Mystical Union: The Incarnation

25 December 2011

“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name ‘Immanuel,’ which is translated, ‘God with us.'”

That was true beyond what Isaiah could have guessed.  The prophecy was fulfilled, not by a child whose name reminds us that God is with us, but by a Child who was God with us.  The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.

It took us centuries to think that one through.  All the Christological debates back and forth for years, the roads being filled with galloping bishops hurrying from one council to another, all the letters written and polemical sermons preached, were just to come to grips with this simple truth.

Why?

Because it’s extraordinarily important, and being so important, it was under constant attack by the enemy.  The Church was besieged by one idiotic scheme after another: “Well, maybe it worked like this….”  Unfailingly, it would turn out that at the heart of the scheme would lie one of two flaws.  Either Christ was divine, godish, but not really God, in the sense that the Father is God, or Christ was humanish, human in some respects, but not really man, in the sense that we are man.

What difference would that have made?

The center of the Christian faith, the promise on which we utterly depend, is that ordinary human beings may be partakers of the divine nature; that we, frail broken as we are, can come as we are, and enter into the fellowship of the Trinity itself.

How do we know this is true?

Because God promises it, of course, but also because we’ve actually seen it.  Jesus did it perfectly.  The Word became flesh.  He was a man as we are men, and very God of very God, as the creeds put it.

If Jesus was humanish, but didn’t really have all the traits we do, then whence our confidence that the traits He did not assume could be redeemed?  Without that confidence, we have no hope of being redeemed as human beings.  The Fall was permanent; humanity is ruined forever, and salvation lies in becoming something less than entirely human.

On the other hand, if Jesus was only godish, divine, touched by the Father but not of the same nature as the Father, then we could hope to be better than we are, certainly, but we can have no confidence of entering into true fellowship, true union, with God.  We can be good human beings, maybe even spiritual supermen, but entry into the fellowship of the Godhead is forever barred to us.  If even Jesus couldn’t manage it, how could we?

But the Divine Word, true and complete God, became the son of Mary, true and complete man, and in His person bore our every sin and frailty to the cross.  In Him dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and therefore we may trust that we too can be partakers of the divine nature, and enter into the circle of the perichoretic Triune fellowship, as Jesus prayed that we would:

I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word;  that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.  And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one:  I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.

The enemy has not stopped attacking our Christology.  We’ve weathered the storm of doctrinal defections, but having pure doctrine on paper never saved anyone.  It has to be lived, and the tragedy is that we simply fail to rise to the destiny Christ won for us.  We live not only as if the Incarnation did not happen; we live as though it could not have happened.  We settle for giving in to our flaws: “I’m only human,” we say, as though Jesus had not shown us what true humanity can be.  Or we settle for being merely good, moral people, as if Jesus had been merely a moral man rather than very God.  But we are neither called to be showcases of the sins of our flesh, nor showcases of the moral accomplishments of our flesh.  We are called to be the image of God in the world, the Body of Christ, and members of the Triune dance.  We are called to union with God, to know the love of God that passes knowledge, and this is not a thought experiment.  It is a real experience, or it is nothing at all.

Today we celebrate the Incarnation, the ultimate demonstration that such an experience is available to us.  Merry Christmas to you all.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Advent Service Communion Meditation

18 December 2011

This evening I had the honor of presenting the Lord’s Table as part of the Advent service at my church, The Dwelling Place.  I had been praying and thinking for a week about what to say, and the biggest problem I had was resisting the temptation to try jamming six sermons’ worth of material into a few minutes’ meditation.  But although I had all the pieces of the puzzle, try as I might, I just couldn’t get it to go together.  The problem persisted right into this evening; I was wandering around the piazza in front of the church just minutes before the service, praying because I still didn’t know what I was going to say.  About five minutes before I actually had to get up and start talking, God made it all click together, and here it is. 

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death til He comes.”
Paul’s meditation on the Lord’s Table includes past, present, and future.  In the past, Jesus died and rose.  In the present, we proclaim that truth by celebrating the Lord’s Table, and we will continue doing that until, at some point in the future, He comes again.

Nor is this some sort of late development brought into the church by Paul.  At the very first celebration of the Lord’s Table, Jesus passed the cup and said, “Drink from it, all of you, for I tell you that I will not taste of the fruit of the vine again until I drink it new with you in My Father’s kingdom.”  From the beginning, the Lord’s Table looked forward to the day that we eat and drink with Jesus in the Kingdom.

