Things Invisible - Don't Go to Hell

Preached on Sunday, April 29, 2018

Scripture readings: Isaiah 57:14-21; Revelation 20:11-15; Matthew 25:31-46

Walking near the Columbia River, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
March 2018

What is God like?

Jesus said, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) So, what is God like?

Sometimes we read that God is like a hand.”

David said this to God, “My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me.” (Psalm 63:8)

Hebrews says this about God, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31)

What does it mean that God is like a hand?

Sometimes we read that God is like fire.

When the prophet Isaiah received his calling to become a prophet, he had a vision of God enthroned in glory surrounded by flaming angelic creatures called Seraphim.

The name seraph means burning one. They are all fire, and wings, and eyes.

Isaiah was in agony with the fear of his own sinfulness, so God sent a burning seraph to do something important with fire. “One of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth, and said, ‘See, thIs has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. “(Isaiah 6:6-7)

After the resurrection of Jesus and his departure to heaven, the disciples were waiting for Jesus to send the Holy Spirit, and this is how it happened: “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit….” (Acts 2:2-4)

So, the Holy Spirit of God and Jesus is like fire. The Holy Spirit enables us to follow, and serve, and be the witnesses of Jesus. The Holy Spirit enables us, as the followers of Jesus, to demonstrate the love shown by Jesus on the cross to take our sins away. So, this is like fire. Those who follow Jesus are filled with something like fire.

In Hebrews, again, the author wants us to be hopeful and excited in our faith, and so he says: “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:28) Security in the love of God and his kingdom is like fire.

So, what do we think that God is like, when we are told that God is like fire?

What do we think that God is like when Jesus says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) What do we think when the apostle John writes that: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8)

We can see the connection between Jesus and love. Then we hear Jesus say: “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matthew 25:41)

If God is like Jesus, what is God like? If God is like fire, and if God is like Jesus, and if punishment is like fire, then what is God like, and what is Jesus like?

I believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God. I believe that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Bible always says exactly what God wants it to say, exactly the way God wants it said. And the same Holy Spirit inspires the hearts and minds of those who read the Bible to receive exactly what God wants to tell them, so long as they are ready to hear whatever God wants to tell them, exactly the way God wants to tell them.

I don’t believe there are any contradictions in the Bible. I do believe that it is perfectly possible to understand the Bible and to make sense of it. I don’t believe that anything about the history of the words of the Bible and how it may have been written and passed down to us take anything away from its divine authority.

Jesus, the Living Word, is truly human and truly God, and so he is able to give us everything we need as human children of God. In the same way, the Written Word of God, in the Bible, is truly human and truly divine, and, (because of this) it is able to give us exactly what we need.

There have been many people who have spoken and written about the geography of Hell, and the temperature of Hell. There seem to be many Christians who are perfectly happy to believe that there is a Hell and that some people are going there. There are Christians who have a very clear idea of exactly who is going to Hell, and they can hardly wait for that to happen.

I want to say something about the mentality of Hell and, at the same time, I also want to tell you: “Don’t go there!”

It’s clear that Hell has something to do with punishment. But I don’t know if we even understand punishment that well.

I don’t. But perhaps you understand it on the basis of your experience as a parent, or as a spouse, in family and marriage.

In my experience as a kid, I think kids talk with each other and make plenty of comparisons about how they are being raised. The 1950’s were the years of the final flowering of the spanking. My friends and I were amazed when one of us shared that when he did something wrong, his dad would get out a heavy leather belt, and pull down his kid’s pants and underwear, and whip him on his bare bottom.

We knew that some of our own parents had been raised like that. We were genuinely glad that this was a thing of the past.

Let me tell you about the punishment my dad gave me. My dad, when I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do, would get mad. But my dad wouldn’t scream, or yell, or raise his voice. He didn’t use bad words. My dad spanked me. He spanked me so that it stung, and I would cry.

But by the time I was about eight years old, I realized that although his spanking stung a little, it didn’t really hurt at all. I suddenly realized this right in the middle of getting a spanking.

I realized that it didn’t hurt. This almost made me laugh, right in the middle of that spanking. I tried not to laugh, but I think I snorted and gave myself away. That scared me for a second, because I wondered, in that second, if it would make him madder.

I remember, at that very moment, how my dad immediately stopped the spanking. He never spanked me again. After that, when I did something that I knew I shouldn’t do, my dad wouldn’t scream. He wouldn’t yell. He wouldn’t raise his voice. He wouldn’t use bad words. My dad would simply look me in the eyes with anger and with a terrible, terrible disappointment.

His eyes, that were normally brown, would turn green for a minute. And I couldn’t stand that.

I mean, I wished that he would spank me. In those days I would have rather been spanked so that it hurt, at least a little. I would rather have had a spanking, than see that look in those eyes. I think my behavior improved a lot when the only punishment I got was that look in those eyes like an angry, sad, green fire.

With human beings, I don’t think that plain and simple punishment does any good. OK, punishment may stop bad behavior. But punishment will also open up a whole new world of trying to get away with things without getting caught.

With my dad, that look in those eyes left me helpless and I had no motivation to try to get away with things without getting caught. There were more things in that green fire than anger, there was disappointment, there was expectation, and there was love.

Punishment alone, plain and simple, never touches the heart, and never makes you better. Good parents know that punishment, plain and simple, is never their job.

Their job is to give their children everything in their heart. Their job is to bring children to life, and give their children more and more life, and give their children the capacity to receive more life from God, and from the love and faithfulness of others.

The parents’ job is to teach their children to use the lessons of the love they’ve received to become givers of life and love to others, in their own right. Parents want their children to be givers of life, especially to those who need it most: to give that life and love most of all to those who need spanking, because they may have children of their own.

