Full Contact Christianity

All They Got Was Lunch

21 February 2023

When I talk about community pastoral work with other believers, there’s one question I get more than any other. It’s not how to prepare, what books to read, or how to evaluate seminary choices. It’s not what to say to a new widow, or how to be at the bedside when someone is in their last hours. As they hear the stories of what God is doing — the alcoholic that got sober and is working toward a senior shotput championship, the single mom that needed new tires, the felon that designed my first business card, the young lady punishing her own sins by serving as as the sexual plaything of a malevolent man, the gay man who’s frustrated by his progressive friends’ unwillingness to actually do anything to improve the city, while the Christians are working their fingers to the bone — almost every single person has the same question: “Where do you find these people?”

I never know what to say.

I know the literal answers: the severe weather shelter, a failing coffee shop, the cafe on the corner, a local massage therapy school, a church that’s focused on meeting the needs of the homeless population. But that’s not what they’re asking, is it?

They’re asking where I find this special class of people that are ready and waiting to be ministered to, as if there were some secret place to find them. And that’s absolutely the wrong question. It’s not where I’m looking; it’s how I’m looking. Lost people are everywhere; the harvest is heartbreakingly plentiful.

Jesus once taught this exact lesson. He was taking the Twelve through Samaritan country, and they had to stop to buy food. Jews have no dealings with Samaritans if they can help it; I’m sure it made a bit of a splash when an obviously diverse group of twelve Jewish men walked through town. How many people did they walk past to get to the market? Five? A dozen? Two dozen? How many merchants did they interact with to buy what they needed? How many people did they pass on their way back out to the well?

Of course, you know the story: while they’d been in town, Jesus accosted a lone woman who came out to the well to draw water in the heat of the day. She believed in Him, and when the disciples came out, she went back into the village to tell everyone about the Man she’d met by the well. As the inhabitants of the town began to come out toward the well, Jesus tells His disciples — with, it seems, some irony — that they should pray for God to sent laborers into the harvest, because the harvest is so plentiful.

Don’t miss this point: the harvest Jesus is talking about is the population of the town He’d just sent the disciples into.

Jesus had one shot at interacting with one person, and He got the whole town out to the well. The disciples walked past who knows how many people passing through town to market, interacted with the merchants, and walked back through town on their way out, and all they got was lunch. They were there, but not as harvesters. They simply weren’t on task.

Where did Jesus find all these people? They were there the whole time.

Better question: what did Jesus do differently? A little further into the story, He tells us: “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me, I speak these things.” (John 8:28)

The harvest is right in front of you. Listen. Listen to them. Listen to God. Say and do what He tells you. I promise you, the Lord of the Harvest knows how to send you as a harvester.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Not Against It

14 February 2023

Last night, a client asked me why I’m drawn to pastoral work with homeless folks. I’ve been asked this many times, and there’s usually a genre expectation: people expect me to tell a story where I was once homeless myself, or a homeless guy’s generosity changed my life, or where I failed to help someone who later died, or a “lightning rod moment” when God gave me a special burden for the homeless population, or some such thing. (None of that is even close to true, by the way.)

The assumption behind the question is that ministry to homeless folks is uniquely hard, and unless you have some kind of special calling to that population, you couldn’t or wouldn’t do it.

The truth is rather more mundane: I’m not against it.

I know that sounds odd, but think about it this way: there’s a seminary just down the road full of students aspiring to “the professional ministry.” Guarantee you, very few of them are looking forward to a ministry that involves hugging someone whose last bath was 2 weeks ago at the sink in a Burger King bathroom. They’re looking for church jobs in the well-heeled suburbs. Most of them are realistic enough to know they aren’t going to waltz into a senior pastor gig first thing; they expect to pay their dues. They’ll start out as youth pastors, or associate pastors at a small church, before moving up to the mid-size churches. Some of them will be happy to stay there; others aspire to the megachurch, where there’s an on-site nursery and day care for the employees’ kids. Others are angling more toward a Ph.D. and a career in academia; still others for positions in publishing.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that, of course. We need books and professors and churches in the ‘burbs; there’s good work to be done there. But the point is, serving the homeless population is simply not on their maps as something one might do. Of course they know, at an intellectual level, that some people do that kind of work, but it’s never seriously occurred to them that they might do it.

And so, mostly, they won’t. They’ll continue to think of the default “ministry position” as a full-time staff position at a mid-sized suburban church, and caring for the homeless as an exotic burden specially gifted to other people. Some of them will think that we are losers — the ones who failed to make the cut for the cushier jobs. Others will think we’re especially dedicated. But neither is true. Me, I’ve no special calling or exotic gift for homeless ministry. But neither am I possessed of the delusion that such a thing is necessary. It’s just feeding Christ’s sheep and loving the lost.

Which ones? The ones He put in front of me. Who’d He put in front of you?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Overemphasizing God?

