The Light Has Come: Glory!

1st Sunday of Advent

A funny story related by a Sunday School teacher speaks of the mindset we sometimes have at church. The Sunday School teacher—playing a game with the kids before the lesson started—asked, “What is brown and furry, sits in a tree, and eats nuts?” One of the children frowned and said, “It sounds like a squirrel, but it has to be Jesus!”

During Advent, our usual temptation is to take all of the usual Advent verses and prophecies and see Jesus as the answer in all of them. However, prophecy (like the hymn says) is supposed to be “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.” Let us not overlook the meaning the prophecies had at the time the prophecies were first uttered; therein lies strength for today.

Isaiah 60:1-3

Commentary

The NIV heading for this chapter is “The Glory of Zion,” which is slightly incorrect. Glory is the thing in which one revels and places one’s trust. The light, the glory, is God—God at work in such an utterly profound way that even pagans take note and draw near. On the other hand, the NIV heading is ironic, for it is the bane of humans to take the work of God in the world and revel in the work (and the way in which they perceive to have wrought the work by their own hands) and forget about the real glory.

Application

Glory! Frederick Buechner in The Magnificent Defeat describes it in part:

"Once upon a time." How many fantastic tales start with the words, "Once upon a time!” Maybe my story should have begun, "Once upon a time, in the town of Nazareth, an angel came to earth to speak to a virgin; and the virgin's name was Mary."

Like all stories, there is a time when the action begins, and therefore a time before the action begins, when it is coming but not yet here. There is a time of staid sameness—and after the action begins, a moment in which that sameness is about to disappear forever. For me and my story, the moment was when the Gabriel came to me. He said to me, "Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!" But I was greatly troubled at his speech, at what this greeting might portend.

It was a moment frozen in time. I stopped dead in my tracks, and the whole world seemed to hold its breath . . . But that is only part of the truth, because when angels draw near, as they do, the earth begins to shake under our feet, as it began to shake under mine. Instead of everything standing still and sure, suddenly nothing was standing still and everything was unsure. Something new and shattering was breaking through into the old. Something was trying to be born. And the old was going to have to give way to the new, and there is agony in the process as well as joy, just as there is agony in the womb as it labors and contracts to bring forth the new life.

There is a moment in our lives, a moment when we see something, something that has never existed anywhere in the world. A world where, " 'The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox, and dust shall be the serpent's food. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain,' says the Lord." Those are Isaiah's words for it. Words of poetry. There is a moment in our lives, when we see the world we were created to live in standing in stark contrast to the world we do live in. Two worlds, two possibilities, side by side, two worlds that contradict each other and are always at war. One world tries to take the vision for what has never existed, and bring it to life! The price we must pay to bring it to life, is death; but even death does not seem too high a price to pay for life, new life. And yet at the same time, the other world entices us to settle for just a smidge less, where the serpent gets a little more than dust to eat, and the lion is allowed an occasional taste of blood. We fend off the perfect and settle for the imperfect, because in each of us there is that which wants to live for our self and not for our brother. We fend off the perfect, because we know in our terrible wisdom that the price we must pay for perfection is death, the death of self and all the values of self, the death that must take place before new life can come.

This is what Gabriel had come to announce, and I stood there as still as life, as still as a painting, even as the my world trembled and quaked and fell apart even as he said, "Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you!" I was deathly still even as I heard him say, "Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name ..."

But I already knew his name before Gabriel said it, just as we knew his name, and you know his name now, because the child who was going to be born is whom all the world's history and all of our own histories have been laboring to bring forth. And I knew it would be no ordinary birth. For this imperfect world could not give birth to him—only God. Only God could bring the other world into ours, and that is why the angel said, "The child to be born will be called the Son of God."

Here at the end, let me give you the parable for your time. It is a peculiar parable—almost too awful to tell, about a teenage boy who, in a fit of crazy rage, killed his father. When he was taken to court, they asked him why he killed his father, and he said he did it because he could not stand his father, because his father demanded too much of him, because his father was always after him, because he hated his father. Then later, when he was put in jail, the jailer heard sounds from the boy's cell late one night. In the dark, the boy was sobbing, "I want my father! I want my father!"