The Lord says, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” But this is not about punishment, plain and simple. God is not about punishment and reward.

God is about creating life. God is about giving to his created children the capacity to thrive in a life that is learned from God and gifted by God. God is about creating and raising children of his own.

In the Bible, fire has strong associations with the holiness of God. Fire often appears when holiness is broken and when punishment becomes the order of the day.

We think of holiness as a standard of perfection, and we think of perfection as never making mistakes, and never breaking rules or laws. Holiness is actually an ability to be devoted to a purpose, to have a goal in view and never letting go of it. Holiness means the capacity to focus on your goal and not deviate from it, ever.

God’s goal is not law keeping. God’s goal is life and love. God’s goal is thriving, and joy, and appreciation, and thankfulness, and praise. God’s goal is to say to every one of us, as creatures who have spread the beauty of goodness: “Well done good and faithful servant.”

Holiness is only one characteristic of God that we call an “attribute”. What we might call God’s moral attributes include holiness, justice, and love, and a number of other very fine qualities.

If we say that punishment is part of God’s attribute of holiness, we are right. But God is never just one thing at a time. God’s holiness never exists in the absence of God’s justice and love.

Imagine that you have, in spades, the attribute of intelligence. You would never want that attribute of intelligence to function without the attribute of wisdom, or else you would end up being too smart for your own good.

It’s no good to go around being less than you are. You want to be ready to be everything that you are all the time.

And if you have the attribute of being right all the time, or at least being right more often that other people, do you realize how much harm you can do, and how hard you will make life for others and for yourself. Never let your attribute of being right elbow your attribute of love out of the way. Some people do that. But, you never want to be less than all that you are.

Back to parenthood, and marriage too: you never want to reduce yourself in what you have to give. You never give enough unless you are ready to give everything.

So, when your child goes wrong, becoming The Avenger won’t do any lasting good unless your child can see your hopes, and dreams, and love in your eyes. Even if your husband or wife messes up, never get mad unless your partner can see your hopes, and dreams, and love in your eyes and in your voice.

Justice is an attribute that goes beyond rewarding and punishing. Justice creates a system where goodness is enjoyed, and flourishes, and where badness fails, and breaks the heart of even the guilty.

And love,” Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1 Corinthians 13:7-8) And God is love.

And God is a consuming fire. And Hell is an eternal fire. In the Bible, fire is, first and foremost, an image and expression of God. Fire is the expression of who God is and what God is like.

I always loved fire. When I was a kid I loved to build fires. It became my family job. We had a fireplace, and I built the fires. When we camped, I built the fire. When we barbequed, I built the fire. When there was trash to burn I loved to build the fire.

I grew up with incinerators in the back yard and burn piles on the farms. Fires were never about punishment. Except that it feels like you’re being punished, when you’re the one who has to build and manage that fire in the summertime, in the Sacramento Valley, when the temperature is 100 degrees. Fire is light, and warmth, and food, and heating water for washing. It’s for cleaning up the yard or the field. If fire were punishment, it would only be the saddest use of a beautiful thing.

Even Jesus says, in his parable of the sheep and the goats, that the fire of Hell wasn’t made for us. It was made for the Devil and his angels; not for human beings. (Matthew 25:41) It was made for cleaning up the creation of God.

God hates us trying to turn him into something less than everything he is. That’s why the Ten Commandments forbid us from making any image of God. No image can show all that God is. So, when the first and foremost expression of who God is, and what God is like, makes God look like Hell, we can trust that this can never be true.

Something else is true. All of the attributes of God are always present. Everything that is true of God is always at work, all the time. Where we see the fire of punishment in the Bible, there is much more at work than punishment. There is holiness that holds to the devotion of its purpose to make us the thriving children of God. There is justice, that creates a system where what is good grows stronger, and more and more joyful and thankful. There is love, which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and never, never ends.

There was a time, many years ago, when I was betrayed. People who knew more than I did told me later that they should have warned me. It damaged me for a long time. But, soon after that betrayal closed in on me, I preached a sermon about absolute forgiveness. At the end of that service, I was told by one of the ambushers, that my sermon about absolute forgiveness was the most negative messages they had ever heard. That same morning, I went to shake the hand of another one of them and, as I reached out my hand, their face got dark and grim and they pulled their hands behind them and backed away from me. I was not being what they wanted me to be at the time.

Forgiveness and grace can be an enormous punishment and pain for those who refuse it. Love can become darkness and fire for those who want to make themselves less, in their attributes, than God created them to be, when they don’t want to combine the fires of holiness, justice, and love.

In the story of the sheep and the goats, neither the sheep nor the goats were aware of doing anything for Jesus. They had only seen the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger (which means alien, like the Samaritan who was an outsider and an enemy of God’s people), the naked, the sick, and the prisoner. These were among the types of people that the God who looks like Jesus tells us to care for. He cares.

The sheep were people who went where Jesus would go in order to love those whom Jesus would love with all the attributes of God. The sheep were the people who shared the attributes of Jesus. They would refuse to be anything less. In a real sense, they had no idea what they were doing, but they did it anyway.

The goats never went near the people with whom Jesus identified. They were content and they led perfectly happy lives being less than what God created them to be. They were never anywhere near where Jesus would be, and so they never really did anything for Jesus.

The sheep must have often found themselves in places where they were very uncomfortable, and yet they were on the road to heaven. The goats led their comfortable lives and never even started up that road. The life of the goats turned out to be all about themselves. Their souls shrank as their holiness, justice and love shrank. In the end, they were held forever in the arms of what they had refused to be. The unwanted fire of love will never end.

