4.30.2013 COST OF DISCIPLESHIP 4

MATTHEW 5; OF THE 'EXTRAORDINARINESS' OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE excerpts from chapters 6,13

CHAPTER 6 - THE BEATITUDES

Jesus calls His disciples blessed in the hearing of the crowd,
and the crowd is called upon as a startled witness.
the heritage which god had promised to israel as a whole
is here attributed to the little flock of disciples
whom Jesus had chosen.
'theirs is the kingdom of heaven'.
but disciples and people are one,
for they are all members of the church which is called of God.
hence the aim of this beatitude is to bring
all who hear it to decision and salvation.
all are called to be what in the reality of God
they are already.
the disciples are called blessed
because they have obeyed the call of Jesus
and the people as a whole because they are heirs of the promise.
but will they now claim their heritage
by believing in Jesus Christ and his word?
or will they fall into apostasy by refusing to accept Him?
that is the question which still remains to be answered.

'blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven'.
privation is the lot of the disciples in every sphere of their lives.
they are poor ..(luke 6.20)
...they have no security, no possessions to call their own,
not even a foot of earth to call their home,
no earthly society to claim their absolute allegiance.
nay more, they have no spiritual power, experience or knowledge
to afford them consolation or security.
for His sake they have lost all.
in following Him they lost even their own selves
and everything that could make them rich.
now they are poor
-so inexperienced, so stupid, that they have no other hope
but Him who called them.
Jesus knows all about the others too,
the representatives and preachers of the national religion,
who enjoy greatness and renown,
whose feet are firmly planted on the earth,
who are deeply rooted in the culture and piety of the people
and moulded by the spirit of the age.
yet it is not they, but the disciples who are called blessed
-theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
that kingdom dawns on them,
the little band who for the sake of Jesus live a life
of absolute renunciation and poverty.
and in that very poverty they are heirs of the kingdom.
they have their treasure in secret,
they find it on the cross.
and they have the promise that they will one day
visibly enjoy the glory of the kingdom,
which in principle is already realized
in the utter poverty of the cross.

this beatitude is poles removed from the caricatures of it which
appear in political and social manifestos.
the antichrist also calls the poor blessed,
but not for the sake of the cross,
which embraces all poverty and transforms it into a source of
blessing
he fights the cross with political and sociological ideology.
he may call it christian, but that only makes him
a still more dangerous enemy.

'blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.'
with each beatitude the gulf is widened between the disciples and the people,
their call to come forth from the people becomes increasingly manifest.
by 'mourning' Jesus, of course, means
doing without what the world calls peace and prosperity:
he means refusing to be in tune with the world
or to accommodate oneself to its standards.
such men mourn for the world,
for its guilt, its fate and its fortune.
while the world keeps holiday they stand aside
and while the world sings, 'gather ye rose buds while ye may',
they mourn.
they see that for all the jollity on board, the ship is beginning to sink.
the world dreams of
progress
..power
..the future,
but the disciples meditate on
the end..
the last judgement..
the coming of the kingdom.
to such heights the world cannot rise.
and so the disciples are strangers in the world,
unwelcome guests and disturbers of the peace.
no wonder the world reflects them!
why does the christian church so often have to look on
from outside when the nation is celebrating?
(note: or rejoicing..will God now be heard and sought?... when the nation is at wits end?)
have church men no understanding and sympathy for their fellow men?
have they become victims of misanthropy?
nobody loves his fellow men better than a disciple,
nobody understands his fellowmen better than the christian fellowship
and that very love impels them to stand aside and mourn
it was a happy and suggestive thought of luther,
to translate the greek word here by the german leidtragen (sorrow bearing).
for the emphasis lies on the BEARING of sorrow.
the disciple community does not shake off sorrow
as though it were no concern of its own, but willingly bears it.
and in this way they show how close
are the bonds which bind them to the rest of humanity.
butt at the same time they do not go out of their way
to look for suffering
or try to contract out of it
by adopting an attitude of contempt and disdain.
they simply bear the suffering
which comes their way as they try to follow Jesus Christ,
and bear it for HIS sake.
sorrow cannot tire them or wear them down,
it cannot embitter them or cause them to break down under the strain;
far from it,
for they bear their sorrow in the strength of Him
who bears them up,
who bore the whole suffering of the world upon the cross.
they stand as the bearers of sorrow in the fellowship of the crucified:
they stand as strangers in the world in the power of Him
who was such a stranger to the world
that it crucified Him.
this is their comfort,
or better still, this Man is their comfort, the comforter luke 2.25.
the community of strangers find their comfort in the cross,
they are comforted by being cast upon the place
where the Comforter of israel awaits them.
thus do they find their rue home with their crucified Lord,
both here and in eternity.

'blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
this community of strangers possesses no inherent right of its own
to protect its members in the world,
nor do they claim such rights,
for they are meek,
they renounce every right of heir own and live for the sake of
Jesus Christ.

when reproached, they hold their peace;
when treated with violence they endure it patiently;
when men drive them from their presence, they yield their ground.
they will not go to law to defend their rights,
or make a scene when they suffer injustice,
nor to they insist on their legal rights.
they are determined to leave their rights to God alone..
their right is in the will of their lord
-that and no more.
they show by every word and gesture
that they do not belong to this earth.
leave heaven o them, says the world in its pity,
that is where they belong.
but Jesus says; 'they shall inherit the earth.'
to these, the powerless and he disenfranchised, the very earth belongs.
those who now possess it by violence and injustice shall lose it,
and those who here have utterly renounced it,
who were meek to he point o he cross,
shall rule the new earth.
we must not interpret this as a reference
to God's exercise of juridicial punishment within the wold..
what it means is that when the kingdom of heaven descends, \
the face of the earth will be renewed
and it will belong to the flock of Jesus.
God does not forsake the earth:
He made it, He sent His Son to it,
and on it He built His church.
thus a beginning has already been made in this present age.
a sign has been given.
the powerless have here and now received a plot of earth,
for they have the church and its fellowship,
its good, its brothers and sisters,
in the midst of persecutions even to the length of the cross.
the renewal of the earth begins at golgotha,
where the meek One died,
and from thence it will spread.
when the kingdom finally comes, he meek shall possess the earth.

blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness:
for hey shall be filled.'
not only do the followers of Jesus renounce their rights,
they renounce heir own righteousness too.
they get no praise for their achievements or sacrifices.
they cannot have righteousness except
by hungering and thirsting for it
(this applies equally to their own righteousness
and to the righteousness of god on earth)
always they look forward to the future righteousness of God,
but they cannot establish it or themselves.
those who follow Jesus grow hungry and thirsty on the way.
they are longing for the forgiveness of all sin,
foo complete renewal, for the renewal too of the earth
and the full establishment of God's law.
they are still involved in the world's curse, and affected by its sin.
He whom they follow must die accursed on the cross,
with a desperate cry for righteousness on His lips:
'My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?'
but the disciple is not above his master,
He follows in His steps.
happy are they who have the promise that they shall be filled,
for the righteousness they receive will be no empty promise,
but real satisfying.
hey will eat the bread of life in the messianic feast.
they are blessed because they already enjoy this bead her and now,
for in their hunger hey are sustained by bread of life,
he bliss of sinners.

'blessed are he merciful, for hey shall obtain mercy'.
these men without possessions of power,
these strangers on the earth,
these sinners,
these followers of Jesus,
have in their life with Him renounced their own dignity,
for they are merciful.
as if their own needs and their own distress were not enough,
they take upon themselves the distress and humiliation and sin of others.
they have an irresistible love o the down trodden,
the sick,
the wretched,
the wronged,
the outcast
and all who are tortured with anxiety.
they o out and seek all who are enmeshed in the oils of sin and guilt.
no distress is too great,
no sin too appalling for their pity.
if any man falls into disgrace,
the merciful will sacrifice their own honour to shield him
and take his shame upon themselves.
they will be found consorting with publicans and sinners,
careless of the shame they incur thereby.
in order that they may be merciful
they cast away the most priceless treasure of human life
their personal dignity and honour.
for the only honour and dignity they know is their Lord's own mercy,
to which alone they owe their very lives.
He was not ashamed of His disciples,
He became the brother of mankind,
and bore their shame unto the death of the cross.
that is how Jesus, the crucified, was merciful.
His followers owe heir lives entirely to hat mercy.
it makes them forget their won honour ad dignity,
ad seek the society of sinners.
they are glad to incur reproach, for they know that then they are blessed.
one day God Himself will come down
and take upon Himself their sin and shame.
He will cover them with his own honour and remove their disgrace.
it will be His glory to bear the shame of sinners
and to clothe them with His honour.
blessed are the merciful, for hey have the merciful for their Lord.

'blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.'
who is pure in heat?
only those who have surrendered their hearts completely to Jesus
that he may reign in them alone.
only those whose hearts are undefiled by their own evil
-and by heir own virtues too.
the pure in heart have a child like simplicity like adam before the fall,
innocent alike of good and evil:
heir hearts are not ruled by heir conscience,
but by the will of Jesus.
if men renounce their own good,
if in penitence they have renounced their own hears,
if they rely solely upon Jesus,
the His word purifies their hearts.
purity of heart is here contrasted with all outward purity,
even the purity of high intentions.
the pure heart is pure alike of good and evil,
it belongs exclusively to Christ
and looks only on Him who goes before.
only they will see God,
who in his life have looked solely unto Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
for then their hearts are free from all defiling fantasies
and are not distracted by conflicting desires and intentions.
they are wholly absorbed by the contemplation of god.
they shall see God,
whose hears have become a reflection of the image of Jesus Christ.

'blessed are the peacemakers; for hey shall be called he children of God.'
the followers of Jesus have been called to peace.
when He called them they found their peace,
for He is their peace.
but now they are told that they must not only have peace but MAKE it.
and to that end they renounce all violence and tumult.
in the cause of Christ nothing is to be gained  by such thoughts.
His kingdom is one of peace,
and the mutual greeting of His flock is a greeting of peace.
His disciples keep the peace by choosing
to endure suffering themselves rather than inflict it on others.
THEY MAINTAIN FELLOWSHIP  WHERE OTHERS WOULD BREAK IT OFF.
they renounce all self assertion
and quietly suffer in the face o hatred and wrong.
in so doing they overcome evil with good
and establish the peace of God in the midst of a world of war and hate.
but nowhere will that peace be more manifest than where they meet
the wicked in peace and are ready to suffer at His hands.
the peacemakers will carry the cross with their Lord,
for it was on he cross that peace was made.
now that they are partners in Christ's work of reconciliation,
they are called the sons of god as He is the Son of God.

'blessed are they that have been persecuted for righteousness' sake:
for heirs is the kingdom of heaven.'
this does not refer to the righteousness of God,
but to suffering in a just cause (not the lack of the definite article),
suffering for their own just judgements and actions.
for it is by these that they who renounce possessions,
fortune, rights, righteousness, honour, and force
for the sake of following Christ,
will be distinguished from the world.
the world will be offended at them,
and so the disciples will be persecuted for righteousness' sake.
not recognition,
but rejection,
is the reward they get from the world or their message and works.
it is important that Jesus gives His blessing not merely
for suffering
incurred directly for the confession of His name,
but suffering in any just cause.
they receive the same promise as the poor,
for in persecution they are their equals in poverty....