Our Father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is here. He is coming: not for revenge; not for justice; simply because we are crying out in the dark. He is coming. Our Father is the one about to be born, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Glory is best seen where God breaks into the imperfect and we realize that we cannot go back to the way life used to be. Poetry breaks into the pedestrian; the extraordinary breaks into the ordinary; the sacred breaks into the mundane.

We work on self-improvement; we try makeovers, diets, the latest fads; we say that we will do anything to get a better life. However, on our own, we settle for a new & improved model of the imperfect. Only God can bring the perfect—on our on we cannot give birth to it. However, we can make room for the perfect to appear. Will you make room for Jesus this season?

Points to Ponder

We try to manufacture a great holiday season, but as Buechner says, “in each of us there is that which wants to live for our self and not for our brother.” What baggage do we carry with us into each Advent season that we would be better off to jettison?

Faith & Politics: Running with Horses

The tension between the sacred and the profane, the saint and the pagan comes down to this:  Why does the way of the wicked prosper?

Sometimes God’s justice seems a long time coming! Sometimes evil seems to run amok—especially in a secular society where God seems to have been shunted aside. Other times—e.g. with Nebuchadnezzar—God says that the pagan is his chosen instrument. Frequently the righteous suffer, frequently the faithful have to live by faith in a better day to come—but why?

Jeremiah 12:1-5

Commentary

v1  John Calvin says of this verse: … this is the view which interpreters take of this passage; that is, that he was disturbed with the prosperous condition of the wicked, and expostulated with God … but he appears to me to have something higher in view. We have said elsewhere, that when the Prophets saw that they spent their labor in vain on the deaf and the intractable, they turned their addresses to God as in despair. I hence doubt not but that it was a sign of indignation when the Prophet addressed God, having as it were given up men, inasmuch as he saw that he spoke to the deaf without any benefit … hence he now addresses God himself, as though he had said, that he would have nothing more to do with them, as he had labored wholly in vain. This then seems to have been the object of the Prophet.

the faithless. A literal translation is “all the cloakers of cloaking.” The Septuagint says “all who prevaricate prevarications.” The faithless are the hypocrites who do what they want behind a veil of hypocrisy.

v3  sheep to be butchered. Calvin says: We may also learn from this passage—that when the ungodly accumulate wealth, they are in a manner fattened … when any one intends to prepare sheep or oxen for the slaughter, he fattens them. So then the feeding of them is nothing else than the fattening of them; and the fattening of them is a preparation for their slaughter. I have therefore said that a very useful doctrine is included in this form of speaking; for when we see that plenty of wealth and power abound with the ungodly and the despisers of God, we see that they are in a manner thus fined with good things, that they may grow fat—it is fattening or cramming. Let us then not bear it in that they are thus covered with their own fatness, for they are prepared for the day of slaughter.

v5  This is the beginning of God’s response, which continues for several chapters. The gist of the verse is, “If you are anxious when life is easy, but will you do when life gets really hard?”

Application

What will we do when life gets really hard? Consider the implications of the question:
There is a struggle going on, but it is not the one with which we consume our thoughts. In both martial arts and military tactics, a feint attack is a real, but diversionary, attack that draws the defender’s attention to one area when the real attack is coming from somewhere else. When one focuses on the feint, the real attack—camouflaged by the feint—is all the more destructive. The defender is caught off-guard and is unprepared.

life is going to get hard;

the hard life is part of God’s plan for us now and in the future;

thus our current situation—the stuff we’re whining about—is not supposed to be our real concern.

In Ephesians 6:12, Paul says, “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” The feint is our struggle against flesh and blood. For Jeremiah, the struggles against flesh and blood were numerous: God had commanded him not to marry and raise children (Jer. 16:1-4); God had commanded him not to go to feasts (Jer. 16:5-13); God had commanded him to warn the rulers about the impending conquering armies, which made Jeremiah an unpopular “prophet of doom;” likewise, by counseling the Jewish rulers to submit to the Babylonian captivity, Jeremiah had been branded a traitor. No wonder Jeremiah has been called the weeping prophet!

