Is John Ortberg Wrong?

Ever since my encounter with the Text, a long time ago (Ha!) in seminary days, and Peter’s walk on the water, I’ve seen that passage as a commentary on Peter’s impulsive and individualist approach to faith and life. In other words, this is no story to be mined for the typical American “you-can-do-anything” approach to life.

Peter was wrong to get out of the boat!

His moment of exultation lasted only a moment, his 15-minutes of fame, if you will. Glory of this kind is always a passing fancy, a story without substance, an experience without purpose (which seems to be very much a part of the American religious story).

Jesus saves Peter from the waves, of course. 

But here’s where the story turns important. Not only for what is said. But for what isn’t said.

Jesus doesn’t invite Peter to try it again.

Nor does Jesus invite the other disciples to try it, either.

Jesus takes Peter in hand and they both return to the boat.

It’s in the boat where the fellowship of faith is experienced, and that was the point of Jesus coming to them. Not to invite them out on to the waves, but to join them, or at least, as Mark puts it, to “pass by them,” as God “passed by Moses in the cleft of the rock,” to reveal God’s glory. 


In Mark and John, there’s no Peter doing his thing. But only in Matthew, and there, Matthew makes it clear when Jesus says to Peter, “You of weak faith; why did you doubt?” Not his ability to walk on water, but that it was the LORD coming to them. 


Peter’s impulsive move contradicts one of the central tenants of Christianity spirituality - waiting. Waiting on the LORD. Peter couldn’t wait, and that can only end badly, for everyone!

Impulsively, Peter leaves the boat, even as he did in the post-resurrection account in John. Peter dives into the water, wanting Jesus for himself, abandoning the work of his fellow-fisherman who have just taken a miraculous haul of fish and need help.

Peter is always about Peter … and he wants Jesus all to himself.

Which is why Jesus instructs Peter to “feed my sheep.” It’s not about Peter; it never is. It’s about others; it always is.

When I first read Ortberg’s book, I was taken with the story as he re-tells it. Yes, and wow, “you can be just like your rabbi; you, too, can walk on water. But ya’ gotta get outta of the boat first.”

It makes for great American preaching.

It appeals to our narcissistic instincts and our “Jesus and me” attitudes.

It appeals to our pride of power, and our daring-do stories.

But is it faithful to the text?

Is this what God wants us to hear?

Is this the Gospel?

I think not.

And more, I think Ortberg is wrong on this point. Seriously, terribly, tragically, wrong, misleading so many who are hell-bent on their pathway to the American version of faith.

It’s not about daring-do and water-walking - this is not what faith is all about, because faith is defined by love, by the Beatitudes, by mercy and compassion, forgiveness and bonding in Jesus, and through Jesus to the fellowship of faith and to the whole wide world. 

Faith about loving one another as Jesus loves us, by washing feet and putting our lives on the line, not for personal achievement, but for the sake of one another.

Faith is all about getting back into the boat with Jesus! It’s about feeding and tending the flock.

Peter has always been willing to abandon the others to secure his own place.

Peter has a lot to learn.

So do we!

Dank, Damp and Dark Places

As I write, and read in these morning hours, I'm overwhelmed and saddened by the drift into ignorance occurring in this nation right now. The megachurches have recruited millions who "love Jesus" and know nothing about him, other than the hope that he might help them achieve the American Dream.

Combine this with the far-right's love of military might (all they read in the Bible are the books of Samuel and Kings, along with some verses ripped from Revelation), combined with a long-standing hatred of FDR and the "welfare society" he allegedly created ... sorry, I'm going on, but there are times I feel like I'm slogging through some dank, damp and dark places where hope is lost amid violence, ignorance and a vast self-interest ... I go on too long.

Rich Fools

The Parable of the Rich Fool by Rembrandt, 1627.

"It's hard for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven" because they consistently fail to recognize their dependence upon the goodness and kindness and decency of millions who've made this a great country in which the wealthy could be creative and enjoy success. Their failure to acknowledge their dependence and only build "larger barns" - a form of market manipulation - (see parable of The Rich Fool) ultimately renders them "the fool." Please note: in this case, it's God who terms the man, "Fool" - Luke 12.13-21.