If a child is pouting or having a tantrum, the thing they hate most is to see you moving in toward them to love them, smile into their faces, and tickle them. This is the way to make them really howl. Love can be Hell. If you love someone who wants to be less than they were created to be, or love someone who is happy to be less than they were created to be, and if you try to love them into being something more: know that you will make them miserable.

But don’t stop. You want to be careful about this. Never let anything or anyone make you consent to be less than you were created to be. Never dream of being any less than Jesus. To choose to be les is the mentality of hell. Don’t go there!

In the beginning of the Book of Revelation, when John first sees Jesus, among the many details he notices is something about those eyes. The eyes of Jesus look like fire. For those who know Jesus, a different form of fire tells us who God is. This world, and the best institutions and laws, and all the people in it, punished Jesus for being all that he is. The punishing fire took the form of a cross, and nails, and a crown of thorns, and the wounds of a whip, and a spear in his heart.

There was much more hanging on the hell of that cross than punishment. The fire of God burned there. The fire of holiness, and justice, and love burned there and took the punishment and the curse of our sins. As our hearts give way to that flame, we die and rise with Jesus. The light in Jesus’ eyes becomes his power and fire in us to break our hearts for change and a new life. Let’s live in that fire forever.

Things Invisible - Meeting and Beating the Devil

Preached on Sunday, April 22, 2018

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:1-15; Revelations 12:1-12; John 8:31-59

The first time I remember almost stepping on a snake in the wild was when I was about ten years old. My family was on vacation and we were staying in a campground at Lake Shasta.

Walking near the Columbia River, Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
March 2018

I was just coming out of the restroom, and there was a little gully that I had walked through, from our camp, to get there. I took the same path to get back to our camp.

Something near my feet caught my eye. It made me jump. A rattlesnake lay stretched out in that gully, and I realized that it must have been there when I came that way in the first place. I had almost stepped on that snake twice.

Since then, I’m sure I have almost stepped on a snake at least once every year. I know it was three or four times just last summer. Of course, they weren’t all rattlesnakes. So, by my guesstimate; I may have almost stepped on about 120 snakes in my adult lifetime. That tells me, all in all, that I must be pretty lucky when it comes to snakes.

  There’s one mean serpent, though, that I haven’t been so lucky with. That serpent has been around for a long, long time. It’s about as old as the creation. It’s one of those snakes that never stops growing as long as it lives. It’s been around so long that it’s even grown extra heads. It’s even grown horns.

The Book of Revelation gives us a pretty good snapshot of this serpent. “Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth.” (Revelation 12:3-4)

If you wonder what the numbers mean (the seven heads, and ten horns, and all that), It means that it’s got plenty. It means that the dragon has more than enough fight in him and more than enough brains in him to do a lot of harm, if he can.

Sometimes, in the Book of Revelation, and a few other places in the Bible, Jesus is a Lamb: The Lamb of God, wounded, bleeding, the perfect sacrifice for all the sins of the world. Sometimes, in the Book of Revelation, Satan (the Devil) is a reptile: snake, serpent, dragon.

This doesn’t mean that the Devil really has become a reptile or that the Devil has horns or anything else that pictures show. In the same way, Jesus isn’t really a lamb. He doesn’t have wool or hooves. But if you had a special dream, or some such thing, with a reptile or a lamb in it, the stories of the Bible could give you a clue about what they are, or what they mean.

Why was Eve talking to a serpent in the Garden of Eden?  The common answer is that Satan took over the body of a living snake in order for Eve to see and talk to something that didn’t scare her. No creature would be scary in those days and in that place, where God’s harmony and peace protected everything and everyone from each other.

Why did the Lord punish the innocent snakes for something the Devil did by forcing them to crawl on their bellies? I think the snakes already crawled on their bellies. It was no punishment for them. But that fowl spirit, Satan, and his team, were humiliated in some way that we cannot imagine. Some power or some dignity, or else the ability to deceive themselves about what their own sins had done to them, was taken from them, and they would never get that back. And Satan would never be able to destroy his own future destroyer.

In all three of the scriptures we have read, we meet some of the same results. First (in God’s prophecy in the garden), we are told of the world as it has become. Next (in the gospel), we meet the same current world as it is resisting the love and peace and freedom of God. In Revelation, we meet the invisible spiritual warfare that goes on in this world, where Jesus has died and risen from the dead, and yet where the Kingdom of God hasn’t been fully installed yet.

In each of these scenes, we meet the snakebite of the world. We meet the Devil and the power of sin as conflict, as deceit, as poison, as the use of ourselves against ourselves. We meet the reason why so many people hate snakes.

Until the final judging and healing come, in a new heaven and earth (heaven and universe), there will be war. That war will be spiritual. The war will also be physical: flesh and blood, and weapons, and killing. In between the war of the spirit and the war of bombs and bullets, we have our own potential for war on the personal level.  This war will be bad attitudes, broken relationships, pride, blame, guilt, resistance, invasion, abuse.

We see and feel this every day. We are all part of it.

It’s poison, it’s sickness, it’s human will, and choices, and habits. It’s lurking there like a snake, so well disguised, so easy to step on, or to step into.

Genesis and Revelation have so much in common. God provides a garden of grace and healing at the beginning of the world and, in the end, when the long war is over, we will all come home to a garden of grace and healing provided by God.

The main difference between the gardens is that the Tree of Life in the first garden will be replaced in the eternal garden by the Tree of Life that is the Cross, and the fruit and the healing leaves will be Jesus, and all the nations (and all of us) will come home to the garden and walk with him, and talk with him, and never need to hide, and never need to ever be afraid again.

All of the conflict and poison of this world, as we see it in the Bible, comes from one sin. It’s been said to be a kind of pride, but it’s also a deep desire for something we don’t have. It comes from a decision to disapprove of what God has made us to be.

