Miracles

When we gather around the Table, we remember the sacrifice of Jesus - His body broken for us and His blood poured out. And we often think that perhaps the choice of elements was just a matter of convenience. Of course when Jesus was around the 1st-Century Jewish table, there would be bread and wine. Of course, 2000 years later, around our own tables, there is grain and a fermented drink. 

But I don't think God ever does anything out of sheer convenience. I think everything He does is divinely orchestrated to be deeply infused with meaning. 

So the wine, I think, is not merely a convenient fluid to remind us of His blood pouring out. I think it's also meant to point us back to His miracles. 

Remember the first time that Jesus enters the scene as something special. It was a wedding in Cana, which He attended with His mother. The wine ran out early, and His mother was concerned about how the rest of the wedding was going to go (which means, by the way, that they were not merely guests at this wedding, but that they were somehow part of the family at this wedding because otherwise, why would she care so much?). So His mother tells Him to do something, and He has the servants fill the jugs with water, then dip it out as wine. 

Not only wine, but the finest wine the wedding guests have ever tasted. 

A few years later, He will pour out that wine again. 

Having tasted it myself, let me tell you - it is good. 

When we drink it, we're not supposed to remember just the sacrifice of Jesus. It can't be. When Jesus said, "Do this in remembrance of me," He hadn't gone to the Cross yet. It wasn't just His final act that He wanted us to remember, but His very life. His goodness. His grace. His glory. 

His miracles. 

The first of which was that He came to us at all. That God wrapped Himself in flesh and let us wrap Him in swaddling clothes and came to walk among us in human form. That He was even here in the first place to turn water into wine. And, friends, He's still doing that. 

He's still taking our plain things and making them glorious. He's still taking our boring things and making them good. He's still taking our empty things and filling them up. He's still coming in when the party seems to be over and starting it back up again. 

Remember, Israel waited in 400-some years of silence between the end of Malachi and the birth of Christ. Four hundred some years. The party was over. The vats were empty. The wine was gone. 

And then, Jesus. A baby in a manger. The Son of God in human flesh. 

Immanuel. 

New wine is being poured out. For us. 

Take this cup and drink.  

The Christmas Story

Here's the hard truth: when we let ourselves get wrapped up in these Christmas myths, no matter how nice they seem, no matter how plausible, no matter how neat, then one of two things happens: 

First, we become so wrapped up in the myth that we defend it unto our death, refusing to even consider any evidence that they might be myths, fictitious accounts made up by persons with any number of motivations for doing so. (Admittedly, many might be pure motivations, but still.) So we cling to a Christmas story that is not the Christ child, and we hold to it forever because it's just too cool to let go of. And we feel like we lose something of Jesus if we ever let it go. 

Second, we let go of the whole thing. Maybe we come into the evidence that tells us that that really cool thing that we were so willing to believe was actually made up, and all of a sudden, we don't know what the real story is any more. If the candy cane doesn't signify the blood of the Savior, then was there ever even a baby in a manger? If the sacrificial lamb wasn't wrapped in cloths and laid in a stone trough, then what do we make of the swaddling clothes we're told about? 

Believing the myth can corrupt the story. 

And again, let's be clear about what the story is: the story is that God Himself put on human flesh and came into the world to walk with us, talk with us, eat with us, wash our feet, and redeem us. Period. 

I'm not saying there aren't layers to this that we don't understand. There are. I'm not saying there aren't things that are true about this moment that we don't understand. There are. I'm not saying the Bible is exhaustive in its description of the birth of Christ. 

I'm saying it's sufficient. 

Remember that just a few days ago, I proposed the presence of a servant in the stable. Given everything we know about how the Jewish world operated at this time, this is not some far-fetched idea. It takes a little bit of a sanctified imagination to picture it, but it's consistent with what we know to be true. 

By contrast, the theory that's floating around about the shepherds and the sacrificial lambs...simply does not have historical evidence to support it. It proposes a fact that cannot be proven nor even suggested by the overwhelming testimony of history, and as such, it is not imaginative; it is fictitious. 

The presence of a servant, on the other hand, has firm grounding in the cultural history of the time and so, though not specifically stated, extends an invitation to imagination and does not propose a missing "fact" that must be taken wholly. 

That said, the presence of a servant is not necessary to the birth story of Christ. That is, it doesn't really add anything to our understanding of the moment. It doesn't change the fundamental nature of how we read the story. It is a supplement, but it is not foundational. It invites us to dance with the story in a new way, but it's the same story. 

The story of the sacrificial lambs demands that we layer this fictitious narrative onto our understanding. Thus, it aims to change the story. It aims to define the story for us. We have to stop doing that. 

The story is the story of God, wrapped in flesh, taking His first breaths in a barn, crying into the formless and void in a new creation, a new covenant, the fulfillment of His promise. And it is sufficient.

Understanding that, and only that, we have captured the heart of the Christmas story.  

Christmas Myths

I recently heard on the radio a Christian personality talking about a story he'd recently heard or read about how Jewish shepherds would have taken great care with a firstborn lamb who was meant to be sacrificial, wrapping it in cloth so that it wouldn't hurt or blemish itself, and putting it into a stone manger for safe keeping until it could be sacrificed. 

I recently saw on social media, as most of us have seen nearly every year, the "story of the candy cane," how the red stands for the blood of Jesus and the white stands for the cleansing of sin ("white as snow") and the curved shape is the shepherds' hook. 

A few years ago, the "star of Bethlehem" appeared in the local December sky, causing quite a heightened interest, and all kinds of stories came out about this star and what it would have meant 2,000 years ago. 

No one has, as yet, proposed a theory as to why Christmas supposedly smells like cinnamon and not, you know, myrrh. 

But I digress.

The point is that everywhere we turn this time of year, there seems to be someone who has a story to tell that we've never heard about the story we all think we know so well - a baby born in a manger, but what have we been missing? In a time in which we have invested ourselves deeply in historical criticism (trying to place the Scriptures into their accurate historical context for "better" understanding), there's something in us that wants to latch onto it every time someone says, "You know, to the people who were living back then, this would have meant _________." 

But don't buy it. 

Some of these stories are cool. Don't get me wrong. There's a reason so many persons love to read fiction. When well done, it feels so real, and it can help us to think about things more deeply. And it would be awesome if some of these stories were true. Of course, as Christians, we want to see Christ reflected in our world. We want there to be a blood-sacrifice story behind the candy cane. We want there to be some powerful meaning in way He was wrapped in the manger. We want to keep discovering new things about Christmas, things that draw us deeper into this story. Closer to Immanuel. 

But what could possibly bring us closer to God this Christmas than God Himself putting on flesh and coming to walk among us? 

That's the thing. At least, for me, it is. We have all of these stories that are cute and cool and might be nice to think about, but the truth is that 2,000-some years ago, God Himself came in human flesh to dwell among us. He was born as a human child, wrapped in blankets the way that any newborn babe would be, laid in a bed of hay because that's all that was available, and came to walk our streets, eat our food, wash our feet, and redeem our souls. 

Friends, I don't need a cooler Christmas story than that. 

I don't need the neat little stories that, if you haven't caught it by now, are completely made up. They're not real. They're just stories, meant to go viral to get you talking about something else. But the talking point of Christmas is the Christ child. Period. Do you really need God to do anything more than that?  

The Servant

There was another witness in the barn that night. Not only was creation watching as the Lord came down, but so was the lowliest of men - the servant. 

The Bible doesn't tell us about any servants in the stable, but it doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to find them. We're talking about an inn in a time when hospitality was a major cultural value. We're talking about a man with enough room to house others, who made his generosity and hospitality a hallmark of his existence. We're talking about a place where high numbers of visitors were prone to come through every year, and a high number of visitors in a time without motorized transportation means a significant number of animals were coming through. 

Remember all of the laws that the Jewish culture had, through the Bible, about protecting someone else's assets and property. About how to take care of your neighbor's ox. About the duty you owe to your neighbor when his animal is loose. The innkeeper knew he would have to provide for the animals that came into his care as much as he provided for the human beings. 

So there had to be at least one servant in the barn that night. Possibly more. 

