Today read Matthew Chapter 23 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.
Questions for Reflection
Today read Matthew Chapter 22 and Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.
Questions for Reflection
Last night at Ikon we kicked off Holy Week with our Palm Sunday gathering and today we begin a series of readings leading up to Easter. You are welcome to participate with us here or at the Ikon Community website.
Today read Matthew Chapter 21 and Zechariah 9:9-17 and contribute your thoughts to the comments below.
Questions for Reflection
Psalm 145: 3-9
“Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise;
His greatness no one can fathom.” (v3)
David is at it again. Here he is, harp in hand, singing of the greatness of God. Only this time David says God is so great that mere mortals cannot even comprehend it, no individual expression of praise can possibly contain it. Its not enough for one man to sing of the Lord’s power and might, no, David says,
“One generation will commend your works to another;
They will tell of your mighty acts.” (v4)
David has glimpsed the greatness of God, and has seen that it is beyond the ability of mere individuals to proclaim it. Indeed, David sees generation after generation spilling forth praise, still unable to contain the vastness of God’s glory. Individuals aren’t enough to proclaim his greatness, generations aren’t enough! Will even eternity be long enough for the people of God to exhaustively proclaim the wonder of his great works! I think not. (Rev 19:1-9)
So David joins with the generations of the people of God, responding to their call and answering their summons to give God Glory,
“They will speak of the glorious splendor of your majesty,
And I will meditate on your wonderful works.
They will tell of the power of your awesome works,
And I will proclaim your great deeds.
They will celebrate your abundant goodness
And joyfully sing of your righteousness.” (v5-7)
But what exactly are God’s “wonderful works,” David, what are his “great deeds?” Is it his creation of the universe, the awesome power of thunder and lightning and earthquakes, or the splendor of the sun and moon? Or, perhaps it is His mighty deeds on behalf of his people, the liberation from bondage in Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea, or the miraculous provision of water and manna in the desert? Certainly these come to mind when dwelling on the greatest works of God.
Yet, in addition to these, David has something even greater in mind and it is to this greatest of all acts of God that David know turn his attention in the middle climax of this song,
“The Lord is gracious and compassionate,
Slow to anger and rich in love.
The Lord is good to all;
He has compassion on all He has made.” (v8-9)
David knows, there is no act of God quite so great as his unfailing compassion and mercy. For this reason, generation after generation, we seek to praise him into eternity.
Jonah 4:1-4 – “Too Much Mercy?”
But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the LORD, “O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
But the LORD replied, “Have you any right to be angry?”
Sometimes, it seems, God is too merciful. Its one thing to relieve the suffering of those who are sick, or injured, or suffering unjustly, but what about those who are lazy or wicked? Aren’t we sending the wrong message when we extend a helping hand to those who seem to refuse to work, acknowledge God, or do what is right?
This is Jonah’s problem exactly. God sent him to the Assyrians – a wicked and morally depraved people – with a message of repentance, and Job, knowing full well the abundance of God’s mercy, does everything he can to avoid bringing that message of hope. Why? Because he knows God will forgive them completely, and Jonah has decided they don’t deserve God’s mercy.
We have a problem with genuine mercy. We’d much prefer people earn our alms, if not through their efforts then at least through their overwhelming gratitude. But sometimes, our hardness runs even deeper. Sometimes we have simply judged certain people to be beyond the privilege of mercy. We all do. What is it for you? Perhaps its people who seem lazy or ungrateful, or wear certain clothes or have certain jobs, or have no jobs at all; perhaps its people who have committed a certain kind of crime; or perhaps its people of a certain religion.
Our problem is that we often come to believe that mercy is the privilege of certain kinds of people, but, in fact, mercy is God’s privilege alone and He extends mercy to whomever He pleases. Just as He said to Moses “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” (Ex 33:19)
By displaying his anger in the sight of the repentant Assyrians, Jonah reveals not only his judgment of the Assyrians, but ultimately his judgment of God. Jonah simply believes he knows best who should and who should not be granted mercy. Like Jonah our problem is that we often judge God.
Its no surprise then that God responds by challenging Jonah’s anger. Our response to the mercy of God should always be rejoicing, for mercy is never the vindication of peoples sins, rather it is the demonstration of God’s power and glory at work in the world in spite of sin.
“Rend Your Heart”
Rend your heart
and not your garments.
Return to the Lord your God,
for he is gracious and compassionate
Slow to anger, abounding in love,
and he relents from sending calamity.~ Joel 2:13
Every expression of worship is in danger of becoming empty religion. Here, the people of God are suffering from trouble and distress. Their “food has been cut off…the storehouses are in ruin, the granaries have been broken down” and as a result, “joy and gladness” have also been cut off from the house of God (Joel 1:16-17).
