William A. Walker III

Pastor, Professor, Theologian, Spiritual Director

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A Cosmic Moral Influence Theory: The Power of the Atonement for Sanctification in the Theology of Dallas Willard

[I presented this paper at the “Experiencing Life with God” conference at the Dallas Willard Center on May 17, 2018, in Santa Barbara, CA (Westmont College).]

For this paper, I’m mostly attempting to synthesize and constructively build on

  • the first two chapters of the Divine Conspiracy, “Entering the Eternal Life Now” and “The Gospels of Sin Management”
  • The Spirit of the Disciplines, Ch. 3, “Salvation is a Life”
  • his discussion of divine retribution and hell in Renovation of the Heart

But more than any of these sources, the most succinct presentation of Willard’s understanding of the atonement that I’ve found is actually in an interview he did with Gary Moon for the Conversations Journal in 2010, so that’s largely what I’m drawing from for Willard’s thoughts in what follows.

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A Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Justice and Mercy

Below is the video recording of my talk from the Second ACNA Matthew 25 Gathering this past Fall of 2017. The video and audio from other presenters can be found here: http://www.anglicanjusticeandmercy.org/M25-2017/

Transcending and Including the Reformation: A Tribute

[A version of this post appeared on the Missio Alliance blog on November 7, 2017.]

As Christians, we all have our own journeys to go on. And rarely is the path straight. There is progress and regress. I think it’s safe to say the same has been true for the Church throughout its history. One of the best pieces of advice I got as a graduate student in theology was that, no matter how much I may learn, grow, and change, I should always try to make room for the old versions of myself. I’ve also heard it said this way: what we focus on determines what we miss, and while God is always calling us forward, it’s easy to disdain the good things we used to know.

500 years after the Reformation, how does the Church continue to grow and change while still making room for what has come before?

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The Matthew 25 Gathering: A Eucharistic Ecclesiology of Justice and Mercy Contending for Shalom

matthew 25 gathering image[The second ACNA Matthew 25 Gathering took place last week in Phoenix, and I had the opportunity to present. There was a video recording as well, which I will share when it is available.]

It was not my plan to become a pastor, go to seminary, and certainly not to become a professor. I wanted to go to law school, practice public interest or non-profit law and do human rights work in Latin America. A job at International Justice Mission would have been a dream for if you had asked me in college to envision my future.

But as it turns out, I liked the idea of that kind of work a lot more than I was actually cut out for it. Of course, we’re all called to be involved in mercy and justice initiatives in the world in Jesus’s name and for the advancement of the kingdom at some level. I just had to realize that my strength was more in the area of teaching, thinking, and writing first.

So what I’d like to do here is just underscore three things that the Eucharist in particular teaches us about how and why we contend for shalom in an unjust and merciless world. In other words, what is the relationship between the work of seeking justice and shalom, and a specifically Eucharistic understanding of God’s mission in the world to redeem and restore all things?

I want to try to answer this question about Eucharistic Shalom, let’s call it, by just saying a little bit more about how I got here — because I think it will help to illustrate the first part of what I have to say.

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Salvation on the Road to Emmaus

[The audio for this sermon can be found here.]

LUKE 24:13-35

Really there are two main ideas from the Emmaus story that struck me right off the bat. One, we’re not in control of receiving salvation. Of seeing the risen Christ. God has to open our eyes. But secondly, God isn’t going to open our eyes until we let go of that attempt to be in control, and let him become our host. Only then will we be able to see the saving nature of his suffering.

It tells us right at the beginning of the story in vs. 15 that:

As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along  with them; 16 but they were kept from recognizing him.

Now, this last line, “They were kept from recognizing him,” is not a very comforting line. It almost sounds like God was playing tricks on them or trying to deceive them and manipulate things. But I think it’s very important for us to note that neither God nor Jesus is mentioned in this verse as the agent, or as the subject, the one who is preventing them from recognizing Jesus. This is no small detail. Because Jesus doesn’t force his way in. It’s just not his style!

Because we know what this is like — to be in a state when we’re just not open, we’re just not receptive or ready to hear certain things, or to learn something new. We’re just closed off, and no matter what we hear, or how many times something is explained, we’re not going to understand or change our thinking.

And when we’re in this place, it’s funny, no one is forcing us to stay that way, or to stay stuck or closed off, or tunnel-visioned, and yet, it certainly feels like we’re trapped and we cannot help the state that we’re in. We’re powerless to change it. We’re not in control.