There had to be someone whose job it was to make sure there was enough hay in the trough, enough grass, enough water. There had to be someone who kept refilling the buckets as they became empty. There had to be someone shoveling away the waste, piling it up in the corner. There had to be someone standing guard, stationing himself at the entrance to the stable so that no predators - wild or human - could come in and so that no animals, entrusted to his care, could wander out. 

There had to be someone...preparing the manger. 

Think about that for a second. 

Mary is crying out in labor pains; Joseph is holding her hand; the animals can't figure out what in the world is going on, so they are making their own noises. Everything is in a ruckus. Everything is all confused. Something is happening, but there's no time to think about anything except what is actively happening right now. 

And quietly, in the corner, a servant is preparing a manger, knowing that when the labor pains are over, the baby will need somewhere to lay. A servant is taking care to make a bed of straw for the Lord of All Creation to rest on. A servant knows that in all the commotion, there are things that Mary and Joseph aren't really thinking about right now. 

But the servant is thinking about them. 

The servant is always thinking about them. 

Bearing Witness

You've heard it said that Jesus is the "second Adam," the recreation of man in the image he was always intended to take. The first of a new order. Something altogether special, on whom the future of all humanity hinges. 

No wonder, then, that He was born in a barn.

Think back for a minute to the first creation, to the first Adam. Start a little bit before that, with the formless and void. 

In the beginning, everything was formless and void. Then, God spoke. And creation filled up. There was light and dark, night and day, mountains and valleys, birds and fish, creatures that roam across the earth, and finally, man. When God bent down into the dirt to form Adam from the dust and breathe into him the breath of life, it was creation - nature, animals, heavens - that were the witnesses. When God breathed out, creation gasped and breathed in. 

Something altogether new was happening. 

Fast forward a few thousand years to a little stable in Bethlehem. 

A few days prior to this moment, that stable was almost empty. There were no travelers; just the regulars passing through, probably. If that. But over the course of just a few days, the place really filled up. The animals of travelers came walking in, being led to their stalls, being fed from the earth. The spiders and mice started scurrying around the floors. The birds came in to nest in the rafters. A veritable zoo was building in that stable - donkeys, camels, sheep, livestock, birds, bees, bugs, rodents. The water was flowing to keep them all watered; the grains were being forked into feeding troughs. All of creation gathered together. 

And then....

And then, a baby. The Lord Himself took His first breath. 

And when He did, creation exhaled. 

Something altogether new was happening. 

Peace on earth. 

The cattle lowed, the donkeys brayed, the birds began to sing, the stars pointed the way, and the heavens sang holy, holy, holy. Healed and whole, for just a moment, in a single breath, with the cry of a new creation, a new Adam. A new Eden. 

Redemption is here. 

Let heaven and nature sing. 

Together

There's something about the Table, isn't there?

So many of the memories that I have with family are wrapped around food in some way, shape, or form. Especially this time of year. Especially when I think about all of the Christmases that I spent as a child running from one house to the next to the next. Seeing all the relatives, sure, but also, eating all the food. 

We would wake up in the morning and go to my grandmother's house, where she always had stockings overflowing with snacks. I'm talking good snacks. Apples, oranges, beef jerky, candies, all the things. I always looked forward to digging through that stocking, which often times was an actual men's extra-long tube sock. 

Then, we'd go to my great-aunt's house, and the smell hit you as soon as you walked in the door. Ham, falling off the bone. Beans (gross, but you could still smell them). Pies. Macaroni and cheese by the panful, one of my great-aunts standing there putting the crumbs on the top, fresh out of the oven. 

We would come home, and there were cookies. There had been cookies for days, honestly. All kinds of them. Sugar, wedding cakes, chocolate chip, chocolate crinkles. 

'Tis the season.

Am I right?

I think a lot of us think about the food when we think about this time of year. But it's not really because the food is something special. There's not really a time of the year when you can't have a ham. Or macaroni and cheese. Or beef jerky. Or cookies. (Did you know you can totally have sugar cookies in June if you want them? You can!) 

No, it's not the food that's special. 

It's something about the way that food is spread, the hands that prepared it, the voices around the table. It's something about the way that food makes us feel like we're home. 

Ah, yes. Home. 

The same is true today, and every day that we partake of this Table. Maybe that's one of the reasons that I love it so much. I walk in the door, and I see the Table set - bread and wine, fellowship, love - and there's something in my soul that just exhales and says, I'm home. 

Home. 

Right where I belong. With all of the folks who love me most. With the smells coming from the kitchen and the table spread thick and the ham and the cookies and the macaroni and cheese. And a tube sock with my name on it, stuff with fruit and beef jerky and all the good things. 

It smells like bread and wine in here, and it gets me every time. 

This is home. 

Lowing Cattle

By the way, if you thought that the first Christmas was somehow as still and silent as the paintings make us think that it was, I have news for you: 

It wasn't. 

We know there was hustle and bustle in the inn, filled to the brim, bedding piled in every conceivable place, guests tripping over each other, families reuniting and trying to share moments together, the luggage getting in the way, folks trickling in from wherever they've spent their days. 

Then, we go down to the barn where a young Joseph and his precious, very-pregnant Mary, are in labor, and we have all these images of a beautiful little manger with the hay all spread out nice and neat, a woman smiling, a baby sleeping peacefully...and I'm telling you, it wasn't like that. 

There was screaming. Mary, in labor, screamed. She took Joseph's hand and squeezed it, and he screamed. That woke up the animals, who started making their own noises, trying to figure out what was going on in their environment. The barnhands would have been close, would have come running. Trying to calm the animals. 

Donkeys braying. Camels spitting. Cows lowing. The song even tells us that cows were lowing. It's almost like it was a barn in there or something. 

It's not, then, that noise itself is a problem at Christmas; the question is really, what are we listening to? 

Can we hear the woman crying in labor? Can we hear the Christ child take His first breath? Can we hear creation - the animals, nature - singing out their song? Can we hear the noise they make when disturbed by the inbreaking? 

Sometimes, I wonder if this is what it was like in the beginning, when the whole of the universe was formless and void until the voice of God broke through. Until the Word spoke.

Until the Son cried out. 

And then, everything woke up. The world came to life. Something new was happening. The hay was scattered, but in a breath, it came together, ordered into the manger, put in place, postcard perfect. 

Ah, yes...postcard perfect. 

Have you ever heard the birds chirping in Eden?

This is what I think we miss out on so easily. We have these images of Christmas as quiet, as still, as...a silent night. But it wasn't silent, just like the Garden wasn't silent; it was abuzz with life, filled with sound. Not noise, but sound. (Do you know the difference?) 

Can you hear it?

It's the sound of a newborn baby crying in a manger...

...and the whole of creation responding in kind.  

Missing Christmas

We all do it - we live our lives, going about our day, and then, we get back home at the end of it all and something strikes us: a moment we totally missed. A word that someone said that we didn't latch onto, a question we should have asked but didn't, an encouragement we should have given but held back. The list goes on and on. We come home with regrets that, honestly, we weren't even aware of in the moment most of the time. Only later does it occur to us what that nagging feeling was, that tug on our hearts, that preoccupation in our minds. Only later do we see what we missed, but by then, it's too late. 

So it is, too, with Christmas. 

Many of us are so busy doing all of the Christmas-related things that we look up sometime in late December, take a deep breath, and realize...we missed it. Again. 

We're shopping and baking and traveling and cooking and wrapping and unwrapping and decorating and singing and dressing up and going to parties and visiting the family and attending church services and donating our time to serve others and driving around to see the lights and having family portraits taken and...and then, it's almost January and we look up and wonder where Christmas went. 

We were so surrounded by all of the accoutrement that we missed the moment, and now, it's gone. Again. 

Whatever happened to a silent night? 

Where was our holy night?

It's one of the things we look most forward to in the Christmas season every year: the stillness. At least, I do. When the darkness settles in a little bit early and the lights come on and there's a twinkle in the air and there's just this quiet that doesn't exist in the rest of the calendar. Maybe it's because unlike the spring and the summer and the fall months, there's no low-grade hum in nature. No chirping of the crickets. No warbles of the birds. No buzzing of the bees. Around Christmas, when all is still, all is really still. 

