Tag: Advent
0 ‘We went back and did some research. Turns out the whole virgin birth thing…’
This week for our ‘Questions about Christmas’ sermon series I’ll be doing a sort of Midrash in the Moment. Randomly selecting your questions and answering them in the time allowed. It’ll be a little off the cuff and a little different than a normal worship service. Hopefully it’ll be fun and edifying too and if not…Dennis gets back soon.
Anyway, every Christmas season and I mean EVERY CHRISTMAS SEASON people ask me about the Virgin Birth and/or tell me they bite their tongue during that part of the Creed.
So I expect to get Virgin Birth questions this Sunday.
Here’s a great, hilarious and insightful spin on how some of our beliefs and scriptures can sound loony to a skeptic. It’s from Mr Deity which all of you should know….This is worth 3.5 mins of your time.
For the denser among us….the guy in the goatee, Mr Deity, is Yahweh. ‘Jesse’ is Jesus and Larry the neurotic OCD character is the Holy Spirit.
2 What Kind of Bedtime Story Do You Tell The Incarnate Deity?
Chalk this one down as Worst Sermon Ever.
I’ve already mentioned here before how my Advent and Christmas sermons are generally panned. The Advent ones for being too obscure. The Christmas ones for resisting sentimentality.
Here’s one I wrote based on the Book of Ruth. In case you don’t know, Ruth’s story finds its way into Jesus’ family tree in Matthew’s Gospel. I tried to imagine the Holy Family telling her story to the little Jesus.
It’s my favorite of the sermons I’ve written….but still everyone else votes ‘Worst Sermon Ever.’
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‘Your father and I read this story at our wedding,’ the young mother told her little boy. And when the boy asked why, his father told him that it was tradition. ‘It’s a love story,’ he said.
The lights from the menorah on the window sill made the boy’s dark room glow. The light of the candles danced off the colored Hanukah decorations. The smells of holiday food lingered in the house. Mary and Joseph were curled up with their little boy.
He’d taken the old, black family bible from its shelf in his room, and it now rested on his lap just as he sat on his mother’s lap. The bible was the kind with the thick, special paper in the front, the kind with gilt lines to fill in important dates: marriages, births, baptisms and, beneath those, lots of lines to sketch the family tree.
Mary had filled in the family tree before she was even properly married, before she started to show. At the time she’d been confused by a great many things, but she absolutely knew that one day it would be important for her boy to know: where he came from, who is ancestors were, and what kind of person they made him.
And so, every night before his parents’ kiss and lullaby, they would read him a story from the bible, a story about one of those names his mother had written on the front, cream-colored page of Joseph’s family bible.
He would point with his little boy finger at one of the names on the family tree. ‘Tell me a story about that one’ he would say. He was just a boy. He liked the adventure stories the best- the stories with action and danger, stories where God spoke like thunder or moved like fire and wind, stories like those of Abraham and Jacob and, of course, David- the boy who would be king.
But on this night the boy pointed to a different name, one he hadn’t pointed to before. ‘Tell me a story about that one.’ And his mother smiled and looked over at her husband. ‘We read this story at our wedding,’ she said. ‘It’s a love story.’ The boy looked skeptically at his mother as she began…
A long, long time ago, in the days when judges ruled… famine struck the whole land that God had promised his people. The stomachs of God’s people were grumbling and empty. Even in Bethlehem where you were born people went hungry.
There was a man on your father’s side of the family named Elimelech. Elimelech had a family and, like everyone else in the land, his family was starving.
‘What did he do?’ the little boy asked, ‘did God provide bread from heaven like in the story of Moses?’
And his mother said, no, not like that. Elimelech had to look out for his family so one night he and his wife and their two sons packed only what they could carry. In the cover of darkness, they snuck across the border and crossed through the muddy river into a new country, Moab.
Elimelech’s wife was a woman named Naomi. ‘Naomi means ‘sweetness,’ said the boy’s father, ‘but Naomi was anything but sweet.’
The little boy asked why that was and his father told him that no sooner did Elimelech’s family arrive in Moab than Elimelech died and Naomi was left alone with her two sons. A widow’s life is hard his mother explained. Don’t ever forget that.
At first things went well for Naomi. Her sons married two girls from Moab, Orpah and Ruth. They weren’t Jewish girls so their marriages would’ve been forbidden back in Bethlehem, but they were happy. Naomi’s boys were married happily for ten years. They had food and money and work. After ten years both of Naomi’s boys died. Just like that, no one knows why.
And poor Naomi, she always worried in the back of her mind that they died because God was punishing her for something, perhaps for letting her boys marry unbelievers.
‘But God doesn’t do things like that, does he?’ the boy asked. No, his mother said, God doesn’t do that and she kissed the top of his head.
But Naomi felt she was being punished. She was left with two daughters-in-law, in a country where she didn’t belong, in a man’s world with no man, no husband, no sons.
‘What does she do?’ the boy asked. Naomi decided to return home, to go back to Bethlehem. ‘All by her self?’ he asked. An uncertain future seemed better to her than what she could expect if she stayed in Moab. So she packed up her things- again just what she needed- along with a photo of her husband and boys, and after her sons were buried, numb with grief, she just started walking… towards home.
‘Is that the story?’ the boy wanted to know.
No, his mother said and looked at the lights in the window. You see, her sons’ wives followed behind her. At first Naomi simply thought they wanted to say goodbye, to wave to her as she disappeared over the horizon. When they got to the outskirts of town, though, Naomi realized they weren’t just seeing her off. Orpah and Ruth, she realized, intended to stay with her, to go with Naomi all the long way back to Israel, back to Bethlehem.
‘Well, did they?’ the boy wanted to know. Not exactly, his mother replied. First Naomi turned around and yelled at them. She yelled at Ruth and Orpah. She told them to turn around, to turn back, to go home to their own families.
They didn’t belong with her. In her country they’d just be foreigners. They wouldn’t be welcome. I’m very grateful for you, Naomi told Ruth and Orpah; I pray that God would give you happiness and husbands. But go.
Ruth and Orpah, they just stood there- stubborn. Naomi yelled at them again, but she was really yelling at God. When Naomi was done cursing, she fell down weeping, crying in the middle of the road with traffic going by.
