Steve's Sermon for Susan and Andrew's Wedding

Matthew 19:4-6                                                                                                    May 19, 2012

“Two-in-One”                                                                             Susan & Andrew’s Wedding

         “So a man shall leave his father and mother…” Speaking from a personal point of view, it seems a little unfair that our Lord didn’t mention that a woman also leaves her father and mother. As I know your mother has pointed out to you often this week, Susan, here you are all grown up, a woman, leaving father and mother to be married. And here you are now getting married to a man who is leaving his father and mother to be with you.

         What your mother and I, along with Neil and Kathy, are accepting—in fact, we’re counting on it—is that God has planned this all from the beginning, from the start of creation. In the Gospel lesson, “Look how it all begins” is Jesus’ response to a group of Pharisees who came questioning Him about divorce. Instead of debating fine points of casuistry, He draws our intention to the original intent of marriage. God is “he which made them at the beginning male and female.”

         Jesus is citing Genesis 1:27 as He says God is the one who “made them at the beginning male and female.” In that verse about our creation it also says that God made them in His image. In fact, the two phrases are apposition. To be male and female unpacks and explains what it means to be in God’s image. God in Godself is neither male nor female, but for human beings to fully and completely bear the image of God we needed to be made in two genders, to be given as part of our nature the possibility of relating to each other across a fundamental distinction and difference.

         In that same place in Genesis God said, “Let us make human beings in our image.” We can debate this with any Old Testament scholars in the congregation, but I follow the long established tradition of the Church in saying that the use of the first person plural there is the voice of the Trinity speaking together. That “us” is Father, Son and Holy Spirit declaring their intent to create human beings to reflect the very plurality and relationship that is at the heart of who God is.

         As I began with, the Gospel tells us that Jesus quoted the creation account a little further on in Genesis 2:24, to say “For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh.” What that means is that the relationship between husband and wife is designed to reflect the difference within unity that is basic to God, who is both three and one.

         From all eternity the three persons of God enjoy the wonderful harmony of being and purpose that’s heard there in that “Let us…” by which they created human beings. It’s a perfect dance of being different yet being one. And God intends that marriage, that your marriage, Andrew and Susan, should reflect and become something like the image of that perfect dance.

         You are so much alike. Kathy remarks often and we the rest of your family and friends would all agree that this is a match made in heaven. You both are people born to academics. You both love things ancient and medieval. You both love the outdoors. You congratulate each other on use of the future perfect. Most of all, you share a deep faith in Jesus Christ and love the ancient, traditional ways of His Church.

         Yet you are different. You are male and female. You are extrovert and introvert. You are medievalist and classicist. You are Canadian and American! And soon you will have discovered (give me points there) that you are different in a myriad of other ways that you  only learn as you set up a home together and find yourself wanting to do things in different ways, whether it’s ordering a kitchen or raising children. Sometimes those differences will seem insurmountable. Yet the plan for you is that you will find, with God’s help, a blessed and beautiful unity across those differences.

         Susan, in your love for things Greek, you’ve come to appreciate the icons of the Greek church. They are paintings designed to be windows into heaven, pictures that we look through in order to see spiritual reality. One of the finest things I’ve learned in the past few years is that marriage is meant to be an icon of the Trinity. In desiring husband and wife to be “one flesh,” God means for your relationship, your marriage, to reflect His own perfect relationship of unity to everyone who looks at you and gets to know you.

         It’s a tall order. We are not God. It’s terribly easy for human beings to let our differences push us apart, even when we want desperately to be together, to be one in heart and mind. Jesus addressed that divisive spirit in us as He admonished the Pharisees and everyone else, “What God therefore hath joined together, let no one put asunder.”

         That’s the work of the rest of your lives now, to keep together what God has put together. You told us the other night that you met on a Pentecost Sunday. It’s clear that part of the work of the Holy Spirit that day was to bring you two together. Now as you stand together and offer vows to each other and hear your priest pronounce you husband and wife, the Spirit is at work again to sanctify that union He began two years ago. Then your task will be to let that same Holy Spirit work out and complete that union in all the years before you.

         It’s a tall order. We might wonder just what it would look like to reflect the divine relationship in a human relationship. Fortunately, the Lord doesn’t leave us in the dark about it. Susan, you love recipes and cooking. Andrew, you love music and singing. The Epistle lesson from I Corinthians 13 is the perfect recipe, the perfect score for what it is to be “twain,” to be different people, and yet to come together in a delicious, harmonious relationship in which you are one.

         Holy charity, divine love, is the heart, the glue of the relationship between the persons of God and my prayer is that it will be heart of your relationship, Andrew and Susan. It is charity, love, says the Apostle, which reaches across your “twainness” and holds you together. It’s charity that gives you patience with each other’s differences. It’s charity that makes you kind toward each other when you look at things in different ways. It’s charity that keeps you from envying each other for what one has and the other does not. It’s charity that banishes pride over one another as one of you gets better grades or earns more money.

         I can’t go through it all, but you heard it. It’s charity, God’s love, the love that exists between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that will keep you together. It’s the love by which God forgave us our sins in Jesus Christ, and it’s the love which will allow you to forgive each other when your differences cause each other pain.

         Please just remember that this love which keeps you one is God’s love. It’s His gift. It’s why the Psalmist said, “Except the Lord build the house their labour is but lost that build it.” You can’t do it on your own, but by His grace in Christ, God will build the house of marriage, of being one together, in the two of you.

         Then, as I said, you will fulfill God’s plan for you. Together you will be an icon of God’s own perfect joy and harmony, an icon of the Trinity. And doing that, you will also help fulfill God’s plan for us all. I think you know very well that it’s not all about the two of you. You’ve invited your friends and families to be here today and that’s partly because God’s plan is for everyone to enter into the loving life of the Trinity. Insofar as you reflect and image that life in your marriage, you are helping and blessing all of us to know and live in God’s life ourselves. Your marriage is meant to be God’s gift, God’s icon, to everyone you know, everyone you love.

         So from this day on, learn to be one. Discover what it means to be different and yet together in a holy love that will not be put asunder. Enjoy the harmony of the parts, the blending of the ingredients that are your separate lives, and let them come together to be a new and truly beautiful life in the image of God.

