Tag: Christmas
0 Taking Christ Out Of…In God We Trust
Every year around this time, many conservatives rail against the “war on Christmas,” using a few dismantled nativities to suggest that America muffles worship.
Hardly. We have God on our dollars, God in our pledge of allegiance, God in our Congress. Last year, the House took the time to vote, 396 to 9, in favor of a resolution affirming “In God We Trust” as our national motto. How utterly needless, unless I missed some insurrectionist initiative to have that motto changed to “Buck Up, Beelzebub”
I’ve no doubt Frank Bruni’s piece from yesterday’s NY Times, the God Glut, will irritate a few. Okay, likely more than a few.
However, I hope folks are able to take off the spectacles of partisanship and read this through a Christian lens because even though the issue is brought by a writer questioning the presumed Christian perspective I think his critique is, unintentionally and ironically perhaps, a thoroughly Christian one.
To me, this has nothing to do with issues of politics and its certainly not a critique of the military. It is a sobering chastisement of the degree to which we Christians often marry our faith to our nation.
And it’s not that Christians can’t love their country. Hell, Christians all over the world love their country. Ever been to a soccer game in Latin America? I mean, geez, it puts our 4th of July parades to shame. But Christians in this country DO have a propensity to see our nation as elect among the nations in a way that is unique and can threaten a coherent reading of our scriptures.
This is especially apropos during Advent as we look towards the birth of our ‘King’ who is born amidst and as an alternative to lords like Herod and Caesar. If there are takeaways from the Christmas story, then one of them is surely that our attitudes to governments and nations are temporal, finite and ambivalent at best.
Christians forget: the reign of Augustus Caesar was GOOD for your average citizen in the Empire. He brought peace (not to mention sanitation, architecture, clean water, poetry, drama, philosophy, democracy etc- see Life of Bryan) to those whom he favored and he was hailed as a savior.
And yet, the angels sent by the God we follow used those very words for a baby wrapped in diapers with peasant parents standing by his manger.
What gets lost in all the ‘In God we trust’ debates is that we follow a God who didn’t have any coins on him when someone else asked him what should be on the currency. And when he answered their question: ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s (i.e., Nothing) and give to God what is God’s (i.e., Everything).’
Tough. Inconvenient. Answer.
So I encourage you to read the following, pausing to remember that the story we’ve turned in to a harmless Christmas pageant for children was, in its inception, a critique of those who cozied the faith too close to the nation.
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Bob Kerrey’s political career spanned four years as the governor of Nebraska and another 12 as a United States senator from that state, during which he made a serious bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. In all that time, to the best of his memory, he never uttered what has become a routine postscript to political remarks: “God bless America.”
That was deliberate.
“It seems a little presumptuous, when you’ve got the land mass and the talent that we do, to ask for more,” he told me recently.
But there was an additional reason he didn’t mention God, so commonly praised in the halls of government, so prevalent a fixture in public discourse.
“I think you have to be very, very careful about keeping religion and politics separate,” Kerrey said.
We Americans aren’t careful at all. In a country that supposedly draws a line between church and state, we allow the former to intrude flagrantly on the latter. Religious faith shapes policy debates. It fuels claims of American exceptionalism.
And it suffuses arenas in which its place should be carefully measured. A recent example of this prompted my conversation with Kerrey. Last week, a fourth-year cadet at West Point packed his bags and left, less than six months shy of graduation, in protest of what he portrayed as a bullying, discriminatory religiousness at the military academy, which receives public funding.
The cadet, Blake Page, detailed his complaint in an article for The Huffington Post, accusing officers at the academy of “unconstitutional proselytism,” specifically of an evangelical Christian variety.
On the phone on Sunday, he explained to me that a few of them urged attendance at religious events in ways that could make a cadet worry about the social and professional consequences of not going. One such event was a prayer breakfast this year at which a retired lieutenant general, William G. Boykin, was slated to speak. Boykin is a born-again Christian, and his past remarks portraying the war on terror in holy and biblical terms were so extreme that he was rebuked in 2003 by President Bush. In fact his scheduled speech at West Point was so vigorously protested that it ultimately had to be canceled.