CHAPTER 13   THE ENEMY-THE 'EXTRAORDINARY'

you have heard that it was said,
thou shalt love thy neighbour and hate thine enemy:
but I say unto you,
LOVE YOUR ENEMIES
and PRY FOR THEM THAT PERSECUTE YOU;
that ye may be sons of your Father which is in heaven;
for He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good,
and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.
for if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye?
do not even the publicans the same?
and if ye salute your brethren only,
what do ye more than others?
do not even the gentiles the same?
ye therefore shall be perfect,
as your heavenly Father is perfect. matt. 5.43-8

here, for the first time in the sermon on the mount, we meet the word
which sums up the whole of its message,
the word 'love'.
LOVE IS DEFINED IN UNCOMPROMISING TERMS
AS THE LOVE OF OUR ENEMIES.
had Jesus only told us to love our brethren,
we might have misunderstood what He meant by love,
bug now He leaves us in no doubt whatever as to His meaning.

the enemy was no mere abstraction for the disciples.
they knew Him only too well.
they came across him every day.
there were those who cursed them for undermining
the faith and transgressing the law.
there were those who hated them
for leaving all they had for Jesus' sake.
there were those who insulted and derided them
for their weakness and humility.
there were those who persecuted them as prospective dangerous revolutionaries
and sought to destroy them.
some of their enemies were numbered among the champions of the popular religion,
who resented the exclusive claim of Jesus.
these last enjoyed considerable power and reputation.
and then there was the enemy which would immediately
occur to every jew,  the political enemy in rome.
over and above all these, the disciples also had to contend with
the hostility which invariably falls to the lot of those
who refuse to follow the crowd
and which brought them daily mockery, derision and threats.

it is true that the old testament never explicitly
bids us hate our enemies.
on the contrary, it tells us more than once
that we must love them
(ex. 23.4f; prov. 25.21f; gen. 45.1f; I sam. 24.7; II kings 6.22 etc.)
but Jesus is not talking of ordinary enmity,
but of that which exists between the people of God and the world.
the wars of israel were the only 'holy wars' in history,
for they were the wars of God
against the world of idols.
it is not this enmity which Jesus condemns,
for then he would have condemned the whole history
of g
God's dealings with His people.
on the contrary, he affirms the old covenant.
He is as concerned as the old testament with the defeat of the enemy
and the victory of the people of God.
no, the real meaning of this saying is that Jesus is again releasing his disciples
from the political associations of the old israel.
from now on there can be no more wars of faith.
the only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him.

to the natural man, the very notion of loving his enemies
is an intolerable offence
and quite beyond his capacity:
it cuts across his ideas of good and evil.
more important still, to man under the law,
the idea of loving his enemies is clean contrary
to the law of God,
which requires men to sever all connection with their enemies
and to pass judgement on them.
Jesus, however, takes the law of God in his own hands and
expounds its true meaning.
the will of God, to which the law gives expression,
is that men should defeat their enemies by loving them.

in the new testament our enemies are those who harbour hostility against us,
not those against whom we cherish hostility,
for Jesus refuses to reckon with such a possibility.
the christian must treat his enemy as a brother
and requite his hostility with love.
his behaviour must be determined not by the way others treat him,
but by the treatment he himself receives from Jesus;
it has only one source, and that is the will of Jesus.

by our enemies Jesus means those who are quite intractable
and utterly unresponsive to our love,
who forgive us nothing when we forgive them all,
who requite our love with hatred and our service with derision,
'for the love that i had unto them, lo,
they now take my contrary part:
but i give myself unto prayer' ps. 109.4
love asks nothing in return,
but seeks those who need it.
and who needs our love more than those who
are consumed with hatred and are utterly devoid of love?
who in other words deserves our love more than our enemy?
where is love more glorified than where she dwells in the midst
of her enemies?

christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another,
except that the more bitter our enemy's hatred,
the greater his need of love.
be his enmity political or religious,
he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus
but unqualified love.
in such love there is no inner discord
between private person and official capacity.
in both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not christians at all.
am i asked how this love is to behave?
Jesus gives the answer:
bless, do good and pray for your enemies
without reserve and without respect of persons.

'LOVE YOUR ENEMIES'
the preceding commandment had spoken only of the passive endurance of evil;
here Jesus goes further and bids us not only to bear with evil
and the evil person patiently,
not only to refrain from treating him as he treats us,
but actively to engage in heart felt love towards him.
we are to serve our enemy in all things without hypocrisy
and with utter sincerity.
no sacrifice which a lover would make for his beloved
is too great for us to make for our enemy.
if out of love for our brother we are willing to sacrifice
good, honour and life,
we must be prepared to do the same for our enemy.
we are not to imagine that this is to condone his evil;
such a love proceeds from strength rather than weakness,
from truth rather than fear
and therefore it cannot be guilty of the hatred of another.
and who is to be the object of such a love,
if not those whose hearts are stifled with hatred?

BLESS THEM THAT PERSECUTE YOU.
if our enemy cannot put up with us any longer and takes to cursing us,
our immediate reaction must be to lift up our hands and bless him.
our enemies are the blessed of the Lord.
their curse can do us no harm.
may their poverty be enriched with all the riches of God,
with the blessing of Him whom they seek to oppose in vain.
we are ready to endure their curses so long as
they redound to their blessing.

DO GOOD TO THEM THAT HATE YOU.
we must love not only in though and word, but in deed,
and there are opportunities of service in every circumstance of daily life.
'if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him to drink rom. 12.20
as brother stands by brother in distress,
binding up his wounds and soothing his pain,
so let us show our love towards our enemy.
there is no deeper distress to be found in the world,
no pain more bitter than our enemy's .
nowhere is service more necessary or more blessed
than when we serve our enemies.
'it is more blessed to give than to receive.'

PRAY FOR THEM WHICH DESPITEFULLY USE YOU..
this is the supreme demand,.
through the medium of prayer we go to our enemy,
stand by his side and plead for him to God.
Jesus does not promise that when we bless our enemies
and do good to them
they will not despitefully use and persecute us.
they certainly will.
but not even that can hurt or overcome us,
so long as we pray for them.
for if we pray for them, we are taking their distress and poverty,
their guilt and perdition upon ourselves and pleading to God for them.
we are doing vicariously for them what they cannot do
for themselves.
every insult they utter only serves to
bind us more closely to god and them.
their persecution of us only serves to bring them
nearer to reconciliation with God and to further triumphs of love.

how then does love conquer?
by asking not how the enemy treats here
but only how Jesus treated her.
the love for our enemies takes us along the way of the cross
and into fellowship with the crucified.
the more we are driven along this road,
the more certain is the victory of love over the enemy's hatred.
for then it is not the disciple's own love,
but the love of Jesus Christ alone,
who fro the sake of His enemies went to the cross
and prayed for them as He hung there.
in the face of the cross
the disciples realized that they too were His enemies
and that He had overcome them by His love.
it is this that opens the disciple's eyes
and enables him to see his enemy as a brother.
he knows that he owes his very life to one,
who though he was His enemy,
treated him as a brother  and accepted him,
who made him His neighbour, and
drew him into fellowship with Himself.
the disciple can now perceive that even his enemy is the
object of God's love,
and that he stands like himself
beneath the cross of Christ.
God asked us nothing about our virtues or our vices,
for in His sight even our virtue was ungodliness.
God's love sought out His enemies who needed it
and whom he deemed worthy of it.
God loves His enemies
-that is the glory of His love,
as every follower of Jesus knows;
through Jesus he has become a partaker in this love.
for god allows His sun to shine upon the just and the unjust..
but it is not only the earthly sun and the earthly rain:
the 'Sun of righteousness' and the rain of God's word
which are on the sinner,
and reveal the grace of the heavenly Father.
perfect,all-inclusive love is the act of the Father,
it is also the act of the sons of God.
as it was the act of the only begotten Son.

'this commandment, that we should love our enemies and forgo revenge
will grow even more urgent in the holy struggle which lies before us
and in which we partly have already been engaged for years.
in it love and hate engage in mortal combat.
it is the urgent duty of every christian soul to prepare itself for it.
the time is coming when the confession of the living God
will incur not only the hatred and the fury of the world,
for on the whole it has come to that already,
but complete ostracism from 'human society, as they call it.
the christians will be hounded from place to place,
subjected to physical assault, maltreatment and death of every kind.
we are approaching an age of widespread persecution.
therein lies the true significance of all the movements and conflicts
of our age.
our adversaries seek to root out the christian church and the christian faith
because they cannot live side by side with us,
because they see in every word we utter and every deed we do,
even when they are not specifically directed against them,
a condemnation.
indeed they must admit that it is utterly futile to condemn us.
we do not reciprocate their hatred and contention,
although they would like it better if we did
and so sink to their own level.
and how is the battle to be fought?
soon the time will come when we shall pray,
not as isolated individuals, but as a corporate body, a congregation,
a church:
we shall pray in multitudes (albeit in relatively small multitudes)
and among the thousands and thousands of apostates
we shall loudly praise and confess the lord who was crucified
and is risen and shall come again.
and what prayer, what confession, what hymn of praise will it be?
it will be the prayer of earnest love for these very sons of perdition
who stand around and gaze at us with eyes aflame with hatred
and who have perhaps  already raised their hands to kill us.
it will be a prayer for the peace of these
erring, devastated and bewildered souls,
a prayer for the same love and peace which we ourselves enjoy,
a prayer which will penetrate to the depths of their souls
and rend their hearts more grievously than anything they can do to us.
yes, the church which is really waiting for its Lord,
and which discerns the signs of the times of decision,
must fling itself with its utmost power and with the panoply of its holy life
into this prayer of love.'    a.f.c.vilmar, 1880

what is undivided love?
love which shows no special favour to those who love us in return.
when we love those who love us,
our brethren, our nation, our friends, yes and even our own congregation,
we are no better than the heathen and the publicans.
such love is ordinary and natural, and not distinctively christian.
we can love our kith and kin,
our fellow countrymen and our friends,
whether we are christians or not,
and there is no need for Jesus to teach us that.
but He takes that kind of love for granted
and in contrast asserts that we must love our enemies.
thus He shows us what he means by love
and the attitude we must display towards it.

how then do the disciples differ from the heathen?
what does it really mean to be a christian?
her we meet the word which controls the whole chapter
and sums up all we have heard so far.
what make the christian different from other men
is the 'peculiar', to perissov (greek),  the extraordinary',
the 'unusual', that which is not 'a matter of course'.
this is the quality whereby the better righteousness exceeds the
righteousness of the scribes and pharisees.
it is 'the more', the 'byond all that'.
the natural is to auto (one and the same)
for heathen and christian,
the distinctive quality of the christian life begins with the perisson.
it is this quality which first enables us to see the natural in its true light.
where it is lacking, the peculiar graces of christianity  are absent.
it cannot occur within the sphere of natural possibilities,
but only when they are transcended.
the perisson never merges into the to auto.
that was the fatal mistake of the false protestant ethic which
diluted christian love into patriotism,
loyalty to friends
and industriousness,
which in short,
perverted the better righteousness into justitia civilis.
not in such terms as these does Jesus speak.
for Him the hallmark of the Christian is the 'extraordinary'.
the christian cannot live at the world's level,
because he must always remember the perisson.

what is the precise nature of the perisson?
it is the life described in the beatitudes,
the life of the followers of Jesus,
the light which lights the world,
the city set on the hill,
the way of self renunciation
of utter love
of absolute purity,
truthfulness and
meekness.
it is unreserved love for our enemies.
for the unloving and the unloved,
love for our religious, political and personal adversaries.
in every case it is the love which was fulfilled in the cross of Christ.
what is the perisson?
it is the love of Jesus Christ Himself,
who went patiently and obediently to the cross
-it is in fact the cross itself.
the cross is the differential of the christian religion,
the power which enables the christian to transcend the world
and to win the victory.
the passio in the love of the crucified
is the supreme expression of
the 'extraorinary' quality  of the christian life.

the 'extraordinary' quality is undoubtedly identical with the light
that sines before men and for which they glorify
the Father which is in heaven.
it cannot be hidden under a bushel,
it must be seen of men.
the community of the followers of Jesus,
the community of the better righteousness,
is the visible community:
it has left the world and society
and counted everything but loss for the cross of Christ.

and how does this quality work out in practice?
the 'extraordinary'
-and this is the supreme scandal-
is something which the followers of Jesus DO.
it must be DONE like the better righteousness,
and done so that all men can see it.
it is not strict puritanism,
not some eccentric pattern of christian living,
but simple, unreflecting obedience to the will of Christ.
if we make the 'extraordinary' our standard,
we shall be led into the passio of Christ,
and in that its peculiar quality will be displayed.
this activity itself is ceaseless suffering.
IN IT THE DISCIPLE ENDURES THE SUFFERING OF CHRIST.
(note: so it this is true, then the 'agonize' of luke 13.24 may not deal with
TRYING to do what God tells me to do,
but rather is involved in the simple DOING of it....)
if this is not so, then this is not the activity of which Jesus speaks.

hence the perisson is the fulfilment of the law,
the keeping or the commandments.
in Christ crucified and in His people
the 'extraordinary' becomes reality.

these men are the perfect,
the men in whom the undivided love of the heavenly Father is perfected.
it was that love which gave the Son to die for us upon the cross
and it is by suffering in the fellowship of this cross
that the followers of Jesus are perfected.
the perfect are none other than the blessed of the beatitudes.

end

4.28.2013 BUTTERFIELD 7

rosaria's long distant relationship with R has developed to the point where he asks her to marry him and she says yes...

