What’s in a Name?

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

The other day I saw a billboard for an area university that promised that its graduates would be “conquerors.” This was not the word I expected. It seems to me that another description might be more accurate. Competent comes to mind. Or perhaps capable. Or maybe even hirable, as long as it was combined with the additional qualifying phrase: “in certain economic environments.”

It seems to me that the trouble with a school advertising that its graduates will be conquerors is that it is making a promise that it cannot possibly deliver upon. I suppose it might be appropriate if the school specialized in military strategy and its students were preparing to be despots or generals. But even then I think I would be suspicious.

This billboard is an example of the kind of hyperbole we often hear in our culture. It isn’t limited to marketing. Sometimes it creeps into the names some families give their children. In the old days bread and butter names like Jack or Suzie were perfectly acceptable choices for our children. Now the names we hear sound more like titles. Instead of Phil it’s Royal. Instead of Judy it’s Precious. These aren’t names. They are adjectives.

Of course, I understand what is going on here. Such names are meant to send a message to the child. They are intended to build a child’s self-image. Parents want their children to feel that they stand out from the crowd. Why merely be Mark when you can be Magnificent instead? Still, sometimes I think we do children a disservice by promising so much. Parents who were forced to be more honest in their naming might call their child Average or possibly Irritating.

Some will say that the Bible sanctions this practice. After all, didn’t Jesus change Simon’s name to Peter which means rock? This is true. But I will point out that the term doesn’t seem to mean a boulder but something smaller. It is more like a stone. Do you know how annoying it is when you get a stone in your shoe? Jesus called James and John the Sons of Thunder. These were the two brothers who offered to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritan village that refused to welcome Jesus (Luke 9:52-56). One wonders if there wasn’t just a touch of affectionate ridicule in the name.

Then, of course, there was the prophet’s daughter-in-law who named her son Ichabod after the ark of the covenant was captured by the Philistines (1 Sam. 4:21). According to Old Testament scholar Robert Alter, the name meant something like “inglorious,” or “Where is the glory?” But this was more of an observation about current events than a value judgement about the child.

The trouble with marketing hyperbole, of course, is that it is empty. By saying too much it says nothing at all. I am afraid that the church is too much given to meaningless hyperbole in its rhetoric. When the church slips into marketing speech, it exaggerates its experiences and misrepresents the nature of the Christian life. It relies on sentimental tropes, pat answers, and superficial analyses of life’s problems. Such talk blunts the force of the Bible’s true hyperbole.

The Bible does not call us conquerors. It says that we are more than that “through him who loved us” (Rom. 8:37). In the same context it also mentions trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger and the sword (vs. 35). This is no marketing hype but real life that has been intersected by the grace of God.

Mob Action

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

It wasn’t a parade, it was a procession. It was also a coronation of sorts. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem the multitude walked with Him, some going before and others following after. They cast their cloaks down upon the road before Him and cut branches from the trees to lay them down as well. They shouted for joy. “Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” Their words were both an acclamation and a cry for deliverance. If we had been among the disciples, we too would have thought that Jesus had finally come into His own. God’s people had recognized their king.

Yet in less than a week a different cry would go up. The crowd that gathered to watch Jesus’ trial, now more mob than multitude would howl for Jesus’ blood. For a short time, Pilate allied Himself with Jesus and tried to set Him free. “Here is your king!” he declared to the crowd spread out on the pavement before his judge’s seat. This was more or less what the multitude had meant when they had cried Hosanna. Now they changed their tune, incited by the jealousy of the religious establishment. “Take him away! Take him away! Crucify him!” they shouted. Pilate, who was no friend, after all, acquiesced. He turned Jesus over to the soldiers to be crucified.

Watching all of this from a comfortable distance of more than two millennia, I am shocked by how quickly the celebrating crowd turns into an angry mob. How is it that they can move so quickly from apparent devotion to denunciation? But then I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at all. That is the nature of the mob. They are quickly moved and easily incited. We see it all the time on the Internet in our day. I should not be surprised by their inconstancy, I should be shocked by my own. For I find that I am more like Pilate than the screaming mob. Like him, I too can move from acknowledgment to acquiescence in seconds.

