Notes from the Corner - Advent IV - Love for the Shepherds

Gypsy Shepherds
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The shepherds camped with their flocks outside Bethlehem were unloved men. No mother, no bride worried for them during the long nights. Perhaps they had a few shepherd buddies that they might trade stories with or meet at the tavern. But society in general overlooked these men. They were the ancient equivalent of today’s retail clerks or gas bar attendants: not faces or names most would remember.

But then the angel appeared to these men, announcing, “Today a Savior has been born for you” (Luke 2:10-12). The angel said this news would bring “great joy to all the people.” Joy for all the people must include those often forgotten or overlooked, folks like the shepherds.

We believe that Christmas means love, and we show that love when we share meals, cards, and gifts with family and friends. However, the true spirit of Christmas love is to love those whom nobody else loves, people like the shepherds. That’s the kind of love God shows at Christmas.

Snippet from Sunday - Christmas Means Love - December 23

This season is all about love. We could add the love we have for friends, the camaraderie we share with co-workers, the cookies we carry next door to neighbors, the warm handshakes and hugs and cards we give and receive after a church service.

As believers and followers of Jesus, we suspect that this strong holiday feeling of love must in some way spring from the birth of our Savior. But we’re left a bit puzzled when we have to explain exactly what the child born in Bethlehem has to do with young couples holding hands while they skate or pretty packages piled underneath a pine tree. How do we trace the connections down from the virgin mother and the angels and shepherds and wise men all the way to the joy we feel as we bake butter tarts and peppernuts and other Christmas sweets to share with loved ones?

Here’s the truth about love and Christmas: Jesus was born because of love and for love. Jesus was born because God loves us, and Jesus was born for the purpose of bringing God’s love to us. The good news of Christmastime doesn’t get any more simple than that. “God loved us and sent his Son” (Jn 3.16).

Every act of love in this season, and in every season, has the potential to echo or to reflect God’s greatest expression of love toward us. Sometimes our expressions of love mirror God’s love with a joyful holiness; sometimes what we think of love is barely a pale reflection, something in which we can recognize a trace resemblance to God’s love only with a lot of hard work and imagination. . .

What we often call love is a strange alloy. It’s part love--the kind of love God shows--and in large part something else. We mix in lust or fear or self-congratulatory pride. Sure, there are trace amounts of real love there, but mostly it’s our desire for possession or pleasure. There’s a bit of true love there, but it’s overshadowed by our fear of being alone, our fear that the other person will leave us. It’s polluted by how good we feel about ourselves for loving others so extravagantly.

What we need is some refining fire to purify our love. We need some North Star to set the compass of our love by.

(Check out the whole sermon after the jump . . .)

October 7 - Snippet from Sunday - Prejudice and the King

I have yet to meet a church whose members don’t quietly hold prejudice and division from one another in their hearts. Already as a small child, I knew there was division in the heart of the congregation I grew up in and loved. The meetinghouse was situated midway between two small towns. Church members came from both towns to worship together as one body. But whenever there was a congregational vote, the church was split along town lines--who lived where, who went to Bible study in one municipality or the other. This internal divided-ness spilled over to the conversations over coffee in the fellowship hall or the church foyer. Those three men were from Town A, that group of women was from Town B, and so forth.

This is not what Jesus wants for the community he calls his body. He prayed that we may be one just as he is one with God his Father, separate in person but united in spirit (Jn 17.21). But even before the New Testament was fully written, already churches were drawing lines and taking sides.

[. . .] According to James in 2.8, the standard we’re held to is unconditional love, love without discrimination, love without favoritism or prejudice. James calls this the “royal” law; we could also translate it “the King’s law.” If we were to read on to v 11, we’d find James focusing our attention more and more on the King, the one who spoke this law to us.

Whether we identify this King with God in the person of Jesus in Mk 12 or Yahweh God speaking to Moses in Lev 19, this law sums up how our King desires us to live with one another. When we nurse prejudice in our hearts or show favoritism, we walk away from what God wants. It doesn’t matter that prejudice is only a feeling or that favoritism is affects how we treat others only a little. Just as surely as if we committed adultery or murder, James says in v 12, we’re walking away from the path to the good, free, and just life God desires for us.

[. . .] My brothers and sisters, this should not be for us. Jesus’ cross has toppled every dividing wall. While age, money, gender, race, class, interests and hobbies are all still realities we live with, we don’t live by them. We don’t let them determine who we extend friendship to. Jesus has crossed the biggest barrier, that between a holy and faithful God and us faithless people, to make us God’s friends. Where that barrier has fallen, no other barrier should still stand.

(Check out the whole sermon after the jump. . .)

