Much of my spiritual formation, as I’ve said before in this space, came through Reformed University Fellowship. Not least among the things I’m thankful for from my time as a student involved in that ministry is my introduction to many great hymns of the church through the Indelible Grace project, one of various efforts to revive hymn texts that have fallen out of use (or at least that are missing a generation of Christians) by pairing them with contemporary melodies.

Thankful as I am for that introduction, I’ve grown more critical of much of what has come out of Indelible Grace since I’ve been out of college. A lot of that has to do with treatments of hymns like “O Come and Mourn with Me Awhile,” whose new tune is major-key, syncopated, and altogether too peppy for its text.

Yet there’s something to the weird effect of singing those words with that tune, something that expresses the strangeness of Good Friday.

It’s a public holiday here in Berlin, so the streets are unusually quiet. We’ll have a worship service in a couple of hours, a simple affair with readings from Mark’s crucifixion account, songs centered on the Cross, and a brief homily. As I type, I can hear church bells tolling the hour of the Lord’s death. It’s a quiet holiday, a day where it’s easy to wallow in the hard things going on in our lives and those of our loved ones – and there’s no shortage of those, at least for us. It’s a day (along with Holy Saturday) that can feel dominated by that “sort of quietness” C.S. Lewis describes in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you… You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”

But we’re commemorating the only time it was ever like that. We’re not left with the misery of disappointed hopes, as the disciples were; we can’t really feel that nothing is ever going to happen again. It did. We are celebrating Good Friday in the Age of Easter. And that transforms what we’re doing. Can our mourning really be grief, since we know what was really happening on Golgotha that spring day?

It’s a good time to try to revive and cultivate our sensibility for solemnity, for that which is solempne, which Lewis writes about in his Preface to Paradise Lost (cited here): “the opposite of what is familiar, free and easy, or ordinary” yet with no suggestion of “gloom, oppression, or austerity.” Lewis says in that context, “Easter is solempne, Good Friday is not.” Here I have to differ with him. The dreadful day itself, of course – as experienced by those who stood by the Cross and laid their Master in the virgin tomb – was not solempne. There was no joy then. But Lewis’s words in the mouth of Aslan the risen Lion are too true to keep all the rest of our Good Fridays devoid of festal joy: “Death itself [started] working backwards.”

Jesus came to defeat death from the inside out, and he did. Death’s victory is gone, and not only now: death’s victory on the Cross is retroactively its defeat.

When we look to the Cross, we can now see what was really happening: not a disaster undone only by the emergency intervention of the Resurrection, but the undoing of all that kept us from the joy God intended for His creatures. The Man on the Cross is the hero sallying forth against the dragon: there’s only one way for this to end. The Suffering Servant is carrying our sins into the grave, to leave them there forever.

The writer to the Hebrews said this: “for the joy that was set before him [Jesus] endured the cross, despising the shame.” We cannot but be humbled; there is nothing so sobering as to contemplate the cost of our sins, the cost of new creation, but this verse says something unfathomable: Jesus despised the shame of the cross – in a culture where nothing was more to be avoided than shame – in favor of promised joy. Joy weighed heavier on Jesus’ heart than all the world’s wickedness.

So yes, come and mourn with me, but let us mourn joyfully over the beautiful and terrible scene. Let us delight in the solemnity of the quiet day. Christ our Passover is sacrificed: let us keep the feast. Jesus our Lord is crucified!

-Ben

I preached this morning’s sermon at church; it’s part of a series we’re doing based on John Stott’s The Cross of Christ. My sermon was based on the chapter “Suffering and Glory” – somehow I seem to have been anointed the expert on suffering among our stable of preachers (my last sermon was on 1 Peter 3:18-4:11) – so I preached from John 12:20-33, where Jesus announces that the hour has come for him to be glorified, by which he means crucified.

Nothing in my fairly meager experience has spoken to me of the terrible paradox at the heart of the Christian faith quite like the story of my RUF campus minister, Dustin Salter. So that’s the example I built my sermon around. As part of putting the sermon together, I wanted to quote Dustin’s final sermon, so I found it online and read through the transcript. Even the better part of a decade later, I was wrecked by the time I came to the end. I commend it to you warmly.

Without even realizing it, I prepared a sermon testifying to the impact of Dustin’s life and death on my life – and trying to show what a picture of Jesus this man was to me – and delivered it the week of the eighth anniversary of his death, which will be this Thursday. I even met someone this week who had also known Dustin and been shaped by his teaching – what a strange confluence of “coincidences.”

Given all of this, I thought it might be worth translating the sermon into English and sharing with anybody who might be interested – the text is below. I can’t claim to have made anything like a worthy tribute to my dear friend’s life and ministry, but I hope it will be a reminder that the Word he dedicated his life to teaching to so many of us is continuing to bear fruit in many corners of the world. “The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.” Thank you, Dustin. Thank you, Lord Jesus.

