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After the fullness of Holy Week, it seems that it's time I get back with my blogging. I got the urge in light of all the discussions of the American legal system recently. It seems to me that recent decisions show why Christians cannot recognize the legitimacy of the American judicial system, nor even hope that it may be reformed. It cannot be redeemed, only endured.

The Schiavo case is very interesting. I admittedly have not followed the details of the case closely, and thus what I say should be taken with caution. What seems to me is that the court has been very restrained in its actions, treating the issue as one of privacy and legal custodianship for the disabled. The issue seems to be: who can determine what Terry Schiavo would have wanted? Her family? Her husband? The whole issue has been discussed over the issue of "rights" -- who has the right to decide to provide food or not for the disabled? The court does not have a capacity to respond for the Good of Life, but only is left with a language of rights to determine the case. Each individual must decide the good for his/her self -- that is our "right" to privacy. Of course, a good merely for an individual cannot participate in the Good at all. When the courts had the opportunity to be activist, instead they chose restraint in the name of privacy. The autonomy of the individual has been sustained -- the basis for American legal theory.

This seems to miss the issue completely, not legally, but Christianly. Christians must view life, not as a right, but as a gift. Here is one of most vulnerable and weak, so weak that she is unable to feed herself, one of the hungry. It does not seem to me that the Courts have ruled outside the rules of the United States legal system at all -- they have reaffirmed the Constitutions deepest convictions. The decisions shows the fundamental falsity of the US legal system.

Likewise, the New York Times reported that a Colorado state court disallowed a jury decision that condemned a man to death because members of the jury consulted a Bible. Nothing other than the supposedly unformed individual moral conscious could determine the matter.

The irony in this is thick. Obviously those who consulted the Scriptures were not capable of reading the Scriptures as Christians because they would again have realized that life is a gift, not a right to be taken away from anyone by the state. It is not the courts who should have taken the Scriptures away from these persons, but their churches -- if they were part of one (and I doubt that any were deeply immersed in the life of the church in its worship, sacraments, and works of mercy). Yet the courts demand that the person make judgments only as an autonomous human being, a citizen of the United States, not a tradition-based rationality such as Christians affirm that we are, ones that affirm life as a gift rather than a right that the State can give or take away. Here in order to sustain again individual autonomous morality, the Court is inappropriately activist, removing the moral formation of the Church from legal consideration of members of the jury.

In sum, it makes no difference whether courts are restrained or activistic in their decisions for Christians. The presuppositions of the system remind Christians that the judicial and legal system of the United States has no legitimacy for Christians. It is fundamentally a system that cannot reason according to the way things really are -- the gift of a Triune God who has called us through Jesus by the power of the Spirit.

Posted by johnwright at 10:21 AM | Comments (12)

Holy Week is here. Yesterday we read from Matthew 21 in the parking lot in French, Khmer, Spanish, and English, before processing into our various rooms where each of our four congregations worship in their own languages.

We did not observe Passion Sunday, but Palm Sunday -- I am counting on our congregation to show up for our Maunday Thursday and Good Friday services. Yet we did read from Isaiah 53. It provided for me an interesting context for thinking about Palm Sunday.

One never feels adequate in preaching. Yet one offers one's words in hope that the Spirit may faithfully shape us into the people of God as we prepare to go to the Eucharist together. My sermon from yesterday is in the extended entry. Your feedback is always appreciated.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Philippians 2:5-1
Matthew 21:1-11

Palm Sunday is an interesting day – happiness tinged with grief itself filled with joy; with Christ’s passion coming, Palm Sunday is full of irony that itself is made ironic by the Resurrection. Let’s not act like we don’t know the story, what we are to live through this next week: Jesus enters Jerusalem. hailed as king by the crowds. He will teach throughout the week in the Temple. He will meet with his disciples in an upper room on Thursday, be arrested during the night, crucified by the Romans the next day, be buried before the Sabbath. Then on Sunday God will raise him from the dead, and deaths reign will be broken. Sin, death, and Satan will have lost in the resurrected body of Jesus. Somehow through our readings today we have to let ourselves get caught up in the story, to find our place truthfully, to live out of this story as the story of all creation. The story begins with the shouts of the people as Jesus enters into Jerusalem.

