Good News - The Story of a New Purpose

Preached on Sunday, July 15, 2018. This is the conclusion of the previous message "Good News - The Story of a New Beginning".

Scripture readings: Isaiah 42:1-7; Luke 4:14-30; Luke 24:36-49

The day that Jesus rose from the dead began a day of complete confusion for his disciples and friends. Jesus’ body was gone. They knew that. They didn’t know what it meant.

Walking around Avalon, Santa Catalina Island.
And scenes from a "touring jeep" of the island.
The end of the cruise with my cousin Christine
June 13, 2018

At first, they wondered: Had the body been stolen? But who would do that, and why? Who had anything to gain from it? Would the authorities do it in order to blame it on them, and then would the authorities produce the body to shame them, and make them a laughing stock?

Of course, Jesus had said he would rise from the dead, but they never thought he meant that literally. (Luke 18:33) His death meant an irreplaceable loss. When they lost Jesus, they lost not only a teacher, a friend, a leader, a wonder-worker; they lost their hope.

They hoped that Jesus would be the Messiah, the King. They hoped that Jesus would lead them at the head of an army to defeat the Romans. They hoped that Jesus would lead them forth to conquer the world and hold the empire for the glory of God.

They loved God, and they loved Jesus, who stood, in their hearts, very much for God and for the kingdom of God. Now this was lost and their hope had died.

When Jesus died on the cross, they died too; and that upper room, had become their tomb. Only it was a living tomb of a disappointed faith, and a failed hope, and a grieving love, and (on that first day of the week) a source of complete confusion.

They had had their doubts, all along, about Jesus’ strategy to bring the kingdom. They had never really bought into that strategy. They just liked Jesus. He was scary sometimes, but he made them happy. And he made them feel important, too; very important. They especially liked that.

The Bible is a gift by which God speaks to us. It tells us about God. It tells us about ourselves. And here we find a little picture of God’s people, the church.

It shows us how they were afraid of believing and living in faith. It shows us that they liked Jesus, but they didn’t like it when he went too far, or when he asked them to go too far with him. They felt far better huddling in the room of a building where they had had good times, and where they felt sheltered from the risks and the judgments of the powerful people who judged them, and who wanted them not to exist.

And there we are. It turns out to be a picture of us, or at least a picture of what we are always on the edge of becoming, because we like to be prudent and safe, because the world outside is a messy place (but really only as messy as we are, if only we could see ourselves as our faithful God sees us).

We don’t always feel sure about buying into Jesus’ priorities and strategies. We like Jesus a lot. He makes us happy. He even makes us feel important.

But he can be sort of scary. He has crazy ideas about love (his love for us and the love he tries to squeeze out of us for others). He has crazy ideas about risk taking for love. All those crazy ideas are just so scary.

Instead of leading an army, Jesus died on the cross for the sins of the world, and for our sins. Instead of ruling a world government from Jerusalem, Jesus rose from the dead to give life to the world, and to us.

This seems an odd way to build a kingdom. What kind of kingdom could he have been thinking of? How could his death and resurrection be a sane strategy for us to follow him and work for him?

Death and resurrection were the first part of his strategy that didn’t make any sense. The second part of his strategy didn’t make sense either. This strategy required him to show us that he is alive and victorious in spite of reality.

Faith means seeing a different reality. His strategy required him to make us sure of what he did, knowing that he had definitely done it, and that he had done it for us and for everyone else who would trust him. Jesus’ strategy requires us to know that death and resurrection are his plan for us. It’s his plan for us today, every day, and forever.

Once we see the glory of those scars that he got because he loved us (a strange kind of glory), and once we know from personal experience that Jesus’ kingdom works through his death and his resurrection, he puts us in charge of gathering the world to this strange kingdom. Then he disappears.

Well he doesn’t exactly disappear, but he sure doesn’t leave traceable footprints or fingerprints. The only prints left on the scene now are our own. But he shows himself the same way to each one of us. He has to.

The love of a God who became human in order to die for the sins of the world, and in order to rise from the dead, is supposed to bring the kingdom of God by changing hearts, and minds, and lives. God’s power in the cross and the empty tomb ends old lives and starts the new life of being born again. This change is his death and resurrection taking place within us.

The whole world is supposed to recognize that it needs this kind of love to empower the change of death and resurrection within us. We are supposed to realize for ourselves that armies, and laws, and education, and technology (though they have their place) will never change what really needs change that comes from the death and resurrection of human hearts, and minds, and lives, from their old selves to their new selves.

The new life shows us a God who loves us more than we love ourselves. It shows us a God who loves the world more than we do, and who loves life more than we do, and who has the power to set us free to live well and not be afraid: a different reality.

In the kingdom of God there is the power to be truly free. This is where the forgiveness of sins takes us. This is resurrection, too.

Jesus not only makes this possible; he makes it a promise. Jesus makes you the evidence-givers of change and freedom. He makes you and me his witnesses. The purpose of witnesses is to give testimony. Testimony can take the form of words, but the best kind of testimony is solid evidence.

