What’s Up With Olivet University?

For as long as I’ve known and followed Bethany University (I graduated from there in 1990), it’s had financial troubles. On the whole, Bethany was a warm, loving place, and I’m grateful for the spiritual and intellectual formation I received there. But its financial difficulties were of long standing (well before I matriculated there in 1986), and they finally came to a head this last summer, when Bethany announced that its search for a white knight who could relieve its $15MM debt burden had failed, and that it was closing its doors for good.

This was very sad, of course, and a number of alumni have expressed ongoing grief about the closure of the school that they’ve known and loved. But this was also problematic for the Northern California/Nevada District of the Assemblies of God for a very different reason. The NCN District had counter-signed for something like $8MM of Bethany’s debt, and when Bethany closed and defaulted on that debt, the assumption was that the district would likely have to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Among other things, this would have meant the closing and sale of many small churches, and it would have hampered the district’s mission for years to come.

Everyone involved, therefore, breathed a huge sigh of relief when Olivet University,  a small, unaccredited ABHE-accredited Christian school located in San Francisco, agreed to purchase the campus, very roughly by assuming Bethany’s existing $15MM debt. Among other things, this meant that the NCN District would not have to declare bankruptcy; and that the Bethany campus, beloved by so many, would continue to serve as a center for Christian formation and ministry. So far, it’s hard not to see the hand of God at work.

So it’s with some trepidation that I find myself asking, “What exactly is Olivet University?” In a very real sense, I have no business asking the question. My formal affiliation with Bethany ended some 21 years ago; and at any rate, that institution is now defunct. And I should be (and am) grateful for any resolution to the NCN District’s financial difficulties that doesn’t involve outright bankruptcy. But there’s been a twist. Apparently Olivet University has received permission from the NCN District to continue business under Bethany’s name. That’s not too weird (Il Giornale did the same thing when it bought Starbucks); but it means that Olivet is now very closely associated with the institution whose name is on my diploma. That piques my interest. And it gets a little stranger.

For one thing, several months after the deal became public, the Olivet University website still doesn’t mention anything about the purchase. Moreover, the folks from Olivet have now put a new Bethany University website up that (as of 9/9/11) doesn’t mention the transition either. And more than that, they’re explicitly claiming to be Bethany University. The degrees they discuss are the degrees offered by Olivet. The library they describe is Olivet’s library. The academic standards they outline are Olivet’s academic standards. But they also claim that they’ve been around since 1919 (when Bethany was founded).  They claim that they used to be Glad Tidings Bible Institute (Bethany’s original name). They claim that they relocated to Scotts Valley in 1950 (when Bethany moved from San Francisco). They claim to be an institution that’s almost 100 years old.

But none of that is true.

When Bethany closed its doors this summer, all the administration, staff and faculty were laid off: and to the best of my knowledge, none of them have been rehired by Olivet. All of Bethany’s students were forced to find other schools: and to the best of my knowledge, none of them will be attending Olivet. When Bethany closed, it immediately and understandably lost its WASC accreditation; and Olivet is not accredited has no regional accreditation. In other words, there are only two things that the original Bethany University and the new Bethany University have in common: the name, and the physical grounds. Consequently, it seems disingenuous at best, and outright false at worst, to claim, without any acknowledgment of the discontinuity, to be Bethany.

And what’s really strange about this is that they didn’t need to handle it this way. There’s no reason that Olivet shouldn’t acknowledge the transition – from my perspective, the fact that a new institution with the same mission has purchased the Bethany campus is worthy of celebration. It’s a great story. It shows how God is still at work. It’s Elijah passing the mantle to Elisha. It’s a wonderful thing.

So why hide it?

I’m not certain of the answer, but one of the disturbing possibilities that occurs to me is, “Because they’ve gotten into the habit of not speaking the absolute truth.” And another is, “Because they’re trying to whitewash something.”

I need to be up-front and say that I have no first-hand knowledge about any of these things. But as I’ve hunted around for more information about Olivet, what I’ve found hasn’t really allayed my suspicions. I certainly haven’t found any smoking gun. But I’ve found a lot of small things that, when put together, show a consistent pattern that’s just a little odd.

• Olivet University is closely associated with a denomination known as the Evangelical Assembly of Presbyterian Churches. This is not the same thing as the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. The EPC is a reasonably small but otherwise well known conservative Presbyterian denomination that is well within the mainstream of evangelical Christianity. Their Wikipedia article has as much information about them as you’d ever want to know. Apart from their own website, however, I can find hardly any direct information about the EAPC. There’s no Wikipedia article. It has no history. I have no idea how many churches it has. In other words, it’s not just small: it’s tiny. There’s nothing wrong with that; but it does raise the question, “Where did they get the $15MM to buy the Bethany campus?”
  
• From its own website, the EAPC seems to be reasonably orthodox and evangelical. But when you read its position papers, say, on divorce and remarriage, or ordination, you’ll find that they were explicitly lifted straight from other denominations (the EPC and Assemblies of God, respectively, in this case). Again, that’s just a little odd. In other words, these position papers didn’t arise organically through the life of a denomination. It’s more like someone said, “We need some position papers to put up on our website. Bob, go find something.”
  
• As I said before, Olivet is very closely associated with the EAPC; so much so, that the two seem to almost be the same organization. For instance, the moderator of the EAPC is Dr. Tom Cowley. Apparently this isn’t a full-time job, as he’s also the Dean of the Olivet College of Business. Again, there’s nothing explicitly wrong with this – it just shows that they’re a very tiny and inbred denomination (if denomination is the right word for it).
  
• Olivet’s Library advertises that they have “150,00 physical and electronic items”. But if you poke around, you find that they’re including things like the (freely available) Christian Classics Ethereal Library in that number, which is disingenuous, to say the least.

Well, whatever. They’re small, they’re trying to appear bigger than they are, they’re getting big money from somewhere. No big deal. But there’s more; and here’s where things start to get a little strange.

• The current Chancellor at Olivet University, and former President, is a man named David Jang. As it turns out, David Jang is a fairly controversial fellow. There’s an entire website – a very strange website, I should add – which is dedicated to convicting him of claiming to be “Second Coming Christ”; and there’s an entirely different website – equally strange – dedicated to clearing him of those charges. Unfortunately, much of the debate seems to take place in various Asian languages, and I don’t trust Google Translate enough to draw any real conclusions from the automatically generated English versions.
  
• At least some websites allege that David Jang used to be a member of Sun Myung Moon’s “Unification Church” (i.e., a “Moonie”), and that in the 1980’s, he was (peripherally?) involved in the fraudulent takeover by the Unification Church of a Methodist seminary in Korea.
  
• Apparently David Jang is a fairly busy individual, because he’s also the founder of (or at least closely associated with) several youth mission organizations, including the Young Disciples of Jesus, and Apostolos Campus Ministry, along with some large for-profit websites, like ChristianPost, ChristianToday, Gospel Herald, and International Business Times. Those mission organizations have generated some controversy, as this extended discussion makes clear. (Basically, several people on the forum say, “I was a part of ACM, and yes, I was taught that David Jang was the Messiah”, while other folks say, “I was a part of ACM, and no, I wasn’t taught that David Jang was the Messiah.” And then it degenerates into the sort of extended but endlessly fascinating paranoid name-calling that should be familiar to any participant on Internet forums.) I should note that Olivet University is closely associated with all of those organizations, as their 2009 Student Handbook makes clear.  (Basically, it lists a whole bunch of David Jang’s ministries and/or companies, and encourages students to work and/or volunteer with them during their time at Olivet.)

And then there’s other stuff that’s not really weird, except maybe in the larger context.

• Olivet University is a Presbyterian school (sort of), but their current president, William Wagner, once presented himself as a candidate for the head of the Southern Baptist Convention. In this ecumenical age, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it certainly indicates that its leadership isn’t closely associated with any particular denomination.
  
• Olivet, the EAPC, and the various organizations associated with David Jang repeatedly go out of their way to stress their ties to mainstream evangelical organizations, such as their membership in the NAE and the World Evangelical Alliance. They call their library the “Ralph D. Winter” library, after the famous missiologist, and prominently advertise the fact that he was there at its opening. I get the impression that Olivet was another, pre-existing Bible college in the Bay Area, before the EAPC took it over in 2000 and stamped it with their own identity. The EAPC gave themselves a name that’s confusingly close to a very different denomination; and the same is true of the ChristianToday website. On top of all this, they’re clearly very eager to assume the mantle and even the identity of Bethany University.