That was when Orpah decided to do as her mother-in-law asked. She gave her dead husband’s mother a long embrace and picked up her bags and walked back into town.
But Ruth, your great….grandmother, she wouldn’t budge. She wouldn’t leave Naomi to fend for herself. She just planted her feet in the dirt and put her hands on her hips and told Naomi that wherever Naomi went Ruth would be going too, wherever Naomi lived Ruth would be living there too, and the place Naomi died would be where Ruth would die.
Ruth, your great…grandma, she was willing to leave behind her home, family, country, even her religion just to care for someone else.
And God never told Ruth to risk all this. She never had a special word of calling like Abraham, never a vision like Moses, no dream like Jacob.
‘God really speaks to people in their dreams?’ the boy asked. Yes, he does, said the boy’s father.
Ruth and Naomi walked the long walk to Bethlehem in silence. Naomi didn’t speak a word until she introduced herself to the people they met in Bethlehem, but she didn’t say that her name was Naomi. Call me ‘Mara’ she told people.
‘Why would she change her name?’ the little boy asked. Mara means bitterness; Naomi was convinced that her life was already over. Remember, a widow’s life is hard. God’s Kingdom should belong to them. Don’t ever forget that. ‘I won’t,’ the boy promised.
Ruth and Naomi found a place to live in Bethlehem. Nothing fancy, not even nice, but Ruth tried to make the best of it. Naomi though just sat in the dark corner of the apartment and stared blankly through her tears and through the window. Ruth had promised to take care of Naomi and she wasn’t about to quit.
They still had no food so, after they settled, Ruth went out to the fields to scavenge what the harvesters left behind. She didn’t know it at the time, but the fields belonged to a rich man named Boaz. Boaz was family to Naomi.
Every day Ruth left to scavenge for food and every day she came home to Naomi’s bitter quiet. But one day, everything started to change.
One day, the same as any other, Ruth was working the fields, looking for leftovers.
On that day, Boaz came out to look over his property and check on his workers. He said hello and thanked them. Then he saw someone he didn’t recognize bent over at the edge of the field, a woman. He pointed to Ruth out in the distance and he asked his foreman: ‘Who is she?’
And his foreman told him all about Ruth and how much Ruth loved her bitter mother-in-law and how Ruth had risked everything to care for her.
Boaz listened to the foreman’s story, and later that day he walked out to the edge of the field. He said hello to Ruth. Then he did a strange thing.
‘What?’ the boy asked. He urged Ruth to scavenge only in his fields. He promised her that his men would never bother her and that they would even leave extra grain behind for her. Ruth stood in the sun and listened to Boaz tell her all of this.
Now, for the first time since her husband had died, it was Ruth’s turn to cry. She fell down at Boaz’s feet and wept and she told him that she was just a foreigner, that she deserved rejection not kindness.
Boaz just smiled gently and he said softly: ‘May God reward the love you’ve shown Naomi.’
When Ruth returned home that day, she told Naomi everything that happened with Boaz.
For the first time, Naomi pulled her wistful eyes away from the window and she said, almost like she’d been holding her breath for a great long while: ‘Bless you!’
When she said it, Ruth didn’t know whether Naomi was talking to her or to God.
‘Is that it?’ the boy wondered aloud, thinking it not nearly as exciting a story as David and Goliath.
No, his mother said. Nothing else happened to Ruth or Naomi for a while. Then one morning Naomi burst into Ruth’s bedroom and she told her that that day Boaz would be winnowing barley with his workers. Its long work, Naomi explained.
The whole town will be there to help. It’s like a festival. There’ll be food and music and dancing and wine, lots of wine, she said with knowing eyes.
Ruth still looked puzzled so Naomi grabbed her by the shoulders and told Ruth to take off the black clothes she’d been wearing since her husband died. Go take a long shower, Naomi told her. And when you’re done anoint your whole body with perfume and then put on a nice dress. You need to look beautiful in every way.
And when Ruth asked why, Naomi told her what she was to do.
That night, after the day’s work and the evening’s party, Boaz wouldn’t be going home. Instead he’d be sleeping in his barn. You’re to go to him, Naomi told Ruth. Go to him and lie down next to him.
‘What did Ruth say?” asked the boy. ‘Probably something like: let it be with me according to your word,’ his mother answered. Whatever Ruth said, she did everything Naomi told her. When she snuck into the barn that night, the band was still playing outside and Boaz was already fast asleep in the hay.
Before Ruth lay down in the straw next to Boaz, she tried to take off his shoes for him. She woke him up. I imagine he was surprised, said the boy’s mother.
When Boaz startled awake, he asked Ruth what she was doing there. And Ruth blushed and panicked. Naomi had told her what to do, but not what to say.
‘What did she say?’ the boy asked.
Ruth told him that if he really wanted to care for her, if he really prayed that God would reward her kindness to Naomi, if he really wanted to help her care for Naomi, then he would marry her.
‘She asked him to marry her?’ the boy asked surprised.
Yes, and Boaz said yes. And he let Ruth sleep there next to him that night.
In the morning, before the sun came up or anyone else awoke, Boaz told Ruth to meet him that afternoon at the gateway that led into town. That’s where he would marry her.
And before Ruth left that early morning, Boaz gave her a gift of barley. He helped load the bag of barley onto her back. Your great-grandma Ruth, she always told people that that morning, helping her with the barley, was the first time they ever touched.
Mary could see that her boy was drifting asleep. So they married, she concluded. And they had a boy named Obed. And he became King David’s grandfather, and, without them, you might not be here with us…
Joseph crept up and blew out the lights on the menorah, and Mary tucked her little boy into bed. And with half open eyes, the little boy said that God wasn’t even in that story. God didn’t say anything or do anything or appear to anyone.
And Mary kissed the word made flesh on the forehead and she said that sometimes God’s love is revealed to us in our love for one another.
Sometimes God is in the person right in front of you. That’s what the story’s about, she said.
And of all the people in the world, only Mary knew just how true that was.
2 What Really P*%^#$ Off Me About Saint Nicholas
Look, I’ve got no beef with Santa Claus (here pictured in his original likeness as a 4th century bishop in Turkey).