So, your purpose and mine, as Jesus’ people, is surely to be the solid evidence of the dying and rising of Jesus. We are to give solid evidence of repentance and the forgiveness of sins.

So, when do you intend to start? When are you going to repent and change? When are you planning to forgive? I know, this means me too! It raises a lot of questions.

Repentance is a kind of change. Forgiveness is a kind of freedom. It is a kind of liberation and healing of the heart. Repentance and forgiveness are both ways of making a new world and setting things right.

Sometimes we make repentance and forgiveness into purely spiritual things. This is wrong. Jesus describes his mission in a way that includes everything in life, everything in the world, and not just what we consider to be spiritual. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and acceptance.” (Luke 4:18-19)

Jesus created the kind of change and freedom that deal with every kind of problem. He didn’t only deal with spiritual blindness. He gave real blind people sight. Jesus didn’t only deal with the spiritually poor. He fed the hungry. The repentance and forgiveness that Jesus authorizes is not just spiritual help for people, but passionate help for all the kinds of problems that people have.

There are prisoners of the mind, and prisoners of abuse, and prisoners of addiction, and prisoners of depression, and fear, and anger, and lust, and pride. And there are prisoners in prison. Jesus’ mission applies to them all.

Jesus gives us the job of being his solid evidence to them all.

The idea of witness has another side to it. A witness is a kind of extension of an event. A witness is a kind of extension of another person. Jesus makes us into extensions of him in this world.

What Jesus does for us is not supposed to stop with us. Jesus wants to play through us. He wants to extend himself through us to others.

He extends himself to each one of us in our hearts. He extends himself through the way we relate to the other members of his family, the church. He extends himself by stretching us, as his church, out into the world. His work becomes our work.

We become the extension of Christ to the world, as individuals and as the church of Christ. He extends himself through us in order to extend himself through those we touch: through them to others, still; and on, and on.

What are we to do?

In the Christian life, there is a basic issue of faith. We are nothing if we don’t believe that (one way or another) the Lord is the creator of the heavens and the earth. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” (Psalm 24:1) Faith means living like people who believe that the world belongs to God.

In the same way we are nothing if we don’t believe that the Lord is the creator of a new world of grace through the cross and the resurrection. We live like people who believe that the old world has passed away and that a new world has come; and is coming.

New rules apply. The old rules (which the citizens of the old world believed were important, and smart, and successful) no longer apply in the new creation. Faith requires us to live believing that what Jesus stands for are the things that matter. That is part of the repentance we need to show as evidence, as witnesses.

Jesus said that repentance and forgiveness of sins are to be preached in his name; that is, in the Christ’s name, the Messiah’s name, the King’s name. The idea of doing something “in his name” is easy to understand.

It’s as easy to understand it now as it was when we played cops and robbers long ago. When we were the cops who yelled, “Stop, in the name of the law” it meant that we had authority to say “stop”. Our order carried weight; the weight of authority.

As the people of Jesus, you carry weight with me, you have authority in my life. I may not do what you want, or what you say; but I care about what you want and I care about what you say, because I love you and I know you are children of God. You are loved by Jesus. That has to carry weight with me.

We don’t always do what Jesus wants or says but, if we love him, he carries an immeasurable weight with us. The authority of Jesus sending us on his mission as his witnesses weighs upon us, even if we don’t listen or respond.

If we run under his weight, or mass, then that weight becomes part of our momentum. It budges us. It moves us. If we stay still under his weight it will just squeeze us. It will crush us.

I’m not proud of being a pastor. I’m not proud of my service to him. But Jesus’ calling carries weight with me.

When I tried, a long time ago, to ignore his calling and not run with it, it made me very unhappy. You can’t love God and expect to be happy if you don’t do what you know he wants. There are a lot of Christians who, if they were honest with themselves, would realize that their spiritual dryness and sourness comes from not doing one special thing they know very well the Lord wants them to do. They are avoiding something, and they pay for it.

But you have to understand that I am not talking about the guilt that comes from neglecting a duty. I am talking about the weakness that comes from ignoring a grace.

What God wants from you is the willingness to discover a special grace that will only come from crossing the line that you refuse to cross for Jesus’ sake. The unwanted calling that comes from God always has grace in it. It is always a new discovery of God’s power and love.

You have a mission to the world in the King’s name. It may be the world at your doorstep. It may be the world around the world. The mission of Jesus does not stop with you.

Then you must know that you have the Father’s promise, the power from on high. (Luke 24:49) For one thing, the word “promise” means that you are people of promise. You need to know that, as the old saying goes, “God don’t make no junk.”

Dependence on God alone is not powerlessness. Confidence in God alone is not a lack of confidence. When I see a child fumbling around with a ball, or plinking tuneless notes on a piano, I don’t see imperfection and failure, I see promise, and that is how God sees you, as people of promise.

The Lord promises you his Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit, you will receive the gifts and you will bear the fruit you need in order to be the glorious children of God: witnesses of the cross, witnesses of the resurrection.