1. Praise Yahweh, the God of Israel! God has brought the King into the Kingdom in Jesus!

In the years before Jesus, Herod the Great, king over Israel, died. Two sons got into a dispute afterward. When Archelaus, the oldest son, heard that his father had died, he dressed like king, came from outside Jerusalem and processed through the town. He made the not so subtle claim that he was the legitimate heir of Herod. Although he had not king been named king by the Romans, everyone in Jerusalem heard his claim. The King had come into his kingdom

We can’t miss what was going on the first Palm Sunday. Yes, it sounds humble, but this is a royal procession; it is Jesus’ claim to kingship. Jesus has come to Jerusalem. Across the valley, he comes up on a donkey. People had heard him talking of kingdom. Now here he is. An instantaneous procession springs up. The king has come into Jerusalem. Israel is to be restored around His rule. God has brought forth God’s reign in the body of Jesus. The end times, the messianic reign, has begun now. Justice will spring forth from Jerusalem. Jesus fulfills the promiseof the prophets. The real king has come.

Hear the shouts: Hosanna to the Son of David. Yah saves!!! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! A true, just government comes! The kingdom! It’s a political rally, a street demonstration. God is doing something new! Yah saves – it is not some otherworldly salvation of souls separate from bodies, nor some inner spiritual renewal so people can experience bondage and like it! No! Yah saves!! The kingdom has come in the body of the king, in the body of Jesus. Hosanna to the Son of David! The messianic age has begun!

2. Yet in the background a haunting counter melody takes place. Within a week, humanity will have rejected this king with his kingdom.

“He was despised, rejected by humans; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised . . . and we esteemed him not.” We can handle the first part of Isaiah’s prophecy. It describes what Jesus encountered in the next week. There is the whole list of grief, rejection, sorrow, encased within the repetition of “he was despised.”
We can feel the self-righteousness growing up in us . . . he was despised, despised for the claims about this kingdom, despised for the political renewal he brought to Israel, despised for the claims he made about himself. We can feel the anger in us, feel the sense of injustice directed against others. How dare they? How dare they crucify the Son of God who came into Jerusalem to establish God’s kingdom? If I’d of been there, I would have led the revolt against these people, forced them to confront their injustice, their exploitation, their cruelty, and coerced them to accept Jesus. Typical empire. If only we were in control, we could elect Jesus as King! We’d give him the authority to rule!

But then we hear, “we esteemed him not; we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. We like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” The text cuts close to our hearts. We see our problem: we want to authorize Jesus as king. We want Jesus to be king to make him beholden to our agenda. When we discover that we can’t separate Jesus’ political order from his body, from his kingship, from the fact that God, not us, elected this King, we recognize that we are just as guilty calling for his crucifixion as Pilate, the council of the High Priest, the crowds who are bought off for a few coins. We can’t make Jesus go our way; we don’t authorize Jesus. We can’t pick and chose what we like and what we don’t in Jesus.

Our problem is that we don’t really want to give up our own authority over our lives, our own ability to define what is important to us and not, our own ability to define the relationships that we enter, that we really want to use Jesus as a way to get more influence for ourselves. Therefore, together we stand and shout with our voices “Crucify him; Crucify him!” To the cross – he’s not on our side. Get him out of here! We see ourselves calling for Jesus’ crucifixion; we esteemed him not.

3. But the amazing thing is: God doesn’t shut us out of the kingdom. God uses our very sin, our rejection of Jesus, as the means to call us into God’s kingdom through Jesus’s faithfulness to God seen on the cross.