7 February 2023

In the run-up to the panel discussion on the Holy Spirit that my friend Chris hosted for Gulfside Ministries, I was mulling over a series of questions that he was planning to toss to the panel. I had a strong opinion about one particular question, but just for fun, I decided to toss the questions to my apprentice and see what she thought. I didn’t tell her any of what I was thinking; I just said “I have the list of talking points for that panel tomorrow — want to see it?” Like me, she’s a theology nerd, so of course she did.

She looked them over, and pinged on the same question I had. “There seems to be on one hand an over-intellectualizing of the faith that minimizes the HS as well as an overly-mystical approach to the faith that overemphasizes the HS. Perhaps not minimizing or overemphasizing but something else. In terms of major errors, is this a proper framing?” She read the question, pondered for a moment, and then asked, “How does one overemphasize a person of the Godhead?”

How, indeed. I made my case for reframing the question in that discussion, which you’re welcome to watch, but there’s a piece of it I want to develop here.

What is it that we think the Holy Spirit does? Do we think that He tries to get us to do irresponsible, disorderly things? Is it the case that we need to hem the Spirit in with Scriptures to get him to behave?

No. Holy Spirit is not some slightly better behaved Bacchus who’s going to drive us mad for His own personal amusement. He is the God of the universe. It is He who inspired the Scriptures to start with. When an assembly (like Corinth) goes completely bananas to the point that those who are outside the church come in and it seems that everyone’s lost their minds (you can read about this in 1 Cor. 12-15), it is not because they “overemphasize the Holy Spirit.”

It is because they are far from Him. In their theologizing, they may talk about the Holy Spirit all the time, but they’re liars, aren’t they? The Spirit does not lead you to commit sin. The Spirit is a God of order, not confusion. What they are doing, these people who “overemphasize the Spirit,” is blaming their own stupid and irresponsible excesses on the Spirit. It is precisely because they are failing to follow the Spirit’s leading that their excesses have a chance to creep in: “I say then, walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh, for the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh….”

The Spirit lusts against the flesh. The Spirit is at war; He wants all the territory for Himself. And He’ll take it, if we let Him. When we insist on going our own way, all manner of disobedience creeps in as a knock-on consequence. We cannot avoid being the puppets of our lusts apart from the Spirit.

So walk in the Spirit, and you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Holy and Just and Good

31 January 2023

An acquaintance in one of the theology groups I hang out in asked what a Christian’s view of the Law should be. I put a little time into a response, and it seems worth sharing here:

The Law is holy and just and good, just like the man said. Sometimes we have a hard time seeing that, and that’s a good occasion to pray for God to open my eyes, that I might see wondrous things in His Law.

The Law was the rule of communal life for Israel, and as a Gentile it compels me to come and marvel: Who has such wise laws as these? It’s an inspiration. As a voter with a voice in public policy in my Gentile nation, I can’t simply seek to bring Israel’s law over wholesale, but if I’m at the city council meeting or the voting booth asking WWJD?, how dumb would it be to ignore the one time God explicitly set up a civil law code?

The Law is principally for the sinner, not the righteous, but it’s also Scripture, and all Scripture is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness. The Law can sanctify in the sense that it set Israel as a nation apart from her neighbors (and that’s not nothing), but it can never sanctify in the sense of making me more like Christ. However, to the extent that I no longer live, but Christ lives in me, I will fulfill the Law truly, because Jesus leads me to love God and my neighbor, and in so doing, I cannot help but fulfill the Law.

Trying to use the Law in check-box fashion to gain God’s favor — either for admission to heaven or to gain his approval in this life — sets the Law against faith and against the Spirit, but faith is not against the Law. It’s faith that moves Paul to call the Law holy and just and good, faith that moves the Psalmist to meditate profitably on the Law, faith that allows me to participate in Christ, who fulfilled the Law for me and — through love of God and neighbor — fulfills the righteous requirement of the Law in me.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Guilt Without Accusations

17 January 2023

How do you talk with contemporary people about guilt? If you grew up with a fairly traditional Christian set of categories, it can be tricky. In a self-consciously post-Christian world, people tend to blow off the things you would normally say. There’s a place and time to preach a barn-burner, but in general, my goal is to speak about guilt without taking the role of the Accuser. The devil’s got that one covered. It’s not like he needs my help.

The fact that guilt and brokenness don’t fit into the contemporary sense-making scheme doesn’t mean that contemporary people have somehow eliminated them. One of the dangers of thinking everything is a “language game” or everything is socially constructed is that you think you can change reality just by changing language. Guilt and shame are enduring realities; people today are as guilty and broken as a preconversion Luther — but unlike Luther, they’ve been deprived of the language to make sense of it all. Because that language has lost currency, there is no generally accepted way of talking about those realities, but people try to put them into words anyway. I spend a lot of time listening for what language this person is going to use. Some common options include absorbing the sin into their identity (“I guess I’m just a cheater”), attempting to positive self-talk it away (“I just gotta stop focusing on the negative”), or aspirational sociopathy (“Eh, shit happens; gotta move on”).