I’ve got no beef with the red-faced, portly merry version of Santa either. I’m not one of these robotronic, literalist Christians who think everything not explicitly spelled out in the bible is pagan. You know, the ones who protested the first Harry Potter movie for promoting witchcraft? Talk about picking a losing cultural argument.
So, no, no problem here with Saint Nick.
Per se.
Red-nosed reindeer, elves working for poverty wages, your kids writing letters to a fictional person, the mathematical impossibility of visiting every child’s house in every nook and cranny of the earth in 24 hours when it took me something like 4 1/2 days to get to Cambodia on a vehicle fueled by, you know, fuel instead of hooves, which presumably have a hard time getting traction, conditioning our children into consumer capitalism with an amalgam of myths…I don’t have a problem with any of it. I don’t think it’s idolatry, undermines the faith or sets our children up to question everything else once they learn the Christmas con.
Nope, I think wonder, imagination, and fantasy are a great and normal part of a healthy childhood. So bring it on.
Except.
The past few days my son has been talking about how if he’s ‘on the naughty list then Santa won’t bring [me] any gifts. He watches us all the time to see if we’re naughty or we’re good.’
Bam.
Suddenly, that sweet bearded old man with a whiskeyed complexion looks not a little like the Dark Lord, Sauron, with his all-knowing eye of fire and ire.
And it’s that, not all the other stuff, that pisses me off about Santa.
Because what could be more contrary to the Christmas Gospel than the idea of God constantly watching our every move to see if we’re good or not? To see if we’re worth rewarding with a gift or if he should instead stick us with a ‘you shouldadunbetter lump of coal.’
Not to get too preachy but the Gospel is: ‘God died for us while we were yet sinners.’
The Christmas Gospel, therefore, is: ‘While we were yet sinners, God took flesh and gave us the gift of himself.’
And, dammit, I want my son to know that God loves him regardless if he’s naughty or nice.
And so do I.
And that fat man with the little helpers and hoes is screwing that message up.
Here’s another thing: The real Saint Nick took it on the chin and was exiled by the Roman Emperor Diocletian for the Gospel. The real Saint Nick was at the Council of Nicea where he landed one- literally- on the chin of Arius (later to be named a heretic) for Arius’ assertion that the person we meet in Jesus Christ is anything less than the fullness of the Godhead revealed perfectly.
So I’d be willing to bet a great big plate of cookies that, somewhere up in Heaven, all this naughty or nice nonsense pisses the real St Nick off too.
0 Theology on Tap, Midrash in the Moment, Sermonic Bingo
Christmas is a season for questions:
Why a virgin birth?
Why does Jesus come in the first place? Why can’t God just forgive us?
Is Jesus really human or did he just seem human? Is Jesus really divine or did he just seem divine?
What if there’d been no Fall- if we hadn’t sinned? Would Jesus still have come?
I’ve already received a ton of good questions from you all, more than I can respond to by email.
It’ll be Jason unfiltered, which could lead to a lot of ‘ummmms’ and inadvertent off color vocabulary but it may just be fun and edifying too.
0 Can Male Preachers Preach Mary?
Every year at Advent, when the Mary scriptures come around, I compose what are generally received as terrible sermons. I don’t intend to but I’m also not surprised by the reaction. You see, Mary’s experience is so unique she is unlike any other character in scripture. It’s also the case that the Protestant Church generally does her a disservice by ignoring her outright. To address the former and remedy the latter, I always try to write sermons that privilege Mary’s voice. I avoid making her an illustration of a larger point. I avoid making her experience analogous to our own. I avoid distilling her narrative down into ‘points.’
Instead I just try to let her story speak for itself, which proves difficult because that requires a lack of explanation listeners can find puzzling or just downright confusing. Of course, with Mary, there’s also the tricky issue of yours truly, an obviously manly man, assuming the voice of a woman but that’s an issue for another day.
For all their failure as sermons, Mary has given me some of the best writing I’ve done (at least I think so.)
Case in point- and definitely in the Final Four for Worst Sermon Ever- is this sermon, ‘The Visitation,’ from a few years ago. The text was the visitation of Mary and Elizabeth in Luke. In it, I tried to narratively imagine Mary’s journey to Elizabeth’s house and the thoughts running through her head, having just been visited by the angel Gabriel. In doing so, I also attempted to weave into the text the many Old Testament narratives Mary’s story hearkens back to- something only bible nerds were able to notice because, again, I refused to stop and explain what I was doing.
So, terrible sermon but decent piece of writing for Advent.
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Her hands kept shaking even after he departed from her.
She gasped and only then realized sheʼd been holding her breath, waiting to see if heʼd reappear as suddenly as heʼd intruded upon her life. His words had lodged in her mind just as something new was supposedly lodged inside her.
He mustʼve seen how terrified she was. ʻDonʼt be afraid,ʼ heʼd said to her.
In those moments after he departed, she just stood there, looking around her bedroom. The posters on the wall, the books on the shelf, the homework on the desk, the dirty laundry on the floor in the corner- in the aftermath of an angelʼs glow, it all seemed very ordinary.
It was an unlikely place for a ʻvisitation.ʼ There wasnʼt anything there in her bedroom to confuse it for a holy place. It was just ordinary.
Looking around her room, she caught a glance of her reflection in the mirror. And so was she: ordinary, not anyone that anyone else should ever remember or notice, not someone youʼd pick out like a single star in all the sky.
Yet, thatʼs just what heʼd told her.
Sheʼd been chosen. Somehow, in the days ahead of her or already right now, God would come to exist in her belly.
The thought made her shake again.
She looked out her window, up at the multitude of stars in the night sky.
ʻDo not be afraid,ʼ heʼd told her.
Those same words, she knew, had been spoken long ago to Abraham.
Do not be afraid, Abraham had been told in the moments before God pointed
to the stars in the sky and dared Abraham to count them, dared Abraham to imagine and believe that for as many stars as there were in the sky so his descendants would be.
She liked the thought, as unbelievable as it sounded, that through her and her baby the whole world would be blessed.
Still, she knew enough scripture to know that the angelʼs words, ʻDo not be afraid,ʼ were auspicious words. She knew the child promised by God to Abraham and Sarah was the same child whose sacrifice God later required.