CRISIS/WEAKNESS

it's hard to explain what happens when you prepare for your first legitimate relationship,
share secrets that you shouldn't (in this case, between R and herself)
read books about preparing for marriage God's way,
lose all your former friends for the promise of one,
incur a wealth of disrespect in your work place,
prepare a two year research leave by
somehow packaging all of this spiritual trauma as intellectually vital,
rent out your house,
tie up all the loose ends of directing the undergraduate studies program,
prepare for a wedding,
believe the whole time that what you are doing is God's will for your life,
feel love and gratitude for the person who shared over and over again
the power of the gospel and
who bridged for you life and ministry amidst tow warring communities,
only to have him come to you one day and say,
'there's something i need to tell you.
you can't marry me.
i'm not ready.
and i'm probably not a christian.'

here's what i though:
you jerk.
you betrayer. you vile, pathetic wimp.
i overhaul my whole professional life
to correspond with your school schedule
and you're not ready?
and, you are probably not a christian?
if you are not a christian, then what are you doing in seminary?
if you are not a christian, then what are you doing behind a pulpit?

how could the person who shared the gospel with me in the most convincing way
and whose christian life most resembled my own 'probably not' be a christian?
what did that mean?
was he not 'really' a christian or was he struggling with assurance of salvation?
assurance of salvation means knowing God's call on your life
-it means knowing in a conscious way that you are His.
we know this through both the Holy Spirit's work in our lives
and His call on our hearts.
the Spirit's work in our lives is evident through our obedience to God
and our love for our fellow man.
we find this in the bible in I john 3.10:
'whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God,
nor is he who does not love his brother.'...
and what about me, what about my faith?
how could i 'probably' be christian and R 'probably' not be?
and what does the word 'probably have to do with it?
this was unthinkable.

this conversation happened a few weeks before the end of the semester
and our scheduled wedding date.

like rocks hitting water,
the reverberations of shock and sadness
came in steady and gentle waves.
at the bottom of my crisis was this:
who is this Jesus?
am i following Jesus or R?
Whom do i love more?
there were other more practical considerations, to be sure.
for example, what was i to do
and where was i to live for the next two years?
the urban ministry program in pittsburgh with whom i had just signed a contract
worked out of the seminary that he attended.
this job didn't pay enough to rent an apartment in pittsburgh.
and my house in syracuse was rented out to grad students who were only paying
\enough to cover the mortgage.
after addressing the practical considerations,
i confronted the personal ones.
the rocky underworld of rejection lodged itself in the shaky
identity of my godly womanhood.
i wondered if somehow R knew something that i did not.
maybe he somehow knew that i was not healed
and that my sexual self would forever be in limbo or worse.
how does a single and celibate person even know
if she is healed sexually?
what is sexual healing
and then if not healed, was i really converted?

i though about other things, too.
do i break all my promises
-urban ministry, research leave, renting my house
-and just hole up at home and lick my wounds?
these were big decisions fueled by big questions.
but the biggest burden on my heart
was the problem of worldview:
who is Jesus?
who had betrayed me, R or God?
who is the Jesus who heals some but not others?
who needs a fickle God?
faith is not a feeling.
faith rides the waves of the treachery of life
on the christian worldview that you own.
faith and worldview are intimately intertwined.
our peace, love, courage, longsuffering and life works,
lock step with our christian worldview
and the faith that undergirds it.
where was mine?

psalm 15 became my guide.
psalm 15 directed me to keep my promises
and showed me how to work in God's strength to do so.
in psalm 15, the psalmist asks the question
that burdened my heart-
'Lord, who may dwell in Your sanctuary?
who may live in Your holy hill'? v1
i needed to know:
was i in God's house?
was i in God's will?
why would God do this to me?
the remaining lines of the psalm answered the question i searched for:
God's people speak truth v2;
God's people do not slander neighbors v3;
God's people fear the Lord v4;
God's people keep promises 'even when it hurts' 15.4, niv;
God's people give money freely v5;
God's people reject bribes v6;
 the psalm's conclusion offers a promise:
'he who does these things will never be shaken' v5;
that's me, i discovered!
i'm shaken,
my faith is shaken.
i prayed that God would help me to live out each line of this psalm,
step by step.
i finally understood what it meant that Jesus identifies with
all our troubles.
i finally believed hebrews 4.15-6:
'for we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize
with our weaknesses,
but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.
let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace,
that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.'
i saw something in myself.
by wallowing in pity, i was holding myself back
from going boldly to the throne of grace. 

the church surrounded me with a gentle presence.
\no one told me what to do, how to feel or what to think.
the women of my church gave me gentle presence.
they enfolded me into their lives and prayers.
it took all i had to come to church
and not bawl my eyes out the whole time.
i felt like i had a year earlier,
when the conviction of sin under the preaching of the word
as too much and i would leave the service
or shut down halfway through.
one day, when i started to leave the service early,
elder B followed me out.
he said, 'rosria, its OK to just pray that God
will get you through this moment-
this very one, right now.'
he prayed for me and God eventually over time
gave me the peace to both grieve and survive minute by minute.
another elder friend invited me to his home for dinner.
he and his wife were big supporters of R
and they were concerned for him as well as for me.
elder M said to me:
this is the biggest faith test you will ever face.
you may face it again in another context,
but this is the test that rises as high as we can imagine:
rosaria, Jesus is saying to you, right now
in this moment of shame and defeat,
whom do you love? Me or him?
whom do you follow?
Me or him?
i was so thankful for bold elders
and faithful praying and grieving friends.

...this crises made me ask:
had i really been obeying Jesus and following Him in faith?
the answer was no.
no, i had been a double minded follower of Christ.
i followed R who followed Jesus (or, so it appeared).
he was my bridge to the gospel, the bible, the church and
Jesus Himself.
these were the incommensurable binary oppositions

(a relation between the members of a pair of linguistic items,
as a pair of distinctive features,
such that one is the absence of the other,
as voicelessness and voice,
or that one is at the opposite pole from the other,
as stridency and mellowness.)

of my life:
1) had R not been in that church at that particular time,
i would not have kept coming back;
2)R betrayed me-Big Time.
sometimes binary oppositions like these are so potentially paralyzing
that you just have to put them aside for awhile.
i tucked this one away for two years.
i knew that God calls us to walk in faith,
not to be paralyzed by doubt.
as pastor ken once said to me,
'you can't steer a parked car.
if you want to turn your life around,
you've got to get moving!'
it wasn't until recently that God gave me the language and safety
to explore what betrayal by a self-proclaimed believer
means in God's economy.
pastor peter smith said these simple words in a sermon
and my ears and eyes and heart and mind opened.
pastor peter said,
'people WILL betray you, but Jesus never will.'
much of my past fell in place when he said these simple words.
here is what i gleaned.
betrayal deepens our knowledge of Jesus and His
sacrifice, obedience and love.
(Jesus was betrayed by His chosen disciples
and by all who call upon Him as savior and Lord...
finally, betrayal deepens our christian vision:
the cross is a rugged place, not a place
for the squeamish or self righteous.
i came to learn that summer that God does use us
through and in our weaknesses.
i came to learn what it means that in Christ
'we live and move and have our being' acts 17.28.
from outside appearances, it looked like the church had betrayed me.
and now that, in the court of public opinion,
my church had, by all appearances,
betrayed me in a public way,
i became safe for another group of people.
friends from the lesbian community came back.
an ex girlfriend wrote me a beautiful note (she is a poet).
in it, she assured me of her faith in me and told me that i was
always welcome back in the lesbian community.
she told me not to fear such a hard life lesson
and not to think that my old friends want me to suffer.
now that i had a serious faith struggle before me,
i became safe for others to share their doubts, fears and disappointments.
my lesbian neighbor had at one point been a woman of faith.
i didn't know this.
now she was dying of cancer.
she approached me one day and said,
'i didn't give a damn about who God was to you in your happiness.
but now that you are suffering,
i want to know;
who is your God?
where is He in your suffering?

...one day while A (a student calling for rosaria
in the midst of a great crisis and who rosaria was nursing back to health)
was knitting potholders in my livingroom, R came over.
he and A talked privately for a while and after he left, A said,
'he's a wacko, rosaria. all he talked about was his prozac dosage
and his difficulty when the doctors changed it.'

situations like that made me realize a hard lesson:
God gives and God takes away
and He does it for our good.
indeed, R was both my best friend and no friend at all.
i loved him because i confused the
sick patterns that we shared with deep personal conviction.
but God took him away for my good.
God knew better than i did.
i-and a whole church of believers-
believed that marrying him was God's will for my life.
the man to whom i had said 'yes'
to the most important question an adult can address
would have been my ruin had we gotten married.
never again will i think of knowing God's will
as anything but the most humbling of acts.
and never again will i confuse other people's hopes and dreams for me
as proof of God's will.

OBEDIENCE/TRUST

it was in this spirit of brokenness, upheaval,
and exceeding gratitude for God's protection,
exactly one year to the day after delivering my solomon lecture,
that i packed my car for beaver falls, pa.
as i was loading the car, elder and friend bob rice said,
'rosaria, never doubt in the darkness what God has promised
in the light. '.
my friend dr. ken smith,
at that time chairman of the board of trustees of geneva college,
was able to get me a one year visiting teaching position at geneva college,
our denomination's christian college.
there i would be able to study christian education
while teaching at a real christian college
-and thus keep the promises of my research leave.
i was about an hour outside of pittsburgh,
so i would still be able to drive out there on friday nights and teach
in the urban ministry program
-and thus keep my promises to my contract.
i didn't have to worry about bumping into R at the seminary
(where my urban ministry class would meet.)
God exposed his sins to the session.
he would not e returning to seminary.
geneva college graciously allowed me to live rent free
in one of its apartments
and the students renting my house covered my mortgage.
this allowed me to give back my salary to the urban ministry program
which dearly needed it ps 15.5.
and the president of geneva college even allowed me
to take my dog murphy.
God truly gave me more than i had asked for.
my cup overflowed.

driving away from syracuse was hard.
i wondered if i would ever come back.
i loved my white house with green trim.
i loved my neighbors.
and, at least in the summer, i loved syracuse.
but most of all, i loved my job...
were these gifts or idols, i wondered?
with a chill, i knew that if they were idols,
then God would, in His love and mercy,
destroy them and remove them from me.

my faithful dog, murphy, licked my face as we got on the highway.
i felt exhilarated about what might come next.
i was still sad.
i was still grieving.
i was still prying the R would
get it together and come back to real faith and even to me.
but no matter what,
i was working for God!
what a privilege!
what an assurance of salvation!
God was teaching me how to hold the things of this world lightly.
God was teaching me how to use my skills for the kingdom.
God was revealing Himself to me through the details of
my life and the choices that He put before me.
i was driving away from the place, the life, the career, and the people
that i knew and loved.
but Jesus Christ was more real to me at that moment
than any of these material things.
murphy licked my face again and i laughed out loud.
this was MY CONVERSION IN A NUTSHELL:
I LOST EVERYTHING BUT THE DOG.

the enormity of the risk i had just undertaken didn't hit me
until i woke up for the first time in beaver falls,
hearing trains, church chimes and cardinals.
where was that trust that i had felt in my sleep?
why didn't obedience produce trust?
..ferry bridge's 'Trusting God even when life hurts'..
the boundaries for obedience are clear,
but trust must somehow manifest itself in the boundaryless world
of 'anything can happen'.
the fact that God is sovereign over the good and the evil
does not necessarily make the evil any less frightening.
i recited psalm 23 and got myself out of bed.

it was psalm 15 that got me to beaver falls
and psalm 23 that kept me there.

for my birthday..floy had given me a little book
by f. b. meyer called the shepherd's psalm..
in it, i found what we in english studies call a controlling metaphor
(a powerful albeit understated idea that hold all the other parts of a
paradigm together)
this i believe is the controlling metaphor of the christian life
and one that i first found in meyer's book..
'unbelief puts circumstances between itself and Christ, so as not to see Him...
faith puts Christ between itself and circumstances, so that it cannot see them..