If I can help someone put their guilt into words, then I’m not the one who’s accusing them of something. They introduced the problem; I’m just helping them sort it out. At that point, I can introduce sin by way of contrast:

“We used to talk about this kind of thing as sin. We’ve kind of ruined the word; anymore the only time we talk about sin is when we’re selling desserts or lingerie. But it used to mean something. In the classical sense, sin doesn’t mean you had 5% too much fun or some crap like that. It means missing the mark. It means that you were built for a purpose, and you stepped outside the design parameters in a way that’s gonna hurt you and others around you. See, God is not a tight-shoed, overly regimented Father who says ‘Don’t play!’ He’s a caring Father who says ‘Don’t play in traffic.’

“What I’m hearing you say is that you did play in traffic, and you got hurt, and some other people got hurt because of you. You can’t make it all better, and you don’t know what to do about it, because the culture you live in has deprived you of any way to make sense of that and deal with it.

“The good news is that what’s happening in you is actually totally normal. You’re not crazy or negative or neurotic; you’re actually built to notice when you’re outside the parameters in damaging ways. Just like physical pain is designed to tell you when something is wrong, guilt is moral pain designed to tell you something is wrong. Just like with physical pain, the purpose is not to punish you for doing a bad thing; it’s to motivate you to correct the problem. Even though the culture is a little brain-dead on this, God hasn’t forgotten how to deal with it.”

From there, I can go straight to what the cross and the resurrection really mean, or I can take a more priestly role and lead them into a direct confession of their sin in the situation we’ve been discussing, in order to then talk about the cross and God’s promise of forgiveness and life.

Lots of people have heard of Jesus dying on the cross; many of them don’t know what it means. When Jesus was crucified, every sin, every weakness, every sickness, every character flaw, every dark thing that separates us from God, all of it was nailed to the cross with Jesus. Died on the cross with Jesus. Was buried in the heart of the earth with Jesus. And when God raised Him from the dead three days later, Jesus did not come out of the grave dragging along a Hefty bag of your crap. It’s gone. It’s done.

Anything that you think is separating you from God — He’s already tended to it. You could let it go today, right now, and be free for the rest of your life.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Epiphany: Just Jesus

6 January 2023

Epiphany is the day we celebrate Jesus revealed to the Gentile world. Nothing Mary and Joseph could have said or done would have convinced the Magi – wealthy, powerful astrologers, philosophers, and rulers – to pay attention to a toddler. But God pulled it off. Through a combination of Balaam’s fourth prophecy (1400 years before Jesus was born), Daniel’s rise to chief of the Magi in the Babylonian captivity (900 years after that), and signs in the heavens, God led them from their home in the empire next door to a construction worker’s house in Bethlehem. What did they find there? A treasure hoard, a magical amulet, scrolls brimming with ancient secrets? No. Just a person, Jesus Himself. And they worshiped.

Mary and Joseph, for their part – what did they get? Did they get a vindication that salvaged their reputations with their families? No. They got gold, frankincense, and myrrh – symbolic gifts to be sure, but more importantly in the moment, unexpected wealth with which to fund their flight to Egypt to save their child’s life.

God gives us enough. He doesn’t often give us what we expected, but He gives us what we need. When God reveals Jesus to you, it will be the same way: not necessarily what you like or how you expected, but what you need, when you need it. Say yes – Jesus is enough.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Twelfth Day of Christmas: Do The Thing

5 January 2023

In hindsight, it’s easy to see how key figures at pivotal moments in history have opportunities to enact major social change: St. Fabiola, the Nicene bishops, or Basil of Caesarea for hospitals; for slavery, figures like William Wilberforce, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But most of us don’t find ourselves in that kind of position, and that’s ok. Remember how Jesus constantly surprised people by acting on the Father’s guidance? Follow His example and act where you are.

That’s what St. Paul did. St. Paul wasn’t in a pivotal position to abolish slavery either, but that didn’t stop him from doing something surprising when God dropped an opportunity in his lap. A runaway slave named Onesimus came into Paul’s circle, having fled from a Christian master named Philemon – a man Paul knew. As a runaway, Onesimus could have been executed. Paul wasn’t in a position to take down the institution of slavery, but by doing what he could, he planted the seeds of its demise. In one short letter that has haunted slaveholders for centuries, Paul forced Philemon to resolve his former slave’s precarious legal position, freed Onesimus, and did it all at his own expense.

