Kingdom of the Caregivers (Part Three - Our Relation with God Restored

Preached on Sunday, January 27, 2019

Scripture readings: Romans 5:1-11; Matthew 16:13-28

Wandering around Malakoff Diggins
Near Bridgeport Bridge and North Bloomfield
California, May 5, 2015

The summer when I was eight years old, I went to YMCA Camp (Camp Osceola, near Big Bear, in the mountains of Southern California). YMCA is, or was supposed to be, a Christian organization, and one morning, toward the end of my week at Camp Osceola, a bunch of the younger campers were gathered at the campfire circle and we were given a talk about knowing God, and the greatness and beauty of God and his love. I’ve forgotten most of the talk.

Then we were all blindfolded, and guided by a bunch of the older boys through the forest. This is in a part of those mountains where there are ten-thousand-foot peaks.

Suddenly, bright light shone through our blinders. We knew that we had come out of the forest. The older boys sat us down on the ground, and the talk went on, something more or less like this.

“Every one of your lives is like a walk on a trail through the forest. You might walk on your path as though you were blind and didn’t see any of the beauty or greatness of God’s creation, but you can meet God through his creation. You can know for yourself how great, beyond your understanding, God is: how high, and beautiful, and deep, and lasting his love for you is. If you could know God, you would love him and never forget him. You would never forget how great he is.”

Then we were told to take off our blindfolds. We saw each other sitting on a wide, rocky shelf, on the top of a high cliff and, across the canyon, was one of those mountains that soared far higher than its tree-line, in rocky peaks and crags.

I felt as though my heart skipped a beat and then started racing. I got goose-bumps all over.

We’re not supposed to make images of God to tell us what he is like. Any image we try to make will fall short and confuse us, and distort our way of life more than it could possible help. But I have images of God in my head.

I sometimes think of God as being like a mountain so high that it will take my whole life to get to the top and see the world on the other side. I love mountains.

I don’t think I would ever want to climb one with ropes, and picks, and my own hands. I would rather love the mountains by walking on them. I’ve walked to the top a few mountains between eight and eleven thousand feet in elevation.

One of those was Mount Rose, between Lake Tahoe and Reno. It’s elevation is over ten thousand feet. I lived close enough to take multiple walks up to its summit, and once I took my youth group to the top. Below a certain height there were multiple trails, and you could use these to see more of the beauties of the mountain. You could wander through meadows and different groves of forest on the mountain-side.

If I had lived there long enough, I would have known Mount Rose from its many sides, and angles, and gentle, and sharp, and wide places, and ridges, and ravines, all over its slopes. I loved that mountain.

That’s part of how I think of God. God is a mountain so big, so high, that you can walk all over the Lord and get to know so much about him to love and cherish. I got to know God this way, because, somehow, I met God in a new way one summer morning when I was eight years old.

Sometimes I climb the mountain of God when I contemplate deep things in the Bible. Sometimes I climb when I’m exhausted by worry, or by puzzlement over what to do next. I might climb the mountain of God when I have a voice to sing with. I do it when I walk through this beautiful desert country.

Lately I’ve been using an image of God that my Baci (Babcia, my Polish grandmother), gave me, when she heard that I was planning to go into the ministry. It’s a small white statue of Jesus holding a lamb in his arms. She thought it was going to glow in the dark. She was disappointed when I told her that it didn’t, but that I loved it anyway.

I loved her. Now this Jesus who doesn’t glow in the dark represents a long, long love that I have lived with, or tried to live with, in good times and bad times, in the church, as a caregiver to the spiritual needs of others.

So lately I’ve been holding my Baci’s Jesus and talking to him as I hold him in my hands. For me, these days, it’s a good way to climb the mountain of God. It’s part of how I know “God, through our Lord Jesus Christ”. (Romans 5:1)

In our reading from Romans chapter five, Paul tells us how he knew “God, through our Lord Jesus Christ”. We know who God is because God, in Christ, gave us a free pass into his presence, at great cost to himself.

Paul’s picture of knowing God looked like one of the wonders of the ancient world called The Temple of the Lord, overlooking the city of Jerusalem: The Temple of the Living God.

Paul’s picture of knowing God in the Temple finds the Temple changed. In Jerusalem, only the High Priest had access to the innermost room, the Holy of Holies. God had promised to make his name to live in that room.