'

4.28.2013 MADAM GUYON

the following taken from the first chapter of madam guyon's (b.4.18.1648) autobiography...

my earnest wish is to paint in true colors the goodness of God to me
and the depth of my own ingratitude
-but it is impossible,
as numberless little circumstances have escaped my memory...

sanctification...let me assure you, this is not attained,
save through pain, weariness and labor;
and it will be reached by a path that will wonderfully disappoint
your expectations.
nevertheless, if you are fully convinced
that it is on the nothing in man that God establishes
His greatest works,
-you will be in part guarded against disappointment or surprise.
He destroys that He might build;
for when He is about to rear His sacred temple in us,
He first totally razes that vain and pompous edifice,
which human art and power had erected,
and from its horrible ruins a new structure is formed,
by His power only.

oh, that you could comprehend the depth of this mystery
and learn the secrets of the conduct of God,
revealed to babes,
but hid from the wise and great of this world,
who think themselves the Lord's counselor's,
and capable of investigating His procedures
and suppose they have attained that divine wisdom
hidden from the eyes of all who live in self
and are enveloped in their own words.
who by a lively genius and elevated faculties
mount up to heaven,
and think to comprehend
the height and depth and length and breadth of God.

this divine wisdom is unknown, even to those who pass
in the world for persons of extraordinary illumination and knowledge.
to whom then is she known
and who can tell us any tidings concerning her?
destruction and death assure us,
that they have heard with their ears of her fame and renown.
it is then in dying to all things
and in being truly lost to them,
passing forward into God and existing only in Him.
that we attain to some knowledge of the true wisdom.....

the Lord judgeth not of things as men do,
who call good evil and evil good,
and account that as righteousness which is
abominable in His sight,
and which according to the prophet
He regards as filthy rags.
he will enter into strict judgment with these
self righteous
and they shall, like the pharisees,
be rather subjects of His wrath,
than objects of His love,
or inheritors of His rewards....
who is not pleased to behold himself righteous in his own eyes
and in the eyes of others?
or, who is it doubts that such righteousness is sufficient
to please God?
yet, we see the indignation of our Lord manifested against such.
He who was the perfect pattern of tenderness and meekness,
such as flowed from the depth of the heart,
and not that affected meekness,
which under the form of a dove, hides the hawk's heart.
He appears severe only to these self righteous people,
and He publicly dishonored them.
in what strange colors does He represent them,
while He beholds the poor sinner
with mercy, compassion and love
and declares that for them only He was come,
that it was the sick who needed the physician...

O Thou source of love!
Thou dost indeed seem so jealous of the salvation
Thou has purchased,
that THOU DOST PREFER THE SINNER TO THE RIGHTEOUS!
the poor sinner beholds himself vile and wretched,
is in a manner constrained to detest himself;
and finding his state so horrible,
casts himself in his desperation
into the arms of his saviour,
and plunges into the healing fountain
and comes forth 'white as wool'.
then confounded at the review of his disordered state,
and overflowing with love for Him
who having alone the power,
had also the compassion to save him
-the excess of his love is proportioned to the enormity of his crimes
and the fullness of his gratitude to the extent of the debt remitted.
the self righteous, relying on the many good works
he imagines he has performed,
seems to hold salvation in his own hand
and considers heaven as a just reward of his merits.
in the bitterness of his zeal
he exclaims against all sinners,
and represents the gates of mercy as barred against them
and heaven as a place to which they have no claim.
what need have such self righteous persons of a saviour?
they are already burdened with the load of their own merits.
oh, how long they bear the flattering load,
while sinners divested of everything,
fly rapidly on the wings of faith and love
into their saviour's arms,
who freely bestows on them that which He
has so freely promised!

how full of self love are the self righteous
and how void of the love of God!
they esteem and admire themselves in their works of righteousness,
which they suppose to be a fountain of happiness.
these works are no sooner exposed to the Sun of Righteousness,
than they discover all to be so full
of impurity and baseness,
that it frets them to the heart.
meanwhile the poor sinner, magdalene,
is pardoned because she loves much
and her faith and love are accepted as righteousness...

..God accomplishes His work either in converted sinners,
whose past iniquities serve as a counterpoise to their elevation
or in persons whose self righteousness He destroys,m
by totally overthrowing the proud building
they had reared on a sandy foundation,
instead of the Rock-CHRIST.

the establishment of all these ends,
which He proposed in coming into the world,
is effected by the apparent overthrow of
that very structure which in reality He would erect.
by means which seem to destroy His church,
He establishes it.
how strangely does He found the new dispensation
and give it His sanction!
the legislator Himself is condemned
by the learned and great,
as a malefactor,
and dies an ignominious death.
oh, that we fully understood how very opposite
our self righteousness is to the designs of Go
-it would be a subject for endless humiliation
and we should have an utter distrust in that which at present
constitutes the whole of our dependence.

from a just love of His supreme power
and a righteous jealousy of mankind,
who attribute to each other the gifts
He Himself bestows upon them,
it pleased Him to take one of the most unworthy of the creation
to make known the fact that His graces are
the effects of His will, not the fruits of our merits.
it is the property of His wisdom to destroy what is proudly built
and to build what is destroyed;
to make use of weak things to confound the mighty
and to employ in His service
such as appear vile and contemptible.

this He does in a manner so astonishing,
as to render them the objects of the scorn and contempt of the world.
it is not to draw public approbation upon them,
that He makes them instrumental in the salvation of others;
but to render them the objects of their dislike
and the subjects of their insults....

4.27.2013 BUTTERFIELD 6

CROSSING THE RUBICON

on august 17, 1999 i returned to my office after delivering a lecture to all
incoming graduate students.
the topic was to be of my choosing.
when the graduate school invited me,
i was a lesbian postmodernist.
when i delivered the lecture six months later,
i was a fledgling follower of Jesus Christ.
the lecture was entitled: 'the solomon problem'
i felt awkward and uncomfortable as i took the podium
and adjusted the clip on microphone to the neckline of my dress.
i was in process of growing out my butch haircut,
so every day was a bad hair day.
and the lecture was going to be a bomb.
in it, i would become a traitor and a turncoat.
to the lesbian community,
i would become the example of what not to be.
i could not have gotten through that lecture had R
not been there
in the six months since my conversion, he had become
my watchdog, big brother, champion, simultaneous translator
and best friend.
he cam to my lectures, to my classes, to my thursday night dinners.
he talked to my students and my colleagues.
he embraced my drag queen friends.
he translated my concerns to the session of our church
with a deftness and sensitivity that i still marvel at.
as i fingered my pages on the podium,
R gave me a firm thumbs up from his spot..
he was the only person who understood this
spiritual and professional schizophrenia that had quickly become
my new normal after conversion.
here is the talk...

lesson#3: it is better to be wrong on an important subject
than right on a trivial one,
as long as you are willing to learn from your mistakes.

this lesson got me through graduate school and, most recently,
became profoundly important for me
during the research of my second book.
i was studying the religious right from the lesbian feminist perspective
of the secular left,
and aside from discovering what i already knew,
that the religious right was manipulating religious commitments
in the name of capitalist consumerism and conservative political agendas,
i discovered something else,
something that i wasn't looking for
and something that changed my life -not to mention my research
-from the ground up.
i discovered that God isn't just a narrative we pick like summer berries
or leave for the next person;
nor is God a set of social conventions tailored for the weak of mind;
nor is God a consumerist social construct who exists in the service
of christian imperialist ideologies and right wing politics.
rather, i discovered that God through Jesus Christ exists,
the triune God of the bible exists,
whether we acknowledge Him or not.
i discovered that God wasn't very happy with me.

this brought me to the awesome realization that our living God
is in all of our life,
and that my 'success' as a professor was His blessing on me,
not my deserved and earned accolade.
i discovered, through what the bible calls
the renewing of our minds,
that what i had previously claimed as mine wasn't even about me.

this leads me to my point and the title of today's talk:
beware of the solomon problem of academic life.
king solomon, one of the many sons of david,
ruled over israel from 962-922BC
before solomon stepped into his kingship,
he asked God to give him an 'understanding heart..
to discern between good and evil I kings 3.9.
God gave him a gift of discernment unmatched
by any other figure then or now
on the condition that solomon never forgot the first commandment
(the commandment to honor God,
not the idols that bolster the autonomy of our own egos).
as solomon became rich and successful, he started to believe
that knowledge was something that he 'owned'.
something that he harbored inside of himself,
rather than what it was:
something loaned to him,
but something fundamentally located in
the radical Otherness of a holy God.
once he lost his anchor, he lost his wisdom,
and it all came tumbling down.
the biblical story does not stop here,
because the nature of a holy God is redemptive, not abandoning,
but that is a lecture for another day.
suffice it to say for today,
that solomon failed by thinking that all truth claims exist
in a contingent relationship to the self.
solomon's legacy offers a warning to all academics,
believers and atheists alike:
we all need to be anchored in something bigger than we are,
something bigger than the ideas currently generated within disciplines
and certainly something bigger than the
politics of our fields of study.

real learning , no matter how polished the moves or rehearsed the rhetoric,
is empty learning unless we who profess
are anchored in something bigger than we are.
choose with discernment and don't let the proclivities
of the here and now choose for you. (august 1999)

..at the time and place i delivered this,
i had just handed myself the proverbial pink slip.
only R knew how serious this was.
after ten years of coming out as a lesbian,
you would think i would have gotten used to the feeling of
peering over the edge of dignity and
choosing instead solidarity with the outcasts.
what was different this time was that in giving this lecture,
i betrayed my friends.
while the lecture itself was not bold,
because my friendships were bold and intimate and risky,
the lecture had impact.
this experience taught me a powerful lesson about evangelism:
the integrity of our relationships matters more than the boldness of our words.
because of who i was to the gay community,
this lecture had made its mark.

what kind of effect did this lecture have?
i might as well have taken out a highway sign that said,
'rosaria is no longer safe
-your secrets are out
-your cover is blown.'
while i gave the lecture i saw my exgirfriend and my lesbian and
gay supporting graduate students go stone cold in disgust and disappointment...

after giving my lecture..i returned to my office drenched with panic sweat.
i felt awkward wearing a dress
and the 'girl' shoes i was wearing hurt my feet
more than any marathon i had ever run.
R left for his office and so i faced mine alone-
i also faced a long line of students wanting to talk to me about what i just did.

the only person trough my office door that day
was an undergraduate named B.
B was a skinny boy, high on prescription medication for
ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder and who knows what else.
he had been flunking out of school since his first day on campus.
B was the president of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered
undergraduate student collective
and i was their faculty advisor.
B came to my office to fire me.
he was fuming.
his eyes were red with tears
and his face taut with fury.
'how dare you! how could you!'
he paced the length of my office,
..spike orange hair..red face..his anger distorted him.

