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) 

God Speaking: Interactive

Preached on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2011

Scripture Reading: Exodus 40:34-38; John 1:14

For years and years, when I was a kid, my family would take a camping trip during the summer and stay for a week or two somewhere in the Sierra Nevada, or in the Coastal Range, or in the southern bottom of the Cascades. We always camped in a tent. We always “tented”.

Once in a while, we kids would ask our parents to get a camper, usually when it was raining. My dad always said that it wasn’t really camping unless you stayed in a tent.

A tent definitely made you much more than an observer of nature. A tent made you a participant in the rain, in the early sun shining through the canvas, in the wind rippling the cloth. A nearby rushing river rushed its song through the flaps.

The tent changed your relationship with the other families who were camping around your. Noises carried from their tent to yours even when yours was pitched more than a hundred feet away. The grove of trees where you were all camping was a single house divided by walls of cloth.

John, in his gospel, writes that, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. We have beheld his glory; glory as of the only Son from the Father.” (John 1:14)

The Greek word for “dwelt among us” is a camping word, and it carries the thought that the Word became flesh “and tented among us”. He uses the “tent” word from the Exodus, when the people of God built a meeting place for God in the form of a tent.

The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem is God in the act of pitching his tent with us. We are not observers but participants with God.

God is interactive. God doesn’t merely see us. He shares our campsite with us. We know him as the one who can hear us breathing; reading our thoughts not from a cloud, but as though God were watching through the eyes of your husband or wife, or friend, or child, or parent.

If we want, we can think of God as a stranger, someone people only talk about. But God refuses to respect that kind of thinking. John tells us that it is the nature of God not to let that happen. He is the kind of God who pitches his tent too close to yours and spoils the privacy of your campsite.

Two people in a room can be strangers even when they have known each other for years. We can live with God like that. We can think of God as the other person in the room that we do not acknowledge and we do not want to look at, as if we were a little child trying to sneak a forbidden cookie when our mother is sitting at the table behind us. But God will not get up and walk out of the room just because we want to think of him that way.

“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us”, can mean that God is like the one person whom you have allowed to know every nook and crevasse of your being. God is like the one who is scary because you know he will feel and know your pain more than you may want anyone else in the world to feel it and know it.

When John tells us that “the Word became flesh” he means, by “flesh”, the essence of human life. He has pitched his tent in what you are, no matter what that means.

“Flesh” can mean the part of life that is like a tent in the sense that it wears out faster than any other kind of house. It is the part of life that gets tired, that gets old; that gets sick; that doesn’t shelter you when you need shelter the most.

“Flesh” can be the part of life we mean when we say, “I am only human.” It is the part of life we would, sometimes, like to forget, or deny, or justify on the basis of very poor logic. It is what we are when we say, “This is who I am and you can’t do anything about it; and neither can I.”

“Flesh” is everything we say and do that makes life hard for others, and for ourselves. Jesus pitches his tent there and lends a hand where our “being human” needs a hand.

But he does more, because he carries the wounds of being “only human”, and he carries the sins of being “only human”. He grew up to carry them on the cross so that we could journey with him, and know him as the bearer of our sins.

“Flesh” can mean the part of life we are thinking of when we say that “life is difficult”. One of the most difficult Christmases of all time was the very first Christmas. It happened when the holy family was uprooted from their home in Nazareth by a decree of the Roman emperor.

They tried to find a place to stay, where their baby could be born, in Bethlehem. They didn’t find a very good place. Even in the ancient world it was a shame for a baby to have to lie in a manger, in a stable. God came in Jesus and pitched his tent with them there; and with us in the places where Christmas was hardest.

God, in Jesus, is with you in your loves, and struggles, and play, and work, and family, and when you are alone. God is not the spot in the corner of your bedroom where you look when you pray at night. God is not the spot on the horizon you look at when you drive across open country. God is there beside you, as well as in your heart.

But this is a good thing. God has done this for us. God has pitched his tent with us, in Jesus, for the sake of a loving intimacy, and inescapable intimacy. It is a good thing not to be able to get away from someone who loves you. God is a parent holding their child close.

However you feel at this stage in your life, God is holding you in your sorrows, fears, achievements, and joys. Christmas means the Lord has come tenting with you, and God is there not to be an observer, but to be a participant. God is always interactive.

The Old Testament people of God had a tent in the wilderness where they could meet with God. We have just such a tent. It is pitched right beside us. It is a tent made of flesh; your flesh and mine. It is both a human tent and the place where God waits to meet us. The name of this tent is Jesus.

God Speaking: The Persuasion of Baby-Talk

Preached on the Fourth Sunday of Advent, December 18, 2011
Scripture Readings: Genesis 18:1-15; John 1:9-13

It was a warm spring day, and a boy was lying on his back looking up at the sky. A sense of awe came over him. He felt he was in the presence of God. The boy said, “God, you’re here!” And God said, “I am always here.”