(Okay, yes, I know it's not, but it feels that way because it's just quieter. Measurably quieter.) 

And yet, so many of us go through the season without any of that quiet in our souls. None of it. We don't get that moment that we've waited all year for, that we prepare for months for. We put up our tree, having that little gnawing in our hearts that knows what it will be like when we finally get to just plug it in and sit down in its glow...but we can't sit down. 

We bake our cookies, thinking about what it will be like to take a long, slow bit of a still-warm sugar fresh out of the oven...but we end up shoving one in our mouth while we're rolling the next batch for the oven. Because there's just no time. 

We wrap our presents, then we pile them under the tree, and what seemed like an empty, inviting space now suddenly feels crowded and is so loaded with anticipation that we mistake it for worry - will they really like it? Do they already have one? We can't wait until Christmas comes and we get to watch someone we love unwrap something that we loved for them. And all of a sudden, that inviting space has filled with this weird sense of pressure....

'Tis the season, isn't it? 

This is the way the world has taught us to do Christmas. So it's no wonder we look up when it's all over, when we finally get our stillness, when all is finally quiet...and realize we missed it again. 

The baby in the manger? Already on His way back to Nazareth with Mary and Joseph.

Shucks. 

A New Eden

The world wants us in the inn, away from home for Christmas, but home is exactly what's happening just a few breaths away in the manger. 

In the basement of that too-full inn, where the animals, too, were packed in tight and sharing some hay and grasses, there comes to us a baby. Jesus. The Messiah. 

Immanuel. 

Do you know what Immanuel means? It means "home." 

Okay, technically, it means "God with us," but in the grand scheme of things, it means home. 

It means home because this is the way that it was meant to be. Remember all the way back in the beginning, there was formless and void. Then, there was darkness and light, earth and water, night and day, mountains and valleys and oceans, birds and creatures, then man...and God. In the beginning, after God formed and filled the earth, He walked with us in the Garden in the cool of the day. Adam and Eve, when they sinned and ate the fig, hid because they heard His footsteps. God cast them out of the Garden, and they no longer walked with Him. 

But that was always the plan. The plan was for us to walk with Him. 

When sin separated us, we no longer walked together. Christmas...changes all of that.

Look at it - here is a baby in a manger, the Son of God, God Himself incarnate. He has a body, a physical body. He has a voice and eyes and ears and feet. He's come to walk with us again. 

In the manger, there is Eden. There is a perfect creation once more, if only for a single, crying breath, and all of a sudden, God is walking with us again, and we with Him, and there is this overwhelming sense of home. Of the way things were meant to be. Of the space that is ours to inhabit. Of things being just the way we like them, the way we function so well. 

We are right where we are supposed to be. 

That's home. 

And if the world can keep you so busy and so overwhelmed and so noised-out and shouted-down in the inn for this season, it knows you'll never make it to the manger and you'll never know what "home" feels like, even when it's right there in the flesh, and when the calendar flips just that one more day, that one small, seemingly insignificant day, and the noise settles down and the inn starts to empty, you will settle - happily - for what you always had: a very small space in this great big world, complete with chores to be done, bills to be paid, miles to be driven, and prayers to be prayed. You'll settle for your cozy bed and your tiny cubicle and your little car, and you'll be happy with it because it will feel so much like the very thing you've been longing for this entire season from the inn. 

But it will still be such a shallow substitute, and in the depths of your soul, you'll know it. You'll know you've missed something, something important. 

Won't you?  

Away from Home

We've said that the world wants you in the inn for Christmas - with all the noise, the hustle and bustle, living out of a suitcase, crammed into a small space with far too many other persons for comfort, unable to really find rest. And it's true - the world wants this for you. 

But what it wants most is simply to keep you away from home. 

That's what being in the inn means. It means you're not at home. Two thousand years ago on that glorious night, the inn wasn't full because everyone was exactly where they wanted to be; the inn was full because so many folks were away from home that the innkeeper was desperate to find space to put them all. 

They had traveled, sometimes fairly long distances, to come back to Bethlehem for the required census, to make themselves present for the ruling authorities. Their feet were dirty; their backs were bent; their bodies were weary. There was barely enough space to stretch out and get a little bit of rest, but with all of the noise, there was no rest. 

They were away from home. 

Have you ever been on vacation? Like, packed yourself up, gone away, stayed somewhere else - a hotel, an air b&b, whatever - lived out of a suitcase, felt like a stranger? Everyone always talks about how refreshing vacations are, but if we're honest, we also say that we need a vacation to recover from our vacation. 

Why is that? Because when the vacation is finally over and we come home, there's something in our soul that just breathes the air in a new way. We think it was the vacation itself that gave us a new way to breathe, but actually, it's coming home. It's coming back to the place where we're settled, where everything is just the way we like it, where our lives function in a way that they just don't when we're living out of a suitcase. Yes, the most refreshing part of vacation is the way it renews for us this place called "home," this place where we actually rest and rejuvenate. 

As long as you're still in the inn, you never feel that. 

That's what the world is really trying to make sure happens. 

It's also why, by the way, we feel such a sense of relief when the Christmas season is finally over - because we get "home" back. We get to clear our space, clear our heads, close our doors, be in our own place, have all the things of our life back around us, stretch out...and rest. The world tries to tell us that we're glad the season is over, but it's not that; we're just happy to be home. (But don't tell the world I told you.) 

Can you feel it? Is this resonating with your heart?

It's not supposed to. Cultural Christmas doesn't want it to. But it really is the true gift of the season.  

Christmas Ham

I'm not really sure where the tradition started, but many of us will have ham around our Table this Christmas. At my house, we start the day with bacon and waffles. 

But the irony is not lost on me. It strikes me every year - and I laugh - at how commonplace it has become to celebrate the birth of our Jewish Savior with pork. 

Unclean!

There would have been neither bacon nor ham around the Table at the Last Supper. These will never become the elements that we pass in the plates or break at the front of the sanctuary. As faithful Jews, the disciples would never have imagined it. Pork? Really? 

Didn't Jesus send that legion of demons into a herd of pigs for a reason?

And yet, here we are, 2,000-some years later, with ham around our Table and bacon in our tummies. 

I laugh, but you know what? I love it. 

I love it because it reminds me that the Table Jesus sets is big enough for all of us. It's bigger than our rules. It's bigger than our regulations. It's bigger than our preferences. It's bigger than the Law. 

It's grace-big. 

It's mercy-big.

It's welcome-big.

It's love-big. 

And I love that. 

I love it because it means we don't have to be kosher - we don't have to get everything exactly right. We don't have to follow a bunch of strict rules. We don't have to have our lives perfect. We don't have to severely restrict and limit ourselves. 

We are free to be who we are, who God created us to be, who He wants us to be, who He needs us to be...who this world needs us to be. 

Every year, when we eat pork on Christmas, I think about the ways that Jesus - Immanuel - set us free for such even as this, to bring bacon to the manger and munch on ham while beholding our Jewish Savior. 

That is what Christ has done. 

In the Inn

If it feels, then, like you're spending this season of Advent in the inn, you're not alone. 

Away from home, a few things packed, living out of a suitcase, surrounded by other folks who have also traveled far from home with a few things packed, living out of a suitcase, bumping through the hallways, trying to get where you're going around all the other folks who are in your way while trying not to be in their way, candles burning all times of the night, music playing, impossible to escape the noise...

This is Christmas. 

In the inn. 

This is what it's like when there's always somewhere to be, something to do, someone to meet up with. When there is always some sort of stimulus around you, no peace and quiet, no room. 

Do you know what it meant to have no room at the inn? It meant there was not another single space in the entire building to stick someone else. It didn't mean that all of the 40x60 rooms with big, queen beds were reserved by nice couples and families with children who had paid months in advance and were probably only using half of that space, but it was theirs anyway; it meant there was not another single place to lay another single cot for another single person to squeeze into the inn for the night. 

So if you're thinking, sure, but when the Jews were done with the census, at least they could go back to the hotel and relax, think again. There wasn't space at the inn even for the persons that were staying there. There was room, but there wasn't space. 

That's what the culture does to Christmas. 

