The Battle Primeval - What's at Stake?

Preached on Sunday, September 16, 2018

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:1-15; Revelation 12:7-12; Matthew 4:1-11

In my studying I found out that there was an excuse that Adam gave to his children for the reason they weren’t living in the Garden of Eden anymore.

“Your mother ate us out of house and home!”

Along the Columbia River, Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
August and September 2018

That’s true, but there was a deeper failure on Eve’s and Adam’s part, and a deeper issue than disobedience at stake.

The truth is that it was all a matter of love. The issue was their failure to choose love. Their failure was their sad choice of something that was not love.

Spiritual warfare is ultimately the struggle to make the right choice and carry it through to the end. The right choice is the choice of love: love for God and love for others.

Adam and Even trusted knowledge more than love. Trusting is the nitty gritty factor of faith. They didn’t love because they didn’t trust. They didn’t trust because they didn’t love: at least, they didn’t love nearly enough.

The Victory of Jesus over the Devil was the power of love in the heart of Jesus: his love for the Father and his love for us.

In the Book of Revelation, in chapter twelve, the picture chosen to depict the people of Jesus on earth fighting and resisting temptation, sin, and evil is the picture of an Angelic Army defeating a great Dragon and his army in heaven. The victory in that battle is also a matter of love.  Part of that love is the love of Jesus, the Lamb, lovingly shedding his blood for our sins, and the sin of the world, on the cross. Another part of that love is the loving testimony that the people of Jesus are able to give about the faithfulness Jesus at work in their lives. The caliber of their love that turned the tide of the battle was powered by their willingness to lay down their lives for Jesus, and for each other. They could lay themselves down this way in death, because they knew how to lay their lives down for Jesus and each other in life.

Adam and Eve did just the opposite. They defeated, or deflated, the power of love in the human race, in the human heart. Since God had designed them (and us) to love and to be loved, they couldn’t destroy God’s design for them, but they could mess with it, and distort it, and infect it. They could turn it from a gift into a gamble. Well, that’s what love often becomes in the world as it is.

They couldn’t harm God’s love. God’s love has remained what it has always been. Their only victory (if you could call it) that was to vandalize their own heart’s capacity for love.

The Devil in the snake told them that God had withheld from them the real meaning and power of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Satan Snake told them that God had not given them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The Ruthless Rattler implied that God was deliberately maintaining a false advantage over them by keeping the secret of the fruit to himself. The Snake suggested that God must not love them.

God must be a liar. The snake didn’t use that word, though, because Adam and Eve might not have known what it meant.

God had designed the woman and the man with the gifts that they needed for learning and maintaining the knowledge and the gifts that they needed in order to be beings of reason, and sense, and discernment, and good judgement.

They were God’s image. They already had this. They had learned to do their thinking from God himself. Most of all, they had known the loving care of the Lord all their lives.

They had the gift of fellowship and communion with the Lord. The Lord would come to the Garden of Eden, near the time of rest in the cool of the day. The Lord would walk with them, and talk with them, and tell them that they were his own. They hadn’t known the Slippery Serpent for very long, and the extent of the knowledge he claimed to have should have surprised them.

The man and the woman had never heard a lie before and maybe they didn’t even know the definition of the word. So, you might think that their lack of experience with lies had tricked them into believing the snake. But, then, if they couldn’t recognize a lie when they heard one, why were they able to believe that God had lied to them?

They were designed to understand things and have dominion over the earth. In a sense, at that time, Eden was their school, and maybe they hadn’t the time to graduate yet.

The snake was offering them the chance to graduate early, and to be grown up. And knowledge and wisdom are such wonderful and desirable things. Maybe God would even be pleased that they had learned so much so quickly and they might even bless him by saving God from trouble when he was at risk for making a mistake.

This could make them into an enormous help to God, if they only they took some initiative on their own. Even though that would mean doing the very opposite of what God had told them.

Everyone knows that if you allow a child to do absolutely anything he or she wants, except for one forbidden thing, the child will do that one forbidden thing.

But even if that is true on this side of Eden, we don’t see it being true then and there. When they ate the forbidden fruit and gained the forbidden knowledge, they were not smarter than they had been. They were much dumber than they had been.

