What does it mean when someone wears a cross? What if that person is a Christian, or a non-Christian? Is it ever wrong to wear a cross? There are roughly two answers to this question.

First, since the cross serves as a symbolic reminder for Christians that the creator God is not a distant divinity, but a flesh-and-blood human who died to rescue his creation, the cross should be worn with faith in Jesus and reverence for the great lengths he went to in his mission to save us.

But second, there still remains a value to the symbol of the cross, even when worn in unbelief. The very fact of its existence as jewelry stands as a witness to the unbelievable subversion of worldly political powers by the self-sacrificial power of God. In the Roman Empire, the cross was a tool of subjugation, of the public humiliation of those who dared oppose the power and claims of Caesar. The whole point of the cross was propaganda - if you dare oppose the Emperor you will be stripped naked, hung up in the middle of your town for all to see, and slowly killed by a symphony of pains and deprivations; in other words, it was designed to be deeply shameful. That Christians took this symbol of the death of a slave and co-opted it as the symbol of their God who became a suffering slave to defeat the evil powers that be and rescue his people from sin is historically astounding. And if the one who wears the cross necklace does not believe in this message (while incredibly important for the eternal destiny of that particular person), the power of the symbol itself can still not be undermined.

In this sense, the wearing of the cross as decoration or jewelry serves as a constant reminder to a culture which would like to forget it, that Jesus is Lord and no amount of effort to stamp him or his kingdom out will ever be successful - truly, the gates of hell cannot prevail against it.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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An idea frequently heard from contemporary Christians is that the Bible is God’s “love letter” to humanity. But is this true? And if it is, why does so much of the Bible not read like a love letter? In this episode Chuck and Aaron discuss the question of the Bible’s genre and its relationship to God’s love.

While a main theme of the Bible is God’s love for his human creatures, it–contrary to a popular evangelical trope–is not a love letter to us.

First of all, the genre of scripture is not that of a letter; while there are letters in the Bible (e.g., the letters of Paul), so much of God’s Word reads completely differently than a letter: there are genealogies, rules, poetry, laws, and many other genres of writing. So fundamentally, the Bible is a story–the story of God’s plan to rescue his creation.

And secondly, the Bible is not written to any individual person but to a group of people, the church. To individualize the message of Scripture is to risk losing its cosmic scope, to minimize his plan to rescue–not just individuals, but–a new family to himself. But at the end of the day, the idea that the Bible is God’s love letter to me does capture an important reality. God does love me!

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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How do pastors become pastors? How does God make pastors, and how do they know that’s what God wants them to be? And how do they know what church they should be at. In this episode Chuck and Aaron answer these questions and also talk about Aaron’s call to be a pastor.

Pastors are called by God to preach and teach the Gospel to the Christian church. In this sense the call is unique to this particular ministry. But in another sense the call to be a pastor is no different than the call to be a mother, or lawyer, or church musician. God gives each of his people gifts to use in loving him and loving each other, and these specific gifts will make clear what call each person has received from God. And for pastors, the question of which church they should serve at is also connected with the gifts God has given them. Which church can best use his gifts and cover his weaknesses?

Aaron is making the transition to pastoring a new church, so Chuck and Aaron discuss how Aaron and his family made the decision to leave St James and move to his new church.

And in related news, Chuck and Aaron also discuss the ongoing mission of Craving Answers Craving God, and how the podcast will continue producing episodes in spite of Aaron’s move.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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It’s not at all controversial to note that Christmas, as a cultural phenomenon in the United States, does not always resemble the Christian festival celebrating Jesus’ birth. Commercial interests have exploited the season for profit, and it seems like all of us have agreed to make the month of December the most hectic and least peaceful season of all.

On the one hand, this misplaced emphasis on capitalist greed and frantic busy-ness at least holds Christmas up as important, and as long as Christmas is at the forefront of the cultural consciousness there is a chance its main message - that God has become human to recur his human creatures and creation - might break through the barriers.

But its worthwhile for Christians to push back against the noise and pace of “American” Christmas and spend more time quietly meditating on what it means to wait on the Lord, to find our happiness in the arrival of Jesus to save us.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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Luther expands the “father and mother” of the fourth commandment to also mean “other authorities.” His reasoning for this is that all human leadership flows out of the leadership and responsibility God gives to parents over their children: parents cannot teach their children everything so they hire schools and teachers to represent them in training their kids; parents cannot defend their homes and children from the threat of foreign invaders so they pay taxes to the government who cares for national defense. So for Luther, the government the citizen lives under is just as much a function of God’s authority as the parents a child lives under.

For that reason, governments must never be rebelled against or overthrown. This does not mean, though, that governments must always be obeyed. While the Christian’s vocation is citizen, his or her identity is baptized into Christ, so the Christian must always obey Jesus before any other human authority, but this must be done with the respect and honor that God’s chosen agent for each country, state, or city is due.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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All of us know what it’s like to be humbled, and almost all of those times of humiliation have been forced upon us - after all, no sane person would willingly choose to be humiliated in front of other people. But Jesus’ humiliation is active: “he humbled himself” Paul says in Philippians 2. But why would he do this?

Paul insists that the path of salvation - in other words, the path of exaltation - is and was necessarily the path of humiliation. Jesus humbled himself, becoming the servants of those very people whom he created, sustained, and who rebelled against him, in order to rescue us who could not rescue ourselves. This also provides a model of what it means to love self-sacrificially, to give up our glory and exaltation to serve others who do not deserve it.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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A person’s appetite for and willingness to change can frequently be a matter of personality - some people are by nature more conservative in their personality and tend to resist change by nature, while others have personalities that are more progressive and tend to embrace and even pursue change.

The former group have the advantage of not being easily swayed into making bad changes in their life but the disadvantage of being unwilling at times to make necessary good changes. On the other hand, the latter group have the advantage of being willing to embrace much-needed changes but the disadvantage of sometimes rushing into unnecessary and even harmful changes. Both groups, of course, need each other to temper each other’s weaknesses. But how do we know what is bad change and what is good change?

The answer the Bible gives is that their is an unchangeable touchstone, Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He never changes because he is perfect and thus needs no change. But we are not perfect, so we must be ready to change when needed, and we know we need to change when our thoughts or behavior does not match up with the perfect, unchangeable Jesus. So, with Jesus as our North Star, we can know when changing is necessary and when changing would be wrong.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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In Christianity there are two different, but related, senses of the word confession. On the one hand, there is a confession of faith - the public and private statement of what Christians believe. On the other hand, there is also a confession of sin - the public and private statement that God is right and his human creatures are wrong. What these two confessions have in common is they both are fundamentally an agreement with God, that he is right and we are wrong.

These confessions carry with them a lot of benefit for the individual human: first, by turning us away from the fake “reality” that God is wrong and we are right and orienting us to true reality, we can know that we are right with God; and second, this right orientation to God’s reality produces psychological comfort as the individual human begins to experience much less dissonance in his life as he moves throughout God’s world.

Chuck and Aaron also discuss the benefits of private confession to God, corporate confession, individual confession with a pastor, and confessing our sins to those we have sinned against.

Hosts: Aaron Mueller and Chuck Rathert

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