A Reflection on Jonah and the Whale

 

A Reflection on Jonah and the Whale

April 3, 2023

 

Say the name Jonah to most people, and they’ll immediately think of Jonah in the belly of a whale. Yes, Jonah in the belly of a whale is part of his story, but it certainly isn’t all of his story. More fully, the story goes like this. God tells a man named Jonah to go to Nineveh and prophesy there. The name Nineveh may not mean much to most of us, but it would have meant a lot to the ancient Hebrew people who were this story’s first audience. Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, one of a succession of empires that rose and fell far to the east of Israel in what is now Iraq. In the eighth century BCE, Assyria threatened both of the Hebrew kingdoms then in existence. In 722 BCE it conquered and destroyed the northern one of those two kingdoms. To this story’s first audience, the name Nineveh would have evoked fear and anger. It was the capital of the enemy, of the evil people who did very bad things to them and their nation.

Jonah knew what Nineveh was. He knew it as the principal city of Israel’s implacable enemy Assyria. He thought something like, “Go to that horrible, dangerous place and preach the word of the God of Israel to them? I don’t think so!” So rather than go east from Israel to Nineveh, he boarded a ship headed west toward a place called Tarshish, which was probably in the southern part of what today is Spain. He was trying to get as far away from Nineveh as he possibly could get. A great storm came up. The ship was in danger of sinking. Everyone onboard faced death by drowning. Everyone thought that someone’s god must be causing the storm. Eventually they decide it is Jonah’s God who was causing the storm because Jonah was trying to run away from God’s call. So they threw Jonah overboard, more or less with his consent. The Lord, that is, Yahweh, Jonah’s God, provides a “great fish,” maybe a whale or maybe not, to swallow Jonah. Jonah is in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights. The Lord then has the great fish disgorge Jonah, who, we can assume, ended up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit.

At that point Jonah says all right already. I’ll go to Nineveh and prophesy to them. He goes there, but all he says is that in forty days Nineveh will be overthrown. Whereupon all the people from the king on down repent, fast, and put on sackcloth. They even put sackcloth on their animals. The Lord does not destroy Nineveh, which makes Jonah go off and pout. The Lord just says to Jonah that the Lord cares about Nineveh, which I guess is why the Lord didn’t destroy the city. The text doesn’t say whether Jonah ever stopped pouting. I seriously doubt that he did.

Frankly, I’ve never taken the story of Jonah very seriously. I’ve thought of it as biblical comic relief. I find Jonah very funny. I can imagine a good standup comedian having great fun with this story, as Bill Cosby once did. Recently however, I read something that has led me to reconsider my take on Jonah. As the thing I read suggested, I have now been thinking of the story of Jonah as an archetypical story of many people’s spiritual journey, my own included. In this story, God calls Jonah to a particular ministry, namely, going and preaching to Nineveh. Preaching to the enemy in the enemy’s capital city probably was about the last thing in the world it would ever have occurred to Jonah to do. When God told him to do it, it was no doubt the last thing in the world Jonah wanted to do. Jonah heard God’s call. There’s no doubt about that. He does not, however, immediately take up the ministry to which God has called him. Quite the opposite. He doesn’t just tell God no, he tries to run away from God and God’s call to him. God, however, doesn’t give up on him. As Jonah runs from God, God causes him to hit rock bottom. I mean, Jonah being swallowed by a whale (or whatever it was) is a pretty good metaphor for the many ways in which we humans hit rock bottom. Then God brings Jonah up from rock bottom. It’s a messy procedure what with the whale vomit and all, but Jonah comes back up. He goes to Nineveh, and when what he does there doesn’t produce the result he wanted, he gets all upset.

Let me illustrate what I mean by saying that the story of Jonah is archetypical of many spiritual journeys by comparing what happens to Jonah to my own spiritual journey. I used to be a lawyer. I started practicing law in 1981. By 1994 I was badly burning out on law. I developed moderate clinical depression for which I was taking drugs that at least kept me from killing myself. When I did a Jungian psychological exercise in an attempt to figure out why I was having so much trouble with law, a voice from deep within me told me, “You’re not a lawyer!” The voice that said those words arose from my subconscious mind without my having ever consciously thought that I wasn’t a lawyer. Of course I’m a lawyer, I thought. When the voice insisted that I wasn’t, I asked it what I was. It said, “You’re a preacher!” I thought that answer was absurd. Though I didn’t think of it this way at the time, I now understand that that voice was God calling me to a ministry it had never occurred to me pursue and that I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to pursue. Jonah never thought of preaching to Nineveh on his own. I had never thought of myself as a preacher or of ever becoming one on my own. Jonah fled from God’s call. I didn’t flee from it so much as I just ignored it. It made no sense to me, so I put it aside and pretty much forgot about it.

God didn’t give up on Jonah. God didn’t give up on me either. Three years later, in 1997, an opportunity to receive seminary training as a Christian minister arose in Seattle, the place where I had worked and near which I lived. When I learned of that opportunity, which hadn’t existed in Seattle before, I knew I had to go the university that offered that opportunity (Seattle University) and earn a Master of Divinity degree. This time it wasn’t that a voice spoke directly to me saying that I had to do that. Somehow I just knew it. I didn’t know how I knew. I just knew that I had to do it, and I knew it as clearly as I had ever known anything. I understand now in a way I didn’t then that that knowledge of mine was precisely God not giving up on me. It was God calling me again, or still, to become what God knew I was but I didn’t. Depression and a failing law practice were my belly of the whale. It was my rock bottom. The Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry was the beach God brought me up to. I don’t recall any whale vomit, but through that school God was bringing me up from my rock bottom. I earned that MDiv degree in December, 2000. In March 2002 Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ called me as their pastor. That little church wasn’t and isn’t anything like Nineveh. Still, in a way it became my Nineveh. It became the place where I could and did perform the ministry of preaching, pastoral care, and other pastoral duties to which God had first called me eight years earlier.

Jonah’s pouting when Nineveh wasn’t destroyed is harder to fit into my story. Here’s one way I can do it. Jonah’s ministry didn’t produce the result he wanted. He wanted Nineveh destroyed, and it wasn’t. It is true of many of us in professionals in ministry that our work doesn’t always, or usually, produce the result we want. Or at least it doesn’t at all appear to do that. The people with whom we minister to all appearances remain the people they were before we began to minister with them. I don’t know that many of us pout about our ministry’s apparent lack of effect, but many of us find ministry disappointing for that reason. We need to understand that just as God cared for Nineveh and didn’t destroy it, so God cares about the people with whom we minister and will bring them along on God’s time not our time.