When Jesus talks about the “power from on high”, “power”, here, translates the basic Greek word “dunamis” from which we get our word “dynamite”. We are people of promise because God has given us dynamite for doing good.

Hear this! There is something you cannot see or hear that wants to go to work through you. The life of the Spirit is not just talk. God is God, and God is supernatural in his power. But the supernatural work of God goes on in disguise. The work of God goes disguised as you and me, and as the Body of Christ.

You may fret and grumble, but there is a power that is able to work beyond your ability, and beyond our very best plans. People may come to see something in you, and in us, that you don’t see in yourself, or in us. People will come to see in your words and your actions, and in ours together, something pointing to God.

The Holy Spirit is the most secret and invisible aspect of God. The Holy Spirit is the most humble aspect of a carelessly humble God, who is not afraid to sweat, and bleed, and die. This Holy Spirit is a gift of the Father and the Son. The power from on high has the freedom to work in every follower of Jesus, because Jesus’ death and resurrection has given you a new, risen life and, therefore, you are fit (and we are fit together) in the Father’s sight, for the fullness of his power.

The Holy Spirit was present in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the Holy Spirit is present in God’s recreation of your new life. The Holy Spirit is present in the new creation taking place in others when you bring Jesus to them in your words and actions. Trust the promise of the Father. Trust the promise of Jesus: “I am with you always.”

Jesus’ kingdom is a strange kingdom. He rules by means of death and resurrection. He rules by means of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. Jesus is ready, willing, and able to perform the major surgery of his own actual Jesus implant in you and in me. Because of our Jesus implant, we die and rise daily, and we will win God’s victory.

We will know the change of repentance and the freedom of forgiveness. We will have something worth giving to the whole world. We will be his witnesses empowered from on high.

Passionate Jesus - Rip the Veil and See

Preached on Good Friday, March 30, 2018

Scripture readings: Mark 15:21-40

I don’t know where all the pictures in my head have come from that show me the stories of Jesus. I’ve got these pictures in my head. Some of them are moving, talking pictures of the crucifixion.

Some Stations of the Cross
Our Lady of the Desert Parish
Mattawa, WA
Spring, 2017

I see Jesus struggling to breathe, and he raises himself up on the nails in order to take each and every breath. In the end, he’s trembling when he lifts himself to take his final breath. He shouts a loud shout, and I think he says, “It is finished.” Finished means that he has accomplished what he came for.

Then the earth shakes and cracks open in places. The rocking of the world moves the Temple, perched high on its terrace on what they used to call Mount Moriah.

This shaking does something spiritual and miraculous. By the hand of God, the curtain or veil that covers the entrance to the Holy of Holies is ripped open from top to bottom. The Holy of Holies, in Jesus’ time, was an empty room where God concentrated his presence and his attention.

Centurion means the commander of somewhere from eighty to one hundred men in the Roman army. Because it was supposed to have a hundred men, a centurion’s unit was called a century. That would make him the equivalent of something like the captain, or the major, of a company in the United States Army or Marine Corps.

Maybe there wasn’t a whole company or century of soldiers at the cross. Maybe the centurion brought some smaller detail to do the job of the crucifying and guarding of the convicts. But Jesus was a kind of security risk to the province and to the Temple. They were on alert because of Jesus.

I was surprised, this year, comparing the four gospels. I found that it wasn’t only the centurion who came to a strange, miraculous conclusion about Jesus. Matthew says that the whole detail was shaken from their mission and from their dice game.

In just a moment, they took it all in. They found themselves saying a bunch of stuff at the sound of the shout and the earthquake. Probably the whole scene came through for them, along with the uncanny darkness of the sky. What they had heard and seen of Jesus, how he conducted himself, and how the crowd (and how nature itself) responded to his execution.

Together, the detail became a military jury rendering their verdict: “This was an innocent man. This was a righteous man. Surely, this was the Son of God.”

Something grabbed them and changed them. They had done many, many crucifixions in this rebellious province. They weren’t overwhelmed by the cruel and boring detail of crucifying criminals. Jesus made this long, tedious day different.

With a body that was beaten and torn into a bloody pulp, Jesus heaved himself up on the cross to take his final breath. With that breath Jesus bellowed, and dropped, and hung still as the corpse that he was, upon the nails of the cross.

His shout seemed to shake everything. The earth itself shook, and the people steadied themselves upon it, but their hearts shook as well.

The Temple Mount and its sanctuary shook. Its marble walls seemed, almost, to pull apart and snap shut again, but the parting tore in two the veil that hid the holiest place from view. A shaken witness reported that he had seen the veil tear from top to bottom as if it were the work of some invisible giant.

The inner room of the presence of God could be clearly seen, even by those who, in spite of the shaking earth, stood outside the Temple and looked through the line of now completely opened doors. “Look! There’s the room of God!”

The shouting and drooping Jesus was the wounded and bloody hand of God himself, shaking whatever was capable of being shaken. The bloody hand of God tore the veil from the forbidden door.

That same hand also tore the veil that hangs over the place, in human souls, where our hearts go to hide: where we hide our hearts in order to avoid knowing ourselves too well.

