A Failure To Disagree

(RE)GROUNDING Part 6 - Jesus in a Pluralistic Age

Mark 2:

When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. 2 And many were gathered together, so that there was no more room, not even at the door. And he was preaching the word to them. 3 And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. 4 And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay. 5 And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” 6 Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, 7 “Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” 8 And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you question these things in your hearts? 9 Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’? 10 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic— 11 “I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.” 12 And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”

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Ethan Magnass, from graceanglicanonline.com/

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The Hope Diamond of the Gospel:
7 key aspects of the core of Christianity.
FROM I Corinthians 15: I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, 2 and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. 3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,

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We explore the complex nature of the the external demand for betterment.

Our Text from Romans 3: 'Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

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Tonight we'll talk about the darkest perspective on human nature from the Letter to the Romans. Join us as we talk about Vampires, Rehab, and Catastrophe (and how to have a happy Lent!).
Our Text from Romans 3: 9 What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
13 “Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
14 “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 in their paths are ruin and misery,
17 and the way of peace they have not known.”
18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
19 Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Full Transcript. Machine generated, it's not perfect, but I'll try to clean it up with time:

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Well, good evening, everyone. I'm hoping that my microphone is working and that this is live. It says that it is, I believe that it is, and I'm using a new microphone. So I hope that you can hear me if you could, let me know if you're able to hear me and hear me clearly, that would be really helpful. If this is your first time joining us welcome. Just as a reminder, our first regrounding class is found on my Facebook page, also the church's Facebook page, and you can access it at any time. You'll be able to access this one as well at any point this talk will in some ways, stem from the last talk and just to go over some housekeeping details before we begin, the regrounding class is intended to be a systematics course in Christian theology, but also it seeks to root those massive conceptions in everyday life.

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And I hope that this project will be helpful for you. It certainly has been helpful for me in reviewing the material. And in many ways it represents what I've been trying to grapple with and learn for the last like 30 years. And and so it's the distilling of all of that data. So I hope that it will have some impact in your life. Additionally, I'll be taking Q&A after I talk for about 35 to 40 minutes. And so I invite you to simply type up your questions in the comments section and we'll get to them. First I have to spend the hour glass so that we stay on time and on target. And so let me do that first. Boom, there we go. I love that thing. Okay. And in order to give you who were with us last time, a refresher, and also to engage with those who were not here last time.

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Last Tuesday I spoke about the theme of Revelation. That is not the scary dragon book at the end of the Bible, but the whole concept that what if, what if the infinite or able to unveil something to communicate something very deep and very profound and very effective about Himself. And I talked about that last time in terms of the ultimate revelation of God is not just romantic love and it's not nature, and it's not sort of ecstatic experience. And all of those things might be wonderful and beautiful, but the ultimate unveiling of God happens in this peasant man from Nazareth that somehow in his life and in his behavior, he evidenced the truest nature of God. And that we can somehow not only recognize something about God, but recognize something about our worth in considering His life. And in fact, in some mystical way bonding with his life, but that the ultimate revelation is not a conception or a philosophy or a book or an author, but it's a man.

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It's a man who really lived and really cared and really trudged alongside us. So I hope that you'll take a listen and take it listen, that doesn't make sense, but you'll listen in to that last conversation. Tonight we are talking about something that is in many ways, a very "Lenton" conception, and that is a human nature. And what is the core crisis of human nature?

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Now it's fitting because tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. And if you don't know anything about Ash Wednesday, that's cool, it's fine. Ash, Wednesday is all about discovering some of the poison within the human system and how one can begin to acknowledge it and, and to receive a little healingand a little restoration, some antidote for that poison. So we'll be talking about that. And if you want to come to church tomorrow, we have lots of openings for you.

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We have a service at 12:10 and then at 7:00 and then at 8:30. So you can come and it'll be great, it'll be heavy, but it'll be great. Tonight we're going to talk about these Lenten themes, and I'm going to discuss them at length. And it's going to be dark tonight. I'm going to tell you, it's not like cheery, we'll get, we'll get there, but we have to begin with the Rocky horror picture show of the human person and the tragedy that is our experience. And then we'll get to the, to the cure, but not yet, not yet. So I want to I want to tell you aboutan opera that I saw that I think most human beings would not like that. I loved it. And it was called dance of the vampires and it started Michael Crawford and it was it was on Broadway for a month and a half.

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It is known to be the biggest flop in Broadway history because they took this very honesty German opera called Tom stair van pier or dance of the vampires, very angsty opera in, and, and it was it was a kind of a retelling of the Dracula story. But they made it a comedy. And anyway, it was a disaster in the United States though. I liked it because I liked the music. And one of the songs from this opera, you already know, you don't know that, you know it, but you know it, and it's called total eclipse of the heart. In German, the original opera, it was called a totalitarian sternness, which means literally the blackout window or total darkness. And the song, if you remember, Bonnie Tyler sang it in 1983, it's actually my favorite rock and roll ballot of all time.

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In 1983, she sang it. And it's about the catastrophe of a romantic love that has gone wrong and the desire for it to go, right. And in the opera it's song by it's a duet by this Dracula character and this young woman named Sarah who are sort of in love, kind of, it's very bizarre. But anyway the the rock opera is all about the the sort of crisis of temptation and falling into temptation and being promised something, but then being utterly devastated whenever you don't get what was promised to you. And so this young woman has offered eternal life if she just offers her neck to the vampire, but ends up losing everything, including her soul and her family and her love. And and so anyway, there's this there's this scene, of course, in total eclipse of the heart where she finally lets go and gives her neck away and the vampire sinks his teeth and drains her blood.

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And then she wakes up just like Adam and Eve in the garden. She wakes up into this new place of awareness and cognition, and she says, and now I see that there are oceans of blood and no land. So she pictures herself as this sort of drowning victim in a world of death. And that's a very heavy image. And I wish I could say the opera ends on a positive note. It doesn't it's German, of course. So it ends with great angst and tragedy, and I bet it does, and that the curtain falls as the vampires conquer the whole world and and destroy everybody. So it's, it's meant to send shivers down your spine and it ends a Nietzschean night in a sort of a Wagnerian hellscape. And I love the music, but I dissatisfied with the conclusion because it lacks any sort of redemptive edge, but, but we have to go into Tom stair vamp here, or a telephone insurnace total darkness territory in order to really grapple with the haunting questions of life, the recidivism of life, the paralysis that so many of us find ourselves experiencing day in and day out.

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The fact that things don't get better most of the time, or they don't get better the way that we think they will, or we find ourselves with the same paralyzing problem in our forties that we had in our twenties. And we thought we would be past it by now, but truth be told we're not. And I think that that's worthy of a very serious and earnest and even zealous conversation and Christianity amidst its many insights, offers a great and unique and harrowing insight regarding the core crisis of human in nature. And I think we avoid it at our plants and at great cost to our own emotional and psychological and spiritual lives. And so the only way to really deal with what you are and what you do is to ask the meta questions about why is it that we are like this?

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Why Y well, tonight we're going to do that, and we're going to do it through the darkest passage in the Bible. That's the darkest exhumation of the human condition, which is found in Romans chapter three. Now a little background, the epistle to the Romans, the letter to the Romans was written by the apostle Paul, who in his early career experienced a massive ideological shift to do to something real that happened to him. He was a very, very zealous and hot headed and type a and driven young man who had excelled in his PhD program. And that is what it is. He was a PhD candidate under a very famous rabbi. And we end to lots of historians, including ancient ones who have commented about him named [inaudible]. And he was the prize pupil of this sort of Stephen Hawking figure. And he was on his way to arrest and force and even execute a group of cult members.

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At least that's what he thought they were this group of Christians or followers of the way as they were called early on. And he was deeply upset with him because he thought that they were perverting the great cause of Judaism. And lo and behold, he was struck down by vision and a voice on his way to a very large city called Damascus. And he heard a voice saying a Saul, which was his Jewish name, Saul, why are you persecuting me? And he said, who are you? And he said, well, I'm Jesus whom you're persecuting. And after that Saul who whose Greek name was Paul goes into the wilderness in Arabia for three years. You just disappears three years because he has to regroup. And he has to completely rethink all of his paradigms because the very man that he thought was the poison in the system was the answer to all his problems.

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And so he, out of that place starts writing lots of letters that have a great impact and still have a great impact. And he wrote a letter to a group of people that he had never met because he heard the word churches in Rome, which was the capital city of the empire. So he just writes them a letter, but he's not addressing particular situation. And other cities he's dealing with all sorts of crises. So in Glacia, he has people that are demanding, the Gentiles is circumcised, and they think that they have to follow the Jewish law in order to be Christians and festival and Nika. These people think it's the end of the world. And, and they know it and they feel fine, and it's not the end of the world and policy to tell them it's not so good to work. And in Corinthians, I mean, he's dealing with people that live in the rough equivalent of Amsterdam.

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They they are Las Vegas. Let's make, bring it closer to home and he's dealing with their licentiousness. Well, he has no crisis in Rome, he's introducing himself and Christian theology. So he lays out Christian theology in a very systematized manner in the book of Romans and it's the clearest and most theologically sophisticated in ordered of Paul's letters. And so he writes this late in his career and and he's really distilled the Christian vision by now and understood Jesus of Nazareth and all of his profundity and his consequence. And so he is extrapolating that for these people who knew a little bit about Judaism, there were some Jews in rum and knew a lot about sort of Gentile, paganism, and were coming to see the world and understand the world in themselves and God in a very new and exciting way.

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And and so I'm going to read from the third chapter of Paul's epistle to the Romans. And you'll notice that the reading is attached to the description of this video. And so you can just follow along right now, if you will. And I am going to I'm going to read from verse nine. So Paul writes, what then, are we Jews any better off? He means better off than Gentiles or non-Jewish people. No, not at all for, we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks are under sin, as it is written. Not as righteous, no, not one, no one understands no one seeks for God. All have turned aside together. They have become worthless. No one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of ASPs is under their lips.

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Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are Swift to shed blood in their paths are ruin and misery. And the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be stopped and the whole world may be held accountable to God for, by the works of the law. No human being will be justified in his sight since through the law comes knowledge of sin. Well, there it is. Now I'm going to make some comments about this particular passage of scripture. That again is very, very dark, but very sacred and revealing and ultimately healing. And that's the purpose of that very rough text is to bring you a healing that you wouldn't ordinarily have through your own capacities and abilities.