Rending, or tearing and ripping, one’s own clothing was an outward sign of grief for people living at this time, so it was common for God’s people to practice this as an expression of their repentance. At its best, it was a bold and public proclamation, an outward confession. It must have been powerful when practiced sincerely.
However, like all outward expressions it could easily fade into meaningless ritual, or worse, a public performance conducted for the admiration of others.
God is not interested when we put on a good show. The Lord does not merely want our clothes, or our money, or our empty words sung mindlessly like a thousand times before. God longs for the sacrifice of our hearts. For the Lord, true worship is born upon the wings of passion and grief, frustration and beseeching, affection and love. No activity is the true worship of God if it does not spring forth from a root deeply entrenched in an inward reality of devotion. Therefore Paul declares “…a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man’s praise is not from men, but from God.” (Romans 2:29)
But as little as God cares for empty religious expression his frustration seems to be especially provoked by those who conduct their rituals for the praise of other men. Jesus had harsh words for those who put on a religious show saying, “When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.” (Matt 6:16) This is a sobering passage. All the Pharisees wanted was the admiration of other men, and Jesus say’s that is all they received. What a paltry reward!
We must align the posture of our hearts with the posture of our bodies and squarely face the crucified Christ, realizing again the agony he suffered and the price he paid on our behalf. We must face his humility and his holiness, his sacrifice and his sanctity, for there we remember the grief of our own pride and un-holiness. There, at the foot of the cross, we are reminded as Paul said, by the Spirit, that we are totally broken sinners with only one hope, the hope of God’s eternal mercy.
We must rend our hearts, and not just our garments. If we do, the character of God remains for us, as it was for Joel, our eternal hope: he is gracious and compassionate.
They Refused to Remember
“But they, our forefathers, became arrogant and stiff-necked, and did not obey your commands. They refused to listen and failed to remember the miracles you performed among them. They became stiff-necked and in their rebellion appointed a leader in order to return to their slavery. But you are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore you did not desert them…”
Our memories can be short…and selective. Yesterday may have been full of the goodness of God, but what of today? Where are my blessings for today and why, O Lord, haven’t you given me what I’ve asked for? The history of the Israelites is replete with God’s intervening power – delivering them from enemies (Exodus 13-14), providing them with food and water in the desert (Exodus 16-17), and serving as their ever present leader and King (Exodus 40).
But the people of God prior to Nehemiah’s time had neglected to remember the Lord’s faithfulness. Caught up in the sensual desires all around them they abandoned their covenant with God and turned to whatever seemed to provide pleasure and wealth. Despite God’s efforts to remind them through the prophets, the people still refused to remember and hardened their hearts. The results were devastating. An enemy swept into their midst, destroying their temple and breaking down the walls of their city, and carrying them away from the riches of the Lord.
We too forget. In the midst of today’s trials our memories grow cloudy and fail to conjure the witness of yesterday’s trials, through which God carried us on wings of mercy. We forget the wounds we inflicted upon others, and ourselves, and upon the covenant, and we forget how his deep well of grace reconciled us anyway. Together forgetfulness and ingratitude birth the temptation to find security and pleasure in something other than the simple goodness of God himself. As James says, this is not God’s fault:
“…but each one is tempted when by his own evil desire he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full grown, gives birth to death.” (James 1: 14-15)
James goes on to say that part of the problem is that we have forgotten something:
“Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers. Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.” (James 1:16)
Are your walls broken down? Are your cities plundered? Is the enemy encamped all around? Don’t be deceived. Nothing but God’s goodness and mercy enables us to persevere – and forgetting so leads to sin and death. Like Nehemiah and ancient Jews – striving to repair their walls and repel the attacks of the enemy – we too can deliberately choose to gratefully remember the mercies of God, thereby strengthening our weak legs and enlarging our feeble hearts as we cry out for fresh mercy to meet our current trials and temptations.
We can be sure that today, as with yesterday, God will come.
“The Lord is compassionate and gracious
slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
He does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
As far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion on his children,
So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.”
Sometimes we walk into worship shouldering a terrible debt. Sometimes we enter prayer nursing a hidden wound. We wonder, will He hear me today? Will he see me? Is this the day He finally realizes how dirty, how utterly screwed up I am? We fear this is the day the Lord finally casts His full gaze upon our lives and comes to His senses, rejecting us once and for all.
We know the truth: Our secret thoughts haunt us, and our ugly open words betray us. Our spouses know, our children know. Wherever we go our sin and guilt are right beside us, taunting us, and even in worship and prayer we are sometimes unable to find freedom. Where can we find freedom?
The Psalms are not the songs of the clean and religious; they are the poetry of the barroom and the jail cell. David, the man who sings this song, is no self-righteous zealot; he is an adulterer, a murderer! He is broken and bloodied from his sin, and bearing upon his frame a terrible guilt, and with it, the penalty of judgment. Yet here, in this song of praise to God, he finds freedom from his shame and cries out from the very beginning,
“Praise the Lord, O my soul;
And forget not His benefits
Who forgives all your sins
And heals all your diseases.”