Jeremiah’s “light and momentary troubles” (2 Cor. 4:17) had the potential to divert him from the real struggle: the proclamation of the advance of God’s kingdom. Jeremiah’s real struggle was not whether he got to “sit with revelers” (Jer. 15:17) or whether those lousy kings of Judah prospered or failed. Rather, Jeremiah’s real struggle was a matter of the heart. Would he remain faithful to God? Would he persevere, or give up? Jeremiah asked:

Why is my pain unending
and my wound grievous and incurable?
Will you be to me like a deceptive brook,
like a spring that fails? (Jer. 15:18)

And God answered:

If you repent, I will restore you
that you may serve me;
if you utter worthy, not worthless, words,
you will be my spokesman.
Let this people turn to you,
but you must not turn to them.

I will make you a wall to this people,
a fortified wall of bronze;
they will fight against you
but will not overcome you,
for I am with you
to rescue and save you. (Jer. 15:19-20)

For us, the struggles are similar. Will we be distracted by the feints—work, family, and worldly pressures—or will we remain faithful to God? God’s answer to us is the same as his answer to Jeremiah: If you repent, I will restore you that you may serve me ... for I am with you to rescue you and save you.

Points to Ponder

There is no time of year when the feints are more poignant, more apparent, than in our preparations for Christmas. What is the point of the Christmas season if not to prepare to receive Jesus in our hearts? However, by what feints do we always get distracted? How does Jer. 15:18-20 suggest what we should approach the season?

Faith & Politics: A Word on Martyrdom”

G.K. Chesterton said:  Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been tried and found hard.

Do you agree or disagree?

What does Chesterton mean that “it has been tried and found hard?”

Living in the world as a Christian can be hard. The world is happy for us to be like everyone else, but we know that we have been called to something different. As I said last week, we have been called to be a blessing to the world.

Certainly Christianity cannot be sampled as one samples morsels from a big box of chocolates: “I only like milk chocolate and I don’t like nuts, so give me this one, not that one.” Rather, Christianity requires complete surrender of one’s life to God, and one cannot fully understand Christian spirituality without surrender.

Alternately, the successful Christian cannot succeed on one’s own power, the power for success comes from the Spirit of God, and God’s Spirit only comes to us after we surrender to God. The nominal Christian who tries to do what Jesus would do without surrendering first to God has no power and will find the way hard indeed.

Finally, Christianity requires a complete rework of one’s thoughts and attitudes. Basic terms like love and forgiveness take on new meanings for Christians—e.g. “You have heard love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I say to you love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:43-44) The fantasy is that Christianity would be great if one could live in a Christian enclave, away from the world; however, our call is to live in the world, to engage the world, and make a difference in the world.

1 Peter 2:13-25

Commentary

The context for today’s passage is the two verses immediately before
Today’s verses are an exposition of what it means to live such good lives!

Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us. (v11-12)

v13  submit … for the Lord’s sake. Our submission is a offering we give to God.

v15  it is God’s will [to] silence the talk of foolish men. Making a difference in the world begins by winning the hearts and minds of the people.

v18  Slaves. Before the Civil War, this verse was used to justify slavery in the South, but the theme through NT is to urge people to remain in the relationships they were in—just or unjust—before becoming Christians. (Eph. 5:22-6:9; Col. 3-18-4:1; 1Tim. 6:1-2).

v19-20  unjust suffering. This is the suffering of the Christian martyr; the one who deserves punishment is no martyr!

v21  to this you were called … you should follow. We think of Christ’s martyrdom as paying a price for our sins. Could it be that there is redemptive power in our martyrdom as well? We cannot pay for the sins of another, but just as Jesus broke the power of death and sin by dying, so we break the lies that people labor under by following Jesus’ steps as a martyr.