In that culture, the word “name” means authority, and the mysterious substance of what you are and what your life means. When the Lord made his name dwell in that innermost place, it meant that you could get to be with him there, if it was allowed.

In the real Temple, the High Priest could only enter that place of the presence once a year, and only if he brought with him the blood of a sacrifice that cleansed him and his people from their sins.

Paul says that his way, and the way that he taught others about knowing God, was like a Temple where anyone could come into the presence of the Lord, any time at all, if they and their sins had been cleansed by the sacrifice and the blood of Jesus. Yes, this is how me meet and know God: “when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son,” (Romans 5:10)

Paul also says: “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (5:5) We don’t know God by taking off our own blindfolds, but by the Father giving us the Holy Spirit to take off our blindfolds.

In Matthew, Peter didn’t know who Jesus was until the Father showed him, and I’m sure there was the silent power of the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father, to show the true identity of Jesus to his disciple.

This happens to us, as well.

We see Jesus on the cross, crucified to bring us peacefully back home to his home, and to be at home truly in the presence of God. It’s the Holy Spirit who has the power to open our eyes to see the Lord Jesus on that cross, and to know that we are welcomed back to a relationship with God. Faith, peace, grace, glory, perseverance, a maturing character, hope, love, joy and celebration come into our lives through our relationship with God our Father, the Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and the Holy Spirit.

You don’t find these things anywhere else, although it is amazing how willing the Lord is to give all of this to his enemies. This gift is for his enemies: including us!

Maybe that’s part of the reason Jesus told us to love our enemies. Who knows just how far this grace will spread, in the end?

We were all created for a relationship with God; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s our true purpose. It’s what we are designed for: what everyone in the world is designed for. Think what pictures come to you, what smells, what sounds, what flavors, what words help you to know God?

There may be a word, or a sentence, or a story in the Bible that helps you to know God. There had to be some experience that exposed your need for something more, in order to know God: a newborn baby, falling in love and proposing, losing a job, being in debt, making a big mistake, walking in the rain. You found that you had a need, and that need turned out to be God.

Everyone needs this, and God is big enough to meet the needs of every one of his creatures. You understand your own needs well enough to want to give help and care for the needs that others have for God.

In our reading, in Romans, there are the treasures of faith, hope, and love: the greatest gifts of the Holy Spirit. Not everyone will admit their need for these. Not everyone understands or even knows their need for these.

People might have reasons to fear us Christians and the church; or at least dislike what we stand for, to them; although most people are charitable enough that they try to overlook these faults in us.

There will come some time when those we know, or work with, or play with will need a foundation to strengthen them, you don’t even need to call it faith until you get to a certain point, and then you can surprise them by what faith means to you.

There will come a time when the people around you will lose hope. They may feel this as weariness, or grief, or fear. You may have been given some understanding of these things, through your own life, and you know how a relationship with God will teach them hope, as it taught you. You can lead them through this change into hope.

A time will come when someone around you has their need for love exposed. I think it might be easier to talk about love, but not about the painful mistakes of love. People hide from love. They avoid the changes that love will make in their life. On Facebook, my persimmon friend David posted a joke that said: “I told my wife that she should embrace her mistakes . . . Then she smiled and hugged me.”

You have been given some gift for knowing how to care for those in need of love.

Paul’s letter is the letter of a helper, a caregiver, dealing with the spiritual needs of others. Paul was what we need to become. He is someone who has died and risen with Jesus. What we have to share, in the school of Paul and Jesus, is to know a glory that dies to bring us in. We become such people. In our turn, we die in order to rise with the Son of the Living God, and lead others where we have gone with Jesus. Just don’t forget your own need for meeting with Jesus. There’s more you need to know.

Pentecost and the Power of Connection

Preached on Pentecost Sunday, May 20, 2018

Scripture readings: John 15:26-16:15; Acts 2:1-21

We all know people who are connectors. Some people dabble in matchmaking.  Some people always want all their best friends to be friends of each other. But there are plenty of other areas in life where we need to make connections or be the connector.

Walks Along the Columbia River and Crab Creek
April 2018

Sometimes a generation will be the connector in a family. Usually it’s the oldest generation that keeps the branches of a family in touch.

Some of my ancestors were Irish. They owned a farm in county Tyrone, in the old kingdom of Ulster in the northern part of that country. The farm was too small to support all the kids when they grew up about 1850, so all but the oldest son left the farm. Some went to England, some to America, and some to Australia.