The culture keeps you away from home, unsettled, in a place where there's room, but no space, so you're constantly bumping into something or someone, always somewhere to be, something else to do. There is no refuge from the noise, from the lights, from the smells (WHY does the world think Christmas smells like cinnamon?). There's something about this season that always seems to keep us from being able to put two feet down at the same time or stretch out our arms a little bit. We curl up to sleep like we used to sleep under the Christmas tree as kids, but now, we're curling up just because we're exhausted and an actual bed seems like a luxury...like a space we don't have. 

I won't say the world has planned to do it this way; it's just sort of happened. Over the years, as we've put more and more emphasis on the season, as we've taken away the waiting and the anticipation, as we have excessively Christmased ourselves out, we have simply...moved into the inn. 

Many of us have forgotten there even is a manger. 

This year, it's time we take back our Christmas - our real Christmas. 

Let's move back out to the barn. 

Christmased Out

In a world in which we don't have to wait for Christmas (it starts all the way back in August, when the stores start putting up the trees) and where we don't have to live in anticipation (having enough to do to keep us busy throughout the whole season), by the time Christmas morning actually gets here, most of us are already Christmased out. 

We're done. We're tired. We're over it. We're glad that the season has finally ended and we can start packing things away and get a little breather before the new year starts. 

Think about it: how many holiday parties will you have this season? How many times will you watch Elf or National Lampoon's with your family? How many days in a row will you move a supposedly-magical elf from place to place around your house? How many creative backstories and how much full-scale scenery will you create for said elf? How many houses will you visit? How many cookies will you bake? How many will you eat? How many times will you make "one more" trip to the store for "one more" last-minute thing? 

How many Advent calendar boxes will you open, and partake of whatever activities might be inside - jigsaw puzzles, cheeses, coloring pages, candles to light? How many presents will you wrap? Unwrap? How many bags of trash will you take out? How much ham will you pull off the bone, and how many pots of macaroni & cheese will feed your clan? How many Christmas services will you attend, at how many churches? How many candles will you burn...and how many are you burning at both ends?

And...are you exhausted yet?

This is what the Christmas season does to us. It's no wonder we're so happy when it's all just over. 

The thing is, Christmas for us ends on Christmas day. It ends in the hustle and bustle of the inn to the point that most of us don't even remember there's a baby crying in the manger. We are so busy with the noise of our own celebrations that we don't hear Him. We are so blinded by the lights of all of the decorations that we couldn't see the star guiding the way even if we remembered to go outside and look up, even if we had the time. 

There's something about going to the big box store down the road and seeing the garden center filling up with hoses and weedeaters again that makes something inside of us just exhale and say, "Thank God." 

Thank God, indeed, but did you remember to?

For Christians for many years, Christmas Day was not the end; it was the beginning. It was the beginning of a new adventure with God with us - Immanuel. It was the beginning of a new covenant. It was the beginning of a fulfilled hope. It was the beginning of the promise come to life. On Christmas morning, Christians have always exhaled and said, "It's beginning. Thank God."

That is, until culture got hold of it. 

That's why the waiting, the anticipation is so important. That's why setting our eyes on the manger early is so important. That's why it's the key to all of this - learning to wait, learning to anticipate. So that when we get to Christmas morning, we're not already Christmased out. We're not too exhausted and over it and done to hear the baby crying in the manger. To remember what all of this is about. 

The day is coming, friends, not when this will finally be over, but when we will remember it is begun. 

Thank God. 

Anticipation

As we enter into the Advent season, we're talking about waiting - something that our culture doesn't really teach us any more. And one of the reasons that we're so poor at waiting is because we don't know how to live with a sense of anticipation. 

Anticipation is a building excitement for what is coming. It's dwelling in the unknown and enjoying the imagination of what might be. 

We don't have to do that. 

We have trailers for movies, spoilers for TV shows, pre-release versions of songs. The ads for Black Friday, as I said yesterday, started coming out in September. Companies drop new products like they're hot, but they drop them when they're ready to launch. Heaven forbid anyone say, "Coming soon" and not mean like, in the next week. But fear not because someone with insider knowledge will publish an entire full-color, ridiculous-length spec on whatever it is long before we can get our hands on it. Product testers will "leak" (on purpose, since that's what they're paid to do) their opinions of things. 

We always know before we think we're supposed to know, but honestly, even that is part of the plan. The whole world wants to make us feel like insiders to something that's still a little far off by putting it in our hands before they told us they would and then, wow. What a world we live in. 

No building excitement. No dwelling in the unknown. No imagination required. 

No wonder we struggle for Advent. 

We are celebrating Christmas all month long. As soon as the clock strikes midnight after Thanksgiving, the radio stations all flip over to their Christmas mix. Restaurants are serving egg nog and candy cane and peppermint flavors. Sugar cookies abound. There are decorations and lights and presents. And parties. Everything you could ever want. 

I remember when I was a kid (which was longer ago than most persons think, but not all that long ago in the grand scheme of time) and Christmas was Christmas. You didn't get three or four family parties leading up to the big day; you hit everyone's house on Christmas. Sometimes, Christmas Eve. You couldn't stalk your wish list and know what you were getting; it was a surprise. There was not buildup of gifts - on day three, you get a book; on day four, you get a snack; on day five, you get pajamas. None of that. There was simply Christmas. 

You circled it on the calendar and counted down the days and that was the only day you got. Christmas was a single event. 

I don't even know what this generation does with Advent calendars - count down the days with some new little something every day to whet your appetite. 

Because we can't stand having to wait. We don't know how to embrace anticipation. We have entitled ourselves to not have to build our excitement; this generation says they are either excited or they aren't. We don't have to dwell in the unknown, and we don't have to use our imaginations. 

There is nothing more magical than the Christmas imagination of the holiday movies 30-40 years ago. The North Pole in The Santa Clause? Magical. Just look at how that north pole changed even throughout that franchise - it became more mechanical, more dull, more blah. Something lost its magic. 

Because we lost our sense of anticipation. Christmas itself became mechanized instead of wondrous. 

Advent is a time when we become intentional about getting that wonder back. And wonder...begins in anticipation. 

Waiting

We are entering again into the holy season of Advent, and I think that a large part of Christianity misses out on what this season means. With the growing number of non-denominational churches and churches outside of the deeply liturgical denominations, there's a certain sense of only a partial understanding of the season. And with a culture around us that barely lives the breath it has before it's two or three breaths down the road, a season like Advent seems...let's say "quaint." 

That's being polite. 

See, Advent is a season of waiting, and our world has taught us that we don't have to wait. 

This past week is a prime example of that. Remember when you didn't know what was going to be on sale for Black Friday until two days prior, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving? You couldn't even start your shopping until some poor soul unlocked the doors on Friday morning and got trampled to death by shoppers losing their minds over a good buy. 

Today, "Black Friday" sales start right at the beginning of the month, you can sneak-peek the ads as early as September in some cases, and you don't even have to go to a physical store to get a good deal; it's on the other end of a click of a button at your greatest convenience. 

Because why should you have to wait for $10 pajamas? 

Why should you have to wait for anything? 

Our world is filled with the instantaneous - the microwave, the world wide web, the streaming services, the on-demand content, Spotify, internet shopping, the list goes on and on. And listen, I'm not immune to this. I will start the microwave for thirty seconds and stop it with three seconds left to go because that has to be long enough. I live in the same world that you do. 

But this world has made us lose our sense of waiting. We have no patience for anything. 

A few weeks ago, I noticed an item that I might like to have. It was a bit pricey for my tastes ($50), and someone who loves me lovingly told me to go ahead and buy it - I have money. But that was not the point. I figured that if I waited, the price would probably go down, and honestly, it wasn't an item I needed (still don't need it), so why does it bother someone else if I decide to wait and price-watch for a little bit? But the world we live in has told this other person, buy it now. 

There's even a button for that. 

So we come to Advent, and it is a season of waiting. A stretch of weeks leading up to what we, this side of the Incarnation, already know is coming It's been coming since August when the big box stores put up the first Christmas trees. And we don't know what we're supposed to do with ourselves. We don't know how to wait. 

Most of this generation has simply never had to. 

But I...love the quiet space of the waiting. 