They became afraid of looking at each other when had hadn’t been afraid before. The forbidden knowledge made them afraid of knowledge. They were afraid of what they now saw in each other.

They forgot that God knew everything, which is part of what knowing good and evil means, and so they thought they could hide from God in the trees, and they thought they could hide what they had done.

The forbidden knowledge made the first people unable to know each other, and to know themselves, and to know God. They forgot that they were each other’s beloveds. They forgot that they were gifts from God to each other. So, they blamed each other, and they denied their own responsibility for their own actions, which is another way of not even knowing yourself. Adam even blamed God for giving him the woman who had given him the forbidden fruit.

The truth is that sin makes us stupid. Anyone with a bit of sense knows this. When we make a mess of our lives, we make ourselves stupid. But never call another human being stupid, or you’ll make Jesus mad at you.

It’s worse than being stupid to make a choice that deprives you of the wisdom and understanding of love. It’s the worst choice in the world to make your love generator, and your love transmitters, and your love receptor break down.

The poet John Milton thought that the only knowledge of good and evil that came from the forbidden fruit was the knowledge of good lost and evil gained. I think Milton was much too generous in his opinion of them.

Now, in a world where the knowledge of good and evil is the rule, and where we pray to be delivered from evil, we must know both good and evil in order to pass muster for the battle between them. The use of the knowledge of good and evil must go like this, as the apostle Paul told us: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21)

If the man and woman had chosen to love God instead of doubting his integrity, they might have found a way, by using the power of goodness, to stomp on the snake Devil. If Eve and Adam had used the power of goodness that they had at their disposal, they wouldn’t have got bitten.

If they had used the power of the goodness that they had learned from their daily walks with God, they might have passed their graduation exams. They would have had a much wiser knowledge than the stupidity of sin that they got from the forbidden fruit.

Adam and Eve stupidly wrecked their own love, but they couldn’t wreck its source. They couldn’t change God’s love.

And, so, God loved them by kicking them out, but this wasn’t because he couldn’t live with them, or vice versa. In love, God simply didn’t dare to let them live forever without a cure for sin and evil. That would make them worse than mortal. Sin kills the beauty of God’s design for life just as it kills the purity of love. To live forever in the clutches of that poison is to become, more and more, like some creature that could be called the living-dead. A loving God would not leave them to that fate worse than death.

The future of our fallen race had to be disciplined by living faithfully and lovingly toward God and each other in our choices. Those choices required a tougher life that Eden could give them. They and we somehow need the discipline of hardship, and pain, and a life-long battle with the Devil and his minions.

God lovingly prepared Adam and Eve for the tough world to come by giving them tough leather clothing to go through it all. God lovingly prepared Adam and Eve for a tough life giving them a promise. God promised that generations of mothers giving birth would win the prize of victory over the snake, and over our own fallen nature. The pain of childbirth would finally receive the prize of a savior whom we would call Jesus.

Men work hard. So do women. But women are the ones whose work gives birth to life.

If you think that it is God’s order of things for the man of the house to rule his wife, guess again. Man’s lordship is a thing that happens, and it doesn’t have to happen. Men have a choice. A man must be very full of the forbidden fruit indeed, and made very stupid by that fruit, if he wants to be the punishment that his wife must bear for the rest of her life.

Remember that the forbidden fruit makes us stupid about love. Don’t be the lord of your house and lord of your wife unless you want to be stupid about love. You have a choice.

Paul says that men owe their wives love and women owe their husbands obedience. I think this is because men need to learn to express tenderness and love, and women need to learn to respectfully listen to people, like men, who aren’t quite as perceptive as they are. Both of these are humility things.

In one church I served, I lost one of our families because I refused to do a wedding when I found out that the woman was abusing her man. Someone else did their wedding and they were divorced in a month. The woman was lording it over her fiancee in a terrible way. She knew nothing about love, and she had nothing worthy of that name to give. Hopefully she’s better now. Lording it is never good.