She knew the story- it was the sort of story you canʼt forget even if youʼd like to- how God one day told Abraham that the promised son would have to suffer and be sacrificed on top of a mountain. How the son obeyed and followed his fatherʼs will all the way up the mount, carrying wood. How they built an offering place up there. How the son was spared only when it was clear how far the father would go.
She used to wonder how God could ask anyone to give up something so precious.
But now, looking out at the stars and rubbing her belly, she wondered about Sarah, Abrahamʼs wife, the boyʼs mother, and what Sarah would have done if God had asked her to follow her boy to his death.
The wondering made her shake again. ʻDonʼt be afraidʼ she whispered to herself.
As the late night turned to early morning she resolved to leave home.
A part of her wanted to see for herself the truth of the angelʼs words growing inside Elizabeth.
A still bigger part of her knew the angelʼs news would make her a stranger now in her own home, perhaps a stranger forever.
Nazareth was a small town; in a town that size thereʼs no room to hide.
And she didnʼt want to be at home when her body started to change, when the neighbors started whispering questions about legitimacy.
And she didnʼt want to remain at home and face her fiance, not yet. The angel could say nothing is impossible but she knew, chances were, everyone would suspect the worst about her before theyʼd believe the truth.
With haste, she packed her belongings into a duffel.
She folded her jeans and some blouses and wondered how long sheʼd fit into them. She zipped her bag shut and sadly glanced at the wedding dress hanging in her closet. Seeing it, she knew it would be too small on her wedding day, should that day ever come.
ʻFavored one,ʼ thatʼs what heʼd called her. Favored one. But now, hurrying before anyone else in the house awoke, it seemed more burden than blessing.
ʻFavored one.ʼ
She hadnʼt known what to make of such a greeting when she first heard it.
ʻFavored one.ʼ
Hannah had received that same greeting. Hannah, who hadnʼt let the gray in her hair or the crowʼs feet around her eyes stop her from praying ceaselessly for God to fill her barren womb with a child.
Eli, the haggard priest, had called Hannah ʻfavored oneʼ just before he spilled the news of her answered prayer.
But packing the last of her things and clicking off the bedroom lights she recalled that even for Hannah a blessing from God wasnʼt so simple. Even for Hannah the blessing was also a summons.
Hannah had prayed holes in the rug for a child but as soon as Hannah weaned her son, God called her to give her boy to Eli, the priest. Hannahʼs boy was to be consecrated.
Tiptoeing through the dark hallway, she wondered how Hannah had explained that to her husband. She wondered what it had been like for Hannah, who lost out on all the memories a mother counts on: his first words, learning to walk, the first day of school, homecoming and his wedding day.
Everything Hannah had wanted when sheʼd wanted a child sacrificed for the purpose God had for her boy.
Hannah- sheʼd been called ʻfavored oneʼ too.
Leaving her house in the cold moonlight, she thought that Godʼs favor was also a kind of humiliation, that Godʼs call was also a call to suffer.
ʻLet it be with me according to your word,ʼ sheʼd told him when she could think of nothing else to say. But if she prayed now for God to let this cup pass from her, would he?
ʻLet it be with me according to your word,ʼ sheʼd said.
Standing out under the streetlight and looking back at the house where sheʼd grown up, she realized it wasnʼt that simple.
Things would never be simple again.
Elizabeth lived in the country outside Jerusalem, several days journey from Nazareth. Sheʼd stop in villages along the way to draw water from their wells.
She knew what others must have thought: a young girl, a single woman, resting at a well all by herself raised eyebrows.
It was in those moments with men and women staring at her, making assumptions and passing judgments, she wondered if the angel knew what sort of family her baby would be grafted onto.
Names like Rahab and Ruth leapt out, a prostitute and a foreigner. Not the sort of family youʼd expect to be chosen.
She wondered what that said God.
And what her boy would one day make of it.
At night she camped out in the fields along the road where the only noise came from the shepherds and their flocks.
She got sick for the first time out there in the fields.
It was then she began to wonder about the stranger she would bring into the
world. Who will this be? she thought. Here is something that is most profoundly me, my flesh and my blood, the sheer stuff of me, depending on me and vulnerable to me. And yet not me, strange to me, impenetrable to me.
Sheʼd asked him there in the room how it would happen. She hadnʼt gotten much in the way of explanation.
“The power of the most high will overshadow youʼ is how heʼd answered. ʻOvershadowʼ was the word heʼd used. She was sure of it.
She still didnʼt know how that worked exactly. She hadnʼt felt anything. But she knew that word, ʻovershadow.ʼ
Itʼs what God did with the ark of the covenant when David brought the ark to Jerusalem with dancing and jubilation and not a little bit of fear. The power of the most high overshadowed the ark.
And before that when God delivered Israel from bondage and led them to freedom through the wilderness, in the tabernacle, the presence and power of God overshadowed.
Now, the most high had overshadowed her, and, if the angel could be believed, God was about to deliver on an even bigger scale.
Sleep came hard those nights on the road. Sheʼd look up at the sky and rub her nauseous belly. It made her dizzy trying to comprehend it: how she could carry within her the sign and the seal of the covenant, as though her womb was an ark; how the hands and feet sheʼd soon feel pushing and kicking inside her were actually the promises of God.
Made flesh.
As soon as she saw Elizabeth in the distance she knew it was true. All of it.
Seeing Elizabeth, it hit her how they were immeasurably different.
Elizabethʼs child will be seen by all as a blessing from God. Elizabeth will be praised, the stigma of her barrenness finally lifted.
But for Mary, as soon as she started to show, it would be different.
A young girl, engaged, suddenly pregnant, with no ring on her finger, no father in sight and her fiance none the wiser? That invited more than just a stigma. She could be stoned to death.
She could see from the end of the road the beautiful contradiction that was Elizabeth: the gray wiry hair, the wrinkled face and stooped back, and the 6 month pregnant belly.
To be sure, Elizabeth was a miracle but it was not unheard of. Sarah, Hannah…Mary had grown up hearing stories of women like Elizabeth.
Mary knew: hers was different.
An unexpected, miraculous birth wasnʼt the same thing as a virgin birth.
With Mary, it was as if the angelʼs message- Godʼs words- alone had flicked a light in the darkness of her womb.
Life from nothing- that was the difference. Not from Joseph or anyone else.
From nothing God created life.
