Author Archives: bjdueholm
Testify
But in Luther’s thinking, and in the life of the church, the cross is much more than that. The cross is the way we know God. The cross is the way God chooses to be revealed in the world. We do not know God by our own wisdom, by our own good deeds, or by our perception of God’s mysterious power and glory. All of those things become idols. When we chase them, when we look for God in greatness or power or glory, we only run into a magnified version of ourselves
And because we find ourselves when we look for God, God chose to hide his glory where we would never think to put ourselves: in suffering.
A Confession
It was so drastic and all-encompassing, which is I guess what people say about cults they’ve left. All-encompassing but not closed off, not provincial or hysterical. It was, as we’d have said about a band or a labor project at Deep Springs, “hardcore,” but in a way that expanded rather than contracted my idea of humanity and human sympathy. I guess I wanted it to be true, to the point of not minding the risk that it would prove not to be.
Ask and Receive
Ask like a child. It was the sort of thing that, if I heard a preacher saying it fifteen years ago would have annoyed me no end. I want what I want, but I want to be good, to be right in my own mind to ask for it, to be convincing to God and myself. I want to trust my words, my intentions, my plans and projects, my goals. But Jesus says to simply ask God for your daily bread.
Heaven’s Gate
And more than that, the gate that the rich man built to keep Lazarus and the rest of the world out turns out to be a chasm that the rich man can no longer escape. He didn’t keep the world out. He locked himself in. The rich man is, in other words, getting exactly what he wanted. He just couldn’t see it at the time.
Righteousness
I understand where all this comes from. It’s good to be personally holy, it’s good to be inclusive, it’s good to be active. I know what our denomination is trying to say by telling people that being Lutheran means doing God’s work. But I rankle when I hear it all the same.
Healing
Naaman wants to be impressed and is bitterly disappointed. He wants shouting and magic words and hand waving and theatrics but all he gets is a simple command: wash in the Jordan seven times. All he has to do is trust the word of the prophet and he can’t do it. So it falls to his servants—the lowly people, so lowly they don’t even get names—it falls to his servants to persuade him.
A Saint Encounters Jesus
And for whatever it’s worth, I think he’s right. But as I thought about it this week, I realized that this author never said explicitly what he thinks makes a saint. If I were in charge of Messiah’s sainthood development program, how would I know one when I see one? What are the characteristics of a saint? And how do we know they are genuine and not pious frauds?
Black Eyes and Wounded Hips
And the truth about people who do not fear God or respect humans is that they may look and sound and even feel tough, but in fact they are not. All it takes is the right kind of pressure to make the judge in the parable give in. The justice of the widow’s case is not his concern. His concern is only that he should not suffer or sacrifice for any particular outcome.
To Be Made Free
God, he suddenly saw, did not send his Son to die for us in order to multiply the terrors of the law. God did not forgive our old sins in order to make us even more afraid of the sins that still lay ahead of us. God did not reveal his righteousness to the faithful in order to torment those faithful with a still higher standard of perfection than what they knew before. God’s righteousness is not the demand that we wring every last little imperfection from our crooked souls. Instead, it’s almost the opposite: God’s righteousness is the gift that makes us righteous, even though we are sinners, even though we are not just a little imperfect but are instead complete disasters, even though we know and want to know nothing at all about God and his love for us and for our neighbor.
Faith with a Limp
Everyone has some scars from wrestling with God. Everyone has had to make a choice they didn’t want to make. Everyone has surrendered something to keep holding on to God. I am never more aware of this than when someone shares a story with me of how they have been wounded by the church. It breaks my heart because the church is where you are supposed to be safe and cared for and loved.
Brutally Ordinary Things 