-Ben

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Suffering and Glory

I stand before you today in large part because of a man named Dustin Salter. Dustin was the leader of the Christian fellowship I belonged to as a student. He greeted our large group every single week with the same words: “You’re never so bad that you’re out of reach of God’s grace, and you’re never so good that you don’t stand in desperate need of that grace.”

His life bore out this teaching: Dustin wasn’t exactly the type you’d imagine as leader of a big, successful student organization. He was tall, lanky, and – to be honest – a little funny-looking. He couldn’t sit still for two minutes straight. He had a laugh like a hyena – and he loved to laugh. He had a new song stuck in his head seemingly every day, and he was always singing little snatches of whatever song it was to himself.

But by God’s grace, he had a profound impact, not only on me but (no exaggeration) on hundreds of my fellow students. Though he never considered himself a scholar, he was always ready to help us wrestle with the Big Questions over coffee or lunch. He often invited us into his home, where we got to know him as an exemplary husband and father. He knew that he was saved, led, and loved by a merciful and sovereign God, and he longed for us to know that same God.

Dustin led a small group of us on a ten-day mission trip to Romania my freshman year – it was my first time in Europe, and the beginning of my interest in church planting. At the beginning of my sophomore year, my dad died of malignant melanoma, and Dustin was there for me. From that point on, he began to be more than just a friend – he was more like a second father. He was the one I’d go to for advice as I tried to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life.

He didn’t shy away from confronting me with the not-so-nice aspects of my personality, either. He had to have a number of tough conversations with me about my arrogance and thoughtlessness toward others. My character changed so dramatically while I was in college that some of my friends believe to this day that that was when I first became a Christian. Dustin had a lot to do with that.

In November 2006, I got a call from a friend: Dustin had had an accident. He wanted to try out his new bike, so he went for a little ride with his two sons in their neighborhood. Somehow, he fell from his bike and hit his head on the curb. The boys couldn’t wake him back up. After emergency surgery, he was first in a coma, then a vegetative state, for the next five months – until at last he passed away from a complication of his injury.

It was truly a freak accident: he wasn’t doing anything dangerous, not riding too fast or doing tricks on his bike or anything. But suddenly he was gone. From that moment, his wife was left with their three children – aged eight, six, and three – to raise alone. And I, along with hundreds of students and alumni, were left to mourn a beloved friend, mentor, and leader.

What was it all supposed to mean? We claim that our God is omnipotent and that He is good – Dustin himself taught us that – and yet this God took a good man away from us, a man who should have still had many years ahead of him.

This is perhaps the single biggest question for people who believe in God: how can God allow such things to happen? Not just in the abstract – how could God have allowed the things that have happened in my life? Couldn’t he have prevented Dustin’s death? That is to say, is he actually omnipotent? Didn’t he want to prevent Dustin’s death? Is he actually good?

It’s hardly any exaggeration to say that almost the entire Bible was written with these questions in mind. Righteous Abel is murdered, and his murderer Cain enjoys a long life under God’s protection. David, the rightful king, is hunted for years by the ruling King Saul. The faithful prophet Elijah has to flee for his life from the wicked Queen Jezebel into the desert. God’s temple is destroyed by the cruel Babylonians, who send the people of Israel into exile. In the centuries to follow, the Israelites are dominated by the heathen Persians, Greeks, and Romans. Even the most faithful and best people fall victim to suffering, disaster, and death.

The Psalmist summarizes the problem in Psalm 44: “You have made us like sheep for slaughter and have scattered us among the nations. … All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you, and we have not been false to your covenant.” In Psalm 74:11, the question is more direct: “Why do you hold back your hand, your right hand?” Why, O Lord? Is it that you can’t help, or that you won’t?

If you don’t believe in God at all, then in theory the “why” question should be no problem for you. If there is no God, then there’s no intent, no purpose, no Why. Whatever happens, happens. There’s nobody to blame – really, there’s no blame to give. I’m not making fun of this view – ultimately, it’s one of only two possibilities: either there is a Creator who is responsible for his creation, or there is only the transitory universe and whatever happens in it.

If that’s your view, I just want to pose a couple of questions to think over: is the reason you don’t believe in God the fact that you can’t find a satisfactory answer to the “why” question? If so, are you actually satisfied with there being no answer at all – and with the question itself being ultimately meaningless? Can you really come to terms with the thought that there’s no reason to ask the “why” question?

As for those of us who do believe God really exists, we must ask this question. We as Christians operate on the assumption that He exists and that He is omnipotent; it’s built right into the first line of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty.” That means that he could prevent all suffering, evil, and misfortune – but apparently He doesn’t mean to. Yet He tells us that He is good and gracious, and he promises good to those who entrust themselves to him. Look at his words in Isaiah 65:

“I will rejoice in Jerusalem and be glad in my people; no more shall be heard in it the sound of weeping and the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not fill out his days. They shall not labor in vain or bear children for calamity. Before they call I will answer; while they are yet speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall graze together; the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent’s food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain,” says the LORD.

That doesn’t look much like the world we live in, does it? Yet God Himself says that is His will. By claiming to be good – in particular, by claiming to be benevolent toward us – it seems like God has some obligation to respond to the “why” question.