“He shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be righteous; and he shall bear their iniquities. He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” Through our rejection of Jesus’ royal claim, our participation in the sin that led to Jesus’ crucifixion, God is able to restore us to justice through Jesus’ faithfulness. Let’s take the mystification out of Jesus’ death for our sins – He died for our iniquities, he bore our sin literally. By rejecting his claims, by rejecting his kingdom, by rejecting that God elected him and refusing to submit to the revelation of God – by our sin – Jesus died on the cross. God did not will for Jesus to die. God willed for Jesus to be obedient in institution God’s kingdom – and Jesus was. Because of our sin, this entailed his death. Jesus became obedient, even unto death, even death on a cross.

Jesus did not give up on the kingdom, suddenly shift agendas, nor did he try to coerce us into following him. He accepted the violence of our sin, trusting God to be faithful. In his resurrection, we see that indeed, God is faithful; justice, obedience to God is possible. Jesus opens the path as the first-fruits of the new creation that many, even those who crucified him, might be made just through him! God takes our sins into the body of Jesus and redeems us as Jesus makes intercession for us in God’s mercy.

Jesus’s faithfulness calls us into the kingdom. It calls us today even more than before to say “Hosanna, blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” Jesus taking our sin into his body reorients our lives because the king has come, our political commitments, the claims made upon our lives by the powers of the world around us no longer have any teeth – they are only human claims, children playing a fantasy game. We may live justly, because in the broken, bloody body of the king, God opens a way for us into his kingdom that shall not fail, for He shall reign for ever and ever. For God has exalted him and one day, may it be one day soon, every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father! God takes our rejection of God’s own revelation in the King, Jesus, and calls us in God’s mercy, into the righteousness, the justice, the kingdom. The kingdom has come! Our sin has not stopped it; indeed, God converts our sin into God’s righteousness through the Son by the Spirit’s present with us today.

The king has come. This morning, though we have esteemed him not, the Spirit nonetheless keeps calling us into the kingdom. Here at this table we eat and drink in the Kingdom, participating now in the graciousness of God’s kingdom in Jesus. Here we experience again the entry into Jerusalem: Hosanna, hosanna in the highest! Here again our still voices cry, “Crucify Him, Crucify Him!” And here God’s voice nonetheless rings out as at the end of days: “Come with all the saints into the joys of my kingdom.” Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Come, friends, and be thankful.

Posted by johnwright at 12:29 PM | Comments (2)

I have been instructed by Tony, my youngest son, to include a weekly feature -- a rant, most likely because I am so practiced at them. So hopefully every Saturday morning I can share the joy of ranting with you. This week, the rant is under the "why don't folk get it?" category. On this, the second anniversary of the unjust invasion of Iraq in which many continue to die (see www.antiwar.com for yesterday's reported casualties), I'd like to share an article that I received from my friend, Father Simon Harak, of the War Resister's League. It is a moving piece, a subtle rant, the type that I just do not do very well. So I'll share others in the fine art of "subtle rant".

Instructions for Care: What Ashley Smith reminded us

By Susan Van Haitsma
March 17, 2005

There must be several reasons why the story of unarmed suburbanite, Ashley Smith peacefully winning over armed fugitive, Brian Nichols so captures the public imagination. Because news accounts of brute force being used to overcome brute force are the norm, this story stands out, offering a different kind of heroism. Audiences might applaud instinctively when the bad guy is trounced by the good guy, but when words and wits triumph over weapons, cheers rise from a deeper, more satisfied place.

My Jesuit friend puts it this way: Because every human being is created with instructions for care that recommend "Love your enemies," we should not be surprised when, like clothing that is washed or dried without regard to what is written on the label, we become misshapen in some way when we substitute vengefulness as our guide. Somehow, Ashley Smith recalled her instructions, or perhaps she lived by them so regularly that she naturally allowed love to be her guide during her time of crisis. Maybe there was some luck involved, or pure weariness on Nichols' part, that opened him to the possibility of love. But the aspect of the story that grabs people most, I think, is the underlying truth that Smith recognized and that saved both of them: Brian Nichols was not a monster, he was just a man.

