Need a little help

My next Adult Bible Study will be on the Standards of the Reformed Church. Fun huh? In my preparations I like to imagine questions people might have. Here is one that I think might come up.

How do we reconcile Heidelberg Q&A 20?

Question 20. Will all people then be saved through Christ just as they were lost through Adam?
Answer. No. Only those are saved who by true faith are grafted into Christ and accept all his blessings.

With 1 Corinthians 15:

20But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. ²¹For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; ²²for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. ²³But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. ²⁴Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. ²⁵For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. ²⁶The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

Looking for suggestions....

Justin

A Tiger Fan in Yankee Land

In some small, I emphasize small, way I can relate to a people in Exile. I am a Detroit Tigers' fan in the heart of NYC. For the last few years my wife and I have fought our way on the subways during rush hour to make our pilgramage to Yankee Stadium dressed in our Tigers paraphernalia. We are often surrounded by throngs of people wearing their Yankee hats and shirts. Once we get there we are  heckled and derided for our choice of teams...but we boldly stand and cheer each time our Tigers get a hit and we roar with delight when they win, risking our lives for the team we love. (Every time we have gone the Tigers have won.)

Last year during our trek to the game a lone soul also wearing a Tigers jersey found us, asked if we were going to the game and if we could show him the way. He told us that a bunch of Yankee fans had told him to take the downtown train. (For you non New Yorkers that is the wrong way.) So we navigated with him though the underground of NY till at last all three of us were standing at the doorstep of  baseball's colosseum. We had made the journey of the faithful fan, going to support our team though the darkest valleys, against mighty armies, and winning despite the odds being against us.

I find being a Christian not all that dissimilar sometimes. We journey through life dressed in the things that mark us as Christian, the hat of Baptism, the jersey of Communion, marking us and making us strangers in the land. We journey through dark valleys...meeting others who are marked with the sign and the seal as we are, journeying to a places where we can show the world our zeal for the Lord, and cheering for the work of God in this world.

P.S. This year I hope to be able to root for the Tigers as they face the Yankees in the playoffs (if anyone has tickets I'll take 2.)

Update on Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 9:41AM by Justin Meyers

Well the Tigers taught me one more thing last night.....

God is the only thing truly worthy of our hope and trust.......

Justin

Not About Us

Dr. Bechtel reminded us once again that at the heart of Reformed Theology is that everything is about God. Sin would try to make us believe that it is all about us. Baptism is a key way that we show this to ourselves and to the world. I have found that one of the most meaningful things that we do as a congregation is the baptism of infants when we use the WHOLE liturgy that the RCA prescribes. This liturgy reminds us again and again that everything, our life, our calling, our salvation is all about God and that we are FIRST receivers of God's grace and that SECONDLY we are responders to God's grace.They are linked BUT they are not equal.

Often times we would like to make our acceptance of God's grace the contingent factor on receiving God's grace....but that would make it about us....when it is all about God.

A common hermeneutic?

I have been sick with "flu like symptoms" most of the weekend and being in Flushing Queens chose to isolate myself from others...which left me time to think...even if it is in a flu like state. I got to thinking about hermeneutics....here are some opinions:

The closest thing that the RCA has to an official hermeneutic ….and I could be wrong….is that Scripture interprets Scripture. This can, and often does, lead to a circular argument. We all come with a hermeneutic of what the Scripture is that interprets itself…see already going in circles. If we start, as the RCA says we should, with the Bible being infallible in all it intends to teach, it says nothing about how exactly we are to interpret the Bible. We can interpret the Bible literally, we can say that some is literal and some allegorical, or any combination of both. The concepts of Infallibility and that Scripture interprets Scriptures say nothing about historical, textual, source, form, canonical, or narrative criticisms (not an exhaustive list of criticisms…I know.) Most Biblical scholars and even not so scholarly readers of the Bible each have their favorite criticisms or reject all criticisms. This alone makes having a common or “official” hermeneutic neigh near impossible.

Also as I was taught in Seminary…and as I now believe…the Bible is a living book and that it reads us even more than we read it. As we study the Scriptures our understanding of them change and grow..not because the Word changes but because we change. Each of us are unique individuals with unique experiences of Christ. This is shown clearly in the four gospels, each writer has a distinct “take” on the Gospel and they present it through their experience and to their particular audience. They each saw Christ in a unique way. If you ask anyone two people in church who Christ is to them…you will get two unique answers. Each of us reads the Word of God and God speaks to us through the word of God in unique ways. This, in addition to the above discussion of the scholarly issues, make having a common hermeneutic impossible in a local church let alone a denomination.

The RCA, in all it’s wisdom, (not being sarcastic) has never adopted an official hermeneutic, nor should they in my opinion, more than Scripture interprets Scripture.

So where does this leave us?

It leaves us with Christ. The RCA will never find a unified hermeneutic, but we can be unified in Christ. Someone asked in a follow up to one of the posts on these blogs if two who disagree can walk together. My answer is a hopeful yes! Peter and Paul disagreed but they still walked together. The Eastern and Western churches have disagreed yet they have still seem to walk together is some ways. The RCA and CRC have disagreed, yet we are now walking closer together than we have for over a hundred years!

With all things we need to trust the faithfulness of Christ, even if and when we prove to be faithless. Our hermeneutics may be wrong sometimes…but they for the most part are faithful and I trust that God will be faithful even when we err.

No matter what are hermeneutics are…Christ is common…Christ is the constant. If we start there we can walk anywhere with anyone.

The Importance of Play

There is an old adage: The family that plays together stays together.

I wonder...when was the last time RCA had a good time playing together.

Some of my favorite moments of life together as a church family in the churches I have served have been around playful acts of fellowship. From hiding underneath the stage beneath the choir and leading the church secretary to believe she was going crazy during choir practice... to  tripping over my wife's purse when I was being introduced to the congregation for the first time and having to try to act graceful and dignified afterwards have been playful moments in my ministry. Moments of planned and spontaneous play bring us to a place where we remember that we were made, in large part, for God's good pleasure. Through the laughter, we as a community can share a laugh and experience, if ever so briefly, playful interactions where we let our guards down and simply be together.

I have the honor of attending General Synod this year as a delegate, and I hope that there will be a time for us to play together. The build up to Synod, or at least blogs that are  leading up to Synod, seem to be so serious.  And while we will be facing some important issues, hopefully we won't take ourselves so seriously that we miss the joy of being together as a community of sisters and brothers in Christ.