Each season of the church year has its own lessons to teach, and all of these lessons apply all the time in our lives.  For example, Lent is about repentance, but of course if we wait for Lent to come around before repenting, we’re going to lead miserable lives; we need repentance every day.  But we set aside the seasons to focus on particular lessons and particular skills in the Christian life.  This season is Advent, and it is about waiting.  Advent anticipates Christmas.  Jesus is coming, but He has not yet come, and so we wait.

It was a long wait.  God placed Adam in the world to be His image, and Adam blew it.  Eve had a son and said “I have gotten a man from the Lord” — hoping that this would be the Seed of the Woman who would crush the serpent and put the world to rights.  Instead, he was Cain, the bad priest who slew his brother Abel, the good priest.  They began a long succession of flawed images: Aaron, the High Priest who made an idol, David, the great King who committed murder and adultery, Balaam, the prophet of God who gave in to greed.  There was a long succession of prophets, priests and kings who failed — a long succession.  But not, God be praised, an endless succession.

Jesus came, and God’s people recognized Him for who He was: the Messiah, the priest, prophet, and king who fulfilled all their hopes.  Then he was crucified — which is what happens to failed messiahs.  All was lost…and then He rose from the dead, and victory was assured.

So what remains to us?  We’ve won, haven’t we?

Jesus died, rose, and ascended to the right hand of God the Father Almighty, whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.  Once again, God’s people are waiting for Messiah to come, and we can’t even imagine what we will be on that day.  As John put it in his first epistle, “It has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”

While we wait for that day, God has given us the task to be His image in the world, the very Body of Christ.  And this is a job that, by His supernatural grace, we can do, because we are what we eat.

So come now to the Table: This is the body of Christ, broken for you.  This is the blood of Christ, shed for you.  As often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death, til He comes.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Community

11 December 2011

I recently had occasion to hear from a disaffected pastor who felt that my talk about “community” was an affectation, an unnecessary flirtation with a popular buzzword.  That furnished me with an occasion to think a little more deeply (and theopoetically) about why community has become a pillar of my practical theology.  Below you’ll find some of my ruminations; I hope they’re helpful to you.

One person is a rotten image of the Triune God.

In the beginning, God saw that everything He made was good, except for one thing: a solitary person.  It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with the person: the “not-good-ness” was very specific: “It is not good that man should be alone.”  God is three Persons; one person is not a good image.

The fix?  God puts the man in a death-like sleep, tears him in two, and fashions woman — the crown and glory of man — from his very flesh.  She is different from him, other than him, not-him.  And yet, what does he say?

“This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.  She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man.”

He sees her, and knows her for what she is.  She is his flesh — if you’ve seen her, you’ve seen him.  And then, you haven’t; they are different.

“Show us the Father,” Philip says to Jesus, “And it is sufficient for us.”

“He who has seen me,” Jesus replies, “has seen the Father.”  He later adds that He indwells the Father, and the Father indwells Him.  In big theological polysyllables, we call this perichoresis.  (That’s Greek for “dancing around,” by the way.)  In another author’s terms, “In Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”   This extends to the Church, and that’s only natural: we are the Body of Christ, of His flesh and of His bones, which is to say, His Bride.  And while He has ascended, the Body remains here on earth, a tangible witness to the Father.

A solitary person, no friends, no family contact, is a lousy image of God.  This is the image of the Trinity in the world: that we dwell in each other’s lives.  A lot.  In a husband and wife, this dancing around one another leads to nakedness and physical union, an intimacy so deep and glorious that it’s too dangerous to share with more than one person.  Too much glory can kill you.  On the other hand, that glory is also the ultimate picture of Christ and His church.

In other contexts, this dancing around leads to the shedding of masks and armor, so that we can see and love one another for who we are.  A different sort of nakedness, to be sure, but it’s still quite threatening, and we’re still tempted to start stitching fig leaves together.  Another person in my life is going to act like…well…not me.  He’s going to be himself.  In my life.  He might not like me; he might not do things like me.

That’s all true, and it’s my job to give him the freedom to do that, as a gift.  And to receive the same freedom from him, if he’s willing to offer it.  That mutual gift becomes a dance that lets us both be ourselves, in harmony, richer than we could be separately.  Sinners can’t do this naturally, but God never meant for us to be only natural; we were always meant to partake in the divine nature.  The dance depicts the Trinity, and the dance requires the presence and guidance of the Trinity, or it will never work.

When it does work…wow.  God has blessed me with this dance in a number of relationships, and I am rich beyond measure.  I can’t begin to express my gratitude adequately, but the very least I can do is name some names: my Sunday morning thinktank partners, Jim and Michele; my youth ministry partners, Joe and Becca; my “huddle,” Dave, Jody, Brad and Joe (again); my church family at The Dwelling Place, whose names are too numerous to list, but y’all know who you are; and saving the best for last, my Lady Wife, Kimberly.  I aspire to be the sort of blessing you have all been to me.