And He does – in the Bible, He does so twice. His first response comes in the book of Job. For those not familiar with that book, it’s the story of a rich, “blameless and upright” man “who feared God and turned away from evil.” Despite Job’s righteousness, God allows Satan to put his fear of God to the test. Job suffers a series of catastrophes: on a single day, he loses all of his possessions as well as his ten children, and shortly thereafter, he falls ill with “loathsome sores” all over his body. Despite all of this, Job stays pious: “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” he asks.

The rest of the book takes the form of a poetic dialogue between Job and four of his acquaintances. Job’s friends are sure that he must have earned this punishment somehow – they can’t imagine how a righteous person would have to suffer so much. Job must be in the wrong. But Job defends himself against their accusations, ultimately calling God Himself to account.

In the end, God does reveal Himself, speaking to Job out of a storm. He declares Job righteous and rebukes his friends. But God’s response to Job’s complaint isn’t exactly satisfying. He offers Job no explanation, instead posing him a series of rhetorical questions: Where were you, Job, when I created the world? Are you omnipotent, as I am? Are you omniscient, as I am? God points Job to the unfathomable greatness of the natural world and to Himself as its sole Creator and Master.

What kind of an answer is that? Anybody who’s read the first chapter of the book knows why all the catastrophes took place: God wanted to prove to Satan that Job’s righteousness is more than skin deep – that he served his Lord from the heart. Yet God doesn’t even hint at that purpose in His speech to Job. No wonder one of my college professors liked to call God as He appears at the end of Job “cheeky”! Ultimately, God says, “I am Who I am, and that will have to be enough for you.”

And the amazing thing is that Job does accept this answer. In the end, he yields, saying, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Job had seen God as He really is, and this vision was enough for him. He didn’t know at the end any more than he did at the beginning why he had to suffer everything he did, but he knew for certain that there was no sane alternative to trusting in this mighty and wise Creator. The experience of God’s glory was the best response He could have made to Job.

So God’s first response to the big “why” question in the Bible is the one He makes in the book of Job; today’s sermon text, John 12:20-33, points us to the second:

               Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor him.

               “Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not mine. Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die. (John 12:20-33 ESV)

John 12 is the turning point of John’s Gospel. In the first 11 chapters, Jesus works a series of great “signs”: he turns water into wine, heals sick and blind people, feeds 5,000 people with a few pieces of fish and bread, walks on water, and finally raises Lazarus from the dead. Three times, however, it’s repeated that Jesus’ “hour” has not yet come. Then in chapter 12, Jesus travels to Jerusalem for Passover, where “some Greeks” approach his disciples, asking to see Jesus. Jesus’ response? “Now the hour has come.”

What does he mean by “the hour”? “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” might not be quite so meaningful for Christians nowadays as it would have been for Jesus’ hearers. The saying alludes to the prophecy in the book of Daniel (chapter 7), in which “one like a son of man” appears “with the clouds of heaven.” This “son of man” is a mysterious apocalyptic figure whose coming heralds the judgment and overthrow of the kings of the earth, so that “the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, forever and ever.”

This means that the “hour” in question is the one in which the prophecy will be fulfilled: now is the time when “dominion and glory and a kingdom” will be given to the Son of Man and “all peoples, nations, and languages” will be made to serve him, and his “dominion” will never pass away. For Jesus’ listeners, the announcement of the “hour” must have been electrifying: the final salvation of Israel has come! The power of Rome will finally be broken! We will be free at last!

And then Jesus starts talking about death. The grain of wheat has to die to bear fruit; only those who despise their lives in this world will gain eternal life. Jesus describes himself as “troubled” by the impending hour. He even expresses the desire to be saved from the hour! It must have been absolutely baffling to those present. What could death and glory have to do with one another?

Verses 31-33 sharpen the paradox: “Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I,” Jesus says, “when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” He makes it abundantly clear that he is identifying himself with the prophesied Son of Man. He considers himself to be the ruler whom “all peoples, nations, and languages” will serve. But John has another interpretation: “He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die.” Jesus’ “lifting up” was going to happen on a cross.

This is much more than a play on words – though of course the crucifixion was a quite literal “lifting up” – the crucifixion is itself the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy. On the cross, Jesus would actually be glorified. And that means that God would reveal Himself in Jesus on the cross.

God’s second and definitive response in the Bible to the great “why” question is the cross of Christ. And just as He could give Job no better answer than the revelation of His own glory, the cross is itself a self-revelation of God – indeed, the ultimate expression of His glory.

How can this be? In our present sermon series, we are looking at the richness of what God has accomplished for us through Jesus’ crucifixion. We receive wonderful gifts through it: forgiveness, justification, liberation from the power of sin, and much more. But the event itself was horrific. How can it be that the cruel execution of an innocent man should reveal God’s glory? And yet this is exactly the thesis of John’s Gospel. The crucifixion is the climax of Jesus’ “hour of glory.”