I think that is why the glorious archangel Lucifer became the Devil in a snakeskin. The legends tell us that he decided that it was better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. The kingdom of God is where Jesus is King. and he is a servant who died for the sins of his people. He died for us. We serve a King who has served us to death.

We need to train and develop our skills and strength if we are going to take our place in the part of life called spiritual warfare. We see how it started in the beginning, in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden.

There can be a lot of participants in the spiritual warfare: a lot of voices sharing the battle. Even at the start, there was the snakes voice, the woman’s voice, the man’s voice, and God’s voice.

Adam and Eve lost the battle. So did the Satan Snake. The war would go on; who knew how long? God knew, and God won, and God will win, and so will we. We will win if we die to our bad knowledge from the forbidden tree, and live by the faith that has love for its foundation.

We see what spiritual warfare looks like from the start. It’s not possession, per se. It’s a conversation and it’s a process of discernment, or the lack of it, in faith and love.

In the end, God is in command and God promises victory. God gets the victory by humbling himself to do what only God could do by becoming human, and using our human gifts, including the ability to die. God, in Christ, became a human servant to the human race, so that he could send and receive love on our frequency and on our level. Jesus, the eternal Word that is God who became flesh, became human and died for our rescue and our rebirth, and to be our captain in the fight.

Jesus fought the battle that Adam and Eve lost. Jesus won the battle of the temptation. The reason why the Lord Jesus did not fail is because he refused the easy way, the compromise. The forbidden fruit was presented to Adam and Eve as the easy way to be wise and independent.

Jesus took the hard way. Jesus was hungry but would not eat. Jesus had a great ambition to save us, but it was an ambition based on love. It was a love that couldn’t take the easy way of winning hearts by putting on a display: leaping from tall buildings and getting rescued by angels. Jesus’ ambition was based on love and so his work could not be built on gaining the world (such as it is) by the easy way of kneeling to evil. Because of love, Jesus’ work could only be built on gaining the world (such as it will be) the hard way. Instead of taking a bow Jesus took on himself the cross. The power of his cross, and his sacrificial death for us, and his resurrection defeated the old world and made it new.

The Devil’s temptation of Jesus had the attraction of easy self-fulfillment, which is clearly what our present world tries to sell us. Jesus tells us that self-fulfillment isn’t the way. The way is servanthood in love. That wins the victory.

When we fight the dragon, in our own spiritual warfare, the victory comes from letting Jesus return us to our original design. We are made for love and to be loved. Living marked by the blood of the lamb named Jesus returns us to God’s design for us to know that we are made to be loved. The testimony we give is one half of that love, and the other half of that love is what we give back to Jesus, and to Jesus through others. Our lives and our words bear the testimony and the evidence of this victory.

The blood of Jesus sets us free by making us like Jesus. Jesus didn’t shrink from, or let himself be held back by, the worst this world could do to him and neither do we. Living like Jesus (to love and be loved through faith) gives us the victory. That is the spiritual warfare.

Wonderful World of Wisdom - When You Don't Know Nothin'

Preached on Sunday, August 26, 2018

Scriptures readings: Colossians 1:24-2:5; Proverbs 30:1-9; Luke 5:1-11

Dick and Jane's Spot, Ellensburg, WA
August 2018

There’s this guy who sounds like he’s beating himself up for how stupid he’s been. “I am the most ignorant of men. I do not have a man’s understanding.” (Proverbs 30:2)

Here’s a guy who feels really stupid. Well, that’s what I thought at first. I thought it was the bad things that make us feel small and clueless. Then again, there might be some huge, wonderful things that make us feel small and clueless.

The man who wrote the words we’ve read is someone named Agur son of Jakeh. The names here aren’t Hebrew names, but they come from a related language that was spoken by the descendants of Abraham’s second-class son Ishmael, who became the ancestor of the Arabs.

The story behind Abraham and Sarah and their treatment of Ishmael, and the ongoing influence of that bad treatment on the relationship between Israel and the Arabs is something that has come to endanger the peace of the whole world. They haven’t always fought each other, but it’s been a rough road for over three thousand years.