They kept writing letters from the very start. Since about 1850 the cousins in Australia and America have been writing to each other every generation. I’m the family connector in America. I write the letters and connect the news on either side of the Pacific. I hold the family together, on my side, as well as I can: to keep going a connection that has lasted one hundred and sixty-seven years.

Someone told me about a grandchild who kept the older generations of a family together, after a divorce had broken up part of the family and made enemies among that older generation.

The child forced the peace. It can be a hard job for a child (and not really a fair job, for a child). Children often show a powerful instinct to be connectors.

Jesus is a connector, building a bridge for us to peace with God through the cross. All the talk, in the Bible, about the faithfulness of God says that it is the nature of God to pursue, restore, and maintain connections.

It is the special work of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, to be “The Great Connector.” The Holy Spirit connects us with all the reality of Jesus. Jesus said that the Spirit, “Will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.” (John 16:14-15)

When the Holy Spirit connects us with Jesus we are connected with nothing different and nothing less than God himself: The Spirit, the Son, and the Father. The Holy Spirit is our living, personal, supernatural connection with all the reality of Jesus and all the reality of God.

Jesus calls us to be his witnesses, so that others may know him through us.

The work of being the church and the work of being a witness to the world, and to your family, and to your neighbor is the work of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The connector, Jesus, gives his connection work to the Holy Spirit, who gives the connection work to us. A witness is a connector. A disciple in the family of the church is a connector. But I want to concentrate on the connection work of witnessing to others.

A witness is a person who has special knowledge, or experience, or a special relationship. A witness is a person who knows what they know, not by hearsay, but by reality. They have seen what they have seen. Or, what has happened has happened to them.

Jesus says that the Spirit “will take from what is mine and make it known to you.” Now, what has the Holy Spirit made known to you, out of the things of Jesus? Or what is there about Jesus that you have discovered, through your connection with the Spirit?

I don’t know whether this is really a good thing or not; but I find that as I get older, I have seen, over and over again, the same pattern taking shape. The pattern of my life is that anything of any importance has taken me a long, long time to achieve.

Some of the most basic parts of living have taken a lot longer for me than they normally take for anyone else. Tying my own shoes, riding a bike, driving a car all took me a lot longer than they normally take anyone else. I look at my personal history, and I see how I have tried my own patience, over and over again; to say nothing of the patience of others, but I have never, somehow, seemed to have tried the patience of God.

I learn that my life must be full of examples of the patience of God, or else I must go crazy. But I also find that the patience of God must be more than only a theory that I can talk about. After all, the patience of God could be nothing but a figment of my imagination, or my wishful thinking. That patience had been a gift that has worked and enabled me to serve God in a way that is a bit different from the gifts of others.

The Holy Spirit is the living, powerful, personal, supernatural connection between the patience of God and the story of my life. And, so, I believe that I could be a good and faithful witness of the patience of God.

If I don’t have that living, personal connection to the patience of God, then I will not be qualified as a witness to that patience. Patience is part of the grace of God. And, if I don’t have the Spirit-connection to that grace, I will not be very convincing.

For one thing, if I am not totally convinced of the grace of God, then I will not be convincingly gracious or patient in my words and my life. I will probably not give much grace to anyone who really needs it. Or, if my words and behavior are gracious and seemingly patient. Others will be able to see though me. My grace and patience will be strangely fragile, or else have a pretend quality to them.

Once, years ago, my dad said something that I thought was the most screwball idea I had ever heard from him, and I told him so. We argued for at least a half hour. I never lost patience with my dad’s ability to listen to reason, when reason was surely on my side. We went on and on and on with this and finally my Dad stopped, and looked me deep in the eyes, and said, “Son, the trouble with you is that you don’t know when to stop.” See how genuine he thought my patience was? (Ha!)

We are, none of us, perfect. That goes without saying. And so, people who have the Holy Spirit’s connection to the grace of God will have lapses and breakdowns of graciousness.

They will need yet more grace for themselves. And they will earnestly, and prayerfully, and repentantly turn to the Lord for that living connection to grace. But, if that is not there, it will become clear.

Does it sound odd to say that when we are being a witness to Jesus, in telling others what we know about him, then we are bearing witness to something that does not belong to us, because it is a gift?  Does it sound odd to say that this is how it is supposed to be? Scripture teaches us to call God “My God” and to call Jesus “My Lord.” But to call him “mine” or “yours” is a gift, and not a possession. It is this way, because what we have is a gift that we call a personal relationship.