And you, gentle reader, wherever you may be: May God bless you with the same, and may you bless others with the same, that the world may know that the Father sent Jesus, and has loved us as He loved Jesus.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Marks of a True Church

4 December 2011

When our fathers were expelled from the Church of Rome five hundred years ago, they had to reconsider what it meant to be a true church.  Since the first few centuries of the Church, they had been able to tell themselves that if they were in communion with the other churches (and then later, if they were in communion with the Pope), they were a true church.  Suddenly they found themselves cast out of the political organization they’d come to identify with the Church, and this forced them to re-confront the question: What is a true church?  How can you tell if you’re in one?

I’m not going to review the whole discussion here, but suffice it to say that over time, the Reformation fathers settled on an answer: the marks of a true church are faithful proclamation of the Word, faithful practice of the Sacraments, and church discipline (which protects the other two).   For quite a long while, “word, sacrament and discipline” were considered the marks of a true church throughout the Protestant world.  Even today, many Protestant churches consider these marks to be the core of their church activity.

As a result, a certain sort of superstition has grown up around the marks of a true church.  Many people believe that if a church is faithful to just maintain word, sacrament and discipline, then God will bless that church.  Unfortunately, in the world we actually live in, churches are regularly closing despite what they would consider their faithful preservation of word, sacrament, and discipline.  Something wrong there…

In my own tradition, the word/sacrament/discipline got boiled down to just word, which is to say, doctrinally sound teaching.  A similar superstition plagues us: if we will just maintain the teaching of sound doctrine, God will bless us, and the rest will come.  But in our tradition also churches are closing every day, despite having maintained the teaching of sound doctrine.

***

Scholars have often commented on the stance of the OT sage as a distinct vantage point, especially as distinct from Moses as lawgiver or the other prophets.  Where the prophetic stance begins with direct verbal or visionary revelation, the sage does not.  The sage observes God at work in the world, and the sorts of things that God tends to do, and draws conclusions.  In other words, the prophet starts with “Thus says the Lord…” and the sage starts with “How’s that working out for ya?”

The sage — even the inspired sage of the book of Proverbs — appeals to observation and experience.  See Prov. 24:30-34, 6:6-11, etc.  The sage catches things that the doctrine-wonk might miss, like: “Hey, guys?  This isn’t working.”  This is quite openly an appeal to experience, and if you have the doctrine-wonk turn of mind, you’ll object that everybody’s experience is different, and how can you really appeal to that?

The answer, of course, is “carefully.”  It is actually easier to decode God’s revelation in His Word than in His spoken World.  It’s easier to misread the World.  But for all that, the World is revelation, meant to be read and understood.  If it requires wisdom, then we will need to be wise.

***

Experimental science arose from ‘natural philosophy.’  One of the key points of departure between philosophy and science (as we now know it) is the willingness to go out and look.  Philosophy can be done from an armchair — if you know the basic nature of things, then you can arrive at all the conclusions you need by thinking through how they interact together, or so the natural philosophers once thought.  But they kept being wrong about the way the world actually worked.  The experimental scientists realized that there are lots of ways God could have made the world — if you want to know how He did make it, you have to go look.

***

The ‘marks of a true church’ approach to church ministry is like old-school natural philosophy; it revolves around sitting in a study and doing lots of thought experiments.  If we’re meeting the standards, then of course we’re doing it right, and of course God will bless our efforts.  The path of wisdom is a little more complex: it involves getting out into the world and seeing what God is, in fact, blessing.

It will turn out that the ‘marks of a true church’ approach is also bad doctrine, but that’s not really the point.  The point is that God reveals that it’s bad doctrine by not blessing it, and so you learn it’s bad doctrine by going out into God’s world and seeing that it doesn’t actually work.  What does?  Love.  Service.  Care for children, the poor, for orphans and widows and the defenseless.  Healing the sick; comforting the broken; hugging people who stink.  Getting out of the holy huddle and engaging the people who need Jesus most.

I’m not rejecting correct doctrine here; it’s important.  I think it’s important enough that I make time to design Bible curriculum for Christian middle school students, and to teach Greek and theology courses to Bible college and seminary students.  Nor am I rejecting the proper practice of the sacraments; in fact, I dare say I take a much higher view of the sacraments than the vast majority of you who will read this post.  And I’m certainly not denigrating church discipline.

What I am doing is observing that being the Body of Christ in the world involves a ministry profile that looks like Jesus.  If we don’t look like Jesus, then how dare we console ourselves because our teaching is good?

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Posted by Tim Nichols