God revealed Himself to Job as a sovereign Creator in order to show him that only He was worthy of Job’s trust. In the cross, He reveals Himself as God the Son, who is willing not to be rescued from the hour of suffering in order to bring the divine plan to completion – and to vindicate Job’s trust. But this second response to the “why” question goes farther: in the book of Job, God reveals Himself to the sufferer; on the cross, He reveals Himself as the sufferer.

Jesus isn’t just the God who spoke to Job from the whirlwind, but also a new Job, who maintains his piety despite the loss of his possessions, his family, his friends, and finally his own life. Just like Job, he glorifies God by what he says: Job famously said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”; Jesus says, “Father, glorify your name.” In response, God’s voice comes like thunder from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” God the Father is also glorified in this hour through Jesus’ faithfulness and surrender to His will.

As I said before, “glorified” and “revealed” are synonymous here: God is glorified by being made known. He made Himself known to Job as the almighty Master, so that Job would find comfort in his suffering. At the cross, He revealed Himself anew in three particular ways.

First, He is the God who brings blessing, even through suffering and death. This much is clear in verses 31-32: the death of Jesus will bring an end to Satan’s dominion in this world, and it will bring countless people into relationship with God. Judgment will take place, and Jesus will be condemned in place of God’s people, so that they might be called “saints of the Most High.” On the cross, Jesus will already have come into his eternal dominion by hating his life in this world so as to keep it for eternal life. After Job’s experience of suffering, he was given twice as much wealth as he had had before; what Jesus received by virtue of his death – what he gained for all of us who believe in him – is so glorious, that (as Paul says in Romans 8) “the sufferings of the present age are not worth comparing” to it.

Second, He is the God who bestows honor, even through suffering and death. This is the promise of verse 26: the Father will honor the one who serves Jesus. He will do that in the same way he honored Jesus on the cross: He will reveal Himself through Jesus’ servants. How we live, how we love, how we suffer, how we die, and how we will one day rise: all of it will become a means by which God reveals Himself to the world.

Third, He is the God who is willing to take part in suffering and death. John writes at the beginning of his Gospel, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.” He dwelled among His people and suffered everything with them that a person can suffer. He let Himself be put to the ultimate test. He must have a good purpose for suffering, misfortune, and death – he didn’t prevent them when he was the victim.

God has revealed Himself as the God who through suffering and death brings blessing and bestows honor, and who Himself takes part in suffering and death. These aren’t mere facts about God: together they constitute an invitation into His own life. Jesus’ words, which in the context of the announcement of his “hour” were so puzzling, are fundamentally a call to his hearers to follow him: “If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also.” Where is Jesus? He is with God, forever and ever, in the glorious kingdom that will never pass away. He is, as he says in chapter 17, one with the Father, the Father in him and he in the Father, united in love from before the foundation of the world. That is where Jesus’ followers will be.

It’s a wonderful invitation. But it costs everything to follow Jesus. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his book The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” He meant this somewhat figuratively: we must die to “all our wishes and desires.” Yet every one of us will encounter death quite literally – both our own death and that of others. We Christians are called to suffer everything that any other people suffer, and to do so as followers of a God who neither prevents suffering and death nor explains why He doesn’t do so.

Because the cross, like God’s speech to Job, is strictly speaking no answer to the “why” question. No matter how many times I read the story of the crucifixion, I will never find the sort of explanation I’d like. What was the reason I had to lose my dad? What was the reason I had to lose Dustin? What’s the reason for thousands of people dying in tsunamis or hurricanes or wars? God just says, “I am Who I am, and that will have to be enough for you.”

How can that be enough for us?

There were over 600 people at Dustin’s funeral, most of them former students. Many of us – including six or seven just counting my own close friends – are now in full-time Christian ministry. Every single one of us was shaped by Dustin in one way or another. I can’t remember that much of the worship service, except for one moment: a friend of mine who had worked as an intern in our student fellowship read from Philippians 2. When she came to verse 8, where it says that Jesus “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death,” she broke down in tears – and so did the whole congregation.

Dustin Salter was obedient to the point of death, a death that was to all appearances senseless – but no more senseless than the crucifixion of Jesus.

I don’t know to what extent God has brought blessing through Dustin’s death. I know that He brought great blessing through Dustin’s life, and I believe that He means even the tragedy for good, somehow. I believe that because God has already brought about the greatest possible blessing through a death that seemed even more senseless.

I know that God honored Dustin even in his death. I – together with hundreds of others – experienced God’s glory through Dustin’s life and teaching; the crowd at the funeral was proof of that. I can also bear witness to the generosity of our fellowship’s alumni: together, they donated enough money to buy Dustin’s widow and children a new house. We are together a testimony that God bestowed something of His own glory on Dustin, who in turn shared it with many others. The Father honored His servant, to His own praise.

I know that God meant Dustin’s death for good and that He was glorified through it, because I am confident that He understands my grief. Why did He let Dustin fall from that bike? I don’t know. But I am convinced that God never led Dustin anywhere He Himself had not been. I am convinced that God knows what it is to lose a father. He knows what it is to lose a friend. He knows what it is to lose everything.

