Grace as Grace | SL 1.11 (September 2020)
In this newsletter
- Grace as Grace
- Work & Ministry Update
- Something Beautiful: Outside the City
- A Moment of Exegetical Euphoria: Bearing God’s Name
- Pray With Us
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Scenes of grace at the end of Summer: Walking on the island of Lindisfarne a few weeks back
Grace as Grace
This has been a draining Summer. Not for the Kirk family in particular, but for the Church and for the world. Some days it feels like the world is a dirty cereal bowl that God is turning over and scraping into a giant garbage can. Much ministry remains on hold, nearly everyone’s lives are disrupted. But through this long season, the LORD had been teaching me about how to find grace, come face to face with myself, and serve Christ even in a disorienting season.
There are several opportunities this Fall that are giving me fresh hope and energy: I’m teaching Hebrew, traveling (!) to train pastors in Colorado and Serbia, and writing for TLI, plus there’s a big change coming for our little family.
I was recently handed an essay by a theologian named Nicholas Lash that has helped me to reorient my experience of this season within the life of discipleship. Lash confronts the idea that so many of us consider “mystical experience” rare and suspect. If by mystical, though, we mean “experience of God,” then surely “the ‘mystical life’ is really nothing other than the Christian life lived to the maximum intensity” (Lash 1996, 171).
>It is God’s love which sets in order all those other loves by which, if we love well, God is thereby loved. Discipleship is a matter of learning to display, in the school that we call Christianity, that courtesy to creatures in which reverence for the Creator finds expression (Lash 1996, 173).
>According to Christian tradition, however, and notwithstanding much modern misunderstanding of monasticism, God is not found in flight. The search for God is not the search for comfort or tranquillity, but for truth, for justice, faithfulness, integrity: these, as the prophets tirelessly reiterated, are the forms of God’s appearance in the world. Von Hügel insists, accordingly, that it is ‘not the smoother, easier times and circumstances in the lives of individuals and of peoples, but, on the contrary, the harder and hardest trials of every conceivable kind, and the unshrinking, full acceptance of these, as part of the price of conscience and of its growing light, [that] have ever been the occasions of the deepest trust in and love of God to which man has attained’. This is neither stoicism nor sadism, but simply a reminder that the paradigm of God’s appearance in the world is Christ’s obedience in Gethsemane (Lash 1996, 179; my emphasis).
And here’s the best part:
>In the beginning, according to Luke’s Gospel, a child got lost. His parents sought him, sorrowing, for ‘three days’ and, on the third day, found him amongst the learned people in the Temple [Luke 2:41–9]. Luke’s first two chapters serve as a ‘trailer’, narrating in miniature the story as a whole. Thus … this discovery happened on that same ‘third day’ on which Mary Magdalene ‘stood weeping outside the tomb’ because, she said, ‘they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him’ [John 20:11, 13]. As readers of the gospel text, we know that she was in the presence of the one whom she thought lost; that what she knew as absence, deprivation, was—in fact—the form and context of God’s presence. But then, as Rahner said, experience of grace, and experience of grace as grace, are not the same thing (Lash 1996, 181–82; my emphasis).
When we are obediently pressing through a long season where the LORD feels absent, we may actually be experiencing his presence with us. Just cause we cannot name this or that moment as grace doesn’t mean it isn’t grace. We may indeed be speaking to the risen LORD, looking him in the eye as we lament his absence. Our job, then, is to love God by loving his creatures and by searching “for truth, for justice, faithfulness, integrity.”
Which is all to say… we’re having ANOTHER baby!
Baby Kirk #3 (gender to be discovered shortly after birth) will be here on or around Feb 5, 2021.
That’s right—we were surprised too. We are honestly a bit overwhelmed that we will have three kids under 3.5 years old, but we are thrilled to welcome our third child. We know that the LORD has grace for us here too.
Scenes of grace at the end of Summer: Towards Lindisfarne castle
You are Training Pastors to be Faithful to Scripture & Strengthening the Global Church
- I’ve started teaching Biblical Hebrew I for William Tennent School of Theology. First time teaching Hebrew, kinda a dream come true. Students are doing a lot of self-directed study and we have a weekly Zoom meeting Thursday afternoons.
- I’ve started prepping in earnest for teaching the intro Old Testament class on the Torah at William Tennent School of Theology in October. Since the teaching site is a remote retreat center in the Rockies, I am still planning on traveling there in person.
- My trip to Serbia to teach Old Testament II at the Baptist Theological School in Novi Sad is still not finalized, but I am going to do everything in my power to make it happen. I am really anxious to serve this school and community so long as it can be done with reasonable attention to safety.