Inside her.
From nothing.
The same way, she thought, God created the heavens and the earth: from nothing.
The same way God created the sun and the sea and the stars. The same way God created Adam and Eve.
From nothing.
As though what she carried within her was creation itself.
The start of a new beginning.
To everything.
A Genesis and an ultimate reversal all in one.
As she walked up Elizabethʼs driveway, she considered the costs that might lie ahead, and with her hand on her stomach she whispered to herself: “The Lord has done great things for me.”
0 The Christmas Gospel (in Chairs): Audio and Video
The audio from this weekend’s sermon is now available in the iTunes Store for free. Search under ‘Tamed Cynic.’
This weekend’s sermon was more visual than usual. For that reason, the video might be more helpful if you missed it.
Click here to view the video.
1 The Christmas Gospel (In Chairs)
Sermon for 1st Advent based on 2 Corinthians 5.16-20 (my favorite scripture).
I used two chairs as props in this sermon to illustrate my point. A white folding chair (God) and a black folding chair (humanity). I’ve included the blocking cues for this to make sense in the text.
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On my blog last week I solicited questions that people have about Jesus’ birth. I promised that the best questions- at least as they’re judged by yours truly- would make their way into our sermons during Advent.
I’ve received all sorts of questions.
Some questions were from church members but many were not.
Some questions were anonymous and others were not.
One question- it wasn’t anonymous, not exactly.
The email wasn’t signed. I don’t know who it was from but the email address identified the writer as ‘emmasmommy@.com
The email said:
‘I suppose you can chalk this up to ‘kids ask the darndest questions.’ Tuesday afternoon I was driving home from Target with my daughter who’s a first grader.
We were listening to Christmas music on the Christian radio station when out of the blue my daughter asked me: ‘Why do we celebrate Christmas?’
I was about to say to her ‘Because Christmas is Jesus’ birthday,’ which is true obviously, but I stopped myself because all of a sudden that struck me as a not very meaningful answer. Think about all the Christmas carols there are- seems silly if ‘Happy Birthday to you; Happy Birthday dear Jesus’ will do the job.
So instead I said to her: ‘We celebrate Christmas because Jesus is the one who saves us.’
I should’ve known better because she came right back and asked me: ‘How does Jesus save us?’
And I answered: ‘He dies on the cross.’
That’s when I started wishing I’d just gone with the birthday answer because naturally, being a child, she had more questions.
‘Why does Jesus have to die?’ she asked me.
‘So God can forgive us’ I said, confidently, hoping that would be the end of it.
But no.
She must’ve seen me in the rearview mirror and known I was out of my depth because she pressed me: ‘Why does Jesus have to die? Why can’t God just forgive us?’
‘Because that’s just the way it works’ I told her, which by the way is the same answer I gave her when she asked me how gas makes the car go: because that’s just the way it works.
She chewed on that for a while and then she said, like she was tattling on a bully at school: ‘God doesn’t sound very nice.’
Here’s what I did not have the courage to tell her: ‘I agree.’
I should’ve just stuck with the ‘Christmas = Jesus’ Birthday’ bit, because the alternative makes Christmas seem awfully dark and it makes God seem that way too.
So there’s my Christmas question: Why Christmas? Why can’t God just forgive our sins and be done with it? Why is Jesus born just to die?
I don’t know if ‘emmasmommy’ goes to this church or not.
Even if she does, I don’t know if she’s here today.
But emmasmommy’s question is an A+ question.
In fact, I think it gets at the most important question.
But before I can answer emmasmommy’s question I need to unpack two different versions of the Gospel for you.
So what I want to do today is offer you a presentation of the Gospel in two different versions. I want to present to you the Modern, Western, Judicial version of the Gospel- the version that most of us in North America assume is the only version.
Some of you will want to argue with me that there is no other version; and you if you do, you will be wrong and I will be right 🙂
And then I want to present to you a version of the Gospel that is more ancient.
It’s the Patristic understanding of Salvation, meaning it comes from the early Church Fathers.
So what I want to do is contrast the Legal-Judicial understanding of Salvation with the Patristic understanding of Salvation, and I want to do it with chairs.
Already I can see some of you tensing up. I got this idea from a colleague who’s an Orthodox priest.
First, the Legal-Judicial understanding of Salvation. It goes like this:
In the beginning, God created man in God’s image to reflect God’s glory and to enjoy fellowship with God [chairs face each other].
But man in the Garden sinned [turn black chair away from white chair].
And as a result, man became sinful, and God, because God is holy and righteous, cannot look upon man in his sin.
And so God turns away from man [turn white chair away from black chair].
But God in his love for humanity sends his Son to occupy our place [bring black chair around to face white chair].
Jesus Christ lives as one of us, lives as we were intended to live, lives in full relationship with the Father, never turns away from the Father, trusts the Father at every juncture of his life, alway does the Father’s will.
And at the end of his life, Jesus is put to death.
In that moment, the Father does the unthinkable. He takes our sin- our personal and collective sin- and he puts it on Jesus; so that, Jesus becomes sinful and guilty [turn black chair away from white chair].
As Paul writes, ‘God made him to be sin who no sin.’
And God, because God is holy and righteous, cannot look upon sin, and so God turns away from his Son [turn white chair away from black chair].
When Jesus cries out on the cross: ‘My God, why have you forsaken me,’ in this understanding of salvation, that’s Jesus experiencing the full wrath of God.
Now, if we sinners believe that God has done this and that Jesus has born the wrath of God that we deserve then we’re protected from the wrath of God. It’s like we’re born all over again and we receive the righteousness of Christ as our own [move black chair to face white chair].
As Martin Luther said: ‘We are like snow-covered crap,’ which maybe sounds better in German I don’t know.
Or, as modern preachers have put it: ‘Christ becomes our asbestos suit to protect us from the white, hot wrath of God against sinners.
Now that’s if we believe this.
If we don’t believe that Jesus has done this for us, then we remain in our sin [turn black chair away from white chair].
And God’s wrath remains against us and we remain alienated from God and eventually the sinner is condemned to everlasting Hell [turn white chair away from black chair].
Merry Christmas!
That’s the Legal or Judicial understanding of salvation.