By the time Nichols took Smith hostage, he had committed four terrible murders one after another while facing charges for a previous crime. It was a spree almost unheard of. "I cannot believe that's me on there," Smith reported Nichols saying when he saw himself later on the TV news. Similar sentiments have echoed during the trials of US soldiers convicted of using torture against Iraqi civilians. Soldiers who were described as gentle,caring persons also were capable of committing unthinkable abuse when a process of dehumanization was involved. What Smith seemed to be able to do when faced with a threatening, demeaning situation was break through the fear and indignity by asserting both her own and Nichols' humanity.

Smith recognized a man who needed a meal and someone to talk with. The media, meanwhile, had built the fugitive into a larger-than-life menace who was a danger to an entire city. In a way, Nichols was given more stature by the very institutions that vowed to undo him. I don't think it's a stretch to make a similar argument about what the US government did to mythologize former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, heaping upon one man so much vilification that the effect was actually a paradoxical inflation of the leader's standing in the world. By making him the embodiment of evil, the US loaned him more power than he really had. Following the invasion, when he emerged from his hideout disheveled and confused, suddenly the world saw the man as man-sized. Had it really required the full firepower of the most powerful military force in the world to capture this pitiful human being?

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community." Over and over, he stressed separating the doer from the deed. He believed this was a crucial element to nonviolent struggle not only because of the moral obligation to love our enemies, but because he knew that part of the "truth-force" that Gandhi taught was to understand that men are neither gods nor devils to be falsely exalted by either praise or scorn. A beloved community relies upon honesty and equality, which are both endangered when anyone is given the powerful and illusive label of "bad guy."

I have the luxury of distance in the Smith - Nichols case. If one of my family members had been among Nichols' victims, would I be able to see him as Smith did? Probably not at first. But, I believe that I would in time seek a meeting with him so that I could express my anger and grief directly and ask for some kind of reconciliation. That is something I could ask of a man, not a monster.

Van Haitsma is active with Central Texas Fellowship of Reconciliation and Nonmilitary Options for Youth

Posted by johnwright at 8:16 AM | Comments (2)

Yesterday I spent in Temecula, interviewing candidates for various ordainted offices in the Church of the Nazarene. The discourse of such gatherings are interesting -- and often difficult, not as much for the candidates, but for the elders entrusted with making judgments about the call, gifts, graces, and qualifications of the candidates. On thing for sure, wisdom in responding to the issue of divorce and remarriage among ordination candidates is a primary point of tension within the clergy in the Church of the Nazarene.

As I get started, I have some material I would like to post that has been "built-up" over the past few months. I had hoped to get started blogging with Ash Wednesday, but, as usual, I'm way behind. So the extended entry is a little paper that I gave as part of a panel discussion in Seattle a few week ago. I will put some other things up as I get caught up on my back blog.

The Church in the Shadow of Wesley
Panel Presentation at the Wesleyan Theological Society Meeting
Seattle Pacific University, March 5, 2005

John Wesley casts a very small shadow over the church today, even among, maybe especially among, those who call upon his name as a founder of their distinct brand of ecclesial existence and thought. The fundamental structure of the 18th century Methodist practices have been transformed by the rise of the modernist liberal nation-state that reduced the Methodists and their heirs to “denominations.” Wesley’s thought became interpreted within a modernist tradition of theological correlationist thought called “the Wesleyan.”

Perhaps it is even wrong to ask Wesley to cast a shadow – to ask for a “Wesleyan shadow” over the church is to violate what Wesley was about, to show how little we have really learned from his witness, how we have read his text through concerns to make him relevant to legitimate our own agendas of respectability within the demographic groups that we believe can afford us more influence. We have come to be everything that Wesley feared his Methodists would become through assimilation into structures provided by a world that stressed upward socio-economic mobility in order to exert greater and greater political influence within host societies. I personally am the epitome of what Wesley feared his Methodists might become.

