Crooked Table Legs from Nazareth and a Nativity Poem from Edessa: A Few Reflections on Christmas

Paul Lim (Ph.D., Cambridge) wears several hats in life! The first hat he wears is as a husband and father; followed by one he wears at vanderbilt as a professor; then one at christ presbyterian church in nashville as scholar-in-residence; then as the interim director of the nashville institute for faith & WOrk. he thinks mondays 5:30-7:30 p.m. are best spent with gotham fellows, all of whom have shown him our collective and desperate need for redeeming grace.

Learning about Jesus from a Syrian

Glad and grateful that you are reading this brief Christmas reflection from me. Per usual, all these “From the Desk of…” entries explore the intersection between Faith & Work. Though daunting, this one is no exception. What does Christmas have to do with Work? More than you think… so ready for a quick trip around the world? Today, we will start at fourth-century Edessa, which was part of Syria then (it is Urfa, Türkiye today). Ephrem the Syrian (died in 373 AD) was known for his sublime ability to express profound theological truths in the language of poetry, so much so that he was called the “Harp of the Holy Spirit.” What I want to share with you today is how he described the way Joseph (the earthly father of Jesus) saw the radical identity-shift wrought by the Incarnation of the Word. This shows in Ephrem’s fourth Hymn of the Nativity. Throughout Ephrem’s poetry, he presents the theme of Paradox and Mystery to the readers, especially so since the readers are having to process the wonder of wonders of the Eternal becoming Finite, Godhead clothing itself with Human flesh, etc. So take a listen here:

“Joseph caressed the Son as a Babe; he ministered to him as God.
He rejoiced in Him as in the Good One, and he was awe-struck at Him as the Just One, greatly bewildered.
Who has given me the Son of the Most High to be a Son to me?
I was jealous of Your Mother, and I thought to put her away,
and I knew not that in her womb was hidden a mighty treasure,
that should suddenly enrich my poor estate.
David the king sprang of my race, and wore the crown:
And I have come to a very low estate, who instead of a king am a carpenter.
Yet a crown has come to me, for in my bosom is the Lord of crowns!”

Joseph recognized that the ennobling of his earthly profession—“who instead of a king am a carpenter”—could only come about by the Incarnation of the One who has become the Son of a carpenter. He was cognizant of the fact that he was related to King David by ancestral connections. He was acutely aware of the fact that his current fortune reflected none of the royal splendor and pomp, so much so that when he had to register the baby at the temple, all he could afford for the sacrifice “to present him to the Lord” as a consecration of the firstborn male were “a pair of doves or two young pigeons” (Leviticus 12:8; Luke 2:24) They were specific economic provision that YHWH made through Moses for the impoverished or for those from the lower strata in the economic scale in the Jewish communities. In other words, Joseph was a relatively poor carpenter. Yet, here is how Ephrem the Syrian captured the beauty of inversion of categories and identities. Unbeknownst to Joseph, the baby to be born would “suddenly enrich my poor estate,” not by conferral of material possessions or a bigger carpentry shop in downtown Jerusalem, mind you. Instead, being given the privilege of parenting the God-child, the eternal Son of God, the second member of the Blessed Trinity, Joseph will sing of this inversion of categories throughout his journey. His earthly lot remained the same, that of a wood-working man who, in the eyes of the cultural and economic elites of his day, did not amount to much. Yet, Ephrem sang of Joseph as “in my bosom is the Lord of crowns.” I don’t know about you, but these lines from Ephrem’s poem encourages me tremendously to not be preoccupied with my earthly “poor estate,” but rather to be excited about the Gift exchange that the Lord Jesus has established. He became that which he was not, namely human, so that we might become that which we are not, namely divine, as in reaching the apex of what it meant to be “like god” (Genesis 3:5). Could I encourage you—as we ponder the Hymn of the Nativity by Ephrem the Syrian—to think of this beautiful gift exchange, viz., the Eternal Creator of all, including trees, had to learn about wood-working from a humble carpenter in Nazareth, eventually to be hung on a tree that he had created for the sake of giving us an identity-as-gift: that of being called redeemed children of God, whether a carpenter, baker, banker, gig-worker, nurse practitioner, teacher or entrepreneur.