Dustin’s last sermon was about God’s providence. It is God’s hands, Dustin said, that guide the whole cosmos and each of our lives, even when the path is dark. “Entrust yourself to those hands,” he said at the end of the sermon; “They are good hands.” Yes, they are good hands, pierced hands, glorious hands.

If you’ve never entrusted yourself to those hands, I invite you to do so. Come, like the Greeks at that Passover almost 2,000 years ago, and say, “Lord, I want to see Jesus.” Come and die. Come and hate your life in this world. Come and be where Jesus is. He will not turn you away. You will see his glory, and it will be enough.

It was my own fault.

Here’s the deal: you can drive on a U.S. driver’s license for six months in Germany (so if you’re here as a tourist, you can rent a car or whatever), but if you want to be allowed to drive after that point, you need to exchange your American license for a German one. The conditions of this exchange are set by agreement between the German government and the governments of individual States, not our federal government – so that, for instance, a licensed driver from Alabama doesn’t need to pass a written test to get a German license, while a driver from Connecticut does. (Texans, happily, don’t have to take a test, though we are required to have an up-to-date eye test.) If you miss the six-month deadline, though, you’ve got to get your German license the way the poor Germans do: by taking an approved (and expensive) driver’s ed course and passing both written and practical tests.

We have no desire to possess or even operate a motor vehicle here anytime in the near future, but we have even less desire to put in the time and money to get licenses later on in the event that having a car becomes a practical necessity. I, procrastinator that I am, had nearly let our six months run out without booking an appointment to apply for German licenses.

This is how we ended up on the boat.

Trying to book an appointment at the nearest Bürgeramt (that’s the local administrative office, a sort of one-stop shop for local government stuff like this) was hopeless at such short notice – so we took what we could get, which was an 8:00 a.m. meeting at a satellite office of the Bürgeramt of Spandau, the borough on Berlin’s far western edge. This office consisted     of a waiting room and two desks in a youth retreat center in the locality of Kladow, which is more or less as far away from – well, anything – as you can get and still technically be in Berlin.

We headed out at 6:00 that morning – the safest route (in terms of how much time would be lost if we missed a bus or train) took us into the center of the city and then on a 45-minute bus ride through quite a lot of nowhere. But after our (successful!) appointment, the timing was right for us to take advantage of one of the lesser-known features of Berlin’s public transit system: the ferry.

Though Berlin is landlocked, its public transit authority (the BVG) operates four ferry routes. Three run across the lakes in the city’s southeastern corner; the fourth is in the southwest corner of Berlin, where the Havel river broadens out into a wide lake, a large arm of which is called the Greater Wannsee. It’s this body of water that separates faraway Kladow from our own borough (and regions directly accessible via train and bus).

So we hopped on the ferry in Kladow and took the 20-minute ride (on a normal ticket, just like you’d use for a train or bus) across the lake. Partway through, I noticed a big grey villa just back of the shore to our right, looked up our location, and sure enough, it was the (in-)famous Wannsee House, the location of the 1942 conference that made all the Nazi leadership complicit in the so-called “Final Solution” – now a museum and memorial.

There’s something very Berlin about the whole adventure, from the realities of navigating German bureaucracy as a foreigner to the strangeness of poking into the far corners of the city limits, from the joy of lakes and rivers and verdure in a city of millions to the sobering memory of my adoptive home’s past.

It ended up a pretty good day.

-Ben

Our not-quite-two-year-old’s favorite Bible story so far is the one about Jesus calming the storm. He likes to make the sounds of thunder and lightning; he laughs at the “wind” Daddy blows through his hair, and squeals with joy as I tell him about the waves by lifting him up, up, up, and plunging him down, down, down – until finally I tell him how Jesus woke up as the disciples cried out frantically. “What did he say?” I ask.

And Peter says, “Hush!”

“That’s right! And you know what? The storm did hush.”

There is something of that experience in Christmas, at least the way I’m used to experiencing it. December is generally a bit of a storm, with lots of events to sap an introvert’s energy, plenty of Christmas shopping to turn my head into a buzzing mess, and usually some good food, drink, and company to enjoy. But at some point, it’s bedtime on Christmas Eve, and there is that lovely sort of hush, the Christmas Hush, that makes me want to linger a bit.

At least judging by my social-media experience, the observation that the whole embellished tale of Mary and Joseph hobbling into Bethlehem late in the evening nine months into Mary’s pregnancy and getting turned away from all the motels until somebody offers a cattle stall for the night is biblically groundless, Westernized nonsense has gotten some traction. It was far more likely that they got to Bethlehem well ahead of the due date, were taken in by family, and lodged in the downstairs area (which would also have housed animals), where Mary most likely delivered Jesus surrounded by women, including a midwife.

It was no silent night, in other words – the bustle was probably considerable. Yet at some point – after the shepherds’ visit, I suppose – I have to imagine that there must have been that hush, with everybody asleep, excepting maybe Mary and her little boy, awake to nurse, and the quiet reality of the union of Creator and creation.