Sometimes it’s the crowd that compels me. I am more attuned to their sensibility than I am to the motions of the Spirit. I don’t want to stand out. I’d rather fit in. Or maybe I am falsely persuaded by the force of their enthusiasm and make the rabble choice. But more often it is my own heart that turns traitor. In the blink of an eye and in the quietness of my own soul I make the choice. I still know that Jesus is my king. But with a look or a word or an act I surreptitiously take up the mob’s rebel’s cry, “We will not have this man to reign over us.”

Just As He Was

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

When I heard the news of Billy Graham’s passing, it brought to mind a story I heard about him several years ago. Billy came to a small Bible conference in Western Michigan and asked to speak at the evening service. The leaders of the Bible conference politely turned him down. But over the next few days, they noticed that the attendance at their services began to thin until it was only a handful. Billy had set up on the beach and a crowd had gathered. Nearly everyone who was supposed to be attending the services at the Bible conference was coming to hear him instead.

I’m pretty sure that if I had been one of the leaders of that Bible conference, I would have made the same decision they did. How were they to know that the bold young man who invited himself into their pulpit would eventually become the Billy Graham we know of today? This was before the days of the Los Angeles crusade that made the evangelist a household name. It was long before Graham achieved the status of “America’s Pastor.” In those days Billy was just another unknown preacher looking for an audience. Did they make the wrong choice? Most of us would probably say yes. But that’s only because we know what Billy Graham eventually became.

How do we distinguish between presumption and the call of God? Often it is only history that enables us to know the difference. There are many things we would like to do but might not have the ability. There are other things that we might able to do but will never be granted the opportunity. The race does not always go to the swift or the battle to the strong (Eccl. 9:11).

The fact that you can do something does not automatically mean that you will do it or even that you should. The fact that you are better at the task than someone else, does not necessarily mean that God will choose you to accomplish that task. The prophet thought it was a good idea for David to build the temple until God said otherwise (2 Sam. 7:3). God’s choice for the task was Solomon, a man who eventually proved to be of lesser character.

So what does all of this mean for our dreams and aspirations? It means, at least, that we need to leave room for God to have the last word about how they will turn out. His plans usually unfold differently from those we envision for ourselves. It means that we need to be careful about the conclusions we draw about our successes. The fact that more people show up on the beach to hear us may not say as much about our own skill or effort as we might think. We should be even more careful with the conclusions we draw about our perceived failures. The outcome is hardly ever up to us and we rarely know the whole story.

This is What Forgiveness Feels Like

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

A few years ago I was diagnosed with cancer. Although it was a common form and treatable, I was shattered by the news. I felt betrayed, not so much by God, but by my own body. I lay awake nights thinking about the thing I had inside me and wishing that I could go back to the days before the diagnosis. When the doctor told me that my surgery appeared to be successful, I felt like a condemned prisoner who has just been given a pardon. “This is what forgiveness feels like,” I told my wife.

But sin is not really like cancer. Sin is not something that can be cut out of us or brought into remission by repeated treatment. It is not an alien presence. This is what I think Paul means when he says, “I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature” (Rom. 7:18). Sin not only is in me, it is me. It is part of my nature. It is because sin is so deeply embedded within, that we have such a high tolerance for it.

Theologian Josef Pieper describes sin as a warping of our created nature: “Sin is an inner contortion whose essence is misconstrued if we interpret it as sickness or, to descend into an even more trivializing level, merely as an infraction against conventional rules of behavior.” Because of this, the only solution for sin is an extreme one. The remedy is death. Since sin is me, there must be an end to me. This is somewhat ironic since death is also the progeny of sin. Death entered the world through sin (Rom. 5:12). Through Jesus Christ, God turned sin’s own weapon against itself. Those who belong to Christ have been united with Him in His death and resurrection (Rom. 6:5).

This remarkable union places the power of the cross at our disposal. Those who have been joined to Christ in His death have been granted power to “put to death the misdeeds of the body” (Rom. 8:13). The once for all death and resurrection of Jesus Christ produces within us a continual experience of dying and rising when it comes to our struggle with sin. There is an end point to this. The climax of our redemption will be our own bodily resurrection when the imperishable will be clothed with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality (1 Cor. 15:54). Then death will be swallowed up in victory and sin along with it. That is when we will really know what forgiveness feels like.