Page said that on other occasions, religious events were promoted by superiors with the kind of mass e-mails seldom used for secular gatherings. “It was always Christian, Christian, Christian,” said Page, who is an atheist.
Mikey Weinstein, an Air Force Academy graduate who presides over an advocacy group called the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, told me that more than 30,000 members of the United States military have been in contact with his organization because of concerns about zealotry in their ranks.
More than 150 of them, he said, work or study at West Point. Several cadets told me in telephone interviews that nonbelievers at the academy can indeed be made to feel uncomfortable, and that benedictions at supposedly nonreligious events refer to “God, Our Father” in a way that certainly doesn’t respect all faiths.
Is the rest of society so different?
Every year around this time, many conservatives rail against the “war on Christmas,” using a few dismantled nativities to suggest that America muffles worship.
Hardly. We have God on our dollars, God in our pledge of allegiance, God in our Congress. Last year, the House took the time to vote, 396 to 9, in favor of a resolution affirming “In God We Trust” as our national motto. How utterly needless, unless I missed some insurrectionist initiative to have that motto changed to “Buck Up, Beelzebub” or “Surrender Dorothy.”
We have God in our public schools, a few of which cling to creationism, and we have major presidential candidates — Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum — who use God in general and Christianity in particular as cornerstones of their campaigns. God’s initial absence from the Democratic Party platform last summer stirred more outrage among Americans than the slaughter in Syria will ever provoke.
God’s wishes are cited in efforts to deny abortions to raped women and civil marriages to same-sex couples. In our country God doesn’t merely have a place at the table. He or She is the host of the prayer-heavy dinner party.
And there’s too little acknowledgment that God isn’t just a potent engine of altruism, mercy and solace, but also, in instances, a divisive, repressive instrument; that godliness isn’t any prerequisite for patriotism; and that someone like Page deserves as much respect as any true believer.
Kerrey labels himself agnostic, but said that an active politician could get away with that only if he or she didn’t “engage in a conversation about the danger of religion” or advertise any spiritual qualms and questions.
“If you talk openly about your doubts,” he said, “you can get in trouble.”
To me that doesn’t sound like religious freedom at all.
2 Midrash in the Moment: Doesn’t Jesus’ Genealogy Fall Apart If Joseph Isn’t Really Jesus’ Father?
This Sunday for our ‘Questions about Christmas’ sermon series I pulled your questions at random from a bingo tumbler and just answered them off the cuff. As I warned, sometimes off the cuff Jason quickly slips into off color Jason but I think I was mostly clean.
This week I will try to post responses to the questions that didn’t get pulled and also summaries of how I answered some of the other questions.
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One thing you have to remember is that the early church was an oral culture. They were good storytellers and, being good storytellers, they would never begin a Gospel with a list of begats unless there was a good point they wanted their listeners to catch.
The first thing Matthew’s audience would’ve noticed is the fact that this isn’t a traditional Jewish genealogy. You can compare Matthew’s list to the lists in the Old Testament. Jewish genealogies were men’s only clubs. But Matthew’s has women in it.
And not just women. Gentiles. Matthew’s constructs a genealogy of Jews and Gentiles, and the only way Matthew can include Gentiles is through women because all the men in Jesus’ family were Jews. So Matthew works in Ruth and Rahab and Tamar and Bathsheba.
Those women aren’t just Gentiles. Matthew also constructs a genealogy of saints and sinners. Tamar slept with her father-in-law, on ‘accident.’ Ruth seduced Boaz. Bathsheba very likely seduced David. Rahab was a hooker.
So what Matthew’s doing isn’t trying to biologically tie Jesus to Jewish history because that would be impossible. What Matthew’s doing is giving you the overture to his Gospel; he’s hinting at the themes to come.
And one of those themes is the compassion Jesus shows women like Tamar and Rahab, who, incidentally, are the kind of women that most would’ve assumed Jesus’ own mother was.
