Writings & Conversations

“Perhaps I am stronger than I think. Perhaps I am even afraid of my strength, and turn it against myself, thus making myself weak. Marking myself secure. Making myself guilty. Perhaps I am most afraid othe strength of God in me. Perhaps I would rather be guilty and weak in myself, than strong in Him whom I cannot understand.” -Thomas Merton Conjecturesd of a Guilty Bystander (135)

Our potential greatness is the monster in our closet? The unnameable fear which can either cripple or motivate us.

Perhaps what keeps us awake is not the devil in me living in the murky waters of the basest of my instincts, but the angel, that glorious divine being who massive wings are beating against the confines of our trembling chest.

We are afraid of our weakness the way we might be afraid of a doberman with a bark and an accompanying ferocious fang. But it is purely a physical fear, and they are fleeting. You turn the corner and the bark is gone and so is the fear.

But if I were to see an angel, I would tremble in a more terrible way. That fear is not tied to my survival. Fear as survival reaction is ready to flee because it has good hope for escape. I would tremble before an angel because I know I cannot escape.

We cannot escape God, or the strong being God wants to make of us, so we pretend we have not seen God or what God has made of us already in Christ. We pretend we are still weak.

Today I heard the skriek of a mother who had lost his son at the age of 26, a cry that shatters the language. Her boy went to sleep flushed with cold medicine. He never woke up. A mother should never bury her child. The earth cannot withstand her clawing pain.

Beside the wailing of the family, I felt utterly useless. Outside of the pulpit, what use is a pastor to such tragedy?

It is at such moments the pastor must remember that he is there as a pastor, not simply as another human being. “Just be yourself” and “just be there” is the postmodern mandate, a generation weary and even cynical of words.

Presence is important, and the humanity of the pastor is necessary if the pastor is to offer anything. But the pastor fails miserably if he is there only as another human fellow. The pastor must speak what no human being can speak from the compound of experience. Death is the limit of life and it is the limit of our language. But God’s Word is not chained by life or death. And it is the only Word that can offer any comfort.

My heart trembled as I turned to 1 Corinthians 15,  worried that the promise of resurrection in this tragic lost might sound out of place, even mean. God’s Word did not fit the reality of loss. But that was what was needed. To embrace the reality of loss with the larger reality of resurrection. When we got to the proclamation “Death where is thy victory?” death became a declawed and tootheless tiger whose roar was still terrifying but threatened nothing.

The pastor must speak God’s Word. That is his first responsibility. His humanity affords him the ears and the hearts. But he does not speak out of his humanity. He is a mouthpiece of God’s speech. Worst thing he can do is to be a “religious” counselor, and being either absolute silent or stringing together the latest  recommended phrases of condolences. Reading scripture, letting the eternal Word of God ring through his body, is what makes him crucial to the grieving family.

My problems go from bad to worse.

Oh, save me from them all!

8Feel my pain and see my trouble.

Forgive all my sins.

-Psalm 25.17-18

Psalm 25 is one of the messier poems by David; the theme is hard to distill.

The proceeding Psalm (26) trumpets one clarion note, David’s “blameless life.” The boast of righteousness is so blatant that many interpret this as one of those Messianic Psalms. Christ’s prayer through David’s lip/pen because David can’t be so haughty as to make such claim. But we don’t need to take such theological leap. The two Psalms contrast inasmuch as our lives contrast from day to day. Some days we feel victorious and fully justified before God (Psalm 26). Other days, we feel our personal sin is the root of all evil and suffering around us (Psalm 25).

I want talk about this latter feeling, because I know it better. David pleads for Israel’s redemption (v22) and confesses that his personal integrity has a role in it. Social ethic is jumbled with personal holiness. David blames the enemies for all the suffering but admits that his sin is the main culprit. The disavowing dualism of victicm and perpetrator comes tumbling down. The devil without is not a separate entity from the devil within. Some reduce this tension to the use of personification. I think it is the messiness of life, that everything is interconnected, even evil, perhaps even more so.

Sometimes, I wake up in the morning and I am certain of my call and that my work with the church is right, that God has been rewarding me for my services. I would not be too surprised when I wake those morning to see my face glow in the bathroom mirror.

Sometimes I am sorry for everything not going right and wonder how God can put up with me and throw myself at His mercy, that I might survive the day.

And the difference between the two can be just few lines of space, a small event or two, one sickness, one setback, one sleepless night, one sin. But God accepts both prayers, the abject and the haughty. Both Psalms, God hears; the rash one and the brash  one, the one spoken on our jumping two feet or the one mumbled with our face flat on the carpet.