Just now, we may not know where our own hearts are, or what they’re hiding, until that wounded, bloody hand of God in Jesus shakes us as it shook the Roman soldiers and officers.

That wounded hand (or maybe it would be better to call it the wounded heart of God) has a special power to shake things up. It has the power to shake and to carry the sins of the world.

That power can shake the whole planet. Its wounds carry the authority of a proven faithfulness (faithful to death) to judge the whole planet; the whole universe; and each and every one of us.

When we meet that hand and heart we meet his carrying that same authority of long ago. We find ourselves shaken, and carried, and judged, and changed.

Through their army life, the centurion and his soldiers understood power and authority. They understood coming into an order of command, and training, and discipline. They understood being changed by that into something they had not been before.

That’s what I wanted to happen to me, at one time, when, late in 1968, I considered enlisting in the armed forces. Then I told my parents what I had decided, and they freaked.

They freaked out big time. They wore me down for days, till I gave up my plan.

I thought it might have made me a new man. In the end, Jesus did that in his own way. He changed me. But it was with the power of that bloody hand and heart. I couldn’t resist that when he grabbed me and held me in his grip.

I think the centurion and his detail became the first converts to Jesus after his death. That would make sense to me. They found out who Jesus is by crucifying him themselves.

Jesus, himself, changed before their eyes into someone they could never have imagined, even though they had crucified so many people before. They became changed because they saw their whole lives, up to that point, in a completely different light, once they recognized what it meant for them to have crucified Jesus (just as we all have). They knew what it meant that Jesus had died because of them (just as he has died because of each one of us). Their understanding of the whole world changed because they now saw how Rome, and its famous laws and Roman peace, that claimed to shape the world for good had been the enemy of the kingdom of God.

The mighty Roman Empire called their Emperor the Son of God, and yet Rome had killed Jesus the true Son of God. These soldiers knew this.

The soldiers would change how they would see themselves from now on. Their real life would change from representing the power of war and military security to serving Jesus the Prince and Servant of Peace, even if they still wore the uniform of Rome. Their true aim in life would turn them into servants of peace.

We all change like that down to our heart and core. We all change like that, down to every detail, when the sacrifice made for us by that wounded, bloody hand and heart have grabbed us and shaken us.

Now we see God and his Son with the eyes of faith. We recognize who God and his Son are, and what they want for us, and what they give to us. We will all be changed. In God’s time everything will change.

Faith for Life - The King of Humility and Peace

Preached on Palm Sunday, April 9, 2017

Scripture readings:

Zechariah 9:9-10 (Mention that the Hebrew word “ani” means humble, not only gentle: "humble and riding on a donkey"); and John 12:12-19

There is a lot to think about here.

One thing to think about is the donkey. Jesus had a specific reason for riding on the donkey in that parade into Jerusalem. The donkey sends a message telling us who Jesus is.

Burkett Lake, North of Mattawa/Desert Aire, WA
March 2017

John, the writer of the gospel, tells us what he wants us to be able to see in his gospel. John says, “These are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:31)

Each new thing we learn and believe about Jesus, as the Christ, the Son of God, changes us. Each new experience of who Jesus is gives us new life from him, in a new way.

We learn about who Jesus is from that donkey. There is just the sheer fact that, five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, the prophet Zechariah had predicted that the Messiah would come to Jerusalem riding on a donkey. So, Jesus did it.

When Jesus rode the donkey, he wasn’t doing something new. The Lord has one story to which everyone who ever lived and ever will live belongs to. It’s the story of our creation, our falling away, our new life from God in Christ, and the glory that is to come. It’s one ancient story that isn’t finished yet.

The donkey wasn’t just a donkey. For Zechariah, the donkey had meaning. The donkey meant (among other things) humility and peace, and the horses stood for pride and war. So, there were no horses in the Palm Sunday parade.

From time to time, especially during the Roman occupation, individuals had come forward, with a lot of charisma, claiming to be the Messiah, and coming forward to raise an army. They would come for war, and they would succeed in killing some Romans, and some collaborators. And then they, themselves would get caught and killed. Those were the horse people.

Jesus rode on a donkey to say that he had come forward for humility and peace. The only trouble with this is that I don’t know if there was anyone there who actually believed him. I don’t know if there was anyone there who was truly interested in humility and peace. Even the disciples didn’t understand what Jesus was about or what he was really saying, until after the crucifixion and the resurrection.

Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey to say that he was fulfilling God’s plan, as the prophet had predicted over five hundred years before. But Jesus also rode on the donkey in order to tell the people who saw him, what he was really all about, and what God was really like. The donkey was a message about what God wanted to accomplish with the Messiah, because of who he is, as God.

The donkey-riding-incident was one of the deepest messages about who God is, and how God works. Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. That is, Jesus is the Messiah, and Jesus is God with us.

