Missions: Who Wants to Write To My Child?

           The line that has stuck with me is “Would you want a foreign adult writing regularly to your seven-year-old daughter?”  If it was me, absolutely not, I would demand some kind of investigation.  But B. Hunter Farrell is quoting a mother whose family is being aided by US mission giving.  I guess this sticks with me because our family “sponsored” a young person, and I was the foreign adult who could write regularly to a boy in another country who was of my son’s age-when my son was in elementary school.

          This ‘In Focus’ article from the Jan. 30 issue of the Presbyterian Outlook has stuck in my theological craw.  I know I threw out the term ‘selfie mission’, and a lot can be loaded into that.  But, as with any short-cut terminology, such an expression can quickly become something to tarnish all missions, to get sarcastic with.  And this is too serious for that.

          Now, all this comes at the end of a series of posts on the kingship of Jesus.  It is my opinion that the ‘divine right’ of kings that is found in Jesus has been horribly abused by ‘royals’ throughout history, that the US rebelled against that privilege in the American Revolution, but that such privilege continues to exist-maybe without the explicit notion of ‘divine right’, but with an implicit notion of superiority from those who ‘have’.

          For me, that stands behind gender privilege, racial privilege, economic privilege, and privileges I am not even conscious of, where someone identifies as superior to someone else, consciously or unconsciously, by some abstract concept.  Poking at that presupposed privilege can get some serious pushback.

          For me, the ‘shakened’ awakening in this case came from applying that cliché, walk a mile in another person’s shoes.  Of course, to truly do that is to equalize all our notions of the other person.  In this case, putting on the mantle of the protective parent.  No way would regular correspondence from adult members of my own family from up in Canada would be welcomed.  Certainly not unmonitored.

          Now consider when that kind of unwelcome correspondence is the lever by which your family may or may not receive the financial support that it needs to function on a day-to-day basis?  And this support-with requisite communication privilege-is being done in the name of Jesus?

But, from our point of view, we are helping.  And we are getting practical feedback.  And we are (hopefully) using a vetted agency to act as our eyes and ears on the ground to make sure our mission dollars are not getting wasted.  And who is that agency going to be most responsive to?  In a perfect world, we would like to say the clients they are serving.  But this is not a perfect world, and the success of the missions depends on "our" support.  So where do the interests of the agency lie?  

We got very professionally done packets of information reporting on our sponsored child. From what I remember, done in the school that the young person was attending, so I cannot state categorically that the correspondence was being run past the parents at all.

But if that were my child, and I was accepting this foreign adult exchange of correspondence, I would want whomever that adult was to know in no uncertain terms that I, as a responsible parent, was screening everything being written to and written by my child.  But it would be a desperately difficult set of circumstances that would get me to even agree to such an arrangement in the first place.  That's what I would demand.  Why should I expect the recipient of my mission dollars to do any different?

Peter Hofstra

How Then Shall We React To The King?

           As I consider Jesus as king and our own reactions to and expectations of ‘kingship’, Jesus does no less than turn our expectations on their head.  Perhaps the most explicit moment was in John’s Gospel, where he speaks of the Last Supper.  Now, John does not actually record the Last Supper, but the lead up to it.  The disciples come in, and Jesus puts on the apparel of a servant, a slave, to wash their feet.

          This is the most menial level of service.  Peter goes so far as to refuse, but that brings about a sharp rebuke from Jesus.  Peter then swings out as far as he can in the other direction.  He practically asks for a bath.  But Jesus corrects him from that extreme as well.

          The kingship of Jesus is not ‘top-down’.  He is not at the lead of everything, defining what must happen by his own perfect nature.  Which would be entirely appropriate for him to choose to do.  The Bible is clear that at the Name of Jesus, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. There IS no way to stand against the glory of Christ.

          But neither is the kingship of Jesus “grass roots”.  He is not the guy trying to build up local networks of believers and followers, being ‘of the people’ in some divine way. 

          No, the kingship of Jesus is bottom up.  Serve where the people need serving.  Jesus does not presume to define what somebody needs from him.  Nor does he seek to build a consensus of what is needed.  When he challenges people on that question, it is not for his own benefit, but to help the one coming to him to articulate that need.  So the father who comes to Jesus on behalf of his child, “Lord, help me in my unbelief.”  Or the woman who dared not speak to Jesus, but only touched his cloak, believing she would be healed-and she was.  It was not till Jesus sought her out that her story could be shared.