July 22 - Snippet from Sunday - Put On Love

Let me describe a situation that may be more familiar. When I started seminary, I took out a loan to pay my tuition. Now that I’m done with school, I’m in the process of paying that loan back. Whatever happens in my life--should I become a father, should I move to another country--the lending bank will find me and demand to be paid back. But if I die, then the bank writes off my debt and clears my name. That’s one of the very few good things about educational debt.

Thankfully, I can manage to make my monthly payments on my student loan. It wasn’t that big. But the claim that sin and death had on me was much greater than that of my lending bank. There was no way I could get free from sin and death. Wherever I went, whatever I did with my life, sin and death would find me and remind me that I owed them, that, in effect, they owned me. I could see evidence of their power all around me--fear and greed in my own heart, sickness, poverty and oppression around me. I was constantly reminded that I would only ever clear my account when they took my very life from me.

Paul actually uses this very image for the power of sin and death in ch 2. But then he says that Jesus, through his cross, freed us from the claims of sin and death. Christ gave his life for ours. Now, if we identify ourselves completely with him, his death counts for ours. The powers of sin and destruction no longer have any claim on us. We’re dead as far as they’re concerned. We owe them nothing, and now we are free to live, just as Jesus lives by the power of his resurrection.

Paul says in Col 3.3, For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. That’s a beautiful picture. The life we live together is hidden away from the forces that want to dominate it. But also hidden in God, which is to say, the way we live now is surrounded by God’s power, it shines with God’s glory, it is full to overflowing with joy, it’s brimming over with love.

So now, Paul tells the believers, live it out. Stop living like sin and death still rule you! Start living like Christ is the one calling the shots! If you’ve really made a commitment to Jesus, you need to change.

(Check out the whole sermon after the jump. . .)

N.T. Wright, the New Friars, and a Small Town Church

I've had time to do a bit or reading over the past few weeks. We've moved north, to Saskatoon following a job for Cindy that will start 1 July. Because we opted for a moving company (for the first time ever), we weren't sure when in the four-week window of June our goods would show up. So we've been waiting, eating off a card table, sitting around on folding chairs, sleeping on an air mattress. I like camping, but I was pretty happy when we got the phone call last week that truck was due in on Tuesday. It came, and now we're gradually unpacked. All to say: I've had some time to read.

Public libraries are great! Even for recent immigrants (like me), libraries offer immediate access to a near-boundless and haphazard collection of books and DVDs. You never know what you'll to find.

For instance: Wandering through our new local branch, I found Scott Bessenecker's The New Friars. I remember hearing about this book shortly after it came out in 2006. I remember meaning to find it and read it, but never quite getting around to it. Now, it seemed, it's time had come. So I checked it out with my brand new Saskatoon library card.

The New Friars is a good read--conversationally written, informative, challenging. I'd recommend it especially to students and twenty-somethings puzzling out how their lives fit into God's good desires for this world. That's the part of me, at least, that I felt it speaking to.

Bessenecker uses five words to characterize the praxis of those he dubs "New Friars"--Jesus' followers who become poor in order to serve the people Jesus loves. They are incarnational, devotional, communal, missional, and marginal. He fleshes each of these out with both stories from practitioners today and also those of their historical forerunners: the desert mothers and fathers, the Celts, the Franciscans and the Poor Clares, the Anabaptists, and the Moravians. Each chapter finds the right mix of personal confessional and prophetic discontent.

The New Friars struck me, got stuck in my mind and my heart, toward the end Bessenecker's discussion of the devotional aspect of the New Friars' work. He tells a story about shoveling snow (something and should get used to) and wrestling with his commitment to Jesus and his mission:

"You love my mission more than you love me," Jesus said to me. At first I found this a bit offensive. I suppose Peter might have felt the same way when Jesus kept asking him later, "Do you love me?" (John 21:15-17). How can this be? I wondered. Of course I love you, Lord. But then I began to ask myself, what was it that motivated me . . .
As wonderful as it is to bring the kingdom of God to the hollow places on earth, even this is rubbish in comparison to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus. Intimacy with Christ must be first. Without it, mission is empty and self-serving.

I hit these words like sparrow hits a window. I went back and re-read the paragraphs. Bessenecker was insisting on a distinction that I simply couldn't comprehend. I read and asked myself, how am I supposed to differentiate between my love for God and my love for God's purposes? If I love God, I want what God wants, right?

I eventually picked myself up and made it to the end of the chapter and the end of the book. I enjoyed it, but I keep returning to this question about what I love. I have a half-forgotten memory of a time in my Evangelical youth when this distinction would have made a bit more sense to me. At times, I feel a vague sense of loss or perhaps even regret that I can't find that conceptual apparatus or feel those feelings at this point. Other times I feel a sneaking sense of superiority or an adolescent air of maturity that I've "grown past" that capability. I'm not sure what I feel, but I keep feeling it because the question stubbornly keeps bobbing to the surface of my thoughts.