The wise man Agur and the publication of Proverbs takes us about seven hundred years into that long story: long enough for him to have earned a bad reputation with the wisdom school of Solomon. And yet there he is! There are a number of people, whose writings are in our Old Testament, who have nothing, or next to nothing, to do with the story of the Bible.

The same is true with Job. The whole Book of Job is the story of one of the best people in the whole human race and one of the most beloved people of God who has nothing to do with God’s people, except that his story matters to God; and God wants to hold up to us these stories of people who lived beyond our horizon and still knew something good about our God, in spite of us and without our help. God has managed to get through to them on his own.

They are part of a world where God is at work in ways we don’t understand. God’s work in other people is beyond our knowledge and our understanding. Which is exactly one of the truths that Agur knows.

You could say that I’m wrong about this. After all, Agur confesses that he doesn’t know the Holy One. He says that doesn’t know God. But he also says that his level of understanding would test out to be subhuman. And that doesn’t seem to be true, and his words form an inspired part of our inspired Bible, so he knows more than he says.

Augur has a faith very much like the faith that the Lord taught to Job. Read chapter thirty-eight in Job and see how what the Lord (speaking through questions) reveals something to Job that sounds a lot like what the Lord has told Agur.

Agur knows that God strides back and forth between the dimensions that separate Heaven and Earth. God creates the atmospheres of the planets and makes their winds blow at the tipping of his hands. God gathers the waters in his cloak, and pours them into the seas. God has defined the ends, or the borders, of the worlds; and surely much more than that.

And those are just a few of the big things. That doesn’t count all the little things God can do.

In just a few verses, Agur the Arab can write a Hebrew poem as good as anything in the Bible. What Agur knows about God is beautiful and great. He knows that the Lord communicates perfect truth and he knows that you can count on that truth if you have any desire to walk with the Lord by faith.

Agur also knows that you can royally mess with the word of God. You can adulterate or contaminate it. He calls this “adding to the words of God.”

We need to take notice of when and where these words were written. Most of the Old Testament was not written at this time. What was already written down was probably not assembled into single scrolls yet. The words of God that Agur knew were the words he passed down to us in this chapter of Proverbs.

God’s words tell us that God can create heaven and earth, the spiritual and physical universe, and the particles and the underlaying fields of energy that are the foundation of everything we can see or detect. The ends of the earth could be like the limits of nature, and the laws of physics, that define how things happen; that define what can and what cannot happen. It’s simpler if we just say that God can do anything and that we can safely, securely live accordingly by faith.

God’s words tell us that his words, his communications to us, can be trusted because God values the truth and makes his words true in such a way that they are like a shield. The shield of God’s words is strong because God has made it from the most perfectly refined and forged metal possible. His words cannot be broken, or shattered, or pierced through to cut you.

Adding to God’s word doesn’t mean rewriting it to make it say something you want it to say. It doesn’t mean scribbling words in, or crossing words out. You don’t need to do any of that in order to add to it, or subtract from it, or just mess with it in general. All you have to do is to teach it messed up. All you have to do, in order to mess with the words of God, is to preach them all messed up.

I may have messed up Agur’s poem about “God Can Do Anything”. Maybe I shouldn’t say that the ends of the earth could be the laws of physics. That’s kind of a leap of the imagination; and maybe a leap of physics, too.

To explain something strange and mysterious in such a way as to make it more rational, or (even worse) to explain something away, is a dangerous game. Preachers and Sunday School teachers might be like children playing where they shouldn’t: like my mom’s two brothers, as kids, when they would compete at jumping off the roof of their garage. Of course, those were the good old days of childhood when parents seldom gave a thought to what their children were doing out of their sight.

Trying to change the meaning of God’s words, God’s messages to us, to suit ourselves, is what it means to add to the words. Making them not so weird, or scary, or threatening is adding to the words of God. Cherry picking them in order to make us look good or, at least, better than other people is the same as adding to the words of God. Making God’s words not mean what they say, or not say what they mean, is adding to God’s words. Those are the lies and the falsehoods that scare Agur.

Agur knows that God’s words tell us reliably what God can do, what God does for us. God’s words tell us who we are as we stand before God, and how to stay right and not forget the good news of God’s word.