He’s foreshadowing themes: Jesus’ compassion on sinners and women, Jesus’ ministry to Gentiles and outsiders. This becomes more obvious when you flip to the end of Matthew’s Gospel and see that it closes with Jesus giving his Great Commission to ‘make disciples of all nations…‘ Meaning: Jews and Gentiles.
So the genealogy isn’t about Jesus’ biological make-up; it’s about the make-up of his Kingdom. It’s Matthew’s of telegraphing that Christ will be a different of King.
A couple of other points:
The word genealogy is genesis. In the beginning. Matthew begins his Gospel in the same way the Hebrew Bible begins. This is Matthew’s way of saying that Jesus is the beginning of a new creation.
Another thing, Matthew says ‘from the deportation to Babylon to the birth of the Messiah…’ In other words, Matthew’s suggesting Israel’s exile to Babylon never ended, that even though Israel returned from Babylon, their exile never truly ended until Jesus was born. That’s what makes ‘Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ an Advent song.
Lastly, Matthew’s not trying to give a proper, traditional family tree for Jesus, but if he wanted to he could do that through Joseph. As an adoptive father myself, I have a stake in this point. In the same way my boys have Virginia birth certificates though they were born in Guatemala, according to Jewish law, Jesus becomes Joseph’s legal son the moment Joseph claims him as such, which is what makes Joseph’s leap of faith and participation in the Christmas story so vital.
0 10 Ways to Live an Extraordinary Life
When I first read this list by Bob Goff in Relevant Magazine, my reaction was: ‘Damn, I don’t follow hardly any of these principles.’
Sometimes Advent can change everything, including your perspective. Reading over this list again while anticipating Emmanuel’s, God with Us, arrival on December 24, I notice that Goff’s guide to an extraordinary life is largely premised on being ‘with’ people as a priority.
And maybe there’s a theological reason this is the key to a good life. After all, if Jesus is true God and true Man then what it means to be authentically human- our true selves as we were created to be- is to be like Jesus. To be most fully alive is to be the sort of person who makes being with others more important than anything else.
That is, is it not, the priority God makes at Christmas. To be God with us. Indeed, as Barth says, God decides not to be God without us.
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When Bob Goff answers the phone, it’s a bit of a shock. It shouldn’t be. His phone number is one of the world’s most easily accessible—available at any bookstore in the country. He printed it in the back of Love Does, his best-selling collection of stories about a few ways he’s managed to turn each day into a “hilarious, whimsical, meaningful change to make faith simple and real.” As you dial the number, you might expect a hotline, or a secretary, or at least a voicemail. But you’ll get no such thing. Call the phone number, and you’ll be greeted with, “This is Bob Goff!”
If it’s possible for someone to become famous for no other reason than that he loves genuinely and lives fully, then Goff has done it. He’s a lawyer in Washington. He’s the Ugandan honorary consul to the U.S. He’s a professor at Pepperdine Law School and Point Loma Nazarene University. He’s the founder of Restore International, which serves underprivileged children in Uganda and India. His endless supply of stories charm, his overseas work inspires and his demeanor encourages—but the most truly fascinating thing about Bob Goff is Bob Goff.
Somehow, using the same 24 hours in a day the rest of us have, Goff has crafted an extraordinary life of adventure, joy and love. It’s an appealing prospect for anyone, and we wondered: What are his secrets? And: Will he share them?
The answer, as with most things in Goff’s life, was an emphatic yes.
1. Don’t Let Anyone Go to Voicemail
“We get really busy,” Goff says. “But the less time Jesus had on earth, the more available He became to people.”
So when Goff put his phone number in the back of Love Does, he made the promise to himself to answer every call—regardless of whether or not he knew who it was. There are practical limits to this, of course. “I don’t feel guilty if I’m on the other line, or on a plane,” he says. But from where Goff sits, Jesus wouldn’t have ignored many phone calls. So neither does he. “If I get a call, I answer it,” he says. “And it’s been terrific!
“There’s a God we can talk to anytime, anywhere, about anything, and I’m so glad He doesn’t screen my calls—because I don’t have anything that’s particularly interesting to say. And I’m understanding that better because I’m available to people.”