So the story of Jonah has a lot more depth for me than it has had before. Though it really is pretty funny, it is a lot more than mere biblical comic relief. The details of my faith journey are very different from Jonah’s, but the broad outline is the same. It’s the same for a great many people God calls to ministry. We get a call. We deny that call. God keeps calling us. Often we hit rock bottom because we deny God’s call. God can then bring us up from rock bottom and send us on our way to do the ministry to which God had originally called us.

There’s one aspect of my story that I don’t think is part of Jonah’s. I mentioned it briefly above. God knew who I am far better than I did. God knew I wasn’t really a Russian historian, which is the first profession I trained for. God was more sure that I wasn’t a lawyer. My decision to go to law school when no university jobs for Russian historians were available in the mid-1970s was poorly thought out. It wasn’t the result of any intentional discernment on my part. It was just something I could do, so I did it. Being a lawyer was fine for quite a few years, but eventually who I really am conflicted with being a lawyer so much that I hit rock bottom. The first day I walked into Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ as it pastor I knew that I was already a better pastor than I ever was a lawyer. And I was. Not long before she died of cancer my wife of thirty years said to me “I’m so glad you finally are who you really are.” I don’t think Jonah was ever finally a prophet. I know that I am a pastor. I’m retired now, but my years of active ministry were the best years of my professional life. By far. And I still get to preach and lead worship occasionally. For calling me, letting me hit rock bottom, then calling me back up to become who I really am all I can say to God is, “From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

On the Indictment of Donald J. Trump

 

On the Indictment of Donald J. Trump

April 1, 2023

 

On Thursday, March 29, 2023, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted former president Donald J. Trump for various alleged crimes. The indictment is not yet publicly available, so we don’t know the details of the charges DA Bragg has brought against Trump. News reports say the indictment charges thirty counts of alleged crimes related to fraud in the use of business records. The charges apparently relate to hush money Trump paid to Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, the name under which she worked as a porn actress. Trump’s former enforcer Michael Cohen has already been convicted of essentially the same crimes. The court papers in his case call Donald Trump “Individual-1” and strongly suggest that the only reason he wasn’t charged as a co-conspirator is that he was president at the time. We do not yet know if any of the crimes alleged in the indictment are felonies, as under New York state law simple falsification of business records is often only a misdemeanor. News reports say Trump will surrender to New York authorities on Tuesday, April 4, 2023, for arraignment.

District Attorney Bragg’s indictment of Trump is the first time in American history that a sitting or former president has been formally indicted for criminal conduct. Richard Nixon would have been but for the pardon President Ford gave him. That’s as close we we’ve come to an indictment of a president. It had never happened before last Thursday. As expected, the indictment has set off a barrage of accusations against Bragg from the Trumpist right- wing of American politics. Trumpists say that this is a political indictment. They usually call it a “witch hunt,” by which I guess they mean something that is illegitimate and cannot produce any proper and justifiable result. They say Bragg is backed by George Soros, a longtime rightist whipping boy, as if that actually mattered. The attacks on Bragg reek of anti-Semitism, Soros being Jewish, and of racism, Bragg being African-American. As I write here on April 1, none of the protests against the indictment has turned violent. We can only hope and pray that none never does. What we know about how this indictment came about indicates that Bragg followed routine New York criminal law and procedure in procuring it. A grand jury heard evidence about Trump’s conduct for months. It voted to indict Trump. There is nothing overtly political about the indictment.

Yet Trump’s supporters say it is political, so we must consider for a moment what it would mean if Bragg’s motive in obtaining the indictment were political. It surely has happened that prosecutors have undertaken criminal investigations of political opponents in an attempt to discredit them with the public. Yet such a political motivation behind a criminal investigation has no effect on what that investigation finds, or at least it doesn’t if the prosecutor doesn’t manufacture otherwise nonexistent evidence. There is no hint that Bragg has done any such thing in his case against Trump. The facts an investigation discovers are simply facts. They either constitute a criminal violation or they don’t. Whether or not they do has nothing to do with the prosecutors motive for discovering them.

Still, any decision to indict Donald Trump will inevitably have political ramifications. That is true whether the decision is to indict Trump or not to indict Trump. Trumpists say the decision is political because it comes from a liberal jurisdiction and is brought by a liberal prosecutor who is a Democrat not a Republican. If Bragg had decided not to charge Trump, those of us on the left side of American politics would say Bragg refused to indict simply for fear of the public consequences of an indictment. Trump is unavoidably a political figure. He has been the country’s president, and he is running for election to the presidency again. His movement is political. His base of rabid rabblerousers demand political action. There is no way to remove any decision about indicting trump from politics. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Bragg has acted from political motives, as irrelevant as it would be if has. It just means that his decision will unavoidably be seen as political, and it will have political consequences.

Trump is the first American president to be criminally indicted. He is indicted, however, not as a former president but as a private American citizen. He has all of the constitutional rights and protections the rest of us have. He has a right to due process of law. As a legal matter, though for many of us not as a practical matter, he is presumed innocent. He cannot be made to testify against himself. He has a right to a jury trial if he wants one. I trust that the New York prosecutors handling Trump’s case are fully aware of Trump’s constitutional rights and will not intentionally or knowingly violate them. After all, they will want any conviction they get to stand up on appeal.

This is, however, no routine criminal indictment. Given who has been indicted it cannot be routine. It is the indictment of a president, and that has never happened before. The public virtually never hears of routine criminal indictments. This indictment is front page news all over the world. Millions of Americans will have an emotional reaction either applauding it or condemning it. Far too few Americans will consider it calmly and rationally. Far too few Americans will be content to let the legal process run its usual course. Far too few Americans will accept the result of that process, whatever that result may be, as legitimate. These truths are unfortunate, but they are absolutely true nonetheless.

There are other issues to consider here. Many people say the charges Bragg has brought against Trump are “small potatoes.” They do indeed seem a bit trivial compared to the possible charges Trump faces under the law of the state of Georgia and under federal law for attempting to overturn the results of a free and fair presidential election and stirring up a seditious mob to attack the United States Capitol in one last, desperate attempt to hold onto the power the American electorate had taken from him. Some wish more serious charges has been brought either in Atlanta or in Washington, DC, first. Yet all of the criminal investigations of Trump are independent of each other. Each proceeds at its own pace. Bragg was ready to indict Trump before with the Fulton County DA or the Justice Department was. So he indicted him. That’s how the system works.