         May the blessing of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, blessed Three-in-One, rest upon you to make you two-in-one now and always.

         Amen.

         Valley Covenant Church
         Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
         Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj

Understanding Mark 4:25

Steve's May 13, 2012  sermon has helped me to finally understand this verse. (By the way, Mark 4:25   not a justification of Republican political theory!)   

"In Acts 10:44-48 we learned how those Gentiles in Cornelius' house listened to the Word as Peter preached and welcomed and believed it. So to the faith they already had, God added the gift of the Holy Spirit, shown by speaking in tongues. Then because no one could then deny that God was at work in them, the Apostles gave them the gift of baptism. TO those who have, more will be given.

On the other hand, if we cover  the lamp with a basket, if we refuse to really listen, then even the light which has come will be taken away, even the message we've heard won't be offered anymore. There will come a day when we won't have the opportunity to see or to listen any further. Even the little light that has managed  to get through will be taken away.

It's not injustice. It's the greatest justice of all. God treats us as we want to be treated. If we want to be with Jesus, if we want to learn from Him, if we give Him our time and attention, then we will receive more and more of His grace. But if we want to hide from him, if we want to be left alone, if we shut out His light and plug our ears, then He will hive us what we want and take away even the tiny bit of light that's gotten through.

The Jewish rabbis had a saying similar to what Jesus says here. They said that for human beings we don't normally add anything to a cup or dish that's full, but that for God it's exactly the cup which has something in it into which God pours more. That's how it is when we listen and respond to Jesus.

God can't work with us if we keep our lives absolutely empty of anything spiritual. It's like you or I trying to work with a computer that has no software on it. Without an operating system, or, at an even deeper level, without some formatting, a hard drive is just a complicated hunk of metal and silicon. It need some information, some structure, before you can add anything else. Our souls are the same way. Until we open them up and let Jesus put a responsive faith there, He can't do anything more with us.

Yet lay down the formatting on the hard drive, install an operating system, then you can add all kinds of software. To the computer that has, much more can be given. You can talk to your friends on Facebook, balance your checking account, read the news, watch a movie, study a foreign language and do thousands of other things, useful or entertaining or both. In the same way, the soul that lets God lay down the basic operating system of faith in Jesus Christ is ready to receive more and more of God's blessing." 

An epitaph to aspire to

  "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing  good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs."   --George Eliot, Middlemarch

KEEPERS: Stanley Fish on Student Evaluations, II

This is the follow up to Fish's original column.  I have always been amazed at the way Asian classrooms are conducted. Students actually thank their teacher when class is over. We could use a little more of that attitude here, I think.
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Student Evaluations, Part Two

By STANLEY FISH

Stanley Fish on education, law and society.

Tags:

evaluations, reader mail, teaching

 

If there is a dominant message in the responses to my column about the dangers of relying on student evaluations to assess teacher performance, it is, “It’s worse than you think.”

Some posters (like this one from Houston) mean that it is worse than I think in Texas, where, it seems, the plot to turn higher education into a training school for right-wing know-nothings is already well advanced. Others, not from Texas, tell me that the future I predicted as a joke — teachers advertising for customers as if they were shills for a floor show — has already arrived along with the predictable bad consequences.

Still others chime in with personal horror stories — the teacher who, after having moved a class to a morning hour in response to student requests, found himself pilloried by those same students for making them get up too early; the teacher who was negatively reviewed by students who had never shown up (they needed to turn in an evaluation in order to get credit for the class they had not attended).

Even students joined the chorus, expressing disgust at colleagues who anonymously settle personal grievances or retaliate for low grades by trashing instructors unable to defend themselves. These anonymous and accountability-free reasons, a former professor complains (he is “former” for just this reason), “can destroy a career that took a decade to train for.” (vero)

They can also lead to the abandoning or blighting of a career. Posters report variously that they left teaching altogether or moved to a foreign country where the “customer” mentality had not yet set in or stuck it out for 30 years while becoming ever more bitter and disillusioned. Even those who are aware that there is little correlation between student evaluations and effective teaching (the preponderance of studies document this non-correlation) and therefore know that negative comments do not reflect an informed judgment are nevertheless pained and humiliated by them: “Even though I know this, they always manage to hurt my feelings and reduce my own personal morale” (Sarah). It is at once a “joke” and a “nightmare” (vero again), a nightmare because it is a joke with teeth.

The deleterious effects of student evaluations extend beyond the personal injuries these comments rehearse; they infect the entire system of higher education. Teachers who fear (correctly) that student evaluations will determine their fate become stand-up comedians — wave your arms around, praise students excessively and “dress sharp,” advises Dr. Bob — and alter their grading policy in an effort to be liked. Since “student evaluations are driven almost entirely by the perception of grades”
(Troglomorphic), grade inflation — “an insidious weed choking out real education” (vince) — “is inevitable.” Once it gets going, grade inflation feeds on itself and initiates a race to the bottom, for “just as teachers in public schools will lessen their effectiveness by teaching to the test, college teachers can lessen their effectiveness by teaching to the evaluation” (Roger Bullard).

Several posters see the ascendance of student evaluations as a reflection of the media-driven obsession with the opinions of the man or woman in the street. It is “part and parcel,” says scottws of “the dreary trend of ubiquitous polling and sampling,” a trend that assumes absurdly that “Katie Couric really cares what I think of BP.” The assumption underlying the soliciting of everyman’s opinions is that expertise is a false currency; we are all, even if we are only 18 years old, the best judges of what affects us: “Who is She or He to say what our policy in the Middle East should be? Just because she’s an expert in it or something ?”(Fulan). After all, the reasoning goes, I know what I like and who are you to tell me anything different? In Craig’s view, this way of thinking is endemic: “people are not willing to be separated into adults and kids anymore . . . This attitude,” he says, “is pervasive and is threatening to destroy not only academia, but with it an important part in human advancement.”

There are, of course, dissenters, and they raise two points: (1) that I display a profound lack of respect for students, and (2) that I offer no alternative to student evaluations and thus seem to leave students, parents and society without protection against bad and unprofessional teaching. (This is a concern expressed by fellow columnist Ross Douthat.) To the first point I would say that I respect students as persons who deserve to be treated with courtesy, which means, minimally, that they should not be harassed or singled out for ridicule or graded up or down on the basis of gender, ethnic, racial or religious affiliation, or sexual orientation. But this courtesy and respect does not extend to their ideas, which may or may not be given a hearing depending on the instructor’s preferred teaching style, and which may be summarily dismissed if they are judged to be beside the pedagogical point. Treat them as human beings with inherent dignity by all means; but don’t treat them as sages before the fact.
And as for ways of monitoring and dealing with irresponsible teaching, here the posters come to my rescue with excellent suggestions. Several propose evaluation forms that determine whether a teacher is doing what he or she is paid to do. “Are grades returned in a timely fashion, does the prof hold office hours, do they show up on time?” (Madison). Questions like that will “detect bad actors” without falling into the error of putting students in charge of their own education.

Another proposal is to base teacher evaluation on student performance in future classes so as “to actually assess whether the learning to be achieved really took place or not” (Thane Doss). John would retain the present practice of evaluation, but with a twist: “May I suggest that Teacher Evaluations be in the form of Essays,” for that would put the burden “on the students’ expository skills and the evaluators’ analytical skills.” A number of posters call for peer review by senior faculty members who would meet with the instructor, offer guidance and constructive criticism and file formal reports that could be reviewed by a chair or dean. (This was the system in place when I was a baby instructor and is no doubt still being used by many colleges and universities.) Each of these ideas deserves consideration, and together they give the lie to the assumption that it is anonymous student evaluations or nothing.

I cannot leave the topic without remarking on the passion voiced by many who took the time to respond. A Teacher lets it all hang out and speaks for many: “Sorry kids, you are not the authority in the classroom. Me Teacher. You student. Me Teach , you learn. End of discussion . . . Education is not a business. You are not my customer. My classroom is not Burger King. You do not get to ‘have it your way.’”

And, finally, I am pleased and amazed to report that one poster actually answered what was thought to be the impossible question: What exactly is good teaching? PES realized years after encountering it that he (or she) had been its beneficiary: “I had learned without knowing it almost, how to see three sides of a twosided story.”

I wish I had said that.

KEEPERS: Stanley Fish on Student Evaluations, I

This article raises an ongoing problem: : what is the  purpose of higher education? Should colleges and universities "be like car dealerships, with an emphasis on the bottom line, efficiency and consumer choice?" Or should they provide the basis for rich intellectual lives, and skills that will enable them to flourish as human beings?  
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Deep in the Heart of Texas

By STANLEY FISH

Stanley Fish on education, law and society.

Tags:

Education, evaluations, teaching, Texas

 

A number of responses to my column about the education I received at Classical High (a public school in Providence, RI) rehearsed a story of late-flowering gratitude after an earlier period of frustration and resentment. “I had a high school (or a college) experience like yours,” the poster typically said, “and I hated it and complained all the time about the homework, the demands and the discipline; but now I am so pleased that I stayed the course and acquired skills that have served me well throughout my entire life.”

Now suppose those who wrote in to me had been asked when they were young if they were satisfied with the instruction they were receiving? Were they getting their money’s worth? Would they recommend the renewal of their teachers’ contracts? I suspect the answers would have been “no,” “no” and “no,” and if their answers had been taken seriously and the curriculum they felt oppressed by had been altered accordingly, they would not have had the rich intellectual lives they now happily report, or acquired some of the skills that have stood them in good stead all these years.

The relationship between present action and the judgment of value is different in other contexts. If a waiter asks me, “Was everything to your taste, sir?”, I am in a position to answer him authoritatively (if I choose to). When I pick up my shirt from the dry cleaner, I immediately know whether the offending spot has been removed. But when, as a student, I exit from a class or even from an entire course, it may be years before I know whether I got my money’s worth, and that goes both ways. A course I absolutely loved may turn out be worthless because the instructor substituted wit and showmanship for an explanation of basic concepts. And a course that left me feeling confused and convinced I had learned very little might turn out to have planted seeds that later grew into mighty trees of understanding.

“Deferred judgment” or “judgment in the fullness of time” seems to be appropriate to the evaluation of teaching.

‘Deferred judgment’ or ‘judgment in the fullness of time’ seems to be appropriate to the evaluation of teaching.

And that is why student evaluations (against which I have inveighed since I first saw them in the ’60s) are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers. 

But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades.

Needless to say, that kind of teaching is unlikely to receive high marks on a questionnaire that rewards the linear delivery of information and penalizes a pedagogy that probes, discomforts and fails to provide closure. Student evaluations, by their very nature, can only recognize, and by recognizing encourage, assembly-line teaching that delivers a nicely packaged product that can be assessed as easily and immediately as one assesses the quality of a hamburger.

Now an entire state is on the brink of implementing just that bite-sized style of teaching under the rubric of “customer satisfaction.” Texas, currently in a contest with Arizona and South Carolina for the title “most retrograde,” is signing on to a plan of “reform” generated by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank dedicated to private property rights and limited government. Backed by Governor Rick Perry (yes, the one who thinks secession is a viable political option), the plan calls for college and university teachers to contract with their customers — that is, students — and to be rewarded by as much as $10,000 depending on whether they meet the contract’s terms. The idea is to hold “tenured professors more accountable” (“A&M regents push reforms,” The Eagle, June 13, 2010), and what they will be accountable to are not professional standards but the preferences of their students, who, in advance of being instructed, are presumed to be authorities on how best they should be taught.

A corollary proposal is to shift funding to the student-customers by giving them vouchers. “Instead of direct appropriations, every Texas high school graduate would get a set amount of state funds usable at any state university” (William Lutz, Lone Star Report, May 23, 2008). Once this gets going (and Texas A&M is already pushing it), you can expect professors to advertise: “Come to my college, sign up for my class, and I can guarantee you a fun-filled time and you won’t have to break a sweat.” If there ever was a recipe for non-risk-taking, entirely formulaic, dumbed-down teaching, this is it. One respondent to the June 13 story in The Eagle got it exactly right: “In the recent past, A&M announced that it wanted to be a top ten public university. Now it appears to be announcing it wants to be an investment firm, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, and a car dealership.”

