Category: Advent

Limping Through Advent

During the night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two servant wives, and his eleven sons and crossed the Jabbok River with them.  After taking them to the other side, he sent over his possessions.  This left Jacob all alone in the camp, and a man came and wrestled with him until dawn began to break…

– Genesis 32:22-24

When I first received this assignment, I wondered why God would ask me, Jacob, to write to you during Advent.  I’m not exactly your typical Advent character.  Usually people want to hear about Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the Magi, or one of the other heroes of the Nativity story.  Not only am I historically distant from those events, I’m nobody’s hero.  Maybe that’s why…maybe God wants you to hear from someone who isn’t a hero.  Someone who might even be a little like you.

Many of you know the basics of my story.  I was born second in my family, having lost a nine month race with my twin brother Esau by mere seconds.  I hated being second, even from birth apparently, so much so that I entered the world grasping my brother’s heel in an effort to overtake him.  That’s how I got my name: Jacob means, ‘he usurps.’  It also means, ‘he deceives,’ or ‘he finagles.’  Yep.  That’s me.  A usurper, a deceiver, a finagler.  About as far from a hero as you get, I suppose. 

I lived up to my name early and often, eventually conniving my way into possession of Esau’s birthright and blessing, which by custom were his as the firstborn.  The latter I gained by tricking my sick and blind father into thinking I was Esau.  Pretty bad, huh?  Not that it bothered me at the time.  Again, I never liked second place, and I had always stood there in my father’s eyes.  His greater love was for Esau, probably because he reminded him of his estranged brother Ishmael.  It was unfair.  Wrong.  I figured I was entitled to set things right.

There were consequences of course.  When Esau found out what I’d done, he consoled himself with thoughts of murdering me.  I guess I didn’t blame him, but I wasn’t about to let him put his dark fantasies into action.  So I high tailed it from my father’s lands to find a wife in the land of my ancestors.  And that’s when the first truly significant thing happened to me. 

Stopping for the night near the town of Luz, I had the most remarkable dream.  I saw stairs reaching to the heavens, with angels going up and down.  I’d never imagined that heaven and earth were so close.  From the top of the stairs I heard the voice of God for the first time.  ‘I am Yahweh,’ he said, and spoke of the promises made to my grandfather Abraham, which now, he said, fell to me: land, descendants as numerous as the dust, blessing for the whole world.  Then he said, ‘I am with you Jacob, and will protect you wherever you go.  One day, I will bring you back to this land.  I will not leave you until I have finished giving you everything I have promised you.’  Quite a promise, huh?  To think that God would bestow such a promise on the likes of me. 

With the promises of God in my back pocket, I went to Haran, where long story short, I continued my finagling ways.  For twenty years I built quite the shepherding business, and along the way picked up two wives, two servant wives, and eleven children.  Then one day, I heard God’s voice again, telling me to go home, and reminding me that he would be with me.  On the one hand, I was glad for an excuse to leave my father-in-law Laban, who besides me, was the biggest finagler I ever met, but on the other, well, what if Esau still wanted to kill me?  I’d like to tell you that I left for home because I believed God’s promise, but honestly, it had more to do with my desire to get away from Laban.  I was half eager, half scared out of my sandals as I made my way across the desert sands.

Along the way, God sent angels to meet me, further assurance of his protection.  But even so, I wasn’t exactly what you would call confident in my faith.  I was really limping along in it.  So imagine my terror when the messengers I had sent to convince Esau I was coming in friendship came back with the news that Esau was on his way in the company of an army of 400 men.  What did I do?   I prayed.  I begged for deliverance.  I reminded God of his promises.  I tried my best to believe in them myself.  And then, proving I did not, I sent more messengers ahead, this time with cattle, goats, sheep, and donkeys as gifts for my brother, hoping these might appease his wrath.  My family and I stayed behind, waiting for news.  Eventually, I sent them across the river too.  And that’s when God came near. 

He didn’t just stand atop a stairway this time.  HE CAME NEAR.  In my most desperate moment.  My finagling ways had finally caught up with me.  I was alone, ruminating over the course of my life, the things I’d done, the things I might have done differently.  Doubting God’s promises.  I mean, seriously, why would he ever protect a guy like me?  It’s funny really, how God meets us where we are.  There I was, wrestling with my faith, so God came to wrestle with me.  I guess it was the only way to get my attention. 

