The Word became flesh . . .

     Those who pay close attention might think we spend a bit too much time in John’s prologue.  Even those who do not pay close attention to the readings, though, may well feel that we hammer the “In the beginning was the Word” passage of John a bit too frequently this time of year.  We usually read it before the singing of Silent Night and the lighting of the candles on the Christmas Eve service.  We also have it as a reading for one of our Christmas Day readings.  We also get to read it a third time on the first Sunday after Christmas.  Why, do you ask, do we spend so much time on just this passage?

     Part of the reason, I think, is that John serves as a theologizing counterpoint to Luke’s historical narrative.  Luke points us to the history of Jesus’ birth: Cyrenius is governor of Syria; Augustus is Emperor of the Roman Empire; Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem in obedience to the command of Augustus; the Messiah is entering the history of Israel not at the head of a legion of soldiers or of angels, but into a manger; his clothing is by no means royal; and the first heralds of this confirming miracle are shepherds, a group that would have been viewed with suspicion by the city-folk.  The Incarnation happens in the real world, among real people, at a real time in history—that is part of the focus of Luke.

     John, though, places the event in the cosmic span of God’s plan for the world.  We cannot read John’s prologue without thinking back to the creation account of Genesis 1.  In the beginning.  Of course, John switches the focus from the author of Genesis to His own focus on the Incarnation of God, Jesus.  You might be sitting here this morning, a bit sleepy because you were up late putting together gifts, and wondering how do we get from the Word to Jesus?  In fact, though of you who have studied John extensively or taken local theology classes or maybe even EFM know that John never again refers to Jesus as the Word.  Why does John choose that description for Jesus?

     What’s in a word?  How do we understand the importance of a word?  Some years ago, when I was still serving on a Vestry, I had occasion to hear a young boy come to my sending rector a bit on the freaked out side of things.  Week in and week out this little boy heard Father Dan pray for the angels and dark angels and all the company of heaven.  The little boy did not want to pray for the dark angels because dark angels had to be bad.  You are laughing, but think of how easy a mistake.  Thousands of times Dan stood before that altar and prayed each time “ . . . joining our voices with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven . . .” but the little boy heard something different, something that scared him.

     Word is important in the Jewish understanding of God and a polemic against all the other Ancient Near East gods and goddesses.  One of the chief distinctions that separates God from the throng of other gods is His ability and willingness to speak to His people.  Lips they have and cannot speak; eyes have they and cannot see.  In fact, the first theophany among the people of Israel was the giving of the torah to them by God.  The people wanted to know what it meant to be a redeemed, holy, righteous people living in communion with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  What they got was the instruction given Moses.  Moses came down the mountain with 611 instructions.  365 don’t’s and 246 do’s – yes, I know I am excluding the Two Great Commandments which sum up the entirety of the torah according to Jesus.  God revealed His character and His expectation for His people in those words.  In essence, God was saying to His people, Want to live like Me, here you go.  Follow these instructions.  Those of us who have studied those words, of course, know the difficulty.  We are like toddlers when it comes to the don’t, and sometimes we are lazy or fearful when it comes to the do’s.  The great news, of course, is that we are in the same boat, though.  We all fail the various instructions at various times in our lives.  We are all, like Israel before us, terrified to hear His voice or to see His glory reflected in the face of another.

     Then, along comes this Jesus.  Want to know what torah living is like?  Look at Jesus.  He keeps the entirety of the torah?  How do we know?  Because He was raised that Easter morning!  By virtue of His ability to keep the torah, Jesus is that firstborn without sin – the very sacrifice demanded of the torah for sacrifices.  That birth we celebrate last night would have no significance were He unable or were He unwilling to keep the torah and face His passion and death during Holy Week.  Why do you think Satan tempts Him so?  Why do you think we tempt Him so?  If You are the Son of God, come down!  But that discussion is for another time.  For now, we are looking at Jesus as one who shares the mind of God.  For John, this is best expressed by the understanding of the Word, and so he uses that word to describe Jesus.  Jesus keeps the mind of God.  If we have seen Him, we have seen the Father, right?  This is not new or isolated understanding.  The early Church did not sit down and say “Hey, let’s think up a theology to explain what we saw and heard.”  No.  It was revealed by God.  We have seen His face . . .

     It is also not easy understanding, right?  How can Jesus be co-eternal with the Father?  How can Jesus be slain in the mind of God before the foundation of the world?  What the heck are these Holy Mysteries really trying to convey?  We understand the challenge, right?  Does Jesus come into the world speaking the mind and heart of God and find the world going “Duh, I get it, now!”  No.  The world finds it a hard saying, a difficult saying.  John says the light shined in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.  Even though He came into what was His own, His own did not receive Him.  This stuff is hard, folks.  The Pharisees and Sadducees and the Temple Elites conspire to kill Him!  They, of all people, should have known who He was; yet they rejected Him!  Without the revealing of the Holy Spirit, you and I would be left to suffer in the same darkness.  Now, though, because He is Lord of our hearts, we have no need to fear the darkness of the world, do we?

