I’d like to prepare us for worship this morning by turning your attention to one sentence in the reflection quote printed on page 1 of your bulletin.  In the middle of the quote we read, “The cross reminds us that we too were enemies whose hostility and offence have been reconciled.” 

Now, this week I attended a lecture given by Stanley Hauerwas who’s a theologian and ethicist at Duke University.  And during the Q & A, Hauerwas was asked about heaven–about what the future would be like when we’re with God.  And his answer was simple, yet surprising.  He said something like this: “Heaven will be about our restored friendship with God.

Now, to some of you that may sound a bit overly simplistic and/or reductionistic.  But at bottom I think Hauerwas is right.  Because both the reflection quote and Hauerwas are picking up on a thought of Paul in Romans 5 which reads,

“For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.”

You see, the God we come to worship this morning; the God we come to sing praises to, has done something special for us: He’s allowed for us to  Him again. And that happened the moment Jesus died; the moment he gave up his friendship with God so we can have a friendship with God once again.

So…Are you ready to worship God our friend this morning?  Welcome to worship!

PROLEGOMENA: Redeemer Presbyterian Church
Sunday, April 29, 2007

I’d like to prepare us for worship this morning by turning your attention to one word, one word in the reflection quote printed on page one of your bulletin; and that word is the word peripety.

Now, the word peripety comes from the Greek word peripeteia, which is a word used in drama and literature to describe the turning point of a story. In other words, the peripety of a drama is the point where the story is: turned on its head, turned inside-out, flipped upside-down. It’s the point that the story goes from good to bad or bad to good. It’s the point that shifts the whole entire story; and that point in the biblical story is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Now, in Acts 2 Peter points this out when he says,

“[Jesus] was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But…God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him.”

You see, the God we come to worship this morning; the God we come to sing praises to has interrupted history; has flipped everything upside-down; has turned everything we know inside-out the moment Jesus Christ was raised from the dead. So, are you ready to worship the God who had done this this morning? Welcome to worship.

The literary structure of peripety found in the book of Esther mirrors on a small scale the structure of all of redemptive history….We should expect nothing but death, but we have seen the ultimate peripety, the ultimate reversal of expected ends,in another seemingly ordinary human event: the birth of a baby in Bethlehem and the execution of that man on a cross. Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our destiny has been reversed from death to life against all expectation.The cross of Jesus is the pivot of the great reversal of history, where our sorrow has been turned to joy.

— Karen Jobes, Esther

The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back:
Why I Switched to the NRSV

Beyond the fact that most noteworthy scholars today use the NRSV, I’ve got my own reasons too. Here’s one:

Everyone has their theological pet-peeves. One of mine is paedo-baptism. I guess you can say that I’m just a good presbyterian working out his covenant theology to its rightful (logical) conclusion.

So, when I was counseling a diaconate candidate out of my NIV–a candiate who was struggling with paedo-baptism–and turned to Acts 16 where Paul baptizes the Philippian jailer’s entire household (oikos) based on his belief, and saw that the NIV took the liberty of changing the pronoun to a plural (his to their faith, pepisteukos), and also found that there weren’t any text-critical issues to speak of, well, that was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” I picked up my leather-bound NRSV and put it in my backpack and took the NIV and buried it on my shelf. (Even though the NIV’s proper place is in the trash, I cannot, for the life of me, chuck a Bible.)