On “Crooked Table Legs” from Nazareth and Why Work?

Dorothy Sayers (1893~1957) is a virtually forgotten literary figure from twentieth-century Britain, although her friends such as C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot knew her giftedness and encouraged her to share her gifts with the rest of the reading public, so we are in their debt. One of the readings we read in the Gotham Fellows Program is her short and punchy essay called “Why Work?” and it remains a crowd favorite, and even if not, it certainly gets the fellows worked up! She makes this pithy and profound statement that the best way a Christian can serve her God is by giving excellence to the work itself: “If work is to find its right place in the world, it is the duty of the Church to see to it that the work serves God, and that the worker serves the work.” Sayers was convinced that in mid-twentieth century Britain, much of the Church was preoccupied with behavior correction as a proof of sanctification: do not be “drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours” and then foist upon the worker with the religious injunction, “come to church on Sundays.” Sayers took umbrage at such a reductionistic view, both of faith and work. All the church attendance notwithstanding, Sayers averred, the carpenter could actually be “insulting God with bad carpentry.” Put bluntly, the work produced by the worker mattered deeply to God because “our work is the expressions of ourselves.” Whether 30 seconds of an ephemeral TikTok video of an artisanal latte or a three-pointer from Steph Curry, these works express who we are, thus the apostolic dictum: “whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as unto the Lord” (Colossians 3:23). So Sayers clinches for her conclusion: “No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth.” Sayers insisted that since Christ was the perfect embodiment of what Adam was supposed to be and do, his work was not flawed or deficient, nor products of indolence. Thus, no crooked table legs. I love it! Then she further carries her point. No one would believe that a drawer that does not close well could be manufactured by the “same hand that made Heaven and earth,” precisely because heaven and earth display such harmony and symmetry (for the most part, and creation groans inwardly, awaiting the day when the children of God will be revealed, as St. Paul reflects in a breath-taking fashion in Romans 8:18~21) of the Creator.

Work Well Done…Cheeseboards?

Let me conclude with a humorous aside of my own. Recently we had a Gotham 9 Christmas party, and this year, we had a white elephant gift exchange as part of it. I went to a store and bought two cheeseboards—one from my wife Miky and one from me—and this one had four markers that helped identify what cheese one is about to eat. Having been to one too many parties where I wondered and was too embarrassed to ask what cheese it was—gouda or cheddar or brie or Swiss—I thought this would be a good gift. Rather than go into all the details, I can say confidently that this was by far the most “fought after” item of the evening. That item reflected work well done, thereby creating the right type of desire. You know what I am bringing to next year’s white elephant party in December! The cheeseboard makers were working unto the glory and delight of their Creator, whether they realized it or not. For those of us who know the Creator in Jesus Christ, this is an awesome invitation: make the best cheeseboard possible!

Friends, thank you for indulging me with these reflections. It has been a singular honor to offer you some reflections that explore the intersection between our Christian faith and work. May the Lord of Christmas remind you of the greatest gift of all: namely the Incarnation of the Word who became flesh for us and for our salvation. May He work within you to bring some modicum of joy in your work, whether at home or in the office, whether remote or in person. Amen!

Advent, Transitions, and a North African Pear Stealer: Misdirected Desires & Fulfillment at Work

Paul Lim (Ph.D., Cambridge) serves as the interim Director of NIFW. He is an award-winning historian, and teaches History of Christianity at Vanderbilt, with particular focus on Reformation history and the rise of modernity and religion’s role therein.

“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6)

Advent beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday???