On the whole, reading between the lines, the consistent impression I get of Olivet University and its associated institutions is that they’re eager: especially when it comes to giving folks the idea that they’re bigger and more reputable than they are. The various institutions are all clearly a little inbred, and seem to revolve around David Jang in a manner that’s hard to characterize, but feels a little unsettling. For instance, David Jang and his companies are the obvious source for the $15MM Olivet is spending on Bethany’s campus; but nobody seems to be acknowledging it.

Unlike poor D. W. and his now-abandoned website, I don’t think that Olivet and the EAPC are just a front for the Moonies or some other Korean cult. But they do seem to have a culture of slanting the truth, and sometimes stepping over the line into outright falsehoods (such as their claim to still be the Bethany University that was founded in 1919). Perhaps that’s just a cultural difference between Asian and American Christians: but regardless, it seems unhealthy, and not the sort of straightforward adherence to reality that you’d want in any educational institution, let alone a Christian university. Let’s just say that it’s a significant red flag for me. I hope that the folks assuming the name and identity of my alma mater are worthy of her mission and heritage.

[Edit 9/9/11 – After a conversation this evening with the Dean of Administration at Olivet, I adjusted the parts of my post where I said that Olivet was “unaccredited”. That wasn’t quite accurate: Olivet is indeed accredited by the Association for Biblical Higher Education, and the ABHE’s accreditations are recognized by the USDE and CHEA as legitimate for financial aid status. However, it’s worth noting again that Olivet is not accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, which is the only accreditation that really matters when trying to get your credits to transfer (see http://www.acswasc.org/faq.htm#11). In other words, if you spend two years at Olivet, and decide to transfer to UCSC, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll need to start from scratch.]

[Edit 9/12/11 – I’ve added a follow-up to this post which explores in some detail – perhaps excessive detail – Olivet’s response, and my ongoing concerns and questions.]

[Note 9/13/11 - Olivet has since updated the language on the Bethany “About” page to a version that I feel is much more accurate. See this post for more details.]

[Note 4/12/12 – Some time after I made this post, some of the websites I linked to changed their domain names. I’ve updated the links to point to the newer versions.]

My Take on Homosexual Behavior and the Church

My denomination, the PC(USA), has recently given its presbyteries the option to begin the ordination of practicing homosexuals. I lamented this decision in my last blog post, but since I’ve thought and read a great deal about this topic over the last few years, I actually had more to say. So I figured that it’s finally time that I summarize (most of) my thoughts on this issue in one place.

The Texts

Oddly enough, this will be the shortest part of my post, for the simple reason that I think the evidence is beyond any serious debate. The starting point for any Christian has to be the acknowledgement that every time the Bible mentions homosexual activity, in the New Testament or in the Old, it condemns that practice unequivocally. In the Old Testament, homosexuality was a capital crime (like murder, though also admittedly like breaking the sabbath, or disobeying your parents). In the New Testament, Paul reaffirms that it's a sin (primarily in Rom. 1:26-27, but also in 1 Cor. 6:9-11 and 1 Tim. 1:9-10), and sees both male and female homosexual behavior as unnatural, dishonorable and shameful.

I should note that Paul's attitude is especially interesting,  because homosexuality in the ancient pagan world was viewed largely like homosexuality in today's culture.  Aristotle, to be sure, thought that for a man to be sexually attracted to other men was “bestial” and “unnatural”, like eating cinders, but in Plato’s dialogues it was something that you could joke or titter about: it certainly wasn’t a big deal to most Athenians. Paul takes a very strong stance against that attitude, and virtually identifies same-sex activity with rebellion against God. And Paul’s opinion would have been entirely uncontroversial in Jewish or Christian circles of the first century.

There have been some attempts to quibble with the particular kind of homosexuality Paul was referring to in Romans and 1 Corinthians, but frankly, they're quite strained, so strained that I can’t even muster up the energy to engage with them. It’s just not an interesting argument. There's never a hint that any Biblical writer saw homosexuality as acceptable. True, the topic isn’t brought up that often, but when it is, there’s no doubt of the writer’s opinion.  Indeed, the relative paucity of texts is likely because opposition to homosexuality was such an unquestioned assumption that the writers didn’t feel they needed to talk about it. In addressing a Jewish audience, Jesus didn’t express an opposition to homosexual behavior, any more than he expressed an opposition to murder or incest, because it was one of many assumptions He shared even with his opponents.

The Story of Liberation

That said, the Presbyterians (and Lutherans and Methodists and Episcopalians) who have argued for ordaining practicing homosexuals don't typically just say that we should ignore the Bible.  Rather, they start from a position that I actually agree with, that it's simply not feasible to take every injunction in Scripture as an absolute command for every time and place.  If you’ve ever read The Year of Living Biblically, you’ll know what I mean, but to take just a couple New Testament examples, 1 Cor. 14:34 says that women should be silent in the church, though 1 Cor. 11:4 presumes the opposite. 1 Cor. 11 also says that men should only have short hair, and women should keep their heads covered in church, neither of which is exactly enforced these days by any mainstream Christian church. And so forth: I could go on. Whatever view we take of Scriptural authority is going to have to be somewhat more subtle than, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

With that in mind, the best argument I've heard for the ordination of practicing homosexuals is to start by pointing out that both the Bible and the history of Christianity tell a story of liberation.  And this is very true.  To take the best known example, we’ve pretty much all concluded that Christianity is incompatible with slavery, despite the various passages in the Bible that allow for its practice: because the general thrust of the Bible points towards strongly away from slavery and towards liberation. The Israelites got their start as the people of God when God freed them from their slavery. The prophets were quite strong in their condemnation of economic oppression, and equally bold in their vision of a society marked by peace, justice and freedom. Paul told slaves to obey their masters, and even sent a runaway slave back to his owner. But Paul also told slave owners to be “right and fair”, and when he told Philemon about Onesimus’ return, he repeatedly pointed out that this slave was now “better than a slave, a dear brother”, “a brother in the Lord”, and “my very heart”. Philemon could hardly miss the hint that a Christian should not own someone whom Christ had purchased with His own blood.

Similarly, most Christians have concluded that the Gospel is incompatible with the unequal treatment of women, and for the same reason. Various passages tell us that, for instance, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man” (1 Tim. 2:12), or that “women should be silent in the churches, for it is not permitted that they speak” (1 Cor. 14:34-35). Against this, Paul apparently did allow women to speak in the church (1 Cor. 11:5), and even acknowledges some as apostles (Rom. 16:7). But most tellingly, in an amazing text of liberation, Paul proclaims to the Galatians that “there is no longer slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

So far, I buy this argument. But then these folks go on to say that we should re-interpret the various passages that condemn homosexual behavior from this same perspective. In other words, since it would be unfaithful to Christ to slavishly follow every command the Bible lays out for us, and since the story that the Bible tells, and which God has been telling through the Church, is a story of liberation from oppression, the moral force of this overarching narrative of liberation outweighs any specific scriptural commands that are themselves oppressive. It’s incumbent on us as Christians, they say, to love homosexuals, and to work for their liberation; and we can’t do that if we deny them access to the same opportunities as heterosexuals.

The Witness of the Church

It’s precisely here that, to my mind, the argument falls down. There’s no doubt that the Bible tells a story of liberation from oppression; the question is whether this story can bear the interpretive weight that its proponents allege. I don’t think that it can, for two distinct reasons.

The first reason is that in contrast to the examples of slavery or women in ministry, the Bible, the historical Church, and nearly all contemporary Christians speak with one voice on the topic of homosexual behavior. Like the advocates of homosexual ordination, I take the Bible to be the authoritative but not an inerrant witness to the work of God in Jesus Christ. What God did in Jesus is critical and fundamental; the Bible's witness to that is authoritative, but so far as I can tell, not necessarily coherent in every detail. If the Bible points in a variety of different directions on a particular topic (as it does with the role of women in the Church), if there's an obvious cultural or incidental explanation for a particular injunction, if there doesn't seem to be any larger theological basis for it, and if the Church as a whole has not seen the wisdom in a particular practice, it's presumably not incumbent on Christians to follow a given command. However, if every verse that mentions a particular topic points in exactly the same direction, if there's a larger theological basis for those statements, and if the Church as a whole has concluded that a particular perspective or practice is wise and appropriate (or unwise and inappropriate), then Christians are in a very different position.

And this is precisely the situation with homosexuality. Every time the Bible mentions homosexual behavior, it condemns it. Every time the great theologians of the Church mention homosexual behavior, they condemn it. And apart from a few declining, liberal denominations in the West, Christians today remain united in their view that homosexual behavior is harmful. I don’t have precise numbers, but I would guess that if you were to poll everyone in the world who was sitting in a pew on some Sunday morning, probably 90-95% of them would agree that homosexual behavior is sinful.