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Good Friday, Psalm 22, and the Comfort of the Cry of Dereliction

Matthew 27:27-66

This week we’ve especially been talking about and looking at the way Jesus’s journey to the cross reveals our sin and the weight of it, the cost and consequences of it — just how devastating and serious it really is. And this is really important. It’s something we can’t lose sight of and that we should indeed focus on and remember during Holy Week. Our violence, our selfishness, our fear, our anger, leads Jesus to the Cross.

And somehow, because Jesus is both human and God, he stands in for us. He’s our representative suffer. He takes on what we would otherwise have to bear for ourselves, and takes it away — sets us free of it. This is central to the gospel and to the hope that we have as Christians.

But of all the words that were just read from Matthew’s gospel, maybe none of them so much as Jesus’ last words have struck Christians and baffled them throughout the Centuries as the ones that Jesus uttered from the cross in his dying breathe: (v. 46) “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

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Palm Sunday: Choosing Barabbas

[The audio for this sermon can be found here.]

Matthew 21:1-11; 27:11-26

Last Sunday we begin to take a turn in a slightly different direction in our sermons as we are preparing for Holy week. And we talked about the story of the golden calf, and about God’s mercy and justice in response to that sin, and then specifically this idea of generational sin — sin that gets inherited, in a sense or passed down, because it’s in our family or environment — it’s just around us, and we may not even realize it.

Sometimes we’re perpetuating it, it’s sin that we’re committing and we’re caught up in, but other times it’s sin that’s been perpetrated against us, and we’re the victim of it. So we’re wounded, and there needs to be awareness, first of all. Because if it isn’t acknowledged, then it can’t be healed, and there can’t be reconciliation in our relationships.

But in the story this morning for Palm Sunday, a different kind of sin is highlighted. It isn’t so much generational sin, and it isn’t necessarily even just individual sin — though it certainly includes those two. What we see in the Palm Sunday episode, and then in the passage I read a moment ago, which takes place only a few days later, is the showcasing of what I think we can just call social sin.

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Defending the Shack (sort of…)

[This review originally appeared on the Mockingbird blog.]

It will perhaps be no surprise to many readers here to learn that, overall, The Shack is simply not a high quality film. It has already received scathing reviews by critics, and for very understandable reasons, even if the popular viewership has been moderately receptive.

A movie like Martin Scorsese’s Silence, for example, is arguably superior to The Shack, and it’s unfortunate, in my opinion, that more people will likely see the latter than the former. But unlike Silence, and this isn’t unimportant, The Shack is a film that is especially suited for older children — much more so than adults. It’s only rated PG-13, I would presume, because of the heavy thematic content: innocent suffering, murder, the problem of evil, etc.

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Invitation to Silence and Solitude

[The following is from the sermon I preached on March 12, 2017 at Saint Peter’s Church. It is based on Mark 1:29-39, and the audio can be found here.]

For the whole year of 2017 so far, and now in the season of Lent, we’ve basically been talking about following Jesus: how to be with him, do what he did, and, as a result, become like him. Moreover, we follow him in community with others, and this following and community happens in the presence and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

For the first Sunday in Lent, we heard about Jesus’s most basic requirement for following him, which was this: if anyone wants to be my disciple, he or she must deny themselves, pick up their cross, and follow me. It’s a discipline of self-denial and self- renunciation. It’s requires a certain kind of self-imposed suffering, in other words — suffering on purpose, you could say, so that suffering on accident doesn’t overtake us. So that we can remain who we are in Christ, and live like him, even when life becomes overwhelming.

And the Christian way of doing this and preparing ourselves for this is through the regular practice of various spiritual disciplines. And not surprisingly, to learn what those disciplines are, again — we look to Jesus and ask how we can do what he did. So this morning we’re getting very specific and asking about one particular practice Jesus observed.

It tells us in Mark 1 that

35 Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.

In other words, Jesus had a regularly rhythm not only of prayer in his life — it does say he went to pray, of course, and we could talk about prayer — but prayer is something we do talk about fairly often.

It also tells us that Jesus had a regular rhythm of moving into silence and solitude. Two things we don’t tend to talk about as much.

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The Politics of Jesus or the Politics of Jesús?

The Politics of Jesus remains a landmark book that has inspired much of neo-Anabaptist thought. I read it for the first time in seminary alongside several other seminal works by Gustavo Gutierrez, James Cone, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Reinhold Neibuhr and others. It’s represents a movement that I’ve been impressed by in recent years, particularly with its critique of how power often gets used in our culture and in the church to reinforce hierarchies and antagonisms, rather than to advance God’s kingdom.

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