Advent Season, more often than not nowadays, is marked by longing and anticipation, waiting and amplification of desires, manifesting itself commercially in what type of gifts we should be giving and receiving! For others, Advent is a season of pain, loneliness, and invisibility. What does the Bible have to say about Advent? It does not mention the word (whether in Greek as parousia, or in Latin as adventus, both of which means arrival or coming of Christ in human flesh) explicitly, but it does speak of the experience and sense of anticipation as the people of God waited for divine righting of all human wrongs, as Israel in both its pre-exilic, exilic, and post-exilic experience of foreign captivities—whether Assyrian, Babylonian, or Roman vagaries—did ardently long for the arrival of the figure who would fulfill the words written above from Isaiah 9:6. As Isaiah was likely to have been written during the 8th century BC, before the capture and subsequent exile experience caused by the Assyrian invasion, Isaiah’s prophetic vision was longing for the person who will vanquish Israel’s foes and usher in the reign of YHWH’s Shalom. The mysterious referent who will embody the qualities of a child, son, counselor, God, father, and prince reduces the number to an extremely small numerical minority: who would be that? In the same way, in Acts 1, we find the disciples who, even after the resurrection of Christ, interpreted the kingdom of God mostly in ethnic-national terms: “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). Jesus’ answer to this question just happens to be the very last words before he was ascended into heaven (Acts 1:7-9). So, the biblical perspective on Advent—if understood as an experience of waiting of the people of God for God to intervene and redeem—shows both in Isaiah and Acts that they knew that unless God showed up, all human aspirations and ambitions and anticipations will lead us further away from the goal that God has in mind. In that regard, Zygmunt Bauman, a leading social critic of our time (whose conversion from Marxism to Christianity is often under-reported), wrote a fabulous book, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (Polity, 2013) where he argues that a life and society built upon the foundation of consumerism is fundamentally at odds with a system that favors and privileges an ethic that cares about the disenfranchised and socio-economically marginalized, thereby pointing us toward the possible world beyond consumerism. He writes: “a consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality” where instant gratification is the name of the game. Yet, life is vastly different. We wait in the middle of the truce talks between Israel and Palestine for a penultimate peace; we anticipate and pray for the cease-fire between the Russians and Ukrainians; we pray for the cessation of trafficking of humans, whether for factory, quarry labor, or sexual exploitation; we wait and wait. Advent Season reminds us that God has, in fact, broken through our temporal waiting game, and yet God has done so in a most unexpected way. When you read—honestly and without the hermeneutical lens of “knowing” that Jesus the Messiah—the text of Isaiah 9:6 above, you would hardly conclude that this divine messianic figure would be born in a manger (undeserving even of a low-price first-century Jewish equivalent of a Motel 6) and that he would be a refugee (spending some time in Egypt, a country not of his birth and a country not traditionally friendly toward Israel). Bingo! God’s ways are not our ways precisely because his ways are higher than our ways. Advent Season cleanses us of our self-exalting perspective that we actually do know what’s best for me, us, and humankind, even as we dare into transhuman societies.

Transitions

Since the last time I wrote for this blog, there have been people who have transitioned from one position to another, or are in the process of transitioning without knowing where they will end up for their next phase of intersection between faith & work. I have a few friends, whether in California, New York, or Tennessee, who are in this phase. I am sure you also know a few folks like that. What words would you impart to them, what words would you impart to your own self if you are in a period of transition? Advent season is a great reminder for us for these two key truths:

(1) Life can be weird, but God is good, and experiencing both the weirdness of life and goodness of God is not a sequential thing, but a concurrent reality. We experience the goodness of God precisely in the middle of life’s weirdness. 1

(2) Sanctification is a team sport. 2 You need a community or village or church full of people to remind you of God’s goodness and Christ’s sufficiency, and (y)our desperate hourly need for the Savior and our Substitute, especially when we are in transitions, in between positions, as we anxiously wonder/worry about our securities of various types—financial, reputational, relational, emotional, and spiritual. I don’t know about you, but what little humility I’ve learned in life has always come through humiliating circumstances and outcomes. Although I would shudder at the thought, I learn more about life from its bitter fruits (and vegetables) than from its sweet counterparts. That’s why I need other beloved friends, family, fellow believers to remind me that my work matters, and God is good, that life is weird, but God is indeed good.