So my point is not precisely that verse 'x' or verse 'y' can be used as a proof-text (though they certainly can). It's much broader and deeper than that. Not just the Bible, but Christian thought for the last two millennia, and contemporary Christian practice anywhere outside certain liberal Western circles, is all strongly against homosexuality: though of course there are some expressions of it which I have to imagine Paul (or Augustine or Aquinas or Luther or Calvin) would say are much less objectionable than others. But none of them match up to the creational norm which Jesus raised as a standard: “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh.”

The Story of Faithfulness

The second reason is that so far as I can tell, and for all its importance, the story of liberation remains a secondary story in the Bible. A much more prominent theme is the requirement of faithfulness to God’s revelation under the constant temptations of the surrounding culture. It’s quite true that the Bible tells how God liberated various people, ranging from the Israelites under Egypt, the exiled population of Judah in Babylon, and the scorned and despised in first century Galilee. But for every verse that talks about economic or social liberation, I suspect there are ten which talk about the faithfulness that God requires of His people in the midst of a culture which scorns such exclusive fidelity.

It would be tedious and exhausting to list all the evidence for this claim, but I’ll at least try to touch on a few out of the thousands of relevant texts. The very first commandment God issues is “You shall have no other Gods before me.” The worst punishments against the Israelites on their desert travels came not from their failure to enact social justice (as important as that is), but because they mixed pure worship with the practices of the nations around them. Pick up any random spot in the prophets, and you’ll find the same theme emerging. “The eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose to do my will and hold fast to my covenant, shall receive from me something better than sons and daughters” (Isaiah 56:4-5). “People from many nations will pass by this city and will ask one another, ‘Why has the LORD done such a thing to this great city?’ ⁹ And the answer will be: ‘Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD their God and have worshiped and served other gods’” (Jeremiah 22:8-9). “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion” (Hosea 2:19). The deuteronomistic history tells same story; indeed, it’s arguable whether it tells any other. Judgment is solemnly issued on each king, with a single, unwavering standard: “Yet Jehu was not careful to keep the law of the LORD, the God of Israel, with all his heart. He did not turn away from the sins of Jeroboam, which he had caused Israel to commit” (2 Kings 10:31).

Paul brings it all together in powerful and demanding call to holiness in the midst of a corrupt and corrupting society (2 Cor. 6:14-18):

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? ¹⁵ What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? Or what does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? ¹⁶ What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said:

   “I will live with them
   and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
   and they will be my people.”

¹⁷ Therefore,

   “Come out from them
   and be separate,
            says the Lord.
Touch no unclean thing,
   and I will receive you.”

¹⁸ And,

   “I will be a Father to you,
   and you will be my sons and daughters,
            says the Lord Almighty.”

You could read the Bible through many times (as I did) and miss the story of liberation. It’s there, but it’s subtle enough that, quite honestly, I didn’t notice it until I got to college and my professors pointed it out. But you can’t even dip into the Bible without being repeatedly beaten over the head with God’s requirement for faithfulness to His law and covenant, intimately paired with warnings against being influenced by the surrounding culture.

It’s also worth noting that this faithfulness to God is frequently presented in terms of sexual purity. Paul clearly links the two when he upbraids the Corinthians for their immoral behavior. “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself?” he storms. “Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute?”  The prophets repeatedly make the same connection. “I will put a stop to the lewdness and prostitution you began in Egypt,” God says in Ezekiel, and the unfaithfulness to which He’s referring appears to be both literal and spiritual. At least one of the reasons why the Bible puts such an emphasis on sexual morality is because it is a sign, a seal, and a sacrament of God’s covenant with us. As Paul wrote to the Ephesians:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her ²⁶ to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, ²⁷ and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. ²⁸ In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. ²⁹ After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— ³⁰ for we are members of his body. ³¹ “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” ³² This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.

In other words, I think that the argument between the liberals and the conservatives in the Presbyterian church (and elsewhere) can largely be reduced to an argument between the dueling narratives of liberation vs. faithfulness. Unfortunately, it’s quite clear to me which of these two narratives is closer to the heart of the Bible. God is unwavering in His requirement for social justice; but this is always within the larger context of fidelity to His covenant. Liberals argue that we should ordain practicing homosexuals, because we must adhere to the requirements of social justice. Conservatives argue that we should not, because we must adhere to the requirements of covenant faithfulness. Both themes are present in the Bible: but there’s simply no question as to which is the more prominent and fundamental.

The Influence of Culture

Nevertheless, many Christians would disagree, and one of the reasons they give for this disagreement is that the Church has often sinned by being on the side of the powerful against the powerless. And it is quite true that Christians have sinned horribly, and that the Church has made grievous mistakes. When the Pope parceled out the New World between Spain and Portugal; when Southern Baptists broke away to form a new denomination in favor of slavery; the Inquisitions, the Crusades, the pogroms. But it needs to be pointed that that, with a very few exceptions, the majority of these sins and failures came from too close a connection to the surrounding culture, rather than too much distance from it.

A good example of this is the Papal bull “Sublimus Dei”, issued by Paul III in 1537, forbidding the enslavement of Native Americans, and threatening excommunication for anyone who mistreated them. It's a well-written document and a fine piece of theology, and it took a strong and principled stand against the genocide that was happening in the New World. It was also rescinded the following year, when the Spanish King Charles V threatened to march on Rome if the Pope didn't take it back. Its withdrawal was a sin: but the sin came from too close a connection to the culture. The culture tempted the Church to unfaithfulness, and the Church very regrettably succumbed to that temptation.

As a result, if the surrounding culture is headed strongly in a particular direction that seems to be at odds with the historic traditions of Christianity, I think the Church is right to be suspicious. It's made that mistake too many times. There are times when the surrounding culture may be correct (I think that women's rights is one of these, though even there, it was often Christians fighting for them). But more often than not, from the perspective of hundreds of years later, the surrounding culture will be judged to have been horribly wrong, and the Church itself will be condemned to the extent that it went along with it. Consequently, although it's quite clear that homosexuality is growing in acceptance, it's not the Church's job to move with the times. As Chesterton said, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

Born Homosexual?

An issue that often comes up when discussing homosexuality is the question as to whether it’s innate or not.  Folks often argue that (a) homosexuality is no more a choice than the color of your hair, and therefore (b) God must have intended for them to be that way. (As someone said recently, “How many more gay people must God create before we accept that He wants them around?”)

On this question, I don't agree with many Christians who argue (against the available scientific evidence) that it's purely a choice. At least, I could no more imagine myself being tempted towards homosexuality than I could imagine myself being tempted, say, to eat a slug. Someone who is tempted to engage in homosexual activity must be made of different stuff than I am. That said, I do think there's quite likely more of a volitional or cultural component to it than gay advocates will sometimes admit. It’s hard to keep a straight face and argue that gender is a social construction but homosexuality is purely biological. From what I understand, many people (though not all) who identify themselves as homosexual in some fashion actually acknowledge a "spectrum of desire", and say that they feel (to some degree) attracted to both sexes. In a culture where homosexuality was not a live option, or where they felt strong moral scruples against it, those "bisexual" folks would presumably settle into a reasonably comfortable heterosexual lifestyle.

But that's really neither here nor there, because I fully acknowledge that some people are more-or-less born homosexual. From my perspective, that's roughly equivalent to being born with a tendency towards any kind of behavior that doesn't match what God wants for us. I know lots of folks who appear to have been born with addictive personalities, i.e., if they drink at all, they're quite likely to become alcoholics. I understand that scientists have even discovered a genetic basis for this predisposition. This is tragic, and they have my love, my sympathy and my support: but I don't see that it excuses them from the duty of living as sober and disciplined a lifestyle as they can. Or another example: it's widely acknowledged that, as a male, I have a biological tendency to want to cheat on my wife. But I doubt that excuse would very much mollify Galena were I to proffer it. Heredity is orthogonal to morality.

Now, clearly, homosexuality doesn't make you fall down in the street the way alcoholism does. In our culture, at least, it has roughly the same negative social repercussions as extramarital heterosexual activity: that is to say, virtually none at all. The question is whether homosexual behavior has other ramifications, especially of the sort that don’t show up in a psychological survey.

Christian Morality

From a Christian perspective, there are three aspects to morality: (1) right relations between people; (2) a right inward disposition; and (3) a right goal for the human life. C. S. Lewis used the example of a fleet of ships sailing in a convoy. Morality is concerned with making sure the ships don't sail into each other (the first one), that each ship is in good working order (the second), and that they're all sailing to the right destination (the third). Christians and non-Christians can generally agree on the various rules that govern the first (with a few exceptions, like abortion), but Christians have a somewhat different perspective on the second, and a completely different approach to the third.