          How does this translate to the church?  Well, there was a fascinating article on mission work in the church in the last Presbyterian Outlook magazine that spoke to this.  Missions receive HUGE funding in the US.  But in a design that is to make the giver feel gratified, often at the expense of those being helped.  Orphanages receive huge support, but we have been systematically dismantling that system in the US and Europe for YEARS.  Why is this system ‘better’ for those we seek to help?  How about agencies that put us in touch with kids we can support.  We can write to our children.  How about the parent of one of those kids who really is not comfortable with adults in another country writing letters to their 7 year old?  That is the basis of many ‘highly successful’, perhaps we should say ‘highly lucrative’ mission industries in our country.

          This comes from a seat of privilege.  We have and we can dole out what we have, so we can define how things should work.  That is NOT how Jesus used His power.  The notion of ‘servant leadership’ sounds very nice in a book title, but translating it into real action on behalf of the church today? 

          In his article, B. Hunter Farrell uses the expression ‘selfie missions’ to describe this kind of outreach designed first for the consumption of the giver rather than tailored to the recipient of mission aid.  I am going to have to reflect on that in its own post.

          We no longer acknowledge the expression of the ‘divine right of kings’, but it looks to me like we, in the West, still feel we have some kind of divine right because of the blessings we have received and the world we have exploited to maintain those blessings.  Until we can face that, confess where it has turned us to sin, and come humbly to our Lord Jesus, how can we come into what Jesus truly embodies as our king?

Peter Hofstra

Jesus, Redeeming Kingship

           Of course, Jesus makes a very different kind of king, ultimately.  When we track what he has in common with Saul and David, there is connection, being anointed, recognized, and going off to war for the people.  But that is where Jesus differs from his predecessors.

          They spearhead armies and go into battle.  Jesus battles alone.  They are strengthened, Jesus is at his weakest, forty days without food.  Theirs was the physical battlefield.  For Jesus, it was something more.  He is forty days without food.  What is the first thing that Satan hits him with?  Make yourself food.  Attack the weak point of his physical being.  When that doesn’t work?  Attack the weak point of his emotional being.  Offer him the kingdoms of the world, appeal to his power to make the world a better place.  And Jesus resists that as well.

          But then there is the one that always baffled me.  Why would Satan tell Jesus to throw himself off the temple?  To kill himself?  Satan claims it won’t happen, that the angels will catch Jesus before he hits the ground.  So what is the devil doing? 

          Well, the prophecies are clear that the Messiah will die and return in three days.  This is something the devil knows almost as well as Jesus himself.  So it seems there is something going on here to exploit a weakness in Jesus’s spiritual being.  We know that Jesus died in agony and alone.  Here, Satan is trying to get Him to do some kind of swan dive to glory.

          Who is this king that the Spirit drove out to meet the devil?  He is hungry, he is not willing to take up the mantle of control of the world, and, as we will see, he will accept death as it comes upon him.  These are the signs of His true kingship. 

          Which runs against every stereotype and expectation of what kingship is supposed to be.  I used to think that the most prevailing sin that Jesus broke down in his ministry is the sin of hierarchy, of control.  But I see know that it is more basic than that.  Jesus is breaking down the sin of power used to exploit.  For every king and every wielder of privilege in the ‘power’ they believe comes to them from God, to truly use the example of Jesus is to surrender all of that power, to serve and not rule.

          There are two extremely powerful figures who are examples of this kind of religious surrender that carried with it tremendous political power, one for good and one, for the United States, for evil.  The first is Mahatma Gandhi, massively popular at the time of Indian independence.  His power came from his living as the people, in homespun cloth, without the trappings of the privileged British and the Indian leadership who’d sold out to these overlords.

          The second is the Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah in Iran in the late 1970’s.  His was a cult of personality, whose legacy made Iran one of the Axis of Evil and one of the continued enemies of the US and world peace to this very day.  His lifestyle was very simple, simple meals, no splendor in his living arrangements, nothing.  Now, it was in pointed contrast to the extravagance of the Shah who came before him.

          What they have in common is that they rejected the ‘rewards’, the material rewards of power in wielding the power itself, as the material was a sign they were corrupted by the power, that they were ‘in it for themselves’. 

Peter Hofstra

We Don’t Like Kings

          So there is a line that we walk as people of faith when it comes to considering Jesus as King.  On the one hand, it is the Bible that lays down this language for us.  On the other, this language has been abused by human hands.

          Anti-kingship is built into the American culture.  The colonists rebelled against mad King George and founded a nation built on freedom.  George Washington navigated our first Presidency so deliberately to prevent the trappings of ‘royalty’ from creeping in.  That is one of the best moments for me in the musical “Hamilton”; the king expresses that he did not know giving up power was even an option when Washington chose not to seek reelection.  This defied the medieval theology of the ‘divine right of kings’ that tied such authority to the authority of the Almighty.