North African Pear Stealer

One of the key texts we tackle early in the fall of the Gotham Fellowship is Augustine’s Confessions. That’s the North African pear stealer I am referring to! In this classic text of the quest for discovery of self and Savior, thus meaning of one’s life, Augustine, a fourth-century North African—born of a pagan father, and a devout Christian mother—spends much more time describing sin either as “not the way it’s supposed to be,” “privation of good,” or “disordered desires.” Whereas we ought to desire the good, thus God, we inescapably find ourselves desiring that which will eventually lead us to destruction, nothingness (which Augustine calls as the substance of evil: no-thing), and death and separation from the Good God. He talks about the triviality and tragedy of disordered desires in the way he stole a bunch of pears from his neighbor’s orchard when he was 16 years old. He said, he liked nothing about it except for the “wickedness which I took pleasure in enjoying.” Evil for evil’s sake; sin for sin’s sake.

In my experience in pastoral ministry of various types since 1992, I have learned that many people's eyes light up when I use the story of Augustine’s pear stealing as a concrete expression of our “disordered desires.” God desires that we desire that which is good, true, and beautiful, all of which are ultimately from God and will return to God. That’s why Augustine could confidently confess these words, which are arguably the most often quoted dictum from him, right at the end of the first paragraph of Confessions: “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”

May we all find our disordered desires redirected in the Lord of the Advent, whether we find ourselves at work or at home, at the gym or at a restaurant, whether on a work trip or around the proverbial water fountain! For unto us not only is a child born, but also a son given, a son who is THE Son of God incarnated for us and for our salvation.

1 – This maxim is not my original. A friend of mine—Jon Butterworth—said that “life is weird but God is good” in his Instagram post a few weeks ago, and that’s been stuck (in a good way!!!) in my head.

2 – Again, not original to me! This is from Barney Zeng, a former Gotham alum, who rendered it as “Sanctification is not an individual sport.”

I-It and I-Thou: How This Distinction Can Help Your Faith Journey

Dr. Paul Lim serves as the interim Director of NIFW, and is an award-winning historian of Christianity. He also serves as a faculty member at Vanderbilt University.

What do Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Martin Buber have in common? Two of them—Jesus and Buber—have lived in Israel, and two of them—Buber and Bonhoeffer—have written books! Many Christians have heard of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), thanks to the modern-day spiritual classics, The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. However, not as many have heard of Martin Buber (1878-1965), a Jewish existentialist philosopher. And even less are aware of the influence Buber has had on Bonhoeffer’s thought. I know, I know, you’re thinking: “There goes the professor, again, nerding out on things that only very few people in the world care about, and getting excited about things that have no real influence in the way I love God and my neighbor!” Well, I am not surprised you thought that! The immense delight I derive from engaging in teaching the Gotham curriculum year after year is to make the esoteric and arcane into essential and accessible for the Christian’s intersection of faith and work. So here we go! How can the “I-it and I-Thou” help my approach to faith and work?

It’s All About Relationships

Martin Buber is perhaps best known for his book, I and Thou (published originally in German in 1923 as Ich und Du), and in it, he emphasized that truly generous and generative relationships are based on the encounter between “I and Thou,” a dialogical relationship. For Buber, the foundational ground for the I-Thou is the encounter humans have with God. This I-Thou is designed to be transformative rather than transactional (as in the case of I-It). It was further understood to be the way to respect the authenticity, integrity and humanity of the Other, rather than using—and abusing—the relationship as a means to self-aggrandizement and power-play (as in the case of I-It). (1) As a personal aside, after I became a Christian as a junior in college, a close friend gave me Buber’s I and Thou, and it really rocked my world. The combination of reading it and Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling taught me the crucial role that a genuine, authentic, personal encounter with God in historical Jesus was the first step toward any meaningful journey of faith. Then for nearly 25 years thereafter I forgot about Buber’s I and Thou. That is, until I began teaching Bonhoeffer’s Life Together as part of the Gotham program 7 years ago.

No Footnotes?