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So this is the great Christian insight regarding human nature. And we can call it total depravity. Now total depravity is a, a theological term that gives some people the willies, and it comes from the reform tradition, but I'll, I'll explain what I mean by it. Total depravity means that every aspect of my humanity has been influenced. It doesn't mean it's been completely taken over. It means it's been influenced by the leaven of of course Snus and rebellion and hiddenness and bifurcation, which means the splitting apart or the Jekyll and Hyde kind of syndrome, the splitting apart of the light and the dark. And Romans three, I would say is the darkest expos, they of human nature, but it's also the least cynical and nihilistic expos I of human nature, but it really suggests that we are all in a Canyon, a boxed Canyon that is broad and deep broad, because it affects everybody that you've ever met and deep because it affects each individual to their toes, from the head to the toes.

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It affects every one of us to our core. So it's broad affects everybody and deep, it affects every every individual to the core. Now I want to speak about the breadth of the crisis that at least is zoomed in this passage. Paul begins this little passage by asking the question, if the Jews are better, are they better people, or are they better off or more ably acclimated with heaven because of some sort of nationalistic status, because they were the chosen people, right? Because they were children of Abraham and they were inheritors of a great religious tradition and certain identity markers. They were circumcised and they practice Sabbath and they were they were the recipients of great wisdom that transcended a human origin that came from God or they better off because they had these insights, these gifts, and this nationalistic understanding than the Greeks.

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Now, the Greeks is just a way of saying everybody else. It was an ancient way of talking about everybody else, other than Jews. And and w what's difficult of course, is that they had certain advantages in that they had the Jewish scriptures and certain ideas about the nature of life and God that were in fact distinctive. So they were sort of well-informed, but Paul's ultimate answer is no, they're not better off. They're not better off because both Jewish people and non-Jewish people, Gentile people, the Greeks have the same crisis that the, the core human conundrum is present in both groups. So the group that grew up in synagogues that grew up watching their language that grew up worshiping only one God that grew up with with great moral instruction from the 10 commandments and from the other 600 commandments of the old Testament who grew up studying what the rabbis studied, who grew up never eating shellfish or pork people that would never intermarry with other races or religions.

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Those people says, Paul, and this is a radical thing. If you remember, Paul's own personal history, those people are not better than the people who worshiped 10,000 gods or, you know, eight or nine who slept and hooked up with a lot of people who did math on weekends, who who kept losing their jobs, who were irresponsible type B hippies, who could never really make it right. Who just spent too much time brewing beer in their basements. Paula saying that those groups are equally damaged before the scrupulous sight of heaven or the, they all seeing eyes of heaven that that God can like an x-ray technician see that the core of every person, regardless of their origin or theirs, zip code, or their income or their status, or their political affiliations, or their parenting styles are all the same that we have all that Paul says fallen short of the glory of God, both Jews and Greeks are under sin.

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That toxicity is universal. Now I want you to notice Paul's universal and very offensive language. This is what he says. None is righteous. The word none in Greek means none. None is righteous. No, not one that underscores the point. No, not one, not even one person, no one understands no one seeks for God. All have turned aside together. They've become worthless. No one does. What is good, not even one. Now what's fascinating about what Paul is doing here is he is not just making up all those words. Those words, all come from the old Testament. They come from the Psalms. Most of them come from the Psalms. And what's fascinating is almost all of those Psalms that have that damaging language are all about Gentiles. The Psalmist is writing against Gentiles. And what Paul is doing is taking that language that was originally written in these hymns and prayers against Gentiles and applying them to everyone.

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All, no one is referring to everyone to a cite. One theologian human nature is evenly distributed. We are all on equal ground. And this message is so deeply counter-intuitive right now at the moment, because everybody is looking for somebody else to blame. And this is true, not just of what we consider sort of snowflake liberals. There are lots of snowflake conservatives out there too. But everybody is looking to blame some sort of group for the catastrophes that they are either experiencing themselves or seeing in the world. And so lots of people are saying terrible things online. I mean, it's just, it's just an, it's a, it's a pandemic of of a cynical, hostile blame oriented and pathological qualities that are seen as almost a sanctified and sanctifying. The it was funny the other day. I was, I somebody said the online well, liberals lean toward reality and I'm like, you don't know the liberals.

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I know, but I would say the same thing when people said conservatives lean toward reality. I'm like, really, really, I know some of these people but that's not the issue. The issue is that people are always trying to very often, many people are trying to distance themselves from the problem and isolate the problem and somebody else, but to coach Solzhenitsyn the crisis that we dare not admit, except in hushed tones, is that the line, the dividing line between good and evil runs down every single human heart that black people are not superior to white people. And white people are not superior to Asians. And agents are not superior to Hispanics. And the gay people are not superior to straight people. And the young people are not superior to old people, and that liberals are not superior to conservatives nor vice versa. That every human being is riddled with crippling and dark capacities that puts them at odds with God and the world.

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And so the core contributor of our own crisis is the one we see in the mirror. Now that is the hardest thing to swallow. It's a to quote Alanis Morissette. It's a jagged little pill that nobody wants to take, but it is obviously true. It is obviously true that the golden thread of all your problems is you it's not somebody else. And that's why lent as we approach Lance. It's always good to S to give it a rest when it comes to blaming the rest of the world for your crises. Am I saying that you're not a victim of anything? Of course you are a victim. I'm a victim too, of horrific things that have formed and fashioned us. Nobody is denying the the notion of, of real victim mode, even in in, in a systemic way. It's very, very possible.

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That's not the question. The question is, are we only a victim? And the answer is obviously, no, we're not only a victim. We are also a victimizer. We can dish it out quite, quite very often in reactivity to our own victim hood. And so St. Paul is saying that if you want to know the principal contributor to the crisis of your own life, then you really do need to consider yourself. And and it is quite true. He says that no one is righteous. So if you're looking for somebody who is flawless and sweetly oriented and benevolent you can't look at yourself. That's what he's saying. And he's saying nobody searched, seeks for God. I mean, outside of some sort of miracle from, without you and your own nature says Saint Paul, you don't go around scrounging for God.

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You don't think about God when you go to bed at night. Most of the time, in fact, you think about yourself, you think about your daughter, you think about your son, you think about the, your spouse, that you're sort of half resenting and half in love with. You think about how much you hate your job or your boss, or how much you wish you didn't hate your job or your boss, or or whatever. But what St Paul was saying is that you don't seek out for God because of some volition within you. And so he is saying that the, the box Canyon of the human condition is broad and that all of us have fallen in everybody that you know is falling in. Now, I'll talk about that more in a little bit. But he also says that the problem is deep and that what he calls sin.

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And remember sin is the bonding that human beings have with the the, the drive of Thanatos of death, of depravity of things that bring wreckage and self-sabotage into our own lives and into the world. Well, he, he says also that it's not just broad, the alls and no one's of Romans three, it's also deep. It affects everybody right to their core. Now notice the comprehensive body imagery that St Paul uses in Romans three, he talks about the throat being an open grave. They use their tongues to deceive. The venom of ASPs is in their lips. Their mouth is full of curses in building a bitterness. Their feet are Swift to shed blood. There is no fear of God before their eyes, right? So he's mentioning all these body parts and it reminds me of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Maybe some of you have read the book or seen the movie with Robert de Niro who plays the monster in a quite compelling way, but Frankenstein is all about Dr.

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Frankenstein who builds a monster, he's trying to create life. And he was trying to play God. I mean, that's the lesson in the book. You don't want to do that because it doesn't work out very well. And he creates the monster. And you may remember this out of the body parts of executed criminals. So we compiles and those body parts and creates the monster. And that's sort of what St. Paul is saying here is that human beings are comprehensively afflicted and affected by the condition of sin. And remember in the Bible, sin is principally a condition, not an action. So San is not principally. I hit a nun with a car on purpose, which I have not done. In case you were wondering, but sin is principally a condition that causes me to want to do things that harm. Now there was the big question during the Protestant reformation, which is this, are we sinners because we sin or do we sin because we are sinners.

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In other words, are we judged as sinners because we do a lot of naughty things or do we do a lot of bad reprehensible things because there's something in us that is broken already broken. And that's what St. Paul is saying that we have an orientation toward vanitas toward the night a total offense sternness. And and so every aspect of our being, and he talks about those different body parts here is infected with a deep infection that causes both religious and social dysfunction, as well as self sabotage. Now Jesus of Nazareth believed this and he communicated it very, very clearly with a group of people that really believed that that immortality was caused by environment. And so if you were able to change your environment, you were able to be a far more well adjusted person in this group of people were known as the Pharisees and the Pharisees were not stupid.

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They were very scrupulous and highly structured and fiercely devoted people who were terrified of some sort of externalized judgment. And so they believed that the way to stave off that judgment was to be ritualistically meticulous. And so Jesus was there when they were doing all these ritual washings of kettles and pots, making sure that everything was perfectly clean and not unclean, and he corrected them. And he said, you think that that unholiness or that a, an impure character comes from the outside, in, in other words, to translate it in modern jargon, you think it's because you listen to death metal, or you get too many tattoos, or you hang out with the wrong sorts of people, or you or you grew up watching too much television or somebody didn't guard the internet for you, or you grew up with parents who smoked or you were exposed to marijuana at an early age or whatever.

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He's saying it's not what comes on the, in the outside, in that makes you unclean and to the Jews, he meant it's not you eating pork, or, you know, the wrong kind of food or not washing things properly. It's not the external world that makes you unclean. It's what comes out of a human being that makes him or her unclean, okay. He said, all these things come out of you. Adultery comes out of you. Rage comes out of you. Jesus is saying, the problem is already within you. It's too late. It's not about shellfish anymore. It's not about washing copper. It's the the beast and past of the human condition that has already got you by the throat. And so St. Paul is using all of these different body images to create a Frankensteinian monster that he says is representative of the human condition.

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Now I've always been a fan of the work of Carl Young or Carl Young, the brilliant psychoanalyst who understood the human condition in terms of the shadow side. He believed that that the unconscious motivator of much of human behavior was not reason or reasonable, but instead was the shadow somewhat related to what Sigmund Freud referred to as the ed. But it's, it's more complicated. But anyway, this is what a young wrote in his work entitled psychology and religion. He writes, unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is on the whole less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. It is a frightening thought that man has a shadow side to him consisting not just a little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this, but let these harmless creatures form a mass that is let them all get together.