“In a world…” is the oft-parodied start to countless movie trailer narrations, trying to cast an imaginative vision for viewers with hackneyed formula. But it’s been echoing in my mind lately, because there in that hush (before the big orchestral hit), there’s a chance just to think: we live in a world where the bottom Mary had to wipe (assuming they did that in the ancient Near East) now sits on the very throne of God Almighty, if I may put it so crassly. Here we are. This is not the same world Mary and Joseph or any of their ancestors were born into. It’s the Year of Our Lord, and even if the math is off, the instinct is right: once Jesus is here, times have changed.

I treasure the hush, because it is a space to soak in the light and the aromas and the warmth of festivity, and then to take stock a little bit. Who am I? What sort of world is this? How good it is to be merry, and how good it is to sit for some few still minutes and know that it is evening, and will be morning, the great Day.

Merry Christmas, dear friends. Blessings to all of you this beautiful season!

-Ben

My thankfulness is too fragile.

I’m tempted to think of it as ironic that this week, Thanksgiving week, has seen the first real disappointment we’ve had to face since we’ve been here – after a season of sustained, joyful thanksgiving on our part.

We arrived safe and sound in Berlin in mid-August, found a lovely apartment – one that gets tons of sunlight, something we’re truly, deeply grateful for just now – within a week of arrival, have found our neighbors friendly and pleasant, both found good language-study situations quickly, have felt welcomed in our church, and finally got all the stuff we shipped last week, meaning that for the first time in almost a year and a half, we live in our own place that’s furnished with things we own. I have been welcomed and encouraged in both sides of the work I’m here to do, being asked to preach in church this month (my first attempt at preaching in German, which went remarkably well) and to take on challenging and exciting work at our partner seminary. We were referred to an excellent ophthalmologist for Peter and had a great first visit there. We are in the place we’ve longed to return to for years, stepping into the tasks we’ve been itching to do for all that time – and we’ve been rejoicing in it.

But on Monday we traveled for 45 minutes in the cold and wet to the rather grim slab of brick and concrete that houses Berlin’s immigration office, waited for a bit, handed over every official document we could scrape together, and waited for another 45 minutes – then were handed three-month temporary visas instead of the four-year ones we’d applied for. We didn’t have the right stamp here, the right wording there. So home we went, another 45 minutes in the rain.

My thankfulness started to fray, just a bit, around the edges.

I can be pretty good at perspective, and that’s my first instinct: hey, it could be worse. And that’s true. We’re not getting deported, and nothing necessarily prevents us from getting the visas we want next time around. Nothing much has actually changed that should make me feel less thankful. And yet…

That’s not the standard. The standard is thanks in all things, for all things (1 Thess 5:18; Eph 5:20). God wants and intends to have a sturdy thankfulness from me, one that rings out in my singing and talking, preaching and teaching, praying and writing, not regardless of but because of, right there in the middle of, the things that He sends. This light and momentary annoyance is a summons: sing to the Lord with thankful voice, a steady and strong voice supported by the breath of Life Himself in your lungs.

So thanks be to God for sun today instead of rain. Thanks be to God for the prospect of cornbread dressing and pumpkin pie in not so many hours. Thanks be to God for dishes and pots and pans we bought with wedding-present gift cards, and thanks be to God for couches and chairs and beds we bought with a setup allowance funded by dozens of generous friends, family members, and barely-acquaintances who have shared of their bounty with us. And thanks be to God for Frau W. at the immigration office, who is unwittingly helping me to learn to give thanks a little better this year. Thanks be to God for every bureaucrat or neighbor or church member or coworker or stranger who will help her in the years to come to tear away the flimsy self-made thankfulness I slap together when I feel like it and force me to build up solid joy in the unfailing love of an invincible God.

Thanks be to God for you, dear friends, and may you rejoice in His bounty today.

-Ben

Can it already have been two weeks that we’ve been in Berlin?

Can it really have been only two weeks so far?

In retrospect, we divide up our lives more neatly than they ever happened: a few years down the road, Lord willing, we’ll think of our time in Berlin as having begun on August 14th, 2014, and that will be that. The frantic preparations of the five weeks prior to that date that followed the booking of our tickets will seem less real than the date (August 13th) that they ended, and these weeks will be hard to remember in much detail.

But there’s a lot of detail. Some things we’ll always remember and talk about – how we spent our first few days in a blitz of apartment viewings, after which we were granted a contract on the very first apartment we’d seen and moved in just a week after arrival. Some things, I expect, will fade: the quaint little burner phone we are using until we get individual smartphones; cooking meals with a few borrowed pots and pans and eating them off of Ikea children’s dishes; trying to keep Peter entertained in the Schloss Mall next door to Steglitz City Hall while we waited to register our new address; the racket our borrowed air mattresses make when we shift in our sleep; waiting for a debit card to arrive from the bank so we can go on our big furniture-buying spree; racing toy cars across the empty living room with Peter.