With this framework in mind, Christians believe that homosexuality interferes with the second and third aspects of morality. In other words, at least in our culture, and apart from the risk of AIDS, homosexual behavior is not really a matter of justice, of right relations between people. (In many other societies it is: if you sleep with another man, you're exposing that man to ridicule and humiliation, or worse: like what happened to Oscar Wilde.) Rather, Christians say, it interferes with your ability to keep your ship in order, and it tends to make your ship head off in the wrong direction. Indeed, this is exactly what Christianity says about sleeping with anyone you're not married to.

And of course, these impacts aren't always obvious from the outside, so if you're not a Christian, if you don't share the overall Christian framework for looking at life, you presumably won't come to the same conclusions. The spiritual effects of homosexuality would be no more visible to a psychologist studying the subject than, say, the spiritual effects of lust, pride, greed or intemperance. So long as you keep your lust under some modicum of control, so long as your pride and anger doesn’t get you fired from your job, so long as your greed keeps earning you more money and you stay out of jail, no psychological test will ever declare you “abnormal”. But from a Christian perspective, homosexuality is exactly like those sins: it’s one among many behaviors and attitudes that are widely accepted in our culture, but which nevertheless exercise a slow, inevitably corrupting influence on those who practice them.

So What Should Christians Do?

C. S. Lewis once said,

“Many people cannot be brought to realise that when B is better than C, A may be even better than B. They like thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better and best, or bad, worse and worst. They want to know whether you think patriotism a good thing: if you reply that it is, of course, far better than individual selfishness, but that it is inferior to universal charity and should always give way to universal charity when the two conflict, they think you are being evasive. If you reply that it is far better to forgive a man than to fight a duel with him, but that even a duel might be better than a lifelong enmity which expresses itself in secret efforts to do the man down, they go away complaining that you would not give them a straight answer.”

With this in mind, the best option for a homosexual Christian is chastity. This is hard, no doubt about it, and I’m grateful that God has not laid this call on me. But I also believe that God has a special grace to offer those who find themselves in this difficult situation.

Nevertheless, not all homosexual relationships are the same, any more than heterosexual relationships. I suspect that some kinds of homosexual behavior are much more damaging to your soul than others. If you're a Christian with strong homosexual tendencies, and you find that you simply can't make chastity work, then shacking up with someone permanently, with all the hard work and self-mortification that any long-term relationship entails, is certainly better than frequenting San Francisco bath houses.

Similarly, if a homosexual couple came to my church, I would treat them exactly like I would treat a heterosexual couple living together without being married. I would love and welcome them in the name of Christ. I would encourage them to get involved, to attend Bible studies and home groups, to sing in the choir and sit on committees and help with VBS. But I would also encourage them to reflect critically on their relationship with God and each other. And it would not be appropriate for them to serve as elders or deacons, as teachers, or as pastors.

The PCUSA’s Decision to Ordain Practicing Homosexuals

I just read that the PCUSA (the denomination to which I belong) has made the decision to begin ordaining practicing homosexual ministers:

http://www.christianpost.com/news/pcusa-votes-to-allow-openly-gay-clergy-50176/

I'm still struggling with how to respond to this. My concern is not precisely with the details of this decision, but with the reasoning behind it.  The theological shifts necessary to make this seem reasonable require that we ignore the unanimous witness of Scripture, two thousand years of Christian reflection and praxis, and the all-but-unanimous consensus of Christians around the world. The PCUSA has apparently decided that these are no longer authoritative, and that strikes me as a very dangerous step. If we're no longer to be constrained by any of these three sources of authority, the PCUSA will almost certainly find itself “blown about by every wind of doctrine.” Fashion, not faithfulness, will reign. In another hundred years, without any solid authority as a guide, it will only be by the grace of God if the PCUSA remains a recognizably Christian organization.

The possibility of apostasy may seem remote now, but when you consider how John Calvin or John Knox would view this move, I think you can get a sense for how far the PCUSA has already shifted from its foundations. Yet this is not just an abandonment of its own roots in the Reformation: it's a clear step away from its ties to historic Christian faith and practice, and to the larger Christian communion worldwide. That more than anything else is what frightens me.

I'm no fundamentalist, but this is a bright line for me and for my wife. We love our church, but our primary commitment is to Christ, to His Word, and to the great traditions of His Body, and we need to be a part of a denomination with the same goals.

Compel Them to Come In

I had the opportunity to preach again this morning; and once again lacking anything substantive to put on my blog, I figured I might as well post my sermon.

Introduction: The Great Commission

Martin Luther once compared humanity to a drunkard trying to ride a horse, first falling off on the left, and then falling off on the right. And this is quite true. Hardly has humanity managed to make a mistake in one direction before we overcorrect, and fall off the horse on the other.

A good example of this is the way that our society treats religion. Back in the 1600’s, religious beliefs were not merely things you argued about; you were also expected to fight for them, and quite likely, to die for them. During the disgraceful 30 Years War, Protestant Christians fought Catholic Christians across the length and breadth of Europe, slaughtering entire cities, and burning whole countrysides, simply because their inhabitants held a different view of ecclesiastical authority, or used different words to describe communion. Perhaps a third of the population of Europe was killed during this brutal period in Western history. It was largely in reaction to those horrors that our own founding fathers enshrined in our Constitution the twin principles of individual religious liberty, and the separation of church and state. We are, and we should be, quite grateful for these protections.

And yet, if it is possible to fall off the horse on one side, slaughtering those who don’t share the details of our faith, it’s just as possible to fall off the horse on the other, and conclude that religious beliefs don’t matter. That is largely the situation in which we find ourselves today.

If you’ve been a follower of Christ for any length of time, you’ve probably had the opportunity to talk to someone who isn’t a Christian, about the fact that you are. If your experience is at all similar to mine, at some point during those conversations you’ve heard the following sentiment expressed: “I’m glad that it works for you, but it’s not really for me.” In other words, their assumption is that religious beliefs aren’t actually true. Faith might be helpful, faith might work for some people, but faith isn’t the sort of thing about which you could say, “this is correct” or “this is false.” Faith, most people are convinced, is a private matter, and if I have a different perspective than you do, the polite response is to say something conventional like, “Well, it takes all sorts.”

Of course, we can see a certain value to thinking this way. We need not go back so far as the 30 Years War to understand the power and terror of religious beliefs. September 11 was less than ten years ago, and religious terrorism remains a persistent threat to people across the globe. When we see religious beliefs used as a justification for killing, it’s perhaps natural to conclude that we should keep any beliefs we might have about the fundamental nature of reality to ourselves. As a result, common-places like “it takes all sorts” and “I’m glad it works for you,” aren’t just something people say to get out of a potentially awkward conversation; they represent a perspective that’s ingrained in our culture, and is reinforced in countless ways by the books and magazines we read, the television shows we watch, and even the advertisements we endure.

This belief, that religious claims have no real truth content, is so ingrained into most people that they don’t even recognize it as a belief: they never think to question it, because they never think about it in the first place. Yet when you do think about it, this perspective really is quite odd, and stands out sharply against the background of human societies. It only makes sense if you’ve already elevated individual selves to an almost insane epistemological height. And we most certainly have done so. I doubt there has ever been a society in the history of the world so intensely individualistic as ours. We want not only to choose our own religion free from external constraints; we also want to make up whatever religion we please; and we would generally prefer that the resulting work of our hands be free from any criticism.

In his book Habits of the Heart Robert Bellah describes an interview with a young woman named Sheila Larson. Sheila describes her religious beliefs as “Sheilaism”, and says that they basically consist of “trying to love yourself and be gentle with yourself.” Although Sheila feels the individuality of her religious beliefs so intensely that she can’t call them by any other name than “Sheilaism”, these beliefs are not nearly so unique as she would have them. What Sheila fancies to be her own private religion, has actually become the unquestioned assumption of hundreds of millions of people. Who says that irony is dead?

But there is a flip side to this intense individualism. Since individuals can make up their own religions as they go, and since different individuals will certainly reach different conclusions, the obvious corollary is that everyone should keep those conclusions to themselves. From this perspective, religious beliefs should be a purely private matter, like underwear: it’s generally acknowledged that most people have them, and that they make life more comfortable, but we’d rather they not be on display. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it.” As soon as religion became a purely individual matter, it necessarily became a purely private one as well.

In the face of this almost universal “Sheilaism”, two aspects of Christianity stand out sharply. The first is that Christianity claims to be true: not just true for me and perhaps true for you. Christianity claims to be true, full-stop. “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life,” Jesus said. “Nobody comes to the Father except through me.” “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” These are fundamental claims about the deep workings of reality. Before a statement can possibly be right, it has to start by being possibly wrong, and while these statements of Jesus are astonishing and outrageous on their face, they have a single glaring virtue: they might be false. And therefore they might be true.