We want to redraw God’s design of us in a way that gives us more of an advantage. We want control. We want to be Gods. Eve and Adam wanted to be wise, but this was no trick of the Devil.

The Devil knew that they loved and worshiped what they saw in God, when God walked with them, and when they were tending the garden designed for them. They were created to begin a family of the human sons and daughters of God, but they could be drawn in to a temptation to take it for themselves, without partnership with God. They could just eat the fruit that would give them the knowledge of everything.

They would know the pros and cons of everything. They would know that if you did “A” and “B”, you would get “C”. The value on the other side of the equations wouldn’t be “X”. It wouldn’t be unknown. They wanted to be Gods not by being created in God’s image, but by self-creation and self-design.

The Devil himself had started his devilry with the same motives. That’s what the war in heaven is about. The Devil is in an agony of envy, to become God of a creation of his own making, even if it means creating a dead and poisoned and starving and hating creation.

The poet Milton was wise when he put these words into the Devil’s mouth: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” That is the philosophy and motivation of the Devil and his kingdom.

This is not so far from us. Jesus called a crowd of people who were believers (people who had chosen to follow Jesus and listen to him) . . . Jesus called them “children of the Devil.” (John 8:44)

They were still ready to turn on Jesus if he disappointed them.

It didn’t take much. Jesus poked at them a couple times and the truth came out. They wanted to create a kingdom of themselves in their own image, and Jesus wouldn’t play along. He never does.

We all see this in the end. Following Jesus, “we die daily.” (1 Corinthians 15:31) We die to ourselves to be recreated in Christ’s image. That is what the kingdom of God is for.

How do we beat this? How do we beat the Devil himself?

We do this by prayer: prayer without ceasing. We do this by knowing and understanding the Bible: learning from our heart the mind of God through the word of God.

We beat this by internalizing a reality of Jesus that we call “the full armor of God.” We find this armor spelled out in Ephesians 6:10-18.

Something more is hiding in our reading of the Book of Revelation. There is a song of victory. Someone is singing about the victory of God’s people over the Devil, and how they did it: “They overcame him by the Blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” (Revelation 12:11)

Let’s take the last phrase first: “They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”

We give our greatest gifts when we give the fullness of our own lives. Soldiers do this. Husbands and wives in mutual devotion and thankfulness do this. Parents do this for their children. Sometimes we do this for our brothers and sisters in Christ. We do this for Jesus.

When Adam and Eve tried to hide from God, they lost themselves by trying to save themselves. The step they took, in which they ate the forbidden fruit, led to the next step of self-preservation to rob God of the gift that he had given to them: the gift of his creation and his love.

They robbed God of his created family, because they (along with all of us) were to be God’s family in flesh and blood. The fear of losing what we want to claim for ourselves is a kind of fear of death that can never stand up to the Devil.

Our defense against the dark arts is to love others more than we love ourselves. Our defense is ultimately to love God more than ourselves. We are not afraid to die to ourselves. Fear of anything less is defeat.

For the soldiers of Jesus, the second defense against the Devil is “the word of their testimony”. Another way Revelation phrases this is to call it, “the testimony of Jesus.” (Revelation 12:17) There is a very strange use of the same phrase later on: “The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” (Revelation 19:10)

It’s a phrase that means two or three different things at the same time. It a sword that cuts both ways. The word of their testimony and the testimony of Jesus is what you say to others about Jesus. It’s also what Jesus says to you. It’s also what the scriptures tell you about Jesus. It’s also the over-arching story of what the gospel (the story of the good news of Jesus) tells you.

Our weapon against the dark arts is to know what Jesus has done for you and what he is still doing for you: to know it, and to share it with others, and to talk to Jesus about it in prayer and thanks.

This weapon against the dark arts is what the Word of God tells us, but it must do more than this.

The Word of God must feed you Jesus. The Word of God must be Jesus knocking on the door of your heart. The Word of God must be a picture of a baby in Bethlehem, and a man teaching and healing others in the desert. The Word of God must be a picture of that same man nailed to the cross, dying for you, and rising from the dead in order to raise you up and to give you life.

Here, again, beating the Devil requires you to make your life into something about more than yourself. Your life is for others. Your life is for the Lord.

The third weapon against the Devil is “the blood of the Lamb.” Again, you have the victory if your life is not about you, but truly a gift designed and shaped by the bloody hands of the one who died for you and for the whole world.

Here is what Jesus means when he started poking at the ones who thought they believed him when they didn’t really believe at all. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

The freedom of reigning in Hell instead of serving in heaven is no freedom at all, in the end. Jesus died in order to give birth to us as sons and daughters of the Living God, and to be brothers and sisters to each other, all around the world. Lesser loves bring the venom of conflict and separation. Freedom is love in Jesus, and in his family.

The Advent Kingdom - Join Bethlehem's Battling Baby

Preached on Sunday, December 24, 2017

Scripture readings: Isaiah 53:1-12; Revelation 12:1-17; Matthew 2:13-23

Riverside Community Church
Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
Thanks to Those Lovingly Decorated
Our Church for the Celebration of the Nativity
December 2017

Christmas can look and feel like a battle. The stores are battling to sell their stock. The customers are battling to buy their gifts. It happens. One year I was stuck buying some last-minute Christmas gifts, in the mall, on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t pretty.

There’s the battle to beautify our homes, but I’ve surrendered in that war. There’s the battle of the Tree. I found (late) that I had a broken tree so I found another by surprise and got it put up yesterday, but I’m not going to decorate it. I’m living with it, just as it is, for three days, then I’m flying home for a late Christmas with my family. Wednesday, I fly from Pasco to Seattle, change for a flight from Seattle to Portland, and then change for a flight from Portland to Sacramento. Then, the following Wednesday, I fly back to you. But I love Christmas.