About Time

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

I had a dream about my boys the other night. They really aren’t boys anymore. My two sons are young men in their late 20’s and early 30’s. But when I dream about them, they almost always appear as little boys. I, on the other hand, am ageless in my dreams. Not so much when I wake up. Within seconds the weight of my years settles upon me and I feel as old as I am. When the dream was over, I lay in the dark listening to my wife’s quiet breathing, the ticking of the clock in the other room, and wondering if age is a characteristic of the soul.

My soul had a beginning but it has no end. There was a time when my soul did not exist. Now that it does, it will exist for eternity. Since the soul is the undying self, it seems that it must have a certain ageless quality to it. My soul exists in time but is not debilitated by it in the same way that the body is. Yet the soul does not seem to be static. If the soul is the essence of the true self and that self is subject to change, should not the soul change as well? My sons are not the boys they once were. They have changed with time and experience, as have I. To put it another way, does the soul mature?

Augustine once observed that just as the human body changes with the passing ages of life and is changed with the changes of place and time, so also does the soul. “It varies by countless changes and thoughts” Augustine said. “It is altered by countless pleasures. By how many desires is it cleaved apart and distended!” In her book Once Out of Nature: Augustine on Time and the Body, Andrea Nightingale explains that this statement reflects Augustine’s belief that when humanity fell into sin, we lost our sense of the divine presence. We also lost our sense of self-presence. As a result, we are distended in time, living in the present but ranging in our thinking from the past to the future. The present is not a dwelling place but a barely noted way station. We give it little regard because we are distracted by our memories or inflamed by our expectation of what is to come. Meanwhile the swiftly passing present is squandered.

Our basic problem is not really the passing away of the present. It is, as Augustine observes, an absence of the sense of God’s presence. Our awareness of God gives meaning to the present.  His presence sanctifies our boredom and redeems our discomfort. As long as we are aware of God, the present is more than a staging ground for the future. It is a moment of fellowship.

Jesus said that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the God of the dead but of the living (Luke 20:38). This makes Him the God of our past and our future as much as He is the God of our present. He is the guarantee of all He has promised to those he has called. His grace is the remedy for all our regret and His assurance is our hope for the future. Does the soul age? I do not think so. At least, I do not think it ages in the same way that the body does. But I do believe that the soul develops. We are not what we once were. We are not yet what we will be. But for now, we are children of the living God and that is enough.

Bethlehem Night

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

What makes this night

different from all others?

Our faces lit before the fire,

we repeat the old stories

and count the constellations.

Or we sit

in the habit of silence

like someone long married.

Until the angel appears

with its stab of glory

and we are sore afraid.

We hear his shouted greeting

at once so jocular and familiar

and yet so strange and unearthly.

We hear too

the beating of many wings

like the sound of many waters

and the bleating of the frightened sheep

who scatter in alarm.

But we cannot

comfort them

because we are struck

dumb with wonder.

How Silently, How Silently

~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, I feel that I can listen to Christmas Carols in good conscience. Though to be honest, I actually started somewhere around Halloween. Yesterday I was reflecting on the line from O Little Town of Bethlehem which goes: “How Silently, How Silently the wondrous gift is given….” In this lyric Philips Brooks is comparing the stillness of Bethlehem on the night of Christ’s birth to the silent miracle of salvation.

“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given;

so God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.

No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin,

where meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.”

But Brooks’s lyric is also a reminder to me of how often silence is a feature of our experience with God. We know that God can speak. The Bible tells us that He spoke creation into existence. We read the Bible and regard it as His word. Yet for many–I would say most– of us it feels that God responds to us in silence. This is one of the things that tends to make prayer so hard. We feel as if we are engaged in a one sided conversation. We don’t know what to make of God’s silence and so misinterpret it, just as we might the silence of a friend or lover. We think that God’s silence is proof of His absence or we take it as a sign of disinterest. It is easy to see why.  We have been taught to think that people who care speak up. Those who don’t speak don’t care.