You cannot possess a person. A relationship is always a gift.

            I think even being in touch with reality is a gift. We cannot take it for granted.

What we have is like a telephone connection, or an electrical connection. Sometimes, when you are on the phone, the connection goes dead. Suddenly you realize that you may very well have launched into some brilliant or very touching observations, and none of it was heard, because the connection went dead and you didn’t even notice.

Without your personal connection to the reality of Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, your connection with the patience, or the grace of God, may have gone dead, at least for the moment. You have to hang up and dial again. Or let the Spirit call you back.

What are you a witness to? What can you make known about Jesus and his Father, because of what the Spirit has brought home to you? Are you thoroughly connected to grace? Are you thoroughly connected to holiness? Are you thoroughly connected to the truth? Are you thoroughly connected with peace, or the servanthood of Christ, or the fellowship to which Christ calls us together?

Or, better yet, can you stand in the crowd that stands on a hill just outside Jerusalem, at the foot of the cross, with others who were the enemies of Jesus, or those who were indifferent to Jesus, or the friends who denied Jesus and ran away? 

Do you have a living, personal connection to that scene, and do you know that it happened for your salvation; that it happened to give you a new life?

Jesus implies that the Holy Spirit is a great connector. That is what he means when he says that the Spirit will witness, will testify, about him. And, since that is so, we are to testify, too. We are to make ourselves available as junior connectors to the Great Connector.

But it was not enough for the disciples to simply have been with Jesus from the start. They could have tried to be witnesses of the things they had seen, and heard, and experienced. But without the living, present connection, working within them, it would not be enough.

Remember that Jesus said the Spirit would be their new Counselor, their new Comforter? Jesus had been their first Counselor.

Part of Jesus’ job had always included explaining the disciple’s behavior and words to the people who were offended by them: like the time when the disciples walked through the wheat fields, and plucked grain on the Sabbath, or when they ate with unwashed hands.

Jesus had to make the connection between his friends who were trying to be his witnesses and the people they were supposed to be witnessing to. From now on, Jesus said, that would be the work of the Holy Spirit.

We need The Great Connector to do his great connecting between the people around us and ourselves. The miracle of the many languages of Pentecost was just as much a miracle of effective hearing as it was a miracle of effective speaking.

We need the Holy Spirit to graciously explain us and interpret us to others, because we do not often deserve to be understood or listened to. We need that grace first, in order to share the grace of God so radically given in Christ. The work that God has graciously assigned to us will always require his grace to make the real work happen.

And then, if we have this living connection with God’s reality, we will see God at work preparing connections with people, and we will do our best to be on the spot, when and where God is working.

To be in the Spirit is to live in a world that is full of connections in various stages of contact or unraveling. To be in the Spirit is to be amazed at the gaping need for connection with God, and the connection with love of God reaching out to those in need. This need is everywhere.

The test question is: Are you connected with this? And the question that goes along with it is: Can you stand in that crowd, at the foot of the cross, and know that that cross is the price paid in blood for you and paid in blood for the whole world?

You cannot be a witness of Jesus, carrying all our sins on the cross, without that living connection of the Holy Spirit to that cross.

And, still, this is what Jesus promises to give you, through his love and grace.

Things Invisible - The Secret Working of Goodness

Preached on Sunday, May 6, 2018

Scripture readings: 2 Kings 6:8-17; Mark 9:1-13

A pastor flew to the big city for a convention, and he got into one of the cabs at the airport. Right from the start, the pastor knew that he had chosen the wrong cab.

Driving along Crab Creek, Smyrna and Corfu, WA
March 2018

The cab was dirty and foul. The cabby was dirty and foul-mouthed. He drove like a maniac. On the way to the hotel the cabby ran a red light and the cab was broadsided by a truck. The cabby and the pastor were killed instantly, and they found themselves at the pearly gates of heaven. St. Peter met them there.

Peter greeted the cabby first. Peter knew him by name, and gave him a beautiful silk robe, a golden staff, and a crown. Then he opened those pearly gates and the cabby marched into heaven.

With the pastor, St. Peter had to search for his name in the book. Then he gave him a brown bathrobe, a wooden staff, and a seed cap.

The pastor was upset. “Why are you treating me like this? I’ve served the Lord all my life.  Why did the cabby get all the good things?”