And it’s the version assumed in the question from emmasmommy because emmasmommy assumed the problem Jesus is born to solve is our guilt and the punishment required for God to forgive us.
It’s a modern understanding in the sense that it only became a common way of thinking about salvation more than a thousand years after Jesus.
It’s sometimes called the Satisfaction understanding of salvation because it’s Jesus’ suffering and death that ‘satisfies’ God’s wrath towards us.
[turn chairs back to face listeners]
Now the Patristic version is the more ancient understanding; it’s how the early Christians understood salvation.
It’s also how John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Movement, thought about salvation.
It goes like this:
In the beginning, God created man in his image [turn black chair to face white chair].
To reflect his love and to share in the fellowship of the Father, Son and Spirit. But in the Garden man sinned and turned away from God [turn black chair away from white chair].
As a result- pay attention, this is important- having turned away from God, we’re no longer fully who God created us to be.
Genesis says, literally, God created Adam and Eve to be ‘eikons’ of God, and when we turn away from God, it’s like those ‘eikons’ get cracked.
So the problem Jesus comes to solve is not our guilt and God’s wrath towards us.
Because sin isn’t so much something we’re guilty of and need to be punished for.
Sin is primarily something we’re afflicted with. By.
John Wesley said that sin is like a disease that impairs every part of our lives and only a restored relationship with God can heal us.
That’s the problem the Gospel addresses.
Now, because God loves humanity and refuses to turn his back on the creatures that turned their backs on him, God takes takes flesh. God becomes one of us.
[move white chair to face black chair].
God comes as Jesus not to judge but to restore.
And so, imagine a woman who, because she’s cracked ‘eikon’ of God, she’s gone from man to man, marriage to marriage [turn black chair away].
She’s been married five times and now she’s living with a sixth and still doesn’t have the love that she longs for.
And what happens?
[move white chair to face black chair]
God comes.
God comes and sits down beside her at a well and says ‘I am the Water of Life. I will love you.’
Picture a man [gesture to black chair].
Because he’s a cracked ‘eikon’ of God, for the sake of greed and ambition has become a tax collector, that is, he colludes with the Roman occupation. He articipates in the oppression of his own people [turn black chair away from white chair].
As a result, he’s ostracized by his people. He’s alienated from society. No one will have anything to do with him.
But what happens?
God comes [turn white around to face black chair].
God comes and sees this tax collector up in a tree and God says ‘Zaccheus, I’ll eat with you. I’ll come to your house.’
And in that moment, God says: ‘Salvation has come to this house.’
Imagine a woman [gesture to black chair].
She’s been caught in adultery. She’s guilty. She’s another cracked ‘eikon’ of God [turn black chair away from white chair].
The religious establishment has condemned her and now they want to stone her.
But what happens?
God comes [bring white chair around to face black chair].
God comes and when this woman is brought before God and thrown down at his feet, God kneels down beside her and says: ‘Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.’
And then he says to the woman: ‘I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more.’
Here is a young man, who because he’s a broken ‘eikon,’ out of greed and resentment, wishes his father dead [turn black chair away from white chair].
He demands his inheritance. And the young man takes the money and leaves to spend his father’s fortune.
But what happens?
When that man’s broke and desperate and returns home, his father does what no fathers in the ancient world ever did [bring white chair around to face black chair].
His father runs up to him and embraces him and throws a feast to welcome him home.
And God says: ‘That’s what I’m like.’
And when humanity [turn black chair away from white chair] is driven by fear and power, takes God and betrays him and spits upon him and scourges him and mocks him and condemns him and crucifies him, what does God say?
[bring white chair around to face black chair]
‘I forgive you.’
And when humanity falls away into death to be forever separated from God [lay black chair down on the floor].
God says: ‘Love is greater than the grave and stronger than Death and, though you make your bed in Sheol, I am there.’
And God joins humanity in Death [lay white chair down on the floor beside black chair].
In his pursuit of restoring relationship with us, God is willing to go all the way down in to Death.
But God also says ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life. I died and am alive for evermore and I hold the keys of Hell and Death. Because I live so shall you live.’
[pick up both chairs so that they’re facing each other]
To those who respond to God’s love with love then God’s love is experienced as a radiant Light and over time as we live in God’s grace we’re restored to who God intended us to be from the very beginning.
We’re saved, healed.
That’s what the word ‘salvation’ means in Greek: healing.
John Wesley said that as our relationship with God is restored and we grow in grace we really do recover the image God intended for us; we can become perfect in love- as Jesus was.
St Athanasius put it this way: God became like us so that we might become like God.
But to those who reject God’s love, who refuse fellowship with God, then that same Light feels unbearable and is experienced as wrath [turn black chair away from white chair].
You see, it’s not that God is angry and wrathful.
Rather that’s what we experience and perceive when we turn our backs on God.
As Paul said, to someone who rejects God’s love, God’s love feels like burning coals upon his head, but it doesn’t mean God’s love is not upon him.
All he ever has to do is turn to God and say: ‘I will love you’ and what had felt like a torment will feel like grace.
That’s the Patristic understanding of salvation.
That’s what you need to have in mind for my reply to emmasmommy to make sense.
Dear Emma’s Mommy,
Thanks for your questions.
As far as answers go, first, keep in mind two core convictions of Christianity:
1) God is immutable, which means God doesn’t change. Ever.
2) God is perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ.
That’s the incarnation. That’s Christmas.
Jesus does not come at Christmas in order to change how the Father feels about us.
God is like Jesus. God has always been like Jesus.
There’s never been a time when God wasn’t like Jesus.
That’s what’s revealed to us at Christmas.
The Apostle Paul says: ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.’
He doesn’t say: God was in Christ reconciling himself to the world.
It’s not the Father who needed to be reconciled to the world; it’s the world that needed to be restored to the Father.
And so the problem isn’t how God feels about us.
The problem is how we feel about God. We turn our backs on God. All the time.
And that can be like an illness that impairs everything about our lives.
That’s what we call sin.
To your second question, forgiveness doesn’t just begin with the cross.
It begins at Christmas.
In fact, you could say it starts the second Adam and Eve step out of the Garden. Because God never turns away from us.
Like I said, God is perfectly revealed in Jesus.
When do you ever see Jesus turning away from a sinner and saying ‘I am too holy to have anything to do with you?’