The boy said, “You seem so huge. What does this world seem like to you?” And God said, “It seems like a tiny, precious jewel to me.”

The boy said, “What does a million years seem like to you?” And God said, “Like only a minute to me.”

The boy said, “What does a million dollars seem like to you?” And God said, “Like only a penny to me.”

The boy said, “God, will you give me one of your pennies?” And God said, “Yes, in a minute.”

The boy had yet to know what was on God’s mind, but God knew what was on the boy’s mind.

There was a cartoon where a husband and wife were sitting side by side. The cartoon “thought-bubble” over the man showed he was thinking about a million dollars. His wife spoke up and said, “A penny for your thoughts!”

We don’t always know how to give the proper value to what may be going on in someone else’s mind or heart.

There were a few times, in my adulthood, when my dad shared some of the experiences that happened around him, and to him, in South China and in the South Pacific, toward the close of World War II. They were horrible things, and he had to decide what to do to fight back and survive.

After he shared those things I began to wonder what kind of thoughts went on inside my father’s head because of those horrible things that happened to him; that he had witnessed and been part of. I began to wonder what it meant to have a father who was haunted by such experiences and who lived a seemingly normal life with such events in his past.

There is a sense in which we are all walking mysteries. At least we are all, in some sense, a mystery to each other.

There are ways of breaking through that mystery. Sometimes there is an adventure (as in love and marriage, perhaps) in having a safe relationship in which you can discover the mystery of one other person, and have that person discover you over time.

There are mysteries in people that we can never penetrate. Sometimes we, ourselves, are impenetrable mysteries to other people.

There are good reasons for being a mystery. There are bad reasons.

The Gospel of John tells us that the God who entered the world and became human in Jesus was a mystery. You would think that the closer you get to the heart of a mystery, the easier it would be to see through it, to get the point of it, to understand and appreciate the mystery that has shown its face and resolved itself into a truth we can know.

John says that the opposite happened. The closer the mystery of God came to the human world, the more it came to be the case that humans did not see through it or understand it.

God came to them and they did not know him. They did not recognize him, or know who he was. They would not even believe what he told them and showed them.

John says, “The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home and his own people received him not.” (John 1:9-11)

Don’t we all know what this is like? You have a secret, and you don’t want to carry it alone, and you don’t know whom to tell. You are afraid of what would happen if you told it. You might lose a friend. You might lose a love. You might build a wall instead of opening a door.

I’m not talking about telling someone else a truth about themselves (something they need to know about themselves that is worse than bad breath or dandruff); or telling something about a third party. I mean, some deep part of you would like to reveal to another person just who you truly are, as a thinking, feeling human being. We know this can be a dangerous and costly thing.

John tells us that this is what happened with God. The God who made the galaxies, and the world, and the heavens, and dogs and cats, and sheep and cattle, and coyotes and cougars, and men, and women, and children was coming into the world. Everything God has made reveals something about him, but God decided to reveal himself by himself.

“He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not.”

John learned from Jesus a wonderful gift of understatement and he wonderfully understates what happened when he wrote, “and his own people received him not.” He means they tried to kill him. The king of his own people (King Herod) sent soldiers to kill the baby Jesus when he heard that a future king had been born in Bethlehem. Other babies were killed in the effort to find and kill the baby Jesus. (Matthew 2:13-18) Years later his own people, with the support of the Romans, crucified him.

Yes, his own people did not receive him. Yes, we do not belong to those people, but we are still the people of his home, because he made his home in our world; the world he has made and given to us. He made his home with us as Jesus, and we are part of the home that did not receive him. We are part of the home that killed him.

What if God wanted you to know him, receive him, believe in him (the way John puts it)? And what if this is a God who true nature is not to wait to be found? What if this is the kind of God who does not want to be guessed at or imagined; who does not want to leave clues or drop hints? What if this God has decided that we should know him, and receive him, and believe in him the way he has proved himself to be by his own actions?

In the Old Testament the Lord wanted to be known as the one who redeems his people from slavery. This was not something for them to contemplate. This was something he did; so that they would know who he truly was, and so they would live accordingly. And living accordingly is what God means by faith.

I am not saying that we should know God all at once, just because it is true that God has said and done what we need to know. The truth is that God takes his time with us. In fact God is much more comfortable taking his time than we are.

There was a lot that Abraham did not know about the Lord, when the Lord came to him. What Abraham saw coming to him, out of the desert, were the figures of three men. (Genesis 18:1-15)

That was strange. That is still a mystery. But the Lord came that way in order to renew his vows. He came to them in their home to give Abraham and Sarah a promise that they had had so much trouble holding onto and trusting, because it was taking so long.

The Lord was taking so long; so long. So the Lord came to them the way he did, as men coming to give their friend a promise that would be kept.

And it happened within the year. The Lord came as a promise-maker. Abraham would hold onto that truth that God had shown. The Lord had shown his face, who he truly was, and Abraham would have faith in this.

And Sarah would laugh again. Sarah would laugh in joy, next time, and not in the desperation and frustration which she, as a person of faith, struggled to deny.