Agur doesn’t want to mess with this, or get in the way. Agur sees himself in God’s words: how easy falsehood is and how it can come to cover God up and make him a different God. Agur sees that we can be tempted to worship a God of our own invention. He prays that God will deliver him from his own lies.

Agur sees that possessing too much can distract us from God and his word for us. Having too much can make us breakers of the truth: promoting ourselves and demoting God.

Having too little can make us desperate, always seeking our own advantage, and worrying about our survival, and forgetting to trust God, and actually stealing, and cheating, and lying to serve ourselves, because we don’t trust that God will give us our daily bread as we need it. Agur prays, like a Christian, for his daily bread, the right amount of anything, as God knows we need it to be.

But Agur prays because he knows great things about God.

If he makes this prayer because he doesn’t trust what God has said, and because he’s afraid, then I don’t know what to do with this prayer. I believe that he prays this way because he loves God so much that he doesn’t want to fail. He knows that God won’t fail him, but he wants the help that only God can design and give to make sure that this poor ignorant believer doesn’t fall short of the love of God.

Agur says he has no knowledge of the Holy One. Knowledge, in the world of the Old Testament, means a deep level of experience. It implies intimacy with the facts, the truth, the message. In some strange way Agur says that he has no knowledge of the Holy One, and yet the very next thing he says is a poem dedicated to the knowledge that the Holy One has given to him.

The dynamic of what we see in Agur is that he possesses no wisdom, but God’s wisdom possesses him. Agur has no knowledge, but God’s self-knowledge has opened his eyes.

There are a lot of experiences that can make us say something like: “I am the most ignorant of men.” “I am the most ignorant of women.”

Something terrible could make us say this. You could lose your job, and seem to fail at finding another. You could be hit by loss or grief: the loss of a home in a flood or fire, the loss of a precious human life that is so much a part of you that you don’t know how you might still be your true self without them.

You could find yourself in the path of an accident, or an illness, or a disability, or the threat of cancer, and the uncertainty of health and life that this brings. You could be hit by a mistake or a failure of your own, or make a horrible discovery about yourself that never occurred to you until now.

It happens. You say: “I don’t know anything.” Then, again, maybe that’s not true. Maybe a word crept in long ago. It was a word of something beautiful waiting for you: something that gave you strength, and courage, and hope, and energy. Maybe the gifts in your life seemed so great and strong that you forgot that word, that message, from God: that God can do anything and make anything possible. Maybe the poverty you feel now makes it hard to hold onto what you once knew, or makes it seem hollow and far away.

Yet there can be a quiet word that tells you that you are in God’s hands. It may be true that you aren’t holding onto God’s wisdom and intimacy, but God is God, and God is holding you in his hands.

Agur was afraid of speaking falsehood, but he was also afraid of hearing it from others. Agur had heard the same message. He had received the same truth that Job heard.

There were others who knew what Agur might have felt slipping away. The wise thing to do would be to find someone who has gone through what you are going through, only that person has not forgotten or lost the perfect shield that nothing can break.

Then, again there can be experiences that aren’t terrible at all, and these can also make you feel as though you didn’t know anything.

I think being in love can make you feel wonderful and scared at the same time and also feel as though you don’t know anything. Absolutely anything might happen. There was this one girl (or woman rather) who I thought might be the one for me, and one really good point in my favor was that her parents loved me.

Well, this girl could be a tomboy and go hiking with me in the woods and cliffs of the Oregon coast, all dressed down in blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Another time I took her out to a dinner theater in the county seat. She fixed herself up and she was gorgeous, and there was a friend of mine and his wife at the same dinner theater and, when they saw us together, they broke into great big grins. My friend gave me a wink, and I felt so proud and giddy at what I was doing and who I had with me. But I moved too slow and she met someone else.

In spite of this, I know something about something wonderful making me not know anything.

I know guys who report that they became serious about their relationship with Jesus when they first held their babies in their arms. They knew that they didn’t know anything, anymore, and that they needed lots of help and strength from someone else in order to become what that child of theirs needed.

Love, parenthood, the work of your dreams, a home of your own designing, a talent that comes to life: These can open your heart to words of wisdom and good news.