I can’t tell you what year it was, but I can tell you the delightful surprise of finding the language of “I-Thou” and “I-It” in Bonhoeffer’s Life Together. I had taught Life Together previously, but hadn’t ever noticed it (you know how it goes! Just think Agent Dave Kujan and the bulletin board in the movie, The Usual Suspects) until that moment. More than just the juxtaposition of Buber and Bonhoeffer, I saw how pivotal personal encounter was for both of their approaches to life, especially encountering God in the mundane. In Life Together, Bonhoeffer uses the “it” and “Thou” without mentioning that this was a philosophical concept he had borrowed from Martin Buber. In fact, he does not even say “I-It” and “I-Thou.” He simply uses the shorthand form of “it” and “Thou.” But the idea is the clearly contained. If all our life’s pursuit was simply a matter of acquisition and accumulation of as many “It’s” as possible, according to both Buber and Bonhoeffer, life will remain insipid, vapid, ultimately leading to a puff of vapor. However, with the constant turning from “I-It” to “I-Thou.” I-It relations are transactional, impersonal, and utilitarian, where I-Thou relations are transformational, personal, and holistic.

Crushing It or Getting Crushed?

One of my friends recently said, “Paul, I am well on my way to crushing it in life, this time in Nashville!” He had been a successful person all along his life. He received an elite college education in the Northeast, flourished in his line of work, and believed that people and things were there to help him “crush it in life.” Much of his life’s mission was about conquering, crushing, and collecting trophies and trappings that the world had to offer. His Christian faith was fundamentally there to help him get there. In other words, for my friend, even Christianity was primarily about I-It. People and things in his work were there to serve him, but almost never the other way around. When I talked to him about the fact a true understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ inevitably leads one to see life as a series of I-Thou relationships, thereby becoming more focused on life as an opportunity for transformation (rather than merely transaction), and work has been appointed by God as a “means of liberation from himself,” he was genuinely perplexed. More on work as a divinely appointed method of “liberation” from ourselves below. Rather than looking at work as an arena to maximize profit or a playground of self-aggrandizement, what if we were to take seriously Bonhoeffer’s dictum that God makes “work a means of liberation from himself”? (2) Let’s turn to the chapter entitled “The Day with Others” in his Life Together to get a clue to gently remind my friend that life and work is neither about crushing or getting crushed. Instead, work is a place to participate in the “cultural mandate” as seen in Genesis 1:26-30 where we see the divine design and desires for the first humans: “so that they may rule over the fish…birds…livestock…and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” This reality of ruling over was an expression of divine outsourcing of God’s work to the co-regents of God, those who were uniquely endowed with the Imago Dei. In Genesis 1:28 we find God blessing the first humans with being fruitful and resulting in population growth, as well as being the type of ruler that God had always been: truly benevolent, beneficent, and expressing power for the purpose of shalom. Such was the design of the human work within the context of I-Thou. Yet the Fall brought about a rupture in the way we see people, places, and things. Thus comes the prevalence of an instrumentalist. utilitarian, and transactional mode of seeing everything: “how can she/he/it/they help me?”

Moving from I-It to I-Thou and Liberation from Self

Bonhoeffer’s writing style is simple, direct, and pulls absolutely no punches at all. Life Together is no exception. Over the years, I have had students who found that inordinate authoritarian and definitive tone bothersome; I have increasingly come to see the validity of their critique. But not to throw the baby with the bathwater… Shall we actually let Bonhoeffer speak for himself?

In an as-a-matter-of-fact manner, Bonhoeffer writes that “work plunges men into the world of things.” Leaving the world of “brotherly encounter,” the Christian worker finds oneself immersed in the “world of impersonal things, the ‘it’” (70). Here, Bonhoeffer offers an illuminating insight into the divine design regarding the purpose of work for one’s sanctification. The impersonal “it”-world is “only an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians from all self-centeredness and self-seeking” (70). If we follow God into our work, Bonhoeffer argues, then our tendencies for seeking one’s own kingdom—as opposed to seeking God’s kingdom and his righteousness—and being excessively self-absorbed will be revealed for what they are: mirage and not true vision of human flourishing. Furthermore, the work—note here, Bonhoeffer makes absolutely no distinction between the so-called blue or white collar work—becomes a “remedy against the indolence and sloth of the flesh.” As a good Lutheran, Bonhoeffer saw that the institutions and laws of the world have a salutary function of curbing human tendencies for greater degeneracy, diminution and ultimately death.