Reading The New Friars began to dredge up question about how I am joining in on God's project. Recently I've been talking with a small town congregation near Saskatoon. They need a pastor of a sort. They need someone who will do the things small town pastors do: sermons and committees and weddings and funerals and Children's Moments and the like. Set against the stories of saints and students giving their lives away in urban slums, a small town pastorate looks pretty far removed from the frontiers of God's kingdom. I doubt the church wants someone who spends more time "sitting with" the community than working in the church office.

So I began googling urban ministry opportunities around Saskatoon. I began making lists of the reasons why God wouldn't call me to a small town pastorate.

But the unanswered question of John 21 stopped once again: Do I love Jesus, or do I simply love what looks to me like his mission? Small town churches don't look like the frontline of mission. But maybe I'm seeing things incorrectly. I remember Jesus telling a story about people at the last judgment asking in disbelief when they served him, fed him, ministered to him. And Jesus responds tells them appearances can be deceiving (see Mt 25). Maybe there is a frontier running right down Main Street (even though it doesn't have a single stoplight). Maybe Jesus is forgotten somewhere amid the semi-affluent homes.  If I love Jesus, I have to go when he says go, right?

Which brings up N.T. Wright. After I finished The New Friars, I picked up Wright's Surprised By Hope. This one's been sitting on the shelf since I got it as a gift a few Christmases back. So when I was grabbing a few books to read while we waited for the moving truck to arrive, I slipped it into my bag. I'm glad I did.

Wright's basic argument runs that a revitalized eschatology will give us a more robust political ecclesiology.

Most of us have a pretty foggy personal eschatology. We know we will die, and we're confident that then we'll be with Jesus eternally. For most of us, this is what the good news is all about.

We may or may not have strong feelings about hell (thanks to Rob Bell and the barrage of books responding to his Love Wins).

Some of us (if you grew up in a certain kind of Evangelical church, like me) also have charts and diagrams about the particular of general eschatology. We're familiar with the various interpretations of "time, times, and half a time"; we've read Christian pulp fiction about the end of the world; we've debated pre-, mid-, and post-trib raptures scenarios. But most of us feel that it's best to hold onto these, if we do at all, with a pretty loose grip.

To all of our muddled feelings and convictions, Wright brings a solidly researched biblical theology. He confronts us with the unanimous early Christian hope in a bodily resurrection after a disembodied intermediate sate with Jesus in heaven/paradise/Abraham's Bosom. Because of Easter, he says, we have more to hope for than a spiritual exit from a sin-sick material world. Jesus has not just made us a nice place to go after the traumatic and unfortunate experience of death; no, he's conquered death. And his own resurrection--his own bodily return back from the dead--proves that death no longer has the final word.

And from bodily resurrection, he draws a clear line to concern for and action on behalf of the present social-political-ecological-material world. God called creation good, and God's intent has always been to redeem, to buy back the good in it. Jesus' resurrection shows us the "how" of that redemption.

Wright returns again and again to 1 Cor 15.58: "Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain."At the resurrection and renewal of all the world, God redemptively validates what we do in the present, just as Jesus' resurrection validated Jesus' work.

Wright doesn't want us confusedly to think that our responsibility now is to "build God's kingdom by our own efforts." There is no way for humanity, Christian or otherwise, to progress from here and now to the resurrection new creation. As Wright insists, "God builds God's kingdom."

Wright follows up this important disclaimer with the following: "But God ordered his world in such a way that his own work within that world takes place not least through one of his creatures in particular, namely, the human beings who reflect his image. . . . God intends his wise, creative, loving presence and power to be reflected--imaged, if you like--into his world through his human creatures." This is the key point: God chooses to usher in God's kingdom, at least in a preliminary way, through human agency. As Paul says to the believers in Corinth, "We are God's co-workers" (1 Cor 3.9). We wait for the final day, the day of general resurrection for the world to be made entirely new. But until then, we declare the glorious goodness of the God who saves us by building for God's kingdom (see Mt 5.16).

But how do we partner with God in this work? The kingdom for many of us includes only the souls of the saved. Others may steer us toward government offices and the need to legislate morality. Both these answers, I think, shoot wide of the goodness of God's kingdom. Look at Jesus: how did Jesus herald the arrival of the kingdom?

Wright suggest three pursuits for the church as we build for God's kingdom: justice, beauty, and evangelism. He concludes, "This is the good news--of justice, beauty, and above all Jesus--that the church is called upon to live and to speak, to bring into reality, in each generation." Then he asks, "What might the life of the church look like if it was shaped, in turn, by this hope-shaped mission?"

Wright develops this beautifully, and I can't urge you strongly enough to read it for yourself.