2. Don’t Make Appointments
Goff says, “When someone calls me and says, ‘Can we meet two Tuesdays from now at 3 p.m.?’ I say, ‘How about now?’ If you call me two Tuesdays from now at 3, I’ll probably say the same thing.”
That’s right. As implausible as it sounds, Bob Goff, lawyer and Ugandan consulate, doesn’t set appointents.
The benefit of this thinking becomes evident even now—he is, as we speak, driving home from an impromptu meeting with a young man who needed to talk.
“Guess what!” he says, laughing. “I didn’t have any appointments that I needed to cancel … I’ve got all the time in the world because I don’t have any appointments.”
Goff insists when your life is appointment-free, your time is at the service of others instead of your personal demands. Plus, you become a different person when you structure your life around others’ needs.
“Can you imagine a lawyer who doesn’t make appointments?” Goff asks, recognizing the absurdity of it. “But it’s been great.”
3. Be Incredibly Inefficient at Love
“Don’t do an efficient brand of love,” Goff says.
Then he does what he does best—launches into a story without missing a beat.
“The woman who lives across the street from us has cancer. She called me up and told me the bad news, and I told her, ‘I’m not going to call you ever again.’ She’s like, ‘What?’
“I went to Radio Shack and got us two walkie-talkies, and it was terrific. For the last year, we’ve been talking on walkie-talkies every night. It’s like we’re both 14-year-olds and we’re both in tree forts.
“She took a turn for the worse about four days ago, so this morning, I woke up about 5, and I went to the hospital. I sent the nurse in with a walkie-talkie, and I sat in the next room and called her up. I heard her just start crying—because there’s something inefficient and beautiful about it. We were sitting in a hospital, separated by a room, talking on walkie-talkies.”
Here he breaks off and seems choked up for a moment.
Then he continues. “Be inefficient with your love. The more in-efficient, the better. It would have been a lot more efficient for God to not send Jesus to die for us. That was very inefficient love. But so sweet and so tender.”
4. Don’t Have a Bible Study
When it comes to Bible studies, Goff says simply, “I’m done. I’ve got all the information I need.”
But this doesn’t leave the Bible out of his daily routine. To the contrary, he’s upped the ante.
“I’ve met with the same guys every Friday who I’ve been meeting with for a decade,” he says. “And we have a Bible Doing.”
The idea, Goff says, is basically that memorization is only effective if it motivates you to action. It’s great when believers meet together to internalize the Bible, but why not externalize it as well?
Goff is likewise unconventional in his approach to a morning quiet time. “I can’t do them,” he says. “I think I got sent to the principal too much when I was a kid.”
“Instead, I take Scripture, I let it wash over me, and I say, ‘What do I really think about this?’” Then he shares his reflections by sending out a morning tweet.
This morning habit helps his day start on the right foot in front of God and everyone else. “It helps me dwell in Christ,” he says. “But it also helps me not be a pill midday. I can’t send a beautiful tweet in the morning and then be a pill.”
5. Quit Stuff
“Every Thursday, I quit something,” Goff says. It’s one of his more infamous habits, one that he follows faithfully—and, often, dramatically. He’s been known to break apartment leases, throw out furniture and quit jobs. “You can quit cussing if you want,” he says, “but go a little higher up on the tree. It can be something really good.”
His most recent Thursday resignation was from the board of a prominent charity. “I called the guy that runs it up and said, ‘I’m out!’ And he said, ‘How come?’ And then he paused and said, ‘No! Thursday!’”
The idea is not to be a liability to charitable organizations (although that might be part of the fallout). It’s to give yourself room to grow and to give God room to work. The patterns of life can weigh down and hold back. Quitting things forces you forward to explore new opportunities, to try things you wouldn’t have time for otherwise and to fill your life with things that are fresh, different
and dangerous.
6. Do What You’re Made to Do
In today’s functional culture, the common question is, “What am I able to do?” People take tests to determine skill sets and aptitude and then march off to pursue a career based on the results.