     Think of our liturgy last night and how it reflects our understanding of this truth.  As we read this passage, what do we do?  We light our candle.  That’s right.  As we are lighting our candle, what happens?  Good job!  The lights are dimmed.  What is the outward sign of the inward and spiritual grace you and I are proclaiming last night in the darkness?  That’s right, our light is from Him and it will not be overcome by the darkness.  No matter how small our candles and how big the darkness, our flickering flame keeps it at bay!  It’s not easy, no.  The darkness is sometimes massive and threatens to consume us always.  But there, in that tiny wick, His light and life are in us, making us fit vessels for His power and heralds of His Gospel.  We can accomplish great things in His name, and we have no need to fear the darkness.  Holly spoke last night of challenges, of mannequin, ice bucket, and glitter challenges.  She also reminded us that the real challenges of our lives are to be found in how we respond to the darkness.  Will we follow our Lord and bear a cross worthy of Him?  Or will we give up, declaring the cross embarrassing or heavy or the darkness too much?

     Brothers and sisters, the peace and hope and joy of that Rockwell picture we call the Nativity is a fantasy.  Yes, God came into the world.  And for just a moment all creation marveled.  But Jesus came into a world, a Creation that was seemingly out of control.  In reality, we were out of control.  The fears and hurts and pains that were present in the days leading up to His birth still remained.  The consequences of sin were ever-present in the world He came to save.  Tomorrow we celebrate the death of the first martyr, Stephen.  Wednesday we celebrate the death of the Holy Innocents.  In our time we are grappling with the consequences of sin still in the events of Aleppo or, closer to home, the pains of homelessness or mental illnesses or racism or whatever elitism you want to include in this list.  Yes, ever since that Night, the darkness has tried hard to overcome the Light that came into the world, that came into us.  Yet you and I are reminded this day that His light burns in all who proclaim Him Lord!  His light shows the way in the darkness that seeks so hard to snuff out all life.

     And though I have mentioned His passion and precious death, and although I have spoken of the importance of enunciation in the Eucharist, let me speak a moment of what we are called to do in light of this Word becoming flesh.  That little Babe, whose birth we celebrate and in Whose glow we bask, will grow to speak of the food that He offers, His own flesh and His own blood, that we might have life eternal.  His language, and that of the early Church was so clear, that some in the Empire thought us cannibals, that we sacrificed young babes on our early altars.  It was one of the reasons for persecution. 

     If all we feel warm and fuzzy when we celebrate the birth our Savior, then perhaps our understanding of His birth has been domesticated a bit too much.  Perhaps, just perhaps, the true meaning behind the Eucharist has been clouded by scales in our own eyes or by the wisdom of the wise of this world.  That Babe is the Word which both saves the world and judges the world.  That babe is the flesh which both judges us and saves each one of us.  That Babe is the Flesh and Blood we consume each and every time we give thanks to God for passing over our sins and giving us both light and life.  That Babe is the Word of God, become flesh, that you and I might share in His glory for ever!

In Christ’s Peace,

Brian†

Sending a baby, sending you and me, as heralds . . .

      Sometimes, as Dixon reminded us yesterday, it takes a certain amount of arrogance to stand up before a congregation week in and week out and proclaim God’s Gospel to a group of people.  I laughed yesterday at his advice to Holly†, and not just because he dared to compare her to an untrained dog.  It does take a certain arrogance.  It’s hard to know where to push forward and pull back.  That’s why this endeavor we call preaching has to be done in prayer.  Certainly, I found myself in that same position of wondering whether I ought to preach on Isaiah this morning earlier in the week.  After all, everyone knows this passage of Isaiah.  It is the prophesy of the virgin giving birth that the Gospel writers will use in support of Jesus’ claim to be the God incarnate / Man divine.  What more is necessary?  Without shirking from the need to boldly proclaim the Gospel and at risk of causing some of you to feel like I am preaching down to you, how does one convey effectively the meaning of the text?  How does one take a familiar text and open it to a modern audience?  That was the gist of Dixon’s admonition to Holly.

     One cannot begin to understand the intricacies of this prophesy without an understanding of Ancient Near East geopolitics at this time and an understanding of ANE cosmology at this time, this time during which Isaiah receives the call, has the brand touched to his lips by the angel, and tells God, “Here I am.  Send me.”  Yes, our readings today pick up not too far from where Dixon preached yesterday.  God-incident?  You decide.

     Geopolitically, