New Student Bible

Yesterday I found a big, heavy box on my front porch—a case of newly re-designed Student Bibles. The Student Bible first appeared in 1986, 37 years ago. Since then it has sold six million copies. Zondervan, its publisher, believes that it is still relevant, and invested in this new design. To my eye it looks clean and sharp and new.

The Student Bible represents sheer grace in my life. It was Philip Yancey’s project, not mine, when he recruited me to help him. The idea was to produce notes for a Bible that would be informed by the best evangelical scholarship but would communicate in workaday language. We wanted to help readers who got stuck when they tried to read the Bible—help them not with gimmicks or arcane knowledge but with notes enabling them to actually understand the Scriptures and become regular readers.

Four years later, when The Student Bible came out, I had a lot more invested in the project but minimal expectations for success—and so did Zondervan, who wondered why they had put so much money and time into it. Against all predictions, it turned into a huge best-seller. It still seems like a gift, that I’m involved with something so close to my heart that has had such impact—and continues to do so.

Peter’s Journey

Like all the apostles, Peter was present when Jesus preached the sermon on the mount. When Jesus first spoke the beatitudes, Peter was standing right there. One can only guess how those simple, upside-down phrases troubled his mind. Blessed are the poor, the mourners, the meek, the justice-seekers, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted. What young men think that sounds like blessing?

Jesus had recruited Peter in the act of fishing. He dropped the net and followed. People did that with Jesus; he had amazing charisma. He told Peter he would make him into a fisher of men, which suggested (at least) a cause that would recruit others. Young men have been known to find that attractive, building a movement by gathering followers.

When he heard the beatitudes, however, Peter must have been bewildered. This was bait for fishers of men? Who would bite?

Perhaps Peter thought he understood what Jesus was after. A simple lifestyle, identification with the poor, rejection of the status quo and its corruption, radical obedience to God—all building toward a new kingdom, one in which God himself would reign through Jesus and his disciples. That made some revolutionary sense.

A close reading of incidents in Peter’s life, however, reveal that he was still far from understanding.

**

The gospels tell us far more about Peter than any other of the disciples, giving us some idea of the struggle he went through. It all started well. Very early in Peter’s association with Jesus, his own mother-in-law was healed. (Matthew 8:14-15) Like all the disciples, Peter saw Jesus heal many people, evict evil spirits, even feed crowds and restore life to dead people. Jesus helped Peter to walk on water. (Matthew 14:22-31) Jesus’s signs and wonders gave plenty of reason to keep following him.

Jesus’s teaching was more difficult. It was often confusing, frequently confrontational, and always demanding. The parables Jesus used were opaque to his disciples. On a number of occasions, the gospels report some version of the following: “They did not understand what this meant. It was hidden from them, so that they did not grasp it, and they were afraid to ask him about it.” (Luke 9:45)

According to John’s gospel, the struggle to absorb Jesus’s teaching eventually came to a head, and “many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” (John 6:66)

Jesus asked the twelve whether they, too, wanted to leave. “Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’”

That answer sounds heroic, but at a deeper level it reveals that the disciples knew they were stuck. Peter didn’t tell Jesus they were as happy as clams. He said they couldn’t see any alternative. Clearly, Jesus’s disciples were struggling to stick it out.

Later, Jesus asked his disciples what people were saying about him. After hearing a sampling of opinion, he asked point blank, “What about you? Who do you say I am?”

Peter spoke for them all: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” (Matthew 16:16) Jesus praised him warmly for that answer.

Then Jesus began to explain his future death. “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ‘Never, Lord!’ he said. ‘This shall never happen to you!’”

Jesus responded with the harshest words he ever spoke. “Get behind me, Satan!”

Peter could not grasp that Jesus’s glorious calling incorporated the hard blessings of the beatitudes. They were not just for disciples. They were for the master, too. He would lead the way to the bottom, through suffering to death, and any attempt to think otherwise was a distraction from God’s ways. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed the persecuted.

**

That was a harsh confrontation, but Jesus didn’t hold it against Peter. He invited him for the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-13) and playfully involved him in the paying of the temple tax. (Matthew 17:24-27) Peter was still grappling to understand. He approached Jesus with a question: how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Seven times? (Matthew 18:21)

Seven times is a lot to forgive somebody who hurts you; two or three is a lot. Peter remembered the beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful.” He was trying to find the limit. Surely seven pardons was the outer limits of the demands of mercy.

Not according to Jesus. He answered, “not seven times, but seventy-seven.” By the time you get to seventy-seven, who’s counting? Jesus was shredding the very idea of maintaining standards. Mercy never reaches a limit. Forgiveness trumps everything.

Then came the Passover. During the regular ceremonial meal, Jesus silently wrapped a towel around his waist and began to wash the disciples’ feet. Peter objected strongly: this was lowly servants’ work, not fit for Jesus. “You shall never wash my feet.” He still did not understand that the beatitudes applied to Jesus, too. Blessed are the meek. Jesus is meek.

“Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

After the meal, Jesus told his disciples they would all fall away from him before the night was over. Peter could not stand this. “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.”

“I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”

Peter refused to accept it. “Even If I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” (Matthew 26:35)

When Peter thought of dying with Jesus, he apparently meant to go down fighting. As Jesus was being arrested, Peter pulled out a sword and took a hack, cutting off a servant’s ear. (Seemingly, he missed; he was a fisherman, after all, not a warrior.) Jesus told him to put the sword away. There is no place for weapons in the beatitudes.

Jesus was fully prepared to die. Peter, for all his talk, was not. His fears blossomed later that night when he shadowed Jesus into the high priest’s domain. Despite his pledges, when feeling threatened Peter vehemently denied any acquaintance with Jesus. The third time, a rooster crowed and Peter remembered Jesus’s prediction. “He went outside and wept bitterly.” (Matthew 26:75) He had failed in every way, and he knew it—failed as a warrior defender, failed as a follower of the beatitudes and their blessed peacemaking.

**

Then it all changed. In the book of Acts, I see no sign of this weeping, struggling Peter. He acts as a strong and confident leader of the newly founded church. He defies the religious authorities when they try to prevent him from preaching. He opens the doors for non-Jews to join in the Christian assembly. His preaching majors on the death and resurrection of Jesus and the forgiveness they offer to anyone. One perceives nothing of the man whom Jesus had to rebuke and correct repeatedly.

Peter had been converted. His process of conversion was the same one all of us must undergo. Only through the repeated discipleship of Jesus, wrapped in disappointments, hurt and disillusionment, do we begin to experience the word, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Peter’s book of 1 Peter glows with this understanding. By the time he wrote he was an old man. He had been imprisoned and threatened with execution. His church had been exiled from Jerusalem, harassed and persecuted all through Palestine. In giving advice to a suffering, scattered church, Peter taught Jesus’s view as he had finally understood it. Suffering was not the exception in life, the bad stuff that must be borne. It was the heart of the Christian life, precisely because it was the heart of Jesus’s life. He suffered and died. So must we.

First Peter is full of this view of suffering. In his rambling style Peter returns to the subject compulsively. Here is the heart of it.

Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.  But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.  If you suffer, it should not be as a murderer or thief or any other kind of criminal, or even as a meddler. However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name. (1 Peter 4:12-16)

Can you hear the voice of the man who objected to Jesus’s prediction of his own death? That voice is gone. Peter now understands. The beatitudes are not extreme and unreachable. They are not high-flying ideals, never applied to life. They are the text of life. We struggle to believe that, but it is what Jesus believed. He taught it patiently to Peter and all his disciples. He lived it. He died it.

And because he lived and died it, he rose. Just as we, too, will rise to share in his glory.

**

Not yet, however. We, the fat and sated children of a self-congratulating civilization, can hardly believe the beatitudes, let alone practice them. For us, turning the other cheek is often a joke, not a precept. We do not much experience persecution and poverty. We have no reason to be meek and we don’t want to mourn.

Me neither.

The call to follow Jesus is and always has been a strange call. It means dying to yourself. Jesus apparently was serious about that, but how do we get serious?

Jesus wants this for his disciples because it will bless us.

I don’t know how we can become believers, following Peter’s journey. God will have to do it; we can’t do it for ourselves. Our celebrity evangelical culture certainly won’t help.

God has other messengers, however. Many Christians in the world are not fat and sated and comfortable. Many are hungry, poor, and persecuted. Possibly they will lead us.

Or perhaps life itself will teach us. I have now reached an age when it becomes impossible to deny that I am going to die. Before my friends or I do that, many of us will be very sick—and sick at heart. Few of us will be fat and sated until the end. Perhaps, if we are willing, old age will strip away our delusions and help us to reach the beatitudes as a guide and a promise. It may be our last chance to follow Peter on his journey.

Why December 25?

The truth is, we have no idea what time of year Jesus was born. It could have been in the spring. It could have been in the summer. The Bible gives no information, at all.

So why do we celebrate on December 25? Somebody—we don’t know who, where or why—set the date on the coldest, darkest time of the year. On the face of it that makes no sense. Christmas is a happy time, with bright decorations, twinkling lights, songs, feasts, family, gifts—and some group of Christians chose a date just after winter solstice, when the sun barely drags itself above the horizon.

I do not like being cold, but I live in a heated house and drive a heated car. In human history, this is not the norm. Imagine this time of year through all the centuries. It chills you to the bone. There is no reading, no TV, no going out on the town. You sit through the long dark hours with your hands extended to a fire. Your back is freezing.

If you google “Why December 25” you may read that Christians adapted pagan festivals of winter solstice. Maybe so. But that begs the question, “Why didn’t they go for summer solstice?” It would make a nicer time for a celebration.

I think the choice of December 25 is deliberate.  I see it as a slap across the face of the normal. It is an enacted parable, meant for the whole Christian church to rehearse, year after year. We act out a paradox, that the light appears to us out of the cold and dark. Day by day through advent season the situation gets worse and worse, darker and colder. Just when we think we can take no more, a tiny spark of light appears. It is a very small point of light: a baby born in an insignificant village to insignificant parents. Yet this light will grow to illuminate the world, and to direct the world’s story.

I’ve heard a lot of Christmas meditations in my life, but never one pointing out how bad the weather is. Mostly we pretend not to notice. This year, however, I hope you will take particular interest in the cold and the dark. Notice that the sun goes down early and comes up late. Our world is like that, often. It has been lately. Yet the light shines in the darkness. Merry Christmas.

Three Paths

When I was young, evangelical Christians placed a great emphasis on “witnessing.” Whether you sat next to a stranger on an airplane or lived next door to someone in your college dorm, you should be sharing your faith. The preferred way to do so was using the “Four Spiritual Laws,” a little pamphlet published by Campus Crusade for Christ. It presented a simple gospel message as a set of spiritual “laws” parallel to physical laws such as gravity. Becoming a Christian was a matter of accepting the logic of those “laws” and acting on it through a prayer of commitment.

I’m not knocking it. Many people were helped by it to find a way into a life of faith. Now, though, it has fallen out of favor, for lots of good reasons. The idea of spiritual laws akin to physical laws was always a stretch, and logic seems like an inadequate basis for being “born again.”

Another time-honored pathway was epitomized by the Billy Graham Crusade—mass events where preaching led to an emotional appeal to “go forward” and surrender your life to God. Those who did were met by “counselors” bearing the Four Spiritual Laws or something like it.

This way, too, has fallen out of favor, mostly because American culture has grown so insulated from religion it is hard to talk your friends and neighbors into going to a religious meeting.

People still are drawn to God, however. How does someone make that transformative step from unbelief to belief, from materialism to spirituality, from autonomy to trust in a living God? Some people would like to be converted but can’t see how. They are stuck in unbelief and alienation and can’t talk themselves into belief. They may see how good a life of faith would be, but they don’t know how to get there.

The process is mysterious, and no doubt different for each person. It seems to me, however, that there are now three main pathways.

One is the path of gratitude. It depends on a sense that we are surrounded by beautiful realities: our family, friends, environment, community. We hear birds sing and watch the clouds move across the sky and know that we should be grateful. Thankfulness sometimes wells up in us, and when it does, we sense that we are our best selves. Then the logical question becomes: grateful to whom? It makes no sense to be grateful to an impersonal universe. A pathway to God can begin by simply saying thank you—saying it in a heartfelt way, saying it again and again. The Who may be mysterious, but the Who is Someone. When we adopt a life of thanking that Someone, we become believers. Given time, we may discover that Someone has a name.

This is why people who become parents sometimes become believers. Looking at your child is a primal experience of wonder, and God help the person who is not grateful.

If the path of gratitude is theocentric, the path of Jesus is Christocentric.

There is no reason to doubt the reality of Jesus: he is an historic figure who lived two millennia ago, and his life and teachings were written down. We have the source documents, and anybody can access them. A great many people have never done so, or have not done so since they were 18. Reading the life of Jesus, you encounter an extraordinary person. Again, this is not controversial—anybody can see for themselves that he is (was) unlike anybody else. To read his words is to come face-to-face with an extraordinary man. Encountering him, one must decide what this extraordinary teacher is to oneself. Some will conclude that they are encountering God himself in human form, and they will begin to experiment with living according to the principles he taught, and even with speaking to him.

A third way I will call the path of fellowship. Here, longing leads us to join. For the sake of friendships, for a love of music, for an appreciation of ritual, we join a church or some other fellowship. It feels good. It feels healthy. We find ourselves part of a group of believers and, over time, we assume their beliefs. There may not ever be a point of decision. We fall into it. (This is how faith comes to those raised in a Christian family, as I was.) This leads naturally and organically to faith in God.

The life of faith is a great deal more than what I have sketched out here. These are merely pathways that can be followed to enter. They offer a plausible way to move from unbelief to belief. Each pathway is less than a total commitment, but it involves initiative. For those who are seeking, these pathways can be a starting point.

And we desperately need starting points! Do you know of other pathways that people follow to go from unbelief to faith? I’d invite you to describe them.

Isaiah’s Hope, Part 3: The Branch and the Stump

When Popie and I moved into our house almost forty years ago, we inherited lots of little oak trees. They were small, bush-sized sprouts, and I had no idea that they would grow so fast into towering shade trees. But they grew at a rate of three feet a year, and we soon discovered there were way too many. They crowded each other and needed thinning. Some, too, grew in awkward places and began to lean on buildings. We had to cut some of them down.

I learned that when you cut down an oak tree, you haven’t eliminated it. You’ve merely set it back. New shoots will come up from the stump and grow into a new tree with great rapidity. It’s hard to get rid of an oak tree. They keep sprouting anew.

That’s one image that Isaiah uses to establish hope:

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; From his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” (11:1)

Jesse was David’s father, and therefore the first in the line of Israel’s kings. That “royal line” came to an end in Isaiah’s time, a victim of corruption, idolatry, injustice, and ego. The last of the kings was taken into captivity by the Babylonians when they destroyed the capital. By that time, there wasn’t much to regret. From God’s point of view, good riddance.

In that grim time, when the nation was about to be decapitated and the Temple decimated, Isaiah offered hope. In many passages Isaiah predicts a new, rescuing king to save Israel. This new hope doesn’t come out of nowhere, however. Isaiah says that the new beginning will spring out of the old. The Branch comes out of a stump. The “branch” passages make it clear: the new king will come from the old line.

A stump is a terrible fate for a magnificent, spreading tree. That is what Israel had become. It was cut down to the ground: no leaves, no shade, no fruit—just a wreck and a ruin. That’s what Isaiah faced. Today, when we think of our beloved nation and our beloved Church, our greatest fear may be that we will suffer similarly. Polarization, immorality, rancor and lies may destroy us. There will be nothing left but a stump.

I hope and pray that we have not reached that point. Reading Isaiah, however, convinces me that we should look calmly at the possibility that such a punishment may come upon our nation and our church. I pray that it will not be so, but it may be. And what then?

What then is that God causes bright, fast-growing green shoots to grow out of the stump. There is new life in the wreckage. It comes from the old root. What grows may be cut down, but new growth will come from healthy, deep roots—below ground and invisible, not easily chopped or burned.

We need tall trees, but even more we need deep roots. How do we nurture healthy roots for America? How do we nurture healthy roots for the church?

Isaiah’s Hope, Part 2: Suffering Servant

Isaiah offers a second vision of the coming King, one that seems to contradict the first. That’s the Suffering Servant. In four passages–42:1–4; 49:1–7; 50:4–9; and 52:13–53:12—a surprising and strangely brutalized figure appears. Though non-violent, he will bring justice to the earth. But how can he, who is such a pathetic figure? “Despised and rejected,” “like a lamb to the slaughter,” “my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.”

There is no precedent for this in the Old Testament. Kings and judges redeemed through power, not suffering.

The comfort in the Suffering Servant comes in the idea of sacrifice, that the Servant is a sin offering that purifies his people.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.
⁶We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
    each of us has turned to our own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
    the iniquity of us all. (53:5-6)

This was a completely new idea—that a sin offering on our behalf could be, not just a sacrificial animal, but a fellow human being. The thought of human sacrifice is enough to make you squirm. For this reason alone, the Suffering Servant passages were hard for Israelites to incorporate into their faith.

Yet I suspect the biggest obstacle to appropriating the Suffering Servant passages into Israel’s faith lay in in something much closer to the surface. The passages assume that Israel’s problems were not simply Babylonian armies, but their wicked hearts that had turned away from God (while continuing to attend worship services). A glorious king could deal with their enemies, but only the highest order of sacrificial substitution could absolve their wickedness. It would require God’s own Chosen One to die on the altar.