The people behind this cockamamie scheme wouldn’t be fazed by this description or regard it as an accusation. They actively want their colleges and universities to be like car dealerships, with an emphasis on the bottom line, efficiency and consumer choice. This means that the middleman has to be cut out, and in this case the middleman is the faculty member. Jeff Sandefer, whose presentation at a 2008 meeting with Governor Perry and the university Board of Regents established the tone and contours of “reform,” makes no bones about it. Professors, he complains, seem to believe “that our colleges and universities belong to them” (“Public Universities Belong to the Public, Not the Faculty,” Texas Public Policy Foundation, May 6, 2009). It’s time, he says, to stop writing “blank checks” to faculty members who occupy themselves “writing academic journal articles that few people read.”
That of course is an accurate description. Senior faculty members do in fact write articles that only their peers at the top of very rarefied disciplines can read.

The Texas ‘reform plan’ is just that; its so called reforms would be funny were they not so dangerous.

That is what academic research is all about: highly qualified scholars working on problems that may have no practical payoff except the unquantifiable payoff of advancing our understanding of something in philosophy or nature that has long been a mystery.

More than occasionally in these columns I have mocked the pretensions of those faculty members who cry “academic freedom” at the slightest infringement of what they take to be their god-given liberty. But academic freedom does in fact have a meaning and a legitimate purpose: it protects faculty members from external constituencies intent on taking over the enterprise for mercenary or political reasons. The Texas “reform plan” is just that; its so called reforms would be funny were they not so dangerous. And it all began with student evaluations, or, rather, with the mistake of taking them seriously. Since then, it’s been all downhill.


raises an ongoing problem: : what is the  purpose of higher education? Should colleges and universities "be like car dealerships, with an emphasis on the bottom line, efficiency and consumer choice?" Or should they provide the basis for rich intellectual lives, and skills that will enable them to flourish as human beings?

"Exclusionary Property Rights Require Deism"

Brad Boydston posted this, and I agree:

I'm not ready to write off Dave Ramsey (while there are points of weakness in his system and his theology I think the overall impact of what he is doing is positive). However, David Dunn is on target with his insights about how we use the Old Testament to understand God. Ramsey might say the Jubilee is impractical or that Christians are not obligated to follow the Old Testament. But he misses the point. Christians believe all Scripture offers insight into the mind of God, and the Jubilee suggests that God and Dave Ramsey are of two minds about "wealth redistribution." ~ David Dunn (an entrepreneurial theologian who doesn't squeeze well into anyone's cubby hole) http://goo.gl/T1r7i Christians need to have a solid discussion about the concepts of "social contract" and "exclusionary property" without someone screaming "Socialist!" or attributing it all to "envy." We by-pass the hard work of discerning what is right and just when we shove all ideas into political paradigms.

Dave Ramsey's Deism and the Economics of Jubilee
Posted: 12/01/11 11:20 AM ET
by David Dunn

Even though the Christian financial "guru" Dave Ramsey claims not to understand Occupy Wall Street, he does know why protesters (and by extension most Americans) want to raise taxes on the wealthy: We are sinners. "At the core of this demand [to raise taxes]," he says, "is envy."

This judgment is not just offensive and wrong (see my last post) but sadly ironic: Dave Ramsey tells people to bring the Bible to their personal finances, so he should know that God's economy is all about (what he scornfully calls) "wealth redistribution."

Being a theologian, I could talk about how sharing in the life of the Trinity obligates us to share our lives with others, but another excuse to "spiritualize" our wallets is the last thing we need. I am also tempted to "tear apart" Ramsey's caricature of the "Occupy" movement (it may truly be one of the finest examples of a "straw man fallacy" I have ever seen). But I respect Dave Ramsey as a fellow Christian and a person who has helped free thousands of families from crushing debt. (He does "God's work.") Therefore I will focus on the practical, theological root of his economic "heresy."

Ramsey says, "When someone takes my money and gives me no say in the matter, that's called theft -- whether they're using a gun or the government." Though this statement begs the question and shows a desperate need to Google "social contract," it is most troublesome because of its exclusionary theology of property. Or as toddlers say, "Mine!" This doctrine does not come from Ramsey's Christian faith.

Exclusionary property rights require Deism. Deists in the 17th and 18th centuries compared God to a watchmaker: God designed the universe, wound it up, then went on vacation until the end of infinity. They said divine hands never dirtied themselves with human affairs.

Prior to Deism, "The earth ... and all its fullness" belonged to God (Psalms 24:1), and people had inherent worth because they bore the divine image (naturally, I am simplifying the history quite a bit). That changed when this mechanistic metaphor took over. British policymakers "privatized" common land that had sustained families for generations, and they used the threat of starvation (allegedly God's way of discouraging laziness) to grow the modern labor market.

When everything is a "gear" or "cog" in a large machine, nature can become a private commodity and a person's value can be judged by her productive capacity.

The biblical God -- the God with dirty hands -- does not tolerate such policies.

If we are truly the possessions of a loving God (Leviticus 25:23), then rights must be regulated by needs. In contrast to the deistic view Leviticus 25 (the closest thing the Bible offers to a clear economic "policy") presents a more "open" theology of people and property. That is why this chapter gives more rights to the poor than the rich, saying that a person who falls into poverty, and sells his property to survive, has the right to buy it back at any time (with some exceptions). Or a relative may but it back for him.

This "policy" does not exactly qualify as what Ramsey calls "theft" (yet) but it does not support his deistic concept of exclusionary property, either. If Ramsey says nobody has a right to take his "stuff," then I assume he believes nobody has a right to make him sell it, either. Though he agrees that everything we have comes from God, which is why he rightly stresses private giving, he sadly fails to let that belief get in the way of his laissez faire economics. Otherwise he might not be so quick to condemn progressive tax reform.

What Ramsey calls "wealth redistribution" the Bible calls "Jubilee." That same chapter goes on to prescribe an economic "Sabbath" to take place every 50 years. The most prominent feature of this Jubilee year is the requirement that all property be returned to its original owners. Thus, twice a century God would "level the playing field" between the rich (who had accumulated property) and the poor (who had lost it). This kept the poor from ever becoming too poor, and the rich too rich, over multiple generations.

Ramsey might say the Jubilee is impractical or that Christians are not obligated to follow the Old Testament. But he misses the point. Christians believe all Scripture offers insight into the mind of God, and the Jubilee suggests that God and Dave Ramsey are of two minds about "wealth redistribution."