Second, Christianity insists on delivering its message to other people, and in a loud enough voice that they have no option but to hear it. “Go ye therefore and make disciples of all nations.” “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.” The truth of the Gospel is inseparable from its proclamation. Christianity at its heart is a missionary religion.

So this is the situation in which we find ourselves. We live in a society which believes religion should be individual and private; but we serve a Lord to whom every knee will eventually bow, and who has called us to proclaim the good news of His resurrection in a very public and conspicuous manner. I suppose the Gospel finds itself in conflict with some aspects of every culture: but these conflicts seem particularly sharp in our own. Consequently, it’s worth thinking some more about these missionary impulses – and more specifically, seeing what the Bible has to say about them.

The Master and His Feast

In today’s passage from Luke, Jesus begins by describing the Kingdom of God as a sumptuous banquet to which God has sent out invitations to all and sundry. This image of a feast and celebration is something we should keep firmly in our minds as we contemplate what it means to proclaim the Gospel. For it is indeed something we often forget: that the Christian proclamation is good news. That’s what the English word “Gospel” means, as well as the Greek word from which we get “evangelism”. And the content of Jesus’ message, and the story of His life, death and resurrection, is in fact very good news. Everywhere, Jesus describes the message of the Kingdom in images of almost outlandish pleasure and beauty. It’s a lavish wedding, a pearl of great price, a sumptuous banquet. The Gospel is health and healing, the best wine you ever tasted, water and light, bread and harvest, the fatted calf, the son who was lost and now is found.

There is, of course, one obvious way in which the Gospel is good news: the proclamation of the Gospel, and our acceptance of its message, brings the possibility of eternal salvation. If we are truly in Christ, we participate vicariously in his life, death and resurrection, and we experience in Him the hope of eternal life. One day, Christ will return to rescue the world, and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away; and all will be new. An eternity with Christ, an eternity contemplating the glorious vision of God, basking in God’s undying love for us, and loving and praising God in return: that is certainly beatitude.

But we sometimes forget that the Gospel brings with it a present hope as well. Jesus’ message of salvation and redemption was not just for the age to come; it is also highly relevant to the age and to the world in which we now live. The Gospel changes people; indeed, it changes whole nations, and has changed the course of history. This present world, without the message of the Gospel, would be dramatically impoverished.

I think one of the reasons we sometimes forget this is because we are keenly aware that the arrival of this Gospel did not, in fact, always mean good news for those who heard it. For hundreds of years after Columbus, European Christians committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of Christianity against Native Americans. Christians have oppressed women, have carried out pogroms against Jews, and crusades against Muslims. These are dark blots indeed against the followers of Christ, and it is important that we remember how easily even Christians can be seduced into horrific evil. But our sorrow over these sins, and our repentance that they were done in something like our name, should not make us forget how hard, even during these horrible times, many true followers of Christ sacrificed all they had for the cause of peace and justice. Evil is a powerful force in this world, and Christians have not always resisted it with success. But through the power of the Gospel, they have indeed opposed it: and there is no doubt that the Gospel has made a powerful positive difference in the history of the world.

To take but one example: throughout human history, slavery was a nearly universal institution. It has existed in one form or another, across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, throughout all of recorded history – until Christian activists fought to abolish it. It’s now inconceivable for a country to tolerate slavery: and this is entirely the result of the light of Christ being shown on the practice. Although Christians sometimes regrettably and shamefully participated in slavery, the movement to abolish slavery began with followers of Christ and was all but unknown except in nations influenced by Christianity. This is not an accident. The Gospel is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of owning another human being. If it is really true that Christ died to save even the lowest slave, there is no justification for slavery of any sort. I suspect very strongly that were it not for the yeast of the Gospel of Christ leavening the world, institutionalized, industrial chattel slavery would still be a prominent feature of life today. Just imagine what our world would be like without the moral force of Christian abolitionists like William Wilberforce and William Lloyd Garrison, or Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Tubman. Try to imagine the stench of a slave market in Bellevue Square Mall, or the sound of the lash on Boeing assembly lines. For the millions now living in freedom who would otherwise be enslaved, for those feasting on liberty at the table of the Kingdom, the proclamation of the Gospel certainly has been good news indeed.

Those Who Declined the Invitation

When we hear the Gospel, we are receiving an invitation to sit down with Jesus at this very feast. But Jesus’ parable makes it clear that we do not need to accept that invitation. Indeed, the whole story turns on the possibility of rejecting the divine offer. And this is another key aspect of the proclamation of the Gospel. It is not always successful. In the parable of the sower, only one of the four seeds eventually bears fruit; but our own efforts to evangelize our friends and neighbors may come to fruition even more sparingly.

This does lead to another question, however, that Jesus doesn’t address directly. We all understand, I suppose, that those who consciously and explicitly reject the Gospel message have nobody but themselves to blame if they’re not present at the heavenly feast. But what about those who have never heard? Or indeed, what about those who have heard, and have even given the Gospel a fair hearing, but simply can’t convince themselves that it’s true? Is it fair for God to send someone to Hell simply because of an honest intellectual mistake?

This question is as difficult as it is common, and it remains puzzling to me that nowhere in the Bible is it clearly addressed. So in offering my thoughts on the matter, you should understand that I’m trying to put together an answer to a question the New Testament never even raises, let alone answers: so take this next bit with whatever dosing of salt you feel is appropriate.

First, the New Testament is quite clear that salvation only comes through Jesus Christ. If the Bible is indeed the Word of God in any meaningful way, it’s simply not tenable that all religions are equally viable paths to God. If we are ever to stand before God with anything like equanimity, we will do so only through the blood of Jesus Christ.

Second, the New Testament doesn’t make any sense if it isn’t possible to reject the Gospel. There are simply too many passages that warn us against such a rejection, and which offer a very clear view into the fate of those who do. Those warnings come from all sources: Paul, Peter, James, and most insistently of all, from Jesus Himself. I wish I could be a Universalist and believe that in the end everyone will make it to heaven. But I can’t square that even with today’s text, let alone the rest of the Bible. God is a gentleman, and He will not override the choices we have spent our whole lives making.

Third, not all mistakes are honest mistakes. I don’t know how God will judge the person who wants to believe, wishes that he could believe, even struggles to believe – but simply can’t convince himself that it’s true. That’s for God to decide, not me. But I don’t think many of us are actually in that position. To put it bluntly, we’re far too gullible. Unless we’re faced with overwhelming evidence, humans tend to end up believing what they wish were true. In my experience, the vast majority of people who believe that the Gospel is not true also hope that it’s not true. They dislike the idea of an Authority who will one day assess their every word and deed. They want to call their lives their own. They really do hope that no outside Power will ever judge each of their choices nor weigh every slow, imperceptible turning of their soul. When someone in this position mistakenly concludes that the Gospel is not true, their mistake is not, perhaps, completely innocent.

Finally, many Christian thinkers have speculated that those who were not Christians in this life might be offered a “second chance” to acknowledge Christ as Lord when they finally stand before His throne on the Day of Judgment. C. S. Lewis was one of those, and he put it this way in Mere Christianity:

There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted by Him that they are His in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it.

I very much hope that Lewis’ belief is true, though I must also be honest and say that I don’t know if it is or not.

Those Who Accepted the Invitation

But the rich friends who declined to attend the feast are only half the story. For the master’s house was eventually filled with the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. When Jesus first told this parable, sitting in the house of a Pharisee, it would have been difficult to miss His point: that the religious leaders of his day, the ones who should have embraced His message and been first into the Kingdom of God, had instead rejected it. In contrast, those who would have been expected to reject the Gospel, the poor and uneducated, the traitors and collaborators, the whores and drug addicts, had actually embraced it.

This strange dichotomy did not disappear after Jesus’ earthly ministry. Paul himself, in writing to the Corinthians, says,

26 Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28 God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, 29 so that no one may boast before him.

And this remains true today. At the macro level, Christianity is no longer a phenomenon restricted to the rich, Western world. On the contrary, Europe and the United States seem to be growing more and more secular with each passing year: but the message of Christ is vibrant, thriving and growing quickly in the poor countries of Africa and South America.

But this is also true on a much smaller scale. I’ll tell you one story; there are thousands like it.