Our “passions of the flesh” can “die in the world of things,” maintains Bonhoeffer. Wait a minute! I thought my passions of the flesh actually come alive in the world of things! How can this be? Bonhoeffer offers a key insight right here when he wrote: “But this can happen only where the Christian breaks through the ‘it’ to the ‘Thou,’ which is God” (70). Seeing “again for the first time” that this place where I am called to work—whether at a science lab, IT firm, funeral homes, healthcare consultancy, non-profit start-up, or at an investment bank—is the place of breakthrough, that is, where the impersonal “It” can be transformed into the “Thou.” That is God’s work through the means of grace of prayer. As the “I-It” and transformed into the “I-Thou” relationship, one can experience how God makes that particular “work a means of liberation” from oneself.

Your work matters to God! And your work does not define you! How? Because you are already loved. Being precedes Doing… These are some of the things you will hear a good deal at Gotham sessions, week in, week out. Bonhoeffer says that prayer and work are inextricably woven together, so much so that “without the burden and labor of the day, prayer is not prayer, and without prayer work is not work.” Without prayer, my work loses its integrity and moral direction. Without prayer, I will look at everyone as a thing to subdue, silence, use, and conquer for my own goal. Prayer throughout the day, rather than hindering the worker’s productivity, “promotes it, affirms it, and lends it meaning and joy.” Give us this day our daily bread, as we are taught to pray. This teaches that there is a Giver and that is not our immediate boss. The part of the Lord’s prayer teaches that there is a personal connection between my work, my food, and my religion. Let’s take a listen to Bonhoeffer one last time: “Thus every word, every work, every labor of the Christian becomes a prayer; not in the unreal sense of a constant turning away from the task that must be done, but in a real breaking through the hard ‘it’ to the gracious ‘Thou’” (71).

Jesus spoke about liberation and freedom a good deal, but the crucial thing was that for Jesus, he himself was the ultimate reference point and goal of liberation and freedom. He was the giver of liberation and freedom. So he said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” and that “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” Here, Jesus was referring to the teaching as referring to the fact that Jesus was in an unique, eternal relationship with the Father, and that he became Incarnate for us and for our salvation to liberate us from ourselves, including our work. I don’t know about you, but unless I watch it, I tend to see many of my relationships through the lens of “I-It” (its theme song is “What Have You Done for Me Lately”). But as I keep in step with the Spirit, I am empowered the myriad relationships in life and work as “I-Thou,” the venues where I can encounter the “gracious Thou” and thereby seeing that my work is a place of “liberation from myself.” Try that tomorrow, and see where the gracious Thou shall lead you.

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1 – More on Buber’s thought, see Tamra Wright’s excellent essay, “Self, Other, Text, God: The Dialogical Thought of Martin Buber,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy, eds. Michael L. Morgan and Peter Eli Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 102-121.

2 – All references are taken from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: HarperCollins, 1954), 70.

Minding the Gap Between Faith and Work

Dr. Paul Lim serves as the interim Director of NIFW, and is an award-winning historian of Christianity. He also serves as a faculty member at Vanderbilt University.

People learn indispensable lessons for life in various venues, often radically divergent contexts. Brother Lawrence (1614-91) – of The Practice of the Presence of God fame – learned crucial lessons for life while working in the kitchen of a Carmelite monastery in Paris. Mother Teresa learned the love of God while serving the most destitute and demonized by society in the slums of Kolkata, India. Both Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr., learned their key lessons of the inestimable price of freedom and fundamental human dignity for all colors while incarcerated, whether on the Robben Island or in the Birmingham Jail. In a much less significant and dramatic way, I learned a key lesson while standing on the platform of a London subway station as a graduate student in England: “Mind the Gap!” Hearing it for the umpteenth time in the late 1990s, it gradually dawned on me that these mind-numbing three words could actually be a poignant lesson for life.

The gap really does exist!