So there we were, rolling in the mud of the Jabbok from dusk till dawn.  I fought him with all I had, something, I suddenly realized, I had been doing all my life.  And then, in a beautifully poetic moment, knowing he had not prevailed over me by conventional means, he wrenched my hip.  Sometimes, you see, when we won’t listen to God, he does something drastic to get our attention.  As one of your poets, Michael Card, has said, ‘pain is [sometimes] the path to blessing.  Love will fight us to be found.’  Well, mission accomplished.  I shouted, ‘I won’t let you go until you bless me!’ I begged to know his name.  He just smiled and said, ‘why do you want to know my name?’  And I remembered he’d already told me long ago, at Luz: Yahweh.  The God who had already blessed me.  And right there, close as breath, he blessed me again.  I walked the rest of my life with a limp, a reminder of the night when God came near.  A night when God condescended to roll in the mud, to get dirty, just to reach a finagling doubter like me. 

The morning after, I met my brother.  Turns out I had nothing to worry about.  Esau greeted me with pure grace.  All had long since been forgiven.  We both wept like children, I more than he.  I told him, barely able to get the words out, that seeing his face was like seeing the face of God.  And so it was. 

But what does this have to do with you, dear reader? Well, you’re here reading my story in the season of Advent.  Celebrating something that, if you haven’t quite made the connection, isn’t all that different from my night at the Jabbok: the time when God came near.  Perhaps you wonder if that story is for you.  Perhaps, like me, you doubt God would ever take up with the likes you.  Maybe your past isn’t as bad as mine, but it might be bad enough.  Or maybe you have trouble believing God’s promises.  You’ve sensed God in his heaven, heard his still small voice, and yet, struggle to believe.  Maybe you’ve been wrestling with belief your whole life.  I want you to know, that all of that is the reason why God came near at Christmas.  It is the reason why he went so far as to come into our world, to roll in its mud, to get dirty.  Sometimes you see, God has to do something unconventional to get our attention.  Sometimes, he has to meet us where we are.   

This Christmas, know that he has done this for you.  Whoever you are, wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done.  You may be limping right now, but trust me, you are loved and blessed beyond imagining.

You are the reason that God came near.

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Jacob

Author’s note: Looking this over, I suspect that there are echoes of a couple of old sermons by Jurgen Moltmann and Max Lucado latent in this monologue. I have not intentionally quoted them, but it is right that I give credit and thank them for their inspiration.

Believe

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it…He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.  He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.  But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to be children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.  And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.  John 1:1-5; 10-14 (NRSV).

The story of Christmas is a story of miracles.  The Gospels tell of the stunning announcement to Mary that she would conceive by the Holy Spirit and bring forth the Son who would be the Savior of the world.  Luke tells of angelic hosts singing ‘Glory to God in the highest,’ as they announced the arrival of the miracle child.  Indeed, the entire Christmas event is from start to finish a supernatural one.  The Gospel accounts of the Nativity make this clear, but it is John who proclaims it most strikingly.  For while Matthew and Luke record the details of what happened, John strikes at the heart of the matter: the mind-boggling reality that Christmas is about nothing less than God becoming human.  The author of creation stepped into his story, became one of the characters, that each of our stories might be enriched by his.  John, more than any Gospel writer, was able to capture the wonder of the event, as he wrote of how the Word, God himself, became flesh and dwelled among us.

Where did he ever find the words?  Surely, they were God-breathed, but we shouldn’t miss John’s own sense of wonder.  John was, apparently, the kind of man who wondered about things.  His was not a matter-of-fact intellect; his was the kind that could soar into the heavens and grasp starlight.  In the mystical prologue to his Gospel, he writes of believing in the name of Jesus, and believing seems to have been what John was all about.  It is the stated purpose of his Gospel: ‘these things are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name’ (John 20:31).  Over and over, this theme is repeated.  ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe‘ (20:20).   ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him, might not perish but have eternal life’ (3:16).  Yes, John was a believer.  Not, mind you, the gullible sort who accepts every cock-eyed story that comes down the pike, but the kind who looks at the world with critical yet wondering eyes, thinks deeply, and allows his heart to guide him.  Nor was he the kind of believer who simply gives a vague intellectual assent to some propositional truth.  No, John was a BELIEVER – the kind who, once his heart was in line with the subject of belief, was willing to believe with the entirety of his being.  The kind who would not simply believe a story, but would take his place in the story, and live it from his heart.

Tragically, that kind of belief is a rare commodity these days.  Ours is a world that has lost its sense of wonder.  We live in times where to believe in anything is considered childish.  We are conditioned to doubt what can’t be seen, heard, touched, or tested.  Science, once a tool used by thinking men and women who sought to understand and marvel at God’s creation, is often wielded by skeptical reductionists who break things down to their simplest parts in order to dismiss the wonder of the whole.  Unlike the ancients, starlight holds no mystery for us (if you can even see it that is – light pollution has blinded us to its wonder).  We look at panoramic mountain vistas and talk about plate tectonics.  True enough, children still have a sense of wonder, Christmas morning is ample evidence of that, but they too are quickly conditioned to lose it in favor of a more ‘rational’ way of looking at things.  And as far as becoming part of a story bigger than us, well, who has time for that?  Our treadmill lifestyles keep us busy and preoccupied with the mundane and the trivial.  We live at such a hectic pace that we no longer have time to take Ferris Bueller’s advice to stop to look around once in a while, let alone to become part of a greater story. 