          And we continue to work to divide the assumption that men have such power “granted” to them by God.  The expression “a man’s home is his castle” has come to epitomize that for me.  On the plus side, it is an expression that the individual has freedom against the state invading their privacy.  On the negative side, it has become the cover for misogynist abuse down to our own time.

          We may not have a king anymore, but that kind of authority is still interpreted as being in the hands of the male, that ‘divine right’ still justifies abuse and domination.

          This does not even begin to address the king-like power of wealth concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people.  There is this idea that the wealthy are above the law, that they buy the lawmakers to bend the law to their own wills, that they control things to their own advantage.  I think back to a story in 2018 during the California wildfires where it was reported that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired private fire fighters to protect their $60 million mansion.

          The word for such abuse is ‘privilege’. 

          So it can be hard to divide out the perfect love of Jesus who would be the perfectly just, perfectly merciful-the one who would use the kingly privilege only to the advantage of those He rules-as a faith-based ideal in the face of how such authority has become sinful exploitation that the exploiters will use religious language and misguided biblical interpretation to justify.

          It is then a very hard thing that when something wonderful in Jesus is then exploited and appropriated for human, sinful gain, when such exploitation is brought into the light of day, to go back and redeem that language once more.

          But maybe Jesus is the King precisely so that such exploitation and appropriation can be exposed, can be confessed, and redeemed in the grace of our King’s death and resurrection.

Peter Hofstra

Christ The King

          Something that the gospels have in common is the pairing of the stories of the baptism of Jesus by John, followed by Jesus being tempted by Satan out in the wilderness.  The details are expanded and contracted in different gospels.

          We see that as the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.  It is fairly obvious.  But something to consider is that this is also the beginning of Jesus’ Kingship.  This is one aspect of the Messiah, that He will be of the line of King David, that He will sit on His Father’s Throne.  This has both an earthly and a heavenly quality to it. 

          I think we recognize the heavenly aspect far more quickly.  The language about heaven is that God will place Jesus at God’s right hand.  But the language is even more, that Jesus will be given the place of God as our Judge, one huge aspect of Kingship.

          This is what we interpret today.  How about the first readers of the Gospels?  Now, there is an axiom about interpreting the Bible that we can find Jesus on every page.  What has struck me is that this pairing of Jesus’ anointing and his temptation find a parallel in the Old Testament, in regards to Kingship.

          In the book of First Samuel, first Saul and then David were anointed by Samuel, at God’s command to be the kings of God’s people.  The story of David supplanting Saul is for another time, but there is a striking parallel in each of their anointings.  The most obvious is Samuel.  He is the ‘judge’s judge’, forming a bridge between the book of Judges and the regional “war leaders” to this centralized King.

          In each case, the man is identified to Samuel by God as the one to be anointed.  Each man is chosen by God.  This anointing is also a shared event.  For Saul, it was done before the gathered people, for David, it was among his brothers, in his immediate family (his public ascension to the throne would come later).  But what marked each situation is what came next.

          In each case, once anointed as king, each man went to make war.  For Saul, it was freeing the city of Jabesh.  For David, it would be going up against the Philistine champion, Goliath.  This was the pattern of leadership from the time of the judges.  Sampson, Jephthah, Gideon, all were called to fight and free the people from invaders.  So it is with Saul and David. 

          For me, having my attention drawn to the repeated patterns is what brought me to this.  While Jesus is prophesied as the king to come, for original readers of this text, for whom the Old Testament is not simply ‘more’ of the bible, but their own history, it was more plainly written.  The parallels of Jesus being baptized, anointed by the Holy Spirit, and then going into ‘battle’ against Satan I believe were not lost on those of the early church.

          Neither should they be lost on us as we seek ever more to understand more wonderfully, more completely, who our Lord Jesus Christ is to us.

Peter Hofstra

Evil Versus Sin: Which One is Lucifer? Which is Us?

          The difference is redemption.

          There is a series that originated on network television before migrating to Netflix called “Lucifer”.  And the title character is the devil, Lucifer Morningstar, king of hell, who came to earth and helps an LAPD detective solve murders.  Of course he does.

          I understand the interest.  The devil, what an interesting character study.  He has a therapist, he’s trying to ‘grow’.  It was always a show for a mature audience.  Once it hit Netflix, it was even more so.  From a humanist cultural perspective, Lucifer makes for a fascinating figure.  The embodiment of evil, the rebellious angel, the waylayer of the goodness of humanity, among other things.  Media has come to this character on several occasions, not just in this show but as a recurring character in “Supernatural” as well.