With Abraham, as a person of faith, what matters is that he received the Lord, even in spite of the strange way the Lord came to him. And he grew because of it. It was the Lord’s plan for making Abraham and Sarah the people he wanted them to be.

In Jesus, “The light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world.” He came as a baby in Bethlehem, and the shepherds, and the wise men, received him as he showed himself to be: as a baby. I don’t mean that they understood what they saw. They understood next to nothing except that God was working there to do something great. They understood next to nothing, but they received him and believed in him anyway.

How do you receive God? I know I receive him in Jesus, but sometimes I find it hard to get past the picture of an old man with a white beard, sitting on a throne, on a cloud in the sky. And that is not God.

God wanted us to see him; and so he set the stage and walked onto it. He walks on stage carrying a cross and he dies on that cross. Then he gets up from death, and walks out of the tomb, and pops in and out of his friends’ houses, or pops onto the shore of the lake where they are fishing, and he eats their food, and he cooks for them. That is God.

Seen in another way, God looks entirely different. In the first sentence of the Gospel of John, or the first verse of Genesis (at the creation), God is beyond time and space. There is no room, beyond time and space, for a face, or for hands and feet. There is no room for anything but God.

That is God. But the man on the cross, and the man who has risen from the dead with holes in his hands and feet, is also God.

Even that is not enough. For us to know who God is, God does not just appear full grown. God is born as the baby of Mary in Bethlehem. He needs to be fed at his mother’s breast. He needs his bottom wiped. And babies of other mothers in Bethlehem were killed by those who wanted to kill this baby. I wonder what it meant to Jesus as a child, and as a man, to know that babies had died because of him. This is part of who this God is.

This is who we pray to. Do you talk to Jesus? Do you ask him to help you understand the reason for things? Do you ask him for things? How would it affect you if you knew that this was the identity of the Jesus you talk to?

Jesus says to pray. He also says to pray in his name. What is his name? If his name was Sam, instead of Jesus, would that change the name we pray in? No!

The name of Jesus is not something that can be spelled and written in a book, or sounded out phonetically. The name of Jesus is what Jesus says and does, and thinks and feels.

It is the same for each one of us. I am what I say and do. I also am what I think and feel, and you may not know what those things are, but that is my real name.

Jesus’ name is written in a book; but the important thing is that what Jesus said, and did, and what Jesus thought and felt, are much written for us to learn about in a book. The Bible is the written word of God given to us so that we can meet the unwritten Word: the everlasting, living Word, whom we name Jesus.

In the Bible we do not meet him as we want him to be. We meet Jesus as he is, and as he has shown himself to be.

When we pray in his name, just as when we receive him and believe in his name, as John tells us to do, we pray in the light of what he has said and done. To belong to him we have to receive not J-E-S-U-S, but the baby, in the arms of his mother, escaping from the soldiers, and the boy with the questions in the Temple, and the rebel teacher and healer on the road, and the man bearing the sins of the world (and our own sins) on the cross. To belong to him we have to receive and believe that we truly have been died for by this one, and that Jesus has risen from the dead to give us a new life now, and to make a new world for us, and to give us everlasting life for what is to come.

What we pray for, what we believe, and how we live has to match that. That is what it means for us to connect ourselves with his name: not sounding out the letters J-E-S-U-S.

The Christmas part of the gospel, the good news of Jesus, is the message for us to live with a God who is a baby in a manger, in some kind of stable; maybe the bottom part of a stone or mud house, or a cave under the inn where the donkeys were kept.

How do you pray, and how do you think, and how do you live, when you live in a stable with God and with the animals? What kind of life do you live, what kind of person do you become lying in the feed trough with a God who is nursing or having his bottom wiped?

I am still trying to figure that out. But we ought to think about what God is showing us about himself in the Bible, and his birth in Bethlehem surely ought to play a large part in our knowing exactly who he is.

The Christmas part of the gospel is the power of God that makes us as small as he made himself. If we were in the manger, with Jesus, everything that happened to us there would be a gift. We would hardly know where anything was coming from, or what anything meant. We would know (whether we wept or smiled; and we would weep and smile a lot) that we were kept in safe and loving arms.

We would know that we were being stretched, and rolled, and wrapped, and carried. We would be used to constantly meeting a world we did not understand at all, but we would have faith because we were warmly and safely held.

Maybe God is able to make us his children, first of all, because he was able to make himself a child, and we begin there. Think about it. But then, in the face of death Jesus dies and rises from the dead.

The presence of death makes us like children in so many ways. But Jesus’ dying and rising makes us better children in the face of all the things we fear, and in the face of all the things that hurt us and those we love. And then we remember that there was danger, and suffering, and injustice, and grief in Bethlehem, too, when Jesus was a baby.

To receive him and believe in his name is to become a part of all that God has been and all that God has done in Jesus. And then we find that God has found a way to draw us in and capture us almost without our understanding what was going on. It is the gift that babies have; the power to capture those they reach out to; the power to capture those who hold them in their arms.