Jesus never did anything like that. The Pharisees did.
And maybe it sounds simple and obvious, but I think we can get confused at Christmastime and so I’ll just say it: God is like Jesus not like a Pharisee.
The Pharisees weren’t very nice. But tell your daughter that God is nice because Jesus is.
Lastly, I have no idea how to explain this to a first-grader so that parts up to you, but here goes:
‘Salvation’ isn’t just something that happens on the cross.
And it definitely isn’t just something that happened once upon a time.
In the Gospels, salvation means ‘healing.’
To be saved means to be healed, restored to who God created us to be.
And our relationship with God- that’s the medicine that makes that healing possible.
And that’s why its such a big deal, it’s such good news, that at Christmas we realize that even though we are determined to live our lives without God, God is determined not to be God with out us.
Merry Christmas!
Jason
1 Recapturing Advent
As stated here previously, Stanley Hauerwas is one of my theological heroes, not the least because he’s paved the way for someone like me to be frequently contrary, often inappropriate and usually badly dressed. Stanley, a militant pacifist, has done much to help the Church recover its identity as a witnessing minority to a world that knows not God. Or, as the Jews put it, to be “a light to the nations.” Here’s a short reflection that’s worth a quick look see: Recapturing Advent
0 What Do the Left Behind Novels Have to Do with Christmas?
It will surprise about no one, I expect, that I loathe those Left Behind novels, the serial fiction that imagines the Rapture (while simultaneously imagining it is in any way a Christian reading of revelation).
Besides the terrible theology of the books, the films are guilty of reviving Kirk Cameron’s acting career, a sin by itself for which the authors should be left behind to perdition.
Even though the books are wrong in their interpretation of scripture, they are-surprisingly to you perhaps- appropriate to this Advent season.
At the end of the Great Thanksgiving, the prayer I pray over the Eucharist, it says: ‘By this meal, make us one in Christ and one in ministry to all the world until Christ comes back and we feast at his heavenly banquet.’
Whether we know it or not, every time we share communion we’re praying for Jesus to come back.
The direction of our hope is not our departure, it’s his return.
A major theme of our Christian hope centers on the ‘parousia’ (the second coming) of Christ. It’s this second coming that Revelation prays for when it says ‘Come, Lord Jesus’ (22.20).
Traditionally, the season of Advent- the season before Christmas- is about the parousia, the second coming of Christ, not the first.
This is why the assigned scripture for Advent worship is so often taken from Old Testament apocalyptic passages and harsh passages from John the Baptist.
To many modern Christians, a hope in Christ’s return seems antiquated and irrational. Too many Christians do not know what to make of this hope if it’s not to be cast in the fantastical way contemporary apocalypticism paints it.
But as theologian David Tracy rightly warns: ‘Without the hope of the Second Coming, Christianity can settle down into a religion that no longer has a profound sense of the not-yet, and thereby no longer has a profound sense of God’s very hiddeness in history.’ To lose hope in the Second Coming, in other words, is to accommodate the faith to the world’s status quo.
It’s to grow complacent with the way things are and lose our faithful restlessness with what can be because it will be.
So if it’s an important hope, as Tracy suggests, what does it have to teach us? The doctrine of the Second Coming first of all grounds Christian hope as hope in someone.
We don’t hope to ‘go to heaven’ when we die if what we mean by that is a vague, billowy by-and-by. Confronted by the problems of the world, we don’t hope in abstractions or concepts like justice or freedom or peace. We hope in Jesus. Our hope for things like peace and justice and freedom only find their coherence in our hope for Jesus’ reign.
The doctrine of the Second Coming means our hope for the future is not an unknown hope. The future is not totally unknown to us. Because the future is Jesus’ return, we’ve already seen it in Jesus’ life and death.
If Jesus is the fullness of God revealed in the flesh, then there is nothing about the future we haven’t been given glimpses of in the Gospels. The future will not be at odds with the forgiveness, grace and mercy already shown to us in Christ.
The doctrine of the Second Coming affirms that God’s final purposes will be consistent with what God has already done. Jesus Christ, who was perfectly faithful unto the Cross, will not abandon us or creation in the future.
We need not fear judgment because the Judge is the Crucified Jesus.
And that Judge has already been judged in our place.
0 What Is Advent?
It’s been brought to my attention that many (Christians and Non) have no idea what some Christians mean by the season of ‘Advent.’ I guess that’s to be expected. Many Christians in the Reformed Tradition don’t observe Advent or Lent.
Here’s this essay by Rob Bell from Relevant Magazine, reflecting on the meaning and purpose of this season of ‘preparation.’
Christmas is coming. It may seem like it’s way too soon to be talking about trees and lights and presents and eggnog and all that. But Christmas is the culmination of Advent, and Advent is about the church calendar and the church calendar is something we never stop talking about.
So that’s what I’m writing on here: Advent. But to talk about Advent, we need to talk about sound, and then time and then Spirit.
First, then, a bit about sound.
If you are quiet enough in your kitchen, you will hear a noise. It is a continuous sound, a long, droning noise with no particular beginning or ending. It has very little, if any, dynamic range. It may go up and down in volume, but those changes are rarely perceptible. It is the same flat noise, and it goes on and on and on, hour after hour, day after day. If it’s loud enough, it can grate on the nerves, but otherwise it’s simply there.
Making that sound, mostly unnoticed, there in the corner of your kitchen.
It is the buzzing of your refrigerator.
Now for another noise. I’m currently listening to the new Jónsi album (he of Sigur Rós fame), which I’ve had on repeat for a number of weeks now. From the first bleeps, squawks and chirps of the first song, the album is full of noises. Drums, voices, piano—the noises stop and start, come and go, they’re loud and quiet. Some notes sustain for a measure or two, others come and go within the second. The kick drum rumbles, the cymbals clang, the strings flutter. All those sounds work together to make something compelling, inspiring, beautiful, evocative, confrontative, urgent, hopeful, honest or peaceful—something that sounds stunning.
And so it is noise, it is the sound—but it is a particular, intentional arrangement of those noises and sounds that make it what we commonly refer to as music.
Two kinds of noise, two variations on sound—one we call music and the other we call refrigerator buzz.