It is also important that we understand what an indictment is and what it is not. An indictment is an accusation only. It plays in criminal law the role a complaint plays in civil law. It initiates a criminal court proceeding. True, an indicted person gets arrested and someone served with a civil summons doesn’t. Still, neither an indictment nor a complaint establishes anything in itself. From them we learn what one party to the case alleges. We then can prepare our defense against those allegations. Remember also, that nearly all criminal and civil court cases never go to trial. Most parties to civil litigation settle their case before trial. Most criminal defendants plead out to lesser charges and thus avoid a trial. Our court system couldn’t possibly function if these things weren’t true. It would be overwhelmed by the number of cases it had to handle. Commentators say it is unlikely that Trump will cop a plea in the case DA Bragg has brought against him. That’s probably correct, and Trump has every right to take the case to trial. What a circus such a trial would be is another matter, but I suspect we’re in for one.

There is also another significant issue surrounding Donald Trump’s legal peril. It is whether any person is above the law or not. With regard to a president of the United States, the answer to that question, sadly, depends on whether the president in question is in office or is a past president no longer in office. The US Department of Justice has a most unfortunate policy against ever indicting a sitting president for anything. This policy says that the only remedy for criminal conduct by a sitting president is impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction by a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Impeachment may not technically be a political proceeding. It is, in theory, beyond politics. Yet in practice it is unavoidably political not legal. Only three presidents have ever been impeached. The impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were frivolous and clearly political. In the two impeachments of Donald Trump, the evidence clearly showed his guilt. Yet in the first impeachment all of the Republicans in the Senate voted from political considerations not legal ones. In the second impeachment, a few Republican senators voted to convict, but the others voted once again from political considerations not legal ones. Therefore, Trump was acquitted in both cases. No president has ever been convicted in an impeachment proceeding, and it is hard to imagine that any president ever will be. Impeachment Is not, in practice at least, an adequate remedy for criminal conduct by a sitting president. The DOJ really should repeal its rule against indicting one.

The matter is different with regard to a former president. As a legal matter, a former president is just an ordinary citizen with the same legal obligations and protections as the rest of us have. A former president has no unique legal standing. Yet some contend that a former president should not be criminally indicted simply because a former president is a former president. There is no legal basis for that contention whatsoever. Indeed, the foundational principles of our legal system dictate the exact opposite. We claim to be a country that operates under the rule of law. We say we are governed by law not by people. People make the law of course, but once law is established, in theory at least, it operates independently of the political wishes of any person. The rule of law is, however, meaningless unless it applies to each and every person equally. That means there must be no one above or outside the law. Neither must there be anyone beneath the law, but that is a different issue and one our country still struggles with. Any rule or practice that says a former president cannot be indicted for criminal actions puts that person above the law. It therefore violates those foundational principles on which our country is based.

What conclusions can we then draw from the current indictment of former president Trump? I draw three conclusions from it. One is negative. The reaction against the indictment by the right wing of American politics shows that people on that side of our politics understand next to nothing about the rule of law and care about it even less. Their reaction against the indictment, and their attacks on DA Bragg, show that the proper functioning of our legal system means nothing to them. Someone has said bad things about their great hero The Donald. To them, those things must be false, and the person who said them must be evil. We get kneejerk political reactions to the indictment not informed and considered opinions. It is most unfortunate that we do.

My other two conclusions are positive. One is that the American legal system seems to be working properly. DA Bragg appears to have followed routine procedure in investigating and charging Trump. Were his motives political? I don’t know. I do know that it doesn’t matter whether they were or not. What matters now are the facts and the law, and neither of them is political. Bragg worked through a properly convened grand jury and did so in accordance with New York state law. There is no obvious basis for claiming that anything was wrong in the process that led to Trump’s indictment.

The most important conclusion we can draw from this indictment is that, indeed, no one is above the law in this country (except, unfortunately, a sitting president while he or she is in office). That Donald Trump was once president and wants to be president again in no way shields him from the proper operation of the criminal law. The law applies to him in the same way that it applies to you and me. It took so long for anyone to indict Trump for anything that one was tempted to think that state and federal prosecutors considered him to be above the law, to think that to indict him for anything would be somehow improper and impermissible. We now see that, at least in New York state, that is not the case. We can only hope and pray that the other investigations into possible criminal conduct by Donald Trump will likewise understand that there is no legal barrier to indicting him and that political considerations must not enter into the process. May it be so.

How Is This All Right?

 

How Is This All Right?

March 13, 2023

 

First, a disclaimer. I mean no disrespect by anything I say here for the men and women who serve or have served in the US military. My father served in the US Navy aboard an aircraft carrier that took a kamikaze hit off of Okinawa in World War II. My mother did legal work for the Department of the Army during that same war. Jesus said, judge not lest ye be judged. I do not judge those who have served in the military and received an honorable discharge. I have my opinions about the morality of war and about my nation’s military-industrial complex. I have opinions about the higher ups, both military and civilian, who order our soldiers into battle. I do not judge the women and men who obey those orders, and I mean them no disrespect here.

 

Here's something that absolutely escapes me. Two nations create massive military institutions. They train everybody in those institutions in the art and science of killing. They give them the most sophisticated, technically advanced, efficient instruments of death available. Then one day these two nations, for reasons that seem adequate to them, send their institutions and instruments of death out into a field, or a desert, or a jungle, and the two sides start killing each other. Most of the people who actually do the killing convince themselves that what they do is morally acceptable though they are killing other human beings. After all, they’re wearing their country’s uniform. Their country has trained and armed them to do precisely what they’re doing. Their superior officers have ordered them to go kill. They’ve been told their whole lives long that what they’re doing isn’t just necessary, it is honorable. Everyone calls them heroes before they’ve done anything heroic. Everyone thanks them for their service. So they believe that when they kill the other side’s highly trained and equipped instruments of death they are doing a good, honorable, heroic thing. Sure. They know that they might be killed themselves as they do it. They resign themselves to that possibility and think that at least they’d get a hero’s funeral.

The huge, sophisticated, highly trained killing machines of the two nations go about killing and maiming each other until one of the killing machines can’t take it any more and surrenders. Then the two sides stop killing each other. They may then express respect for those who a short time before were enemies they were trying to kill. After all, they’re both doing the same thing for the same reasons, and professionals tend to respect other capable people in the same profession. After the passage of a long, or sometimes only a short, time, the former enemies may become friends and allies. All of us who have studied history or even just lived more than a few years have seen nations play out this scenario again and again.

Can someone tell me why humanity thinks this scenario of death and destruction is all right? Can someone tell me why we accept and support if over and over again? We accept the premature death and permanent mental and physical disability of huge numbers of our people almost as if there were no loss involved in the tragedies of war. The loved ones of those killed and maimed certainly feel a great loss, but we assuage their grief, or at least try to, by calling those who suffered and died all heroes. We call the mothers of those killed “Gold Star Mothers” as if that could somehow make up in even the smallest way for their tragic loss. We make all this killing and dying the patriotic duty of every one of us, and we revile those who resist or refuse to go along. We make conscientious objectors support the violence they abhor by making them serve as medics or in other roles in which they will not personally kill anyone but in which they support those who do kill other people. We don’t just accept all this horror. We make everyone we can participate in it or at least finance it with their tax dollars. And I just don’t get it.