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And there emerges a raging monster. And each individual is only one tiny cell in the Monster's body. So that for better or worse, he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost, having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities. That man turns a blind eye to the shadow side of human nature. Blindly, he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin. You hear that blindly, he strives against the Salish Harry dogma of original sin, which is so prodigious only true. Yes. Even he hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is. So painfully aware. Now that's quite a thing to say. I believe it wholeheartedly. And I believe it wholeheartedly for a variety of reasons, but I had an episode once where I went to a rehab center to visit a relative who was there for the 14th time.

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So I actually knew some of the AIDS who are working there and people that work in rehab centers. Most of them are very concentrated and lovely and present people to great cost to it's very, very costly to engage in that way with people that are addicted in a recidivistic and very deep way. Well, anyway, I was visiting this relative and I was impacted greatly by something that they said, which is I had to come to the point where I could admit that I loved painkillers more than my family.

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Now that's quite a thing to say, I love painkillers more than my family. What were they really indicating that their desire to subsume their pain and pharmaceutical exploration was so great that it became their chief as love and that they knew that was a problem that had them by the throat. They were out of control or to use the 12 step language powerless over that particular agent that it wins time after time, and then sent them into rehab again, 14 times. Now this is a totally counter-cultural message right now. Totally counter-cultural because we live within this very bizarre moment that was captured in a very clear way in a, in a film that I don't hate, but I don't love it called the greatest showman. And the music is very catchy. But it's an, and many of the themes are good and I even agree with it, but there's this song, this is me that the bearded lady sings, and you may remember it, and she she's sort of owning herself publicly.

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And and she sayings I know that I deserve your love. There's nothing I'm not worthy of. You know, I'm brave, I'm true. I'm proud. This is me. And that really is the message of the cultural moment. If there is a new message of salvation and the current context in which we live, it's self-acceptance that you have a certain amount of givens and what you need for those givens is to completely identify with them, to accept them and to have other people accept that in fact, demand that other people accept them. And if they don't, they're full of fear or hate or bigotry or some other monstrous quality and yet, and yet the new Testament, if we really, and, and by bet would suggest that there are many beautiful things about you. No doubt about it. And yet everything within you is to one degree or another, not all equally, but one degree or another troubled and that and so this doctrine teaches you to be a little suspicious of your emotions and to be a little suspicious of your deep seated drives.

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And it's, counter-cultural in our moment also counterculture in the church. It's funny in the Episcopal church, which is w going always in a rather fascinating direction these days. Not all, not all churches, but many in the Episcopal church, there was a confession that was written in a book and titled enriching our worship, which is not in the book of common prayer in the Episcopal church, but it's in an additional book that you could purchase and use. And eight of the seminaries in the Episcopal church that are still in it are using it from time to time. And there's a confession, you know, when you confess your sins before God and others, and the confession goes a little, something like this, God, not Lord, because that's too masculine and hierarchical. So they got rid of that language. God, we confess that we have sinned against you by denying the goodness within ourselves.

(00:35:42):
So there's that that goes against the grain of Romans three to deny the goodness within yourself. So do you hear what that's saying? So to S to say you are a sinner is to be sinning because that's a denial of the innate goodness within yourself. Now we're not denying that there was goodness within you, but that's not a confession. A confession is when you admit to God, the paralyzing and alienating qualities that you have, the things that you're doing to sabotage your own life, to sabotage others. And there that are at a front to the father that created you. So this is a completely dark doctrine of human, the human condition, not just human behavior, but the condition that produces it. It's the darkest chapter in the new Testament. It says that we are under the Paul of midnight, that we are comprehensively fallen. Now, does this mean that no human beings do no good things? Well, no, it doesn't mean that there's no good things that happen. It just means there's no untainted thing that we are experiencing tainted love, tainted love. Do you remember that tainted love from from the eighties? I forget who was saying it anyway, and what's more, Paul says this at the end, he says that the law or

(00:36:58):
An external demand for moral for a moral adjustment, I can't care. You know,

(00:37:10):
I mean, so he says, this is your condition. No one searches for God. No one does what is right. Everybody is a Frankensteinian construct that is congealed together by dynamic dark forces. And then he says, and telling you to stop it. Yeah.

(00:37:27):
Well, stop it. The law doesn't work. The law cannot cure you.

(00:37:32):
Somebody telling you to knock it off will not help you knock it off. He, he says that through the works of the law, no one will be justified in his sight. That means that nobody comes to a place of peace and tranquil equilibrium with heaven through effort or through improvement. And in fact, you can't improve yourself just by hearing that you ought to, this is why lectures to change. One's behavior don't work. This is why, if you tell an addict to stop doing it, they won't, they'll just hide around you because they feel ashamed. I learned this the hard way, by the way in in my own family and friendship circle. I used to think that what the, what the addict is missing is knowledge. If they just knew the damage that they were doing, if they understood it without sort of an ex as stigmatic vision, if they could have clear eyes, then they would be completely free.

(00:38:31):
If they just thought about it, thought about that this addiction is really helping them, not really helping the people who love them, then they would be completely liberated. And yet anybody who has dealt with an addiction to any degree knows whether it's food, whether it's over over spending, whether it's cutting, whether it's porn, whether it's sex, whether it's too much vodka, whether it's toxic relationships cutting you, name it you need more than an ethical lecture on why it said behavior is harmful to you and to us because you, you are more than just a brain. There was a wonderful intro episode between Brennan Manning, whom I mentioned last week and his wife. At one point they S she cornered him and said all of this drinking and this deceit, I don't understand. You're the one who talks all the time about the love of God.

(00:39:30):
Don't you believe that God loves you and can help you with this. Don't you don't, you know, that you're the one who taught me that don't, you know, that, and he looked at Rosalind, his wife and said, yes, but knowing is not the hard part. Like, just knowing it. It's not enough. And so, yeah, anyway, that's our situation. And that's why people lie. It's why they hide, because they don't want you to see them. That's what happens since Genesis three, as soon as God comes to the couple and the wind of the day, not the rant, the morning Dew or whatever stupid translation is out there. It's the wind of the day it's job's whirlwind. God comes to the first couple and they run and they hide in the trees. They camouflage themselves so that they're not seen. That's what we do, because we don't want people to know how bad it is now.

(00:40:18):
So that's some thoughts about Romans chapter three. Now I have three brief points that I'm going to make and conclusion, and then I'm going to take a Q and a, and then we'll be done. Three points, universality, freedom, and compassion. So let's talk about universality. There is a wonderful Talmudic proverb that says that every human being carries in their hands, two invisible scrolls, the first girl says, make way for the image of God. And the second scroll says I am, but Dustin ashes, and everybody carries both girls. In other words, you are beautiful and wonderful and worthy of affirmation. And the other scroll says you are a complete and utter train wreck that has, that has been toxified by the human condition, but you are both. So it doesn't eradicate your beauty, this doctrine of sin, but it does suggest that the beauty has been afflicted at every level.

(00:41:11):
And, and th this is simply the condition of everybody that you've ever met. That's why we need to love and respect everybody, because they carry the scroll of the image of God. But we also need to be aware that everybody that we have come into contact with is damaged and damaging. That's the universality of sin. And that's why we have to recognize that the unifying factor in all our problems is ourselves. So I think we need to really stop critiquing people online. That's my applica Tory word for you. We need to stop this because there are of course all sorts of social issues that need to be written about and and talked about and repented of, but let's not isolate ourselves from the crisis. Instead. Let's say that we ourselves are deeply damaged. And if you really believe yourself to be deeply damaged, you will speak about other people differently, and you won't be as ruthless or severe, or blame oriented against your parents or your upbringing or your school, or your, I was mentioning this in a talk that I gave a while ago about why people lie about their upbringing.

(00:42:16):
I know many, many people, especially some former Grovers that lie about their upbringing. They say they were raised in a cult because they grew up in a cramped religious household. Really, they grew up Presbyterian. They didn't belong. They weren't a part of a cult, but they, they create a dark narrative which gives them license to be as rage oriented, bitter, and hostile as possible in their late twenties. And and that's really no way to live. And you are still owned by your past if you're doing that. And so the universality of sin that you are actually not better than any Republican you've ever met, and you are not better than any Democrat that you've ever met, and you are not better than anybody who is who has tried illicit drugs. And you are not better than anybody who is abstained from Melissa trucks that that human nature is evenly distributed.

(00:43:09):
That doesn't mean we've all made equal mistakes. It just means the nature or the proclivity, the capacity to engage in dastardly ways that bring great pain and terror into the world is a universal. So that's something about universality from this text, something about freedom. And I find it very strange that most people, in fact, some Christians believe that human beings are innately free, that they have so-called free will. I want to argue against that. Don't worry. I'm not talking about free will and predestination from a Calvinist perspective or an, our mini I don't care about that question. I'm not interested in it. All I'm saying is we're not neutral. Our wills, our hearts, our minds are not by nature free, Jesus says this. I mean, it's not like crazy. Jesus says, whoever sins is a slave to sin, meaning that if you participate in the nihilistic and dark and self-sabotaging human condition, you're not as free as you think you are.

(00:44:08):
And our, our affections are warped. This is what Thomas Cranmer taught. He taught that what the heart wants, the will chooses, and the mind justifies people do this all the time with extra marital affairs. They justify why they're doing what they're doing, but it's saying there's something wrong with what I love my heart. My decision-making capacities are based and founded upon what I want. And then my mind just justifies what my heart wants profoundly true and devastating. So I would argue that we are not born free, but we are born to become free. And he, whom the son makes free is free. Indeed. Now we'll get into that next week. But biblically speaking freedom does not meaning having one's own will or getting what we want that often is the definition of sin. Instead in the Bible, freedom means wanting what is beautiful, having what you desire,

(00:45:08):
Change, starting

(00:45:12):
To love what God loves is freedom. And so when I meet people in rehabs that say, I love fentanyl more than my family. That's not freedom. The alcoholic is not free when they choose vodka over their children. That is not an expression of freedom, but a because he who sends is a slave to sin. So freedom, ironically enough, it looks like the first step of AA. The first step of AA says we have admitted that we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable. Luther said that the naming of the disease is the beginning of freedom. True freedom is acknowledging the truth for what it is. And so when you are totally devastated and totally broken in the rag and bone shop of the heart, and you admit that openly and say, I'm out of my depth, I have lost. I say, uncle, I can't win.