The world we are a part of has taught us not to receive him, and not even to recognize him. He is, after all, such a strange God; something we would never have made up on our own. He has humbled himself and we have gotten caught. And we have found ourselves humbled in exactly the right way by God coming in this Jesus. And we become his children, born not of our own will or of our own planning but of his.

God Speaking: Making Christmas Witnesses

Preached on the Third Sunday in Advent, December 11, 2011
Scripture readings: Malachi 3:1-4; John 1:1-8

A husband and wife were taking a walk, and the wife asked her husband if he thought she was still attractive, after all their years together. The husband stopped, and turned, and held her hands, and looked into her face, and answered that the more he looked at her, the prettier she got.

The wife beamed with happiness at the thoughtfulness of her husband and the sweetness of his words. She thanked him for his enduring tenderness and love.

Then they resumed their walk and the husband began to think to himself, “I guess I ought to look at her more often.” (Brian Crane, in “Pickles” comic strip [“Parables, Etc.”, June ‘95])

This tells us a lot about what it means to be a witness in God’s scheme of things. We are only eight verses into the Gospel of John when he begins to talk about the action of being a witness. Witness is one of John’s keys to understanding everything.

So far, leading up to the introduction of the first witness, John has only told us about beauty. John has told us majestic mind-stretching things about God, and God’s connection to everything that he has made. The Word, who has spoken everything into existence, has spoken his own life and light into them. There is nothing in the universe that does not owe its existence to this God speaking himself and God grounding every created thing in his life and light. (John 1:3) What a beautiful thing that is.

Before the beginning, there was nothing but God; but God himself is an everlasting relationship. Relationship is his very nature and so he was never alone, even though there was nothing outside of him. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

It sheds light on the understanding that “God is love.” In a sense it tells us that, from everlasting to everlasting, love is enough. Love is sufficient in itself. It truly can exist by itself, and it needs nothing else.

This love is life-creating, life-giving, life-sustaining. Love underlies all of life. This is what life is for (what life is created for; for love, to give love, and to receive love). To deny this, to resist this, to escape from this is to try to go to a place that does not exist. To seek to be something that is not responsible to God, when all things were made by him, is to seek to leave the world of all things and be nothing. Sin is a state of mind and desire that wants to be on its own without reference to God but (as such) it wants something that cannot exist. In the effort to achieve the impossible it causes great harm. Through sin we hurt others and ourselves, and our world.

When we seek to create our own life without reference to God, we try to overcome a light that cannot be overcome, we bend our minds to thinking and justifying the impossible, and we make ourselves incapable of understanding and comprehending the light. “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.” Or, as other translations tell us, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it.” (John 1:5)

There is darkness around us and within us, and so there is a special demand for witnesses. John the gospel writer tells us about the witness who was called to introduce the light when it came into the world as one of us. There needed to be a witness because the darkness might make it hard to see how one particular man could be God with us. So John the writer of the Gospel tells us about John, the cousin of Jesus; the John who became known as John the Baptist, or John the Baptizer (because there were no real Baptists in those days, just as there were no Presbyterians or Methodists).

Those of us who have read the stories of the gospels many times can’t help thinking of John the Baptist as a harsh and blunt man. Do good witnesses have to be harsh and blunt? But John, the gospel writer, has only given the Baptist great and beautiful things to be harsh and blunt about, so far.

Surely any parent will understand this. A good parent needs to be a witness to the truth which is a great and beautiful thing. Sometimes a parent has to be harsh and blunt in their witness to such things.

The truth is that the child needs to learn a passion for such beautiful things as goodness and love. A child needs to grow to become a person who is safe to love and who will love others wisely, and justly, and mercifully, and faithfully. So a good parent needs to love the truth and be such a passionate, faithful witness of the truth that their children cannot overcome them. Sometimes a parent, as any lover of goodness, needs to be harsh and blunt.

The word witness, in the Greek, is our root word for martyr. Bearing witness, in God’s scheme of things, is a passion and commitment that is faithful unto death.

In fact witness is part of the beauty of God himself. Remember what John said, “The Word was with God and the Word was God.” God is a great and beautiful Word, and God is always faithful to it.

Love, and life, and light are like great events and stories; and so God is an event worth seeing and a story worth telling. We should expect witness to be important. The word “gospel” means good news, and the news is a message, and a message needs a witness, even when the only witness of the message is God.

Christmas is part of the message. It is the message of the humility of God who left the glory of heaven to become the baby in a carpenter’s family. God became a baby who would grow up to learn the carpenter’s trade and even die on a cross that another carpenter may have sawn and shaped. But, first he was born in a place where animals were kept, and his first bed was a manger, a feed trough for donkeys or other animals.

The prophet Malachi said that the Lord is a kind of messenger for himself. The Lord is a messenger about his own relationship with us as his people. “The Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to his Temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come, says the Lord of Hosts (the Lord of the angel armies, the Lord of might).”