Application

As I noted before, when I started this sermon series, urging you (like the captives in Babylon) to seek the peace of the place where you live, Priscilla asked, “I understand all that. But aren’t we sometimes to resist? Should the Germans have not hidden the Jews during the war?” Of course they should have hidden the Jews. However, instead of trying to make heroes out of the German citizens, let us consider a different class of people: the millions of martyrs who were arrested the killed (at the concentration camps, or elsewhere).

Perhaps you have been to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.—if you have not, I strongly encourage you to go. The museum is a testament to all the martyrs—Jews and Gentiles alike—who died at the hands of the Nazis. While the term Holocaust is commonly used to refer to the Nazi systematic murder of over 6 million Jews, they also tried to eliminate other ethnic, racial, and religious groups, including: gypsies, Poles, Soviet citizens, Soviet POWs, Catholics, homosexuals, the handicapped, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, bringing the total number of non-combatants killed by the Nazis as high as 17 million. The Holocaust Museum is not just a memorial to the dead Jews, but rather to all those persecuted and killed by the Nazis.

When I went to the museum, one of the most moving moments was when my children, my nieces, and nephews met a Holocaust survivor who had come to visit the museum. The woman—in her seventies, at least—showed the children the number tattooed on her arm. She described the living conditions, her brutal treatment, and the hopelessness of her situation. All of the children were in tears. The woman was so kind, so gentle—strangely she was not judgmental. Rather, the story told itself; the moral presented itself; and the children learned a powerful lesson without her telling them what they needed to learn.

What is World War II without the Holocaust? Hitler is still a crazy megalomaniac who needs to be taken down; millions will still die taking him down. However, at the end of the war, does everyone speak with one voice, saying, “We must make sure this never happens again!”? World War I was originally called The Great War, and the War to End All Wars; but everyone was wrong, for the Second World War began barely twenty years later. The slaughter of the innocents was so dastardly that Jews and non-Jews alike agreed that such power and such genocide should never be allowed to happen again. In the 60+ years since, the world has seen plenty of wars, but the wars have been regional conflicts; moreover, genocide—the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge, the Second Sudanese Civil War, the persecution of ethnic minorities in Iraq or the former Yugoslavia—has not been allowed to continue. In a world without the Holocaust, perhaps some of these conflicts mushroom into world-consuming wars; however, in a world with the Holocaust, evil still persists—it always will—but it is constrained at a price paid by the millions of Holocaust victims.

This is what martyrdom does. Martyrdom, by definition, never sees justice in its own time. Jesus dies on a cross; 17 million die at the hands of the Nazis; 240 years of slaves in America die in slavery; later generations of black Americans are forced to live as 2nd-class citizens under the lie of “separate, but equal.” Martyrs, by their suffering, expose the injustice in oppressive systems in such stark terms that others—sometimes even the oppressors—say, “Stop! This cannot be allowed to continue.” The centurion at the cross—the commander of execution squad—says, “Surely this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39). The Allies’ Nuremberg Trials and subsequent courts judge the Nazis for their war crimes. 6% of all males in the Northern States, aged 13-43, die during the Civil War to free the slaves. During the American Civil Rights Movement, Jews and other minorities demonstrate for the rights “coloreds,” and National Guard troops ensure that court orders desegregating schools are followed. However, none of this happens without the martyrs who pay the price to make others take notice.

You too are called to be a martyr. It may be as innocuous as being held up to ridicule; it may cost you financially; it may cost you your family; it may cost you your life. Our society gives us the message daily, “Do what is in your own best interest, and stand up for your rights,” but Jesus says, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Through these actions, and by God’s Spirit, you will change the world.

Points to Ponder

Martyrdom may start with something as simple as forgiving somebody whom has hurt you badly, but to the one who can suffer injustice in small things Jesus says, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things!” (Matt. 25:21).

Faith & Politics: True Separation of Church & State

Last week (“Faith and Politics: Seek the Peace of Where You Are”) I said that Jeremiah’s advice to those contemplating rebellion against the Babylonian king was to submit to the yoke of subjugation to the king, because the pagan king was God’s chosen instrument for that time. Jeremiah encouraged them—even in captivity in Babylon—to seek the peace of that place, for if Babylon prospered, they would prosper.