Besides, the economics of Jubilee do appear in the New Testament as the "kingdom of God." Those three little words make us modern people think of "heaven" (with puffy white clouds and possibly harps), but it was a technical, theological term for Jesus and his fellow Jews. The kingdom of God meant social and especially economic justice.

Prophets like Amos (4-5) and Isaiah (59-66) proclaimed a day of judgment on those who oppressed the poor, which would also be a day of feasting for their victims. Or as Jesus' mother sang (Luke 1:52-53),

    "[God] has put down the mighty from their thrones,
    And exalted the lowly.
    He has filled the hungry with good things,
    And the rich He has sent away empty."

Jesus' audience "marveled" when he proclaimed "good news" for the poor (Luke 4:18, 22) and (some scholars think) maybe even a new Jubilee (v. 19), words he later elaborated on, saying, "Blessed are you poor, For yours is the kingdom of God ... But woe to you who are rich, For you have received your consolation" (6:20, 24). It takes some spry intellectual gymnastics to make those words not mean "wealth redistribution."

The kingdom has not come, but Mary did not praise a God who "will put down," nor did Jesus say, "Tomorrow, this Scripture will be fulfilled..." (see Luke 4:21). The Bible assumes that God's kingdom has begun in Christ Jesus. Thus, the social and economic reordering he proclaimed should already be happening.

It also indicates that what our word "heaven" means -- the kingdom of God -- looks a lot like Dave Ramsey's economic hell.

Someone who truly believes God's kingdom is a place where the "first will be last, and the last first" (Matt 19:30) should think twice before implying people who do not agree with him are sinners. Some of us are his sisters and brothers. Many Christians want to see higher taxes for the rich because the mission of the church is not "private." We must "lean" into our future hope -- the hope of social justice and wealth redistribution far more radical than anything Occupy Wall Street has demanded -- working toward the economics Jubilee as if the kingdom of God were already among us (Luke 17:21). Because it is.

Teaching Economics by Playing Monopoly

Dear Joanna,

Here's a novel idea for teaching economic philosophy--play "rigged Monopoly."  Now that you've read Adam Smith and Karl Marx, this might be fun to do with your classmates in Soc. 

I love this part:

In fact the "invisible hand" is attached to the "invisible arm" of an entrenched plutocracy that will strangle anyone who suggests it give its power back to the people.

Love,

Mamma

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"It's the Democracy, Stupid!": The "Vague" Goals of the Other 99%
Posted: 10/31/11 05:20 PM ET
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-j-dunn-phd/its-the-democracy-stupid-_b_1067304.html

Some conservative punditry has claimed to be flummoxed by the "vague" goals of the "Occupy" protests happening across the country. I will grant that there is some truth to this complaint. In their early days, "patchwork" protests often lack a clear and unified voice. Still, no one with a basic understanding of history or an ounce of empathy should be surprised or confused by the outrage of "The Other 99%."

Perhaps an example will make things clearer. For several summers I have taught a course on "Consumerism in Society" to gifted and talented teenagers. To help my students think about the way the market works, and especially how it affects real people, I have them play Monopoly. But I modify the rules to make the game more realistic. Normally all players start with the same amount of money, but in my version a couple of players get ten times more than most, while others have next to nothing.

I do it this way because in many ways life is "rigged." A lot of the circumstances that shape our future are basically accidents. We Americans with our pioneer spirits like the idea of folks pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but this assumes they have boots. Whether we are raised by absent, alcoholic parents or given every advantage and opportunity is basically a roll of the dice. (As a theologian, I know I should say something about divine Providence, but I have a hard time thinking that kids raised by meth dealers are somehow all "part of God's plan.") Chances are most Americans will be born middle class, which means that if we stay out of trouble, work hard, and go to college, we can look forward to graduating with $24,000 worth of student loan debt and no job prospects.

People are not protesting because the economy is bad. Most middle class Americans can weather a bad economy, even one as bad as this. What is sending people to the streets is an ever-growing awareness that the system is dysfunctional. America is not ruled "by the people" but a cabal of plutocrats. Republican representatives have proven themselves crazy enough to hold America hostage to the wealthy, while the leaders who promised to fundamentally "change" the system back in 2008 have proven they have no spines.

"The Other 99%" are backed into a corner, and that is a dangerous place to be. I am not saying the protesters will turn violent. Though the first law of group dynamics states that whenever a large crowd gathers, somebody will do something stupid, most of the "occupiers" have been peaceful. My point is actually that this pervasive feeling of powerlessness is the sign of an increasingly unstable, failing state. At least that is what the history suggests.

Most of us are familiar with the cycles of "boom" and "bust," but the economic sociologist, Karl Polanyi, noticed another kind of "double movement" at work in market-driven societies like ours. Libertarians clamor to "let the market do its job." They say that when we commit our government regulations, food stamps, and social security checks to the flames, a glorious capitalist utopia will rise up from the ashes. So the state begins to loosen the leash on business and industry. That is when the second movement occurs. The advantage to libertarian arguments is that the market they want has never actually existed because "We the people" just will not allow it to come into being. We fight back! We take to the streets and in "vague" slogans demand to be protected from the market! To see why, I need to say a bit more about Monopoly.™

My "middle class" and "poor" students are a little indignant when they learn that some players start out with an advantage, but many believe they can win if they just play the game "better" than everybody else. They are wrong. The "poorest" players get eliminated fairly quickly. The "middle class" players hang on a bit longer, but soon almost everyone is discouraged. By the time I end the game, the rich have gotten richer (sometimes a lot richer) and almost everyone else is worse off or "out."

I usually play this game before I have my class read Marx because it is easy to dismiss economic "bad guys," but I want my students to begin thinking about what it must be like to work hard, make good decisions, and still lose. It is an exercise in empathy.

It seems to work. When we talk about the "rigged" game, most students complain that I was not being "fair." Many say they just "gave up" when they figured out they could not win no matter how hard they tried. That is when the light bulbs begin to go on. "What happens if you give up in real life?" I ask them. "What happens if you are 'eliminated?'" Slowly the significance of the game begins to dawn on them.

They answer back with, "We die."