          But what this humanist approach to Lucifer accomplishes is a reflection of their consideration of humanity.  Can the evil be redeemed?  Even outside of Christian thought and theology, this question weighs heavily.  Can the evil be redeemed? 

          In Christian theology, Lucifer, Satan, is the embodiment of all against God.  Satan is not a sinful being but, to look at Genesis, the author of sin.  And in Genesis, Satan was not trying to turn Adam and Eve against God, but rather to subvert their obedience to God.  It was a malicious determination to destroy what God created.

          Lucifer is beyond redemption.  He is destroyed in the Last Day, according to the Book of Revelation.  So, for the sake of this post, Lucifer is evil.  For the sake of this post, Lucifer is beyond redemption, from a Biblical perspective.

          It is for humanity that God has created a plan of redemption.  We are sinful, as a species, taken there through an appeal to human self-interest and deception.  Lucifer should be held responsible for that, as Satan, and Lucifer will be.  But as we created as beings with free will, we hold responsibility for our own actions.

          But the promises of God are universal.  The assurance of our salvation is guaranteed by the power of Providence.  God acts in, what to we humans, is a paradox.  We have the freedom of choice, which includes the freedom to turn away from the promises of God and follow the path of evil (which Lucifer takes us along) or the choice to give ourselves into the mercy of God for the forgiveness won for us in Jesus, but still within the plan and perfection of God. 

          But that drifts us into discussion of foreknowledge and predestination, which is a whole other place.

          So, when I contrast “sin” and “evil”, in this context, it is to assign these terms absolutes (over and against their more general meanings) to contrast those who can be redeemed versus those who cannot be redeemed. 

Why, in the Biblical witness, can Lucifer not be redeemed?  Because Lucifer has turned irrevocably against God and seeks to subvert God’s plan and purpose. 

In the popular media, why is there an obsession with redeeming Lucifer?  I believe it is because there is a hunger in humanity to find redemption.  It is a question in the human heart and mind which our faith gives us an answer to.  To be so hungry for redemption strikes me that there is a fear that redemption is ultimately lacking, because we, as humanity, know our sin and know our capacity to commit evil acts.

While the truth is that, in the promises of God, redemption is promised to all humanity.

Peter Hofstra     

The Promises of God

           Everything we have is built upon the promises of God.  Our very existence is built upon the promises of creation itself.  Our eternal existence is built upon the covenant promises that God has given to us throughout the Bible.  We can enumerate those covenants, but the one that rules our relationship with God is the covenant of Christ.

          What are the promises?  That God will be our God.  That God is love.  That, in Jesus Christ, our sins our forgiven.  That, by the grace of God, we have life eternal.  These are the promises of the covenant.  What is the promise of creation?  That we have existence.  It will not end at the return of Jesus, but instead will be renewed to the New Heaven and the New Earth.

          Our actions are built upon those promises.  Our actions are not a call to work for our salvation, the so called “works righteousness”, we do not do good works to gain these promises, but these promises are for us then to do good works.  It is a subtle consideration of human nature that is built in here.

          The idea of works righteousness presumes a people perpetually, intentionally at odds with the Almighty.  Thus, we have to do these things to prove ourselves, by action and intention, that we are, if not worthy-which we are not-at least trying to do what we can.  It is an assumption that sin turns us all from God and we are nothing but self-serving greedy-guts. 

          But to look to Adam and Eve, to look at their fall into sin, is to see something a little different.  Yes, they turned from God, but for them, it was with the best of intentions.  They wanted to be more like God.  It served their desires of course, but it also was a ‘favor’ they were doing for God. 

          I am not entirely sure how to define this, but I think the bible teaches that while we are innately sinful, we are not innately evil.  The divine spark still exists within us.  Discussions could be held about those who are the most evil in the history of humanity to seek out that bit of love, that one place of decency, in their otherwise horrible existences.  Usually someone like Hitler is put into this context.

          What is the measure of this?  The possibility of redemption.  The devil is evil, to my Biblical understanding, beyond the possibility of redemption and so the devil seeks to bring us down as well.  So the promises of God have no place in the context of Satan.

          But we, who are sinful, have that possibility.  We have the ability to do good, but that ability has been warped and redirected to serving our own interests instead of God and Neighbor.  So, to look to Paul, all have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God. 

          But God’s promises are established to bring us back into God’s Glory.

Peter Hofstra