And so we lose out.  We lose out on living with a sense of wonder, and we lose out on living a life of meaning.  The beloved apostle John would only have wept, for as Albert Einstein said, ‘the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the true source of all true art and science.  He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.’ 

The tragedy, I fear, is that there may be some reading this to whom such a quote applies (if so, I thank you for making it this far, and hope you will keep going).  You want to believe, you wish you could become part of a bigger story, in fact, that may be the very reason you are visiting this blog: to have belief rekindled.  But having come of age in a world without wonder, such a thing seems impossible at best and ludicrous at worst. 

But friend, it’s Christmas, and Christmas is our chance to regain a sense of wonder.   The Nativity story takes place in a time when people, in a sense, lived on the verge of disbelief.  They lived under the brutal hand of the Roman Empire, and God had seemingly been silent for centuries.  The age-old longing for the Messiah who would deliver Israel had grown a bit thin, and many at the time simply accepted that things would never change, at least not during their lifetimes.  But then the light of Christmas broke through.  Zechariah and Elizabeth discovered they would have a son in their old age.  Mary received the news that she would conceive by the Holy Spirit.  Shepherds, living at the margins of society, were invited by angels to celebrate the Messiah’s birth.  Wise men from the East, astrologers who didn’t really know Israel’s God, trusted in starlight to guide them, and found the place where life could begin again.  All of these people had been struck by the light of Christmas, and all became believers.  All became part of a story bigger than themselves. 

Wouldn’t you like to believe like that?  To wonder again, and become a part of something big? 

You can. 

Like many of you, at this time of year I read and watch many classic Christmas stories: A Christmas Carol; A Charlie Brown Christmas; How the Grinch Stole Christmas; Elf.  And of course, The Polar Express, the Robert Zemeckis film based on the classic Chris Van Allsburg book.  That too has become a classic in my household. My daughter insists on watching it multiple times every year.  You may be familiar with the story, but to recap, it is the story of a boy who has lost his ability to believe in Santa, who nonetheless takes a magical journey by train to the North Pole, where he discovers a remarkable truth: ‘Sometimes seeing is believing; and sometimes, the most real things in the world are the things you can’t see.’

There is a scene in the movie that really gets to me.  The boy, standing at the center square at the North Pole alongside Elves and other children, watches the celebration begin as Santa strides forth to take the reins of his sleigh and begin his annual Christmas ride.  Alas, the boy can’t see Santa because of the crowd.  The reindeer go wild, and the chain of bells that links them together jingles with a sound that the other children adore.  But the boy, who still struggles to believe, can’t hear them.  Suddenly, one of the bells breaks from its string and bounces to his feet.  He picks it up, almost with tears in his eyes, and begins to repeat, ‘I believe, I believe, I believe.’  And as he does, he hears the bell.  Suddenly, Santa appears next to him and asks, ‘What did you say?’ and with eyes full of wonder, the boy says, ‘I believe.’  Santa goes on to give the bell to the boy as the ‘first gift of Christmas,’ and explains, with words that tell us clearly that The Polar Express really isn’t about Santa Claus, ‘This bell is a wonderful symbol of the spirit of Christmas, as am I.  The true spirit of Christmas lives in your heart.’  You see, the bell represents the boy’s newfound faith, his renewed sense of wonder, his recaptured ability to believe.  It represents that sense of wonder we long for, that ability to become part of something bigger than ourselves.  That sense of wonder the world tries to take from us, but deep down, never fully goes away. 

I love the way the story ends.  The boy, having returned home, discovers that only he and his little sister can hear the bell.  His parents, having been dulled and worn down by the cares of the world, have lost their ability to believe.  And so, with the boy jingling the bell and listening to it with his renewed sense of wonder, a voice – the voice of the boy, now an old man, says something important: ‘At one time most of my friends could hear the bell, but as years passed it fell silent for all of them. Even Sarah found one Christmas that she could no longer hear its sweet sound. Though I’ve grown old the bell still rings for me, as it does for all who truly believe.’

So here’s the question: does the bell ring for you?  When you hear John’s words of indescribable mystery, or the story of the shepherd and the angels, or when you listen to the songs of Christmas, doesn’t your heart just ache to believe?  How wonderful then, that we have something to believe in.  How wonderful that there really is a first gift of Christmas, and it isn’t a bell from Santa’s Sleigh.  It is Jesus, the Christ, the Word made flesh, God with us, come to teach us how to live and love, to infuse us with wonder, and to make our lives part of the remarkable story he is telling.  