Incarnation was a big issue for the early Christian Fathers because nothing less than the identity of Jesus was at stake. Because they drank Greek metaphysics of substance with their milk bottle, they tried to explain Jesus in the language of metaphysics.

Another way to approach incarnation might be translation, a linguistic approach. Not that translation will fully explain incarnation, but it can be another layer offering a deeper understanding of incarnation, perhaps even more practical.

We have enough reason to pursue this analogy: In the beginning was the “Word” and the “Word” became flesh/translated…Incarnation=translation of God’s Word into Human Word..

What does it mean when a work is a faithful translation?

Does that mean that meaning from the original(O) has been completely and without change transferred to the translated work (T). No one holds onto such belief. Is impossible. Change is necessary for translation.

This change was so feared that some early bible translators chose literal translations :faithful to word, grammar, structure of the original. Of course the result of such translation led to nonsense, that is, it did not make sense in the translated language (TL). In their attempt to remain unchanged, they turned what made sense into nonsense. They had performed a more drastic change.

So change is part of the translation process. And faithfulness of a translation depends on how the change is done and not on changelessness.

The idea of translation bring to light the fascinating truth of the inevitability and the “goodness” of change, which the Greek metaphysics could not digest. It had fits with change! But in translation, change is essential to faithfulness. That is, a “faithful” translation is one that has been changed well.

In one sense, that is what happened to Christ. When Christ was incarnated, it was a “faithful” translation in that the Deity of God was not destroyed. Yet, it was changed. After all, when Christ ascended after resurrection, his human body was not discarded. He went up in a bodily form. It was John Milton who awakened me to the startling fact that Trinity now includes a human being — Jesus Christ (the whole Hebrew epistle and its comfort of an empathetic High Priest is about this but I never saw it in this mind boggling way).

We focus so much on our need to become like God, but that endeavor is empowered by the reality of this new/old Trinity! We change, because God changed. St. Iraneus is famous for his words, “God became man, so we can become like God.” Our jaws should drop at the incredible declaration of that first phrase! God was not wearing a body suit in Jesus! A real translation/transformation took place, which was permanent. It is the human being(Jesus) who is part of the Trinity that fires up our imagination and empowers our own translation/transformation, changed to be more faithful to God.

Few days ago, I attended an extended education conference of my denomination (C&MA) where Rev. Paul I. Sohn (손인식 목사님) was the speaker. As a pastor of a large/healthy church (Bethany Church) the distilling of his experience was precious; With ambition for a big church and a dream to be teachers of pastors, I sought him out for a one to one mentoring. I wanted to extract as many techniques of ministry as possible. But I got what I did not expect and would not have gone if I had known beforehand. I thank God for the grace of ignorance so I can be trapped by God’s love.

I went to Rev. Sohn’s room with my wife, hoping my wife would “overhear” the necessary qualities of a succesful pastor’s wife so she could make the adjustments to help me in my career. But the coversation went off track and before I knew it, my eyes filled with repentative tears as I came to see my selfish ways with the one most dear.

I think I would have fought this realization to the last dying breath except that Rev Sohn exposed me by opening his life, sharing from his marriage life, from the brink of destruction to a transformed Eden. His vulnerability defused all my defensive mechnisms.

Now I am not at a place where I can share the details of my repentance, for I am still in the process of it, a “metanoia,” but I do see things differently. Since then, even the scripture speaks to me with great clarity. All this time I had thought I could plumb the depth of scripture through my seminary trained intellect. I realize that purity is a better exegesis tool (“Blessed are the pure..for they shall see God”).

Resurrection Sunday, my first baptism service, and needless to say I botched up few words in my haste. I did the Lord’s prayer instead of the Apostle’s Creed and the congregation, thankfully, followed along. Midway through the Lord’s Prayer, I realized I was in the wrong page. I thought it best to admit the mistake through humor, and everyone laughed it off. Maybe my age gives me this room for error.

Humor is not a time-filler. It can be a form of forgiveness, or at least a road towards it. It can even be subversive. Humor is the quickest disarming technique as it lodges the truth so inconspicuously that the recipient, laughing, will not know it until that truth has already become part of him and he sees no reason to fight it. The shadow side of humor is its fear of truth. Everything is laughed away, pain and truth, which often go together. Sometimes it hardens to cynicism. At that point, there is no real humor left, just a smoldering bitterness.