Am I making it look bad? For some people it really is: for soldiers on a foreign front, for the homeless, for those in a home with unpayable bills and empty cupboards, for the grief stricken, for the lonely.

The first Christmas (whatever the date when it really happened) looked bad. There was a hundred-mile hike for a young, pregnant teenager and her husband. (The Bible doesn’t tell us, in so many words, whether she was lucky enough to have a donkey to ride. I think that Christmas artists must just like painting donkeys.

There was the pregnancy itself: how it happened was controversial, and (to some) unbelievable. There are people who always like to think the worst, and they’re not afraid to say what they think. You hear hints of this, later in the Gospel’s, there’s a time when Jesus is called Mary’s son without naming Joseph. In that time and place not naming the father was a kind of slur on Jesus’ parentage. (Mark 6:3)

There was the Roman, so-called emperor. (Some thought dictator: and he had certainly killed enough people to win his way into power, so that he deserved to be called a dictator, no matter how smart he was.) The Roman Caesar ordered a tax-revenue and military-occupation related census that forced the whole journey on Joseph and Mary, and thousands of others just like them.

There was the “puppet” king, named Herod. They called him the Great. Was he so great because he was willing to kill all the baby boys of Bethlehem in order to get rid of some peasant baby with a claim to be the King of the Jews? Herod was perfectly willing to kill anybody in order to hold onto a title that he had already killed for, just like Caesar. It all stank.

We don’t know for sure if the manger was in the stable of an inn, or in the animal quarters of a peasant house, where the one or two other rooms were filled with people. Peasant houses did have animal rooms. Probably, the way that world smelled, the animal room may not have smelled much worse. An article came out last week which had the title: “The Real, Stinky Nativity.”

The interesting connection between our world and that ancient, stinky world, is that those people, now, for whom Christmas is a mess, are the ones who have the most in common with the people of the very first Christmas.

Jesus was born to change the nature of our lives, to fight the battle that would save us from the power of sin and death, the battle that would give us life abundant, and life eternal. The climax of that battle (which began in Bethlehem) was the cross and the grave. Those were places that stank.

Jesus must also have been born to change the smell of this world and the smell of our lives within this world. The birth of Jesus was a heavenly miracle in which God, in all his glory and power, invaded a world that stinks. Our world stinks with war, with slaughter, with the slaughter of innocents and babies, with dictators killing for power, with suspicion and fear, with injustice and poverty, with disease and hunger.

The world is beautiful with the power and ingenuity of God, but it is a fallen world, and it’s fallenness stinks. Jesus was born to bring the beauty of God, the power of God, the righteousness of God, the compassion of God, the servanthood of God, and the love that comes from God,  into the stink of the world.

That was also a battle. That is still a battle.

Jesus, and Mary, and Joseph represent the presence of God giving meaning, and value, and blessing to those who live with the indignities and the struggles that stink. That, too, is a battle.

With the understanding that Joseph gets left out of the picture so often that he stands for so many invisible people who matter, lets look at a strange, strange picture in the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation. It’s the picture of the woman, and her baby, and a fiery, watery dragon.

It’s not a picture of something that happens during the trouble at the end of things.

The picture began long before that. The story of the picture began when a woman met a reptile in the Garden of Eden. The reptile was called a snake there, but he has many names.

The reptile won that battle in Eden, and his victory seemed to promise to ruin the lives of the woman and her man, and all future human beings who came after them. Then, God promised something better. God promised that a son of the woman would crush the reptile’s head, even though that reptile would injure the son. God’s brand of justice would be done, and that would bring about a new kind of world. Revelation will show us pictures of that new world: that new heaven and earth.

The Book of Revelation tells us that the birth of the son would defeat the dragon. And the son did exactly that.

But, the Book of Revelation, in this picture of the woman, the son, and the dragon, says that this battle will go on for quite a while, and it has. We’re living in this battle still.

Christmas carries the message that we must get involved in this battle. We are enlisted in a war where a baby has invaded the enemy’s territory. This baby has won the essential, turning-point battles that will lead to the end of the war, in which we and the baby will win.

I was thinking about war. I watched the recent movie “Dunkirk” and think it was a great movie. But the Battle of Dunkirk looked like defeat, at first.

Because of their defeat at Dunkirk, some of the British wanted to negotiate a peace settlement with Hitler. Prime Minister Winston Churchill saw it differently, and made it count as a victory, in a way that surprised his own people. In this surprising sense, the evacuation of Dunkirk by the British was a victory that help make the American entry into that war possible. That led to the bloody, costly victory of the Landing at Normandy, which enabled us to turn the German victories at the Battle of the Bulge into allied victories there.

It still wasn’t done. There were still more horrible battles to be fought until der Fuhrer shot himself in his bunker. Our own war with the dragon goes on like that.

The dragon shifts his strategy many times. Revelation shows us this. The dragon is going to raise up two beasts: one, from the sea, will be a beast of political power; the other, from the ground will be a botched imitation of the Lamb and this imitation Lamb will have the power of spiritual deceit and blindness.

No matter how far away the battle seems, the cultures of the world always try to mold, or scare, or trick, or deceive the people of the True Lamb who was slain. The dragon, gently or harshly, tries to loosen our grip on the True Lamb in heaven. If he succeeds, he thinks that the True Lamb might get disgusted and loosen his grip on us.

This struggle began with the Battle of Christmas, and we have been recruited to join this Battle. The Christmas Battle is the invasion begun by The Baby of Bethlehem. We are the invaders of a stinky world and we are called to take our stand against the hardships that make life stink for so many.