The theme of humility and peace go right through the Bible. In the Old Testament book of the prophet Isaiah, in chapter 42, the Lord speaks of his Messiah this way: he says, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations. He will not shout or cry out, or raise his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness, he will bring forth justice; he will not falter or be discouraged till he has established justice on earth. In his law the islands will put their hope.” (Isaiah 42:1-4) There is something in the heart of God that loves quietness, humility, and peace.

In some strange way, the new world full of God’s justice (full of the work of God’s making things right and good) were (from the beginning) supposed to get done without any show of force, without a lot of noise. God’s great work was predicted, in these words from Isaiah, to come with humility and peace.

In spite of all the violence in the Bible, and in spite of the apparent violence of God in the Old Testament, I believe there is one very simple, basic example of God’s humility and peace. That example is the people of Israel. This is very mysterious (I know).

In fact, it sounds like a complete contradiction of everything the Old Testament is so famous for. But I believe that the simple fact that God called one single, little family (a sterile and infertile couple), that became a little tribe, that became a little nation that, often, betrayed God, and was often defeated, and enslaved, and slaughtered (and did more than its share of slaughtering), and yet this family, and this part of the story, has continued to exist to the present day: and it says something. It’s a miracle that says a lot about the humility of God.

It even says something about the peace of God. We should study that word “peace” sometime. Peace doesn’t mean that you will have no problems, no trouble, and no conflict. What peace does mean, among other things, is that you will be always held in the strength of a faithful, and abundant, and enduring love: the love of God.

God was in Christ, offering his humility and peace to Jerusalem. Jesus was the face of God’s humility and peace looking Jerusalem in the eye, and looking us in the eye. The look in Jesus’ eye offered forgiveness and a new birth, as a way of returning to the God of humility and peace.

The strangest thing is this. The humility and peace of Jesus on the donkey gives you the freedom to do with Jesus absolutely whatever you want. It is as if he asks each one of us, “Here I am. What will you do with me?”

There were many in the crowd who celebrated the coming of Jesus because they thought he would raise an army and lead a revolution. They thought he came to throw out the Romans and the Greeks. If Jesus failed to do this, they would turn against him. And that’s exactly what they did.

They didn’t care so much about forgiveness and grace, or humility and peace. They wanted vindication. They wanted to get even. They wanted the defeat of their enemies and their own superiority. Maybe this is one kind of peace, but it’s not Jesus’ kind of peace.

I often want to be vindicated. But I am basically a man of words. So, what I notice about myself, when I get angry, or when I feel slighted, or misunderstood, or mistreated is that I rehearse words in my mind, after the event. I imagine what I might say to justify myself, or to prove myself; or to produce shame, and guilt, and regret in others. I make very unhumble and unpeaceful speeches to myself.

I do this. And I would rather run through these speeches over and over again, in my head, rather than to step down, and step away, and have peace. For me, this is a test. It’s God’s test. I don’t always meet this test very well.

The Pharisees represent a different group of people; the people who look into the eyes of Jesus and say: “I don’t need forgiveness. I don’t need a new heart and mind. There is nothing wrong with me. The problem is somewhere else. You’re the one who has the problem.”

This is pride. Pride never has peace, and it’s always offended by the humble, and the peaceful, and the peace-makers.

The Pharisees can represent any of us, even when we love to be followers of Jesus, because we want to be right so badly. We want to be good so badly. We don’t want to see our own failures or our own shallowness.

It is the hardest thing in the world for the proud to say: “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” I know this, because it is one of the hardest things for me to do.

This is another test from God. The Pharisees didn’t pass this test, and they couldn’t live with the challenge of having Jesus looking them in the eye.

They had to close those eyes of Jesus. They had to close those eyes to keep themselves from seeing their true reflection in his eyes.

They had to get rid of Jesus, and kill him. They wouldn’t admit that (in thinking this, and doing this) they were actually killing themselves. The truth is that they were dying, spiritually, on the inside.

Then, there was a different group of people in the crowd. They saw Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead. There were people in the crowd who knew that the blind could see, and the deaf could hear, and the lame could walk, and that people were being made new.

They were finding faith. They were believing, and coming to life in Jesus’ name.

They were the thankful people, and they felt a great freedom stirring in their hearts. It was the freedom of humility and peace, and it was something that they could share with others. It was a new way for them to live in this world.

Jesus came to Jerusalem on a donkey, and people could do with him whatever they wanted. The Pharisees, and the Temple authorities, and the Roman governor couldn’t maintain their authority, and the order of the day, in the presence of a higher power that ruled with humility and peace.

Jesus came the way he did to offer himself as a sacrifice for the sin of the world, at their hands. He simply let them be themselves, and he went on being himself.

In the greatest humility, Jesus actually got his work done by letting them do with him what they most wanted to do. He managed to die for the sins of the world, and our sins, by letting them (and us through them) carry out their sins against him. The sins of our world killed him, and he defeated those sins by rising from the dead as our savior. This is the way he is.

This is the way God is. This is the work of a God who rules and works with humility and peace. This is Jesus, and when we believe in him, we have life in his name.

Because our king is Jesus, we have a different kind of king. Because we have a different king, we have a different life.