Let me start with the key theme of this blog: “Mind the Gap Between your Faith and Work! The only One who can identify that gap and stand in our place is Jesus: our Identity Giver and Idol Destroyer.” First of all, let’s make one thing clear: gaps really do exist! Gaps between our public personae and private expressions thereof. Isn’t that precisely what drives the sales of tabloid journalism? Many still find some perverse “delight” in reading about the fall or scandal of celebrities, especially those whose putative high morals are exposed as a tragic revelation of the gap that exist between the public (and false) presentation of images of these figures and the private (and true) outworking of the real self. This gap also exists in all of us. If the cultural and global awakening for justice that has erupted since the death of George Floyd in May 2020 – when he was beaten to death in the hands of Minneapolis police officers – has taught us anything, it is this: there is a structural and systemic gap with individual implications. Scholars might call this “social malaise,” “improper human flourishing,” “lapse of moral judgment,” etc. The Bible simply calls it sin, viz, the gap between God and humankind. Make no mistake about it. By the very distinction between the fact that God is the Creator and we are creatures inevitably leads us to acknowledge the two gaps: ontological and ethical. The ontological gap is that God is God, and we are not. The ethical gap is that God is holy, and we are – especially after the fall – unholy, affected by sin in all our capacities: emotional, intellectual, relational, volitional.

Not only do we see this dual gap between God the Creator and we the creature, more pertinently for our discussion, we see yet another gap, closely related to the second gap: the ethical gap. According Genesis chapters 3-4, the deliberate disobedience of humankind catapulted all of us into a different type of existence: birth and explosion of the human social and structural sin which led to a tragic alienation between the first human couple, Adam and Eve, and subsequently to another tragedy of fratricide, when Cain murdered Abel. So the gap really does exist. Both Cain, Adam, and Eve’s words of self-defense and blame-shifting belied the clear existence of this gap: gap between who they said they are, and who they actually were, fallen and in need of covering. The greater tragedy with Cain was that the murdering of Abel happened in the very place of Cain’s economic production: in the fields where Cain the “worker of the ground” was supposed to honor God and offer livelihood for all who worked with and for him. Ever since the collective fall of the “Adams Family,” we are still dealing with the cataclysmic reverberations of this gap. Thus the clarion call: “Mind the gap.”

So…what type of gap?

As previously mentioned, it seems that in 2023, there is a greater willingness to acknowledge that evil exists in a grander, even global, scale. Just as in the case of Cain, who took away the life of another human being in the place of work, there are gaps between our confession of faith and how that faith is manifested (or not) at work. Cain should have been his brother’s keeper, yet he was manifestly not that. Just as “every square inch in our whole domain of human existence” belongs to Christ who cries “Mine!” as the Lord over all, we are called to honor the Triune God as the meaning-giver and fulfiller of all human work. (1) The Christian perspective on this ubiquitous, universal gap is that it manifests itself both at the individual and societal levels. Historically, conservative Christians have tended to put greater emphasis on individual sins – Jesus as the forgiver of my personal sins and Savior of me and my family – progressive Christians have tended put greater emphasis on structural and social and systemic sins, which often tended to leave unattended one’s own individual moral gaps and sins. The truth is not an either/or, but both.

Minding the gap: Isaiah and Calvin

The Bible unequivocally calls out both the institutional and individual, the systems that perpetuate the gap as well as the self that participate in widening it. Isaiah 10:1-2 expresses the intensity of divine displeasure toward the creation and perpetuation of this gap, in this case in creation of unjust laws. Laws – by divine design – were intended to promote greater human flourishing and curb evil. Yet the Lord pronounces “woe” upon those “who make unjust laws,” e.g., creation of a Gap, and those “who issue oppressive decrees” to “deprive the poor of their rights” by withholding “justice from the oppressed of my peoples.” The Prophet continues that these unjust laws end up crushing the lives of the most vulnerable: “making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.” The poor, the widows, and the orphans were the triumvirate of the most vulnerable, not only in Isaiah’s times, but also in ours. This haunting question was answered by John Calvin (1509-1564), a refugee pastor who escaped persecution in native France and ended up in Geneva, Switzerland. His commentary on Isaiah speaks powerfully of the existence of the Ethical Gap in ancient Israel as well as – by extension – in sixteenth-century Geneva. Calvin wrote: “He chiefly mentions the poor, because for the most part they are destitute of help. While magistrates and judges ought to have assisted them more than others, they allow themselves greater liberty. . .in oppressing them.” What a poignant description of the gap between justice proclaimed and justice practiced, especially toward those who were poor! Continuing in the same verse, Calvin wrote: “But the Lord says that he takes peculiar care of the poor, though they are commonly despised; and. . .he does not allow oppression inflicted on them to pass unpunished.” (2) God is the One who will emerge as not only the defender of the poor and the marginalized, but also as the One who will stand to fill the gap. God does not merely “mind” the gap. As we will see below, the God of Isaiah will eventually fill the gap. So how? Or who?