If we were to repent, if we would let Wesley’s witness be a means of grace for my sanctification, what sort of embodied commitments would we bring to the Table? First, the Table would have to be the Table of the Lord, the Lord’s Supper, incorporation into body of Christ through the body and blood of Jesus in the bread and the cup. We could not be at a table of protest, a protestant table; we must be gathered at the table of Thanksgiving, a Eucharistic table. The Lord’s Table is found only within the church catholic. We would not seek to belong to a group of protesters, for we are all guests at the Table; Christ is the host. We would join with the saints through the ages in thanksgiving for the gifts of God for the people of God through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The requirement would not be to protest others as we gather, but to engage in repentance ourselves. We would be a people who were willing to learn that we are sinners in order to repent of inward sin, asking for the removal of my evil tempers in order to be filled with holy tempers, in perfect love of God and neighbor. We would seek to emulate the saints, particular those who lived and died for Christ before Constantine’s conversion – the grand blow against true religion.

Of course, given that we have been so deeply malformed by desires implanted in us by the world, to undergo genuine repentance, either as an unbeliever or within the believer, would be to join a group of disciplined Christian ascetics, much like catholic monastics, willing to devote our lives to the works of mercy and devotion as described by the church catholic. It would be to make all we can, save all we can, and give all we can for the redistribution of wealth to the poor, especially the poor of the church. We would to take personally responsibility to visit the poor, feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison. We would refuse frivolous activities, fast, pray, search the Scriptures, not return evil for evil, but overcome evil with good. We would be part of a constant catechism much like that found in the baptismal catechism of Hippolytus from the early second century.

In sum, we would reject the distortions of ecclesial life placed upon us by the Reformation and then, modernity, and return to the life of the church as witnessed before Constantine. We would learn to live the practices of this pre-Constantinian church today, supported by deep immersion into the Augustinian/Thomistic tradition of Christian reflection upon God for the sake of being perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect, as we await the consummation of all things in Christ. Maybe it is not a shadow that we need from Wesley, but a future.

Posted by johnwright at 9:51 AM | Comments (2)

It is with fear and trepidation that I enter the blogosphere. Yet cyberspace gives a wonderful opportunity to share thoughts together as we pass through this life. Below in the extended entry is a written copy of my sermon for yesterday, the fourth Sunday of Lent. I look forward to hearing from you and posting with at least semi-regularity!

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Romans 6:23

Can these bones live? The image from Ezekiel pictures the human remains from a battlefield. The image is about as ugly as it gets. The image has haunted me all week. I couldn’t leave it because I read a story on the United States use of phosphorous weapons in Fallujah in November. The article had pictures of incinerated human skulls – dry bones. Can these bones live? I’ve been thinking about the struggles of our lives that we experience, the psychological/moral struggles made ever so real by a friend that I taught last semester whose life ended this week in carbon monoxide poisoning in his car. Can these bones live? And I need to say, Yes!! These bones can live! Here we are in the midst of our Lenten reflections, a time of fasting and self-examination. I want us to hear the good news of the Spirit’s coming upon and making these bones live – justice in creation, healing within the self. That is our hope.