Libertarians usually leave that part out of their brochures. John Stewart recently asked Judge Andrew Napolitano the same question I ask my students, and he was extremely reluctant to answer. It is not hard to see why! According to his view, if you make bad decisions, or even if you just get a bad roll of the dice, the market's job is to kill you!

Some might object that I am denying "free will." I seem to be saying that people who ruin their lives by joining gangs or doing drugs are not responsible for their actions. Actually, I believe they are as responsible as the rich kid who gets busted for smoking weed in the high school parking lot. The difference is that one's parents can afford a good lawyer, while the other gets an over-worked public defender. One is insulated from his mistakes, while the other goes to jail for a very long time ("Do not pass 'Go!' Do not collect $200!"). As my students would say, that isn't fair.

Some will probably dismiss me as a "socialist" for saying this, but a democracy cannot survive without fairness. That is why we instituted graduated income taxes and safety nets in the first place. The point is not to give "handouts" but create opportunities through affordable medical care, nutrition programs, educational interventions, and grants and scholarships. Even public transportation creates opportunities by increasing one's areas of possible employment. The point is never to make everyone socio-economic equals, but to give everyone an equal chance to live a meaningful and productive life.

Such programs are increasingly being slashed (often with great enthusiasm), and many of us feel powerless to do anything about it. That is why people are taking to the streets. It is part of the "double movement" of history. Market liberals sow the seeds of their own undoing by gleefully backing ordinary folks up against a wall until they have no choice but to start pushing back.

Historically, when large populations feel suffocated by a "rigged" system, one of two things can happen. Sometimes the state becomes a little more "socialist," which is another way of saying that ordinary people have a greater say in how they want the economy to affect them.

Other times the rich double-down. Police get more violent. Unrest gets more widespread and intense. Sometimes governments fail, and then anything can happen, but it is usually bad.

I do not want to sound like a Jeremiah. Historical analogies can be tricky. There are always exceptions. Still, either scenario suggests it is in the self-interest of those who think (against the evidence) that our "democracy" has hamstrung the market, or that flat taxes would be "awesome," to give a little ground on their ideological commitments.

Libertarian mythology about smaller government and a free market is completely baseless. Only an extremely powerful, extremely intrusive state can subject people to the whims of the market. Effective regulations and a social safety net are not the goals of the protesters but the signs of a functioning democracy.

Democracy is all the protesters want - the power of the people to protect themselves from the self-interest of those with the resources to circumvent the obligations of our social contract. Libertarians would have us believe the "invisible hand" of the market is indifferent, and therefore fair. (While others assume it is the hand of God, but clearly they have never read Adam Smith or the Bible.) In fact the "invisible hand" is attached to the "invisible arm" of an entrenched plutocracy that will strangle anyone who suggests it give its power back to the people.

We can come back from this. The "Occupy" movement does have some specific policy goals, which involve restricting corporate influence in congress and giving the other 99% of us a voice in government again. People are shouting into megaphones because that voice is lost. History shows us what can happen when people like us get pushed into the corner we are in now. Our democracy has been taken from us, and we want it back. It is broken, and we need to fix it.

Either that, or we die.

What is missing at Barack Hussein Obama's press conference?

I just got this from my tea bagger uncle. Perhaps you have seen it, or one of its permutations? 

It is just plain nasty gossip. "rotten to the decor," as Snopes puts it.
For the truth, please see
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/photos/ovaloffice.asp
and http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/o/Obama-East-Room-Flag-Flap.htm
and http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_obama_press_conference.htm

I cannot see how spreading rumors honors our Lord! There's plenty of real issues that deserve our attention without having to address what is at best an urban legend, and at worst, an out-and-out lie.


Proverbs 16:27-29 (TNIV)
Scoundrels plot evil, and on their lips it is like a scorching fire
The perverse stir up dissension, and gossips separate close friends.
The violent entice their neighbors and lead them down a path that is not good.

Lord, deliver us!

Why the Crucifixion Was Not Divine Child Abuse

The crucifixion was not divine child abuse, nor was the Trinity divided. Yet another reason I agree with P.P. Waldenstrom: man, not God, was the object of the Atonement; and God was the initiator, not the recipient of the work of reconciliation in Christ. This one is a keeper!  


He's Calling For Elijah! Why We Still Mishear Jesus


by Al Hsu

When the Jesus film is screened in cultures that have never heard of Jesus, the viewers often love the movie and get completely wrapped up in the story. But the crucifixion comes as an utter shock. Many audiences jump up and cry out in protest. This can't be. This is not how the story should end. The crucifixion of Jesus has always been profoundly disturbing. For me, what's most troubling is not the unjust trial, how the crowd turns against Jesus, or how his disciples abandon him. The most troubling part is one line. Mark 15, verse 34: "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") This line horrifies me. It calls into question the very nature of God. Is God the kind of God that turns his back on his Son? Does God abandon those who cry out to him? How could God forsake the perfect God-man, the only one who has ever served him perfectly? Because if Jesus was truly forsaken by God, what's preventing God from forsaking any of us? How could we ever trust him to be good?

The Apologetic Challenge

 These have always been important questions, addressed at various lengths since the early church. But now it has become a serious apologetic emergency. In a more rationalist era, people believed in Christianity on the basis of truth. We proved the reliability of the Gospels, gave evidence for the resurrection, argued that Christianity was historically verifiable. Believe in Jesus, we said, because Christianity is true. But then culture shifted. Many people didn't accept absolute truth claims anymore. So we turned to pragmatic appeals. Believe in Jesus, we said, because Christianity works. Come to Jesus because he'll change your life. The proof is in the pudding. Christians are happier, healthier, live longer, and so on. But the appeal has its limits. Christians are not immune to all the troubles and trials of life. Christians get divorced at only a marginally lower rate than their neighbors.

 So we shifted our appeal again, proclaiming that Christianity is real. It's not fake, it's not artificial. For people sick of being marketed to and being presented with a pre-packaged religion, we could offer the authentic Jesus, not religion. This strategy especially resonated with Gen Xers in the '90s, who blanched at "victory in Jesus" sermons and songs that omitted any sense of pain. A generation that experienced broken families, broken relationships, and broken lives needed to know that God could understand. Jesus suffered and died. As John Stott said in his classic book The Cross of Christ, "I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?" So Christianity is real because Jesus is real. He lived in the real world, and he really suffered and died. But today, that's not enough. The cultural questions have shifted once again.