We are the invaders of a world disabled by sin.

So, we are the re-enablers of lives, and relationships, and hearts and minds, through the power of forgiveness and love.

What strange weapons these are! And what a strange strategy. It’s like the invasion of Troy by means of the Trojan Horse. But, in our war, the strategy that defeats the dragon is the Trojan Baby. Or you could call God’s strange tactics the mommy-and-baby strategy: the discipline of forgiveness and love.

The mommy is Eve, and Abraham’s wife Sarah, and the Lord’s wife Israel, and the Virgin Mary, and the Bride of Christ, the Church. The mommy is God’s people nurturing and strengthening each other, so that the Church becomes our mother. The mommy-and-baby strategy stretches the whole Church inside out; because it has taught us to care for the strays that wonder beyond us. Our hearts are tender for those outside because the greatest baby we know is the battling baby Jesus. The everlasting Son of God became a baby in order to conquer life itself, and temptation, and pride, and hypocrisy, and sin, and death.

But there are lots of other babies, just like us, in the Battle. The Dragon knows this and goes off, in the end, to fight them and us. These babies are the other offspring of the mommy, that the Book of Revelation tells us about.

Yes, they are us. No other weapon will do but the blood of the lamb and “the testimony of Jesus”. We tell the story of Jesus as he has taught us. We tell the story of Jesus in words and in our lives.

We live what Jesus taught. How can we give the testimony of Jesus without loving our enemies, or without being the Good Samaritan to all of those who have been injured by the stink that gets into the world, and into its people, and into us?

The Bethlehem Baby, and the babies who are us, fight with these strange weapons. Jesus did this and we follow him everywhere.

Isaiah told us what people would think of these strange weapons. People who use the conventional wisdom will never see that this is the strategy that will fight for the world as God designed it to be. It takes a very different kind of wisdom to shift the powers of our minds to see strategy that will change the world. “Surely, he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each one of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6)

That looks like no way to fight evil, or sin, or stink: for Jesus and us to bear it ourselves, to carry it for others. Actually, it is a bit like a mommy’s strategy. The Battle of Bethlehem was fought with mommy/baby strategy.

The baby who was growing up to carry the sin of the world would have a strange bit of identity to direct him in his purpose. When the boy Jesus was old enough to understand things, he knew the story that other babies had died in his place, they died for him. What would he grow up to do for others? We are the babies who follow him, and we know that he has died for us and that others have died for him. All of them have died for us too, so that we could know and follow the baby who was the Savior they had loved.

That is the miracle of Christmas. That is the calling of Christmas to each one of us. That is the power of Christmas, or the Jesus of Christmas, that can change us, and work through us for the washing, the disinfecting, the sweetening, and the healing of the world, and for the coming new heaven and the new earth that will be won by this baby.

People in times long past have understood this better than we do. I’m going to finish by reading a poem written by a Catholic priest, in the 1500’s, who was executed for his faith by the government of Reformation England. The poet’s name is Robert Southwell. His poem was later set to music by the British composer Benjamin Britten in “A Ceremony of Carols”, during World War II: “This Little Babe”. 

This little Babe so few days old

Is come to rifle Satan's fold;

All hell doth at His presence quake,

Though He Himself for cold doth shake;

For in this weak unarmed wise

The gates of hell He will surprise.

With tears He fights and wins the field,

His tiny breast stands for a shield;

His battering shot are babish cries,

His arrows looks of weeping eyes,

His martial ensigns cold and need,

And feeble flesh His warrior's steed.

His camp is builded in a stall,

His bulwark but a broken wall,

The crib His trench, haystalks His stakes,

Of shepherds He His army makes;

And thus, as sure His foe to wound,

The angels' trumps the charge now sound.

My soul with Christ join thou in fight;

Stick to His tents, the place of might.

Within His crib is surest ward;

This little Babe will be thy Guard.

If thou wilt foil thy foes with joy,

Then flit not from this heavenly Boy!

(Written by Robert Southwell, c. 1561-1595) 

The Advent Kingdom - Creation 2.0

Preached on the Second Sunday of Advent, December 17, 2017

Scripture readings: Isaiah 52; Revelation 21

We are reading about God making things new.

God tells Isaiah about a new Israel and a new Jerusalem. He says they will finally be safe, in the end, because no one who is uncircumcised or unclean will enter.

Christmas lights: Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
December 2017

The uncircumcised and unclean are really the same thing, so all the nations except Israel are shut out. But, in the end, God tells Isaiah that many nations (which really means all nations) will have something done to them that will change them completely.

 They will be sprinkled by the Servant (the Messiah, the Christ). And, so, they will all be clean. They will become citizens of the kingdom of the Messiah. But the kingdom of the Messiah is Israel.

This means that Israel will be new indeed; new in a way it has never dreamed of. Israel and Jerusalem will be everyone. The unclean will be gone.

The same is true in the Book of Revelation. The gates and foundations are labeled with the names of the tribes of Israel and the apostles of the Church. All of the nations will come to the New Jerusalem to give their praise and glory to God; their praise and glory to the Lamb. The New Jerusalem will be home for everyone. And the gates will always be open. There will be no cover of darkness for evil and enemies to enter and destroy. But the truth is that all evil and all enemies will be gone. They’ve been put out of the new creation forever. They have disappeared into the Lake of Fire.

When we have a solid feel for what Israel and Jerusalem have been, through the centuries, and what they are now, we can only say: “Well! That will be different! That will be something new!”

The same has begun to be true for us. Some glad day, it will be completely true for us; true for everyone who truly wants it. But it has begun to be true now. We have been given the first installments of something totally different, something totally new.