Yet we need to be careful. It is so easy at this point to move to idolatry, to an animated corpse, a corpse to consume a spirit, even a spiritual corpse, and think that this is what we are about. We can hear this passage as a call to find meaning, authenticity, justice, fulfilling experience with the spirit. Listen to a contemporary psychotherapist speak about this danger that comes from the formation given to us by the fallen, sinful world around us: “The self is now not only suffering from feeling unreal, and thereby somewhat passively hoping for a cure . . . it is also aggressively, sometimes desperately, acquisitive. It must consume in order to be soothed and satisfied; it must ‘take in’ and merge with a . . . celebrity, an ideology, or a drug, or it will be in danger of feeling worthless, confused, and despairing” (Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America, p. 82). We are in danger. We can so easy turn the Spirit into some sort of soothing experience within, or the Spirit into a source of spirituality for an ideology of justice without so that we might meaningfully right all the wrongs within the world without having them acknowledge and participate in the Triune God revealed in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit. If we fall into this danger, we will discover our lives and the congregation being pulled apart in the middle, waffling back and forth between a false distinction between the private and the public, personal experience and public activism. We will find baptism, engaging together in works of mercy and devotion, reading the Scriptures, and participating together in the Lord’s Supper less and less central to who we are as we try to ask, Can these bones live? We’ll find ourselves mourning for the dead slaughtered in Iraq while celebrating the “freedom” for abortions in the United States or mourning for the slaughter of the innocents in abortion while celebrating the growth of “freedom” in Iraq, rather than confessing with Paul that “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ”. We need to take care not to fall into idolatry to accept options that the world seems to give us as the only ones, the way the world has tried to form us into experiencing life as a consuming self in responding to “Can these bones live?” It seems to me that we need to hear the apostle Paul at this point from Romans 6. Can these bones live? Yes! For the Spirit that brings life to the dead is the Spirit of obedience for our sanctification.

1. Can these bones live? Yes, and life begins in obedience. Paul states in v. 17: Thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, and having been freed from sin, you have become slaves to righteousness.

A. Can these bones live? Yes. But first we have to live obedient to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. If we could change the goal of our lives from trying to live meaningfully, trying to live fulfilled, trying to live purposefully, trying to live an abstract notion of justice, to living by the Spirit obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, then these bones could live. How? What is this form of teaching?

B. I am convinced that this form, this standard is found in the sayings of Jesus, recorded for us in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6. Paul here is talking in Romans 6 about the baptismal process, a movement from one realm of allegiances to another. In baptism, Christians were initiated into what the kingdom of God begun in Jesus, the kingdom for which Jesus died, the kingdom for which God the Father raised him to life, defeating sin, death, and Satan, and taught what being a part of this kingdom entailed. Already in Rome Christians had been kicked out of town because they would not be slaves to sin, the world that the Romans taught them was natural. Already many Romans, especially the elite, saw Christians as haters of humanity, intolerant, difficult, because they would not participate in the practices of the world around them, but instead, cared for each other in allegiance to this Jesus whom the Romans had crucified. Instead of members of the empire, instead of believing that they could reform the system so that it could save people, these people insisted that they were members of a kingdom that was yet to come in its fullness, a kingdom in which they already participated where the poor were blessed, the hungry fed, the outsider welcomed, the naked clothed, the sick healed. The Christians believed that they themselves were members of a kingdom in the church that did not distinguish between private piety and public acts, a personal righteousness and public just policy. They knew that one could only be part of a just community if one worshipped the true God the Father and the Son Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. They knew that this worship had to be reflected in the habits of the individuals as they lived as part of a people called together by Jesus. These Christian people had been taught that they would not divorce and remarry because it was adultery, at the same time they were called to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Before baptism these people were taught that before you take the speck out of the eye of your brother, we’d better take the log out of our own eyes. They were taught to forgive so that they might be forgiven, to condemn not so that they not be condemned. They were taught that seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, his justice. This is how dry, dead bones live. This is the standard of teaching to which you were entrusted as well. Obedience to the kingdom of God in Jesus as recorded in the Scriptures, not some private voice within our inner person, is the obedience to the standards of teaching to which we are entrusted in our baptism.

C. Paul contrasts obedience to this standard of teaching with obedience to sin – singular. Sin here is not violating the laws of the society around us – and getting caught. Sin is not irresponsible choices, nor our struggle feeling estranged and lonely. Sin is not separation. Sin is singular because it is the formation, the loyalties, obedience that a fallen world encodes into our bodies. Sin is the perversion of the good world that God created, taking God’s good creation and making it a world that leads to death, to dry bones, to incinerated bodies, to carbon monoxide poisoning, to psychological distress, to starvation because of corrupt distribution of goods, to reducing all of life to power struggles. This fallen world slices right through our bodies, obviously in the pains we feel, the past that haunts us, the type of struggles we face, even to our deepest understandings of our own self. The sinfulness of the world is so subtle. It grasps us, not as obviously evil, but as perversions of what is good. Unless we give ourselves entirely over to obedience to God as seen in Jesus and the truthfulness about ourselves this entails, to the justice, the righteousness of the kingdom where Jesus is Lord, we can’t even begin to find the depth of slavery that this world has placed upon us. Death will haunt us, for death, like sin, is the loss of what is good, that is life. We must hear that the end of obedience to sin is death, eternal death.