David has found freedom, not just from his guilt but also in spite of his guilt. How? Because, David sings, the Lord is the God who forgives and heals, the God who is slow to anger and rich in love, not the God who receives repayment. David is no longer concerned with paying his debt, because his is a debt he can never repay. The price is too great, the sin too grievous. Rather than paying what he owes David realizes, God “does not treat us as our sins deserve, or repay us according to our iniquities.”
We do not worship an invisible debt collector in the sky, and God is no mere accountant of sin, dispensing punishments and rewards. Instead, God has reserved for himself a role in the universe of far greater majesty and nobility. The Lord is a God of mercy, He does not collect your debt, He pays it! The Lord is a God of compassion, He does not look past your festering wounds, He heals them!
Perhaps harder to grasp, from God’s perch of eternity this work is finished and complete the moment we have placed our faith in him. Hence, David helps us lay hold of this truth by painting for us a picture of the incredible depth and breadth of God’s goodness, sketching distances so great they cannot be measured. How large is God’s love for us David? As high as the heavens are above the earth. How far removed from our sins have we become? As far as the East is from the West. Tell us David, what is God’s love for us really like? It is like a fathers compassion for his children. “So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him…”
It’s one of the fantastic paradoxes of Christianity that as long as we fear God, we need not be afraid of Him any longer. When we enter in humility, we enter into grace. However, when we enter in arrogance or self-righteousness, we enter into judgment. When we insist on carrying our own debts, we are insisting on our pride, but Christ died to pay our debts and all that is left for us is humility and eternity. Cast your sins upon the Lord, humbly accepting his gift of mercy, boasting in nothing whatsoever except the grace of Christ Jesus and you will find that your debts are as far from you as the east is from the west, and you will be able to agree with Paul, that “in Him and through faith in Him we may approach God with freedom and confidence” (Eph 3:12).
(This is the second in a six-part series exploring the dynamics of clergy pay in missional churches. See previous installments: Prelude | Part 1)
When I first posted my initial prompt asking whether clergy should be paid I received a quick response from an old family friend simply stating, “The worker is worthy of his wages,”referencing Paul 1 Timothy Chapter 5 and Jesus in Luke 10. That would seem to settle it then, wouldn’t it?
Well, not for me. My questions are: What kind of work? What kind of wages?
It’s too easy to read these passages through our Modern market-based lenses where work is a 40-60 hour a week assembly-line-optimized style of productivity and wages are either paid hourly blocks of labor or annual salaries with compensation packages. This is clearly how we’ve read Paul and Jesus, with most Pastors in the U.S. making between 70k and 97k per year. Some who identify with being “missional” believe this kind of professionalism is detrimental to mission, but most would probably at least agree it’s unsustainable considering our trajectory.
We can’t simply graft isolated passages onto our contextual paradigms but we can’t ignore our context either paradigms either, so what I’m aiming for is an understanding of a church leader’s work and wage that is:
Personally, I need a biblically-informed way to think about and practice leadership vocation that makes sense for the future, not the past. We’ll start with trying to become biblically-informed, so let’s take a brief look at the aforementioned passages.
1 Timothy Chapter 5:17-18
It’s interesting to note that in this chapter Paul is giving practical advice about the general care of the neediest people in the community – namely, older widows – and out of that advice he suddenly switches gears to the care of the church elders who govern:
The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages.”
In order to lend credibility to this advice Paul quotes Deut 25:4 and Luke 10:7. I think these passages are telling, so let’s look at them too, in reverse chronological order.
Luke 10:5-7
The occasion here is the sending out of the 72 disciples. Jesus has given them authority to heal the sick and drive out demons and now he is giving them practical instructions for the trip:
“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. Stay in that house, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house.”
By using the Greek word misthos (which generally to work-wages of some form) Jesus is clearly saying that the disciples ministry alone is worthy of being considered “work.” However, it’s interesting to notice that Jesus sent them out with nothing (v4), essentially making them itinerant beggars. Moreover, what he says they are permitted to receive, strictly speaking, is not payment – it’s hospitality. Jesus seems to be saying that their payment will come in the form of care, not that their care will come in the form of payment. (As a bit of an aside, it may also be that he is warning them against capitalizing on this care and hospitality by admonishing them to not “move from house to house.”)
Deuteronomy 25:4
Here in Deut. we again find practical instructions focused on the just care of people in the community. But strangely enough, sandwiched between negotiating conflicts and caring for widows we find this:
Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.