(00:46:03):
I can't fix this. It is beyond my capacities. That's freedom, that's freedom. And so that's something about freedom that freedom is alignment with what is beautiful and true, not just the having of one's own will, which can be a very dark Manoj. And lastly, something about compassion, the dark anthropology of the new Testament regarding the human condition that longs for the the night of fanatastic night, the dark anthropology in the new Testament is supposed to level us all so that we have a little compassion for each other, because everybody you meet is inherently needy. And and there are aspects of complete destruction within them. No, and here's the thing about the human condition, particularly related to freedom, the form of point, nobody that, you know, wakes up in the morning and decides from a neutral will to be terrible.

(00:46:55):
They don't wake up and say, I wonder, Hmm. I wonder how I can devastate everybody that I love today. I wonder how I can ruin my marriage of 25 years. I wonder how I can make it, turn my son into an alienating and and gruff and you know, Jagen and a service person through my neglect. Nobody does that. They, they act that out, but they don't think that and, and act it out from some sort of place of neutrality. A neutral will. No, no, no, we're damaged. And we act out of our damage. And I, I did this, you know, for years. And I'll tell you a sweet story about my mother who passed away about well over a year ago, year and a half ago. So I was talking with a dear friend named Janet Broderick who lives in California.

(00:47:51):
And we were talking about our parents and, and she says, Ethan, the reason that you don't engage well with your mother, who's an alcoholic is because she was very open about that by the way, my mother so I'm not speaking out of turn. And she taught, told me that I could talk about this. She said, the reason that you don't deal well with her is because you're acting as Ethan, the hurt child to the mother who didn't, you know, mother you in the way that maybe she ought to, and that doesn't work. So you need to try a different approach, maybe more Jesus he approach. He said, which I thought was funny. And I said, what do you mean don't give me some sort of, what would Jesus do thing? Tell me what you mean. And she said, well, when you sit with her the next time, maybe you could sit with her, like Jesus would sit with her and look at her.

(00:48:38):
Like Jesus would look at her and really listen to her. Like Jesus would look at her, just pretend to be Jesus for five minutes and see what happens. You've tried everything else and nothing works. You moralize, you scold her, or you lecture her. It's not drinking, which has never worked. How about you just sit and sit with her as Jesus would, and to see what happens. It considered a religious experiment. And and you know, I have to say after about five or 10 minutes of just doing that really being with her and not being a reactive teenager in my

(00:49:08):
Heart and

(00:49:10):
Looking at it with a little bit of compassion instead of score, she who was an often, very guarded person, looked at me at one point and said, Ethan, I hope to God, you know, I never, ever wanted to be this.

(00:49:25):
That's why I had this whole other life

(00:49:28):
Planned. And I never wanted to be a joke.

(00:49:34):
Well,

(00:49:34):
Cut me to the quick, I mean, I never really recovered from that sentence because there was so much heart and honesty and integrity at it. And that line healed years and years of pain

(00:49:47):
For me the, what

(00:49:50):
Happened? Well, she became free and some of her slipped away because she experienced some sort of compassion, some sort of compassion because I realized this I'm not better than her. I never was. I'm not better. I'm still dealing with my own problems and running from most of them to quote Brennan Manning. I'm still shifting the heavy suitcase from one aching hand to the other, the suitcase of guilt. But I've discovered through the doctrine of original sin and total depravity that I have so much in common with everybody else. And that I'm not better. I'm not better because I'm a priest. I'm not better because I'm a Christian. I'm not better because I am in my forties and learned some lessons. I may have less problems in this area than you do, but I have more problems in this area than YouTube, right?

(00:50:47):
Because human nature is evenly distributed, which means I can hopefully by God's grace, connect with people in a way that's disarming and kind, and coming from a heart that understands that all of us are in a bad way and we need all the love we can get. So the last word will come from Brideshead revisited Brideshead revisited is this glorious novel about sort of English Catholicism and and its rejection as well as its acceptance. And there was a, a wonderful part of the book in which Julia flight who sort of the rebel character who who within this sort of bougie household of very well to do people and ha highly adjusted Robin Catholics rejects the Catholicism of for youth and, and starts a fling with a married man. And and she is really in love with hate, at least hate for the church.

(00:51:43):
And she, at one point starts muttering to herself about how much she wants to adore sin, worship, sin, idolized, sin, kiss, sin, and worship at the alter of sin. Well, she has her affair, her flying and and things don't go well for Julia. But later in life one of her former lovers sees her praying near her bedside. And he essentially is saying Julia, what the hell are you doing? You know, what is the superstition, what are you doing? And she looks at the man with such compassion and she says, you know, I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad. Again, I cannot escape his mercy, however bad I am. I trust he shall not despair me in the end. I trust he shall not despair of me in the end. Well, that's the idea. And the concept that I'm trying to communicate is the place of revelation.

(00:52:42):
The place of love always goes to the country of total depravity. You are just as much loved in the place of your greatest shame and greatest crisis then when you are having your best day. And so I simply want to conclude by offering you that word, that I hope is a word of solicitude and grace that will meet you wherever you find yourself tonight. So that's my little expo say on Romans three, as heavy as it is next week, we'll get a little lighter. But I wanted to see if there were any questions at this point and you can simply type them in the comments section and I'll do my best. I know I spoke a little too long tonight, and I thank you for your patience, That I will wait as you type and play some sort of internet game. No, I'm kidding. I won't do that though. I am very into angry birds, which is a ridiculous. I know.

(00:53:39):
Yeah.

(00:53:45):
Do we have anything, anything coming, anybody want to say something? Just sort of dear?

(00:53:59):
I know it's heavy. I know

(00:54:06):
Jonathan Price has asked he's a wonderful person by the way. How did we accept and confess our own sinfulness without devolving into an assessment, self pity or self depreciation? It's a great question. So many good questions. Okay. Let me get to Jonathan's. How do we confess our own sinfulness? Yeah. well, it's a great question. I think that we only confess our own sinfulness well through practice because very often we don't even know why we're confessing. Sometimes we're actually confessing to somebody, so that they'll feel sorry for us. Right. sometimes it's so that they think we're that, that we do have sort of a dark side and that gives us an edge. You know what I mean? Like it makes you feel like you, like, like you could fit in with the sons of anarchy too.

(00:55:00):
And so the reasons for our confession or motivations are always complicated, but you don't know that until you've confessed, you don't know it. So I would say always confessed to God. What is your top plate emotion? I always say this in your prayer, whenever you confess privately to God from your heart, always take the top plate emotion, which is not the cleanest emotion, but bring whatever is raw to God and deal with that. And then he'll deal with what's beneath it. So deal with the evidence of the tree, and he'll take you down into the root system. But I would say that's always how it begins, articulate what you really think and feel. And then and then you'll, you may notice that there are layers of complexity even in your confession, and you can confess those to knowing that all those grace yeah.

(00:55:44):
That's my thought Josh Thompson, the wind of the day. Yeah. so the best article that was written about God's sort of con confrontation of Adam and Eve, it's sort of the job whirlwind wind of the day is found in Meredith Klein's book kingdom, prologue, kingdom, prologue. It's very inexpensive. In fact, I think there's an online copy for free. So I would look that up there, but he takes the the view that Rulof does not mean. I forget how it's normally translated, but it's normally translated very tepidly that God is sort of singing, singing in the rain and just happens to find Adam and Eve instead of confronting them through judgment. But I think that there's a judgment Oracle at Genesis three. So Meredith Kline, K L I N E. And he can really help you with the linguistics there.

(00:56:34):
And Kathleen Sweeney, Dr. Kathleen, how do people heal from the wounds of their hearts? Oh my gosh. It's the question of questions, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, the, the thing that I would always say, and I think this is very much in line with the scriptural bent and broad directive is is a lack of hiding. So what Adam and Eve do in the garden in that great Metta Metta story that really describes the human condition in a way that is alarming as well as universal is that their first impulse is to hide God's first impulses to reveal. So you have to, if you really want to heal you can't heal, what's hidden. You have to go to somebody and talk about it. And that's very difficult, especially if you were the victim of horrific abuse or sort of pathological behavior from somebody who was supposed to love you, but didn't do it.

(00:57:25):
Or maybe it's something that you feel guilty about because you did something when you were 14 or, you know, whatever. But what you really need to do is find somebody that is that is very kind and Christ like in their orientation and then their effect and pour out your heart to them. You can also go right to God, of course, but there is something very valuable about communicating to somebody made in God's image. And this is why at St. James it decile a letter, he talks about the, the importance of confessing one to another. And so I think the wounds of the heart are only healed when they're examined and brought to God and, and brought in the presence of love, otherwise they fester. So so there is, and there's great power and emotional healing, by the way. There was a great quote from rabbi Hillel who said greatest repentance for it brings healing upon the whole world.

(00:58:15):
What did he mean? If you get better in one area, 18,000 others in your life get better because everything is monistic or it's all connected interconnected. And so if you have one aspect of your emotional life that gets well, everything else is lifted, a rising tide lifts, all boats. And so I just can't urge you well enough or highly enough to deal with some of this stuff. Now Josh Thompson Oh my gosh. You're just, I want to canonize Josh Thompson after he said that that makes my day, I can't even tell you, it really does. Kathleen Sweeney, how do people connect to what they know in their head to change in their hearts? Th th th the best way to deal, I think with the integration of the human being who buy because of sin, bifurcates, is that again, to exume the material in front of somebody who's loving, not somebody who is just affirming.

(00:59:12):
I don't mean that because that's the current Cultus right now is just sort of blanket affirmation of all your drives. No, no, no. I don't mean that. I just mean somebody who's nice and normal down to earth rooted, biblically, saturated, and also understands the gospel as core and key to the to, to the human capacity for change. It's always rooted to the gospel. So you need to find somebody like that. And and, and that helps to integrate what, you know, theologically and what you feel, because that integration is just so crucial. Caitlyn Peterson, who we miss every week, how do we balance self-compassion with rightfully sitting in the weightiness of our sin? I don't know. I mean, I think to maintain an, an a self-awareness of where you lean. So most people that you meet lean in one direction or another, they either hate themselves too much, or they give themselves passes in weird way.