'how do you know that you are no longer a lesbian?
how do you know?' he demanded.
of all the questions that someone could have asked me at the time,
this was the one that i couldn't answer.
this question unsettled me and made me feel sick and dizzy.
i had no idea how to answer it.
Christ honoring words and ideas were nowhere to be found.
they weren't ready to come out of me.
my sense of truth was divided.
one truth was simply that
the word of God had gotten to be bigger inside of me than i was,
bigger by about the size of a hair.
the other truth was that, now back at work,
i started to feel like a lesbian again.
the summer break had helped me to establish new patterns,
but these new patterns were flimsy.
the patterns of mindfulness of a research professor
are well established and they extend beyond reading and writing.
because my scholarship and my personal life shared
a symbiotic relationship, the old patterns of mindfulness
started to creep back as i sat in my office chair.
i had always been both a professor and a lesbian at the same time.
my research supported what is called 'identity politics-
the assumption that the researcher holds integrity
when she also holds membership in the area that she studies.
research professors also enjoy being part of
a community of scholars.
i lost my community when God saved my soul.
and now i started to lose my nerve-and my faith.

i tried to stall B and so i asked him a question in return.
i said, 'B, how do you know you are a gay man?'

like a birthday balloon deflated by a pinprick,
B staggered and collapsed into my office chair.
slumped over and with tears in his eyes,
he fell silent for what seemed a long time.
then he said, 'rosaria, i'm a gay man because the GLBT
community is the only safe home i have,
a home made safe by you.
how could you not know this?
how dare you not know this!

although it replicated my own experience,
i was taken aback by his response.
and i certainly didn't fail to hear that i was
fingered in his sin.
i don't remember how i responded-right there in my office.
i think i covered his hands with my own as
he slumped in the chair and cried.
i remember that it was dark by the time he left my office
and that we agreed to talk again the next day.
i accepted my resignation from the student group that he chaired
and, later that week, from the other five that i advised.
i accepted my resignation from every dissertation committee
that i was on
and started to dig through my computer and hard files
to throw away the book project on the religious right.
i had to accept it: i was a failure.
by God's grace, He would not allow me to work in the way
that i had always wanted to labor.
i was no stranger to failure, but this was an odd failure.
at the infinitesimal core of this failure resided something that
i didn't at first recognize.
when i examined my feelings against the rugged cross,
i realized that this failure was wrapped in relief.
whatever was God's providence for me,
it was His to lay out and mine to obey.
no longer did i have to invent myself.

one week later, when the fall 1999 school semester came around,
i felt more ready to face the patterns and legacy of my past.
my church knew my struggles and surrounded me
with prayer and counsel.
i had been reading augustine's confessions
and was alert to the reality that God
had a ministry waiting for me.
i prayed that i would be strong for the task at hand.
yes, i was still a traitor and an example of what not to be.
but so too was paul the apostle shamed among the pharisees,
and i trusted that God would take my life
and make a place for me.

during this time, i lost my primary support person
-R left for seminary in pittsburgh.
he felt called to be a pastor, or so he said.
we agreed to continue to talk daily and support one another.
during the past six months, i had spent most of my time with him,
and while i was sad to see him go,
i really needed my time back to focus
on my new life as a christian professor.
we had started talking about the emotional attraction we felt
for one another.
i filed this away,
not really knowing what to do with this kind of information.
in the gay community, it is normal (and safe)
for gay men and lesbian women to bond in this way.
but i wasn't in the gay community any more.
was this still safe?
was this dangerous?

during this time, i also gained a powerful support person and friend-
vivian rice.
vivian was a professor at the university, a member of my church
and the wife of an elder.
vivian and i committed to praying together at least once a week
and talking daily for support and colleagueship.
with my church supporting me,
i felt ready to face the semester as an 'out' follower of Christ.

God did have ministry waiting for me in my classes.
the story of my conversion ran like wildfire
through the university community. instead of having fewer students,
i had classes that were over-enrolled with
students sitting on the floor  and in the aisles.
some students came for the carnival aspect,
but others came because God had put them where he wanted them.
amazingly, i continued to draw students from the
gay and lesbian community,
students who wanted to dialogue across differences.
i also drew students who were suicidal and chronically sick.
as a lesbian, i had always been an outsider.
but now i was a different kind of outsider,
and in my new status, God brought me a new crop of
hurting people. 

4.27.2013 BUTTERFIELD 5

CONVERSION

...i came to the understanding that i couldnot possibly be a godly woman
if i didn't even know how to be a WOMAN.
pastor ken preached a sermon that really brought this point home to me.
and one monday afternoon, after praying fervently for God
to show me how to live as a godly woman,
i went through the church directory and picked out the three women
whose godlness, sense of self, p;ersonal strength and integrity
really stood out to me.
i picked women who were different from me,
but people who would answer me honestly.
i called becky smith, corrine thompson and kathy donath.
i askedd simple questions, even perhaps naive ones,
and i remember how tender each woman was in answering...
i was still struggling with my identity,
now with my new christian identityy.
how could a woman 'like me' be a godly woman?
each woman directed me to mary magdalene and to the proverbs 31 woman.
each woman reminded me that knowing God's forgiveness
in a real and vital way
is the root of all godliness-for men or..women.

making a life commitment to Christ was not merely a philosophical shift.
it was not a one step process.
it did not involve rearranging
the surface prejudices and fickle loyalties of my life.
in it i learned-and am still learning
-how to love God with all my heart...

CHANGES

..i also started to notice something else about my life:
i wasn't plagued with anxiety or nightmares anymore.
the intestinal distress that had been my daily companion
was no longer a part of my life..
i changed my exercise routine from intense running to active walking.
i cleaned my house and my office the way God was cleaning my soul:
i pitched things that weren't honoring to God.
i got rid of whole libraries of books, CDs, movies, pictures.
i unsubscribed to magazines and professional journals.
i suddenly had time in my life to reflect.
i took up gardening.
i enjoyed baking bread from scratch..(for others)
i forgave my enemies and enjoyed the solitude of daily prayer.
i read and re-read the bible, searching for examples for my life.
...i started to develop real friendships from within my church family.

CHURCH MEMBERSHIP

during one of my weekly discipleship meetings with floy,
she asked my if i had thought about church membership.
church membership ?
Me?
THIS church?
i was horrified!..Yuck!
i have never been a person given to joining clubs
and i found the whole question to be antithetical to my free spirit.
i told floy that i loved our church but that i didn't see any reason to
'join the club'.
she then told me something that really made me ..think:
she said that every believer in the bible is
what we would consider today to be a church member.
...pastor...said, if the US declared
that we were going to send one soldier to iraq.
one soldier!
even with the best equipment in the word,
how could one little soldier survive?
his point resonated with me
and reminded me of floy's counsel about church membership:
nobody goes into battle alone.
sanctification-growing in Christ
-is always both personal and communal.
we need one another.
our faith struggles and our successes are part of the body of Christ,
not possessed by our own little kingdom. this christian life was war..who in her right mind, floy asked,
would go to war without an army?

the covenant membership vows of the reformed presbyterian church are simple,
yet they cut me to the core...

1. do you believe the scriptures of the old and new testaments to
be the word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and life?

my 'rule of faith and life' had been my own intellect.
as a document wholly produced through oral history,
i hadno faith in the bible as true or accurate...
and what about the ontological fallacy inherent in using
the bible to 'prop up' God
while simultaneously using
God to 'prop up' the bible?...

2. do you believe in the one living and true God
-the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as revealed in the scriptures?

i had believed that God was an imperialist social construct invented
to sooth the consciousness of the intellectually infirm...

3. do you repent of your sin
confess your guilt and helplessness as a sinner against God
profess Jesus Christ, Son of God, as your savior and Lord
and dedicate yourself to His service?
do you promise that you will endeavor to forsake all sin and
to conform your life to His teaching and example?

repent? sin? guilt? helplessness?
profess Jesus Christ as my savior and Lord?
the very name of Jesus i had once hated-deeply-and the only time
His name was uttered from my mouth was in curing something.

4. do you promise to submit in the Lord to the
teaching and government of this church
as being based upon the scriptures...?
do you recognize your responsibility to work with others in the church
and do you promise to support and encourage them
in their service to the Lord?
in case you should need correction in doctrine or life,
do you promise to respect the authority and discipline of the church?

submit myself to the elders of my church?
submit myself to a bunch of men, not one of whom had a PhD?
had i lost my mind...

5. to the end that you may grow in the christian life,
do you promise that you will diligently
read the bible,
engage in private prayer,
keep the Lord's day,
regularly attend the worship services,
observe the appointed sacraments
and give to the Lord's work as He shall prosper you?

how will i build my empire if i spend all of this time on God?...

6. do you purpose to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness
in all the relationships of life,
faithfully to perform your whoe duty as a true servant of Jesus Christ
and seek to win others to Him?

i had always sought first the kingdom of my own pleasure and person.
i sought to win others to myself and myself alone.

7. do you make this profession of faith and purpose in the presence of God,
in humble reliance upon His grace,
as you desire to give your account with joy at the last great day?

i didn't like thinking about my mortality or about the last great day.
i had buried countless gay friends ..
and it felt blasphemous to even entertain the idea
that after a hellish death that they would now spend eternity in hell.
i almost feared that believing this condemned them to hell.

in july 1999, i made my profession of faith before God..congregation..
ken smith had taught me that i was not 'joining' a church,
but rather, was making a covenant with God and with a church body.
as i stood before the congregation to make this profession of faith,
i felt the assault of my disloyalty to the gay community
as powerfully as i did my loyalty to Christ.
indeed, i could barely speak the 'i do'.
pastor ken took my uncontrolled shaking as consent
and the rest of the congregation took me on faith.
i still remember the trauma in my body when i hear our membership vows or
watch someone stand before the congregation for the purpose of baptism
or church membership.
each Lord's supper made me experience my traitorship
to my gay friends and to the person that i once was.

4.26.2013 BUTTERFIELD 4

THE NATURE OF SIN

april 1999..at this time, i was just starting to pray that
God would show me my sins and help me to repent of them.
i didn't understand why homosexuality was sin,
why something in the particular manifestation of same gender love
was wrong in itself.
but i did know that pride was a sin
and so i decided to start there.
as i began to pray and repent, i wondered:
could pride be the root of all my sins?
i wondered:
what was the real sin of sodom?
i had always thought that God's judgment upon sodom (in genesis 19)
clearly singled out and targeted homosexuality.
i believed that God's judgment against sodom
exemplified the fiercest of God's judgments.
but as i read more deeply in the bible,
i ran across a passage that made me stop and think.
this passage in the book of ezekiel revealed to me that sodom was indicted
for materialism and neglect of the poor and needy
-and that homosexuality was a symptom and an extension of these other sins.
in this passage, God is speaking to His chosen people in jerusalem
and warning them about their hidden sin using sodom as an example.
importantly, god does not say that this sin of sodom is the worst
of all sins.
instead, God uses the sin of sodom to reveal the greater sin committed by
His own people
'as i live, says the Lord God, neither your sister sodom nor her daughters
have done as you and your daughters have done.
look, this was the iniquity of your sister sodom:
she and her daughters had
pride,
fullness of food, and
abundance of idleness;
neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy...ezek. 16.48-50

i found this passage to reveal some surprising things...
sodom's sin is less offensive to God than jerusalem's...
that the root of homosexuality is also the root of a myriad of other sins...
pride...wealth...entertainment driven...lack of mercy
living according to God's standards is an acquired taste.
we develop a taste for God's standards only by disciplining our
minds, hands money and time....
God did not create us so that we would...
'amuse ourselves to death....
God calls us to be merciful to others for our own good
as well as for the good of our community...

you might notice that there is nothing inherently sexual about any of these sins...

importantly, we don't see God making fun of homosexuality
or regarding it as a different, unusual or exotic sin...