For those who long for something to fan the flames of faith, who ache to fill the hole in their heart, who hope to take Christmas magic back from a world that has virtually dug its grave, who yearn for a story to believe in – let the words from the theme song to The Polar Express, words that could well have been written by John himself, speak to your soul:

Believe in what your heart is saying, hear the melody that’s playing,

There’s no time to waste, there’s so much to celebrate. 

Believe in what you feel inside and give your dreams the wings to fly.

You have everything you need.  If you just believe.

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Pastor Brent

The Outsiders

‘In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?’  For we observed his star at its rising and have come to pay him homage.’  When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all of Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born.  They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea…’ (NRSV).

In his Meditations, Soren Kierkegaard comments on the remarkable fact that the chief priests and scribes of Israel, the very men who knew the prophecies of the Messiah so well they could tell the place of his birth, were not stirred to action at the news of the wise men.  Here were the very people who had, supposedly, longed for and preached about his coming, and yet, when he came, they remained in place; only the magi went forward to the town of Bethlehem to behold the long-awaited newborn King.  Kierkegaard writes:

‘What vexation it must have been for the kings, that the scribes who gave them the news they wanted remained quiet in Jerusalem!  ‘We are being mocked,’ the kings might have thought.  For indeed what an atrocious self-contradiction that the scribes should have the knowledge and yet remain still.’

It isn’t hard to see why they remained still.  These men were connected to Herod.  Perhaps they did not approve of all Herod stood for, indeed it would be hard to believe otherwise, given Herod’s ghastly reputation, but they certainly liked the perks of being connected.  They were, in essence, court prophets with easy access to the halls of power.  They treasured the honor and authority of their position, the fine and flowing robes that spoke to their prestige, the sumptuous feasts at the table of the king, and their places among the councils of the mighty.  Had they left with the wise men, all of that would have been lost.  Who would leave such a life to find the one born in the impoverished town of Bethlehem?  And so rather than go to see the one they supposedly believed in, they remained in Herod’s court, savoring their insider status and the glories of a lesser kingdom.

Insiders are like that.  Men and women of influence, those who enjoy a certain level of what the world calls success, can become so enthralled by the perks of their position and their political, social, or economic masters that they lose sight of what truly matters.  Sadly, we live in a world where most want to be insiders.  To have access to the halls of power, to possess honor and authority, to wear fine and flowing robes, to feast sumptuously at the tables of influence, to find places in the councils of the mighty, that is what life is all about.  Who would trade such a life to follow the one found in impoverished places like Bethlehem?  And so as it was in the case of the magi, it remains today.  Most, even in the church it seems, would prefer to remain in the halls of Herod than risk their insider status in pursuit of one whose kingdom is of a different nature. 

For Jesus’ Kingdom, of course, is of different nature.  It does not occupy the halls of power.  It does not possess the kind of honor and authority coveted by the insiders of the world.  It involves no flowing robes, no sumptuous feasts around tables of influence, no place in the councils of those whom the world calls mighty.  Indeed, the only time Jesus spent time in those halls and councils was when he was on trial for his life. 

Which is why Jesus’ Kingdom is usually filled with outsiders. 

Just take a look at the cross.  As Jesus died on Calvary, he didn’t have much of a following.  Most had abandoned him.  Only one of the twelve, John, was present, along with several women, one of whom was his mother.  There was a criminal dying on a cross to his side, and a Centurion, who, while he may have begun the day as an insider, ended it by treasonously declaring Jesus to be God’s Son.[1]   None of these would find access to the halls of power.  None would ever find positions of honor and authority in the eyes of the world.  None would wear fine flowing robes that enhanced their prestige in the eyes of the people.  None would feast sumptuously at the tables of a king or take places in the councils of the mighty.  Their positions at the foot of the cross marked them out, not only as insignificant men and women in the eyes of the insiders, but as men and women willing to risk their reputations and lives for the sake of an upside-down kingdom.  For them, the glories of the world were nothing when compared to the infinite value of simply being near Jesus. 

Such is the way of things.  The insiders, those with much to lose, are the most reluctant, the most hesitant, to move in the direction of Jesus.  But the outsiders, those with little or nothing to lose, or at least those who are willing to give up what they do have for the sake of something better, something real, those who do not love their lives so much that they are afraid to lose them, will always be found leaving the places of honor for a place at Jesus’ side.  They will always be found, not in the halls of power, but in impoverished towns, beside lowly mangers, and at the foot of the cross, willing to follow the one who led them there. 

This year, may we be found among them.   

Under Christ’s Mercy,

Brent

[1] Son of God was a title belonging to the Roman Emperor.