When I’m visiting my parents in Longview, I usually go with them to their church, Columbia Heights Assembly of God. Over the years, I’ve grown acquainted with a program Columbia Heights is running called Celebrate Recovery. As you might guess from the name, Celebrate Recovery is targeted at addicts, and in Longview, this invariably means methamphetamine. Every Friday night, in the church fellowship hall, nearly a hundred current and recovering meth-heads get together to talk about Jesus. I’ve met many of these folks, and trust me, this meeting isn’t a pretty sight. My Dad, who isn’t one to mince words, says it looks like the bar scene out of Star Wars. Last Halloween, everyone came in costume, and my Dad said he couldn’t tell the difference. The people who come to Celebrate Recovery have had precious little to celebrate in their lives. They’re addicts and prostitutes and alcoholics. Many of them have spent time in jail. Most of them have spent time on the street, homeless. They don’t have any teeth. They talk weird. They’re strange. They smell. They make me uncomfortable. I don’t like how they sing.

And they love Jesus. And Jesus loves them; and they know it. Columbia Heights is in a rich neighborhood: but it’s these poor broken and bloodied slobs from Celebrate Recovery who are the beating heart of that church. On Sunday morning, it’s easy to spot them. They’ve got their hands raised higher than anyone else, and they’re singing louder. They’re not ashamed to get their bodies into it, either, and if you happen to be sitting next to one, you may get bumped a little as they start dancing. They’ve been called in from the highways and byways, they’re the crippled the blind and the lame who don’t belong at the Feast of the Kingdom of God, but got invited anyway.

I don’t mean to say that the folks from Celebrate Recovery are perfect Christians. Hell, they know that. That’s why they’re there. They know they’re not perfect: but they know that they are loved.

Conclusion: The Great Authority

I think many of us find the whole idea of evangelism intimidating. It brings to mind images of street preachers, or folks turning up on your doorstep on Saturday morning, smiles plastered on their faces and a stack of tracts in their hand. To be sure, those things have their place, especially for those who are called to that sort of ministry.

But evangelism doesn’t have to be intimidating. To start with, remember that evangelism is the reason why you’re here this morning. The reason your butt’s in that pew is because Peter or Paul or James or John told somebody who told somebody who told somebody else about Jesus – and one of those somebodies told you. Evangelism isn’t something foreign to any of us: it’s something we’ve each experienced. It’s why we’re here. There’s no reason to be scared of it.

So if you want to start evangelizing, if you want to start taking seriously Christ’s command to proclaim the Gospel, do this. Start by thinking about the things that attracted you to Christ, and the things that have held you to Him over the years. Think about the satisfaction that comes from serving Him and His body. Think about the difference He’s made in your life: how you’re not the person you once were, or would have been, had He not been with you, step by step. Think about why you’re here this morning. And then look for opportunities to explain those reasons to the people around you. As Peter said, “Always be ready to give an answer to anyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.”

There’s no particular need to be pushy about it. To be sure, if you’re a natural salesman, feel free to be as assertive as you want: I’ve seen it work. But most of us aren’t like that. We already have conversations with friends and family and coworkers where it’s natural to ask questions about their own beliefs: so go ahead and ask, and listen to their answers. And when the timing is right, or when they ask, tell them what you yourself believe, and why. If someone is going through a hard time, offer to pray for them. Go out of your way to help people out. Talk about your church. Bring a thoughtful but explicitly Christian perspective into conversations about politics or business or family life. Talk about why you went down to D’Iberville to help rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. Tell them why you think God is interested in social justice. Pique their curiosity. Surprise them. Give them an explanation for the hope that is within you.

When Jesus told his disciples – when he told us – to go forth into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation, He didn’t tell us it would be easy. As a matter of fact, He told us pretty bluntly that it would be difficult. But He also told us that He would be with us as we went, even to the end of the age. And that makes all the difference.

Why do the Nations Rage?

I had the opportunity to preach at my church this morning, and since my blogging has been a little thin lately, I thought I’d post it here as well.

The Crevice

Strange things happen on mountains. Mountains are hard to climb, and even harder to live on. They can kill you if you’re not careful, and sometimes they can kill you even if you are. Twice, I’ve fallen into crevasses on a mountain; but I’ve also seen sights of unbearable beauty from their summits. Mountains take your breath away, literally and figuratively. They leave your lungs aching from the exertion and your heart aching from their beauty. They are astonishing and terrifying, as inhospitable as they are alluring. We’re not meant to live on mountains, but our lives would be far less rich if we could never see their distant peaks, imagine their thin, cold air, and sometimes, stand on their summits.

It’s no surprise, then, that mountains have often been places where God chooses to meet human beings. Mountains stand apart from our daily lives; they are beautiful and mysterious and terrifying: and in this way, they are much like our God. When Moses removed his sandals before the burning bush, he was standing on the sides of Mt. Sinai; and less than a year later, he was standing on its summit, communing with God, receiving the Law of God’s covenant with His holy people, hiding in a crack in the rock when God Himself passed by in a storm. Many hundreds of years later, when Elijah fled from Jezebel, he took refuge in perhaps the same cleft in the rocks of Mount Sinai, and once again God descended: but this time, God was not in the earthquake, God was not in the fire, God was not in the storm: but after the storm, there was a still small voice, and God spoke to Elijah, restored his faith and his courage, and sent him on his way.

And of course, in our passage today, Moses and Elijah are once again privileged to meet God on a mountaintop, though in a rather different setting. Today is Transfiguration Sunday, that point in the church year when we remember first the sleepy, then the astonished and finally the terrified looks on the disciples’ faces. Mountains are places where God can break through into our normal existence, and today we will try to imagine, and maybe even remember, some small part of what that can look like.

The Climb

When Jesus took Peter, James and John for a hike on that late winter day two thousand years ago, it was at a crucial time in Jesus’ ministry. Matthew tells us that that just six days prior, Jesus had for the first time revealed to His disciples that His destiny was a death by torture at the hands of the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. The disciples were still reeling from this revelation, none more than Peter, who, like many of us, was the proud owner of a tongue that frequently outran his brain. Peter began to upbraid Jesus for thinking this way, and for his troubles received perhaps the harshest rebuke Jesus ever uttered: “Get thee behind me, Satan!” Peter’s response made it clear to Jesus that His disciples needed to understand more about exactly who He was; and this undoubtedly weighed on His thoughts as they ascended together that morning.

Peter, James and John, similarly, must have had much on their minds. They had been together with Jesus now for nearly three years. They had left their careers and their families to follow Him, even though they didn’t really know what they were doing, or why they were leaving all they held dear, or even who they were following. There was no doubt Jesus was a popular rabbi and a charismatic teacher: the crowds hung on His words, and He spoke with an uncommon authority, even daring on occasion to constrain or correct the Law of Moses. But the more time they spent with Him, the more impressed they grew. He spoke with authority not only to the crowds, but also to the wind and the waves. His touch could not just comfort the sick, but could also heal them. A leper who approached Jesus did not make Jesus unclean, but rather, it was Jesus who made the leper clean. So the disciples knew Jesus was at least a prophet, and a powerful one: anointed by God in a way that Israel had not seen for many generations. But was Jesus something more? Perhaps, they thought. Perhaps He might even be the one to redeem Israel, to return Israel to the glory she had formerly enjoyed, and to the faithfulness that she had not. But even as these hopes were rising in their hearts, Jesus had begun to talk of disturbing things: of conspiracies and betrayals, of a trial, torture, and death. None of this made any sense to them. How could God raise up a servant, and then allow that servant to suffer? How could God place His Spirit upon a prophet, and then withdraw His protection? How could God anoint a king, and then lead that king to his death?

And so it was that Jesus and His disciples reached the summit. With all this on their minds, and after a wearisome climb, followed by a lengthy prayer, it’s perhaps understandable that the disciples decided a nap was in order. And so, one after another, their eyelids closed, and they began to drift in and out of sleep.

Try to imagine what it must have been like to be one of those disciples on that morning. Lying on a hard bed of uncomfortable rocks, you’re napping fitfully, slipping in and out of dreams, occasionally lifting an eye to see if anything interesting is happening. Then something you had initially mistaken for another uncomfortable dream abruptly becomes all too real. It’s the shadows from the rocks that you notice first: they’re all at the wrong angles. A sudden light has flooded the mountaintop, and with a start, you look up and realize that the light is coming from your rabbi’s face. Just a few seconds earlier his tunic had been grey with old dirt and muddy from the morning’s ascent. But now His clothes are suddenly and painfully white – whiter than any earthly detergent could make them, as Mark tells us helpfully. Still blinking and shielding your eyes, a mounting excitement compels you look closer, a mounting terror all but convinces you to flee. And then you see not just Jesus, but two other figures that weren’t there a moment ago. In that sharp and frightening light, you can’t make out their faces, but you hear Jesus greet them by name: Moshe, He says. Eliyahu. It takes a minute to sink in, but as they begin to converse, you realize who your rabbi is talking to. Moses. Elijah. And He’s talking with them like they’re old friends.