Have you ever been made new before? Have you ever felt that your life had become completely different than it was before?

If we must be spiritually correct, we would say that we became new and different people when we wholeheartedly opened ourselves to God in Christ. One of my most favorite sentences in the Bible was written by Paul, in his letter to the Galatians. It’s his description of being completely new and different. Paul wrote: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

I have another favorite line by Paul. It comes from his Second Letter to the Corinthians: “Therefore, if any one is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

We, as Christians, honestly, don’t always look to others as if we were completely new and different. We can look like we think we’re members of some sort of exclusive club or lodge. Even Christians forget that being a member is not a matter of having your name on a roll, or in a record book. Being a member is not about being on the list of past or present officers.

Being a member of the Church is about being in Christ: a part of Christ. It’s about being a member of his body, as opposed to being dismembered. A member is someone who is an organ, or a ligament, or a muscle, or a finger, or a mustache in the Body of Jesus, the Body of Christ. The head of this body is Jesus, although we might serve as one of his many, many eyes, or tongues, or ears, or mustaches.

What would it be like, as a member of the church, to be a nose in the body of Christ? It would have to be much more than being able to say that the potluck was ready to eat. What would it be like to be a completely new and different nose than you are right now?

Have you ever become a completely new and different person?

There was a guy in my first church who became a new Christian. He was talking a lot about this. I thought it must have happened before I had arrived, because I was a really new arrival. But, when I said this to him, he grinned and tapped his finger on my chest. He gave me the credit. That was such an honor.

Ralph was a lumbermill worker, and he had been most of his life. If I recall correctly, his youngest son was still in high school. Some of Ralph’s older kids had given him and Virginia grandkids. So, he had lived long enough to have formed a very definite pattern of personality and abilities.

Before he was found by Jesus, Ralph had been a harsh, critical, and judgmental man, even within his home and family; or especially there. He had also been functionally illiterate.

Now the obvious miracle was that he could suddenly read, and he soon loved to read. His favorite reading was the Bible, and he absorbed it like a sponge. He also began, at once, the new habit of reading the newspaper every day.

There was once a famous theologian who said that a good Christian was one who held a Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. That could be true.

Ralph also began reading books like “The Works of Flavius Josephus”. Flavius Josephus was a Jewish army officer at the time that the people of Israel rose up in rebellion against their Roman overlords, in the middle of the sixties, and up to 70 A.D., or so. He wrote a first century history of the Jewish people down to the time right after Jesus: the time of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. In fact, Josephus mentions Jesus in his history, briefly. Josephus is not easy reading.

So, that was brand new. That was different. That was Ralph and Jesus.

But there was something just as good and even better for those who knew Ralph, and even better for his wife and family. Ralph became a loving, gentle man. He became patient, and compassionate, and generous. His wife would talk to me, personally, about the wonderful change in Ralph.

 The change was so impressive and persuasive that Ralph’s eighty-five-year-old father-in-law (Bob) became a disciple of Jesus after a lifetime of scorning religion in general and Christians in particular. Of course, he had never scorned his own wife Nellie, or his daughter Virginia. For years Bob, like Ralph, had tolerated their faith. Now they embrace that faith. So, Bob’s wife, Nellie, and Ralph’s wife, Virginia, were having a good time with this.

But how can someone, who doesn’t know this peculiar brand of newness and differentness, understand, by looking at us (when we don’t look all that new and different) understand what we hope and pray that they will understand?

We long for them to understand what they can become with Jesus. Is there something that anyone can understand about being a new person (a different person) than you were before? What has changed you into a new and different person? What, in life, has changed your life?

In the Book of Revelation, the new universe, the new heaven and earth, the new future life of all believing human beings who will ever live, can be described and pictured in the same, common ways that our current lives are changed.

It isn’t so much a matter of having a new life merely because you have a new house. It isn’t the kind of new life that comes with a new job.

A real-life change might come with the birth of a child. Such a thing changes a woman into a mother, which (I’m told) is a complete difference.

I’ve known men who told me that the first step they took toward Jesus was completely unconscious and completely unintentional. It was simply the fact that they held a child of their own flesh and blood in their arms.

The experience told them that they needed to become something they had never been before. It opened them to change on an almost miraculous level or depth.

This is the change in life described to us when we learn that the new universe and the new way to be human is to truly be born again. In the world to come, we will become, like never before, the direct children of God. “The one who conquers will inherit these things. I will be his God and he will be my son (my daughter)” (Revelation 21:7)

I’m also told that marriage changes your life. I also suspect that, if it doesn’t make you a new person, you will not be about what marriage is for.

The future world, and the future you, will be “prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” (Revelation 21:2) The Christian hope is that the future world, and the future you, will be like a wedding that won’t stop. There will be enough joy, and giving, and love, and passion for that wedding to go on and on in that timeless world.

A member of one of my churches, whom I’ve known for decades, passed away recently, and I was suddenly reminded of the terrible auto accident she had been in with a friend, years ago. The friend had died. Linda was about seventy years old when she was injured. She was in the hospital for weeks. She was in physical therapy for months.

Linda, and her husband Bob, had been living in the grand, old, brick, family farmhouse that Bob’s father had built. They had been living independently, and graciously, and generously, and hospitably, and deeply spiritually for many years.

Linda’s good friend had died, and Linda almost died. She, herself, when she was in the greatest danger, had an encounter with Jesus beyond this world. Afterwards, in her humility, she said little about that experience, but the whole thing touched her deeply.

For months no one knew what progress she would make, if any, in the end. After months, she was well enough to return home and live, very much, the way she had before, at least for a while.

She was a saint before. That never changed. But she saw her physical presence in this world very differently. And she saw all her relationships much more preciously than ever.