Apparently even beasts deserve to eat. Moreover, the ox’s sustenance comes from the work itself. That is, his care is tied intimately to his work. Here’s what I’m noticing so far:
1. Ministry is real work: Jesus and Paul seem to make this clear. Of course, everyone in ministry leadership knows this, but not everyone outside of ministry leadership does, and that seems to be a growing problem in post-Christian cultures. Every pastor has dealt with the question, “What exactly do you do all day?” But for some reason this was apparently enough of a problem in the first century that Jesus and Paul needed to reinforce it. Can this tell us something about the nature of ministry work?
2. The work of ministry involves the reciprocity of giving and receiving, not the transaction of buying and selling: The distinction is subtle but important and lies in the general lack of reckoning value and extracting profit. There is a recognition of the contribution people do or do not make (especially in 1 Tim 5), but no reckoning of specific value or profit. The ox gives work and eats of the grain upon which he treads. Jesus receives from the Father and gives to the itinerant disciples; the disciples give what they’ve received to the people of the towns; the people give the disciples food and shelter. This is a cycle of gifts whereby what is increased is the kingdom, not individual wallets (one could say it is the Kingdom that profits, not people, or even that they are “laying up treasures in heaven”). Along the way people extract from the increasing Kingdom for their own needs, but not for their own profits.
3. Christian leaders are part of the society of the poor: This is humbling, but I just don’t see any other way to understand these passages without recognizing that each is dealing with the care of those who are lowly. Paul’s “elders who govern” are mentioned in the same breath as old widows who have nothing left (1 Tim 5). In fact, it would appear that church elders are even worse off than young widows (v11-16)! Jesus sends out the disciples as beggars – which is appropriate, given that prior to Luke 10 Jesus is referring to “the least”as “the greatest” and turning away followers with a warning about the poverty of his own society (Luke 9:46-50; 57-62). It’s possible to read this as a deficiency in the early church (many have), but I don’t think so, for reasons I’ll address in Part 4.
4. The fundamental driving ethic is a community of inclusive care, not an economy of exclusive transactions: Seeing the “wages” as payment sets these passages in opposition to other relevant biblical paradigms, especially Exodus 16, Acts 2, and 1 Cor 8, but also (IMO) including that of the Priests and Levites who are not so much functioning as a profiteering professional class but rather are key servants participating in the gift-cycle of sacrifice, particularly by the “eating” of the sacrifices (more on this in Part 3). Of course payment can be a kind of care and a kind of gift, but such gifts can all too easily become corrupted into something else such as profit, power, or status – especially, I would add, in market-cultures where profit often is the currency of power and status.
5. There is something qualitatively different about the work of governing, teaching, and preaching: I’m deeply uncomfortable with this statement, so please correct me if you think I’m wrong, but I can’t get away from it based on Paul’s words in 1 Tim 5:17: “The elders who direct the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those whose work is preaching and teaching” and the more I rflect on the biblical paradigms as a whole the more I’m struck by the distinct role of certain people with these gifts. It would be easy to suggest that Paul’s “double-honor” is actually an upside-down term, but I don’t think that’s true to the spirit of this statement. I think it’s clear that Paul is saying there is something different about the kind of work these leaders do that must be honored through the intentional care of them, perhaps partly because they must “eat of the sacrifice” and perhaps partly because it’s apparently easy to forget that what they do is “work.”
This has gone on long enough. What are your thoughts? Disagreements, insights, additions?
At Ikon we’re trying to learn how to pray. My mother – who is part of our community of faith – wrote this in the comments of a recent exercise on “daily bread”:
So I did this exercise the other day and thought to myself, OK, that was nice but do I really trust God to provide my needs? No not really.
Then today as I am coming back from picking up my husband and son from the airport and complaining how I need a vacation, we stopped at a light and I notice an old man on the side of the road with a card board sign that said, “Please, I’m Hungry”
I’m looking around for my purse and I’m really agitated because I can’t find it, finally I say out loud, doesn’t somebody have some money on them?! My husband pulls out the cash in his pocket and I command him to give the guy the 5$ I see lying in his palm. Dave rolls down the window and the old man hobbles over to the car, not only is he old but he is also crippled. Dave hands the man the money and the guy not only profusely thanks us but He also says God Bless You. Now I am so pissed off I almost cry. I rail loudly to my poor family in the car against a society who doesn’t take care of it’s poor, it’s old, it’s crippled. But is that who I am really mad at? Could I be mad at a God who allows this old, crippled man to have to beg on the street? Or am I mad at myself because I allow it? Give us this day our daily bread…….
I love this tension. You know you’re reading the Bible wrong if all it ever provides you is comforting thoughts to reinforce a comfortable life.
There was a time when the Bible fed me nothing but comfort and I was a glutton. Then came a time when it fed me nothing but sorrow and I became an anorexic. Lord help me feast in temperance, finding joy and nourishment in both the sweet and the bitter.
"Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
Copyright © 2009. All rights reserved.
RSS Feed. Wordpress theme by Rodrigo Galindez. Customized by Jason Coker.