That’s also why so much of the communication we hear these days seems to come in the form of a shriek. Whether it is an audible shout or an emoji filled, all caps, bold face post on social media, outrage has become our culture’s primary Love Language. So we naturally think that if God does not respond in some emphatic way to our pleas it must mean that He doesn’t care about us.

We equate God’s silence with disengagement. In Psalm 28:1 David says, “To you I call, O LORD my Rock; do not turn a deaf ear to me. For if you remain silent, I will be like those who have gone down to the pit.” Notice the connection between silence and deafness. This is our fear when it comes to God’s silence. We worry that it means that God can’t hear us or even worse that He won’t hear us. One of the ironies of this is that in the Bible we find that God’s speech can be more difficult to bear than His silence. According to Exodus 20:19 when the Israel heard God declare the Law from Mount Sinai, they begged Moses to act as His go-between: “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die” (Ex. 20:19). God’s silence is sometimes a sign of judgment. But it may also be a mercy.

Silence doesn’t necessarily mean disinterest. It is also a mark of attention. Those who listen are silent. Silence is also emphatic. Silence often acts as God’s exclamation point, forcing us to focus on the situation at hand. Instead of speaking to us in words, God communicates through our circumstances. Silence is a feature of stillness and stillness is a characteristic of those who wait. “Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him” Psalm 37:7 urges, “do not fret when men succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes.” Those who are still are waiting for God to act.

Such a strategy seems counter-intuitive in this age of activism. I mean we can’t do nothing can we? Surely we should do something! Of course the answer is that when we are still, we are doing something. We are waiting. We are expecting. We are trusting. Stillness is the atmosphere of Bethlehem, as God draws near in silence and relative obscurity. When the time had fully come, God sent His Son (Gal. 4:4). When our time is fully come God will act on our behalf. In the meantime, the best thing we can do may be to be still and wait.

Speaking of God

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

prayingWhen I was a pastor some people addressed me as “Pastor.” Others called me “Pastor John.” Some called me “Preacher” and a few referred to me as “Reverend.” If they asked what I preferred, I usually said, “My friends call me John.” But what about God? How should we address Him? Sir? Your Majesty? Some other title? He has several in Scripture. Jesus reveals the answer in the opening to the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9: “This, then is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven….”

Jesus frames our conversation with God in terms of relationship. Speaking of God this way was not something new. God is spoken of as a “Father” in the Old Testament. But there the title generally speaks of His role as creator and deliverer. When Jesus speaks of God as Father in the New Testament He takes it a step further. In the Lord’s Prayer Jesus teaches us to address God as our Father. He teaches us to address God as our Father.

More often than not the thing that shapes our approach to God in prayer is the fact that we want something. It isn’t the only thing we are interested in but it is usually the main thing. It is why we are praying. We are interested in the request itself and the request is certainly not insignificant. But thinking about prayer only in terms of what we want from God can create a problem. Instead of bringing us closer to God, this kind of praying may actually drive us apart.

In his little book How to Pray, Anthony Bloom writes: “Let us think of our prayers, yours and mine; think of the warmth, the depth and intensity of your prayer when it concerns someone you love, or something which matters in your life. Then your heart is open, all your inner self is recollected, in the prayer. Does it mean that God matters to you? No, it does not. It simply means that the subject of your prayer matters to you.”

It is possible for the subject matter of our prayer–the request itself–to be so important to us that it overshadows God. The solution to this problem is not to set the request aside but to recognize that prayer is more of a relationship than a transaction. Don’t just approach God in prayer. Approach God as Father. Don’t just approach God as a Father. Come to Him as your Father.

Most of the people I know are disappointed with their prayer life. Ask them if they believe in prayer and they will say yes. Ask them if they are good at prayer and they will answer no. Usually we think that the problem lies in the mechanics. We don’t pray well. We don’t pray enough. We don’t stay on task. We get bored or distracted. But the root problem is really one of relationship. It is not that we have forgotten how to pray or even that we have forgotten that we should pray. Our problem is that we lose sight of the One to whom we pray.

Theologian Helmut Thielicke observed that we would all be orphans if it were not for Jesus: “There would be no one to hear us if He had not opened the gates of Heaven. We should all be like sheep gone astray without a shepherd. But now we have a shepherd. Now we have a father. What can ever cast us down, what can ever unhinge us as long as we look into that countenance and as long as we can say in the name of our brother Jesus Christ: Abba Father.”