It’s unclear whether any Israelites between Isaiah’s day and Jesus’—seven hundred years, more or less—could fathom what Isaiah predicted, let alone find comfort in it. They knew, just as we do, that they were a sinful people. Yet nobody understood—not even Jesus’ disciples—that Jesus would fulfill this prophecy by dying a cruel death at the hands of the Roman oppressors.

These strange Suffering Servant prophecies are the special property of those of us who live on this side of Jesus’s resurrection. Even for us, the medicine is hard to swallow. It means accepting that our problems are not brought on simply by our enemies, but by our own sinful failings. Nobody likes to look in the mirror and find that kind of ugliness.

But who can deny that we, corporately, as Americans and as American Christians, are sick beyond understanding? Individually, we may be able to cling to a sense of virtue. Where, though, is the virtue of our country, and of our Church? We are in a desperate condition.

Someone has to pay a price for this immorality. Not us, however. Isaiah’s comfort is that God’s own Servant suffers for us.

Make no mistake, our world is full of enemies. There are those who dedicate themselves to making America ugly, and who profit from a politicized Church. It is not enough to defeat those enemies, however. We might trounce them in the courts and on Twitter and at the ballot box, but the problems will not disappear. That is because we, victorious, remain part of the problem. Our comfort comes in acknowledging our own corporate sin-sickness, accepting it as belonging to us (and not just our enemies), and recognizing God’s plan for absolving us. He sent Jesus as our substitute, to pay the price for our part in our sin-sick world.

Isaiah’s hope, Part 1

I’m teaching a class on Isaiah’s hope. The premise of the class is that our current sorrows are more than personal and individual; we feel deep communal sorrow over our nation’s polarization and rancor, and the American church’s politicization and trivialization. 

We usually think of our faith providing comfort for individual sorrows. It speaks personally to our spiritual and emotional needs. Yet when our sorrows are corporate and communal, we need comfort that speaks corporately and communally—which is just what Isaiah’s comfort does.

Isaiah spoke into a political and religious situation worse than ours, yet a good half of his message was hope. It’s communal hope, which of course filters down to the personal level. Isaiah 40 (and other passages) plant our hope in God’s arrival—not coming into our hearts but coming into history as a king, powerful, generous and gentle:

See, the Sovereign Lord comes with power,
    and he rules with a mighty arm.
See, his reward is with him,
    and his recompense accompanies him.
He tends his flock like a shepherd:
    He gathers the lambs in his arms
and carries them close to his heart;
    he gently leads those that have young. (40:8-11)

Can you see this as a prediction of Jesus’ coming to the world? His first coming in Bethlehem, and his second arrival yet to occur, provide our hope. We can’t bring it about by our efforts or our goodness. It’s not subject to our strategies. It’s for us, but it’s not by us. We can only anticipate, welcome and celebrate it. 

As the Christmas carol puts it:

• Joy to the world, the Lord is come.
• Let earth receive her king.

God knows all about the state of our nation and our church. He has plans to set it right, not according to our timing or methods, but by his. 

It’s worth noting that after Isaiah’s hopeful prediction of the King’s coming, Israel continued to suffer for 700 years. I find it quite amazing that when the baby Jesus was brought to the Temple for dedication, there were people waiting and watching for him, people who rejoiced to see him. That’s a portrait of faith, belief in what you cannot see. Isaiah’s hope offers no guarantee that we will see the King coming in power any time soon. It is a guarantee that God has a plan for our world, that he has promised to come, that we can count on it.

Real Comfort

I preached today on the extremely well known text of Isaiah 40:1-11. I talked about the distinct, political comfort that God offers through the prophet. It’s different from the nostalgic comfort of music, lights, family and food. You can hear it here: https://www.covefellowship.org/go/downloads

Black Theology

For most of my life, I’ve been aware that the Bible doesn’t portray the kingdom of God as a melting pot. Rather, the nations—the ethne, the “people groups”—maintain their distinctive identities to the end. Revelation 7:9-10 captures this:

“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:

“’Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.’”

When my mother was dying, she wanted to hear this passage read again and again. She joyfully anticipated joining that scene. It is a lovely portrait, but it risks becoming a religious version of “It’s a Small World” unless those ethne contribute something distinctive to our worship of God. Ethnicity in God’s kingdom can’t be just distinctive clothes and foods—otherwise, why would it endure to the end?