It’s like Peter in our gospel story. He met a man, a teacher, a man about whom people were reporting a lot of crazy stuff, a man with callouses on his hands and maybe some stray sawdust on his tunic, like a carpenter. This stranger walked up to Peter and commandeered Peter’s boat, to use as a pulpit.

Then this stranger named Jesus told Peter where the good fishing could be found, as if he were a fisherman too. Peter grumbled and then he got a word from the Lord in the form of his biggest catch ever.

Peter didn’t know anything anymore. He knew that Jesus had done something, but he didn’t know how or why. He realized that he had made a huge mistake. He had misjudged someone who knew far more that he did. Peter had scoffed at someone who could seemingly do anything. This Jesus could do anything where Peter couldn’t do anything. Jesus was like the power and truth that Agur had known.

Jesus said, “Don’t be afraid. From now on you’ll be catching men. You will fish for people.” Peter and his partners left everything and followed Jesus. Something wonderful made Simon Peter feel very small, and stupid, and clueless, and he never felt better in his life. It’s not a bad change. I recommend it to you.

Peter and his partners would come to feel the same way, sort of, when Jesus died on the cross. That was a bad thing. Now, again, they didn’t know anything anymore. That was a bad change.

Then, they were wrong again. They didn’t know anything all over again, when Jesus rose from the dead. They never felt better in their lives. And that’s not a bad change. I highly recommend it to you.

There is someone who can do anything. He can create a world, and he can save that world, and he does, and he has. What Agur knew was the wisdom that knew more than he did. In Jesus we meet the very wisdom of God in the flesh.

We may feel like we don’t know anything. We may feel like we can’t do anything. Jesus is God’s word and our shield, when our littleness comes from terrible things. Jesus is God’s word and our shield when our littleness comes from his wonderful gifts.

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 - Prophecies for the Journey Home

Preached on Sunday, December 3, 2017

Scripture readings: Isaiah 44:6-23; Revelation 14:13-15:4

A seminary student was taking a class on the Book of Revelation. He had a paper to write on the judgement. He was wrestling with all the images of monsters, and dragons, and plagues, and fires.

It was due soon. He spent one whole weekend on it, and Sunday night he phoned home. His dad answered, and asked his son how things were going.

Driving and walking around Priest Rapids Lake,
Columbia River, With Friend,
November 2017

The son confessed, “Dad, I’m having an awful time with the wrath of God.” There was a pause on the other side, and his dad said: “Don’t we all?”

Over the Sundays of Advent, we are going to take a look at the Old Testament Book of Isaiah and the New Testament Book of Revelation. They are both books that we call prophecy. They both have horrific descriptions of wrath and judgement. They both have wonderful descriptions of love and hope.

Prophecy has two main elements. We call the most obvious element “foretelling”. Foretelling is about time and the future. Its message is that God has a plan, and that God’s side will win. This is very important for our faith and hope.

The other element of prophecy is even more important for our life with God. We can call that element “forth-telling”. In forth-telling, God speaks forth his mind about the issues of the world, and his concerns about his people, and how they are to go on living by faith, hope, and love in such a world as this. What about their need to change and grow? What grace, and power, and faith do they need from God?

Some people compare the Bible to a map. It’s true that the Bible is a kind of map of history of the world under the rule of God; past, present, and future. That’s foretelling. That’s the future.

But the Bible is also a map of our pilgrimage in life with God. It’s a map showing how we left home, and how God takes us home again. That’s forth-telling: What do we need to give to God? What do we need to receive from God?

The map of our pilgrimage also shows how this journey will test us in order to change our hearts, and minds, and souls by the way we live with God, and by the way we live with others in this world. It guides us how to shape our lives by faith, and hope, and love. The map shows us the crossroads where we must decide how to live and how to commit ourselves.

Both of the passages we’ve read from Isaiah and Revelation present us with a crucial test of where our hearts are truly focused. Each test requires a commitment, in a world that tries to squeeze us into its mold: a commitment to stand out, and in some ways a commitment to stand apart, in our priorities, and in the whole direction of our lives.