- I’ve re-joined the TLI writing team. Our mission is to promote the needs of disadvantaged pastors and offer support and encouragement to TLI’s volunteer teachers. I’ll be writing the occasional short essay relating to the work and ministry of TLI—these will appear in various online outlets. Stay tuned.
- Writing daily on the dissertation. I’ve got a working outline for the whole thing (huge hurdle cleared?), and now I am chipping away at “A Short History of Reading Proverbs 30 from the Nineteenth Century to Today.” This will help establish all the hermeneutical precedents for my own interpretation and will eventually be part of the intro to the dissertation.
Thank you. Your prayers and support empower everything we do.
Outside the City: Prayer as Vocation
The film opens on an elderly monk in close up. From his death bed he narrates his life’s wisdom in a quavering voice. “I’ve been living sixty years or more in a monastery … In the early days prayer was something that we did. Now, I don’t pray. Prayer is the atmosphere in which I live. My whole life is just a prayer to God. You understand. I don’t say prayers. I’m constantly… The presence of God is something that … I am aware of all the time. I’m just living in the presence of God. That’s my prayer.”
I’ve been reflecting quite a lot on vocation, purpose, meaning in life, and what is worth doing. The very idea of monasticism is bizarre and foreign to us—a relic of a lost time. Many Evangelicals today might even see it as cowardly, a way of sidelining yourself from activism of one form or another. With an exquisite, patient touch Outside the City does not let us dismiss monasticism so easily. As one monk puts it in the film, everyday they are forced to come face to face with themselves before God. These monks see prayer, a life lived continually in the presence of God, as their offering of themselves for the sake of the world.
Filmmaker Nick Hamer spent a year living with the monks of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire* documenting their lives and deaths. During the year this community of twenty-five men, half of them over 80, make the bold move to start the first every Trappist brewery in the UK. As the website for the film puts it, “For their historic, counter cultural lifestyle to survive, the venture must succeed.”
Clearly, I am not called to a monastic life, but the beauty of these monks’ vocations has left me reflecting on how I can bring a little of their perspective on discipleship into my own life. What will become of us if we completely loose the idea of a life of dedicated prayer as a crucial and sacrificial service to the Church?
“If we weren’t here,” says one old monk, “the world would be a different place.”
Watch the trailer for the film. Highly recommended.
Here’s some info on the beer. (I had some at my prof’s house—it was excellent.)
*For my American readers, this is pronounced NOT Lay-sester-shire, but, Lestrshur. Extra points awarded if you can make the whole thing approximate one syllable.
Scenes of grace at the end of Summer: The beach! England’s got it, but its never not cold.
Bearing God’s Name: The Law as Grace
I’m going to be starting a new series in this space over the next nine months. Each month I’ll break down one of the lectures from my class on the Torah in condensed form. This month, as an entry into the Torah, I’m offering a review of Carmen Joy Imes’s Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters. Next month: Genesis 1, creation, myth, and the character of God.
In a now infamous recent message, beloved pastor and communicator, Andy Stanley called for Christians to “unhitch” from “the worldview, value systems, and regulations of the Jewish Scriptures” (3). He went on to suggest that the Old Testament is a foreign world for Christians, one where we don’t find much grace. The goal of Carmen Joy Imes’s new book, Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters is to demonstrate that this commonly held sentiment is dead wrong. But more than that, she also wants to illustrate that if we buy into Stanley’s perspective on this point then we will miss crucial aspects of Christ’s ministry and our role as Christians. “If you follow Jesus,” Imes writes, “you’ve been marked with his name” (180; cf. Acts 15:14; 1 Pet 4:14, 16). We cannot grasp what this means unless we understand our Old Testament, especially what happened at Mt. Sinai.
Imes makes this case in her lively book by walking us through the Torah and focusing on the Sinai narrative—the chapters from Exodus 19–Numbers 10 where Israel is actually encamped at the foot of the mountain.
The first half of the book focuses on the Torah, with the Ten Commandments at the center. On the opening page of her opening chapter, Imes dismantles what is surely the greatest single misconception about Old Testament law: ancient Israelites had to earn their salvation by keeping God’s laws. The exodus from Egypt, she explains, is the salvation event in the Old Testament and the law comes after God saves them. “Whatever Sinai represents, it cannot be a prerequisite for salvation. Israel has already been delivered when they arrive” (12). We watch as this rebellious, confused nation—lacking a coherent sense of identity—comes and meets with their redeemer on his holy mountain. It is messy and disorienting, but a whole nation must learn to trust the LORD. One way of understanding Sinai is to see it as God’s way of training his people to trust him (23).