War and other varieties of violence are the way of the world. They are today. They always have been. Tragically, there is no reason to believe that they won’t be far into the future. A small percentage of a nation’s population does the actual killing, and, at least when they win the war, we give them medals and victory parades and put monuments to them all over the place. Most people alive today can’t imagine living in a country with no military, and very few people actually do. The little town where I live calls itself a “Purple Heart City” in honor of its citizens wounded during military service and flies flags representing each branch of the US military in a prominent public place. War and violence are the way of the world, and all but a few of us have bought into them as though there were no reason not to.

Well, there is plenty of reason not to. The unacceptability of war was driven home to me many years ago when I was on a business trip to central Pennsylvania. I had some free time, so I went to the Gettysburg National Military Park, located where one of the fiercest battles of the Civil War had been fought. It was a bright, crisp February weekday, and I had the place nearly to myself. As I stood at the top of the bluff that had been the site of the disastrous Pickett’s Charge in the Battle of Gettysburg, it struck me in a way it never had before, that war is madness. War is mass insanity. There is no way to justify the slaughter that war produces, slaughter that both sides of a war are trained and equipped to inflict on each other. I have thought ever since that war is simply madness with no rational justification.

That experience perhaps explains why the most important part of Jesus’ teaching for me is his teaching of nonviolence. He didn’t teach passivity. He taught creative, assertive, nonviolent opposition to evil, but he rejected all use of violence. He wouldn’t let his disciples use violence in an effort to free him from Roman captivity and certain crucifixion. He said “Love your enemies.” I’ll mention again what I’ve mentioned in writing before. Years ago the Church of the Brethren, one of the historic peace churches, put out a bumper sticker that said “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them” Indeed, that is a big part of what he meant. He meant stand up for peace and justice, but always, without exception, do it nonviolently.

The Christian tradition has compromised, misinterpreted, and ignored Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence since the fourth century CE, when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Christians have slaughtered other people, including other Christians and people of other faiths, as much as anyone else has, or more. None of that changes the truth of what Jesus taught. None of that changes the truth that violence begets more violence. None of that changes the truth that violence can’t overcome hate, only love can do that, to paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Jesus taught nonviolence in part, I suppose, because he knew that Jewish violence against the Romans would have disastrous consequences, as indeed it did a few decades after Jesus’ death. More importantly, he surely taught nonviolence because he knew that God is nonviolent. He knew, as scripture tells us, that God is love, and love can never be violent.

Look. I know that resisting all use of violence is extremely difficult at best in our world today. I get it when people say they have a right to self-defense. I get it when people say a nation has a right to defend itself militarily. I know that there was no way to stop Hitler other than through military force, Yet none of that makes violence moral. We may well feel ourselves compelled to resort to it in any number of different situations. Dietrich Bonhoeffer felt compelled to join a conspiracy to murder Hitler though he knew full well that killing is immoral. God forgives our failures to live up to God’s standard of nonviolence, but God calls us to live up to that standard nonetheless. The world will never function the way God dreams that it ought until violence becomes simply unacceptable to most people. Will that ever happen? I don’t know. I know I won’t live to see it. I also know, however, that nonviolence is God’s way. I know that nonviolence is the only way to genuine, lasting peace. Maybe someday enough people will understand that truth that war and violence really will not be all right. May it be so.

A Reply to Timothy J. Keller

 

A Reply to Timothy J. Keller

March 10, 2023

 

My wife just bought me a copy of Eric Metaxas’ book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.[1] The book includes a very brief forward by Timothy J. Keller.[2] Keller is a best-selling author and was the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. He is Chairman and Co-Founder of Redeemer City to City, an organization that works on new church starts. His forward to Metaxa’s book is less than two pages long. In it Keller makes some theological points with which I strongly disagree. I want here to set out what Keller says and to explain why I so disagree with the theology he presents.

Keller first asks how it was possible for the German church to capitulate to Hitler, as most German churches did in the 1930s. His answer to that question is “that the true gospel, summed up by Bonhoeffer as costly grace, had been lost.” This loss led to two developments Keller considers to have been negative. One is what he calls “formalism.” He says that this formalism “meant going to church and hearing that God just loves and forgives everyone, so it doesn’t really matter much how you live.” He calls this formalism cheap grace. The other bad consequence is what Keller calls “legalism,” which he defines as “salvation by law and good works.” It meant “that God loves you because you have pulled yourself together and are trying to live a good, disciplined life.”

Keller then develops these thoughts this way:

 

Both of these impulses made it possible for Hitler to come to power. The formalists in Germany may have seen things that bothered them, but saw no need to sacrifice their safety to stand up to them. Legalists responded by having pharisaical attitudes toward other nations and races that approved of Hitler’s policies. But as one, Germany lost hold of the brilliant balance of the gospel that Luther so persistently expounded—‘We are saved by faith alone, but not by faith that is alone.’ That is, we are saved, not by anything we do but by grace. Yet if we have truly understood and believed the gospel, it will change what we do and how we live.”[3]

 

Keller is able to give only the briefest statement of his theology in this Foreword of course. Since I don’t know his work except for this very short piece, I can only assume certain things about his theology that what he says in the Foreword suggests. He seems to accept the classical theory of atonement. He says: “But we know that true grace comes to us by costly sacrifice. And if God was willing to go to the cross and endure such pain and absorb such a cost in order to save us, then we must live sacrificially  as we serve others.”

Cheap grace is his bête noir. He writes: “Anyone who truly understands how God’s grace comes to us will have a changed life. That’s the gospel, not salvation by law or by cheap grace, but by costly grace. Costly grace changes you from the inside out. Neither law nor cheap grace can do that.” Then comes one of Keller’s most important and most problematic statements:

 

[M]any Christians want to talk only about God’s love and acceptance. They don’t like talking about Jesus’ death on the cross to satisfy divine wrath and justice. Some even call it ‘divine child abuse.’ Yet if they are not careful, they run the risk of falling into the belief in ‘cheap grace’—a non-costly love from a non-holy God who just loves and accepts us as we are. That will never change anyone’s life.[4]

 

In his Foreword, Keller asserts a traditional Christian theology that I have preached, taught, and written against for many, many years. He simply dismisses the notion that God loves and accepts everyone. I’ve said many times that I cannot understand or accept God any other way. Keller’s theology unavoidably leads to the conclusion that God saves some people and doesn’t save others. Insisting that God loves and accepts only some unavoidably makes God far too human, far too small. The way of the world is to require that a person do something (or refrain from doing something, which amounts to the same thing) in order to receive some reward or compensation. Making God’s grace less than universal reduces God to that human way of operating. Yet God infinitely transcends the human. As we read at Isaiah 55:8-9, God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts.