Seven hours and then thirty minutes on March 15, 2012

From my good friend, colleague, and occasional poet, Bob Orr:

It was last Thursday,

and I had worked with others for seven hours

at a Habitat house over in Ypsilanti.

I came home dirty, and sweaty. 

I peeled off my clothes and put them in the washer. 

I stepped into the shower and tried to keep from going down 

the drain myself.  Tiredness and aching muscles engulfed me. 

With a change of clothes, a shower and dinner,

my energy began to recover. 

Then the weather became the news.

Dexter, Michigan (19 miles northwest of Ypsilanti) was in the path of a storm. 

It dumped two inches of water and golf-ball-size hail. 

About five o'clock a tornado with winds exceeding 130 mph hit the ground for thirty minutes

leaving a path 7.2 miles long. 

Two hundred residents were displaced, but no one got hurt.

A hundred homes were damaged and ten were destroyed. 

I'll return next week  to work on the same Habitat house,

but I'll still be thinking about the tornado of last Thursday and what it

did to so many homes and lives in just thirty minutes.

The Widow's Two Coins

A good friend wrote a comment on my earlier piece: "Diminishing Kindness in America," and here's my reply:

G'morning Judy - read your comment on the blog, and I appreciate your thoughtfulness. The Jeremiah quote, btw, is in Mark 11.17 - Jesus cites Jeremiah's complaint that folks have turned the temple into a den of robbers - a place where robbers go after their crimes to find safety, only to prepare again for further crimes.

With regard to the widow, one of the problems with preaching is isolating a passage from its context, and then adding "value" to it to suit our own interests. Mark places the widow's story immediately after Jesus warns the disciples about the scribes, or legal experts, who devour widows' homes. When Jesus describes the widow, I hear compassion for her plight ("all she has to live on) - because she's giving to a system that plays upon her piety, her faithfulness, her love of God. But to lift this passage from its context and isolate it, and then turn it into a "Hallmark Card" moment misses the point - while she may be a woman of great virtue (that we really don't know), she's a victim of a system that has made religion a business and business a religion.

You mention kindness and government - and that's the very link Jeremiah makes - Jeremiah 5.27-31 and Jeremiah 7.5-7. He's very clear, and so is Jesus, how the system is weighted in favor of the wealthy, and their increasing wealth (see Isaiah 5.8-13).

It's a matter of social kindness, not just personal. Offering a temporary job to someone is very different than a system that provides steady jobs, with good salaries and the appropriate safety nets that folks need for their children and their health, including public transportation, job-security (a boss just can't fire them at will) and the hope for a secure retirement.

Judy, in my world and travels and ministry, I have never met a lazy poor person - I've met folks working two and three jobs, getting up at 3 in the morning to ride buses to a job that starts at 7, and then when the bus schedule fails, they lose their job. I've met poor people who are sick and still work endless hours for small wages, who put up with insult and injury, who weep about their children, and can't sleep at night. I've met poor people who never had good families to rear them, who had no friends or relatives to bail them out when they failed (and who hasn't been bailed out a time or two by their family, or their friends?).

Judy, there is so much wrong with our system right now, and it's getting worse, and we are failing the very people whom Jeremiah notes: the alien, the widow and the orphan.

As for Christians, we have to read Jesus a whole lot more, and we have to read the prophets upon whom Jesus relied. On the Mt. of Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah were there, not David. Moses and Elijah are both prophets (to simply call Moses a representative of the law - Reformation theology - misses the point). Elijah's presence is best understood when Ahab calls him a "troubler of Israel," and Elijah fires back, "Not me buddy; it's you!" And Moses is the one who confronted Pharaoh and set the people free, leading them through the wilderness, with God providing for them (hardly a do-it-yourself proposition, because God is kind).

Anyway, I stand by what I wrote about the widow, because of Mark's context and how Jesus referes to Jeremiah. Luke has the same setting: Luke 20.45-47, and then 21.1-4 ... when Jesus says, "all she has to live on," it's a sad comment on a cruel system that will never honor her, or provide for her, but only take her home when she can't climb out of her debt (which was how most homes were taken, and if she's a widow, then she likely has debt).