(01:00:13):
It's that? Yeah, not to and the only way that you can really know that is to know another person very well, because I Martin Luther said that he said, if you really want to know where you're being sanctified, never ask yourself, always ask your spouse or ask a friend, a good friend, because they will see development in you that you yourself can't say, because you are the least objective person about your own life. So you always have to go external. So I would say Katelyn try to talk to somebody in your life, if that is your issue. And it might not be an issue of course, but if it is, and you're not sure where you lean am I, am I giving myself a pass all the time? And I'm sort of part of the, this is me movement, so to speak, or if you're just lost in your own depravity, and you are forgetting in fact that everything has been covered by love and blood, and that you have been made whole, and and God loves you as you are not as you should be, because none of us are as we should be.

(01:01:12):
If you're forgetting that you need a friend to tell you. So I would say, be associated with people who are non neurotic Christians. Okay. Mary Duffy. Oh my gosh. Oh, she has a new baby, Evelyn and Mary and Rob, we got them married off what almost two years ago now, I think. And and they're doing so well. Gosh, they're both brilliant. It's sort of shocking how brilliant they are anyway. Friends. This is the message for tonight. I I hope that you'll join us for Ash Wednesday, where we all receive a death smudge and remind ourselves that we are deeply devastated and even more deeply loved because the love runs deeper than the depths of hell. And the love will find you where you are, and we'll not castigate you, but instead will bring you the beauty of equilibrium and reconciliation and acquittal and amnesty is granted.

(01:02:10):
Amnesty is granted always for you. So I hope that you'll hold on to that and know that your identity is rooted in unflinching love from Royal blood. Anyway, those are some thoughts for tonight, and I hope you'll chew on that. I hope you'll give people some space and some compassion, knowing that we're all on the same level and that and that you'll find great freedom and knowing that, and and that you'll have some compassion for yourself as well, because we are all devastated, but all deeply loved. Okay. I got to say sidebar now. Bye bye.

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Related to: http://afailuretodisagree.com/
Ethan, who preaches at Grace Anglican: https://graceanglicanonline.com/

Full Transcript: (the time stamps are off by about 30 seconds, sorry, I'm still figuring all this stuff out.)

(00:00:28):
Well, hello, everyone who is tuning into our ReGrounding course, I'm just going to give things a few minutes, so that the people who are joining us will be able to do so. I realized that I'm about a minute early and, hopefully that won't be an issue. So, we will have, people dropping by, for their class, some, some of them in and out of the class. and I hope it will be a worthwhile experience for you as we consider some of the major themes that are taught in the Christian faith. And so whether you come from a place of belief or you don't, or you're not sure right now, or you're regrouping after a difficult religious experience or you're exploring things for, the first time, but in an open way, or if you're really skeptical, I understand all of those emotions and I'm just really glad that you're willing to take an hour out of your schedule to do this.

(00:01:45):
I'm really grateful for that. And to that end, I'm going to use my hourglass. You see it behind me, my friend Alex bought that for me. And, he was joking that it was a way to get pastoral appointments done in one hour that people have until the sand runs out, to get their problems dealt with, which I thought was pretty funny. but tonight we are going to go until that hour glass is free of sand, at least the top portion. So I'm going to spin it round and then we'll get started. So there we go. There we go. All right. And, so, I wanted to, begin by just sort of explaining why it is that we're doing this and then what we're doing exactly. the, the, the reason that I wanted to do a class called ReGrounding is because I think due to the pandemic and due to a difficult political season and due to all of the things that have been stirring up in people during this difficult time, I think that it seems like the ground has given way. There are a lot of fissures in relationships. There

(00:03:00):
Are a lot of, people that are, for a whole host of reasons at enmity with one another. I think that the bonds of our affection have been strained. And I think that the teachings and personality of Jesus of Nazareth has the ability that they have the ability to, to bond us back together and to give us some common ground and common roots

(00:03:32):
That can really help us and sustain us in the long haul. And so I'm really interested in rooting all of us, including myself in conceptions that are greater than we are. And so that's what the class is all about tonight. And I hope that it will be helpful for you, not just intellectually, but emotionally. I hope it helps you to feel differently. In other words, because Christianity is, is not just a head trip, it's not just about having errant ideas, corrected. It's also about the rectitude of the heart. And so I'm hoping that some part of you will be reached tonight, by what's communicated.

(00:04:12):
A few housekeeping details: I'm going to speak tonight for about 35 to 40 minutes after that we'll do Q&A, in order for me to see your questions you'll need to type them up in the comments, or you can private message me and I'll get them and try to address them. If we have too many, I might not be able to address all of them, but I do encourage you to write your questions at the end and I'll do my best.

(00:04:41):
And, additionally, I'll be using a single Bible passage tonight from John chapter 1 using the ESV version, and it should be typed up, I believe in the description for the class. And so you can follow along there. One thing simply to resist, I realized that some people, it was funny, some people were saying, "Ethan, this is really risky and sort of dumb that you're doing this online because you know how people act online, they get very angry and, and, ascerbic. And, and why are you doing that?"

(00:05:12):
I trust that you won't [do that], I want this to be sort of a Green Zone. That term was used during the Iraq war. Green zones were the place where no warfare was occurring. so I'm not interested. I don't have the bandwidth to deal with drama and fighting. So, I trust that that won't happen as we, together kind of collaborate about these, massive conceptions and truths.

(00:05:34):
so I just ask, I ask that you would not act out your animus toward me, as much as I would normally love it. and, last but not least this class, which will be going on, six weeks will be cumulative. That is to say, it will, it will build. And if you miss one of the classes, that's fine, but if you wouldn't like to watch it, even after missed it, I will have it on my Facebook page. And we'll also have it on the church's Facebook page. And so you can catch up if you want to. Okay. So, so that's it. So tonight what we're doing is essentially beginning to talk about systematic theology as it relates to deep personal experience. So I really believe in it put a lot of stock in the fact that Christianity works best whenever it involves the whole person.

(00:06:27):
So not just our ideas, but also our psychology and our emotional lives. And when that all comes together onto the personality of Jesus, of Nazareth, there's, it's like magic. Something really beautiful begins to happen. And I trust that as we study tonight and think about great things that you'll have both an intellectual as well as an emotional experience, at least that's my, that's my goal. and, the first thing that we're going to talk about in this systematic theology class, and that simply means big themes from scripture, as now, as they relate to us personally, the first thing we're going to talk about is revelation. And by revelation, I do not mean the rated R book that resides at the end of the Bible. I'm talking about the idea that God, that the infinite might disclose something about God's own self to us.

(00:07:26):
The Christianity is predicated on this idea that some things about God are intuitive, that we just sort of get them as hunches. But the main thing about God needs more than intuition. It needs God to part the curtain, to evidence something that we couldn't naturally Intuit just by looking at nature or our own personal histories, or even the history of the world. And so what I'd like to talk about tonight is the core, the nuclear core of revelation, and how we can know certain things and even experience certain things because of that divine revelation. So I'm going to be using a text tonight from the Bible, in the Bible, you have various biographies that were written about Jesus of Nazareth each from a slightly different angle. And I'm going to be reading out of John's gospel. John is, the, the last of the biographies, at least categorically in the new Testament.

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It's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and then John and John has his own unique take on Jesus. And it it's simpatico with the others, but it's in some ways deeper than the others, at least metaphysically. And he begins his gospel with this magnificent and poetic prologue, to really help us understand how he sees Jesus of Nazareth and what he hopes will be. we'll become our perspective as well. And so I'm going to read from this very lengthy passage, and I hope that you'll follow along, either in your own Bible, if you have one or online or something like that, or again, in the description of the class, which has the passage, I'm going to read it. This is from John chapter one in the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God. He was in the beginning with God.

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All things were made through him. And without him was not anything made that was made in him, in him was life. And the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to bear witness about the light that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but he came to bear witness to the light. The true light, which gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world and the world was made through him yet. The world did not know him. He came to his own and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God and who were born, not of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor the will of man, but of God.

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And the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen his glory glory as of the only son from the father full of grace and truth. John bore witness about him and cried out. This was he of whom. I said, he who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me for, for, from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace for the law was given through Moses grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. The only God who is at the father's side, he has made him known stop there. So I just read, one of the most famous passages from the Bible. And, and it's known as a, a prologue to John's gospel. And in it, he's discussing this idea of what Christians call the incarnation. And the incarnation is simply this idea that there was an instance in time in which the eternal tunnel and the temporal bonded together in a single individual, they were braided together either and, and not violently, but peaceably.

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And that person was Jesus of Nazareth. That's the big claim that John is making in his prologue. And this prologue is bottomless in terms of its profundity. It would take like a hundred years to grasp what this text is really trying to say. and I don't have a hundred years. I have like, you know, 45 minutes with you. So I'm going to be, I'm going to be talking about four things that are part of this revelation, four things that are revealed about God in this man, this Mediterranean laborer, whom we know as Jesus of Nazareth. And, the first word that I think, should come to us as we consider this passage is the word "Genesis". Genesis. Now you may know that Genesis is the first book of the Bible, and what's interesting about, John's prologue in which he describes using grande and poetic and rich language.

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That's both Greek and Hebrew. I mean, it's really interesting. what's fascinating is he quotes Genesis. The first thing that he does is quote, Genesis. And now what does Genesis chapter 1 verse 1 say? It is the most famous verse in the Hebrew Bible. What does it say in the beginning? God created the heavens and the earth. What's fascinating about that passage is it just simply assumes God's existence, right from the start and says that he went about making physical retail, but John takes that verse and alters it. He says "In the beginning was the word". So he goes before the making of heavens and earth, he starts his prologue, at least in terms of time before the creation of anything in the beginning, was not the heavens and the earth. "In the beginning" it was God and the word and the word who was God.

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Now we'll get into that in a minute. but this is a, this is a really important idea, that, John is connecting Jesus of Nazareth to the eternal God. Now here's why that's interesting. I mean, it's interesting for a variety of reasons, but here's one of them. So Sigmund Freud in his last book, which was entitled Moses and monotheism, continued his ongoing critique of organized religion. Freud was not a fan of organized religion in any way. I actually think he was a rather cheap critic of religion. Nietzsche had had a different, and I think a deeper critique, I'm not convinced by it, but, but I, I find it more commendable than Freud's. But one of the things that Freud did in his book, Moses and monotheism is he unpacked the seriousness of Judaism. he, he stepped away at least in part from his critic role and became a more serious thinker, acknowledging the genius of both paganism and Judaism.