D. Can these bones live? Yes, but only when we commit our lives to obedience to the standard of teaching to which we have been entrusted.

2. For in obedience, we will find sanctification by the Spirit. As Paul says in v. 19, Now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification.

A. Sanctification, being made holy, is nothing more than being set apart for the glory of God, being made different from the world around us. Sanctification is separation, a holy difference from the world, not to be odd, but because the world is not all that it really is. All creation in its goodness was originally sanctified, set apart for God in its goodness, its fullness. But in the sinfulness of the world, the world, humanity, our own selves being less than what they are because of the lack that is sin, sanctification is the restoration of who we really are by participating in the Love that is the very Life that is God, Father, Son, and Spirit.

B. Obedience is for sanctification. Obedience to the standard of teaching is not for a moralism to show that we are more righteous than they are, whoever they are. Obedience is for sanctification, a setting apart, a forming of us as a people into a holy nation, a kingdom of priest, a people, communally and personally, different from the world. Obedience is for our sanctification, the removal of the inward sin that so besets us, the deprivations that take us from being who God created us to be, the obedience to the world that has become encoded into our bodies. Obedience is for sanctification. In obedience to the teachings of Jesus from the heart, the Spirit has to remake us, has to renew us by the transformation of our minds, has to teach us over and over again from within that our lives are ultimately for the love of God and neighbor, or we will be reduced back to dry bones. In obedience to such simple things as a life embedded in the acts of mercy, living out the teaching of Jesus, the Spirit must remake us into people who love others, not because people are naturally and easily loveable, but because God loves them; the Spirit must make us into persons who can forgive without resentment, not because once we forgive, other immediately change, but because we know that God has forgiven us; the Spirit must remake us beyond our own inner, psychological struggles because we are part of a people that need us if we are going to participate in a kingdom where the poor are blessed and the hungry fed; the Spirit must remake us beyond the chemical dependencies we have with alcohol, nicotine, weed, narcotics, because we recognize that our bodies are gifts of God given to us for the sake of others; the Spirit must remake us even from the lure of a spirituality that turns God into a commodity for our own personal consumption like a designer drug that wants to leave behind a commitment to a particular institution called the church because it is full of hypocrites, power hungry idiots, and interferes with my ability to set my own schedule of events; the Spirit must make us into persons who above all live thankfully because we know that God in God’s love shared the Son who gave himself in obedience for our sins that we might have life, and life everlasting;

C. Obedience is for our sanctification, personally and communally – and we cannot play those against each other. We can be holy as individuals only as we are part of a holy people, and we can only be a holy people when there are holy persons among us: You are the body of Christ, and individually members of it. And it is only as we participate in the holiness of the head, that is Christ, in obedience, that we ourselves, by the Spirit’s cleansing work within us, can be made holy.

D. God the Father calls us to obedience to Christ for a certain end: our sanctification by the Spirit, as a congregation, and as individuals within it.

Conclusion: Can these bones live? Listen, can you hear the rattling? “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land; then you shall know that I, the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, says the Lord.” “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord.” In obedience to the standard of teachings to which you have been entrusted, come in faith to the gifts of God for the people of God, the body and blood of our Lord, given for you. Coming to take the body and blood of Jesus is not our idea; it is not some form of marketing tool for a special sort of spirituality for you to find meaning in your life. It is obedience to the standard of teaching commanded us by Jesus Christ in the Gospels. And it is therefore for your sanctification. Come, please, please, please, above all else, be thankful.