Other people boast about their freedom, but their freedom doesn’t change them and it doesn’t make the world a better place. Jesus said, “If the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed.” (John 8:36)

The freedom of Jesus takes us somewhere new. His freedom helps us to grow and change, and yet his freedom also helps us to hold onto the things that it would be a shame for us to lose (a certain childlikeness, for instance). A different king lets us see life differently and truly live.

Our different king shows us how to find our way through this world. He makes our values different; and our morals and ethics. He changes the way we see other people and treat them. He changes the way we understand ourselves and our purpose in life as it is shaped by Jesus.

He makes our view of the world different. Jesus makes us see our society, and our culture, and our laws, and our government, and our world deeper than what television and radio and the internet teach us to see. We learn to see to the roots of the real issues of good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice.

But that different lens, through which we see and live, is Jesus. Jesus is about forgiveness and mercy that give us humility and peace. And peace is the strength of the faithful, enduring, abundant love of God. This gives us a different life, and this is good news that we can practice in our lives, and we can share this good news with others.

The Incarnation - The Homecoming

Preached on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2016

Scripture readings: Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:1-20; John 1:1, 14-18

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (and made his dwelling among us) full of grace and truth….” (John 1:9)

Houses around Desert Aire, WA: December 2016

“The Word” is God speaking to us. It’s God’s self-expression, in which we hear and see his glory, his grace, and his truth at work.

We call this Word the only Son of the Father. It’s deep. It is also the love that lives within God making itself (or himself) real for us. It’s deep. It’s much bigger than us.

The Apostle John, who wrote this gospel, was a well-to-do Jewish fisherman who lived by the Sea of Galilee, in the north part of the Holy Land. There were a lot of Greek speaking people around there, and so John is good with Greek. He writes a very simple, plain spoken form of Greek; but he’s a simple man who is also an intelligent man, and he writes deep. And he writes out of the thoughts of generations of his people.

So, the Greek word he uses for God, the Word, dwelling among us harks back to the Old Testament, when the Jewish people wandered around the desert and lived in tents. It especially takes us back to the Exodus when the people of Israel escaped from slavery in Egypt and traveled through the wilderness to the promised land. John uses a Greek word that could just as well say that “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.”

I like that because it reminds me of happy things in my family: that tent-pitching thing. Pitching our tent was always a classic time in my family, when I was growing up.

We went camping every summer for a couple weeks. Plenty of other people had campers, but my Dad always said that it wasn’t really camping unless you had a tent.

For my family, like for the people of Israel, that time of tents was a time of escape. For my family, our time in tents was also the Promised Land. For Israel, it wasn’t the promised land, but it was the time when they were most themselves, for better and for worse, walking with the Lord in the desert.

There was a special tent that was pitched every time they stopped. It was the Lord’s tent. The priests of Israel would pitch the Lord’s tent, as God had commanded, in the exact middle of the camp ground.

In Jesus, God has pitched his tent right in the middle of us. He pitched this tent without anyone’s help, except for the help of Mary and Joseph. You might say that all of human life is not a sturdy house, but only a tent: whether you recognize it or not.

The Lord has his tent right in the middle of wherever we are. Do you know that the Lord is right in the middle of wherever you are?

Jesus is God with us. The fact that we are all tenting together is not an escape. It’s the fact that we are on a journey together. And camping means living where the basics are pretty obvious and they take a lot of work.

God pitching his tent with you, and you knowing it, helps sort out the basics. When you really know that God has pitched his ten right in the middle of where you are, you realize that you’re not on an escape and you pay more attention, like most of the old-timers did, to the things that are really important.

For my family, camping was when we were all the most real and, in some ways, we were at our best. All of us are at our most real, and at our most authentic, when we pitch our tents where God pitches his. There’s no real privacy and, when you’re camping, that’s OK. Everybody sees and hears, and everyone knows, including God, and that’s OK.

The tent in Exodus was the place where God’s glory came down, and you could see it. John tells us that the place where God’s glory is really seen (much more than in that tent in Exodus) is the tent we call Jesus. In Jesus, we see that God’s true glory isn’t the cloud of smoke, or the pillar of fire, or the roar of thunder and lightning on the mountain.

God’s glory is to be one of us. God’s glory is to be a baby. God’s glory is to be a craftsman. The Creator was glad to become a carpenter. God’s glory is to sacrifice for people he loves. The Creator, who gave life to the universe, was glad to die to save sinners, and make them a new creation.

The Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke are full of trouble. If we don’t see this, it’s only because people have gone out of their way to dress up those stories, in books and on the screen.

The gospels tell us plainly about all the trouble of Christmas, if we pay attention. Luke tells us that it was orders for a tax census by the Roman Emperor that took the Holy Family away from their home in Nazareth so that they could be counted in Bethlehem. Matthew gives us King Herod’ command for his soldiers to slaughter the babies in Bethlehem.

John only tells us that there’s a struggle with the darkness. He tells us (in verse 5 of chapter one) that the light shines in the darkness and that the darkness has not overcome it.