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And here's, some of what, Freud concluded. He thought that there was great genius behind paganism. That is the worship of different dominions within creation. He thought that was really intelligent because he said it relieved the self from the burden of the self. In other words, if you were a pagan, you weren't worshiping yourself, you were worshiping strength. That was as it localized in some sort of good domain that was grander than the self. So he thought that was very good for people to be drawn out of the self and to worship something strong. And so what did the ancient pagans do? And even contemporary pagans, what do they do they see divinity as divinity is instantiated in creational forms or in domains like water, which you need for a society or you die, right? That's why the Nile was worshiped, because it kept Egypt literally alive, or you worship the sun or you worship fertility or safety or strength or the military, or love or motherhood or authority or the state, right.

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But you have these various domains within the created sphere that are, deferred to worshiped and adored. and, Freud thought that there was no ability in that because it recognized that there was something of transcendent worth, something of the numinous in various aspects of the world or human experience, but here's where Freud saw the problem. And I think he's right within that kind of peg and construct is you have by necessity competition between those different domains in different spheres, take, for example, the ongoing tension between justice and mercy. So justice requires that people who do wrong pay for the wrongs that they do, mercy suggest that you should lead people off the hook. those two things are in contrast. And how do you, how do you find balance, between those two drives? So this is, this is what Freud saw as the problem with an ancient paganism is competition between the spheres and therefore a lack of coherence.

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And he said that the genius of Judaism was that it was monotheistic in a particular way. So the monotheism that impressed him was the sense of unity and coherence. He said, yes, you have all of these various spheres of human experience and of natural experience that are greater than humanity. That ought to draw a person out of the self that ought to liberate them from the, the boundedness of the self. But because, but Judaism said, all of them have to have some sort of golden thread of coherence. They have to have some sort of coherence. So we live in a chaotic world, w w without, without unity and Freud thought that that was actually likely that, that we, we probably do, but he said Judaism was trying, was trying to say that everything, everything in being had to have a solid connection and contact with, with everything else in such a way that you have coherence.

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And more than that, he said, the genius of Judaism was that this common source or this golden thread was distinguishable from the material world. And he said that was different than paganism because in paganism, when the King, who was often thought to be an instantiation of heaven died, there was something of God that died, right? Whenever the, the, the, the, rivers were pulling alluded whenever infertility fit, whenever infertility, is, an issue, there is something of heaven that is at stake. What's fascinating about Judaism. As you have a distinction between the golden thread of all reality, the great source of being and that, which is a localized and temporal. And so you can have a King, but that King will never, ever be divine at best in Judaism. The King will reflect temporarily, the, the, some, something of the divine nature, but it's only a temporal reflection.

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And in fact does not represent the fullness of deity. And that's why, idolatry was a problem within a Jewish framework, because if you were an idolater, you were taking one particular domain and highlighting it above all others, and worshiping only it while neglecting everything else. And so you were like worshiping one of the fractals of divinity, but also you were localizing that divinity in a statue or form. And so Judaism was unique in the ancient world because it stood against any sort of physical construct of, or localization of the transcendent or numinous powers. So Judaism was different in that way. And, moreover, Freud made a lot of the fact that when God communicates God's name to Moses, he doesn't really give him a name. He doesn't say rah, right? It doesn't say all, he doesn't say Asherah. He says, I am that I am, which is really not a name, but what that's suggesting, and that name is that God can only be likened to God's self, right?

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I am that I am, he's comparing himself to himself. He's not giving a, him a metaphor. I'm like a tower. I'm like a rock. I'm like a mountain. I'm like a river. I'm like the sun instead, he's saying I'm so Holy other and transcendent. And beyond, beyond newness, beyond all things that were created, that I can't even metaphorized myself. If you want to know the core essence of who I am. and so, that actually leads to Freud's critique of Judaism, to some extent that the God of Judaism within Freud's understanding and conceptualization, however we want to critique. It says that God is there for a God of infinite distance, because he can't be concretized within time and space. What's interesting too, is in his book society and its discontents, which I find a fascinating and, a deeply interesting book is that, he, in the book lays out the problem of, of Western society and says that, Western society.

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And I'm sure this is not just, don't just true Western society, but he said, Western society creates all these, mores and Folkways and, and sort of written and unwritten rules about how to function in society, because they're trying to instantiate the patterns of heaven. They're trying to make God right. They're trying to make God by making all these laws so that people function well within society. But he said, the problem with that construct is that people are so overburdened by the construction of laws that they have created, to make God nearer in some sense, to instantiate him legally, if not physically, that people are crushed by the requirements and demands of those laws and therefore people bifurcate, right? So people act one way in, in society while dying on the inside or acting out terribly against all their core principles. and so, Freud at the end of the book, cries out essentially saying, there's no answer, like there's no answer because you need laws and structure to create a healthy society and to create, good and wholesome expectations so that society continues to flourish.

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But the problem is that once it does start to flourish, it by necessity creates all sorts of internal conflict because the inner it oriented itself rages against the, the construct of society. And then he concludes on the last page. The only hope that we have is if the spirit of error, Aspen, he didn't mean erotic love there. The spirit of arrows or the spirit of love would draw near and heal us and Freud being an atheist, at least what we think he's an atheist, set a remarkable thing. I agree with him, the only hope would that tension of the bifurcated self due to the demand of the law is that the spirit of love we're to draw near. And what I would like to say to you is that that is exactly what the incarnation is. John begins his gospel by saying a great revelation is taking place.

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Something is about to be revealed that is older than the heavens and the earth. And in fact is more significant than the heavens and the earth. So in his conception of Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus is a new Genesis through him, comes new creation, a new start and a new bonding, a new bonding between the eternal and the temporal. And so Freud's concern about Judaism that it made too much transcendence, the God who was distant now in Jesus of Nazareth, that same deity has an meshed himself in his created world, not as a statue to be worshiped, but as a human being, to be worshiped. So we see an ultimate bonding of creator and creation in Jesus of Nazareth. That's the first aspect of Christian revelation that we have a new Genesis happening, a new beginning, and this, character in this person of Jesus.

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So that's the first word Genesis. The second word regarding what is revealed his word word. The second word is word. That was a bit redundant, wasn't it? Yeah. so the text says, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God. And the word was, God. Now I understand, especially if you are new to this particular language, that, that sounds weird. That sounds strange. And sort of hype or hyper metaphysical. well, let me, let me sort of unpack it if I, if I might, what this is saying is that there was a union of some mysterious sort, in God's nature between different persons and this Christ figure was as it Turnell as the father and attached to the father and get distinguishable from the father. And yet John was not a polytheist believing in multiple deities.

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He believed that there was a great union there, but also differentiation. So right from the start, he is saying that this Jesus of Nazareth who really lived and drank, you know, water and, drank wine at parties and hung out with hoodlums. this person was not just a person. He wasn't just like us only nicer or like us, but inclined toward piety, or more consistent or more earnest. He, he was those things, but he was more than those things. So right from the start, he wants us to know that the identity of this person is wrapped up in God. and, and that's why he doesn't use the word Jesus. At first, he describes him as the word now in Greek it's logos, logos, what does that mean? Logos is something like spoken wisdom or articulated intelligence. In fact, I like that a lot and articulated intelligence and the, the concept of articulated intelligence. Isn't a new idea in Judaism. In fact, people in that particular faith believe that the ground of being, or God or the infinite creates heaven and earth through language, speaks it into existence, articulates it into existence. And so the thought that things can be improved or things can be made through, articulating something true in the midst of chaos is core to Judaism. But what's scandalous about this text and what certainly no Jew before John would have said is that, that same impulse, that same

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Reality

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Of articulated speech that causes creation, articulated intelligence, that it becomes flesh. It embeds itself within history. Doesn't just affect history from afar, but in meshes itself with history. And so the hunch of God, right? For Freud, it was always a hunch. The hunch becomes history. And in fact, scandalously historical Christianity, is a historically rooted religion. Therefore we don't believe in just timeless truths. I mean, we believe that there are some timeless truths, but that's not like

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Our anchor, the anchor is that something odd and

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Bizarre and beautiful and mysterious and bottomless

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And, and S

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Something that causes great speculation really did happen. In fact, some of the other authors in the new Testament are,

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Are,

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So persuaded that they're wanting to persuade us that that's the case. you have Peter who very late in his life wrote a little letter. It's called second Peter, how creative, right. Peter wrote a letter called second, Peter, actually, it's this name? We gave it. And he said, look, when we were with you, we didn't just make up a bunch of stuff. Like we saw things and we want you to know what those things were. he wrote that right before he was going to be killed by Nero. You know? So it wasn't like he was getting a lot of money or girls through making that proclamation. No, he was in danger of his life by making it St. Paul says the same thing. He's a historicist in first Corinthians 15. He says, look, if this Jesus figure wasn't raised from the dead, then I'm out of a job and I should just die.

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And the rest of us have no hope. So, I mean, it's quite a thing to say, but he hinges everything upon the historicity of this action, this blending together of heaven and earth, it's something happened. And this is why the bulk of the Christian creed. So if you go to church and you read either the nice seen creed or the Apostle's creed, the bulk of them, the big middle chunk is all about this man. Jesus, the creed says that he was God from God, light, from light, very God of very God begotten not made. And then it lists all this stuff that he did. And so Christianity is a historicist religion in that it hinges upon the word, this sort of a morphous conception becoming less a morphous and less just a conception, but something wedded to the frameworks that we're all used. So this is Christianity's wild claim.

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If you want to know, God, you have to know a Mediterranean peasant day laborer because that's gone on to quote Paul in the new Testament. This is the image of the invisible God. This is the big revelation that God is not a book. That God is not a philosophy. That God is not just a hunch. God is certainly not wish fulfillment. That what God is, is the Palestinian Jew of the first century. This is the big revelation that your husband, that the biggest revelation, the clearest picture, the open window that we get regarding God, the curtain pulled back shows not a burning shrub in Egypt, not a whirlwind to job, not manna from heaven, not the Torah. in fact, it was the wise articulation of God that was typewritten in human skin who lived in a real place with a real zip code and a real weeping mother and a dad who taught him how to build things.

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that, that is God. and, and so when Christians think about revelation, when we, we start with Jesus, we don't start reading the Bible in Genesis, actually. And reading then from Genesis on, no, we start with Jesus and read backwards and forwards. So we read back to Genesis Ford revelation, but we start with Jesus. Why? Because we believe that he is the image of the invisible God. He was the word made flesh, the ultimate revelation. and, Martin Luther has a great, equip about this. He says that. And of course he, he loves, overspeak and boldness he's a German. He can't help it. I didn't just, I didn't say that just now. but he says that Jesus Christ is a big fat God and Jesus Christ is a big fat God, what does that mean? That Jesus Christ fills up all the space of divinity.