This comes back around to the small town church. Our strongest witness to Jesus' good news, our fullest participation in God's mission, is how we live together as church-communities. We herald the kingdom Jesus inaugurated by how we live and love as a community. Wright devotes final third of Surprised By Hope outlining this sort of ecclesial politics found in the New Testament. 

The work of the new friars, if we look past its (un)glamour, the strangely attractive unattractiveness of it, is primarily to demonstrate the way Jesus lived among the world's poorest people. There work is less one of social development than one of accompaniment. Their expectation seems less to be that they will end poverty than that they will live faithfully with poor people, welcoming them, eating together, sharing their resources.

My work (whatever the outcome of conversations with the small town church) is to love Jesus. In Jn 21, Peter answers Jesus three times that, yes, he loves Jesus. Jesus responds three times telling Peter to care for Jesus' flock. Earlier in John, Jesus said, "If you love me, keep my commands." And what is his command? Jesus continues on to say that his command is that we love one another as he loved us (Jn 15.12).

Loving Jesus (not just Jesus' mission) means, for me, loving as Jesus loved. This is first an ecclesial reality, something that we do together in the church family. If I am not willing to share table with my partners in this body, if I do not care for the, if I cannot forgo my own interests in order to attend to theirs--I have not love. I have not yet experienced Jesus' reconciliation of all things because I am not reconciled to my sisters and my brothers in this gathering. But if I do love them, then the kingdom of God is truly among us.

But as Wright and Bessenecker would both insist, a good congregational life is not enough. Just as my lone wolf activism for the kingdom falls short of God's desires, so also our in-group comfort and harmony does not bring us to the goal God has for us. No.

Instead, our church-community must build for the kingdom in this world. Our mutual love must spill over into love for the entire world, especially those places where justice and beauty are hardest to find. Remember, Jesus says, "As the Father sent me, so I send you." Sent from love to love.

And because we are a community--not just individuals--we can love more robustly. The lonely not only find a friend, they find a family. The movers and shakers of the world are confronted not only by a vote but by a grassroots movement. Politics (ecclesial or otherwise) gains force when enacted by a community, a polis.


So perhaps I'm still struggling to understand Bessenecker's distinction. Loving Jesus seems to entail loving as Jesus loved, which, in turn, seems to be the essence of mission. But I think the struggle is good for me, so I hope it continues.

June 20 - Yahweh is Looking for a Faithful People

Living Water Community Church - Sunday Worship

1 Kings 17 - “Yahweh is Looking for a Faithful People”

Yahweh loves with a loyal love. Yahweh provides for our needs. Yahweh alone provides for our needs. Yahweh is true and reliable. Yahweh alone is reliable, dependable, worthy of our trust. When Yahweh says something will happen, it happens. Yahweh loves with a loyal and faithful love.

Israel and its king did not believe these things. One hundred years after David, Israel denied every one of these claims. They did not believe that Yahweh was loyal, faithful, true, reliable, dependable, loving. Israel did not believe Yahweh was sufficient. Ahab, Israel’s king, did not believe Yahweh was sufficient.

When I was growing up, I had a story book about Elijah. Elijah being fed by ravens, Elijah and the jar of oil, Elijah on Mount Carmel, Elijah and the fiery chariot. My mom would sit on the bed with me and let me turn the pages while she read. I had other Bible story books--they were in a series, thin and paperback: Samson and the Philistines, David and Goliath, Daniel and the Lions’ Den. These stories were simply told with matching simple, colorful illustrations. I would turn the pages and learn the moral or find an example to imitate in each story.

The moral of the stories we’ve  heard this morning is that God is the one who is control and the one who provides for us. Elijah and also the Sidonian widow are wonderful examples to imitate, heroes of faith. This is what my childhood storybook said.

But we can hear more in these stories when we listen to them in context. The storybook moral of David and Goliath, for instance, was that when we trust in God, no one (however big) can stand against us. When we read the story in the unfolding history of 1 Samuel, however, we find that the contest is less about David versus Goliath and more about the question of who will be God’s chosen shepherd-king-protector of the people--David who completely depends on Yahweh or Saul who is a tall and strong warrior. No one can stand against us when we trust in Yahweh, but the real threat is Saul, not some Philistine giant.

In the same way, we need to hear these Elijah stories as part of a larger story about how God’s people move from theocratic rule under Samuel to exile in the Assyrian and Babylonian empires. The moral of that bigger story is a theme that shows up over and over again in each of the intervening narratives: Yahweh’s people must depend on Yahweh alone.

Love and Metaphor

The lover speaks out of a keen awareness of the power of figurative language to break open closed frames of reference and make us see things with a shock of new recognition. (Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, 193)

(Alter may be writing about the speaker of Songs 1, but can anyone blame us for feeling for the outer limits of what sort of lover this may be?)