Welcome to Advent. Let's talk about it. 

Satisfied

This week marks one of the most beloved traditions in American history. Every year on this week, we come together to celebrate what has become so special to us. Families make plans for weeks, sometimes months, to be able to engage this day together, to share some space and make some memories and celebrate. 

Yes, it's Black Friday. 

As astute observer once noted, and many good-natured cynics have since repeated via social media, that Black Friday is so strange because it's a day in which we get up early and stand in line for hours just to trample each other save money on things we don't need exactly one sunrise after we spent the day being thankful for all that we already have. 

Humans are so silly sometimes. 

But...the astute observer is right about us. This is who we are - broadly. Not everyone fits that mold, of course, but culturally, this is where we're at - turning into absolute monsters to get a good deal right after being content with what we already have. 

And...it's true about us as Christians, too. 

How many times have we sat at this Table? How many pieces of bread have we broken off? How many cups of juice have we poured? How many times have we come and feasted, remembered, celebrated the sacrifice of Jesus and His invitation to us to share this intimate space with Him...only to walk out the door of our churches and live like we don't love Jesus...or like He doesn't love us? 

Another astute observer (it's probably not the same guy; it might have been, but it's probably not) once said, and it has been passed through Christian circles for generations now, that the mark of a Christian is not what you do on Sunday, but how you live the other six days of the week. 

And we, like cultural Americans, are just so good at walking out the doors of the church and living like we didn't just spend an hour of our lives confessing our love and our belovedness and celebrating mercy and grace and committing ourselves to the kind of life that God always imagined for us, from the very moment that He knit us together in our mothers' wombs. 

We come and we break the bread and we drink the juice and we walk out of the church and into the world like we're ravenously hungry, like we didn't just have a meal that fills us up to the depths of our bones. 

Christians are so silly sometimes. 

What would it take for us to live differently? What would it take for us to settle into that Sunday morning feeling and carry it throughout the rest of the week? What would it take for us to let that be the real testament of who we are and not lose ourselves just one sunrise later to a mass frenzy of cultural demand? 

What would it mean for us if we were a people who were just as thankful on Friday as we were on Thursday? 

Who were just as loving on Monday as we were on Sunday? 

Who were just as beloved tomorrow as we are today? 

What if we were a people who eat this bread and drink this juice and go out into the world satisfied and sanctified? 

It would change our witness to the world.  

God is Great

When I was working in the school a few years ago, I had a student who came up to me one day and said he wrote a song, and would I like to hear it? He started by singing, "God is good; God is great," then proceeded into some kind of young teenager weirdness that made little actual sense, then busted up laughing. For the next two years while we shared a building, every time this young man saw me, he would break out in a chorus of, "God is good; God is great," then bust up laughing all over again. 

I delighted in him. That laugh was contagious, even if I never made sense of whatever came next, which he never repeated. 

And...he was right. God is great. 

This has been a refrain of many a song and prayer for thousands of years. We say it almost without thinking about it. But to be in the presence of God is to know His greatness. 

Psalm 90 tells us that God shows His greatness to all of His servants; His children see His majesty.

For me, this seems like being in the presence of a great leader. 

When you were a servant in the house, you saw things that maybe you wouldn't have seen if you weren't just busying yourself in your work. You hear things. You're trusted to be in the presence of the master of the house because you're faithful in what you're doing and you're genuine in your being. So you get these glimpses of the private nature of the master. 

And in God's case, that private nature is greatness. (Just as is His public nature.) 

There's something about seeing someone who is the same in private as they are in public. Who is just as full of grace and love in the living room as in the board room. Who engages every situation with grace and tenderness, but also strength and confidence. Who is just as good today as He was yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. 

There's something about hearing the whispers and realizing that the voice is the same in private as it is in public. That there's no pretense or posturing. That the Master is just through-and-through an example of greatness, fully Himself all the time. Without changing. 

It's when you're privy to these private moments that you realize that everything God has said about Himself is true. It's as true in the kitchen as it is in the bedroom as it is in the bathroom as it is in the backyard as it is in the grocery store and the cubicle and the parking lot. He just is exactly as He says that He is. And you witness it over and over and over again. 

And you witness it as a servant and as a child. As a faithful attendant to the things of God and as an heir to heaven itself. You witness it from your proper place, doing your proper duty, permitted to experience it as a member of the household, a trusted member of the household, a beloved member of the household of God. 

So serve, child, and delight in your Father, for He is truly great. And everything you see, hear, taste, smell, and come to know will confirm that, for He is gracious to show you again and again and again. 

God of Slow Anger

Rage is the thing. Isn't it? 

We live in a world that loves to be angry. That loves to call others out on every perceived infraction. That relishes every opportunity to point out someone else's stupidity. We are quick to lose ourselves into the mindless anger of whatever the media has given us, on limited details and even more limited understanding. Many folks, especially the younger generations that have not been taught discernment, are ready to be angry about whatever they're told to be angry about. Anger, it seems, is a virtue. 

And yet, I would be remiss if I didn't say that there's starting to be a bit of a pushback to this. We have coined the term "Karen" for someone who is ridiculously angry, over-the-top self-righteous and outrageous. We see folks starting to push back on social media, calling out the angry for being angry over, well, silly little things that no one should be angry about. We are ready, in some cases, to say, just give it up already - the anger isn't worth it. 

More than that, we're starting to see that the anger isn't helping. 

Not that that always stops us. 

It's interesting that a world that is so invested in its anger has also been upset with the church for its fire and brimstone. At the very same moment that we're blasting someone on social media for taking up two parking spaces or for failing to put their trash firmly in the trash can, we're also blasting the church for preaching a God who has a concept of a place called Hell and has standards for the way that we live our lives on earth. 

So it seems that everyone is allowed to be angry but God. God, who is supposed to be loving, is not permitted to be angry or else, what kind of God do we have? 

What's even more interesting is that God...isn't really angry. He's real about Hell and He's sincere about the ways He wants us to live, but He's not really angry. His Word shows us that over and over again, as He continues to be patient with a wayward people and forgiving to a sinful creation. And it tells us that plainly in Psalm 86 - But Lord, You are a God full of compassion, generous in grace, slow to anger, and boundless in loyal love and truth. 

And any one of us who has ever been on the receiving end of God's grace or mercy knows this to be true. If God were not so slow to anger with us, we wouldn't have the opportunities that we have today. We wouldn't have our second chances...and our thirds...and our fifteenths. If God were not boundless in His love and generous in His grace and full of compassion for us, if He were not slow to anger, this whole thing falls completely apart. 

The world doesn't love the idea of God's anger, but God is, historically, far less angry than most of us have ever been. He's never, not once, ever blown His stack over getting the wrong order at a fast food restaurant. 

But more importantly than that, in a world that is trending toward grace (finally), God is exactly the example and guidepost we need - not quick to anger, but tempered by love.

May we be more like Him. 

God of Freedom

They are some of the most famous words in all of Scripture, immortalized in Hollywood and known even to those outside of the faith - Let My people go. 

These are the words Moses spoke to Pharaoh when trying to secure freedom from slavery for the Israelites and a journey into the Promised Land. They are words he repeated more than once. They are words that were ignored, even mocked, by the Egyptian leader. 

But Moses had to say them. At the time, Israel was captive to Egypt. Pharaoh had a powerful say over what the people did or did not do. If they wanted to leave Goshen, if they wanted to journey toward Canaan, if they wanted to travel and not worry about being pursued and killed, if they wanted to leave their lowly position under Pharaoh's heavy thumb, they had to have his permission. He was the boss. 

So it is, we think, with God. 

He is the boss. He's the one in charge. He's got us where He wants us, and if we want to leave without being smitten (smited?), we have to have His permission. We have to get Him to let us go. 

Often, we think we'll just stomp out in obstinance. We'll just throw a finger (a certain finger) in His face and walk out. He can't stop us, right? I mean, He can, but who cares? We're done with this God thing. We're tired of being under His rules. We're ready to go our own way, so come Hell or high water (and God, ironically, has been responsible for both), we're out of here. 

But it doesn't take obstinance. 

God will let us go. 

