things one doesn’t really want to do. When I was finished, he said, “So what you’re telling me is that life basically sucks.” That wasn’t what I was telling him, but I could see why he thought it was. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you think I’m saying something similar about God. Does it seem to you that God’s primary agenda is to disappoint you? Perhaps you think I am saying that the “chief end of man” is to suck it up and lower your expectations. If God intends to leave us disappointed, His goal is that we would be disappointed with ourselves and the simplistic, bargaining faith to which we are so addicted. Like a doctor who must break a bone to set it, God shatters our misaligned expectations, so that faith will have room to grow in the right direction. He does not do this lightly but carefully. And often, I think, with tears.

The Danger of Smugness

What are we to make of the defections from the faith of so many prominent Christians? I think we ought to be careful not to be smug in our rush to judgment about them. It may be true that they were never “of us” to begin with. But we too are guilty of naïve faith and unreasonable expectations of the Christian life. We shouldn’t shrug off their repudiation of the foundational truths of the Christian faith. Their defection is a sin, and their loss is a tragedy. They are responsible to God for the decision they have made. However, some of the comments I have seen about their departure from the faith sound too much like gloating to me. Besides, we don’t yet know how their story will end.

Several years after my friends Dale and Nancy divorced, I talked with Nancy on the phone. She told me how terrible the experience had been for her and how, after the divorce, she had walked away from the church and from God. The promise had failed. She spent years feeling like damaged goods. She believed that God no longer had a purpose for her life. Then one day she realized that what she had believed about herself was a lie. Not only was God waiting, He was welcoming. At the time she and I spoke, Dale was still far from God. In a way, their story is a kind of parable. Some who have renounced their faith will discover that what they have rejected is not God or the gospel but a counterfeit. Others will continue to live in a way which suggests that “they were not of us” to begin with. But either way, God will be waiting.

John’s latest book Practicing the Present: The Neglected Art of Living in the Now (Moody Publishers) is now available. Order your copy today.

Clean

November 13, 2018 ~ John Koessler ~ 1 Comment

According to family legend, my great grandfather was the first one to drive the twenty-mule team out of Death Valley loaded with borax. I have no idea whether this is actually true or not. Like most family legends, I suspect that it is a work of fiction. But I liked to recount this story to my friends when I was growing up since the twenty-mule team was featured in commercials on the popular television show Death Valley Days. It made me feel just short of famous.

Borax is a “detergent booster.” Apparently, it is used in a lot of other things too. Fertilizer, rocket fuel, and automobile windshields, just to name a few. But I always thought of it as soap. The same people who made Borax also made Boraxo, the hand detergent that promised to make hands “soft, smooth, and really clean.”

Looking back on it, cleanliness seemed to be the driving concern of most of the commercials we watched in those days. They fretted about clean clothes, clean floors, and clear complexions. What did this say about us as a culture? Were we especially dirty? Maybe we were just fastidious. Perhaps it was a little of both.

At points, the Bible seems similarly obsessed. The Old Testament, in particular, appears to be especially concerned about matters of cleanness and uncleanness with its detailed regulations about food, clothing, and its peculiar stipulations regarding spots and blemishes. When we read through these laws we do not get the impression that what is at issue is primarily a matter of hygiene. Indeed, some of the measures prescribed do not seem hygienic at all, especially when the “cleansing” agent is blood. Something else is going on.

The New Testament writer of Hebrews admits as much by calling such measures a “shadow” that can never perfect those who repeat them year after year. Instead of being a remedy, they were a reminder of sin (Hebrews 10:1-3). In a way, so is Jesus’ sixth beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). The Greek word that is translated “pure” means clean. No other assertion shatters our illusion that these beatitudes are some kind of moral yardstick quite like this one.

What Jesus describes is a cleanness that originates on the inside and works its way out. Every other kind of cleansing with which we are familiar works the other way around. Jesus is not talking about getting clean but being clean. When we read his statement, we know instinctively that this is not what we are. If we do not know this, it can only be because we do not really know ourselves. We cannot hear Jesus’ assertion without wondering how it is possible for anyone to see God.

Like the others that precede it, we must take this beatitude as a promise. What Jesus gives us here is not a rod by which to measure our lives but a final portrait of what those lives will look like when Christ is finished with them. Purity of heart is not the condition we must meet in order to gain access into the Kingdom of God. Instead, it is the final destination for those who enter that kingdom through the gate of Christ. He is the only hope we have of being pure in heart. “You can start trying to clean your heart, but at the end of your life it will be as black as it was at the beginning, perhaps blacker” Martyn Lloyd-Jones warns. “No! It is God alone who can do it, and, thank God, He has promised to do it.” Only the blessed can be pure in heart. They will see God.

Empty is Enough

October 9, 2018 ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

I have reached the age where a large percentage of the articles that show up on my social media feed offer suggestions about retirement. They appeal to a combination of greed and fear. Apparently, your retirement savings need to be at least a million (if not more). Social security won’t be enough to cover your expenses. You need a steady stream of income from stocks or bonds or annuities, which are luckily being sold by whoever has posted the article in the first place. No matter the source, the message is almost always the same. Whatever you have, it probably isn’t enough. The aim is to make me nervous. It often works.

For people like me who by nature and long experience have learned to want more, Jesus’ blessing in Matthew 5:3 seems jarring and maybe even nonsensical: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Nobody really believes that less is more, least of all the poor. Those who want to view this remarkable saying as a statement about the genteel virtues of poverty are really saying that Jesus was merely a sentimentalist and of the worst possible sort. They imply that He was a naïve sentimentalist. “We should not think that Jesus merely wanted to give us a few maxims of practical wisdom, that he merely intended to talk about the blessing of suffering and poverty and console us by telling us that suffering would make us more mature” theologian Helmut Thielicke warns. “Jesus knew all too well that it can turn out just the opposite, that a man can break down under suffering, that it can drive us into cursing instead of prayer, and that its ultimate effect will perhaps be bitter complaining and accusing of God for his injustice.”

Yet the qualifying phrase “in spirit” hardly removes the scandal of Jesus’ pronounced blessing. In Christ’s day as in our own, one’s spiritual standing was considered to be a function of accumulated merits. This is true of all salvation systems save one. The world’s religions all operate on the same basic economy that we employ with our finances. More is always better. You can never have enough. And if you want to acquire it, you’ve got to earn it. There is no other way.

Jesus’ words are a diagnosis as much as they are a promise. Only the poor in spirit can be blessed because there is no other category for us when it comes to righteousness. This is what sets Jesus’ message apart from all others. Those who look to their own reserves to calculate whether they have enough holiness to find acceptance with God will inevitably come up short. If you want it, you must take it as a gift or not at all. This is what the Bible calls grace. Where grace is concerned, only empty is enough.

But this rule only makes sense in light of the second half of Jesus’ beatitude. His point isn’t about the inherent virtue of poverty, whether it is economic or spiritual. It is about access. According to Jesus, emptiness is the necessary precondition to entering what He calls “the kingdom.” Actually, Jesus doesn’t employ the language of entering here, even though He does elsewhere. Jesus uses the language of ownership. The kingdom of heaven belongs to the empty. Only they can claim it as their own because they alone know that they cannot buy it. They do not obtain it by natural right or by personal effort. If they are to receive the kingdom it must be delivered over to them by Christ Himself.

This is the first principle for any who wish to experience the blessedness that Jesus describes in the beatitudes. You must come to Christ as you are. You must come to Him empty and without anything to recommend you. All that you need will be given to you upon entry into His realm. You cannot store it up in advance. You cannot bring it with you as you cross the threshold. You can only come to Christ as a beggar and receive. There is no other way.