St. Peter gave him this for an answer: “Up here we’re interested in results. When you preached, people slept. When that cabby drove, people prayed!”

The words we have read from the Bible don’t claim to show us heaven, but both of our readings show us something heavenly. They don’t show us the center of heaven, the throne of the Lord, and the joy and worship that never ceases.

They don’t answer the questions of what life would be like in heaven. (God’s word tells us nothing about that, anywhere.) But they show us what heaven is like when it reaches out to us. They show us a bit about how heaven enters our world and touches our lives, perhaps every day.

There is an unseen reality that surrounds us. The servant of Elisha, and the disciples with Jesus on the mountain, were allowed to see with their own eyes something that most of us are only allowed to see by faith.

They were allowed to see what the world is really like, what the world really is, because the earth is the footstool of God (Isaiah 66:1; Matthew 5:35). In the language of the Biblical world, heaven and earth are two parts of one single thing, which is the creation of God.

This world is really the threshold of heaven (or the threshold of both heaven and hell). The most real things in this world are the invisible things. And this is like the difference between a car, as seen by most drivers, and the same car as seen by the mechanic, or the mechanically inclined.

Most drivers probably see their car as a box of metal and plastic that rides on four wheels, and has places to sit on the inside, and a steering wheel to guide it, and a place to put in the gas. And it has an engine that we don’t usually even look at, unless something is wrong and, even then, we don’t know what we’re looking at.

The mechanic spends most of his time working with the hidden machinery inside the box. What to us is a sound or a silence, to the mechanic is something solid that is part of a system of systems that works together to make the car go.

What we don’t see in this world is the stuff hidden deep within the box. This is the stuff that really makes the world run. Inside the secret places, are the armies of angels and the generations of people who struggled, and believed, and have gone into that invisible half of creation ahead of us. And they are not just there minding their own business. And they are not just living their own lives.

They forget about themselves and they get joyfully involved in God’s business.

Many people today have a great interest in the angels, but they have very little curiosity about what the angels are most interested in. The angels (like those people who have gone ahead, before us) are most interested in worshiping and enjoying God and each other. And they equally enjoy life as they serve God, and serving God leads them back to us, to serve us. In Hebrews, it says: “Are not all angels ministering or serving spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14).

Those who are so interested in angels should realize that angels are not interested in themselves at all. They are too filled with praise and love to be interested in themselves.

There is so much going on, perhaps all around us, all the time. In the world, as the Bible tells it, you might be anywhere, minding your own business, and meet the Lord in a bush, or by the door of your own tent. If you were sleeping out doors and woke up at the right time you might see armies of angels passing by.

Even in the Bible this was very rare, but it was possible because it was the real world as we seldom see it. Jesus said that heaven is God’s throne, and God is everywhere. Jesus is always with us and Jesus shares the throne with his Father. And Jesus says: “I will be with you always.” (Matthew 28:20)

All the generations that have gone before us, and all the armies of angels with their fiery chariots, are as near to us as God is. They are God’s people and God’s army playing their part in the Lord’s plan and purpose. But that is invisible to us most of the time

In the visible world, Elisha, the disciple of Elijah, was a man often in danger, and here he was trapped by the Syrian army. In our visible world, Jesus was a wonder working carpenter; and that’s what everybody saw when they bothered looking at hi..

In our visible world the truth is that things are not always what they seem to be. The unseen reality has always been much different. And yet nobody could see it without special help.

The fact that the Lord is here now, and that the Lord is working now, is usually absolutely invisible to us, but sometimes we are given a gift, and our eyes are opened, and then we can see what we usually aren’t allowed to see. Lord, open our eyes!

We are surrounded by an unseen glory.

Elisha, and his servant, and the disciples of Jesus were surrounded by a glory they did not know how to see.

Jesus was surrounded by a glory he was very familiar with. He was the one shining with glory. The glory came from him. Jesus was the one showing himself to his friends as he truly was.

What he was giving them was sort of a temporarily confidential secret, at least for the near future. What they saw was given to them to help them, because things were not going to get easier for them. It was Jesus’ way of taking care of them before the bad turn up ahead.

It was like a big, deep bear-hug you would give to your child.

As for Elisha, apart from the fact that the chariots of fire were there for his protection, the servant saw them as if God had his arms around Elisha. They were the Lord’s love.

