Co-missioners,
I keep a hodgepodge file on my computer desktop for Thursday Theology. It’s where I drop share-worthy items I’ve run across in my reading. They’re usually plucked from the internet. Most are snippets of a longer work. Some are memes. A few are links to videos. All of them have gotten me thinking about essays I haven’t written yet.
I started the file at the end of September 2018. It’s gotten pretty fat by now. I decided to raid it for this week’s post, giving some of the items the attention they deserve from a community that treasures the distinction between Law (as in real law) and Gospel (as in genuine Gospel). Enough with the faux stuff that the church keeps choking down. No wonder we retain the “lean and hungry look” that Shakespeare attributed to Cassius. (Therein lies another of those unwritten essays, by the way. Laughing.)
Anyway, for this seventh and final week of Easter 2026, let’s get a dose of the real deal, thanking God for the gift and for whoever it came through. Not all of them are connected to the church, or at least not visibly. That’s part of the fun, methinks.
Peace and Joy,
Jerry Burce, Co-editor
The Crossings Community
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Late Easter Fragments: Shards of Law, Chips of Gospel
Collected and presented by Jerome Burce
From Canva
Shards of Law
Shard | SHärd | noun a piece of broken ceramic, metal, glass, or rock, typically having sharp edges: shards of glass flew in all directions. [New Oxford American Dictionary]
I suggest fancifully that God has lots of unwitting servants who are doing among us as Moses did among the Israelites at Sinai, i.e. smashing down those law-engraved tablets so that they shatter and spatter and ding us all. Here are a few examples—
- I have lately become a fan of a Southern writer named Robert Arnold. I ran across him on Facebook many months ago. He records himself reading the nigh-poetic prose he churns out at what seems to be the same astonishing pace that Luther maintained with his writing. Arnold is a truth-teller like few people I’ve encountered. He’s one of the fewer still whom I’d refer to as a prophet. In his refusal to be anything less than an equal opportunity truth-teller he channels Amos. See for yourselves in this video, “The Fire Next Time,” where he not only stings the white racists I deplore but is even fiercer with the smugly white progressives I tend to give a pass too, being too nearly one of them myself, I suppose. The five minutes it takes you to watch this will be well spent. And then you get to join me in praying “Christ, have mercy on us all!
- A cartoon. A doctor is talking to the patient he has just examined. The caption: “Try to reduce your stress level, and if you somehow succeed please let me know how in God’s name you did it.” The thought I can’t escape: if only the clerics who harangue the saints about “doing justice” were equally honest about their cluelessness as to how to pull this off. (And yes, thanks be to God and to God alone when it does happen.)
- David French joined the opinion section of the New York Times three years ago and has since become one of my favorite columnists. This is due in no small part to his cheerful willingness to own his identity as a Christian evangelical and to do so humbly, with deep respect for people who are not. French is also a lawyer who, among much else, served in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps for seven years that included a stint in Iraq. Three weeks ago, at the end of April, he wrote about an emerging pattern of A.I. chatbots advising suicidal people on how to get the job done. Is there any legal recourse, he asked, for survivors who loved these people? His answer: “ChatGPT and Claude and Grok and Gemini are not your friends or, God forbid, your lovers; they are human creations, and their creators are responsible for everything the creatures do” (emphasis added).
I couldn’t help but ask immediately: is the same not true of our creator? Is God not responsible, first and last, “for everything the creatures do”? I can hear pious screams of horror at the very suggestion. Yet St. Paul, for one, seems to think as much. Why else does he come ever so close to asserting that Christ was crucified because God accepted responsibility for the messes we make and is at pains to demonstrate his righteousness—how? By making things right for us all over again in a new and different way, i.e. through faith in Christ. See Romans 3:25-26. (Something to think about when the question comes up at the next pastors’ confab as to what Jesus is for. Will anyone have the nerve to point out a) that God takes his Law far more seriously than any of us would dare to, and b) that in doing so God winds up making far greater use of his Christ than most of us have the chutzpah to imagine?)
- Pamela Paul was also a New York Times opinion columnist for a brief while. She started about the same time French did but stepped away at the beginning of last month. In her farewell column she described how the work she valued most involved challenging conventional progressive imperatives on behalf of people being hurt by them. An example of this appeared in March 2024 when she critiqued the urge of universities to take “moral stances.” Said she, “When universities make it their mission to do the ‘right’ thing politically, they’re effectively telling large parts of their communities . . . they’re wrong.” And again, “When universities become overtly political, and tilt too far toward one end of the spectrum, they’re denying students and faculty the kind of open-ended inquiry and knowledge-seeking that has long been the basis of American higher education’s success. They’re putting its future at risk.”
Comes the question: is this risking of the future not all the more true of American churches when they turn moral stances into their defining characteristic? Have we forgotten that the good and holy Law drives wrath and division? Or conversely, that Jesus had a habit of lunching with Pharisees and tax collectors alike, neither group doing all that great a job with loving their neighbors as they loved themselves?