Paul addresses this in Romans. He writes: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove (or test) what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

When we are faithful, when we meet the test, when we take the good road, when we overcome; then we test and prove and show that God is right. We show that God’s way of love and compassion are right. We show that God’s design for our relationships with him, and with others, and with the world is the design that achieves God’s greatest goals for us. God’s design makes us what he created us, and saved us, to be, through the cross.

This is designed to show how beautiful the goodness and love of God are. This glorifies God.

There is fear in this. But Biblical fear is made of wonder, and out of tender and courageous love. The song of those who overcome says this: “Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name?” (Revelation 15:4)

Isaiah also has a song that creation will sing about us when we overcome this world: “Burst into song, you mountains, you forests and all your trees, for the Lord has redeemed Jacob, he displays his glory in Israel.” (Isaiah 44:23) This applies to all God’s people: to you, and me, and everyone who hears and follows.

It’s a question of what we will value, what we will hold onto, what we will choose, and what we will pass on to others. It’s the question of a choice between faithfulness and idolatry.

Idolatry may lead us to think of statues and paintings that are worshiped as sources of spiritual and divine power: statues and pictures of beings, or such, that have names and stories told about them. Their names and the stories told about what they could control, and about what they could do for you, in order to give you what you wanted.

Idols were not usually considered to be actual gods. Idols are only representations of gods; but you can (so they claim) make the representation into a real connection. The claim is that you can make that connection work for you. Whatever power these images connected with claimed to be the power that were in charge of things you needed for success.

The ocean for a successful voyage, the soil and the rain and the seeds to successfully grow good harvests. These were all so-called gods. Gold had its god. The sun had its god. The cupboards in your house had a god. And so did your doors: the door god guarded who might come in or not. It’s why a groom carries his bride over the threshold.

If you worked these connections properly, then you were in charge. You became responsible for seeing to the success of your family, your community, your tribe and nation. When you served your idols well, you were serving your own interests and benefits. That was what we call the pagan world.

The strange thing is that, even in America today, we have a religion that teaches you to serve your own interests and benefits, and not care so much about others, or about the world around us. The church might not teach this, but the world of business does, and certainly the world of politics does. People of power, people of success set this example, even if they don’t say it in words.

The Bible shows us that God’s own people make God into an idol by making him smaller than he is. In the Old Testament, this often involved making a picture or a statue of God (for instance, in the shape of a studly calf) and saying that this is what God is about.

God’s people, in the Old Testament, usually only turned away from God by making him smaller and so making room for their own interests and benefits. The Temple in Jerusalem was the house of the God of Israel, but often, when the people and the kings were not faithful, they made all kinds of extra rooms, around the main building, that had other gods in them.

Sometimes it was worse than that, but God’s people excused themselves by saying: “We’re still giving God the sacrifices he listed for us in his law.”

They did this, but they didn’t give God their whole heart. They thought that if they offered what the law required that they simply had a bigger crowd of spiritual powers at their back. Just like them, we want our success to come from many different directions, and techniques, and disciplines.

In Revelation, there is a major idol that is called many things: the beast, the multiple beasts, Babylon the Great, the Great Harlot. They’re all a part of the same thing. They all serve the dragon. They all serve the devil. Like every idol, they want worship, and they want to be our god.

They are very tricky. They pretend to be at our service. They promise to serve our interests. They promise that we will receive the benefits.

We see this in the Garden of Eden. The serpent didn’t ask for worship, but he asked for attention, he asked for Eve and Adam to trust him, to have faith in him. He promised them that he could lead them to success. He promised that success would come to them if they moved into God’s territory, in order to be like God. What would make them most like God was knowledge: knowledge of good and evil: and that really meant the knowledge and understanding of everything under the sun.

By being attracted to knowledge, they followed their new idol, and they also made God’s claim upon them smaller in their hearts.

They chose to forget that they were made by God. They belonged to God. God provided them with everything they needed, and with the knowledge of the world around them which they needed if they were going to join God in taking care of the world. God’s design was for them to be God’s partners, and that is why God made them in his image. This was love. But, they didn’t seek the love they needed to be partners. They sought the knowledge they needed for independence.