The unseen truth is that everyone you know (or don’t know) is just as likely to be surrounded by chariots of fire as Elisha was. The truth is that, if God had a wallet, he would have your picture in it. God would carry your children’s pictures in his wallet too.

Well, you must realize that God would have everyone’s picture in his wallet. That would make a very big wallet, and that’s probably why God doesn’t have a wallet. He carries everyone’s picture in his heart instead.

We are surrounded by an unseen power.

In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses said to his people, “The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” (33:27) They couldn’t see it but it was true.

Elisha told his servant the truth, ‘Don’t be afraid, “Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.”’ 

On the mountain, Moses and Elijah were talking with Jesus. Luke’s gospel tells us more plainly what they were talking about. They were talking about Jesus’ departure which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem. But the Greek word for departure in that verse is the same Greek word as the title of the Book of Exodus. They were talking about Jesus’ exodus.

When Jesus’ departure happened, it looked exactly like death by torture on a cross. It was a terrible thing to see. Everything about the cross told the story of Jesus’ failure; Jesus’ utter and brutal defeat.

But all of that horror and pain were only the reality of things as the people around the cross saw it. The visible reality, as they perceived it, made some of the people there laugh, or taunt. Or it made them angry. Or it made them despair. Or it simply made them weep. The visible reality, as they perceived it was not true.

The unseen reality was completely different. The unseen reality was Jesus the pioneer, blazing the trail that all of his people would follow. The exodus trail of Jesus is our way to the promised land. The exodus trail of Jesus permanently divides the red sea of death. Jesus’ trail makes the desert of sin into a valley of springs. The narrow path is a park where manna bread falls from the sky.

Of course, when it came time to happen, it wouldn’t look anything like an exodus. It looked horrible. It looked like a crucifixion: one of the worst ways to die.

Moses and Elijah were talking to Jesus about the cross, and the nails, and the tomb.
The cross was the visible side of an invisible power. The cross is the strategy which Jesus used to capture us and change us: if we would be willing to receive it.

The cross held the invisible power to crack the barriers of this universe, in order to create it new. The cross would make heaven and earth (the home places of angels and humans into new places. The cross would bring heaven and earth together into one place where the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit would dwell with all his creatures.

The cross holds the invisible power to tell us we are loved and there will be no more tragedies, no more sorrows, no more griefs. The cross is the power that fights our enemies: fear, hatred, discouragement, sin.

            The Lord’s gifts to his people are often visible signs of an invisible power and grace. They look like one thing to our eyes of flesh and blood. They are a completely different reality, spiritually.

When we sing and pray and listen to God word read and preached, the grey carpet in this room turns into holy ground. But you’ve also got holy ground at home and, next door, your neighbor’s floors are holy ground: or they can be.

Quiet, with your heads bowed, and with your hands folded or raised, aliens from another planet might not suspect what to make of you when you pray, but the invisible reality is that you are standing around God’s throne singing thanks for God’s answers to your prayers.

The Lord’s Supper looks like bread and juice, the invisible reality is that Jesus is feeding us with himself: with all that he is and with all that he has done for us. It’s a heavenly feast served with unending pitchers of wine.

The water of baptism looks like whatever flows from your faucet or whatever you swim in at the river. The invisible reality is that it is much more like the river of life that flows from the throne of God in the new Jerusalem come down from heaven.

The stories of Elisha and the chariots, and Jesus and the transfiguration sound like miracles, and maybe they are, only they are the rare opportunities that come and allow us to see the real rules of the universe behind the visible, measurable reality that we take for granted. Miracles don’t break the rules of nature. Miracle obey the simple rules of the part of nature we usually don’t see, even though that reality surrounds us all the time and never goes away.

Every human being on this earth is the same kind of miracle. All the human beings who have ever lived, or those who ever will live, have the potential to be more than they appear to be. Even now they may be resisting, or they may be in the process of becoming, like the riders of those fiery chariots. Even more, they may be resisting, or struggling, or in the process of becoming, like our Lord Jesus when his friends could see him shining like tender, loving lightening.

Everyone you know is made to shine, and you are the ones who know the truth. You are the ones who can go to others in your God-given light and be just a little part of a whole choir of light with which the Lord surrounds each and every unknowing, unsuspecting person around you.

You can be God’s gift and serve God’s purpose to make that invisible light and power to come on for them forever. Let’s think and pray to find the ways to work and to live it, and the ways to speak and to share it, that God in his grace can use to make that invisible world visible in this one.

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)