Covenant is a message too. Covenant is a message about the relationship that God wants with his people. The manger in Bethlehem and the cross in Jerusalem were always intended to be part of the message of the covenant of the Lord with us.

His death on the cross is part of the covenant not only because it is the sacrifice that gives us forgiveness, grace, and life. His death on the cross is the sign of his faithfulness to us. It is a sign of his passion for his own truth. It is his faithful willingness to be the one who carries out his own truth for our sake.

God makes everything not out of his emptiness of longing for another. God makes everything out of such a great fullness that he can look at what he has made and see the image of himself. His work of creation makes everything he has made into a witness, because that is what God is in his own heart.

John the Baptist, as a witness who came from God, and who was sent by God, is what we are all created to be. We all come into this world for witness, to have a passion for what we see and hear about God, and to have a passion to share it.

John, the writer of this gospel, tells us some important issues about being a witness.

One issue is a problem (or what my Uncle Eddie would like to call a situation). We have that old issue called the darkness.

There is a battle going on. The devil’s temptation of Adam and Eve, to separate them and the rest of the human race from God, was an attempt to overcome God and rob God of his creation.

There is a darkness that wants to be in charge, in the place of God, and get his own way. It is our human nature, as born rebels, to make a world for ourselves where we are in control, and where other people, and the rest of creation, are all our competitors.

In fact nature has fallen with us, and what we see in creation often reflects our sins and our fallenness instead of the image of God. We and the most other living things are all competitors, as if we were all programmed to do everything in our power to tip the balance of creation in our favor. We are all damaged goods that God wants to recreate in his true image.

I guess that means that we, ourselves, are our own worst enemy in being a witness to God and to God’s plan for a new creation. It was the calling of John the Baptist, as the ideal witness, to know that he himself was not the light.

We often live as people who are saying, “Look at me! Look at me!” John the Baptist was shaped by God to get over this and say, “Don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!”

I will tell you that, when my mom was in the hospital and my sisters and I were spending so much time there, and trying so hard to figure things out and do the right things, there were times when I was alarmed to find myself thinking about myself: how tired I was, and how stressed I was. I got angry because I was being forced to be tired and stressed. It made me mad.

I was less capable of being patient with my sisters and understanding of them than they needed me to be. It was a dark around me and within me.

I should have focused more on God. I should have focused more on the fellowship we have with God in the midst of suffering, through Jesus. When I did focus on that, it helped me to be the person I needed to be for my mom and my sisters; or at least I hope so.

Peter, in his first letter (Peter 2:9) calls us to be people of the light: “That you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” We are people of the light, in Christ, but we have some old sympathies with the darkness, and we carry some divided loyalties in our heart.

When fear, and anger, and weariness, and suffering, and injustice create darkness around us, we have trouble seeing the light and understanding the presence and the work of God, even in his partnership with us in Bethlehem and on the cross.

The area where I grew up, in the Sacramento Valley, is prone to floods. I remember two times we evacuated our home because the danger was so real. One time was just before Christmas, when I was thirteen. It was our first year in Live Oak and I remember putting our presents up in the top shelf of the closets in the hopes of keeping them safe before we left our home.

The second time we evacuated was just after Christmas, a few years after I moved to Washtucna. I had gone down to my folks for a late Christmas celebration.

I am not sure where everyone else was but my parents and I left our family home and we went to stay with friends of the family who lived in a neighboring town, on slightly higher ground. These friends had given shelter to a lot of their relatives, and to other friends like us.

There must have been thirty people or more in that house. All I know is that the only room for me to sleep was under their Christmas tree; and so I did, but not very well.

We were away from home for only a couple nights, and then all was well. I wasn’t homeless for long; really not homeless at all. But God left his home in heaven, and stripped himself of his familiar glory, and lived in a world where he was supposed to be the light of the world, and yet that world treated him like a stranger and an enemy. It treated him with misunderstanding and rejection. A storm of darkness constantly swept around him.

Even in his mother’s womb (where a baby almost ready to be born should be surround by safety and shelter) the world conspired against him. The Roman emperor made a decree that uprooted his family from their home and required them to go to a town where Jesus would be born in the place for animals.

His family was uprooted more than once. They had to run away to Egypt for a while. And Jesus was often on the road during the time of his ministry. He could truthfully say that he had no place to lay his head. (Matthew 8:20)

His own neighbors misunderstood him and, once, they were so mad at him that they tried to throw him over the cliff where their town was built. In the end, the leaders of the truest religion in the world and the empire that prided itself on giving the world its best laws and finest justice conspired to kill the one who had created them.

This was no accident. It was part of the plan, but God did not have to force the world to treat him this way. He was meeting the darkness on its own terms and winning on his own terms.

On the cross God saluted the nature of the darkness that opposes God and lives in each one of us as sin. In the strange plan of God, the solution was for God to allow himself to be the victim of the darkness. The solution was to free us from our sins and darkness by carrying them upon his shoulders on the cross. But that sacrifice began in Bethlehem.