Towards the end of the sermon, Priscilla asked, “But what about something like Nazi Germany? Surely it was right to hide the Jews! Surely we should not have collaborated with the Nazis!” Today’s sermon is a step towards addressing Priscilla’s concern.


Matthew 22:15-22


Commentary


v15-16  Politics makes strange bedfellows. Here the Herodians (supporters of the half-breed King Herod, the puppet-king installed by the Romans) and the Pharisees (pious legalists) conspire together to trap Jesus. If Jesus advocates sedition by refusing to pay the tax, the Herodians will be offended. If Jesus advocates capitulation by paying the tax, the Pharisees will be scandalized.


v20  Whose portrait ... whose inscription? Tiberius was Caesar when this event occurred, so most likely the coin bore the image of Tiberius and the words "Caesar Augustus Tiberius, the son of the divine Augustus." In addition to despising the Roman occupation of Judah, the Pharisees considered the coin (the required coin for paying the tribute) blasphemous.


v21  Jesus' words have posed a riddle for Christians through the ages. Some have read into Jesus' words a separation of church and state; others see it as commanding respect for worldly authority; others claim it demands rendering everything over to God. (Wikipedia has a great overview of the range of opinions at "Render Unto_Caesar".)


Application


Consider the context of the words. Jesus will shortly be arrested, tortured, put on trial, and killed by the minions of Caesar. Jesus will submit to Caesar without a word in his defense. He will do nothing to prevent the government from forcibly imposing its will. Certainly in his arrest, trial, and death, Jesus is obedient to his Father—rendering unto God what is God's—but that includes submitting to government reprisal when his actions run afoul of what the government desires. This is the heart of civil disobedience. Jesus' counsel in the face of what is about to happen to him is profound. Jesus pays taxes to a government that turns around and executes him—talk about seeing your tax dollars at work! It suggests that we do not go far enough in submission to the authorities that (as we learned last week) are God's chosen instruments.


Priscilla's question was, "What about the Nazis?" Nazis and fascists have been so demonized by historians that we have forgotten that—prior to World War II—the Roosevelt New Deal administration held up fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as progressive models that America should follow. A famous, and telling, defense of Mussolini was that, "He made the trains run on time," while early Nazi Germany was hailed for its advances in universal health care, senior care, organic foods, and cancer research (all this for pure-blood Aryans, at least). No government is so corrupt as to not care for at least a portion of its citizens, and no government is so benevolent as to care for all its citizens as it should. [1]


However, the problem comes when government oversteps its boundaries and claims the place of God. We see this in Caesar's claim to be divine, or Nazi Germany's mix of radical nationalism & racism. We cannot give our trust, our souls, to anything but God—that is idolatry. Therefore submitting to an immoral law is indefensible; Germans must hide the Jews. However, when we refuse to give to the government that which it cannot have and the government punishes us, we must submit. As Jesus said:

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew 10:28).

Points to Ponder


We can see the boundaries overstepped by Caesar or the Nazis. What boundaries have been overstepped by our own national, state, and municipal governments?


On the other hand, even if we disagree with the laws of the government, can we submit to giving the government what it is due?


If you think abortion is wrong, but it is allowed by the government, would Jesus say it is OK to bomb abortion clinics?


If you think war is wrong, would Jesus say it is OK to protest the war? Would Jesus say it is OK to riot?


If Mainers vote to allow gay marriage next week, would Jesus say that is sufficient reason to disengage with society and hold up in church?


Many Christians believe that the mark of the beast in Revelation has something to do with money or the ability to conduct commerce (Revelation 13:17-18). If a world government came along and ordered a world currency, would Jesus say it is OK not to give to the government what it is due?


Read The Declaration of Independence. Would its authors agree or disagree with Jesus?


End Notes


1- This is why the founding fathers believed in checks and balances to mitigate or rectify the “train of abuses” that are bound to occur when government oversteps its bounds. Nevertheless, our fathers said, we should suffer the evils which are sufferable:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. (The Declaration of Independence)