Posted by johnwright at 8:22 AM | Comments (11)

December 24, 2004

A little over a year ago, some San Diego residents lost everything they owned in the Cedar fire. In response, families invited others into their homes; food services for the hungry appeared; emergency shelters sprung up quickly for the displaced; policy-makers established long-term programs for the sustainable life of those who suffered the calamity of their sudden poverty.

Last Sunday, Dave gathered to worship as part of our congregation. Dave had lost everything he owned the previous week as well. He watched from afar as police in La Jolla took his sleeping bag and backpack that he had carefully hidden in the bushes, threw them into the back of their squad car and pulled away. Despite his best attempts to remain inconspicuous, someone had seen where he was sleeping at night. Dave became visible, thus committing a crime in San Diego: being visible while poor.

Police seem to have begun a campaign of aggressive prosecution of the crime of being visible while poor in San Diego. Ticketing those sleeping on the sidewalks for not having housing would seem to represent a new level of moral callousness, except for events of last week when the winter shelters opened. Persons who slept in line overnight to get a spot when the shelter opened were ticketed; those who came too late to secure a spot were ticketed as well. Both groups were guilty of loitering -- they became visible while poor even as they tried to slip into the shelter to become invisible.

Yet loitering itself is a class crime in an attempt to stop the poor from being visible. An all-night line for Chargers playoff tickets would be a sign of civic pride with full media coverage; for the poor trying to secure refuge from the elements of winter with no other options, it is a crime.

Herding the poor into a distinct corner of the city to struggle for the meager resources available by well-meaning agencies is another strategy to keep the poor invisible. Yet downtown development has changed the ability of the poor to stay invisible even in their sequestered corner of America's Finest City.

It has become controversial even for churches to feed the hungry who live in the hotels and on the streets downtown. In walking to a location to eat, the poor commit a crime -- they become visible.

Being visible while poor is a crime because we now live in a society where all of life is market driven. One's ability to consume in the public marketplace determines human worth, dignity and status.

We have discovered that we can treat all of life and life's services as commodities to be traded. Resources flow to the highest bidder. In such a system, the poor cannot win. They just do not have resources to consume.

Moreover, those who have resources go out of their way to avoid encountering the poor; the poor cannot contribute to their accumulation of wealth, they can only challenge it. The bodies of the poor therefore reduce the market value of property and services.

Yet as property values and rents increase in the San Diego area and development causes previously invisible areas to become visible to the propertied, the poor are trapped in a circumstance not of their making: they have no space to remain invisible.

For the good of the market, the poor must be removed from visibility. Thus they are increasingly guilty of their particular crime: being visible while poor.

For Christians, such a situation should be morally unbearable. Not only do we believe that all human beings are created in the image of God, we also confess as Lord, Jesus Christ, who "though he was rich, yet for your sakes became poor" (2 Cor. 8:9).

As the Christmas season reminds us, this poverty was so extreme that Jesus was placed in an animal trough at his birth, as his transient mother and stepfather attempted to survive on the streets. For Christians the poor are not a problem to be solved nor criminals waiting to be removed from view -- they are blessed, for theirs is the kingdom of God that we believe God has begun in Jesus (Luke 6:20).

For all members of the San Diego community, it is time to examine the dehumanization of fellow human beings that has arisen as an unintended consequence of the shrinking supply of property. We must remember that economic development is not a good in and of itself. It is a good only in so far as it contributes to the good of sustaining life, all life, not the life of a chosen few.

It is time to mobilize the intellectual, social and economic resources of the region to design a response not solely dictated by strict market forces to recover the conditions for flourishing life here in San Diego.

Dr. Wright is pastor of the English-Speaking Congregation of the Church of the Nazarene in Mid-City. He also is professor of theology and Christian scriptures in the School of Theology and Christian Ministry at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Posted by johnwright at 9:48 AM | Comments (9)