God made them in his image, so that they had something in common, and they could be in relationship with God himself. They experienced the love of God, and they were discovering how to love God and each other. This was so important because they were learning that God is love.

But they were tempted, by their self-interests and self-benefits, to make God smaller. They made God into the image of knowledge instead of the everlasting fountain of all love.

The place we have read from Revelation is an odd place between the Beast of the number 666, and the Great Harlot, which are both the power of Babylon.

Babylon is the world we know so well. It’s the world that worships the power of self-serving.

In Revelation it’s a system that rules the world. It rules business, and trade, and food, and clothing, and money, and property, and survival. This power has always been at work. It was at work long ago in the tower of Babel. It is at work now. It is the cause of most of the news.

This power has had its ups and downs. It will certainly get worse.

Isaiah gives us the secret of overcoming this tribulation in the world. The Lord says: “You are my witnesses. Is there any God besides me? No, there is no other Rock; I know not one…. All who make idols are nothing, and the things they treasure are worthless…. Remember these things, O Jacob, for you are my servant, O Israel. I have made you, you are my servant; O Israel, I will not forget you. I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you.” (Isaiah 44:8,9,21,22)

When the Lord talks to the people of Israel about idols, he tells us why he hates idols. He doesn’t hate them because they are beings other than him who have names, and personalities and interests. The Lord hates idols because they are nothing. They are a lie. (Isaiah 44:20)

God’s reasoning is that when you worship what’s false, you make yourself false. If you serve interests that won’t make you what you are created and redeemed to be, then you won’t be anything.

God is life. If you focus somewhere else, you go outside of life, at least you go outside as far as you can. I’ve known people who ruined themselves by devoting themselves to things outside the love of God. I hated that. You do too, and so does God.

When you harvest wheat, you can separate it from everything else and it still has life in itself. A grain of wheat contains a new life ready to grow and thrive. The grains of wheat have a future because, at least, you can plant them for another harvest.

When you harvest grapes in a world without refrigeration, they really aren’t good for anything unless you crush them. Winepresses became symbols of judgment because grapes were only good for stomping on. And then it has no power to come to life again.

Don’t try pressing this too far!

So, Revelation has a wheat harvest and a grape harvest, but they’re really the same harvest. They are like the harvest of the wheat and the weeds that Jesus tells a story about. (Matthew 13:24-30) The wheat has life and the power to overcome. The grapes have no more power or life within them.

The Book of Revelation is very interested in forth-telling, or telling forth, the way to make the journey home. It’s by remembering who God is; not making God smaller than he is; not by scattering the life in you by attaching yourself to things and to power, and influence, and success. These are empty things and they will empty your heart and your soul.

The Beast and Babylon are always around. Even now, in order to overcome, we have to remember who God is, and what that Beast and Babylon are (idols which will only grow bigger, and bigger, and more threatening, and more persuasive).

Sometimes we may suffer because we don’t choose what the world chooses. In some times and places, God’s people have had to give their lives in order to stay free for God and overcome the world.

John tells forth our need, however small or hard it seems. He says: “This calls for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God’s commandments and remain faithful to Jesus.” (Revelation 14:12)

If the choice is very hard, the voice of God says this: “Write! Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “Yes, says the Spirit, “they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.” (Revelation 14:13,14)

In the Bible, rest is the ability to put yourself in God’s hands and enjoy everything.

Your deeds following you means that what you do, in faithfulness, lasts forever, and what you do may even become part of your eternal purpose as God created you to be, in love. The service you give will be gifts that keep on giving.

This is life, and this is you, when you remember, and choose, and endure.

We use the season of Advent to remember what it means to be ready for the coming of God in his Son Jesus. Jesus came long ago in Bethlehem and he truly changed the world by changing those who received him. His birth, his life, his word, his sacrifice on the cross, and his rising from the dead changed people so that they could make the choices they needed to make to be prepared for life with God, life in God’s kingdom.

If you will, it shapes us into the spirit of Christmas. It also shapes us for heaven, and for the coming return of Jesus, when there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and we will fit that new creation. We will fit it and thrive forever, because it will be a new creation made for those who have overcome and found the way to life, through Jesus.