The temptation to make God too much like us is strong. We give in to it frequently, but that we do is a theological mistake with destructive consequences. It divides people into the ins and the outs, the saved and the condemned, the loved and the damned. If there is one thing the world does not need today it is more division. Division invariably creates strife, and human strife almost always becomes violent. We do a fine job of dividing people into antagonistic groups on our own. We don’t need God dividing us even more.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer did indeed criticize what he called cheap grace. As I understand it, Bonhoeffer insisted that true grace is not cheap because it cost a man his life. Jesus Christ suffered and died to bring God’s grace to us. Grace also costs another human life. It costs the life of the faithful Christian. When we truly grasp God’s amazing grace, we will give up the old ways of our life, the ways of judgment, antagonism, and violence. We will live into God’s ways of love, reconciliation, and peace. Keller thinks that a grace that does not distinguish between those who are in it and those who are out of it cannot produce that transformation. He’s wrong about that, something I’ll discuss further anon.

Keller ties two things together that don’t necessarily go together at all. One of them is talking about Jesus’ death on the cross. The other is what Keller calls “divine wrath and justice.” It is true that progressive Christians don’t like talking about Jesus’ crucifixion. Though to me it is the most important service of the year, few of them attend Good Friday services.[5] Crucifixion is ugly. Suffering and death are ugly. Of course it is more pleasant to talk about resurrection, about new life, and about God conquering death. Far too many Christians (and one is too many) never enter into or seriously contemplate the meaning of Jesus’ suffering and death.

All of that, however, is not true of all of us who understand the universality of God’s grace. Keller has either never heard of theology of the cross, an alternative soteriology to that of the classical theory of atonement, or has considered it and rejected it. The cross is absolutely central to that soteriology, about which I have written at length elsewhere. Theology of the cross is a demonstration soteriology. It says that in the life, suffering, and death of Jesus, God has demonstrated to us how God relates to human life. In Jesus God entered into the worst that human life can bring, unjust suffering and state-ordered murder. We see that God does not intervene in the world to stop bad things from happening. Rather, God is present in solidarity with us in everything that happens in our lives. In the good things, yes. More importantly, in the bad things. In Jesus on the cross theology of the cross sees the divine paradox of God’s presence even in the human experience of the absence of God.

Keller is both right and wrong when he says, or at least implies, that the theology I present here and elsewhere says that it doesn’t matter much how we live. How we live has nothing to do with the presence of God’s grace. God’s grace is there always, everywhere, and for everyone. We all live in it. Our problem isn’t that we don’t have God’s grace, our problem is that we don’t know that we do. How we live does, however, have a lot to do with the authenticity of our Christian faith. If we really know that we live in God’s universal, totally unconditional grace, we will respond. There are countless ways we can respond. I responded by going to seminary (although it wasn’t entirely clear to me at the time that that was what I was doing). The specifics of how we respond don’t matter. We all are at different stages of life. We all have our own gifts and shortcomings. What matters is that we do what we can to express God’s love in the world. That doesn’t matter because we’re damned if we don’t. We aren’t. It matters because God calls us to respond to love with love. We gain satisfaction, contentment, and peace when we do. That’s why it matters.

Theology of the cross does not tie the cross to divine wrath and justice the way Keller does. God’s wrath never enters into God’s way of relating to creation. God cares about justice, but not justice for God as it appears in the classic statement of classical atonement theory, Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo from the early twelfth century CE. God cares about distributive justice for God’s people, especially the ones Jesus calls “the least of these.” Jesus does not suffer and die on the cross to satisfy God’s wrath. Nor does he suffer and die on the cross to pay God a price for human sin. Jesus was not any kind of sacrifice. Indeed, he rejected the whole idea of sacrifice as what God wants from us, so we really shouldn’t be turning him into one. What Keller’s traditional theology says God did in Jesus is truly divine child abuse. I, and a great many of us today, cannot and will not love a God who is a child abuser, indeed, a child killer, which is what the classical theory of atonement makes of God.

Though he doesn’t use these terms, Keller contends that Christian universalism and theology of the cross do not have the power to transform human lives. About that he could not be more wrong. My theology has the power to transform lives, but it does it in a different way and for a different reason than does classical atonement theory. Classical atonement theory works to transform lives through fear. Adherents of that theology strive to act in Christ-like ways because they fear eternal damnation if they do not. Once when I was teaching universalism a parishioner of mine said, “Tom, you’ve taken away every reason to be good!”

Well, no I hadn’t. I had however changed the reason to be good. My theology does not frighten people into proper behavior. Rather, when we really know the free gift of God’s grace and the power of that grace in our lives, we respond not with fear but with gratitude. We respond to God’s unconditional love for us with our own love for God and for God’s people. We make our love as unconditional as we possibly can. Not love as a sappy emotion. Rather, sacrificial love, something Keller says my theology cannot create. My theology does create the drive to live into such love, but it doesn’t do it by frightening people into behaving themselves. It grounds the Christian life not in fear but in love. Its doing so makes the Christian life much more Christ-like than is a life grounded in fear.

I haven’t read Metaxas’ book on Bonhoeffer yet. I know of Bonhoeffers concept of cheap grace. I know a little bit about his contention that people of faith must now learn to live without God, though I don’t understand that contention at all. Perhaps I will after I read this book. I have no idea what Metaxas’ theology is or even if he has one, so I make no comment on it. Keller gives us at least hints at his traditional Presbyterian theology of sacrificial atonement. I disagree with that theology profoundly. I’ve presented some of the reasons for my disagreement here. I mean none of it personally. I do not know Rev. Keller. Faithful Christians can disagree about theology and still acknowledge one another as faithful Christians. I have nothing against Keller personally. I do have a lot against what appears to be his theology. Perhaps you do too.

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[1] Metaxas, Eric, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, A Righteous Gentile vs. The Third Reich (Thomas Nelson, Nashville, 2010).

[2] The Foreword is on pages xv and xvi.

[3] I don’t know that Keller’s formalism and legalism are “urges,” but never mind. Also, I have no idea what he means by “pharisaical attitudes toward other nations and races that approved of Hitler’s policies,” but his meaning there doesn’t matter for my purposes here.

[4] I have no idea what Keller means by “un-holy God.”

[5] Years ago I preached a Good Friday sermon on theology of the cross, which I discuss below. Afterwards, a man came up to me and said that for the first time in his life he felt like wearing a cross. Things like that make all the work we do as pastors worth the time and effort we put into it.