God Incarnate and the gap filled

All of us, hopefully, know acutely well the existence of this gap. Gap between who we say we are as followers of Christ, and how that confession manifests itself at work. As I am writing this blog post, a book came to my mind. It is Who You Are when No One’s Looking. I read it when I was in seminary back in the 1990s. I have often gone back to it, and found just title itself convicting: who you are when no one’s looking. The author called the readers to be mindful of the gap, between public and private divergences, between perception and reality. The truth is, friends, we all fail to mind the gap, including the author of this book. The real trouble is more often that not, you might not like who you are when no one’s looking. Perhaps it is that the projection of self at places of worship (the Faith part) and the projection of self at one’s place of employment (the Work part) might have little in common. Ezekiel spoke on God’s behalf and issued judgment on Jerusalem: “I looked for someone among them who would build up the wall and stand before me in the gap…but I found no one” (Ezekiel 22:30). This verse is not meant to get contemporary readers excited and say, “Yes, I will stand in the gap!” Actually this verse says that no human endeavors could be worthy of this task. The God of Israel found no one who would/could stand in the gap.

The Christian story is that God became human and filled that gap. In other words, for all human failings, universally considered, and for all human willful violation of divine desires and laws, God provided the One who would/could stand in the gap. They called him Jesus. Jesus was faithful in his work, firstly as a carpenter and then as a full-time itinerant teacher. There was no gap to mind between his public and private self. He alone is the One who could mind-and-fill the gap, both the Ontological and Ethical. He is the eternal, unique Son of God who could stand as our substitute (thus the Ontological); he is the second Adam who fulfilled where Adam had failed, and did not fail where he had fallen.

He also stands in the Gap in giving us a new valuation. In our contemporary world, much of our sense of worth and self is derived from our salary, or net worth. Here, Karl Marx’s words are hauntingly true when he says that money is the new god. This deity, aka money “is the universal self-established value of all things.” Money has “therefore robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.” (3) The tragedy of this gap is that money as the new god for our existence distorts the fundamental human worth and dignity by robbing it of its essence. Notice how Marx says this “alien essence dominates” all of humankind! It is alien, not natural, and yet we end up worshiping this alien deity. Jesus comes to offer to us the true and real God, not as late modern capitalistic fervor will radically alter our sense of self, society, and savior.

No Herculean effort to stand in the gap will do. Adam, Eve, and Cain all spectacularly failed. Only the Son of Adam and Son of God could do. Jesus filled and fills the gap, our gap, of hypocrisy and sin. Jesus reminds us: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Now, be free, and mind the gap as an act of delightful obedience who is continuing to fill the gap for us as our great high priest. Amen.

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1 – This quote is from Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) whose theological perspective on human work and sphere sovereignty has influenced a number of Christians, including the current author.

2 – Calvin’s Commentary on Isaiah. https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom13/calcom13.xvii.i.html Accessed on 9/15/2023.

3 – Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/ Accessed 9/15/2023. As one reads this, there is an inescapable sense of anti-Semitism in Marx’s thought. Whereas Marx linked this creation of a new deity of money as “the jealous god of Israel,” I am universalizing the force of money as the new universal deity, by way of late modern capitalism. On this see Devin Singh, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford University Press, 2018).

Interim NIFW Director Announcement

As we pray that God will lead us to the right candidate to fill the NIFW Director position, we are excited to announce that Paul Lim will be our interim NIFW Director.  In addition to teaching the weekly Gotham 2023-2024 classes, Paul will lead the entire Gotham program, including community formation and active leadership of our three retreats and City Saturdays.  A teaching assistant and Gotham alum Roscoe Mayberry will support Paul. Please join us in praying for Paul and Roscoe as they help ensure our NIFW ministry continues to equip, connect and mobilize Christians to integrate their faith and work for the flourishing of Nashville and beyond.