Unlike Pharaoh, God doesn't have a stake in keeping us here. He'd like us to stay, sure, but His empire doesn't collapse if we walk away. His reputation isn't really on the line here. He's got nothing to lose except, well, us, and as much as He doesn't want to lose us, He doesn't want to keep us by force. That's not the relationship that He wants with us. 

Love, He knows, requires freedom, and freedom means that sometimes, we walk away. And as much as that hurts His heart, He lets us. 

Psalm 81:12 tells us this truth in God's own voice: So I freed them to follow their hard hearts, to do what they thought was best. 

In other words, I let them go. They wanted to go, and I let them go. Because God knows that the only way to truly have us is to have our hearts, and the only way to have our hearts is to let them come back to Him. 

The only way we come back is if we are truly free to walk away. So...He gives us that freedom. 

But He never stops scanning the horizon, like the prodigal's father, for our return. 

God Holds Back

For as long as we have known our God in a fallen world (so as far back as Genesis 3), we have all been asking the same question - why doesn't He act more quickly?

Why do the wicked prosper? Why does evil seem to win? How do we reconcile the bad things of this world with a God who says He is 1) good and 2) in control? Why do we get cancer? Why do children die? Why do the good struggle? Why, as the psalmist often wonders, do we spend our lives running from those who chase us only to destroy us? 

It is the psalmist who gives us the most passionate exclamation of this troubled soul, as well, when he cries out, Why do You stand by and do nothing? Unleash Your power and finish them off! (Psalm 74:11).

Yes, Lord. Amen! Come and put them in their place. Show Yourself. 

But...

But I confess that for as often as I have expressed this same sentiment, for as often as these words have been my own prayer, for as often as my own broken heart has longed for God to unleash His power already, my more humble heart is thankful that He hasn't. 

My more humble heart recognizes that there have been times in my life when I have fallen short and others have been praying the same thing to God toward me - they have wanted Him to unleash His power on my fallen and sinful self. On my self that has wounded someone else. On my self that has been short-tempered. On my self that has not been deserving of success but somehow found it anyway (through blessing and mercy, if we're being honest). On myself that has seemed to be, in my weaker moments, all that is wrong with the world and a standing testimony to the failure of God to set things right. 

My more humble heart recognizes that I am so very thankful that God holds back His judgment and His wrath and His power in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, His person will turn their heart back toward Him, repent, atone, weep, and make a new path through the world with righteous steps. 

Because if He didn't hold back, I would already be toast. 

And this is the rub. We weep and mourn and cry and tear our clothes and beg for the Lord to come in His mighty power and fix all the things that are wrong in this broken world...and yet, if we're being honest with ourselves, we have to confess that sometimes, we are the things that are wrong in this broken world. 

And what goodness it is that He has not answered the prayers of those we have wounded and unleashed His power and finished us off. 

What grace that He is patient with us, standing by and not doing nothing, but waiting.... 

Bread and Wine

Sometimes, I think about this Table and the meal that is set upon it. 

We know that at the Passover meal, the seder, there was much more on the spread than bread and wine. We know that there would have been lamb and all of the accoutrement that went with the remembrance. Jesus could have chosen anything on that table to represent His body and His blood. 

But He didn't. 

And here's why I think He didn't: because the bread and the wine were the most universal of all foods that day. Every culture from every place and every time has had some form of bread and some form of fermented drink. We've been talking this week about culture, and the bread and the wine...it isn't cultural. 

It's cross-cultural. 

Think about all of the foods that you've read about in the Bible. There's a lot of talk about pomegranates. Raisin cakes. Lamb. Manna. Quail. Mandrakes. Honey. Figs. Any or all of these things, Jesus could have chosen. But these things, they are local. They are specialized. They are cultural. For example, lamb was common and perhaps if Jesus had made lamb the thing, it would still be common for us, but most Americans aren't eating lamb on any kind of regular basis. We certainly aren't eating raisin cakes. I'm not even sure I know what a raisin cake is.

And I certainly don't want any figs. (If you've been around this blog for awhile, you know that I believe the fruit that Eve ate from the tree was a fig. There's a very fun theological thread to follow to support that idea, but I've already done that in other places.)

But no. We have a God who chose bread and wine. And if we look across time and around the world, every civilization has had some form of these foods. Bread, pan, naan, crackers, ciabatta, focaccia, baguette...everyone is grinding grain and making bread. 

And all kinds of fermented drinks. Wine, of course, is quite popular, and even in places like maximum security prisons, persons are finding things to ferment - saving the scraps of their fruit from their meal trays and tucking them away in socks to make a fermented drink. There's something in the human spirit that likes to ferment. Native tribes all around the world have their own drinks. We just keep doing it. 

So Jesus looked at this table that was spread with the very cultural meal of the Israelites - the Passover - and He took the things that were least cultural among them, the things that every man and woman would know across all times and all places, and He said, This is it. This is My body; this is My blood. Do this in remembrance of me. 

As we think about culture wars, then, about the Bible and postmodernism and maybe even post-Christiandom or whatever other era we think we want to be in, and as we try to read back through His Word with whatever cultural lens we've gathered, this Table puts us back in our right place - reclining with Him, enjoying the meal, breaking the bread, pouring the wine, and doing this thing that every man and woman would always know. 

Bread and wine. 

Broken and poured out for you and me. 

Thank you, Jesus. 

Uncultured

It's easy for us to make the argument that our culture is giving us the opportunity to interpret God's Word, finally, the way that He always wanted us to - against the culture of the day it was written. We see the women and the weak and the powerless and the outcast, and we think, yes, this is what we're doing and this is what God is doing; we're on the same page. 

But what if we're not?

This is, I think, where we can really see our cultural lens most dominantly, if we're willing to really look at it. 

We see God using women, and we think that He was doing it to be countercultural. We see Jesus eating with the outcasts, and we think He was doing it to be countercultural. We see healers in the New Testament touching the unclean, and we think they were doing it to be countercultural, to turn things on their head. 

What if God just doesn't care about culture?

What if God cares about hearts? 

This is, I think, the rub. I think that God uses the men and women He uses in the Bible, that He chooses them, based on the characteristics of their heart, not to make a point about the world that we live in and the culture we've created. 

Remember, this is the same God who had to give His people a culture to even start with. Left on their own, they would be wholly barbaric and not even do the most basic things to care for one another. We call this "the Law." He had to tell them things like that they ought to return things they borrow, build safety walls around their roofs, not take things that don't belong to them, stay committed to one another. God created the kind of culture that He wanted His people to live in. 

And while we can get hung up, if you want to, I guess, on the fact that masculine pronouns are used most often in this, I think that's missing the point. I think that's getting caught up in what our own culture is trying to tell us about gender and identity and not really catching the heart of the message, which is that God Himself created for us the kind of culture that He wanted us to have. Not as patriarchal or gender concrete or cis or whatever other buzzword you want to put on it, but as friends, brothers and sisters, neighbors, and...all the way back in Genesis when togetherness even started...helpmeets. If you read the very first accounts of male and female, there is no patriarchy; there is equality. That was God's design. 

The rest is the curse. Which, by the way, we're still living under, no matter how "enlightened" we think we're becoming. 

I think God looks at a person's heart and at a person's relationships and at a person's positions and uses them in exactly the way that He wants to. I think He groans when we read our Bible and try to make a social hierarchy out of it, create some kind of dynamic that was never intended. I think when He watches us raise the woman and the outcast and the gender fluid and all that other stuff, what He sees is the way we lower others to trod them under the same feet we regret having tread former ground on. I think He looks at the way that we're trying to twist the Bible through our postmodern cultural lens, and He mourns because we're just not getting it. 

The Bible is about erasing lines, not redrawing them. And no matter how right we think we are, every time we simply shift them, we are still getting it wrong. 

I read this little word, "women," in the psalms and saw God using them in His army to bring the good news, and I wondered if this was one of those things I was supposed to be paying attention to as a signal that God actually prefers our culture over Israel's. It immediately jumped out to me. 

But it didn't take long before I realized that was my culture speaking and not my Lord. 

The message God wants us to hear is not that women are running...but that the faithful are running. Running to share the Good News. 

Lord, in the words of the mighty warrior, let me run.  