That is how we have received our salvation and our freedom in Christ. That is how God, in Jesus, created a new life for us.

The old problem of the darkness is that we don’t want a God who works that way. That is a hard way. The darkness wants to find some easier way of its own devising.

The way of God’s choosing means that we can find life no other way. It is the way of humility and smallness. God’s way may very well even take us the opposite way of what this world calls success. Jesus says we must be willing to take up crosses of our own, in order to follow him.

We want to tell the world, “Look at me!” But we don’t want the world to watch us become humble and small, unless we find a way to brag about it and use our humility to get our way.

We don’t want to look at him on the cross if it requires us to become his kind of witness; passionately faithful unto death. If we would only look at him more often, perhaps we would see that this humility and passion were part of his beauty, and we would want to be like him; but only so we could say, with all our heart, “Look at him!”

We don’t complain about having to look at him in a manger, if we can only think about the baby and not a real manger, or the danger that baby was in. But we don’t really want the way of the cross. The fact is that the two are the same. The manger was only a type of cross that was suitable for the needs a baby whose strategy was to grow up and carry a cross. We need to look at him more.

But the manger and the cross make us witnesses in another way. In one way, God came into our world to confront the darkness and set our lives free from it. In another way we can truly say that the manger and the cross reclaim this world as holy ground. God left his home, and came to us here, in order to make this world a home as well.

God entered the place where babies are conceived and take shape within their mothers, to make that place holy ground. God entered childhood with all its play, and with all its learning, and with all its questions, into holy ground for us. It is through him that we know childhood and growing up are not only difficult and risky but also beautiful and holy.

God entered families to make them holy, and when Joseph died, as he likely did in Jesus’ teenage years, Jesus became the breadwinner and the caregiver of the family. He was the man of the house (almost the father) until his sisters and brothers grew up and found their own places in the world. Jesus made work, and parenthood, and family holy.

Jesus was born in a world of need to make the needs of others holy. Jesus entered the world of grief and death in order to make them holy ground as well. Jesus wept when he confronted grief and death. (John 11:35) Then Jesus died and rose from the dead to make them the holy ground of our mysterious birth into a new life.

We can tell Jesus that he didn’t take the way we would have chosen but, the truth is, that he is with us on our way. Through the miracle of his birth, Jesus makes our ground his ground and makes his home with us. That is his way. That is his story. We are here to become witnesses of this.

Even in a court of law, witnesses may have to be patient, but patience is a daily requirement for those who are born into this world to be witnesses. God, as our witness, is patient. When God shows himself to us, he tells us his message over, and over, and over, and over and over again; like parents and teachers do with children. They do this well when they have gotten a vision of goodness deep enough within their hearts that they become passionate witnesses.

We need a vision of the Lord that works like that. We need a vision that will help us stop trying to be the light and enable us to give our witness to the light that became flesh in Bethlehem.

We will stop saying, “Look at me!” We look at him more often.

Christmas Lights: The Kingdom of Peace

Preached Sunday, December 26
Scripture readings:
Isaiah 9:1-7; Hebrews 1:1-14; Luke 2:8-14

The message the angels gave to the shepherds, in the rangelands above Bethlehem, was about the birth of a new king who would cause a new world to be born. It was revolutionary news.

To the shepherds, and anyone who heard their report, the words of the angels meant that the world order and God’s order were about to collide, and the world order was going down. This is what it would have meant to them, when the angels said, “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you. He is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:11) The Christ was a royal title: messiah, king. They understood this to mean that, in a few years’ time, a leader would rise to the attention of the people of Israel and lead them in a confrontation against Rome and the other great powers of the world, and defeat those powers.



Jerusalem would become the imperial city of the world; the seat of world government. The nations would pay tribute and taxes, and support that government. The people of Israel would be free to worship as God intended, and follow God’s laws without distraction and without the competition and the corrupting influences of alien cultures. The Christ, the Messiah, would see to this, when he grew up to fight his battles and win his wars.

This is what they thought. This is what they thought when the read Isaiah’s words. “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be upon his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6) A new world government in Jerusalem: this is what almost every one of the people of Israel thought these words were about.

The problem came when the baby grew up, and thought differently than almost everyone else did. He understood those words differently. He put the accent on a different place, on a different word, and came out with a meaning and purpose that surprised everyone.

Jesus took the accent off the word government and put the accent on the word peace. Didn’t the angels, themselves, call the baby king the bringer of “peace on earth”?
I want us to think about having an intense interest in peace; in being bringers of the Lord’s peace. In the gospels, we don’t hear Jesus using the word peace very often. In fact, he sometimes denied that he had come to bring peace at all (Matthew 10:34). Jesus always found a way to disrupt the peace of people who he thought were unworthy of it (Matthew 21:12-16).