But Goff says the better question is, “What am I made to do?” He goes on to say, “It’s as simple as asking, ‘What are the things you think are beautiful? And you want in your life?’ … And then there’s other stuff you stink at, and they cause you a bunch of stress. I just try and do more of the first and less of the second.”
7. Get More Unschooled, Ordinary Friends
For most people, friendship is accidental. You see someone often enough, find a few common interests, hang out and strike up an easy friendship. New friends probably come from the people you work with or go to church with. The childhood idea of “making friends,” a proactive pursuit, has been replaced with the idea of “letting friends happen.”
Goff suggests making friendship intentional and, moreover, risky. Because sometimes you can learn more from friends who stand just left of center than those with whom you share everything in common.
One of Goff’s dearest friendships began with a simple thank you, for example.
“They call me Mr. G at the airport, because I’m there just about every day,” Goff says. And before every flight, the same TSA security guard—Adrian—checked Goff’s ID. After a few months of this, Goff decided to extend his appreciation.
“You start every day for me,” he recalls telling Adrian. “When I think of you, I think of God. You’re so tender and kind to everybody!”
And just like that, the diminutive security guard put his arms around Goff and held him, in front of a line of waiting passengers. “It started this terrific friendship,” Goff says. “We spent the next six Christmases together with his family at our house.”
Adrian tragically passed away last summer, but not before coming to Jesus. “And now, when I think of heaven,” Goff says, “I don’t think of St. Peter. I think of a guy like Adrian, who’s checking IDs. And all of that came because I decided to get more unschooled, ordinary friends.”
8. Jump the Tracks
Goff spends most Wednesday mornings at Disneyland, prepping to teach his courses at Pepperdine University. From his vantage point on Tom Sawyer Island, he watches hundreds of park visitors board the monorail, content to be whisked wherever the train takes them.
And their park experience, says Goff, suffers because of it. The real adventure, both in Disneyland and in life, is when you venture outside the fixed loop.
But Goff is quick to point out there’s a difference between fighting the system and choosing to explore new paths outside the system. He says everyone should be jumping more tracks: “Not with a militancy. Not with a black arm band around your arm, just saying what you’re against. But with a resolve.”
And what can you expect to find off the beaten path? Adventure, and good company. “I’ll know more about my character, and I’ll know more about Jesus,” he says. “I’ll meet a lot of cool people.”
9. Crowd-Surf Each Other
At a speaking event, Goff met a man who had just received word that his 8-year-old son had been diagnosed with leukemia. Someone suggested everyone lay hands on him and pray for healing.
“That means the four dudes next to him put hands on him, and the guy in row 50 is really just putting hands on the guy in row 49,” he says.
Not satisfied with this set-up, Goff called out, just as the group was bowing their heads, “Let’s crowd surf this guy.”
So the man was passed up and down the rows of the auditorium. “That’s the picture that’s etched in my mind,” he says. “This man in agony and delight.”
Goff, who is big on physical touch, doesn’t shake hands. “If we say we’re the body of Christ, let’s act like it,” he says. “Let’s stop treating this faith thing like it’s a business trip. I want us to treat it like it’s a family. Family picks up the phone. Family surfs each other. Family hugs each other.”
Goff’s personal policy is to hug whoever he meets. It doesn’t suit everyone’s comfort zone, but he says it’s part of his identity as a believer. And the benefit of breaking through these bubbles of security is being opened up to a deeper understanding of community.
“I’m the big winner,” Goff insists, on crowd-surfing others. “I understand more about my faith and the idea of being a body.”
10. Take the Next Step
Many people are passionate but often have no idea how to get where they want to end up. Goff says you don’t really have to. You just have to start.
“If I could do this Jedi move over a lot of people, I’d just tell them to take the next step,” he says. “And then the next step. You don’t know all the steps, but most people know the next step.”
And even if not, Goff says that’s no excuse. “I’m not that freaked out about knowing what the next step is. Because I know that if I trip, I’ll fall forward. I’ll be moving toward the next thing.”
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.
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
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.