Bygone Eras

The problem we get into when we start looking through our own cultural lens at the text of the Bible is that we end up in a place where we can completely dismiss the Word of God as authoritative, then attempt to change it to suit our own tastes. 

 You've seen this; I know you have. 

So we start with a group of postmodern Christians who are upset that the Bible is so "patriarchal" - by this, they mean that men feature prominently in the Scriptures, that male pronouns are used to describe God and much of the narration of His story, that women are subjugated, that the whole male dominance thing is clearly a product of the time that the characters lived in and not part of God's design. 

Once they've made this argument, they can throw out much of the Bible as "cultural," and not only as cultural, but as outdated or backward. Then, we start getting Christians who try to expand the Bible into the age of feminism by using more inclusive pronouns, by taking out "cultural" rules about things like marriage and sex, and so on. And if God isn't really "He" and the Bible isn't really "he" and "she," well, then, we make room for the gender fluidity that we're fighting about in our own age. 

At the same time, these very same folks will emphasize the roles of women in the Bible, prominent women, to claim that God isn't as patriarchal as the culture was, that God wants us to be feminists, and so on, etc., ad nauseum. 

This is the same group of folks that uses our postmodern understandings of homosexuality to claim that the Bible doesn't actually make any claims against homosexuality. The Bible in its own culture, they say, is talking about the servant-boy type of homosexuality often practiced in Rome, which was about power and not about love, whereas today, our homosexual relationships are about love and therefore, they are more like the lifetime union that God was talking about all the way back in Genesis than they are about the homosexual "acts" that appear to be condemned, by some arguments from the text.

Thus, once again, our culture trumps the authoritativeness of God's Word as we spin things to make sense according to what we think we've already made sense of. 

And we say that God would want it this way because He would not want the culture in which His people lived in a bygone era to cause offense to a new generation of Christians who are just looking for His love. 

So in the very same breath, they are throwing out the Bible while clinging to some versions of its teachings, trying to claim that culture - not God - is everything and that what we need is a Word that speaks to the age that we're in. 

Of course, we know that Bible is already speaking to our age; many are just refusing to listen because the message isn't an easy one...or popular. 

On one hand, it's an easy argument to make. After all, we see God using women in a time when women were appreciated differently than they are today. We see God using the small shepherd to defeat the giant. We see God using the powerless to shame the powerful. We see God using the weak to subdue the strong. We see God making the last first. We see God turning culture on its head, and so it's only natural that as we live in a culture that turns many things on its head, we assume we are doing the work of the Lord and that He approves of our new readings of His Word. It's easy to make the argument that our understanding is the one He wanted all along. 

Unless that's not at all what's going on.... 

Cultural Lens

We are living in a time of textual criticism - an academic sort of approach (or what passes as one) to the Bible and its stories. We have invested quite a bit of our time and energies into determining the actual cultural and social setting of the words that were written and talking about how those truths affect the perspective that is presented through what is supposed to be God's Word. 

We have spent our time digging and uncovering shards of pottery and slivers of parchment and piecing things back together so that we can get a glimpse of what it looked like to be living in biblical times and how that day-to-day life might affect the way we understand what was written for us. 

We have made excuses for the things that we find distasteful in the Scriptures - things like slavery or this so-called "patriarchy" that is so popular to condemn these days. We have confessed that they are there, but have called them cultural and tried to sweep them away as uneducated, ignorant realities of a bygone era, whereas we are now so civilized as to have moved past them. 

Yes, our criticism seems to have given us a way to approach the Bible more soberly...or so we think. 

And when we have come to conclusions through our criticisms, we have decided that the appropriate response is to update our interpretation according to our higher sophistication so that we can get to the heart of what God really said (and meant) and throw out all that messy, barbaric stuff that has no place in a "progressive" society like ours. 

You know, that kind of Christianity that doesn't "gel" with the "real world" that we live in now. 

Less time has been spent on discovering the biases that we bring from our present culture back into the ancient words of the Bible. 

We think, and we have convinced ourselves, that since we are an ever-evolving species (thanks, Darwin) and since our thinking is more "progressive" today than it was even a generation ago and since we are more civilized and more sophisticated and overall better human beings now than our ancestors were, bound as they were by broken cultures with misplaced priorities, that what we have today is a truth that is worth rewriting history for. 

We've seen it in the ways that we rewrite our secular history to match our modern sentiments, but it's happening at the biblical level, too. 

It's essentially self-righteousness. It's the belief that we are finally in a place where we are right and where we have the truth and where our understanding gives us the right to reframe everything into our lens because our lens is finally correct. Like a world struggling with blurred vision, we, finally, have developed the glasses that bring everything into focus and now, it is not only possible, but it is required of us that we invest ourselves in putting all things into that focus. 

Even biblical, holy, scared things that the Lord our God has told us Himself are eternal. We are now in such a place of cultural superiority that we are starting to think it's time we "improve" upon these things, too. 

So this word - women - struck me as I had a very cultural response to it. But should I have? How much of my reaction was our current culture self-righteously trying to speak backward into history and make the inerrant word of God "better?" 

How do we even begin to reconcile this?

Culture Wars

As I was writing one of last week's blogs, the one about the messengers in the army of the Lord being ready to run with good news, there's a little detail that I left out: 

The Scriptures actually identify that it was women in the army of the Lord who were ready to run. 

When I was going back through my notes for that particular reflection, that little word - "women" - struck me, but I didn't want to jump on it right away. It was one of those things that I needed to sit with for awhile longer, to let roll around in my heart, to prayerfully consider what it is that I wanted to say about this. 

There has been, as most of us are well aware, an outpouring of...let's call it "anti-patriarchy" in Christian circles in recent years. "Patriarchy" has become a buzz word in all the worst ways. Sects of Christians are coming out against what they perceive as an overemphasis on maleness in the Scriptures and in historical Christianity, and they are ready to jump on any mention of a female in the Bible as evidence that we are completely backward and getting God's social economy all wrong. They are ready to use a verse like this to condemn everything, to throw it all out and to claim that we need to start over and build a more...equal? equitable? Christianity, one that isn't male-dominated and in fact, is actually gender-blind. 

I confess that as I read my notes, a similar sort of spark went off in my head, put there by the very kind of culture wars that I'm talking about. I read that word - women - and something inside of me leaped to "Aha! Women fighting in the army of the Lord. Now that will preach." 

But...should it?

In an age of advanced feminism and moving into and through gender fluidity, self-identified sexuality, and blurring lines, a message like that will preach to those inclined to hear such a thing, but would it capture the heart of God in a meaningful way? 

I'm not so sure. 

This draws us back into a discussion about contextual reading, about how we approach the Bible, about what we bring to it and what it offers us and the barriers that exist and the ones that are being torn down, what we can take and what we must ignore, what it says and what we hear. 

Sects of Christianity have come out against the Bible as too "patriarchal," but is it really, or is that just the way that we are reading it through our own cultural lens? 

This is important. So let's talk about it for a few days.  

On the Edge of Empty

As the disciples gathered in the Upper Room with Jesus to share the Passover meal, they didn't know what was about to happen. They had no idea that all this talk He'd been sharing about going to Jerusalem to die was about to come true. They couldn't fathom that He was talking about a physical death. It wasn't in their most bizarre imagination that in just a matter of hours, they would lose their Rabbi and Friend. 

But Jesus knew. 

Jesus knew, and He tried to tell them. They didn't understand, and He knew they didn't understand. So He did the only thing He knew to do - He gave them the fullness of the Passover meal. 

This wasn't just about satisfying a physical appetite, although the Passover meal would have been the one that every faithful Jew looked forward to every year - all the best food, all the best flavors, the aromas wafting through the air. But this meal, this night, was also about building a fullness into the spaces that Jesus knew were about to become empty. 

The spaces He knew were about to fill the ache. 

It's why He made a point to explain to them that this was symbolic of what they were about to experience, of what they were all about to go through. It's why He told them this was His body and His blood. It's why He made sure that around that Table, they shared stories and laughed over memories and remembered all of the times they'd had together. He was telling them about tomorrow, sure, but He was making sure they were so full of today that when the bottom fell out - which again, only He truly understood was coming - there would be somewhere sort of soft for them to land. Something for them not to fall back on, but to fall into; something that would catch them. 