Judy, I appreciate the length and quality of your reply, and I appreciate the struggles of your soul on these matters. That you and I should be FB friends is a gift - when I was in South Africa recently, I was talking with some Dutchmen there, and we all had a good laugh when I said, "If you're not Dutch, you're not much!"

Carry on the good fight!

To God be the glory!

Tom

Diminishing Kindness in America

I see one of our nation’s greatest attributes diminishing - kindness.

We’re known around the world for kindness, but I see this quality of character taking quite a beating under the onslaught of t-party values and right-wing crabbiness, with far too many Christians either ignoring the progressive loss of kindness or, worse, cheering it on in some kind of an upside-down misconstrual of the gospel.

And this worries me.

As it did Jeremiah, as he watched his beloved nation slide further and further into a very dark hole, wherein the wealthy were privileged and living in pleasure and three representative categories of people were slipping deeper into distress.

Jeremiah identifies three groups who are the victims of his nation’s greed - aliens, widows and orphans. People who ordinarily have no social voice or economic clout. Only a nation with compassion and kindness will address their needs. But as Judah slipped further away from God, all the while claiming to be righteous (“The temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD” - Jeremiah 7), compassion died on the vine before a harvest.

Jesus quotes Jeremiah in the context of his condemnation of the temple, and his instructive warning to beware of the scribes, or legal experts, who devour widows’ homes and then say long prayers. When Jesus sits by the treasury to watch people depositing their money, nothing how easily the wealthy drop in large sums, while noting a widow who puts in her last two copper coins, he notes her situation, not as an example of giving, nor does he lift up her virtue as a giver, but she’s a victim of a heartless system that would willingly take “all she has on which to live,” and put into a treasury that can only benefit the already-wealthy. Indeed, she’s a singular example of those widows whose homes are being devoured by the legal experts for the sake of the wealthy.

All of this dressed up in religion: the use of religion to bless business, and the transformation of business into religion.

We have taken the very people Jeremiah identifies as vulnerable, and the victimized widow of Mark, and turned them into “bad people” who are parasites on the system, lazy and irresponsible, depriving the upper-crust of their self-proclaimed share of the pie.

That some should feel this way is a contradiction of our better angels, so to speak, a denial of something vital to America’s identity. But what truly disappoints me is the failure of Christians to identify this decline and lament it’s loss in the American character.

Sadly, a lot of Christians have bought the story of the t-party as if it were the gospel, and it makes no sense whatsoever, for nothing could be further from the gospel than the bitterness and crabbiness of the t-party and right-wing ranters. Their childish complaints about government and their idolization of the wealthy as “job-providers” doesn’t square at all with history, nor does it reflect anything of the Gospel.

Furthermore, it’s a message being proclaimed in many pulpit, but then, many a pulpit has become nothing more than a message-chair to ease the pains of the life and give us a good night’s sleep. Preachers go on and on about marriage, children, success and self-esteem, while Jesus slips further into the shadows of our forgetfulness.

Yes, this disturbs me deeply.

But my greatest distress is the failure of so many Christians to do anything about it.

Proclaiming the Kingdom

If the church had proclaimed the Kingdom of God, and seriously prayed the Lord's Prayer, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, rather than eternal salvation and the sweet by-and-by, there never would have been a slave trade, or an Andrew Jackson, a "good" Presbyterian, ordering the expulsion of the Cherokee from the Carolinas, nor would there ever have been two World Wars fought by Christian against Christian. Had the church proclaimed the Kingdom of God, Christians would have never tolerated such inhumanity or violence.

With eternal life the goal, no one really cared about the earth and its creatures. Without the kingdom at the center of the church's life, greed and violence rose up and took command. And the clergy, often the beneficiaries of the wealthy, blessed the status quo, promised salvation to the masses, and enjoyed the privilege of the few.

Is this what Jesus had in mind when he announced the Kingdom of God?

Oh well, I'm just saying ...