..God is a God of mercy, redemption, second chances and salvation.
..when Jesus uses sodom as an example..the example reveals that God
is angrier at..people of Jesus' day...
..and you, capernaum..will be brought to hades;
for it the mighty words which were done in you had been done in sodom,
it would have remained until this say.
but I say to you that it shall be more tolerable for..sodom in the day of judgment
than for you matt.11.23-4

4.26.2013 BUTTERFIELD 3

COST

when i became a christian, i had to change everything-
my life
my friends
my writing
my teaching
my advising
myclothes
my speech
my thoughts.
i was tenured to a field that i could no longer work in.
i was the faculty advisor to all of the gay and lesbian
and feminist groups on campus.
i was writing a ook that i no longer believed in.
and, i was scheduled in a few months to give
the incoming address to all of syracuse university's graduate students.
what in the world would i say to them?
the lecture that i had written and planned to deliver
-on Queer Theory
-i threw in the trash.
thousands of new students would hear my first, fledgling attempts
to speak aboutchristian herneueutics at a postmodern university.
i was flooded with doubt about my new life in Christ.
was i willing to suffer like Christ?
was i willing to be considered stupid by those who didn't know Jesus?
the world's eyes register what a life in Christ takes away,
but how do i communicate all that it gives?
do i really believe..'the very chains of Christ are glorious?
peter, after being beaten for preaching the gospel,
rejoiced that he was 'counted worthy to suffer shame for (Christ's) name? acts 5.41
i pondered this. to the world, this is masochism.
to the christian, this is freedom.
did i really believe this?
do i really believe this today?

i wondered:
if my life was the only evidence that Christ was alive,
would anyone be convinced?

and what about my home, my HABITUS?
a habitus is a way of life that forms habits of the head,
habits of the heart, and habits of the mind.
my habitus had heretofore been a bastion of leftist politiacal activism.
what does a christian habitus look like,
especially one run by a single ex lesbian with a now defunct PhD?

and what about my frag queen friend, who had prayed
for the Lord's healing?
what exactly did that mean?
what exacly is repentance?
if it is a way of life for a christian,
i need to understand it
fully comprehensively deeply and well.

and what of my responsibilities to my gay friends?
were their secrets still safe with me?

what does joy in Christ mean when faced with duties that
you don't want?

as i am sure it is clear by these concerns,
i did not, in any way want to
'share the hope that lies within me'.
i wanted to go back to bed and draw the covers over my head.

conversion put me in a complicated and comprehensive chaos.
i sometimes wonder, when i hear other christians pray for
the salvation of the 'lost'.
if they realize that this comprehensive chaos
is the desired end of such prayers.
often, people asked me to describe the 'lessons'
that i learned from this exsperience.
i can't. it was too traumatic.
sometimes in crisis, we don't really learn lessons.
sometimes the result is simpler and more profound:
sometimes our character is simply transformed

4.26.2013 BUTTERFIELD 2

ARE THERE NO SINNERS LEFT IN THE CHURCH..OR HAVE ALL BECOME JUDGES?  ...the publican smote his breast...God be merciful to me the sinner!....went down to his house justified...

healing comes through God's work , and God deals differently with us
when we deal diffeently with Him.
when we repent, He hears.
do i believe that i'm healed? yes.
my life whos the signs.
my life went from black and white to color.
at first i didn't recognize myself in the world.
today, i don't recognize myself in the pictures from my life as a lesbian.

dr. maureen vanterpool, a colleague from geneva college,
told me recently that being a lesbian was a case of mistaken identity.
this became an intriguing and important paradigm for me.
and even though i'm no longer a lesbian,
I'M STILL A SINNER.
I'M redeemed but STILL FALLEN.
and SIN IS SIN.
i believe that the Lord is more grieved by the sins of my current life
than by my past life as a lesbian. (note: when deaf, dumb and blind spiritually.)
how did the Lord help me?
the way that He always heals:
the word of God got to be bigger inside me than i.
my natural inclination was to resist, so like a reflex, i did this.
God's people surrounded me.
not to manipulate.
not to badger.
but to love and to listen and to watch and to pray.
and eventually instead of resisting, i surrendered.

shortly after becoming a christian,
i counseled a woman who was in a closeted lesbian relationship
and a member of a bible believing church.
no one in her church knw.
therefore, no one in her church was praying for her.
therfore, she sought and received no counsel.
there was no 'bearing one with the other' for her.
no confession.
no repentance.
no healing.
no joy in Christ.
JUST ISOLATION.
AND SHAME.
AND PRETENSE.
someone had sold her thae pack of lies that said that God can heal
your lying tongue or your broken heart, even cure your cancer if He choses,
but He can't transform your sexuality.
i told here that my heart breaks for her isolation and shame
and asked her why she didn't share with anyone in her church her struggle.
she said: 'rosaria if people in my church really believed
that gay people could be transformed by Christ,
they wouldn't talk about us or pray about us in the hateful way that they do. '

christian reader, is this what people say about you when they hear you talk and pray?
do your prayers rise no higher than your prejudice?

i think that churches would be places of greater intimacy and growth in Chtrist
if people stopped LYING about
what we need,
whta we fear,
where we fail,
and how we sin.
i think that many of us have a hard time believing the God we believe in,
when the going gets tough.
and i suspect that instead of seeking counsel and direction
from those stronger in the Loed,
we retreat into our isolation and shame
and let the sin wash over us... defeating us again.
or maybe we muscle through on our pride.
do we really believe that the word of God is
a double edge sword, cutting between the spirit and the soul?
or do we use the word of God as a cue card to commandeer only our external behavior?

4.26.2013 THE SECRET THOUGHTS OF AN UNLIKELY CONVERT by ROSARIA BUTTERFIELD

WITH GOD ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE

the following is taken from chapter 1. note: all the 'butterfield' blogs to follow are taken from this book.

..even though i felt like a freak in that church, i was drawn to keep going back.

..i came home and my lesbian partner told me that i was changing and that she was concerned.
what did i need?
some time away from my work?
maybe we needed to take that long vacation...

my trangendered friend's words
(rosaria, i know that Jesus is a risen and living lord.
i was a presbyterian minister for 15 years,
and during that time, i prayed that the Lord would heal me.
He didn't, but maybe He'll heal you.
i'll pray for you.)
were still weighing heavily upon my heart.
who is this Jesus that He heals some but not others?
is it right to pray for healing when,
from the bible's perspective, i was to repent from my sin?
does God hear prayers that are not construed
in the terms he lays out in the bible?
if Jesus is the living word,
can we pray 'through' Him
if we do not follow Him as our savior and Lord?
these questions weighed hard on me.

that night, i prayed and asked God if the gospel message was for
someone like me, too.
i viscerally felt the living presence of God as i prayed.
Jesus seemed present and alive.
i knew that i was not alone in my room.
i prayed that if Jesus was truly a real and risen God,
that He would change my heart.
and if He was real and if i was His,
i prayed that He would give me the strength of mind
to follow Him and the character to become a godly woman.
i prayed for the strength of character to repent for a sin that
at that time didn't feel like sin at all
-it felt like life, plain and simple.
i prayed that if my life was actually His life,
that He would take it back
and make it what He wanted it to be.
i asked Him to take it all:
my sexuality, my profession, my community,
my tastes, my books and my tomorrows.

two incommensurable worldviews clashed together:
the reality of my lived experience
and the truth of the word of God.
in continental philosophy,
we talk about the difference between the true and the real.
had my life become real, but not true?
the bible told me to repent,
but i didn't feel like repenting.
do you have to feel like repenting in order to repent?
was i a sinner, or was i,
in my drag queen friend's words, sick?
how do you repent for a sin that doesn't feel like a sin?
how could the thing that i had studied and become be sinful?
how could i be tenured in a field that is sin?
how could i and everone that i knew and loved be in sin?
in this crucible of confusion, i learned something important.
i learned the first rule of repentance:
that REPENTENCE REQUIRES GREATER INTIMACY WITH GOD
THAN WITH OUR SIN.
how much greater?
about the size of a mustard seed.
repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus,
no matter what.
and sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees.
repentance is an intimate affair.
and for many of us, intimacy with anthing
is a terrifying prospect.

when Christ gave me the strength to follow Him,
i didn't stop feeling like a lesbian.
i've discovered that the Lord doesn't change my feelings until i obey Him.
during one sermon, ken pointed to john 7.17,
and called this 'the hermeneutics of obedience'.
Jesus is speaking in this passage and He says:
'if anyone is willing to do God's will,
he will know of the teaching,whether it is of God or whether i speak from myself.'
ah ha! here it was !
obedience comes before understanding.
i wanted to understand.
but did i actually will to do His will?
God promised to reveal this understanding to me if i 'willed to do His will'
the bible doesn't just say DO His will, but 'will to do His will'.
wanting to understand is a theoretical statement;
willing to do His will takes action.

i knew i didn't have that!
i prayed that the Lord would give me that whole hearted will.
i learned that the Lord wants all of our loyalties
under submission to Him.
He wants us to identify ourselves,
to call ourselves by name, in His name for us.
in my case,
my feelings of lesbianism were
familiar, comfortable and recognizable,
and i was reluctant to give them up.
i clung to matthew 16.24,
remembering that every believer had to at some point in life
take the step that i was taking:
giving up the right to myself,
taking up His cross..
and following Jesus.
the Lord made it clear to me that i had to make some serious life changes.

i started to obey God in my heart one step at a time.
i broke up with my girlfriend.
my heart really wasn't in the break up,
but i hoped that God would regard my obedience even in
its doublemindedness.
i started to go to the rp (reformed presbyterian) church fully,
in my heart, for the ..purpose of worshiping God.
i stopped caring if i looked like a freak there.
i started to receive the friendship that the church members offered to me.
i learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different.
at this time, though, obeying in faith, to me,
felt like throwing myself off a cliff.
faith that endures is heroic, not sentimental.

and then came the night terrors.
night after night, dreams so vivid and real that i could taste and feel them.
dreams so commanding that when i finally awoke,
i felt filthy and delirious.

my journey out of lesbianism
i spent a lot of time in prayer-and still do.
i leaned heavily on the counsel of the women of the syracuse church:
fly smith vivian rice, NM, becky smith, robyn zorn,
corrine thompson, marty wright, kathy donath.
i asked them vulverable and real questions
and they answered me and loved me anyway.
the journey out of lesbianism had many dimensions,
and the Lrod was gracious in leading me a small step,
and then burning the bridge i crossed
to keep me safely closer to Him.
from the first night, there was no going back.

slowly but steadily, by feelings did start to change
-feelings about myself as a woman and
feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn't.
i-like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian
-felt very comfortable,
very at home in my body, in my lesianism.
one doesn
to repent from a sin of identity in one session.
sins of identity have multiple dimensions,
and throughout this journey,
i have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord,
and always to the Lord Himself
with different facets of my sin.
i don't mean differnet incidents or examples of the same sin,
but different facets of sin
-how pride, for example, informed my decision makeing
or how my unwillingness to forgive others hadd landlocked my heart in bitterness.
i have walked this journey with help.
ther is no other way to do it.
i still walk this journey with help.
(note: oh Lord bring back true spiritual fellowship into Your church,
which now feels like a howling spiritual wasteland. make me an answer to this prayer.)

the teaching, the prayers and the friendships
the Lord has given to me through the body of Christ have blessed me righly.
i'm grateful that the Lord brough me to a church that was as strong on teaching
as it is on compassion.
did i find the perfect church?
no.
i almost left when things got hard and they got hard fast.
the time that i brought my drag queen friend to church
pushed alot of folks out of their comfort zone.