This Grace in Which we Stand

 

This Grace in Which We Stand

March 6, 2023

 

At Romans 5:2 St. Paul refers to “this grace in which we stand.” With Paul it is never quite clear, to me at least, whether we have to do anything to acquire God’s grace or not. Sometimes he seems to say yes, we have to have faith. Other times he seems to say God’s grace is always there for everyone. Paul, it seems to me, lands on both sides of what I believe to be a defining issue in American Christianity: Do we have to do something in order to be saved or do we not? There is no question that an enormous majority of Christians will answer that question, “Yes, we do. There’s something each of us has to do in order to be saved.” For most Christians the thing they think they must do in order to be saved is believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. We so often hear Christians asking people, “When were you saved? By which they mean when did you accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. A late, great friend and mentor in ministry of mine once told me he answered the question of when he was saved by saying “About two thousand years ago.” It’s about the best answer to that question I’ve ever heard. I once had a few parishioners mad at me because, as they put it, I never told them what they had to do to be saved. Those who ask that question, and those who get mad at their pastor for that reason, all make the same assumption. We must do something in order to be saved. If we don’t do whatever it is we must do in order to be saved, we won’t be saved. Christians traditionally have said that if you aren’t saved by doing whatever it is they say you have to do, your soul will spend eternity in the agonies of hell.

Well, there’s a reason I didn’t tell those parishioners of mine what they had to do to be saved. I didn’t tell them that because they didn’t have to do anything. I’m sure I said words to that effect dozens of times at least in sermons in the three years I was pastor of that church, but these folks didn’t grasp the truth that they didn’t have to do anything. Like most Christians, they surely had been told their whole lives that they had to do something, probably in believe in Jesus Christ, in order to avoid spending eternity in hell. Unfortunately, nay tragically, that has been Christianity’s main message from the beginning of the faith two thousand years ago.

Folks, it just isn’t true. Each and every person who has ever lived has stood completely in God’s grace their entire lives. Unless God is not a God of grace, it has to be that way. Scripture tells us that God is love. 1 John 4:8. The love that God is must surpass human love absolutely. If it doesn’t, it is human love not divine love. God’s grace is God’s love, which is God’s very essence, poured out endlessly on all of creation. We humans live our lives always surrounded by God’s love, God’s grace. It is like the air we breathe. It is to us as water is to fish. We live in it. We’re surrounded by it. We can’t and never do live without it. It even permeates our very being. Our souls are filled with it. They never lose it. Mystics and contemplatives of all faith traditions come to that truth. It is the ground of our being. We are never, ever, separated from it.

In his book What the Mystics Know the great Christian sage Richard Rohr says that we are spiritually starving in the midst of plenty. We just don’t get it that, as Rohr says, “We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God.” If we are already totally in the presence of God, and we are, then we are already totally in God’s grace because God is love. God is therefore also grace. Rohr also tells us what our problem really is. He follows his words about our being in the presence of God by saying, “What’s absent is awareness.” Joseph Campbell says, metaphorically of course, that we don’t see the spiritual dimension of reality because we have scales over our eyes. God and God’s grace are around and within us every moment of our lives, but we just don’t see them.

Which, when you think about it, makes no sense. If God is always everywhere, even inside of us, how can we not see God present everywhere? Put another way, just what are those scales we have over our eyes? I believe that there are at least two causes of the spiritual blindness from which so many of us individually and our culture collectively suffer. One is the philosophical materialism of so-called Western culture. The way most people of Western culture think has been strongly conditioned by Enlightenment rationalism and the Scientific Revolution. Reason alone leads to the conclusion that only the material, that is, the physical, is real. That’s why Karl Marx preached dialectical materialism. Science addresses questions about physical reality brilliantly and convincingly. These two related developments in Western culture, rationalism and science, have reduced truth to fact for nearly everyone in our context. Even most people who self-identify as people of faith believe that truth consists only of facts.

Yet the rationalism and science that lead us to so many facts are incommensurate with spiritual reality. To understand the spiritual as mere fact is badly to misunderstand the spiritual. The spiritual is not less than factual. It is so much more than factual. Most people in our culture just dismiss the spiritual as irrational, unscientific, and therefor not real. We aren’t likely to experience the reality of something we deny is real. That denial is one of the scales we have over our eyes.

The other is the way the supposed teachers of Christianity have told people for centuries that God’s not mostly down here with us. Rather, God is mostly up there in heaven staring down at us. These authorities have mostly told people that God is angry and wrathful. You’d better believe in “Him” they say, this God always being masculine, or He’s gonna get you but good. And don’t look around here for Him. Look up. Way up. To a different level of existence and certainly not down here with us. We aren’t likely to experience the presence of something or someone we don’t believe is here to be experienced. The conviction that God is there not here is another of the opaque scales over our eyes.

Well folks, the spiritual, that is, God, is real and really is present all around us. Some of us know that truth because we have had personal encounters with God. I know I have. We can all know it because we can see that every human culture there has ever been, even, at least to some limited extent, ours, has known the reality of the spiritual. They have all sought to live connected to it through a system of symbols and myths, in other words, through a religion. Human beings over the millennia and across cultures haven’t all, independently, just made up a spiritual dimension of reality. They have experienced it, or at least some of them have. They have experienced the reality we call God because God is real and God is here. We believe that God is there too, but what’s important is that God is definitely here.

Here, and full of love and grace. Nothing but love and grace. And that means we don’t have to do anything to be saved because we already are. We are saved not because of anything we’ve done or not done or believed or not believed. We are saved because God loves what God has created. God relates to what She has created not in judgment and wrath but in love and grace. God, who is love, is not about to damn anyone because God loves everyone. So do we have to do anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved. Do we have to avoid doing anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved. Do we have to believe anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved. Do we have not to believe anything to be saved? No, we’re already saved.

The function of religion is not to create anything for anyone that wasn’t already there. Faith does not create a salvation that wasn’t already there. Religion’s function is not to create, it is to reveal what is already there. There always and everywhere. And it is to give us a way to live into God’s amazing, omnipresent Grace. We do not stand in God’s judgment. None of us does. We stand in God’s grace. Every one of us does. We do indeed, to use Paul’s phrase, stand in grace. The world will be a much better place when masses of people realize that divine truth.

On the Love of Enemies: A September 11 Meditation

 A former parishioner of mine just sent me this text of a meditation I gave on the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. I read it, and I think it isn't bad. So here it is.