But Jesus did use the word peace in important ways, and he brought peace to the people who needed it most. In the Gospel of John, Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” (John 14:27) And Jesus said, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)



Notice that Jesus said, “I have overcome the world.” These are a king’s words. Jesus was saying something about his type of government but, in the same breath, he was also talking about his cross. He was saying these things as he waited for his capture, and arrest, and crucifixion. He didn’t want his friends to be completely undone by the horrible things that were about to happen.

The story of the gospel: the birth and life of Jesus; the death and resurrection of Jesus; describes his power as king. They are the actual weapons of his kingdom. They are the way his kingdom functions. They are his law that works in every person who belongs to his kingdom. The birth and life of Jesus; the death and resurrection of Jesus; are his way of governing you, and teaching you, and shaping your life and your commitments and relationships.

Jesus was also talking about his death (about the action of his being nailed to the cross, and that cross or that cross piece being lifted into place, and the people at the foot of the cross looking up at him dying there) when he said, “But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” (John 12:32-33) His cross was his government drawing all people into his orbit.

This is his kingdom. This is part of what Isaiah meant when he said, “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end. He will reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing it and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever.” (Isaiah 9:7)

The justice and righteousness of the kingdom of God are the gift of Jesus in the work he has done for us. Jesus was born in Bethlehem to stand in for us in his humanity, in his life, in his death, in his resurrection. He carried our life in his. Our lives are contained in his life and everything he did.

The justice and righteousness of the child who has been born for us are the humility and mercy of God coming down in Jesus to rule in our favor. His justice and righteousness consisted of taking our sins and our old way of life, taking the world’s way of working, onto the cross in order to take it from us. His dying for the sins of the world is his way of overcoming the world. This is the key to the role of Jesus as Prince of Peace. Everything that Jesus is, and everything that Jesus does, is about peace.



But the peace is not just peace in our heart. And it is not only peace between us and God. The Prince of Peace rules a kingdom that is governed by the same laws that are at work in Jesus himself. If Jesus is our king, if we belong to his kingdom, then the law of peace will operate through us, in our lives.

If the Lord wants to give peace to the members of our family, and peace to our neighbors, and peace to our community, and peace to our world, then the laws of the Prince of Peace are going to reach out through us in order to give God’s peace to them. What God gives us in Christ, God seeks to give through us in Christ. Peace, as the Bible conceives it, is interactive.

The world around you needs you just as much as it needs God, because the kingdom of God is within you, as Jesus said. (Luke 17:12) The kingdom of God within you means that you are ruled by God. You are needed because the people around you, and the world you live in, needs people who are ruled by God. They need people who can be counted on; not just because of your talent, or imagination, or intelligence, or your creativity, but because, through Christ, the fullness of God dwells in you and works through you. (Ephesians 3:19) Through the Holy Spirit, the fullness of God and the life of Christ live in you. This makes you the mouth, and the hands, and the feet, and the shoulders of Jesus.

Peace is more than all things being calm. Peace is more than the absence of conflict. Peace is more than a feeling inside you. Peace is how you act and relate to the world around you.

Biblical peace is the state of things working right. Biblical peace is about the world working the way we know it ought to work. Marriages working right are peace. Constructive parenthood is peace. The healthy teaching and nurturing of children are peace. Neighbors being neighborly are peace. Outsiders being welcomed are peace. Old people being respected are peace. Good laws and honest public service are peace. People being free to find ways to improve their own lives are peace. Satisfying work to do is peace. Having time to rest and play and think is peace. Just and righteous societies are peace.

The Prince of Peace loves these things and he has a passion for them. Jesus showed this in the way he related to common people and to leaders in the gospels. His people, the people of his kingdom, should share with him a passion for the peace that makes things work the way we know they ought to work.



The kingdom of God has not fully come yet. Jesus promised to return from heaven to earth, and make all things new (Revelation 21:5). Part of the power and passion of being the people of God comes from a holy discontent, a yearning for the peace that hasn’t come. We are discontented because we know that the real reason for the world being the conflicted, brutal, unjust, and angry place that it is comes from the separation of the world from the rule of Christ.

We know Jesus, and we know that it is the lack of Jesus that the world cries out for. We see also that, if the world worked as if Jesus were living his life through every human being, the world would be a Christ-like place.

That is what we want. When we don’t see these things (the things that we and the whole world cry out for), we pray for them, and we stand and work in this world as if Jesus were working through us. This is what Jesus wants, and he can be trusted to do it.

If Jesus returned to the earth and set up his government in Jerusalem, and made us his bureaucrats, and his legislators, and his police force; that would not bring about the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God will come when the people of the world operate according to the justice, and righteousness, and peace that come through the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit.

Exactly how and when this will happen, in the course of history, is not clear. But it is promised.

Loving the coming of God in Christ and loving the birth of Jesus means loving the work of the Prince of Peace. It means praying for his power to be at work in you. The whole principle of his being born in human flesh and blood goes hand in hand with his coming to be born in you.