We know what it feels like to wonder if the darkness is overcoming the light. We seem to be entering in one of the most unsettled times of the past one hundred years. We live in a time of growing fear, and anger, and doubt, and confusion about the truth.

Jesus grew up to tell us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:43) and we can see how far our world has gone from that. We know how hard it has become for us to do it. Yes, the darkness tries to overcome us all.

In Jesus, we have an antidote to the darkness. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” And we read that he is “full of grace and truth.”

The truth of God is a fact, but the truth of God is more than facts. Truth here is just as much about what we mean about trueness when we say that a person is “true blue”. God is true, meaning he is faithful through and through. Jesus shows us the kind of God we can count on.

And grace is about forgiveness, but that’s only because forgiveness is a beautiful gift. A good dancer moves with grace, and that is part of what the Bible means by God’s grace that we see in Jesus.

God, and what God has done in Jesus, is simply beautiful. Jesus is beautiful: in a very manly way, but, also, he is beautiful in a way that can touch the hearts of men and women, boys and girls.

This is the antidote to the world as it is. And the darkness has not overcome it.

They say that all babies are beautiful: so, what about God in the manger? Nowhere else has the ultimate reality become a baby, and a man on a cross. What normal human being would have thought of it, or taken it seriously. We believe this is the real grace and truth that come from God. We believe that this is something that only God could think of, and only God could pull it off. What do you think?

The Incarnation - Stooping Low to Meet God

Preached on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, December 18, 2016

Scripture readings: Isaiah 53:1-6; John 1:9-13

The word incarnation is a big word. It’s an old word from the Latin language. It means “embodied in flesh”. It means made flesh and blood. It means made human.

Around Home and Desert Aire/Mattawa WA
December 2016

It describes what we celebrate at Christmas. God came to earth in the flesh: God himself became a human being: a human baby, like any other baby. Like any other baby: except God was a baby who would grow up to give his life for the sins of the world; and to give us light and life; and to give us himself.

The Gospel of John calls Jesus the Word: God speaking himself. The Word is God making himself into a message. It says, “The Word was with God and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) The thing about Christmas is that, when God became a particular human baby, in Bethlehem, God was speaking himself in that life he had taken into himself.

The story of the first Christmas is God describing himself. God is living out who he really is and what he wants for himself, and for us, in that manger, in that stable, in Bethlehem.

John says, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not (did not recognize him). He came into his own, and his own received him not.” (John 1:10-11) And this perfectly describes what we see in Bethlehem.

Now Jesus was born at a time of great spiritual discontent both for the Jews and the pagans. There was a lot of searching, and praying, and questioning going on. But, when God’s answer arrived, nobody seemed to notice.

Well, some noticed. But John is pretty clear that the normal thing was not to notice, not to receive, not to be open to what God was doing. That is the human condition. That is the way humans are. It’s the way we are, if we are normal humans.

So when you are discontent, or questioning, or searching, the lesson is that God is there speaking to you, shining his light on you, and you just don’t see it. And you don’t receive it: that is, if you are normal; because that’s the normal thing, according to the Bible. At least that’s that state of our being normal that God wants to overcome.

The pagan Greeks and Romans were discontented with the old paganism. They were looking for newer answers among what they called “The Mysteries”. In the Mysteries, there were special places you could go in order to be initiated into hidden truths that would give you a new spiritual life. Stories of the gods and the great heroes would be acted out in gorgeous pageants, as if it were theater, with music, and singing, and dancing, and art, and special staging affects.

Those who attended the mysteries would experience inspiration and ecstasy. They believed that this experience was their spiritual rebirth and the promise of everlasting life. But their inspiration was mere excitement.

The Jews were waiting and searching for a great warrior king to lead them to victory over their enemies; and to bring the Lord’s people to power, and success, and glory.

The pagans and the Jews were looking up; looking up to hear a divine message, a spiritual message: God’s word to them.

But the lesson which was made flesh in Bethlehem is that you don’t look up to find the spiritual truth. In some strange way, you have to look down.

This is hard for us, if we are normal human beings. The Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, said it. This is how the Lord, the Savior, would come. “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” (Isaiah 53:2)  

You look down into the messes and weaknesses of this world, and of your own life, and that is where you can hear the Lord speaking to you. If the Lord loves you just the way you are (and he does) you will never know God, or hear God, unless you know what he sees when he loves you just as you are.

There was a girl I was in love with, when I was twenty years old. I even asked her the question: “Would you ever consider marrying a guy who was going into the ministry?” But, even though she didn’t want to do that, the great thing about her was that she could see right through me, and laugh at me, and still like me, even though I might not deserve it.

One of my problems was that I didn’t always want to admit that I was the guy she liked just as I was. I wanted her to look at me as if I were someone she knew I wasn’t. But she even saw through this, and she still liked me, and she could make me laugh at myself.

I was a very serious Christian and, as such, I would have been much better off if I had known how to deal with myself just as I was. To really know God, and know one’s self, one must be able to look down to the struggles and the weaknesses of one’s own life, and hear what God is saying just there, in his infinite love.