On the Love of Enemies: A September 11 Meditation
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 11, 2011

On September 11, 2001, extremists who claimed to be acting in the name of Islam but who were actually betraying several core principles of Islam attacked the United States of America. They brought down the two skyscrapers of the World Trade Center in New York. They crashed an airplane into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Another plane they had hijacked, that they apparently intended to crash into either the Capitol Building or the White House, crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers overpowered the terrorists. The United States responded with a massive military invasion of Afghanistan, the country whose Islamist government we believed (with some but not solid justification) had harbored the terrorists as they planned and trained for their breathtaking act of terrorism. The United States then responded further with a massive military invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorist attacks. Today, ten years later, American troops are still engaged in combat in those two countries, especially in Afghanistan, where we are bogged down in an unwinnable war that has no end in sight. The United States responded by passing laws and adopting supposed security measures that severely restrict the valued civil liberties of all Americans.

On July 22, 2011, a crazed terrorist set off a bomb outside the office of the Prime Minister in Oslo, the capital of Norway. A few hours later he opened fire and killed 69 people at a youth camp run by the ruling political party of Norway. The Norwegian Prime Minister responded by saying that Norway would react to the attack by being more loving and more democratic. He apparently meant that strengthening the values that the terrorist hated would be the surest way to punish that terrorist.

 

St. Paul said “If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:20-21 By saying we would heap burning coals on the heads of our enemies by loving them he surely meant that returning good for evil is the surest way to lead the evildoers to repentance. Jesus said “Do not resist an evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile.” Matthew 5:38-42 He also said “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Matthew 5:44 He meant do not resist evil with more evil. Do not resist evil with violence, but resist evil with creative, assertive measures of nonviolence.

 

Our country suffered a terrible wrong on September 11, 2001. Of that there is no doubt. Nothing we say here today is intended in any way to excuse what those terrorists did. They committed a monstrous crime against humanity for which there is no conceivable justification. That truth is undeniable. Yet here’s another undeniable truth. We had no control over what people filled with hate and bad theology did. We did have, and we do have, control over how we respond to what they did. And, my friends, we responded very badly to what they did. We repaid violence with violence. We repaid hatred with hatred. We responded to an attack on our way of life by making changes to that way of life through measures like the so-called Patriot Act and in other ways that have diminished our freedom and handed the terrorists a victory they could never win on their own. Our invasions of two Muslim countries fed the terrorists’ cause of fanning hatred of our country and created more terrorists than it eliminated.

 

I don’t know if the Prime Minister of Norway is a Christian, but his response to the terrorist attack on his country was far more Christian than was, and is, our response to the terrorist attack on ours. Yes, the attack on us killed a lot more people than the attack in Norway, but then we’re a much bigger country than Norway. Jesus calls us to respond to hatred with love. We didn’t do that. Jesus calls us to love our enemies. We don’t do that. The Church of the Brethren puts out a bumper sticker that reads: “When Jesus said love your enemies, I think he probably meant don’t kill them.” It seems such an obvious truth, but it is one we Americans have never learned.

 

Today we remember the terrible events of ten years ago. We remember the pain, the fear, and the anger that we felt. We remember the lives that were lost, and we grieve with the families whose innocent loved ones died simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We remember and give thanks for the countless acts of heroism of that day. We remember and give thanks especially for the members of the New York City Fire and Police Departments who rushed into those blazing buildings trying to save lives and who lost their lives because they did. We remember and give thanks for the heroism of the airplane passengers whose bravery prevented another completed attack on another symbol of our nation. We remember and give thanks for the service of the American men and women who chose to respond to the terrible events of that day by serving in the American military. The decisions on how to use them were not theirs, and so many of them serve out of a true sense of loyalty to their country.

 

As we remember the terrible events of that day we remember the power of forgiveness. That day so demonstrates the need for forgiveness. Forgiveness for those whose hearts are so filled with hatred that they would do such terrible things. Forgiveness for ourselves and our nation for the ways in which our actions contributed to and created not a justification for that hatred but a pretext, a rationalization for it. Forgiveness for the ways in which we have perpetuated violence in the years since that violent day.

 

On that terrible day we suffered an act of extreme violence. And we responded to that violence with more violence. Far more people have died in the violent aftermath of 9/11 than died on that dreadful day. More Americans. More Iraqis. More Afghanis. Our violence has not made us safer. It has merely perpetuated the hatred that led to those acts of terrorism. Our great faith tradition teaches that nonviolence is God’s way and must be our way. God’s dream is of that day when we shall beat our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks, when nation shall not lift up arms against nation, and we shall learn war no more. If that day is ever to come someone must break the cycle of violence. Someone must respond to hatred with love.

 

We are the most powerful nation on earth by far, and that means that we are the ones who must break the cycle of violence. We can’t leave it up to others. So today let us remember. Let us grieve. Let us celebrate the heroes of that day. But mostly let us learn. Let us learn that violence only begets more violence. Let us at long last learn the lesson that Jesus taught so long ago. Love your enemies. It is the only way to peace. Amen.

 

Being On Call

 

Being On Call

March 3, 2023

 

Many people of faith believe that, at some time in their lives, they have heard a call from God for them to do something they weren’t doing when they heard the call. God calls people to a great many different kinds of activity. Perhaps it’s a call to help a particular person. Or to work for some nonprofit agency on an important cause. Or to take up a particular profession. Or to go to seminary. Or to do a great many other things as well. People have attributed any number of things they’ve done to a call from God. I’ve done so myself. Yet the understanding that God is calling you to do something raises a lot of questions. They include, how do you know it is God calling and not just your ego trying to justify your doing something you want to do anyway? Have you heard a voice? Or had a dream? Or just had a sense you couldn’t explain but of which you have been as sure as you have ever been sure of anything? How does what you think God is calling you to do relate to you and your life as they are now? Does the thing you think you’re being called to do make sense to you? It’s not necessarily that there are right and wrong answers to these questions. They do however point to a truth about calls from God The notion of divine call is unavoidably complex even if the person claiming to hear the call doesn’t realize the complexity of what is happening.

There is a solid biblical foundation for the notion of God calling specific people to specific tasks. Abraham, Moses, and Jeremiah all have call stories. Abraham’s is the tersest. We read that the Lord, that is, the Hebrew God Yahweh, “said to Abram [later on called Abraham], ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Genesis 12:1. God promises Abraham that if he does God will make of him “a great nation.” Genesis 12:2. So Abraham “went as the Lord had told him….”