Today's young adults have come of age in a world of terrorism, a clash of civilizations, religiously motivated violence, and new extremisms. Now the question is whether religion of any kind is of any good. Does it just incite crusades and inquisitions, holy war and jihad? It's not just if Christianity is true, works, or is real. Is it good? Is Christianity good for the world? Is the God of Christianity a good God?

Is the Cross Divine Child Abuse?

This brings us back to Jesus' cry on the cross. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? One of the major objections that today's new atheists have about Christianity is that the Christian God is not worth believing in. They argue that Christianity is a primitive backwards religion of punitive bloodlust, of a father who kills his own son. The Cross is divine child abuse, they say. Fathers should love their children, not abandon them, not torture them, not kill them. If the Christian God forsakes his own child, how could he be worthy of worship? We don't respect human child abusers—why would we believe in a God who forsakes his own perfect son? Christians usually respond that God had to turn his back on Jesus because Jesus took on the sin of the whole world, and God can't look upon sin, so he turned away. We hear this in sermons and worship songs. "The Father turns his face away." "God can't stand sin, so he turned his back on Jesus."

On one level this provides a tidy theological answer. But at a more visceral, emotional level, it's still unsatisfying. In our own families, when a child has erred, we might get mad at them. But would we forsake them? Abandon them? Kill them? There was a case last year of parents with a very strict form of discipline. They thought their daughter was "rebellious," so they starved her and beat her. They locked their daughter out of the house in the middle of winter. She froze to death. We call that child abuse.

Is that what God did to Jesus? Left him on the cross to die?

This also raises the theological problem of the broken Trinity. Christians are Trinitarian; we believe that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, eternally united in purpose and divine love. But does the Father break fellowship with the Son on the cross? Are they pitted against each other?

Cross-Cultural Perspectives

We in the West live in a predominantly guilt-based culture; we tend to think in terms of guilt and punishment. When someone is guilty, they must be punished. So if Jesus took on our guilt and sin, the punishment is death. God's justice must be satisfied, so Jesus must be executed. It's disturbing, but that's how we understand the story.

But much of the world, including the ancient biblical world, thinks less in terms of guilt and more in terms of shame and honor. A few years ago I read the book The Bookseller of Kabul, about life in Afghanistan. And some of the most disturbing parts were the descriptions of honor killings. A woman somehow brings shame to a family, and she is killed to take away the shame and to restore honor. It doesn't matter if she committed adultery or was raped. It doesn't matter if she was the perpetrator or the victim. If she has been made impure, the impurity must be removed to restore family honor. And in many cases, a father will kill his daughter. Or a woman's brothers will kill her. It will be described as an accident, but everybody knows what happened.

So modern objections to Christianity say that this is the essence of Christian teaching on the Cross. God's son has been made impure, tainted by the sin of the world. So God restores his honor by killing his son. This puts us Christians in a bind. If we defend this theology of the Cross, then it seems like our Christianity does the same thing as honor killings in Afghanistan. And we lose our basis for saying that those honor killings are wrong, because our God does the same thing. Does he?

I find it interesting that Matthew and Mark tell us that some of the hearers misheard Jesus. That opens up the possibility that the same has been true for others, and for us. Have we misunderstood this cry from the cross? The crucifixion narratives do not explicitly tell us what Jesus' cry meant. Both Matthew and Mark record the cry, but neither unpacks the meaning. They just let it stand. Neither actually says that God turned his face away, turned his back on Jesus, or abandoned him. That's an assumption that we bring to the text. It doesn't come from the passage itself.

Making a Reference

Here's the key biblical insight that changed everything for me in how I read this passage. It's a simple historical fact about how Israelites cited their Scriptures. They didn't identify passages by chapter numbers or verse numbers. Verse numbers weren't invented yet. Their Scriptures did not have little numbers in the text. So how they referenced a passage was to quote it, especially the first line. So the book of Genesis, in Hebrew, is not called Genesis. It's called, "In the beginning." Exodus is "Names." We similarly evoke a larger body of work with just a line of allusion: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." or "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

That's why Jesus often says, "It is written" or "You have heard it said." He doesn't say, "Deuteronomy 8:3 says this." No, he says, "It is written, 'Man does not live by bread alone.' " That's just the way they did it.

So when Jesus says, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he's saying, "Psalm 22." He expected his hearers to catch the literary allusion. And his hearers should have thought of the whole thing, not just the first verse: "I am … scorned by everyone, despised by the people. All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads. … I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax. … My mouth is dried up … my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death. … All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment."

Is Jesus saying "I have been forsaken by God"? No. He's declaring, "Psalm 22! Pay attention! This psalm, this messianic psalm, applies to me! Do you see it? Do you see the uncanny way that my death is fulfilling this psalm?"

Jesus has done this before. At the beginning of his ministry, in Luke 4, he read the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue, saying, "The spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Then to make things completely clear, he said, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

That's what Jesus is saying on the cross. When he says, "My God, my God," he's saying, "Psalm 22. Today Psalm 22 is fulfilled in your hearing. I am the embodiment of this psalm. I am its fulfillment."

A Psalm of Lament and Vindication

Psalm 22 is one of many psalms that fit a particular lyrical pattern. We call them the psalms of lament. They usually begin with a complaint to God, rehearsing the wrongs and injustices that have been experienced by the psalmist. Psalm 5: "Listen to my words, Lord. Consider my lament." Psalm 10: "Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?" Psalm 13: "How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?" Psalm 74: "O God, why have you rejected us forever?"

This is a common pattern in the Psalms. This opening lament usually goes on for a stanza or two. But then the psalm pivots. The psalmist remembers the works of God, and the psalm concludes on a note of hope. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says that these psalms were Israel's way of ordering their grief and making sense of their sorrow. Today, we'd call it "processing." They would recount their troubles, but by the end of the psalm, they declared their confidence in God.

That's what's happening in Psalm 22. It starts out with the psalmist feeling forsaken and abandoned. "Why have you forsaken me? … I cry out by day, but you do not answer." But he's not literally forsaken, any more than the other psalms mean that God was literally forgetting the psalmist forever. It's expressing how the psalmist felt at the time.