Next, then, a bit about time, because time is a lot like sound. A song works because the noises and sounds and voices and drums are arranged with a precise awareness of time. Music divides time up into beats, giving time a shape, a flow, a pattern, a rhythm.
We’ve all experienced the low-grade despair that comes when our days blend into each other—wake up, eat breakfast, brush teeth, go to school or work or the office, change another diaper, do another load of laundry, write a check, fill a tank, cook a meal and then repeat it all over again the next day.
One day looks like the next, everything starts to feel the same, life starts to feel like the existential equivalent of refrigerator buzz.
And that, of course, takes us back to the Exodus. (Didn’t see that coming, did you?) The story of those Hebrew slaves being rescued from Pharaoh isn’t just a story about the God who rescues people from having to make bricks every day—it’s about the God who rescues people from other kinds of slavery as well. Namely, the one involving time.
Life in Egypt was comprised of making bricks for the Pharaoh every day, all day.
Bricks, bricks, bricks, eat, sleep, more bricks, bricks, bricks. Tomorrow will be just like today: bricks, bricks, bricks.
When the Israelites are rescued, however, God gives them commands, one of the most urgent being to take a Sabbath day a week, a day unlike the others. A day without bricks.
Six days you shall work, but on the seventh, don’t. Why is this so monumental? God gives them rhythm. But not the rhythm of sound, the rhythm of time. Life before was an interminable succession of sevens. Seven, seven, seven.
But now, their time is broken up, measured, arranged with a beat: six and one, six and one, six and one.
God is the God of the groove.
We need rhythm in our time—it’s what makes one moment different from another. It gives shape and color and form to all of life.
The first Christians understood this—that time, like sound, is best when broken up, divided and arranged into patterns and rhythms. And so they created the church calendar. A way to organize the year, a way to bring variance to our days, a way to find a song in the passing of time.
For example, Lent. For the seven weeks leading up to Resurrection Sunday, we practice sober awareness of our frailty, sins and smallness. It starts on Ash Wednesday when those ashes are traced on our foreheads in the shape of the cross, a tactile reminder of our origins in the dust. From there we come, and to there we will go.
You want to really live, the kind of living that drains the marrow from every day? Then start by facing your death, your weakness, your smallness. We spend seven weeks facing our death and despair and doubt, entering into it with the fullness of our being—heart, mind, emotions—we leave nothing behind.
We do this for a number of reasons, chief among them the simple truth that Sunday comes after Friday. Only when you’ve gotten through, not around “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are you ready to throw the only kind of Resurrection party worthy of the occasion—that Sunday when we run huffing and puffing from the open tomb, beating our pots and pans in that clanging raucous outburst that begins with those three resounding words: “He is risen.”
That day when all the amps are turned up to “11.”
But that’s not the end—don’t let your pastor start a preaching series on tithing or marriage that next week—because Resurrection is just the beginning. On we go to the season of Pentecost—the celebration of the Spirit, the One who moves in mysterious ways. Jesus is not with us in body, He’s with us in Spirit. He’s risen, but He’s also here, in ways that transcend language, and so reflect on this for a season, tuning your radar to the divine presence in every moment of every day.
And so we’re headed somewhere, we’re coming from somewhere else, and we’re doing it together, as a community of disciples, as a church.
Finally, then, a bit about Spirit. Because Spirit, it turns out, is a lot like sound and time.
The first thing Spirit does in creation is move. That tells us the deepest matters of the Spirit are constantly moving, shifting and morphing. The life of the spirit is a dynamic reality, taking us through a myriad of emotions, experiences and states of being.
Sometimes we’re exhausted, other times we’re overwhelmed with doubt. Sometimes we’re on top of the world and everything is going smoothly, other times we find ourselves standing in the midst of the wreckage, surrounded by smoldering flames, wondering how it all went so wrong.
What the church calendar does is create space for Jesus to meet us in the full range of human experience, for God to speak to us across the spectrum, in the good and the bad, in the joy and in the tears.
This is the crime of only singing happy victory songs in church (we often ask sad people to sing happy songs)—half of the Psalms are laments.
The math should move us on that. The Bible is not a collection of war chants from victors—it’s an incredibly varied collection of writings reflecting an intensely diverse amount of postures, moods and perspectives.
A lot like how life is, actually. Sometimes you’re furious with God, other times you’re madly in love.
The issue then, as it is now, isn’t just getting us out of Egypt—it’s getting the Egypt out of us.
Rescuing us from sameness, dullness, flatlined routine, reminding us that however we’re feeling, whatever we’re experiencing, wherever we are in our heart—the Spirit waits to meet us there.
And that takes us to Advent. Advent, then, is a season. Lots of people know about holidays—one day a year set apart. The church calendar is about seasons, whole periods of time we enter into with a specific cry, a particular intention, for a reason.
Advent is about anticipating the birth of Christ. It’s about longing, desire, that which is yet to come. That which isn’t here yet. And so we wait, expectantly. Together. With an ache. Because all is not right. Something is missing.
Why does Advent mean so much to me?
Because cynicism is the new religion of our world. Whatever it is, this religion teaches that it isn’t as good as it seems. It will let you down. It will betray you.
That institution? That church? That politician? That authority figure? They’ll all let you down.
Whatever you do, don’t get your hopes up. Whatever you think it is, whatever it appears to be, it will burn you, just give it time.
Advent confronts this corrosion of the heart with the insistence that God has not abandoned the world, hope is real and something is coming.
Advent charges into the temple of cynicism with a whip of hope, overturning the tables of despair, driving out the priests of that jaded cult, announcing there’s a new day and it’s not like the one that came before it.
“The not yet will be worth it,” Advent whispers in the dark.
Old man Simeon stands in the temple, holding the Christ child, rejoicing that now he can die because what he’d been waiting for actually arrived.
And so each December (though Advent starts the last Sunday of November this year), we enter into a season of waiting, expecting, longing. Spirit meets us in the ache.
We ask God to enter into the deepest places of cynicism, bitterness and hardness where we have stopped believing that tomorrow can be better than today.
We open up. We soften up. We turn our hearts in the direction of that day. That day when the baby cries His first cry and we, surrounded by shepherds and angels and everybody in between, celebrate that sound in time that brings our Spirits what we’ve been longing for.
Here’s the post.