This is a work in progress, just as his kingdom coming on earth in all its fullness is a work in progress. It is not finished yet. And we are to look for it, wait for it, pray for it, and work for it passionately. Isaiah promises that the Lord of hosts works with zeal and passion to make it happen. (Isaiah 9:7)



This is just a part of the promise which the angels spoke about to the shepherds: of peace on earth, good will toward men. It is an inescapable part of the real meaning of Christmas. May the birth of the Prince of Peace be within you and me.

You Will Find the Baby in the Neediest Place

Preached on Christmas Eve

Scripture readings: Isaiah 42:1-9; Luke 2:1-20

On the hills above Bethlehem, the shepherds saw, and heard, and felt unimaginable things, indescribable things. Angels: but there was more than angels with them. “The glory of the Lord shone around them.” (Luke 2:9)

The glory of the Lord is the sign of the presence of the Lord. The Lord was there; and the shepherds experienced his presence as an exceeding weight, and light, and fear, and joy, and peace. There are no words for this.



The Lord was there. But the Lord was also to be found in a manger. He was lying in a feed trough in the place where the animals were kept for the inn at Bethlehem. There would be no sense of glory there: nothing that you could see, or hear, or feel. It would not be obvious.

The angel had to give the shepherds signs, so that they would know when they had found the Lord who had come to be the Christ, the Messiah, the king of the kingdom of God. According to the signs, they would have to find the Lord by means of priorities that were the exact opposite of what everyone else would have expected.

The message of the angels was about good news, joy, and peace. And these are things the world desperately needs and cries out for. We want them too. Sooner or later, we cry out for them. We want good news for a change. We want joy. We want peace. The message of the angels, and the directions they gave, and what the shepherds found tell us things about good news, and joy, and peace that very few people know anything about. The angels sent the shepherds to a place where no one else was going.

We think that if we could only go where everyone else is going that we could find good news, joy, and peace. We think that if we could only be like what everyone else seems to be, we would be happy.



Everybody thinks this by nature. Even those who seek to live in total rejection of being like everyone else find their happiness in being like others. The people who are Goths: who wear black clothing and black lipstick (even the guys) and dye their hair black, and wear spikes, and get piercings all look alike. They all look for much the same things. They like the same things, and that is their happiness.

The shepherds had to go to a really strange place, where no one else seemed to be going, to find the Lord. Maybe there were other babies in other mangers; but, if there were any, it was completely unintentional. In order to find the Lord, we must look where other people don’t look. We must go where no one goes intentionally. This is a mystery.

It is a strange kind of search that the shepherds were on. They were looking for the Lord who was really looking for them. The Lord insisted on finding them by making them go to the places where they wouldn’t want to find him. The Lord found them by sending them to the neediest place in Bethlehem.



I am thinking about going where God wants me to go, and experiencing what God wants me to experience. But I want to tell him what and where those things are. I think that I will find God there, but God sends me where I have no intention of going. God sends me to the neediest places.

I visit people in hospitals and nursing homes. Especially at Christmas time, I look for people who need help with groceries and other necessities. I deal with people who need to give gifts to their children, and they lack the means to do it. The greatest need a parent can feel is the need to give something good to their children. God often sends me to the neediest places, on behalf of his love for the world. This is not just what I do. It is what we want our communities to do. It’s what we want to be for others.



Sometimes God sends us to the places where we become the needy ones.
When these are the places we go, when these are the places where we meet other people, and where we pray for the wisdom to think the right thoughts, and speak the right words, and do the right things, it makes us have very interesting conversations with God. It forces us to look for the Lord in a different way, and a different place, than we would otherwise.

The holy family and the baby Jesus were in the neediest place. They were people who were pushed around by government programs. They were uprooted. They found all kinds of doors slammed in their faces. They had almost nothing. They had no idea what to expect next.

But the baby was the Lord himself. The Lord, himself, was to be found there in the middle of these unexpected and completely undesired circumstances.

Sometimes God blesses us with plenty. We have comforts. We have shelter. We have family and friends. We have plans. We have predictable lives, for a while. We can find God is these places. We can find him richly. But we often find him in the rich places in such a way that we do not really know him or know ourselves.

It is in the needy places where we must depend on God alone, and not on our money, or our health, or our work, or the kindness and welcome of others, that we will find the Lord, and really know who he is and who we are with him.

The good news of joy and peace belongs to a world that doesn’t know much about them. The good news is the news of a God who steps into the center of a needy world, and steps into the center of our lives when we need him most.

If we were able to see our own great need right now, we would be in the place where we could truly find the Lord’s presence and a glory that cannot be seen, or heard, or maybe even felt, but the Lord’s presence in born within us and makes its home in us.

This is why the Lord’s Table is such a simple thing. Bread and wine are the things you might find a beggar eating and drinking under a bridge in Spokane, or in a stable. It really is. And maybe, spiritually, we know what it is like to be in such needy places of our own.



The story of the baby in the manger is the story of God with us in the needy places. This is one of the greatest lessons of Christmas.