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He is not just one little like tool in the hand of God to get work done. No, no, no. in him the fullness of deity, dwelt bodily, that's what the new Testament says that he was God or to quote Lutheran and other place. There is no little God hiding behind Christ. that Christ rep not only represents, but embodies the fullness of God. And that's why when he was born, his mother had this, miracle occur where this agent from heaven, this, this grand being visited her and said that his legal name will be Jesus, but his title, like his title name will be Emmanuel, which means God with us. So that's, that's the idea of revelation is that it, it has to do with skin and bones and blood pressure and antagonized man who was really brutally treated by the world. but that's God that's.

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And so, okay. Those are the two first words Genesis, right? And the word, and the next word is pain. That's part of the revelation pain. It's interesting in John's prologue, which is all about the word becoming flesh and light and all this beautiful imagery. He talks about pain. He mentions it, hints at it and also mentions it very clearly that the light shines in the darkness. So there's darkness and the light shining in it. And he came to his own, but his own

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Did not receive him. Now,

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What this means is that the great revelation goes to the ground zero of human experience. The great revelation has to do with somebody whose heart was cloven into who was deeply hurt, who was hurt along the way.

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and,

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who, who wasn't aloof to the pain. There's a very famous painting by Salvador Dali. And I've done a teaching on it before, called St. John on the cross, which displays, the crucifixion of Jesus. but he's hanging above the earth on a cross, but there are no nails and there's no blood and the cross doesn't touch the ground. And so we have an architectural crucifixion in which you have a Christ that feels no pain, essentially. the incarnation isn't like,

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I like that. It's a, it's a splintering act. It's a, it's a fracturing act. It's a deeply painful act.

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There's this beautiful line in O Holy night, a line that we never sing cause it's in like the 18th verse of it. but it's, he knows our need to our weaknesses, no stranger, that he was a person who hurdles.

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and that means that this is God who heard a lot.

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So, a little story from my youth and it happened a long time ago, so it doesn't affect me anymore, but I thought maybe you could relate to it. when I was in seventh grade, I, I was not nearly yeah.

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As, as popular as I am now, not popular now either, but,

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I, I was picked on quite a bit. And, and there was this, this bullies, I think, I mean, he was a skinny runt of a guy. I think I could have taken him actually, but I didn't have enough esteem to like do that. And he hated me for some reason. I never understood why, but, there was a moment, in which I was walking down the hall and he grabbed the side of my head and slammed it into the corner of a brick wall. And it actually split open,

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my year. And, and yeah, my, the left side of my face and I was

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Bleeding profusely, but I was knocked out when I came to just, you know, a minute later I stumbled into the class. and I, I remember I sat there. I was sort of delirious and I was sitting there just dripping blood all over myself. And, and the thing that got me though later that I realized is nobody said anything. I mean, for minutes and minutes until the teacher noticed it and then freaked and then ran to the nurse and I got stitches and I, you know, it was, it was quite something, but I remember that Sunday sitting there with my face, like all broken up and cut up. And, the minister was actually preaching from Isaiah 53. I remember this because I felt it in my face when he was reading it. And it was about Isaiah, this really old Haggard prophet.

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And he was looking into the future. He had some foresight and he saw that someday God would visit people and help them that he would do that through pain. And he said, Isaiah said about this future, God, man, surely he bore our infirmities and he carried our sorrows. And what I loved about that in that moment is that I was in touch with my own infirmities and my sorrows that I was the kid with the cut open face and the stitches in his ear. And I was the kid that nobody liked. And I was the one who, who had a lot of sorrow in my heart. And I couldn't talk to people about it, but I was understood like somebody understood me. Somebody felt that I was, you know, worthwhile. Somebody felt that, that same kind of rejection and hurt on a grander scale, but they knew what it was like to be me.

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And that, meant a great deal to me, especially knowing that it wasn't just a man, but it was a man in whom heaven had a home. And therefore heaven was interested. Haven't cared to there's this line from Francis Bufford and he has an English theologian. And, a lot of what he writes is pretty helpful. And this is what he says about pain. When I pray, I'm not praying to a philosophically complicated absentee creator. I'm not trying to envisage the impossible to imagine domain beyond the universe. I do not picture Kings Thrones, crystal pavements, or any of the possible cosmological updating of these things. I look across not up. I look into the world, not away from it. When I pray, I see a face, a human face among other faces. It is a face and an angry crowd, a crowd and Gorge by the confidence that it is doing the right thing, that it is being virtuous. The man in the middle of the crowd looks tired and frightened and battered by the passions around him. But he is the crowds focused and center the center of everything. In fact, because if you are a Christian, you do not believe that the characteristic action of God, of, of the God, of everything is to mold the course of the universe powerfully from a far for a Christian. The most essential thing that God does is to be that man in that crowd, a man on his way to our common catastrophe.

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Well, that's what I'm saying, that there is no revelation without

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That word pain it's core, absolutely core. Okay.

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And so the, and then there's a fourth word that I want to focus on tonight and really explains the nature of revelation. And this is the most counterintuitive bit

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Grace. Now, if you

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Go to grace Anglican, you know that I talk about this, but that's because the Bible does and emphasizes this so highly from him. The text says we've received grace upon grace. The law came through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ that mentions grace four times actually in the prologue. So what is grace? Well, it's a little complicated, but basically it is the, the beautiful marriage of certain ideas. And those ideas are love, forgiveness and favor all at the same time, those things that we all eat

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Before that Enlive in us, that they're given, they're not earned, they're not struggled for they're given. And I think we all

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I'll ask for it, but I don't think there's a lot of grace in the world right now. I think there's a lot of vengeance. I think there's a lot of anger. I think there's a lot of digging through people's past in order to find something incriminating. I don't think anything is forgotten or forgiven very easily. So I have a friend who's a jock. And, and I was when I was a young priest, I went to a party with him and we were there with lots of people from the diocese and my friend and I, I had a mentor in college.

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and, and, and,

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this person was very important to both of us. They weren't at the party, but we, we were talking about our mentor and how much he meant to us and, and what a profound impact he had. And then somebody at the party overheard us talking. And

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I came

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Up to us rather casually and said, are you talking about this person?

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And we said,

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Yeah. And he said, any motion to us to come closer. Like he had something fragrant in his mouth. He wanted to whisper to us about this person. And he said, well, what you don't know is that this person did this, this and this and this, and, and highlighted all of these scandals.

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and

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We heard it all and, left pretty shaken, not because we expect people to be perfect, but just shaken by the fact that our mentor could have been, you know, that devastated, but also wondering why this man had to tell us about these CD secrets And do so with a, with a smile and a smirk. And my friend, the big jock actually on the drive home started to stop.

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And he said, yeah,

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Ethan, you know, we talk in church all the time about forgiveness and forgive and forget, and sins being blotted out. He said, I don't think we believe that at all.

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I mean, are we have a really forgiven or are we just trash? And we'll always be regarded that way. it's a hard question. But

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What I've come to realize is that the heart of everything is not affirmation our age. We're going to talk about this later. Our age loves the notion of affirmation, just affirm everybody and everything they think and do, or at least many things that they think and do that the cure is somehow just blanket affirmation. Other people find that the cure is accusation, that you're just supposed to critique people constantly. And that will change them. I believe in neither accusation nor affirmation. I believe in absolution, that is grace, which acknowledges problems as problems.

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But doesn't think that the person who has problems is gross and disgusting and revolting and horrible,

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But instead the love goes to that place. And so this person, this Jesus of Nazareth was the man with the golden eyes of compassion who ran toward

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The problem and not away from

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It and ran toward the problem not to make it right

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Worse. That's a heal it. Yeah.

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And so I have this story, it's a true story from Brennan Manning, who was one of my favorite authors, he's a forehead. Well, he was a former Catholic priest that he got married. and then he, he recently died. I mean, he was always a mess. I kinda like him though, because of that, I like

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Messes.

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and he, discovered in the midst of his recovery from alcoholism that, his treasured friend and sponsor from alcoholics anonymous named Joe B some of you know, in AA, they don't give the full, last name, just the initial Joby who had 20 years of sobriety under his belt back slid into very heavy drinking and lost his job in his house and his family, and was then living on the street in Tampa, Florida. And so when Brennan found this out, he was scouring the city looking for his friend, but he couldn't find Joby anywhere. Well, one day, Brennan saw this man out of the corner of his eye that looked just like Joe wearing tattered, salvo clothing, shaking from alcoholic withdrawal and begging on a street corner. And he came up to him and said, Joe, I finally found you, but he realized that beggar wasn't Joe, after all a near look alike, but not his friend. So Brennan got down on his knees and he kissed the beggars shaking hands and embrace them. And this bag has started to cry.

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And,

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And then a few days later, Brennan found this letter in his mailbox.

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It said, or it read

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Dear Brennan. You will never know what you did for me. Your old sponsor two weeks ago in Tampa, you didn't see me, but I saw you. I was 20 yards away looking through a storefront window. When I saw you kneel down and kiss that old Wynonna's hands, you wiped away from my eyes, the blank stare of the walking dead. When I saw that you cared, I mean, really cared. My heart began to grow wings, small wings, feeble wings, but wings, you breathe life into me. I need you to know that I had a bottle of cheap wine. In my hand. I dropped it in the trash. I haven't had a drink since Brandon, if you ever should wonder who Joby is, remember, I'm someone, you know, very well. I'm every man you meet I'm every woman, you mean Brennan Miu. Well, wherever I go now sober by the grace of God one day at a time, I will thank him for you.

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Well, that's grace,

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That's grace, and we aim for it. I ask for it all the time. and I talk about it a lot because I think it's the great revelation. I think it's the cure

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Or, and

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This is the heart of the revelation that I want to discuss with you. the Christianity, says that the heavens are not antagonized

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Or antagonistic, that in Jesus, there can be a bonding, not just between heaven and earth in him,

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But between us and God, there can be a beautiful reconciliation in which we are forgiven

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And how old and made well and even made eternal. But

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God came near and we understand God principally through Jesus, that he is the prism through which we see the heavens and understand them. So, that's my little talk for tonight on revelation and the four words that, express it, which are Genesis

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Word pain and grace.