This Table catches us. 

None of us knows what tomorrow brings. None of us can imagine what might happen when the sun rises again. If it rises for us at all. None of us can plan on the things that we don't know, on what we don't see. Today could go on forever or tomorrow could bring it all crashing down. We simply don't know. And even if there are signs, sometimes, we don't understand. It doesn't register in our brains. 

But we have this: we have the fullness of God present in us. We have the physical gift of His body and His blood, all the best flavors in all of the world, and we have the spiritual gift of this moment - this time shared with Jesus and with brothers and sisters, laughing and remembering and relishing our time together. This Table fills us up so that if the world should crumble, if the world should fall, there's something there to catch us. 

And it's this: Jesus Christ came and dwelt among us in flesh and prepared a Table for us that we might come and eat with Him in the fullness of all things, even - even - on the very edge of empty, whether we know it or not. 

Be full in Christ, friends. For it is the only thing we can truly ever trust in.  

God of Help

Every once in awhile, all of us need help. 

Sometimes, we're fortunate enough to get it. 

We see stories on the news all the time of humans helping humans, of persons who end up down on their luck or caught in disaster and their story gets out and all of a sudden, that debt is paid off, that roof is repaired, that heirloom restored, that body healed...whatever it is. We see persons coming out of the woodwork to do good deeds...and we hear whispers of things that we never see, actors in the background who wish to remain nameless. 

Yes, look for the good in the world, and you will find it. There's plenty of good to go around. 

And yet, there are also many of us who wonder why that's never our story. Why no one comes out of the woodwork to help us. Why we can keep telling our story and nothing ever changes about it, no one is moved by it, no one comes to help move us. We look at our debt, our brokenness, our lostness, our disease, and we wonder when our help is coming. 

If it ever is. 

It's enough to make a person bitter. It really is. It's easy to start wondering what's wrong with you, that no one seems to want to help you with anything. If you need to see this in action, look at any local facebook group. Watch the folks ask for help. Watch as the usual suspects jump in and volunteer themselves...and then don't...and then no one does...but on another request, they're back again like nothing happened. Watch folks pick and choose who they respond to and who they offer to help. Watch those who get no offers wonder what happened to the 47 persons who commented on the similar post the week before. 

Watch them ache and wonder what's so wrong with them that nobody wants to help. 

Thankfully, we always have a Helper. He is the Lord, our God, and He's been helping us since He knit us together in our mother's womb. We would not even be here if it were not for the force of His assistance in our lives, to do something so simple as to birth us into the physical world. 

Listen to the psalmist - I have leaned upon you since I came into this world; I have relied on you since you took me safely from my mother's body, so I will ever praise you. 

The very first thing You ever did for me, Lord, was help me - help me be born into this world, help me form and develop and push out and breathe. And because my soul remembers that help, because I know that without Your aid, I wouldn't even be here, I lean solely upon You. You, I know, will help me. You, I know, are helping me. 

You're the only one I know for sure I've got. 

And you know what, friends? That's enough. He's enough. 

God of Good News

There are a great many stories in the Bible about the army of God and about the army of Israel and about, well, armies in general. About men willing to fight for what they believe in. About marksmen on the battlefield. About a single stone in a small sling. About chariots of fire and mountains covered in unseen warriors. About a messenger running to bring report to a commander far away. 

Remember that story? David is hanging out on the rooftop and sees a man running from the battlefield and determines, by the way the man is running, what kind of news he is bringing from the war. Then, he sees a second man running, and he knows by the way the man is running exactly who the man is. 

When we think about armies, we don't think often about the messengers, but maybe we should. 

They are, after all, a very important part of God's army. 

Psalm 68 talks about the army of the Lord, and it says that when He commands them, when He gives the word, there are very many ready to tell the good news. 

This is important, especially for a Christianity that has had a reputation in the not-too-distant past for being about fighting God's battles for Him, with violence if necessary. It's important for those of us who think the behavior modification of the rest of the world is God's mission for us. It's important for those of us who believe that the best way to be in God's army is to carry a sword, light a fire, thump a Bible. 

No, friends. The army of the Lord is an army of messengers.

It's an army of runners, folks from the front lines who are carrying a message back. Sinners who have been redeemed. Broken who have been healed. Lost who have been found. 

The world should be standing on its rooftop and see us come running and not be afraid of whatever weapons we might be carrying, but know that we come with a message from the battle - the very same battle that they are fighting. The same troubles they're facing. Only, we know how the fight is going. 

We know how the war ends. 

We know Who wins. 

The world ought to be watching and see us running and say to themselves, "Now, there. There is someone who's running like they have good news to share." 

Good news, indeed.

God of Hope

I've had a lot of wishes in my life. I have wished for better jobs, for good friends, for healing, for financial assistance, for peace. I have wished my cares away...and sometimes, it has worked. But more often than not, I end up lying around wondering how much harder I have to wish for things to change before they will. 

My hope, however, is firm. 

A lot of folks think that wishing is the same as hoping, or at least a close enough equivalent that the difference doesn't really matter. They used the words interchangeably - I hope it doesn't rain today; I wish the price would go down; I hope the results are good; I wish they'd just call already. 

But let me tell you this: there is a huge difference between hoping and wishing. And that's probably why as much as I sit around wishing, things never really change the way I dream for them to. 

In short, hoping is believing and wishing is wanting. 

To truly hope, you have to have more than a wish. You have to have trust in something, an expectation, a firm belief in the power of something not only to change things, but to be good enough to change things. You have to believe a promise made by something (or Someone) worth hoping in. 

You can want all day for your life to change, but until you believe it really can, it never will. 

That's the difference between wishing and hoping. 

Thankfully for us, we have God. We have a God of promises who has been true to His Word from the formless and void. We have a God who has done what He said He would do and still has a few things He's working on. We have a God who is trustworthy and dependable, powerful, and good. We have a God who not only can change our lives, but will...if only we believe in Him. 

The Psalmist says it very well - My soul waits quietly for the True God alone because I hope only in Him. (Psalm 62:5)

In other words, I want a lot of things in this world and I could spend a lot of my time wishing, and I probably do, but at the end of the day, my soul waits in stillness for God because that's the only real place I have more than a wish; that's the only place I have hope. 

Are you wishing today? Is there something heavy on your heart that you're longing to see happen in your life, for you or for someone you love? 

How would it change things if your wish became a hope?

God of Healing

We have seen by now that God shakes the earth; the very foundations of it tremble at His voice. And of course, if you happen to live along a fault line or have passed third grade science, you know that when the earth trembles, it also cracks. 

Have you ever been cracked? 

I tell you, there have been times in my life when my whole world was shaken so hard that I have felt like I was falling apart. Falling absolutely apart, into a million little pieces. One little piece of me falls over here, another little piece over there, until the gaps in my being are so big and so wide that it feels like all the king's horses and all the king's men will never be able to put me back together again. 

But God can. 

In Psalm 60, the psalmist is having one of these moments. The whole earth has shaken, he feels disrupted, everything is splitting wide open, and it seems like it took nothing at all for God to make this all happen. He knows the Lord is the only one with this kind of power. 

But he also knows that the Lord is the only one with the power to fix it. 

So he cries out - You have made the earth shake; You have cracked it open effortlessly. Heal the fissures in the earth, for it is unsteady. 

In other words, only Your power does this, Lord. Only You are so strong and awe-inspiring. Only for You does the earth tremble this way. Only because of the way You move does everything feel like it's falling apart. But only You can put it back together. 

And, Lord, we need You to put it back together because everything was shaken and now, it feels a little shaky. It's unsteady. It feels like any second, whatever is left standing on whatever feeble legs we have is going to come crashing down, too. 

Heal the fissures, Lord. Like only You can. 

Do you feel this? Have you felt this? Are you feeling this right now? 

If your world is shaken, if you're falling apart, if little pieces seem to be hitting the ground all around you and everything feels unsteady, cry out to the One who shakes the earth. For He shakes it, yes, but He also heals it. He heals its fissures and puts things back together. 

Including you.

Cry out to Him.