But that's not the end of the story. Like the other psalms of lament, there's a pivot point. Several, in fact. Verse 9: "Yet you brought me out of the womb … from my mother's womb you have been my God." Verse 19: "But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me." The psalm is not a psalm of forsakenness. It starts out that way, but it shifts to confidence in God's deliverance. Verse 22: "I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you." And here's the key verse, verse 24: "For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help."

Here is a direct refutation of the notion that the Father turned his face away from the Son. But the refutation is not as important as the pivot. Jesus is declaring: Right now, you are witnessing Psalm 22. I seem forsaken right now, but my death is not the end of the story. God has not despised my suffering. I will be vindicated. The Lord has heard my cry. Because death is not the end. Verse 30–31: "Future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!"

Jesus is not saying that God has forsaken him. He's declaring the opposite. He's saying that God is with him, even in this time of seeming abandonment, and that God will vindicate him by raising him from the dead.

The closest modern analogy I can come up with might be something like this. Imagine that later on this election year, this summer, the President is on the campaign trail. And despite his security, an assassin gets in and shoots him. As the President falls to the ground, he says, "I still have a dream." And then he dies.

Now imagine everybody saying, "Hmmm, his last words were 'I still have a dream.' I wonder what that means. What was his dream? Was he napping on the campaign bus? What was it about?" No, we'd all recognize that he was making an allusion to Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech. He'd be saying that this dream is still alive, that it did not stop with MLK's death, and it would not stop with his.

It's the same way with "My God, my God" on the cross. It's a biblical allusion, and the point of Psalm 22 is not about being forsaken. After all, David wrote Psalm 22. Was David saying that God had forsaken him forever? No. The literary genre of the psalm of lament shows that David was saying that he felt like God had forsaken him. That the odds were against him. That things looked really bad right then. But that was not the end of the story. David still had confidence that God would hear his cry. God did not abandon David. And God did not abandon Jesus. The clearest evidence of that, besides the rest of Psalm 22, is Jesus' final words on the cross, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." The Father had not forsaken him. God was still his Father. Jesus was still his Son.

The Trinity Unbroken

This goes a long way to correct mistaken notions of divine child abuse, or of a God who might be righteous or holy but not loving or good. If we understand Psalm 22, we see Jesus declaring his confidence that God will hear his cry, that even in the face of death, he will be vindicated. Jesus on the cross is every bit as connected to his heavenly Father as he had been his entire earthly life. Jesus could trust in the goodness of God. God would raise him from the dead.

This corrects the dangerous tendency to divide the Trinity. Sometimes we tell the crucifixion story as if God is against Jesus. But Jesus said that he and the Father are one. They can't be divided. The Trinity was not broken. God doesn't execute his son. Rather, God in Christ takes the bullet to save humanity. Jesus and the Father together are united in their solidarity with each other and with humanity. The enemy is evil and death. Together the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit disarm the powers of evil through the Cross.

Sometimes Christians emphasize God's holiness so much that they isolate themselves from anything that might taint that. I read a book a few months ago that mentioned someone who had been divorced, and his church completely shunned him. They could not talk with him, could not have any contact with him, lest his divorce infect the rest of the church. They thought that was the Christian thing to do.

But Jesus did not forsake people or turn his back on them like that. No sin was too great for him to bear. He never pushed people away and said, Sorry, you're yucky. I can't have dinner with you. I can't be in your presence. No, touching a sinner didn't make Jesus impure. It was the other way around: Jesus made the sinner clean. If Jesus on the cross welcomes the thief next to him into paradise, then we can be pretty sure that this reflects the heart of God to us.

So even if Jesus bore the sin of the world on the cross, that doesn't mean God turned away as if he couldn't handle it. No, God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.

Theologian Thomas McCall of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School has just written a book on this topic called Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters (InterVarsity Press, 2012). He emphatically states that there is nothing in Scripture that says that the Father rejected the Son. McCall says that the only sense in which Jesus was forsaken was in the very limited sense that the Father did indeed let Jesus die on the cross. But their relationship was unbroken. This is like parents sending kids off to school or college. We acknowledge the physical separation, but the relationship is unbroken. Or when a family sends a soldier off to battle. The parents let the soldier go do what must be done, but their love and affection is unbroken.

Not the End of the Story

So from here on out, whenever we think of Jesus' cry, let's first remember that the beginning is not the end of the story. We might be feeling forsaken right now. We might feel like we've been abandoned by God. That's where we all start, in our fallenness, our forsakenness, our distance from God. But there's a pivot point, at the Cross and in our lives. Jesus' rescue mission was to seek us and save us. So just as Psalm 22 doesn't stop with verse 1, so too does our own story continue through the rest of the psalm. Verse 26: "The poor will eat and be satisfied"—that's us! "Those who seek the Lord will praise him"—that's us! "May your hearts live forever"—that's us! Our story starts in forsakenness, but it ends with us living forever with the Lord.

Those first few words—My God, my God—remind us that God is not a theoretical abstraction. He is personal. He is our God. The gospel of John ends with Thomas touching the hands and feet of Jesus and declaring, "My Lord and my God!" Even in death, Jesus declared, "My God, my God." And that is our cry as well. Father, into your hands we commit our spirit. When we face death, we turn to Jesus and see the face of God. Jesus is my God, my God.

When I think back to September 11, 2001, one image sticks with me more than any other. From the top of the Twin Towers, people fell to their deaths. Many jumped to escape the flames. But in the midst of that horrible day, there were pairs of people who held each other's hands, and jumped together. We don't know if they were couples, if they knew each other or were total strangers. But in that terrible moment, someone reached out to another and took their hand. They were saying, "You are not alone. I will face this with you. I will be with you to the very end. I will die with you."

And that's what Jesus said to us from that cross. Jesus declared to the world, You do not face life and death on your own. I will share your humanity and mortality. I will face death with you.

Jesus takes us by the hand and says, You are not alone in this. I will be with you. You may feel forsaken. But Jesus promises, Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you. I will die with you. I will die for you. And my God, my God and I will subvert death from within.

Death is not the end of the story. Jesus was not forsaken. Neither are we.

Al Hsu is an editor at InterVarsity Press. This article is adapted from a sermon preached at Church of the Savior in Wheaton, Illinois, where he serves on the vestry as senior warden.