I just finished reading Esau McCaulley’s Reading While Black. The book showed me something I have never seen before: an ethnic theology.

McCaulley writes for American Black people in an attempt to vindicate the Black church he grew up in. Sniped at by progressive Blacks for maintaining its faithfulness to the Bible along with belief in forgiveness and a hope for Christian unity, while also treated with condescension by evangelical whites for (supposedly) less rigorous theology, the broad Black church, according to McCaulley, offers a distinctive voice that is worth clinging to. As I say, he is writing for Black people, but McCauley explodes the White Enlightenment theology that claims to hold a single, scholarly and biblical theology that speaks for all people. In exploring and defending a distinctively Black approach to answering Black questions (such as how to Christianly think about policing in a setting where the police start with a grudge against your skin color) McCaulley demonstrates that the Black angle of questioning can illuminate texts for all of us.

For example, in probing the painful Black question of whether God really cares about Black people, given their centuries of oppression and suffering, McCaulley discovers in the Advent narrative of Zechariah and Elizabeth two characters Black people can identify with: elderly, personally disappointed, and fully aware that their nation, which they love, has endured centuries of mistreatment with no end in sight. Are they fools to maintain hope? And yet they do.

Similarly, in Mary’s song, the Magnificat, McCaulley discovers a model song for Black people living under oppression.

In treating the biblical view of slavery, McCaulley makes use of Jesus’ distinction (in discussing divorce) between God’s original intention for human beings and the ways in which the Law accommodated our hardness of heart. Surely no one who reads Genesis 1-3 (or the story of the Exodus) would think that God intends for a portion of humanity to be enslaved!

McCaulley is also very helpful on the imprecatory psalms, using them to explore Black rage. Regarding Psalm 137, he asks, “what kind of prayer would you expect Israel to pray after watching the murder of their children and the destruction of their families? What kinds of words of vengeance lingered in the hearts of the Black slave women and men when they found themselves at the mercy of their enslavers’ passions? … Traumatized communities must be able to tell God the truth about what they feel.” With that as background, Isaiah 49 (and other texts) burst out as though a miracle:

It is too light a thing that you should be my servant

To raise up the tribes of Jacob

And to restore the survivors of Israel;

I will give you as a light to the nations,

That my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

By bringing Black questions and Black emotions to the biblical text, McCaulley illuminates texts from a different angle. It is not a Black theology that necessarily excludes other points of view—there is plenty of room for a White person like myself to learn and to interact. But time and again he sees things in the text that I would never have seen, leaving no doubt that these insights come because he is Black, living in a distinct community with its own questions and emotions. They are not my questions and emotions, but I gain from them.

David and David’s Son

The book I’ve been working on for three years, David and David’s Son: 13 Meditations on Success and Failure, is published and available on Amazon. Here’s the link: https://www.amazon.com/David-Davids-Son-Meditations-Success/dp/B092C6B5NT/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1618610108&sr=8-1

I’m very excited about this book. It covers virtually every episode in David’s long and fascinating life–including some that never make it into sermons–and explores his personality and character in detail. I frame the book around 13 meditations, tying David’s highs and lows to our experiences of ambition, frustration, success and failure. Anybody with hopes and dreams will find multiple points of connection. Each chapter ends with a Question for Meditation, to help readers use the book for personal devotion or for a group study.

I learned a lot in working on this book, and I am hopeful others will too.

Here’s the back cover copy:

David’s career path was a roller coaster: from teenage nobody to ace commander, from fugitive to king, from high-on-God to lost-in-sin. He lived ecstatic triumphs and devastating failures. In David and David’s Son Tim Stafford carefully analyzes the highs and lows. He asks, “What can we learn about success and failure from David’s drama?”

David is a compelling personality, strong and charismatic and yet enigmatic, too. How was he lifted so high? Why did he fall so low? Through David and David’s Son you’ll accompany him through every challenge, and get to know him deeply.

“David’s Son” is Jesus. There’s a reason he was so often referred to as “Son of David,” and it’s more than genealogy. David’s story is captivating, but it only really has meaning when embedded in God’s story that culminates in Jesus. David and David’s Son explores many parallels between Jesus’ and David’s lives, and shows how Jesus completes David’s story. We learn to see David in Jesus’ redemptive light.

The real David is not a Sunday school hero, but a deeply flawed, deeply troubled, deeply blessed human being—a king, a warrior, a poet, a husband and a father. Come walk with him.