That’s all Genesis tells us about Abraham’s call, but it’s not hard to imagine how more of the story would go if Genesis told it. There are questions about this call we’d like to have answered, but Genesis doesn’t even ask them. Our text says that the Lord “said” to Abraham to pack up and go. Does that mean Abraham heard a human-like voice speaking to him? Or, did he just have an inner sense that God was calling him to go, so he expressed that sense by saying the Lord “said?” Was the call really from God, or was it just Abraham’s ego wanting to get out of Haran to find something new? Did he argue with God about the call? The text doesn’t say he did, but prophets often did when they heard God’s call. All of these are valid questions that Genesis doesn’t answer. They also are questions many of us who believe God has called us have asked. Let me use my own call story as an example.

Back in 1994 I was a practicing attorney, but I wasn’t doing well at it. I was burning out though I didn’t realize it at the time. One day I did a psychological exercise I knew about to see if I could get some clarity about what was going on with me and the practice of law. I asked myself why I was having so much trouble practicing law. As I did that exercise, a voice either completely outside of me or from deep, deep within me said, “You’re not a lawyer!” I was surprised to say the least. I said of course I’m a lawyer. I am, after all, sitting here in my law office. The voice said again, “You’re not a lawyer!” I thought that voice, whatever it was, was nuts. Still, I asked, “OK. What am I?” Immediately the voice said, “You’re a preacher!” At that point I knew the voice was nuts, so I ended the exercise. I know now but did not know then that this experience was the beginning of God’s call to me to quit law and go into ministry.

In the spring of 1997 I learned that the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry had worked with representatives of several Protestant denominations, including mine, to set up something called the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies as a way for that Roman Catholic university to train Protestants like me for ministry. We would be able to earn a fully accredited Master of Divinity degree without having to travel to Berkeley, California, or Vancouver, British Columbia, which were the closest alternatives at the time. We’d never been able to do that before.

I knew I had to go. I just knew I had to do it. I was still miserable trying to practice law, but I had no idea why I had to go get an MDiv degree. It didn’t make a lick of sense. I didn’t, and don’t, know how I knew, but I knew. I didn’t hear a voice speaking words to me. I hadn’t a clue why I should earn an MDiv or what I would do with one once I earned it. I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it. Yet it all felt like more than a call. It felt like I didn’t have a choice. I had to do it, and I did. I entered the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry in the fall of 1997. I got my MDiv at the end of 2000. I got my first call as a parish pastor in March 2002. I was ordained to the ministry of the gospel of Jesus Christ in June of that year. After I started my work as a pastor my wife (now sadly passed away) said to me, “I’m so glad you finally are who you really are.”

There are several things about this call story of mine that are common to many call stories, and a few that aren’t. I heard a voice. It was in my head not my ears, but I heard a voice. I thought that what the voice said was crazy, so I ignored it. For three years I ignored it. After those three years I knew I had to go to seminary. I just knew. When I finally did what I knew I had to do, I became who I really am.

The call was for me to do something that made no sense. I’d already spent more years in post-graduate studies than most anyone I’ve ever met what with my PhD in history and my JD degree. I had a profession, though I was struggling mightily with it. I was a person of faith of a sort, I guess. I had read a lot of good Christian theology. I had given one sermon at the church I attended, filling in for the pastor one Sunday when he was away. It was well received, but it didn’t lead to anything. I’d never thought of myself as a cleric.

It made no sense. Yet along the way, after I said yes, God did some things for me that really helped me out. When I entered seminary I closed my law office. I knew I would need a parttime job while I was in school. One day I looked in the help wanted ads in the Seattle Times. I knew the experts say that’s not how you find a job, but I looked anyway. There I found a listing for a halftime attorney to work with a legal services agency. I applied. It turned out to be the Legal Action Center, an agency of Catholic Community Services of Western Washington. The pay wasn’t great, but the job came with full medical coverage and even a small retirement benefit. I got the job. And I learned after I took the job that because I worked at least halftime for a Catholic agency, I would get at 25% reduction in my tuition at Seattle University. I don’t think the Legal Action Center ever expected to hire an attorney who had been a senior litigation associate at the fourth largest law firm in the country like I once had been. I sure never expected to find such a perfect job. We represented low income tenants in eviction cases. I was finally doing law that felt worth doing. I still thank God for that job that fell into my lap twenty-six years ago. That job is the closest thing I’ve ever had in my life to proof of divine providence.

My getting that job probably isn’t typical of most call stories. That the call made absolutely no sense to me is. God’s calls frequently make no sense to the people God is calling. People usually resist accepting the call. In the new student orientation I went to at the School of Theology and Ministry it became a joke how many people said, “God called, and I hung up.” Moses tried to get out of his call. He said I can’t speak well. Exodus 4:10. Jeremiah resisted too. He said he was only a boy and therefore couldn’t speak well. Jeremiah 1:4. Yet Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, and those fellow students of mine eventually said yes. They conceded the point and followed God’s call. So did I. Perhaps you too have heard a call from God and are resisting accepting it. Don’t despair. You’re in good company.

There are some questions we all need to ask when we think we’re receiving a call from God. They include: Is the thing I think God is calling me to something I’ve always wanted to do? Did I want to do it when I first heard the call? Do I want to do it now? Sometimes the answers to those questions can be yes, and the call can still be authentic. I had a parishioner who had always wanted to be a high school science teacher, but she’d never become one. She was sure God was calling her to that sacred work, and, after working with her a bit, so was I. She resisted her call harder than anyone else I’ve ever known. Finally she gave in, got her Master of Teaching degree, and has now been a high school science teacher for many years. Like I did, she became who she really is only after she accepted God’s call.

Far more often, however, our answers to those questions about wanting to do what God is calling us to do are going to be no. It seems that most of the time God calls people to situations and work they had never thought of doing on their own. Situations and work they had never thought they wanted to do and couldn’t imagine doing. That was true for Moses and Jeremiah. It was true for me too. We all said no. God kept saying yes. God was right. God knows us better than we know ourselves. When God calls, God is always right.

There is at least one great danger we face when we think we are hearing a call from God. It is the risk that what we’re hearing isn’t God at all. Sometimes people think a call is from God when it really is only a call from their ego. Discerning the authenticity of a divine call isn’t easy. There are some things you can do to help. Pray. A lot. Talk to your pastor if you have one. Get one and talk to them if you don’t. Talk with sympathetic friends and family members. Don’t try to make a final decision about a call on your own. Discussing the call with others who will actually listen to you and not jump to quick conclusions can only help.

So if you think you’re hearing a call from God that makes no sense, don’t let that reaction of yours lead you to shut God out. Keep listening. Keep praying. Keep discerning. God may indeed be calling you to something that makes no sense to you but makes perfect sense to God. God’s always right, of course. If what you’re hearing is an authentic call from God, God will be right about you too. If that call is authentic, you’ll be right when you stop saying no and finally yes. I pray that those of you who are hearing a call from God but resisting it will find the wisdom and the courage to say yes at last.