Luke adds an interesting detail at this point. He’s the only one of the Gospel writers to give us any hints as to the content of that memorable conversation. He tells us that Moses and Elijah were discussing with Jesus his impending departure from Jerusalem. We should note that Luke was a very careful writer, and the Greek word he uses for “departure” is literally “εξοδος”, “Exodus”. Moses and Elijah were discussing the Exodus that Jesus was about to bring to completion in Jerusalem. And remember what the Exodus was: it was when God made the children of Jacob into the children of God, when God established an eternal covenant between Himself and the squirrelly sons of Israel. And Jesus was about to do the same thing in Jerusalem: he was about pour out his life-blood to establish a new covenant between God and humanity.

It’s at this point that poor Peter’s mouth runs away with him again, and he utters what must be one of the greatest non sequiturs of all time. He’s just been confronted with two of the greatest figures of the Old Testament, heroes of Israel who have been dead for a combined two thousand years. In addition, it’s become apparent that Jesus is on speaking terms with these two men; and beyond that, has developed an uncanny resemblance to a light bulb. So what does Peter say in response to this astonishing situation? “Umm, Lord, Lord, umm, hey, I’ve got an idea. This would be a great place to pitch some tents.”

But perhaps we shouldn’t be quite so hard on poor Peter. His idea actually had some merit to it. The Greek word for “tent” – σκηνη – also means “tabernacle”, that is, a place of worship. A σκηνη was where the Ark of the Covenant dwelt; a σκηνη where all of Israel worshiped until Solomon built his famous temple. A tent, a tabernacle, was where Israel celebrated the great acts of God, and remembered the amazing things that God had done in bringing them out of Egypt, repeatedly delivering them from the hands of their enemies. So although it’s not entirely clear what Peter was thinking in suggesting three tents, he certainly realized something big was happening there on the mountain, something worthy of celebration and remembrance.

The Crux

But hardly were the words out of Peter’s mouth when the disciples’ very strange and impressive day became even stranger and more terrifying. While Peter was still speaking, a cloud covered the mountaintop, much as clouds had covered Mt. Sinai during Moses and Elijah’s earlier visits. And a voice came from the shining mist: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him.”

If you’ve ever been in an earthquake, you must have some sense for what the disciples were feeling at that moment. A powerful earthquake is an almost numinous experience. When you feel concrete and asphalt begin to move under your feet, when you watch solid rock dance like a wave in the ocean, when the hills themselves skip like lambs, it becomes plain that the mundane and simple texture of what we call reality is not all that there is. In an earthquake, we realize that an external force has the potential to break through into our daily lives, that perhaps this reality has always been breaking through, that our lives are mere foam on the surface of something larger and infinitely more powerful than ourselves, that the depths of existence hold a power and a mystery and a terror we had never suspected.

Any thoughts the disciples might have entertained about being equal to Jesus, or for that matter, of being equal to the situation, were immediately abandoned. They did what every sane person would do: they fell trembling on their faces before the God of the universe.

But what did the voice in the cloud mean by those mysterious words? “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him!” Any first-century Jew could have told you in an instant that those words were an allusion to a famous and well-known Messianic psalm. Earlier today, we read this passage from Psalm 2:

I will proclaim the LORD’s decree:
   He said to me, “You are my son;
   today I have become your father.
⁸ Ask of me,
   and I will make the nations your inheritance,
   the ends of the earth your possession.
⁹ You will shepherd them with a rod of iron;
   you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

Psalm 2 describes a revolt of the nations against the King of Israel, the “anointed one,” for that is what the Hebrew word משיח, Messiah means, or the Greek word χριστος, Christ. In this Psalm, the Messiah had been anointed, installed as king and proclaimed as the Son of God on the holy mountain of God. But the Messiah now faced a rebellion from those who should have known better.

The kings of the earth rise up
   and the rulers band together
   against the LORD and against his anointed, saying,
³ “Let us break their chains
   and throw off their shackles.”

Originally, this psalm referred to a specific king of Israel: perhaps David, possibly one of his descendants, Solomon, Hezekiah, or one of the others. This king had been crowned on Mount Zion, in Jerusalem, and ruled, under God, with God’s blessing. But there were many nations around Israel: Moab, Syria, Edom, Egypt, and others. These nations were restive, and were often opposed to Israel, to Israel’s king, and to Israel’s God. When the kings of Israel were strong, the neighboring rulers resisted their authority. When the kings of Israel were weak, the neighboring rulers took advantage of this weakness, and plundered their people and stole their territory. But in the end, this psalm says, God would stand up for His king and would redeem His people: and those who opposed God in this matter would find themselves learning better wisdom in a somewhat painful fashion.

It should be obvious now how this psalm relates to the story of the Transfiguration, and what the disciples would have understood the voice from heaven to mean. “This is my Son, the Messiah,” God was saying. “Here on the holy mountain I have installed Him, and I proclaim that He speaks with my blessing and acts with my authority. The ends of the earth are His possession; the whole world belongs to Him. Even so, what He has been telling you is true. He is facing a challenge from those who claim to rule the world I gave Him. They will reject His authority, and conspire against Him. But I will be with Him, and in the end, their rebellion will not succeed. They will be broken like pottery, and my Son, the son of David the shepherd king, will shepherd not merely the people of Israel, but all the nations of the world.”

The Cross

The Transfiguration stands out sharply against all the other stories in the New Testament. We are told, of course, that Jesus performed many strange and wonderful miracles during the course of His ministry. Indeed, miracles followed Him around like so many sheep: from the angel who announced his birth, to the angels who greeted the wondering disciples on the Mount of Olives after his ascension, Jesus’ life was marked by repeated incursions of the supernatural into our merely natural world. But amidst all these miraculous stories, the Transfiguration remains unique. The Gospels clearly present Jesus as the suffering servant: but in the Transfiguration, we see him, for the first and only time prior to the Resurrection, as a triumphant Lord. The Gospels tell us Jesus was a man, fully human, like ourselves; in the Transfiguration, we are shown that Jesus was God, fully divine, like His Father. We know that Jesus did not defend Himself before the Sanhedrin and Pilate; the Transfiguration tells us that Jesus could have defended Himself very ably indeed, had he but chosen to.

The brilliance that shone from Jesus’ face that morning brought light to much that had hitherto been shrouded in mystery. But nothing on which that light shown threw so long and dark a shadow as the cross; and that shadow stretches out over the centuries, and reaches across the oceans. Indeed, we still live today in that shadow. For in the light of the Transfiguration, it becomes clear what actually happened on that dark afternoon on a hill outside Jerusalem. It was not a good man going bravely to his death. It was not a teacher of peace and love whose message had been sadly misinterpreted. It was not even a dangerous revolutionary, ruthlessly executed by those whose positions he threatened. No: the cross was the death of the undying God, the passion of the impassive deity, Omnipotence made helpless. On the cross, Life itself gave His life so that we might live.

And of course, this changes everything. If God did not go to the gallows, Christianity is at best a maudlin religion with a mildly interesting moral code. But if it was God in person who hung on that tree, if it was God Himself who left infinite glory to rescue a fallen humanity, then everything we thought we knew about this world is wrong. We are far worse off than we thought: because it took the death of God to save us. But we are far more blessed, and far more important, than we could have imagined: because our redemption was purchased with a price beyond any possible value.

As G. K. Chesterton said:

That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already: but that God could have His back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator.

The Crown

But eventually the cloud lifted, and the awful light faded. The disciples felt Jesus shaking them: “Arise,” he said, “don’t be scared.” And when they dared to raise their eyes, they saw only their rabbi, with the same dirty clothing, the same care-lined face, the same long beard and dusty sandals.

Their descent off the mountain that afternoon must have involved some long and interesting conversations, as well as some equally long and interesting silences. All we know, however, is that Jesus told them not to tell anyone about what had happened, until He had been raised from the dead. And it’s not hard to see why: however true what had happened on the mountain, and however important the lesson, it was a dangerous truth, and the lesson could be easily misunderstood. For just as Jesus needed to make it clear to the disciples that he was not just another prophet, not just another rabble-rousing Messiah with dreams of greatness, Jesus also needed to make it clear to them that his destiny did not consist in evicting the Romans from the land of Israel. Yes, Jesus’ authority was not that of a human being, however wise, moral or charismatic. His choices and His destiny brooked no argument from a mouthy Peter, for Jesus had set his face towards Jerusalem, and His destiny was death on the cross. But while the Transfiguration made it clear that Jesus was more than a prophet, it was not until Jesus’ death and resurrection had been accomplished that the disciples could understand just how radical Jesus’ mission was.