Imes then goes on to situate the law within the relationship between God and his people. She argues that we will not understand the law unless we see it as a gift and connect it to God’s own commitment to his people in a holy covenant (36–38). In her third chapter, Imes offers her special contribution through a fresh, in-depth analysis of the Ten Commandments (this was the subject of her PhD dissertation at Wheaton). Imes argues that the commandment not to “take the name of the Lord your God in vain” (Exod 20:7) has often been misunderstood. This doesn’t relate exclusively to words—saying or not saying the divine name or invoking it frivolously in curses. She translates this command—with good warrant—as, “You must not bear the name of Yahweh, your God, in vain” (49). What God is telling us is that we must represent him well. We each have an invisible tattoo that says YAHWEH on our foreheads and whatever we do (or don’t do) reflects on the name of our God (49). The rest of the law is a gracious guide to God’s character so that we might know what he is like and reflect him well.
After sorting out Sinai and situating the Ten Commandments within this broader story, Imes explains how the rest of the obscure parts of the Torah relate to it. She looks at the Tabernacle, the sacrificial system, and the garments of the high priest in the back half of Exodus and Leviticus. Then she walks us through the significance of the daunting book of Numbers. These chapters are brisk and packed full of insights and illustrations that will help the confusing parts of the Old Testament fall into place.
In the second half of the book, Imes takes her central insight—that the command to “bear God’s name” captures the heart of the covenant at Mt. Sinai—and she traces this idea forward through the rest of the Bible. In chapters six and seven she shows that reflecting God’s name is a central concern of the historical books (Joshua–2 Kings) as well as the prophets. Chapter eight and nine transition to the New Testament to show how Jesus personally accomplishes the command to bear God’s name and how his name comes to be equated with the name of Yahweh. One of the highlights here is her brilliant, accessible analysis of how Jesus embodies the story of Israel, carrying Yahweh’s name where Israel failed (139–42). For Christians, then, we keep the Ten Commandments by bearing Christ’s name and reflecting his character (152). In the final chapter, Imes deals directly with how gentile believers relate to Israel’s covenant and how Old Testament law applies to Christians today.
For me, the second half of the book was less engaging than the first. She provides some helpful conceptual framing, but I felt that the walls were left unfinished. I don’t think she fully did justice to the complexity of the relationship between gentiles and Jews in Christ or to the ongoing relevance of the law. Her treatment occasionally makes the issues feel almost obvious or simple, while many individual passages remain complex. You might find toward the last chapter or two that she raises a few more questions than she answers, particularly if you’ve read or studied these issues before. Nevertheless, I believe her argument is broadly correct.
In my opinion, the best part of Imes’s book is the first half where she guides us through the Torah as a vibrant, life-shaping narrative. She is lively and down to earth, blending the best of big-picture biblical thinking with homey illustrations and straight-forward language. Her heart with this book is clearly to write for the average Christian. If you want to understand the Torah a bit better—especially law and ritual—then Bearing God’s Name is a good place to start. I think nearly everyone would find several “ah-ha” moments here.
In her words, “The fact that God has revealed to us what pleases him is one of his most gracious gifts—it’s an invitation to know him, to become like him, and therefore to be part of his mission” (183). We don’t have to keep the law, but because we know Christ we get to be like him.
LORD, may we know your law as the grace that it truly is. Free us from perfectionism, from striving after standards that we cannot keep, from misusing your law so that it buries us in sin. May we rest in your perfection, your victory over sin and death, and the salvation from slavery that you bring us. May this rest allow us labor to know and reflect you.
Scenes of grace at the end of Summer: Baby Willa Eve is the sweetest, so cheerful and calm (unless hungry).
Pray With Us
- For my prep for teaching at Tennent. Pray that the LORD would help me write lessons that truly open up the Torah for these students.
- That I would be unhindered in my ability to travel to Serbia in December to teach Old Testament. So much feels outside of our control, but it has been a long time since I was able to teach overseas.
- For progress on my dissertation—as I enter a new “busier” season. I’m praying and working towards finishing next October.
- For Meghan and our new baby to be health and strong. For our little family to be strong and connected and lean into grace.
Scenes of grace at the end of Summer: Working on my dissertation with a killer view in the post-Corona library.
Notes:
- Imes, Carmen Joy. Bearing God’s Name: Why Sinai Still Matters. Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2019.
- Lash, Nicholas. “Creation, Courtesy and Contemplation.” Pages 164–82 in The Beginning and End of Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.