After my dad had heart surgery (a triple by-pass), he wasn’t in the hospital very long, but he changed. This happened shortly after he retired, so he was in his later sixties. Suddenly he would tell us grown up kids (I was in my early forties) that he loved us. He would say (out of the blue), “Son, I love you.” I had never heard him say this before. I’m sure he never, in my life, told me that he loved me until that time. It was so strange. I never got used to it. My dad had become very different and new.

I understand that recoveries like these can make you a new person. Recoveries can make you a truly different person than you were before. I believe this.

The Christian hope, the future world, the future you, will be a recovery like that. John tells us that: “God will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Rev. 21:4)

We have lived in a world that has borne a long illness, with its long history of death, and mourning and crying, and pain. Whether we have heard, and believed, the promise of recovery, or not, we have known no other world than the one in which we have been living, under the influence of this long sickness, and all our lives have shared this sickness in common. We may have begun the gift of recovery in our own lives, but we know no other world.

But now, our lives have seen some of the future change. When the fullness of time has come, the change will be perfect. We and the new world will be well. A medieval nun had a little song that went: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” (Julian of Norwich)

Sometimes life changes when someone comes to live with you. When my Polish Grandmother (my Baci, or Babcia) retired, she didn’t come to live with us. She went to live with her son (my mother’s brother, Uncle Eddie, and his family). I know this changed my cousins’ lives.

But Baci would come and spend her summers with us. I was about thirteen or fourteen, when this began.

I changed because I became Polish. My Baci would teach me to talk with her in Polish, and to help her cook Polish food. I learned to make pierogi. I thought that, when I got older, I might do some college work in Poland. Maybe I would get some experience that would qualify me for working with the State Department.

Of course, God had other plans for me that I was already seriously resisting. When Baci, or some of my other older Polish relatives, would come and visit us, they would talk with me and tell me that I thought like a Polak. I had changed.

This was quite a compliment. No one can receive a finer compliment than to be called a Polak. It’s a Polish word that means a Polish person. What could be greater than that?

Change comes, and it makes all the difference in the world, when someone comes to live with you. John tells us that: “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them.” (Revelation 21:3) Surely everyone here knows something about this, even now.

The newness described all through the Book of Revelation is a special kind of newness. There are two words for newness, in the Biblical Greek.

There is an ordinary, standard newness called “neos”, which is like getting a new computer, or a new car.

Then there is a radical newness called “kainos”, which means a whole new order of change, as if change, itself, will change into something else.

New heavens and earth don’t mean that heaven and earth will be replaced. Becoming a new creation doesn’t mean that we will have the secret of eternal youth, or an intelligence boost, or an altered memory.

What you will be, and whatever this world will be, will become something we can’t even imagine now. What we want will change. What we enjoy will change. What we’re able to do will change. What we see, and hear, and take into ourselves will change. What others are for us, and what we are for others, will change.

We, and the whole world, will be so surprisingly new. And yet we will be ourselves. What we are now will be recognizable in what we will be. What we are now will have played its part, in the love of God in Christ. What we are now will have played its part in the person that God has planned us to be, all along.

How will this new change become ours? How will this future hope, this future world (this future heaven and earth), become ours? Two things go together in this, in a way we don’t ordinarily notice.

The language of the Book of Revelation is Greek, but the thinking in it is Hebrew. In Hebrew thought you can put things together that seem different, side by side, and they really are part of the same, single thing. The different things share one meaning in common.

So, John hears about the Lion of Judah and he looks and sees a Lamb that was slain. These are two different things that are the same thing. John hears about the Bride, and he looks and sees the New Jerusalem City. And all that we are told about what’s in the city is that there is a throne, with God and the Lamb sitting on it, and fruit trees, and a river, as if it were a garden: maybe even the garden of Eden, all over again, but safe and complete. These all seem like different things, but they’re the same thing.

John hears about two things that don’t sound like the same thing. He hears that the thirsty will receive the water of life: which means that they will live in the New Jerusalem. He hears that the ones who conquer, or overcome, “will inherit all of this”: which means that they will live in the New Jerusalem.

John is telling us that the one who thirsts and the one who conquers are the same. You conquer by thirsting. You thirst by conquering.

It’s the same thing. You want something so bad, or (better yet) you want something so good, that your desire and your commitment become your deepest need, and your deepest need grows to become your greatest strength.

You want just one thing, and you don’t settle for anything else. You don’t settle for anything less. You become true, as in true-blue, to your need, and to your strength, which is God.

This need and this strength begin with what Isaiah tells us comes from being sprinkled by the Servant, the Messiah, the Christ. John tells us that this need and this strength come from being washed in the blood of the Lamb. This comes from the love and grace of God, in our Savior Jesus Christ.

John tells us to thirst and to conquer. Isaiah tells us to wake up, and get up, and sing out, and to come out, and to chill out (don’t rush, don’t worry). Read more about this in Isaiah chapter fifty-two.

But, a little bit later (in chapter fifty-three), Isaiah says that the servant who is the Messiah, will change us, because he has carried our sorrows and our sins. Carrying us gives him the ability to do something he calls sprinkling us. The sprinkling power, coming from suffering, will be able to make us all into new people. The sprinkling that comes from his suffering is intended to enable all who desire it to enter into the new future creation of God.

The servant Jesus was born in Bethlehem to carry, on himself, our sufferings and our sins, on the cross. Doing this, he has made newness and difference possible.

John tells us that it is the Son of God, the Word of God, the Lion who is the Lamb who was slain for us on the cross, who is responsible for making the great thirst and the great overcoming possible.

If we do hold onto that overcoming thirst, as if our life depended on it, that newness, and that difference will become our abundant life. It will become our everlasting life.