“I appeal to you for my son Onesimus…I am sending him back….Perhaps he departed for a while for this purpose, that you might receive him forever, no longer as a slave but better than a slave—a beloved brother….If you consider me a partner, receive him as you would receive me. If he has wronged you or owes you anything, charge it to me….I will pay it back.” (The whole letter is only a few hundred words long – click through and read it; it’s worth your time.)

The question is never about what you can’t do. The question is what you can do, right where you are. Perhaps you can’t change healthcare, but you can change the bandage on a homeless man’s hand. You can’t change the past, but you can provide a firm hug and a soft landing for someone who’s trying to put their life back together. Jesus came to heal the brokenhearted, free the oppressed, heal the sick – follow Him by doing what’s nearest and clearest, what’s within your reach right now. (In an age of social media slacktivism, I feel compelled to add: You can’t “stand with” anybody while sitting on your ass. Go actually do the thing.) Merry Christmas!

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philemon%201&version=NIV

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Eleventh Day of Christmas: The Slave is our Brother

4 January 2023

“Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother/And in His name, all aggression shall cease.” My favorite Christmas song has been “O Holy Night” since I was a kid. Those two lines from the second verse are my favorite part. Whence this bold assertion of brotherhood with a slave? You won’t find that anywhere in the ancient world, but it fits very naturally in a Christmas song. Why?

Ubiquitous across time and culture, slavery is everywhere in history and still practiced in places to this day. Jesus came to liberate the captives, and Christians started working against slavery very early, but abolition was slow and painful. By the late Middle Ages, a number of jurisdictions in Christendom had rejected slavery, but then we lost ground and had to stomp it out all over again several centuries later. We didn’t bin it for good until 1865. In the long argument over slavery, a lot of the apologists for slavery were Christians. Christians today find that embarrassing, and should.

It’s particularly embarrassing because abolition is uniquely ours. The entire discourse of abolition was–and still is–conducted on Christian principles. And it was so wildly successful that the whole Western world now thinks of the universal brotherhood of humanity (and therefore abolition and equality) as common sense. We often forget that to this day, the Christian West remains the only culture in world history ever to abolish slavery as a matter of moral principle, because it’s harmful to the slaves. We think that’s common sense now, but only after Jesus did it become common sense, and only in Christian and Christ-haunted places does it remain common sense.

For which all thanksgiving. Merry Christmas!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Tenth Day of Christmas: Like Yeast in Dough

3 January 2023

“The Kingdom of God is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until all was leavened.” That’s the way Jesus taught us to think about the Kingdom: it grows like yeast. Ever made bread? You put the yeast in, make the dough, and then go about your business. There are some variables you can tweak to help it rise a little faster or slower, but yeast is alive, and it does its work even when you’re not looking. Slowly. So slowly, in many cases, that it’s hard to see.

Jesus sent His followers to heal the sick, and we’ve cared for the sick and dying everywhere we’ve ever gone. We stayed in the plague-ridden cities to care for the sick when Galen fled to the countryside. We founded and staffed leper colonies at risk of our lives. We scoured the hillsides for unwanted babies abandoned by their parents (a crime now, but common practice in the ancient world). We literally invented the concept of public hospitals. We’ve been so successful that today, everybody just thinks having hospitals is common sense. Nobody thinks of hospitals as a peculiarly Christian thing. But even in a city as young as Denver, most of the hospitals were founded by Christians: Rose and St. Joseph’s (Catholic), Swedish (Lutheran), Porter and Littleton (Adventist), Presbyterian/St. Luke’s, and so on.
This is Christmas working its way out across history: God incarnate in Jesus offers us all access to the divine nature. That being the case, humanity is unitable in principle; in an important way, we are already one, and should treat each other accordingly.

Merry Christmas!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Ninth Day of Christmas: Why You’re So Unhappy

2 January 2023

So to review: God incarnate in Jesus destroys our certainty about who we are and how we relate to the world; calls us to abandon our respectability; challenges us to forsake simplistic decision-making and listen to God’s voice. He renders angelic powers and allegedly divine human rulers un-worshipable, and in their place gives us a direct relationship with God as our Father, effectively forcing us into spiritual adulthood. Add it all up, and it’s profoundly destructive. “You want to know why you’re so unhappy?” my mentor Rich once bellowed at a crowd. “Because Jesus ruined everything!”

So He did. Where’s He going with all that? Jesus told us: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed; to proclaim the favorable year of the LORD,” and again: “If I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the Kingdom of God has come upon you.”

The old world dies so that the new world can be born – a world of freedom and healing that Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. What will that be like? The prophets Jesus quoted talk of a time when the lion lies down with the lamb, when disease, hunger, and war are no more. We are obviously not there yet. Do we have to wait until then? Jesus says no; if He’s the real thing, then it’s already here. Fully here? Of course not. But truly here nonetheless. How would you like to live there?

You can – it’s what Christmas is all about. Merry Christmas!

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Posted by Tim Nichols