We are speaking German again, quite a bit, and it’s coming back well enough, but you never really remember how tiring it is to speak your second language, even if just for a few hours out of the day. A few online errands to sign us up for this or that service, a short prayer meeting at church, a quick chat with a friendly neighbor who’s picking up a package the Amazon delivery guy left for him with you, and you feel like you’ve just taken an all-day exam – your brain just shuts down. It gets easier with “exercise,” but you’re always working a little harder mentally than you ever have to back in the States.

All the same, these things are gifts, each one of them. We are in a beautiful, green part of the city, a place we have found wonderfully friendly so far. Our apartment is delightful, with big windows and an airy layout that will help us to all the sun we can get in the dark months to come; aside from all sorts of lovely little conveniences (lots of built-in or pre-installed storage is not to be sniffed at here), it’s across the street from a bakery, a block off of the canal with its walking paths and playgrounds, and most importantly, around the corner from our church on one side and our teammates’ home on the other.

I tend to be rather like Puddleglum in mentality, especially in the face of a wealth of blessing like this: when’s the other shoe going to drop? Ten to one the new washing machine leaks or our visa application is rejected or the Calormenes invade, something like that. It’s easy to put a pious face on that thinking – doesn’t God grow us through suffering? Then surely we can’t be growing very much right now. Surely some major inconvenience needs to come along to set the balance right!

But I am trying to keep in mind what Jesus had to say about good gifts and what they’re for, trying to see these things as minas given for us to invest here in the neighborhood He is entrusting, in some measure, to us. Perhaps so far the Lord has found us faithful with a little, and is now giving a little more, in the expectation of reaping a greater return. It’s a humbling, daunting thought, but a joyful one: how might we make the living space God has given us into a home not only for us but for the neighbors we don’t know yet? If so much good to us is just the initial investment, the first mina, what will it be to see that make ten minas more?

It’s good to be here.

-Ben

Abraham is the first person the Bible identifies as a “prophet” (Gen 20:7), and in the same context, he becomes the first person in the Bible whose prayer is narrated (20:17).

It’s not often easy for us to understand where the label “prophet” comes from in that story. How is Abraham a prophet? When has he foretold any future events, or spoken on God’s behalf to anybody at all? Evidently, there’s something more fundamental to the identity of a prophet even than the speaking role he carries out: the prophet has God’s ear.

Abraham hears from God all the way back in chapter 12, the beginning of his story, and God speaks to him in the intervening chapters, but it’s only in chapter 15 that he starts talking back – immediately after the famous assertion that he was justified by faith. As a believer and party to a solemn covenant with God, Abraham is now also a dialogue partner, a privilege he exercises at the end of chapter 18 when the Lord has revealed His plan to redress the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah.

It’s because a prophet is part of God’s council, privy to the Lord’s deliberations about how to respond to human evil, that he has the right to speak the Lord’s words to His people.

There’s much more to say about what the Bible means by “prophet,” but it’s important to keep that central idea in view when we talk about Jesus as the great Prophet, and when we think about ourselves as Christians as participants in his prophetic ministry. He – and we through him – belong in God’s presence, have a right to stand there and speak for ourselves and others. It’s because we do this that we in turn have something to say to the world around us, or that we have any power to do good works for our neighbors.

That’s why we hammer the idea that prayer is ministry, and why I’m so grateful that our agency is working to begin a series of short-term trips focused on prayer. That’s a hard sell – Anna and I hear that the usual comment is, “I’d just rather go on a trip where I felt like I’d really done something afterward.” If you can’t relate to that, you’re a far more saintly soul than I; but it’s a painfully wrong way to understand prayer.

Intercessory prayer is, simply put, exercising the prophetic office, which is to say wielding God-given authority toward God-given ends. It’s a crucial way not just to be personally intimate with God, but to carry out His mission by speaking on behalf of the world to Him and in turn being commissioned to speak for Him, to carry His word in our mouths and hearts in the places He sends us. We tend to think of the speaking and acting we do as the work we’re called to, but in our more pious moments, we would always admit that the real work, the kind that yields real, lasting fruit, is done by God Himself, independently of our control or orchestration.

I say the work is independent of our control, but it is most emphatically not independent of our involvement – if we are taking our proper place in the divine war room by prayer.

If it’s at all possible for you, I strongly urge you to consider joining MTW’s upcoming trip to Berlin this October (you can email the two-week department for more info), or to keep an eye out for future opportunities like it. You will “do something” – something perhaps invisible, to be sure, but something that you were made to do, something you are called to do where you live, something that is the very heart and soul of every effort to do the Lord’s work.

-Ben

Last night, I watched the first episode of Call the Midwife with Anna. I enjoyed it a lot, but it did remind me of what a truncated version of pregnancy and childbirth TV and movies give. When Anna was pregnant with Peter, we took a childbirth class at the hospital, and the one thing I really took away from it was this: childbirth is long.

It never is, onscreen. Her water breaks, she breathes fast, she’s in pain and screams a lot, and boom: baby. It rarely takes longer than a few minutes of screen time. Sure, you hear about extended periods of labor, but it usually comes across either as exaggeration or exception.