We want to look up for peace, and joy, and fullness, and love. God is full of peace, and joy, and fullness, and love. When we experience these things, we experience the presence of God. These things are heavenly, but they were meant to be found on earth too. God means for us to find these blessings in our deepest and greatest needs.

The heavenly things became rare, and almost disappeared, when sin and evil came into the world. When peace, and joy, and fullness, and love disappear, we have trouble believing that God is present. We don’t know where God is, or what God is doing.

So God became flesh and blood in order to be in our world, such as it is. He became a baby in a town where King Herod ordered all the baby boys under the age of two to be killed in order kill the baby king.

We hate this about the world, and God agrees with us. But God became flesh and blood in order to be wherever peace, and joy, and fullness, and love are absent, so that we can have him especially there. We have a lot of trouble recognizing this and receiving it.

We don’t know the actual date, or month (and we’re not even sure of the year), when Jesus was born. We only know that he deliberately came down from light into darkness in order to shine in the darkness.

This is why ancient Christians chose the idea of Christ being born in the winter, near the winter solstice, in the cold and dark. Knowing this, we add their wisdom to what the gospels tell us about the beginnings of his life in this world: on a straw bed, in a feed trough for livestock, in a stable, in the cave, under an inn, in an obscure village of an occupied, defeated country, in a violent corner of the ancient world.

The novelist Taylor Caldwell wrote this about a dark period of her life: “I am not alone at all, I thought. I was never alone at all. And that, of course, is the message of Christmas. We are never alone. Not when the night is darkest, the wind coldest, the world seemingly most indifferent. For this is still the time God chooses.” (Taylor Caldwell, “Family Circle”, Dec. 24, 1961)

When we look down to where we really are, we can find God there with us, working for us, working for our new life.

If you’re lucky, you can look back and down, into your childhood, and remember the faith of your parents, or your grandparents, or Sunday Schools, or Vacation Bible School teachers, who taught you things that you once knew to be real, when you were ten and much closer to the ground. But now you are tall, and you look up when you should be looking down.

Or you should look down to see the people who are doing justice, and loving mercy, and walking humbly with their God. Or you should look down, in love, and see the people who need justice, or who need mercy, or who need to walk humbly with their God.

There are people around us who are living demonstrations of the grace of God, or the need for grace, but we want to look up to better people, smarter people, cooler people. We spend our time looking at famous people and thinking about them.

The normal thing is to look up. You may very well find something when you look up, and call it Jesus, and call it God. But it won’t really be the real Jesus, who chose the feed trough of a stable for his first bed. You have to look closer to the ground to truly find Jesus as he wants you to know him, and to know yourself as he knows you.

Excitement is a high. Repentance (which means adjusting your life to the real truth) is a low. But Jesus is with the low. We think inspiration comes with excitement, but it really comes with repentance: with a kind of looking down and turning around.

Sometimes we think that faith means looking up to receive God’s blessings, God’s help, God’s strength, God’s mercy. But, in a way, faith is looking down, looking low, because it means trusting. It means letting the Lord be God. A preacher asked a child, “What does Lord mean?” And the child answered, “He’s the boss!”

John wrote “But to those who received him, who believed in his name...” When you receive someone, they may be the guest and you are the host, but the host is the servant. You look low to serve the one you have welcomed. Jesus did this for us. We look low for Jesus.

“But to those who received him, who believed in his name he gave power to become children of God.” God became a child to make us children. It means knowing our dependence; knowing who to listen to. It means imitating and following. We aim high, but we start low.

The wife of one of my cousins posted on Facebook ten “Perks of Being Sixty and Older”. One of them was “People no longer view you as a hypochondriac.” I could see that one. The one I disagreed with was: “There is nothing left to learn the hard way.” I commented that I’m still learning plenty of things the hard way.

Children start out wanting to be like their dads and moms. We want to be like Jesus. And we know that this means learning to do what the child in Bethlehem grew up to do. We aim high, but we start low.

There is one way we don’t look high enough, and that is to see what the Lord wants to do with us. We are not usually very ambitious about letting God have his way with us. We have plans of our own, and we are more than happy if God cooperates with our own ideas and plans. God doesn’t usually do this.

C. S. Lewis wrote about God’s high plans: "Imagine yourself a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised.
But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to?
The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up the towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a little decent cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself." (CS Lewis, “Mere Christianity”, Chapter 9)

If we look low enough at ourselves, we’ll understand why we need the gift of freedom that comes from the humility of God in the manger, and on the cross. God came low to make us capable of something beyond our wildest dreams, and hopes, and ambitions: something beyond our deepest desires.

God came low to pay the price for our entry into a new life as the sons and daughters of God. Some translations say that he gave us this as a right. Others translate the gift as “the power to become children of God.” Both are correct.

We need both: the right and the power. We need the right and privilege of entry; the open door and the greeting. And we need the power of God. We need what it takes to grow up into that privilege; that new life.

Christmas first tells us to look low. When you look low, you will hear the Word and his message to you where you are. The Word made flesh (Jesus), the Word of God, will find you and make you his child.