The voice on the mountain had declared Jesus to be the unique Son of God; and by quoting from Psalm 2, God had, in effect, made Jesus the recipient of the extravagant and even militaristic claims in that psalm. All the old prophecies, all the old promises, were to come true in Jesus. Jesus could ask of God, and God would give Him the nations as His inheritance, the ends of the earth as His possession. If Jesus had asked the disciples for advice at this point, they would certainly have recommended that Jesus use that position and authority to drive out the Romans, and restore Israel to its former glory.

But however far the disciples could see that day on the mountain, Jesus could see further. He could see far beyond the borders of Israel, over the oceans, and through the millennia. He could see into a small church on the outskirts of Seattle, into a congregation mostly faithful, sometimes struggling, always in need of grace. In short, He could see us. He knew that we needed redemption every bit as much as Israel did. He knew that we needed His love and His leadership, His compassion and His wisdom. And He knew that we needed His death.

And so it was that Jesus went willingly from the Mount of Transfiguration to the Mount of Golgotha. He asked, and His Father truly gave Him the nations as His inheritance. You and I are a small part, but a well-tended and cherished part, of that possession. For we belong to Christ.

These recent weeks have been filled with two events of great moment and some discomfort for our church. Pastor Vonna announced last month that she will be leaving in September, and I anticipate that we will feel the want of her gifts immensely. And we received word just this week that after 13 years of hard work and faithful service, Pastor Charlie won’t be returning at the end of his sabbatical. He is leaving with good will and blessings on both sides, but I, for one, will miss my friend a great deal.

In these times, it may be all too easy, like Peter, to jump to conclusions and pass judgment on matters we don’t understand. Like Peter, it may be tempting for us to let our mouths race ahead of our brains and say things that we may later regret. These are unsettled times, after all. But we also have the opportunity to learn a lesson it took Peter many more tries to learn: that Jesus is in charge. This is not Pastor Charlie’s church. This is not Pastor Vonna’s church. It is not mine, and it is not yours. It is our Lord’s. Our Lord died for this church. Our Lord bought every member of this congregation with His blood. You and I, each one of us, and every one of us: we are not our own, for we were bought with a price. Our Lord could see us from the Mount of Transfiguration when the disciples fell on their faces; He could see us from the Mount of Golgotha, when the disciples fled in fear; He could see us from the Mount of Olives when He ascended to heaven; and He is watching over us right now, from His seat at the right hand of His Father. Our Lord is present with us, and He will not abandon us, for we belong to Him, and He takes good care of His own.

Alanta Web Conferencing Released to Beta

I’m pleased to announce that the product the small team at Alanta has been working on for the last 18 months is finally in beta. Now, this is a true beta, rather than a Google-style “forever-beta”, so use at your own risk. But we’ve been dog-fooding it ourselves for the better part of six months, and we decided it was time to let other folks start banging on it. As Matt Mullenwegg said, “If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.” And if that’s true, well, we haven’t exactly waited too long.

If you have only a small amount of courage, you can start using it here:  http://alanta.com/

Some Details

Alanta is the first completely in-browser web conferencing and collaboration solution with acoustic echo cancellation. There are other in-browser solutions, like DimDim and TokBox, but because they use Flash, and because Flash has no echo cancellation, they’re basically unusable unless everyone in the conference is wearing headphones. We managed to add echo cancellation by using Silverlight as our platform, which gave us raw access to the audio and video streams, though precious little else. As a result, we ended up having to rebuild the entire web conferencing stack, more-or-less from scratch: but the result is a solution that can offer features nobody else has.  

Some Important Caveats

1. We’re still working through some stability issues with our media server. As a result, sometimes sound will cut out on one or more parties. Our best recommendation is to (a) refresh your browser when this happens, and (b) don’t use this yet for mission-critical stuff. Like I said, this is a real beta.
   
2. At the moment, this is all just running on one aging server for which we’re paying $70 / month. We’re not expecting a ton of usage right out the gate, but if we’re wrong, we might hit some near-term scalability issues.
   
3. We theoretically support Macs, but our testing shows that this support is still pretty iffy. It turns out there are important differences in how various sound card/web cam drivers behave under Silverlight, and these differences seem to be worse on Macs. We’re working to improve this.  Still beta, remember?
   
4. There’s no hard-coded limit to the number of concurrent sessions in each call, but we’ve noticed that our media server starts acting weird after four or five. We’re working on that. Have I mentioned that this is beta?

Some Additional Details

1. This all free at the moment – we haven’t even built the piece to charge folks. We anticipate that we’ll eventually offer a free and several paid levels.
   
2. This is all written in Silverlight. Some folks have wondered about our choice of platform, mostly because of the limited reach of Silverlight compared to Flash. We don’t think this is going to be an issue in the long term: Silverlight had ~25% reach when we started, is now up to ~70%, and is continuing to grow at ~2% a month (see riastats for details).  HTML5 isn’t going to be an option for at least five years, as the W3C/IETF committee tasked with working on realtime web conferencing technologies only spun up last month, and is likely years away from a working spec, let alone widespread browser adoption.
   
3. We built the media pieces basically from scratch. We used CSpeex for our audio codec and ported the Speex preprocessor from C to C# for the heart of our audio DSP, but we rolled our own video codec, media server, and protocol. It would have been nice to use RTP and a concomitant RTP server, but Silverlight doesn’t support UDP, and we have some long-term plans to fix the problems inherent in real-time two-way communication over TCP/IP that required us to control the underlying protocol. Our acoustic echo cancellation is the piece that needs the most long-term work: we’re measuring about 90% echo removal in our tests, which is OK for 2-3 people in a room, and lots better than Flash, but the 10% that remains is still too annoying when it’s multiplied by lots of simultaneous participants.

Because all this is happening is completely in-browser, the next step in our strategy is to offer a simple API that websites can use to add real-time communications to their own sites.  Imagine car dealerships talking with customers in real-time as they’re browsing their site, or Nordstrom’s “personal shoppers” talking with their clients, or, really, any website with a high-touch sales model. Or use it to turn casual games into social games: Scrabulous meets Chatroulette (presumably without the penises).  Or lots of stuff we haven’t thought of yet.  Our bet is that companies will be looking to distinguish themselves over the next few years by adding real-time communications to their websites; and that customers will grow to expect it.

I’d like to offer a special thanks to Andre Kirchner and Roman Buchyn, the two other Alanta developers, and to Alex Ermolaev, our CEO.  You’ve been a great team to work with, and I look forward to conquering the world with you.

URL Rewriting Module Interferes with WCF REST Service Processing

I spent most of yesterday and a good chunk of this morning troubleshooting a problem with a WCF REST service I’ve been trying to create.  Specifically, I had a brain-dead simple WCF service that looked like this:

    [ServiceContract(Namespace = "AjaxRoomService")]
    public interface IAjaxRoomService
    {
        [OperationContract]
        [WebGet(ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Json, BodyStyle = WebMessageBodyStyle.Wrapped)]
        string SayHello();
    }

The implementation looked like this:

    public class AjaxRoomService : IAjaxRoomService
    {
        public string SayHello()
        {
            return "Hello";
        }
    }

And the actual .svc file looked like this:

<%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="Alanta.Web.Services.AjaxRoomService" Factory="System.ServiceModel.Activation.WebServiceHostFactory" CodeBehind="AjaxRoomService.svc.cs" %>

Note that I was using the WebServiceHostFactory, so I didn’t need to have anything in my web.config file.  Simple, right? Everything should have worked, right?  But when I tried to call the service (i.e., by navigating to http://localhost:51150/Services/AjaxRoomService.svc/SayHello), I consistently received a 404 error.

I did my standard Google searches, but all the issues people described had to do with running the service in IIS, and I wasn’t even getting that far: I was just trying to get this running under Cassini, in Visual Studio. 

But after much troubleshooting and more than a little swearing, I finally put my finger on it.  We’re using a simple URL rewriting module that shouldn’t have been interfering with this, but it was.  The trouble was in this particular line of code in the URL rewriting module:

HttpContext.Current.RewritePath(rewrittenPath);

A debugger showed that it was rewriting the path from “/Services/AjaxRoomService.svc/SayHello” to “/Services/AjaxRoomService.svc/SayHello” – in other words, it wasn’t making any changes.  But as soon as I changed it to only rewrite the path if the path had actually changed, my problem went away:

// Only rewrite the path if the path has changed, as otherwise it interferes with .svc request processing.
if (string.Compare(HttpContext.Current.Request.Path, rewrittenPath, true) != 0)
{
    Debug.WriteLine(string.Format("Rewriting {0} to {1}", HttpContext.Current.Request.Path, rewrittenPath));
    HttpContext.Current.RewritePath(rewrittenPath);
}

Not exactly a dramatic discovery, but I figured it might benefit someone else at some point, so I’ll toss it out there for the Google indexer to discover, in the hopes that it helps someone else someday.