But no: labor is, strictly on average, the affair of an entire day (or night). The mom-to-be has endured three quarters of a year of pregnancy, and now It’s Time – which means hours upon hours of early labor, culminating in (potentially) hours of pushing until the Big Moment. In retrospect, it’s a blur, but at the time it seems like a pretty grueling race to the finish line, one it would seem only fair to get to skip after so many months of frantic preparations and general inconvenience.

I bring this all up as a labored (sorry) analogy for where we are right now. Support raising is over, praise God! That process is, in its way, like a pregnancy: uncomfortable and tiring, but necessary to prepare us financially, emotionally, and spiritually for the new phase of life to come – not to mention that at the end, we were really wondering how much longer we’d have to wait (granted, support raising could easily have lasted 19 or 29 months as easily as 9).

Now is a mad rush to the finish, which is of course really the start. I don’t mean to push the analogy too far here – while picking a shipping company isn’t my idea of a good time, we’ll hardly need an epidural to get through it – but very suddenly, we are no longer wondering how long we’ll still be in the States (we fly out August 13th); we’re just trying to hang on and get through an exhausting gauntlet to get to the start of something new.

This is why, if you see us and ask if we’re excited to be done with support raising, we say (truthfully!) yes, but we may look and sound ever so slightly frazzled or preoccupied. There are wills to have drawn up and witnessed, retirement plans to enroll in, shipping companies to call for quotes, boxes to repack, possessions to sell, and churches to visit and friends and family to spend evenings with one last time. There’s a whole new to-do list waiting for us in Berlin, too.

And yet, of course, there’s the baby – the city, in this case. The hard part will just be beginning when we get there, but we will be there, field missionaries again, with a church to serve and neighbors to reach, doing what we believe God made us for. Even on our worst days, we know that’s a gift beyond price.

-Ben

Russell Saltzman posted an amusing, perceptive piece on First Things today titled “Time to Admit It: I Live In the Suburbs and Love It.”

“Suburbs have a bad name,” he says, “which is a bit odd what with all the people living in them contentedly. Perhaps that is part of our problem. People like it here and other people know we shouldn’t.” That’s a trenchant observation; Saltzman’s sense of the popular attitude toward the suburbs lines up well with my experience (and frankly, it articulates the attitude I tend to hold as well). Suburbs “sprawl,” evince “poor land use,” stifle creativity, enforce conformity, promote the petty tyrannies of HOAs, and more than likely spread a thin veneer of happiness over a rotting core of middle-class depravity.

True enough, maybe, but Saltzman points out that, for all that, they can be pretty nice places to live – certainly millions of Americans join him in thinking so.

I’ve lived in some reasonably diverse settings – among them a small West Virginia town, the German capital, and, yes, a North Texas suburb (our current home base), so I think I have a decent knack for liking places for what they are. That knack has produced a certain gut-level contrariness that flares up whenever I hear some setting or other idealized or vilified.

In my circles, the idealization usually applies to the city – so much more vibrant and “authentic” and important than the far-flung, samey suburbs – and I remember at least once or twice in seminary pushing back against that tendency. My dad was a small-town pastor for the last seven years of his life, and my respect for that calling has never waned (small towns tend to be forgotten entirely among my ministry-oriented peers). I worried that I may be a bit hypocritical in this, pursuing as I am a call to one of the world’s cities most likely to be labeled “vibrant” or “hip,” but I worry that our godly-enough desire to reach cities and even build a “theology of the city” tends to put those engaging in “urban ministry” on a pedestal.

It’s likewise easy to vilify church planting and ministry in the suburbs as the Christian version of “selling out” – it’s no secret that starting up evangelical churches among high concentrations of affluent white conservatives is a fairly safe investment of church-planting resources, and it’s one my denomination is certainly fond of. There’s a contempt mixed with envy: those suburban church plants neglect the poor, avoid uncomfortable diversity – and have a far easier time reaching financial self-sufficiency and getting volunteers for their ministries. It’s enough to make me a little ashamed to be moving to an area of Berlin that’s not that “urban” compared to some of its bohemian, immigrant-heavy inner-city neighborhoods.

All of this is simply envy, adaptable and virulent. Even a cursory read through Paul’s letters to the Corinthians ought to tell us that different people are made for different places, different roles in the local and global church, different mission fields. We despise those who have it easier than we do – whether because their ministry is trendy and sexy and thus easier to get funding for, or because it’s easier to get things off the ground without needing years of support from outside.

So I feel convicted of the need to emphasize that neither we nor our teammates in truly “urban” settings are doing different work from those reaching developing-world villagers or Bible-Belt suburbanites or anything in between. There is one mission, and we are either engaged in it faithfully or we aren’t: we have to proclaim good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, the year of the Lord’s favor, the Scripture fulfilled in Christ Jesus. We’re to live as servants of God, honoring everyone, silencing slander by doing good, that our neighbors might glorify God on the day of visitation. What we’re called to, you’re called to, and by prayer we are participants in each other’s work, however far apart geographically, culturally, or socially we find ourselves.

-Ben