How to Create the Ideal Colleague

~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

The other day a group of us were asked to describe our ideal colleague. You wouldn’t have been surprised by the result. The person we came up with was winsome. Generous. Quick to forgive. Patient with everyone but not afraid to say the hard thing. In other words, perfect. It occurred to me when we were finished that the profile we had created didn’t look anything like me. To be honest, it didn’t look anything like any of us. It looked a bit like Jesus. Only shinier.

I am not against idealism. We all need ideals. They are inspiring. But I find that this kind of idealism doesn’t help me much when it comes to living in the real world. My heroes are my heroes precisely because they aren’t like me. I have people in my life that I admire very much. Some of them are my colleagues. But I admire them because I can’t do what they can do. In most cases, I never will.

The problem with our ideal colleague was that we did not really have ourselves in mind when we created him (or her). Not our true selves. Ours was a profile shaped mostly through reverse engineering and preening. It is easy to do. First you catalog the traits you like the least among your peers and describe the opposite. Next add the qualities you admire the most about yourself. The result will be an ideal person who does not look like anyone you hate but who looks like what you think you look like when you are at your best.

There is a word which describes this kind of idealism. I am reluctant to use it because it will seem harsh. This is not idealism at all. It is hypocrisy. The self-pleasure we took in completing the exercise should have tipped us off that something was wrong with our creation. We had been asked to come up with a portrait. Instead we produced a mirror. A false mirror at that.

The greatest challenge of living in community is not the challenge of living up to our ideal. It is the challenge of living together as we are. What we need is not a better ideal but a savior. We do not need better colleagues either. Only the grace to live with the ones we have.

Believing is Seeing

~ John Koessler

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I think that the experience of the disciples during the last week of Jesus’ earthly ministry was a lot like ours. The week started with such promise. As Jesus entered Jerusalem to shouts of acclaim on Palm Sunday, His disciples must have assumed that He was coming into His own.

On Monday Jesus cursed a fig tree and drove the money changers out of the temple. On Tuesday he denounced the religious leaders calling them “blind fools” and “hypocrites.” On Wednesday, at least as far as the biblical record is concerned, nothing happened. Instead of being swept into the city in victory–the whole project seems to have stalled out.

On Thursday there was that awkward Passover supper. The disciples fought among themselves about which of them should be regarded as the greatest and Jesus began acting strangely again, dressing like a household slave and washing their feet. Then, of course, the whole thing fell apart. Instead of being recognized as Israel’s rightful king, Jesus was arrested. On Friday He is tried, condemned, crucified, and buried.

Then on Saturday-nothing but silence.

And this, I think, is where many of us live in terms of our experience. We live in the silence of Holy Saturday. Things haven’t turned out the way we had expected–or the way we had hoped. It may even seem to us as if this whole “Jesus thing” has failed. Miserably.

Our problem, it turns out, is the same problem that the disciples had. We can see what God is doing (more or less) but we don’t understand it. We often wish that God would explain His actions to us. Why has He allowed things to unfold this way? But if the Gospels are any indication, we wouldn’t understand even if we were told. Because Jesus did tell His followers in advance what God was doing. They just couldn’t comprehend it.

In his book A Cross Shattered Church, Stanley Hauerwas observes, “We say that ‘seeing is believing,’ but it seems in matters having to do with God that ‘believing is seeing.’ But believing does not mean that we must accept twenty-three improbable propositions before breakfast. Rather, believing means being made participants in a way of life unintelligible if Jesus is not our Lord and our God. To so live is not to try to make the world conform to our wishes and fantasies, but rather to see truthfully the way the world is.” Hauerwas goes on to say that before we can see the world as it is, we must be transformed. Or to use Paul’s language, we must be transferred or translated into the Kingdom of God’s Son (Col. 1:13).

In other words, the only view which enables us to make sense of the strange things that God has done with our lives is the view from above. It is a view from the cross. It is from there that we can see, not only the cross itself, but also the empty tomb which lies beyond. It is not a vision of life which comprehends God but one that comes from Him. Hauerwas was right. Believing is seeing.