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I hope that something I said reached some part of you. And now that I'm done talking, we have a little bit of time for Q and a. And so if you want to write a question, I think I can,

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I see them in, in my, comment

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Section. And so if you, wish to,

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write

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One, I'd love to hear from you. And if not, I can ramble on incoherently. I'm very good at that as somebody,

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You know, I mean, I tried out some coherence, but I don't know, is it working?

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Did I answer every theological question you've ever had? Am I that good? I don't think, Well, let me say this. why I think this message is so important is because, everybody that you know is loved. we live in a time right now where you have to have the right convictions or the right track record or the, the

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Right

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Political affiliations, or, or you have to reject certain things and accept other things. And if you don't, you're not part of like the right group.

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and so,

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Jesus actually seems to think that we all have the same problem that our, that our nature is beautiful and twisted and that he loves the, the devastation that we are. And, and, and therefore everybody has the same need, which is for grace. And so that's a very unifying conception. So was the author. We have questions. I'm very excited about this. Okay. So, Christie Thompson has asked, was the authors named Brennan Manning? yes, but it's Brennan with two ends, not brand Brendan. Yeah. and his book, all his grace is the last book that he ever wrote. it's not a biography written by him and an editor. the editor, it was a substantial contributor to the work because, Brendan Manning was dying of all sorts of complications due to his alcoholism. And so I think he had a lot of help there.

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but he's worth reading like every author, you know, not perfect, but he's great. and Kathleen, Sweeney, Dr. Kathleen has asked a question. How do you know that you were experiencing Jesus as opposed to your own thoughts? well, it's a great question. And, because we do believe that this same person of Jesus of Nazareth has a personality and, and it comes through the Holy spirit, which we'll talk about later, but his personality will have reverberations in our own life. And I think, how, you know, if you are being moved by something of his sacred substance, is if what you are moved to do or be, or seems like it jives with the testimony of him in scripture. So if it, if it seems that it flows within the teachings of Jesus and within his personality, that is very clearly displayed in the new Testament.

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I think that you're on some solid ground, but in order to do that because we are a historic historicist faith, we need to be very, very tied to the document that unveils his personality. And so, knowing scripture is really key and scripture is wonderful because it's so comforting and so terribly offensive all at the same time. And it's really good that it's offensive by the way, because if we had written it, we would make it completely curtailed to our personalities and never say anything that would contradict us. And therefore we would create all sorts of mayhem and pathology in the world. So it's actually wonderful that scripture is what it is. and so stay true to the heartbeat of the text and you'll stay true to the, to the heartbeat of the Christ with him. That's what I would say.

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and, this is great. yeah. Oh my gosh. It's Emily Peterson. What a wonderful human being. I mean, she's just great. And now she has a new last name and I will try to call her, yeah, here we go. Hi, how do we show and encourage others that the belonging they seek is in him and not an earthly things? Well, it's a great question that there isn't, there is an ultimate belonging that we find in Christ because he's the, he's, he's the one that, bonds us back together with our source. But what happens in life is that, people create sort of surrogate, almost lovers in a way, I mean, because what happens within, people and things that they deify is a great bonding. And, and so here's, what's very difficult. So this is difficult to parse out, but I'm going to try is that very often God, in the created world gives you lots of things that reflect the eternal beauty of God, right?

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There is something when you stare out at the Pacific, there's something, numinous about it. And there's something healing about it right there. In other words, there's something of God and the fractals of God that are reflected in that experience. And, and yet the ocean isn't gone, right? So there's nothing wrong with loving it and even sensing your source and being connected to it. but it actually isn't enough. And here's why it's not enough the ocean as good as it is the grand Canyon, as good as it is the, your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your fiance, your shrink, your lawyer here, or your professor, all your mentors, all of your authors, Bernay Brown, you know, Joan Didion, all these people as wonderful as they are. They cannot give you what only the core of revelation can give you. So the grand Canyon good, but it's not gracious.

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The grand Canyon cannot tell you that your sins are forgiven. That you're loved eternally, that you are a beautiful in the sight of God through the, through the lovely sacrifice of Christ, only, in Jesus, do you have the core, which is redemption? So in the other things you can attach to the God of God's creative nature and power and, and something about his eternal quality, but the only place that you're going to go defined the reunification of, of a God who says to you through blood, sweat, and tears. I love you as you are, and not as you should be, because you're never going to be as you should be this side of the Jordan. And more than that, I not only absolve you, I hold you close. I'm never letting you go come hell or high water I'm with utility.

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And that's only found in the good news of the gospel that is announced through Jesus of Nazareth, that's found nowhere else. And so, so when I meet all sorts of, the neopagan friends or more agnostic friends who say, look, you, can I find a great deal of what if you believe in it? You know, I don't know how I would call it God, but I sorta call it God. And I find God in the woods, or I find God when I'm, when I have romantic interludes with my spouse, or I find God and, and, in my art or my sculpting, or, I don't disagree with them. I'm not saying there isn't something of eternity in the moment. I don't disagree at all. What I'm saying is that there is something, that you need, that's more than just the numinous or the transcendence that can be, conceptualized, a reflective and creation.

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You need the, the, the great Redeemer who says, I love you to hell and back, and that's only found in Christ. And so I would say if somebody says, I find God in those other things, I would say, that's wonderful. I agree. I agree. w w but what do you, what do you make this and S and say something that Jesus has offered that is unique and just leave it there and you have to wait for the right moment. Not every moment is the right moment. Right. so, Emily, I'm not sure if that helps at all, but that's what I would say right now. And you're just a dear person, and I miss you all the time. I have a few more minutes before, my hourglass is that, isn't that cool by the way? I really liked it.

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Yeah.

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Okay. Well, what I'm going to, talk about, next week to give you a little bit of a preview. And if there's another question that pops up, I'll try to do my best, but next week, I'm going to talk about, essentially God in the rehab that is to say, what is the core, human problem that causes a very well-intentioned and, sweet and, really lovely people to self-sabotage. So what is the drive that creates self-sabotage in, people and, really AIDS them in ruining their lives. And how is that understood? And, and to some degree, how's it remedied, but next week, we're really gonna focus on the core human problem from the book of Romans. And, because Paul, according to Hannah ardent, the, the great, metaphysicist but also philosopher, says that a Saint Paul has the most insightful comment about human nature.

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That's ever been written in Romans three. So we're going to listen to Hannah and we're going to on Vale, the, profound and, majestically, haunting vision of St. Paul and, that we'll get to redemption. So anyway, well, Kyle Sutton, my dear brother. Oh my gosh. I got all those. I got more questions. Okay. I'm going to try this. Okay. And this is Alison from Kyle's computer. Why do you think it's so hard to forgive other people? I, well, there's a million reasons. It's a wonderful question. I would say that, for me, it's a chiefly because I have yet to really discover the fullness of forgiveness for me. I mean, that's just me, I'm not saying that to you at all, or anybody that, you know, but for me, I find that when I am least likely to offer anybody the olive branch it's because I have yet to discover the I'm as love design as I really am.

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I mean, because we don't believe in forgiveness. I mean, that's why Gary Hartford or the great Lutherans scholar says that a sanctification is for the most part, coping with justification over a lifetime. Now those are very theologically loaded words. But what that means is I need to hear that I'm loved and forgiven and treasured every day. because I don't believe it. I don't believe it. I mean, I live in a quid pro quo world. So to you where everything is a deal, everything is sort of an exchange and everything is a, you know, a, a justice thing where I do this and that yield certain results. It's all karma. And so I have to get used to and cope with the message of grace. That's what you need to go to a church that proclaims the gospel week in and week out without moralizing.

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That's a hugely important. And the more that I, that I realized that I just had it happen this week, I was able to extend it all branch, even though I didn't want to at first, but, the, the impulse to forgive became, overwhelmingly powerful. but for me, I need to know that I'm forgiven and loved, and then I can extend it. David arrows, who was just a remarkable human being with a remarkable son, I might add, how do you forgive those who don't think they need to be forgiven? Don't recognize that they've wronged you or realize that they did, but they don't care. Oh my God. yeah, let me just try, to, to answer that a wonderful question. I'm not sure I've mastered the craft because I have people that, that, go to sleep without caring that they really injured me.

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They don't care at all. not that I know of. Maybe it haunts them, but I have no evidence of that. Are we still called to forgive them? I think so. Yes. But, how do you do it? Well, the first thing I find now, this is a little counterintuitive. I have to have a trusted friend with whom I can tell that friend how much I hate that person. I mean, I'm just being honest. You have to say how much you resent the person who made your life a living hell, you have to have somebody that you can expiate with and say, this is driving me crazy. I just can't stand this person. I want to throw them into an active volcano. I want to have a vaporizer gun and completely destroy them. And not just destroyed that maybe I want to destroy all their work.

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I want to publicly shame them in some way, but sort of SBA. And that's a confessional act actually. And then go to God. So, so don't stifle. It don't hide. It don't borrow it. Don't don't act like it's not real because it is real. You do feel those things. That's why the Psalms are filled with violence. the solemn sacred scripture is filled with prayers that are deeply violent, about people expressing their rage to heaven. but there is something beautiful that happens when you express your rage to a trusted friend and, to God, or confess to God as you're confessing to your friend or however you want to conceptualize it. after that, after it's, it's given voice, you bring it to heaven vertically, and you say, and heaven have mercy upon me, a sinner. But, but what many people do is they're sort of shamed into containment.

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they take all of their deepest, darkest animals, and they want to shame it. I should have the mind of Christ. So I'm going to press it down, press it down, press it down and act like it doesn't exist or, or muscle through muscling through will only help you if your house is on fire. Yes. If your house is on fire, you need to muscle through and get the kids out of the house, but you can't muscle through matters of the heart. You have to express them, with a trusted, loving person who will then pray for you. And, and after things are zoomed and confessed and prayed for, they can, I believe with a light of love, lose some of their, dominance. and I've actually seen it happen. I have seen it happen and I myself have vianet even had it happen.

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I've I've said this before, but I'm driven by a great deal of anxiety. I always have them. However, I have to tell you, in the last, especially 10 years, that anxiety has diminished about 80%. And a lot of that had to do with resentment and all sorts of on dealt with feelings, but because they've been, by God's grace dealt with and subsumed and love, I'm I'm, I don't lose sleep anymore and that's not nothing. So I hope that helps a little bit. I hope this was helpful for all of you. Love you, and hopefully we'll see you next week side aura.

A Failure To Disagree: Recent Episodes

Josh Thompson