4.16.2013 COST OF DISCIPLESHIP 3

the following hopefully will cover chapters 3-5

CHAPTER 3   SINGLE MINDED OBEDIENCE

when he was challenged by Jesus to accept a life of voluntary poverty,
the rich young man knew he was faced with
the simple alternative of obedience or disobedience.
when levi was called from the receipt of custom
and peter from his nets,
there was no doubt that Jesus meant business.
both of them were to leave everything and follow.
again, when peter was called to walk on the rolling sea,
he had to get up and risk his life.
only one thing was required in each case
-to rely on Christ's word, and to cling to it
as offering greater security than all the securities in the world.
the forces which tried to interpose themselves
between the word of Jesus and the response of obedience
were as formidable then as they are today.
reason and conscience, responsibility and piety all stood in the way,
and even the law and 'scriptural authority' itself
were obstacles which pretended to defend them from
going to extremes of antinomianism
(belief that a christian is free from having to keep the moral law due to grace)
and 'enthusiasms'.
but the call of Jesus made short work of
all these barriers, and created obedience.
that call was the word of God Himself,
and all that it required was single minded obedience.

if, as we read our bibles, we heard Jesus speaking to us
in this way today we should probably try
to argue ourselves out of it like this;
'it is true that the demand of Jesus is definite enough,
but i have to remember that He never
expects us to take His commands legalistically.
what he really wants me to have is faith.
but my faith is not necessarily tied up with riches
or poverty or anything of the kind.
we may be both poor and rich in the spirit.
it is not important that i should have no possessions,
but if i do i must keep them as though i had them not,
in other words i must cultivate a spirit of
inward detachment,
so that my heart is not in my possessions.
Jesus may have said:
'sell thy goods,
but He meant:
'do not let it be a matter of consequence to you that
you have outward prosperity;
rather keep your goods quietly,
having them as if you had them not.
let not your heart be in your goods.'
-we are excusing ourselves from single minded obedience to the word of Jesus
on the pretext of legalism and a supposed preference for an obedience 'in faith'.
the difference between ourselves and the rich young man is
that he was not allowed to solace his regrets by saying:
'never mind what Jesus says,
i can still hold on to my riches,
but in a spirit of inner detachment.
despite my inadequacy i can take comfort in the thought
that God has forgiven me my sins
and can have fellowship with Christ in faith.'
but no, he went away sorrowful.
because he would not obey, he could not believe.
in this the young man was quite honest.
he went away from Jesus and indeed this honesty
had more promise than any apparent communion with Jesus
based on disobedience.
as Jesus realized, the trouble with the young man
was that he was not capable of such an inward
detachment from riches.
as an earnest seeker for perfection
he had probably tried it a thousand times before and failed,
as he showed by refusing to obey the word of Jesus
when the moment of decision came.
ti is just here that the young man was entirely honest.
but we in our sophistry differ altogether
from the hearers of Jesus' word of whom the bible speaks.
if Jesus said to someone:
'leave all else behind and follow Me;
resign your profession,
quit your family,
and the home of your fathers',
then He knew that to this call there was only one answer
-the answer of single minded obedience,
and that it is only to his obedience that
the promise of fellowship with Jesus is given.
but we should probably argue thus:
'of course we are meant to take the call of Jesus with
'absolute seriousness',
but after all the true way of obedience
would be to continue all the more in our present occupations,
to stay with our families,
and to serve Him there in a spirit of true inward detachment. '
if Jesus challenged us with the command:
'get out of it'
we should take Him to mean
'stay where you are but cultivate that inward detachment.
again, if he were to say to us:
'be not anxious'
we should take Him to mean:
'of course it is not wrong for us to be anxious:
we must work and provide for ourselves and our dependents.'
if we did not we should be shirking our responsibilities.
but all the time we ought to be inwardly free from all anxiety.'
perhaps Jesus would say to us:
'whosoever smiteth thee on the right cheek,
turn to him the other also.'
we should then suppose Him to mean:
'the way really to love your enemy is to fight him hard
and hit him back.'
Jesus might say:
'seek ye first the kingdom of God'
and we should interpret it thus:
'of course we should have to seek all sorts of other things first;
how could we otherwise exist?
what He really means is the final preparedness
to stake all on the kingdom of God.'
all along the line we are trying to evade the obligation
of single minded, literal obedience.

how is such absurdity possible?
what has happened that the word of Jesus can be thus degraded
by this trifling,
and thus left open to the mockery of the word?
when orders are issued in other spheres of life
there is no doubt whatever of their meaning.
if a father sends his child to bed,
the boy knows at once what he has to do.
but suppose he has picked up a smattering of pseudo-theology.
in that case he would argue more or less like this:
'father tells me to go to bed,
but he really means that i am tired,
and he does not want me to be tired.
i can overcome my tiredness just as well if i go out and play.
therefore though father tells me to go to bed,
he really means:
'go out and play.'
if a child tried such arguments on his father
or a citizen on his government,
they would both meet with a kind of language
they could not  fail to understand
-in short they would be punished.
are we to treat the commandment of Jesus differently
from other orders
and exchange single minded obedience for downright
disobedience?
how could that be possible!

it is possible because there is an element of truth
underlying all this sophistry.
(a subtle, tricky, superficially plausible,
but generally fallacious method of reasoning.)

when Jesus calls the young man to enter into the situation
where faith is possible,
He does it only with the aim of making the man have faith in Him,
that is to say, He calls him into fellowship with Himself.
in the last resort what matters is not what the man does,
but only his faith in Jesus as the Son of God and Mediator.
...everything depends on faith alone.
so far then we are quite right:
it is possible to have wealth
and the possession of this world's goods
and to believe in Christ
-so that a man may have these goods as
one who has them not.
but this is an ULTIMATE  possibility of the Christian life,
only within our capacity in so far as we await
with earnest expectation
the immediate return of Christ.
it is by no means the first and the simplest possibility.
the paradoxical understanding of the commandments
has its christian justification,
but it must never lead to the abandoning of
the single minded understanding of the commandments....

CHAPTER 4  DISCIPLESHIP AND THE CROSS

..peter's protest displays his own unwillingness to suffer,
and that means that satan has gained entry into the church
and is trying to tear it away from the cross of its Lord.

Jesus must therefore make it clear beyond all doubt that
the 'must' of suffering applies to His disciples no less than
to Himself.
just as Christ is Christ only in virtue of His suffering
and rejection,
so the disciple is a disciple only in so far as
he shares his Lord's suffering and rejection and crucifixion.
discipleship means adherence to the person of Jesus
and therefore submission to the law of Christ
which is the law of the cross.

surprisingly enough, when Jesus begins to unfold this
inescapable truth to His disciples,
he once more sets them free to choose or reject Him.
'if any man would come after Me' He says.
for it is not a matter of course,
not even among the disciples.
nobody can be forced,
nobody can even be expected to come.
He (who) says rather 'IF any man'
is prepared to spurn all other offers
which come His way in order to follow Him.
once again, everything is left for the individual to decide.
when the disciples are half way along the road of discipleship,
they come to another cross roads.
once more they are left free to
chose for themselves,
nothing is expected of them,
nothing forced upon them.
so crucial is the demand of the present hour
that the disciples must be left free to make their own choice
before they are told of the law of discipleship.

...to deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ
and no more of self,
to see only Him who goes before
and no more the road which is too hard for us.
once more, all that self denial can say is:
'He leads the way, keep close to Him.'

..to endure the cross is not a tragedy;
it is the suffering which is the fruit of an
exclusive allegiance to Jesus Christ.
when it comes, it is not an accident, but a necessity.
it is not the sort of suffering which is inseparable from
this mortal life,
but the suffering which is an essential part of the specifically
christian life.
it is not suffering per se
but suffering and rejection,
and not rejection for any cause or conviction of our own.
but rejection for the sake of Christ.
if our christianity has ceased to be serious about discipleship,
if we have watered down the gospel into
emotional uplift which makes no costly demands
and which fails to distinguish between natural and christian existence,
then we cannot help regarding the cross
as an everyday calamity,
as one of the trials and tribulations of life.
we have then forgotten that the cross means
rejection and shame as well as suffering.
the psalmist was lamenting that he was
despised and rejected of men,
and that is an essential quality of the suffering of the cross.
but this notion has ceased to be intelligible to a christianity
which can no longer see any difference between
an ordinary human life
a life committed to Christ.
the cross means sharing the suffering of Christ
to the last and to the fullest.
only a man thus totally committed in discipleship
can experience the meaning of the cross.

...the cross is laid on every christian...
thus it begins;
the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing
and happy life,
but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ.
WHEN CHRIST CALLS A MAN
HE BIDS HIM COME AND DIE.
it may be a death like that of the first disciples
who had to leave home and work to follow Him,
or it may be a death like luther's,
who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world.
but it is the same death every time
-death in Jesus Christ,
the death of the old man at His call.
Jesus' summons to the rich young man was calling him to die,
because only the man who is dead to his own will
can follow Christ.
in fact every command of Jesus is a call to die,
with all our affections and lusts.
but we do not want to die,
and therefore Jesus Christ and His call
are necessarily our death as well as our life.
the call to discipleship,
the baptism in the name of Jesus Christ
means both death and life.
the call of Christ, his baptism (?)
sets the christian in the middle of the
daily arena against sin and the devil.
every day he encounters new temptations,
and every day he must suffer anew for Jesus Christ's sake.
the wounds and scars he receives in the fray are living tokens of
this participation in the cross of his Lord.
but there is another kind of suffering and shame
which the christian is not spared.
while it is true that only the sufferings of Christ
are a means of atonement,
yet since He has suffered for and borne the sins of the whole world
and shares with His disciples the fruits of His passion,
the Christian also has to undergo temptation,
he too has to bear the sins of others;
he too must bear their shame and be driven like a scapegoat
from the gate of the city.
but he would certainly break down under this burden,
but for the support of Him who bore the sins of all.
the passion of Christ strengthens him to overcome the sins of others
by forgiving them.
he becomes the bearer of other men's burdens
-'bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. gal. 6.2
as Christ bears our burdens,
so ought we to bear the burdens of our fellow men.
the law of Christ, which it is our duty to fulfil,
is the bearing of the cross.
my brother's burden which i must bear is not only his outward lot,
his natural characteristics and gifts,
but quite literally his sin.
and the only way to bear that sin is by forgiving it
in the power of the cross of Christ
in which i now share.
 thus the call to follow Christ always means
a call to share the work of forgiving men their sins.
forgiveness is the Christlike suffering
which it is the christian's duty to bear.

but how is the disciple to know what kind of cross is meant for him?
he will find out as soon as he begins to follow his Lord
and to share His life.

suffering, then, is the badge of true discipleship.
the disciple is not above his master.
following Christ means pasio passiva,
suffering because we have to suffer.
that is why luther reckoned suffering among the marks of
the true church.
and one of the memoranda drawn up
in preparation for the augsburg confession
similarly defines the church as the community of those
'who are persecuted and martyred for the gospel's sake'.
if we refuse to take up our cross and submit to suffering
and rejection at the hands of men,
we forfeit our fellowship with Christ
and have ceased to follow Him.
but if we lose our lives in his service and carry our cross,
we shall find our lives again in the fellowship of the cross with Christ.
the opposite of discipleship is to be ashamed of Christ
and His cross
and all the offence which the cross brings in its train.

discipleship means allegiance to the suffering Christ,
and it is therefore not at all surprising
that christians should be called upon to suffer.
in fact it is a joy
and a token of His grace.
the acts of the early christian martyrs are full of evidence
which shows how Christ transfigures for His own
the hour of their mortal agony by granting them
the unspeakable assurance of His presence.
in the hour of the cruelest torture
they bear for His sake,
they are made partakers
in the perfect joy and bliss of fellowship with Him.
to bear the cross proves to be the only way of triumphing
over suffering.
this is true for all who follow Christ,
because it was true for Him...

Jesus prays to His Father that the cup may pass from Him,
and His Father hears His prayer;
for the cup of suffering will indeed pass from Him
-but ONLY BY HIS DRINKING IT.
that is the assurance he receives as He kneels for the second time
in the garden of gethsemane that suffering will indeed pass
as He accepts it.
the cross is His triumph over suffering....

suffering has to be endured in order that
it may pass away.
either the world must  ear the whole burden
and collapse beneath it,
or it must fall of Christ to be overcome in Him.
He therefore suffers vicariously for the world.
His is the only suffering which has redemptive efficacy.
but the church knows that the world is still seeking
for someone to bear its sufferings,
and so, as it follows Christ,
suffering becomes the church's lot too and bearing it,
it is born up by Christ.
as it follows Him beneath the cross,
the church stands before God as
the representative of the world....

for God is a God who BEARS.
the Son of God bore our flesh,
He bore the cross,
He bore our sins,
thus making atonement for us.
in the same way His followers are also called upon to bear,
and that is precisely what if means to be a Christian.
just as Christ maintained His communion with the Father
by his endurance,
so His followers are to maintain their communion with Christ
by their endurance.
we can of course shake off the burden which is laid upon us,
but only find that we have a still heavier burden to carry
-a yoke of our own choosing,
THE YOKE OF OUR SELF.
but Jesus  invites all who travail and are heavy laden
to throw off their own  yoke and take His yoke upon them
-and His yoke is easy, and His burden is light.
the yoke and the burden of Christ are His cross.
to go one's way under the sign of the cross
is not misery and desperation,
but peace and refreshment for the soul,
it is the highest joy.
then we do not walk under our self made laws and burdens,
but under the yoke of Him who knows us
and who walks under the yoke with us.
under His yoke we are certain of His nearness and communion.
it is He whom the disciple finds as he lifts up his cross.

'discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend
-it must transcend all comprehension.
plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension,
and I will help you to comprehend even as I do.
BEWILDERMENT IS THE TRUE COMPREHENSION.
NOT TO KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING IS TRUE KNOWLEDGE.
My comprehension transcends yours.
thus abraham went forth from his father
and not knowing whither he wen.
he trusted himself to My knowledge and cared not for his own
and thus he took the right road and came to his journey's end.
behold, that is the way of the cross.
you cannot find it yourself,
so you must let Me lead you as though you were a blind man.
wherefore it is not you, no man, no living creature,
but I Myself, who instruct you by My word and Spirit
in the way you should go.
not the work which you choose,
not the suffering you devise,
but the road which is clean contrary to
all that you choose or connive or desire
-that is the road you must take.
to that I call you and in that you must be My disciple.
if you do that, there is the acceptable time
and there your master is come.'  luther


CHAPTER 5    DISCIPLESHIP AND THE INDIVIDUAL

if any man cometh unto Me
and hateth not his own father and mother and wife and children
and brethren and sisters, yea and his won life also,
he CANNOT be My disciple luke 14.26

through the call of Jesus men become individuals.
willy nilly, they are compelled to decide
and that decision can only be made by themselves.
it is no choice of their own that makes them individuals:
it is Chris who makes them individuals by calling them.
every man is called separately ,
and must follow alone.
but men are frightened of solitude,
and they try to protect themselves from it
by merging themselves in the society of their fellow me
and in their material environment.
they become suddenly aware of their responsibilities and duties,
and are loath to part with them.
but all this is only a cloak to protect them
from having to make a decision.
they are unwilling to stand alone before Jesus
and to be compelled to decide with their eyes fixed on Him alone.
yet neither father nor mother,
neither wife nor child,
neither nationality nor tradition
can protect a man at the moment of his call.
it is Christ's will
that he should be thus isolated
and that he should fix his eyes solely upon Him.

at the very moment of their call,
men find that they have already broken
with all the natural ties of life.
this is not their own doing,
but His who calls them.
for Christ has delivered them from
immediacy with the world,
and brought them into immediacy with Himself.
we cannot follow Christ unless we are prepared
to accept and affirm that breach as a fait accompli.
it is no arbitrary choice on the disciple's part,
but Christ Himself,
who compels Him thus to break with his past.

why is this necessary?
why are we not allowed to grow slowly, gradually, uninterruptedly
in progressive sanctification
out of the natural order into the fellowship of Christ?
what is this power which so angrily comes between a man
and the natural life in which it had pleased God to place him?
surely such a breach with the past is a legalistic technique
and surly contempt for he good gifts of God.
a technique far removed from the
'liberty of the christian man'?
we must face up to the truth that the call of Christ
DOES set up a barrier between man and his natural life.
but this barrier is no surly contempt for life,
no legalistic piety,
it is the life which is life indeed,
the Gospel, the person of Jesus Christ.
by virtue of His incarnation He has come between man and his natural life.
there can be no turning back,
for Christ bars the way.
by calling us He has cut us off from all immediacy
with the things of this world.
He wants to be he centre, through Him alone
all things shall come to pass.
He stands between us and God,
and for that very reason He stands between us and all other men and things.
HE IS THE MEDIATOR,
not only between God and man,
but between man and man, between man and reality.
since the whole world was created through Him and unto Him
john 1.3; I cor. 8.6; heb 1.2'
He is the sole mediator in the world.
since His coming man has no immediate relationship of his own
any more to anything,
neither to God nor to the world:
Christ wants to be the mediator.
of course, there are plenty of gods who offer men direct access,
and the world naturally uses every means in its power to retain
its direct hold on men,
but that is the very reason why it is so bitterly opposed to Christ,
the Mediator.

this breach with the immediacies of the world is identical
with the acknowledgement of Christ
as the Son of God the Mediator.
it is never a deliberate act whereby we renounce all
contact with the world for the sake of some ideal or other,
as though for instance
we were exchanging a lower ideal for a higher one.
that would be enthusiasm and willfulness
and again an attempt at direct relationship with the world.
only the recognition of the fait accompli of Christ as the Mediator
can separate the disciple from the world of men and hings.
it is he call of Jesus, regarded not as an ideal,
but as the word of a Mediator,
which effects in us this complete breach with the world....

the call of Jesus teaches us that our relation to the wold has been
built on an illusion.
all the time we thought we had
enjoyed a direct relation with men and things.
this is what had hindered us from faith and obedience.
now we learn that in the most intimate relationships of life,
in our kinship with father and mother, brothers and sisters,
in married love and in our duty to the community,
direct relationships are impossible.
since the coming of Christ,
His followers have no more immediate realities of their own,
not in their family relationships nor in the ties with their nation
nor in the relationships formed in the process of living.
between father and son, husband and wife.
the individual and the nation,
stands Christ the Mediator,
whether they are able to recognize Him or not.
we cannot establish direct contact outside ourselves
except through Him,
through His word and through our following of Him.
to think otherwise is o deceive ourselves.

but since we are bound to abhor
any deception which hides the truth from our sight,
we must of necessity repudiate any direct relationship with
the things of this world -and that for the sake of Christ.
WHEREVER A GROUP, BE IT LARGE OR SMALL,
PREVENTS US FROM STANDING ALONE BEFORE CHRIST,
wherever such a group raises a claim of immediacy
IT MUST BE HATED FOR THE SAKE OF CHRIST.
for every immediacy, whether we realize it or not,
means hatred of Christ,
and this is especially true where such relationships
claim the sanction of christian principles....

for the christian the only God given realities
are those he receives from Christ.
what is not given us through the incarnate Son
is not given us by God.
what has not been given me for Christ's sake,
does not come from God.
when we offer thanks for the gifts of creation
we must do it through Jesus Christ,
and when we pray for the preservation of this life by the grace of God,
we must make our prayer for Christ's sake.
anything i cannot thank God for the sake of Christ,
i may not thank god for at all';
to do so would be sin.
the path, too, to the 'God given reality' of my
fellow man or woman with whom i have o live
leads through Christ,
or it is a blind alley.
we are separated from one another by an unbridgeable gulf of
otherness and strangeness
which resists all our attempts to overcome it
by means of natural association
or emotional or spiritual union.
there is no way from one person to another.
however loving and sympathetic we try to be,
however sound our psychology,
however frank and open our behaviour,
we cannot penetrate the incognito of he other man,
for there are no direct relationships,
not even between soul and soul.
Christ stands between us,
and we can only get into touch with our neighbours through Him.
that is why intercession is the most promising way to reach our neighbours,
and corporate prayer, offered in the name of Chris,
the purest form of fellowship.

we cannot rightly acknowledge the gifts of God unless we
acknowledge the Mediator for whose sake alone they are given to us.
there can be no genuine thanksgiving for the blessings of
nation, family, history and nature without
that heart felt penitence which gives the glory
to Christ alone above all else.
there can be no real attachment to the given creation,
no genuine responsibility in the world, unless we recognize the breach
which already separates us from it.
there can be no genuine love of the world
except he love wherewith God loved it in Jesus Christ....

this breach with all our immediate relationships is inescapable.
it may take the form of an external breach with family or nation
in that case we shall be called upon to bear visibly
the reproach of Christ,
the odium generis humani.
or it may be a hidden and a secret breach.
but even then we must always be ready to come out into the open.
in the last resort it makes no difference whether the breach be secret or open.
abraham is an example of both.
he had to leave his friends and his father's house because
Christ came between him and his own.
on this occasion the breach was evident.
abraham became a stranger and a sojourner
in order to gain the promised land.
this was his first call.
later on he was called by God to offer his own son isaac as a sacrifice.
Christ had come between the father of faith and the child of promise.
this time the direct relationship not only of flesh and blood,
but also of the spirit, must be broken.
abraham must learn that the promise does not depend on isaac, but on god alone.
no one else hears his call of god,
not even the servants who accompanied abraham to mount moriah.
once again, as when he left his father's house,
abraham becomes an individual,
a lonely and solitary figure.
he accepts the call as it comes;
he will not shirk it or 'spiritualize' it.
he takes God at His word and is ready to obey.
against every direct claim upon him,
whether natural, ethical or religious,
he will be obedient o the word of God.
by his willingness to sacrifice isaac,
he shows that he is prepared to come out into the open
with the breach which he had already made secretly,
and to do so for the sake of he Mediator.
and at that very moment all that he had surrendered was given back to him.
he receives back his son.
God shows him as better sacrifice which will take the place of isaac.
the tables are completely urned,
abraham received isaac back,
but henceforth he will have his son in quite a new way
-through the mediator and for the Mediator's sake.
since he had shown himself ready to obey God literally,
he is now allowed to possess isaac though he had him no
-to possess him through Jesus Christ.
no one else knows what has happened.
abraham comes down from the mountain with isaac
just as he went up,
but the whole situation has changed.
Christ has stepped between father and son.
abraham had left all and followed Christ,
and as he follows Him he is allowed to
go back and live in the world as he had done before.
outwardly the picture is unchanged,
but the old is passed away,
and behold all things are new.
everything has had o pass through Christ.

this is the second way of becoming an individual
-to be a follower of Christ in the midst of society among our own kith and kin
and in the enjoyment of all our worldly wealth.
but note that is is abraham who is called to this manner of life.
abraham who had already known what it was to make a visible
breach with the past.
abraham who in the new testament became the example of faith.
we are easily tempted to generalize the possibility that was granted to abraham,
to understand it as a spiritual principle and without hesitation
to apply it to ourselves.
we would like to think that we had the same call o a christian life,
as a specially called follower of Christ
who yet retained the enjoyment of his worldly possessions.
yet the outward breach is most certainly easier than the hidden one.
unless we have learn this from the bible and from our experience,
we are indeed deceiving ourselves.
we shall fall back on our direct relationships
and forfeit our fellowship with Christ.
it is not for us to choose which way we shall follow.
that depends on the will of Christ.
but this at least is certain:
in one way or the other we shall have to leave the immediacy of the world
and become individuals,
whether secretly or openly.

but the same Mediator who makes us individuals is
also the founded of a new fellowship.
He stands in the centre between my neighbour and myself.
He divides, but He also unites.
thus although the direct way to our neighbour is barred,
we now find the new and only real way to him
-the way which passes through the Mediator.

peter began to say unto Him,
lo, we have left all and have followed The.
Jesus said, verily I say unto you,
there is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters
or mother or father or children or lands, for My sake
and for the gospel's sake,
but he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time,
houses and brethren and sisters and mothers and children and lands
with persecutions;
and in the world o come, eternal life.
but many that are first shall be last and the last first. mark 10.28-31

Jesus is here speaking to men who have become individuals for His sake,
who have left all at His call, and can say of themselves:
'lo, we have left all and have followed Thee.
they receive the promise of a new fellowship.
according to the word of Jesus,
they will receive in this time a hundredfold of what they have left.
Jesus is referring to His church,
which finds itself in Him.
he who leaves his father for Jesus' sake
does most assuredly find father and mother, brothers and sisters again
and even lands and houses.
though we all have to enter upon discipleship alone,
we do not remain alone.
if we take Him at His word
and dare to become individuals,
our reward is the fellowship of the church.
here is a visible brotherhood to compensate
a hundredfold  for all we have lost.
a hundredfold?
yes, for we now have everything through the Mediator,
but with this proviso
-'with persecutions'.
a hundredfold with persecutions
-such is the grace which is granted o the church
which follows its Lord beneath the cross.
such also is the promise which is held out to Christ's followers
-they will be members of the community of the cross,
the People of he Mediator,
the People under the cross.

and they were in the way, going up to jerusalem;
and Jesus was going before them:
and they were amazed;
and they that followed were afraid.
and He took again the twelve
and began o tell them the things that were to happen unto Him. mark 10.32

as if to bring home to them how serious was His call,
to show them how impossible it was to follow in their own strength,
and to emphasize that adherence to him means persecutions,
Jesus goes on before to jerusalem and to the cross,
and they are filled with fear and amazement at the road He calls them to follow.