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Chips of Gospel
From Canva
Chip | CHip | noun 1 a small piece of something removed in the course of chopping, cutting, or breaking a hard material such as wood or stone…. [New Oxford American Dictionary]
Think here of the diamond fragments the jeweler collects and stores ever so carefully so as to fashion them into something beautiful that gives joy. - An Easter thought by Chad Bird, captured in an internet meme: “At the grave of Lazarus Jesus did not say, ‘Death is natural, a normal part of the cycle of life.’ No, he wept. Then he kicked death in the teeth.”
- An Easter-ish thought by Larry Doby, the American League’s first black baseball player who suffered as much racist abuse as the National League’s Jackie Robinson; as quoted in a 2023 article from the Washington Post about a photo taken on the day when Doby’s team, the Cleveland Indians, won the 1948 World Series. The photo featured the hitherto unimaginable, Doby and a white teammate in a post-game locker room embrace. Said Doby, “I don’t know what [the teammate] thought later that night when he went home…but when you win, color sort of disappears because the joy in you comes out. At that particular moment, I don’t think you have any prejudice even if it’s in you. The joy just takes over.” (Bring it on, Lord Jesus!)
- Fred Niedner on Easter identity, speaking last month at Valparaiso University’s Institute for Liturgical Studies:
“…On the road to Jerusalem, Jesus would teach that one’s heart will always follow one’s greatest treasure (12:34). His own treasure he invested continually by putting it into the mouths of the poor, or strapping it to the limbs of the lame. In the end, his collection of friends was the only treasure he could claim. . . . (This, too, is who we get to be—the treasure the Risen One gives his life to have and to hold, but which he then gives away constantly everywhere he goes.)”
Now there’s a thought for all of us who keep assuming (and telling others) that Easter identity is chiefly about us following Jesus.
- As it happens, much the same thought—that we’re here for Christ to give away—was captured by an old schoolmate of mine, Kevin Born, in a critique he wrote for Ed Schroeder in 2003 about an “evangelism strategy” the ELCA was developing at the time. There is so much thoughtful stuff in that critique that I think I’ll return to it at some length one of these days. In the meantime, here is Kevin pre-echoing Fred’s observation: “Why [in that draft strategy] is there not a single acknowledgement, not even a…hint of the truth that what the evangel invariably does to everyone who hears it is invite them to die with the one who has already died for them?” (Emphasis added. Happy Easter indeed.)
- And here’s a longer passage. I filched it from Facebook on Maundy Thursday 2022. Matt Metevelis had posted it there. Matt’s writing sparkles in that Facebook venue. The item here captures both the vividness of his thought and his blunt honesty. And then he gives us a picture of the Gospel at its most astonishing. See his closing sentence in particular—and recall how Christ is risen to keep this going:
“Lots of talk about “love” on Maundy Thursday. It is a clear command that Jesus gives—‘Love one another as I have loved you.’ And in response to that command I hear from countless people unaffiliated with churches exactly how loving they are. They’re good to their families. They give to charity. They have general good intentions in their hearts about humanity. They do not kick puppies. By turning love into the highest spiritual virtue churches have turned what they believe to be a ceiling into a floor—and a very crowded floor at that.
“Love in the abstract is easy. Love in a hard situation once in a while is doable. Love for those in need is laudable. But the love that God has for us is different. That God would encounter us in the form of a servant to tell us not that we’re so great for loving people but that he himself will wash our dirty feet is another matter. That God would tell us that we’re incapable of doing anything without him is downright offensive. That God would treat us as aimless beggars who can expect nothing greater from God than a cracker and a sip of grape juice is hard to swallow. That God would take us in scarred hands, die with us and for us, and give us life not as a reward but as an utter gift is a mystery that makes us tremble. That’s this holy Thursday. The relentless radioactive love of God that banishes our efforts and good intentions to claim us forever.”
Final item. I’ve seen reports in past months about Gen Z folks starting suddenly to show up at churches that feature the ancient liturgies, whether Eastern or Western. On the Monday of this year’s second week of Easter, I got a note from a boyhood friend and high school classmate who lives in Adelaide, Australia. His name is Jeff Heppner. Australians are notoriously secular, a legacy, I’m told, of a very bad relationship between early Anglican chaplains and the convicts they failed to serve. This noted, here’s what Jeff wrote:
On Easter Saturday we were invited to a former work mate’s confirmation and his wife’s baptism into the Catholic church. This was part of the Easter vigil at a very conservative church with a three and a half hours service in Latin from 7:30pm to 11pm. The church was packed (400 people) with young families including babies. Quite amazing. I read that in France they had 21,000 baptisms this Easter.
Is this something to thank God for this Sunday? I think so. It’s Pentecost. Veni creator Spiritus!
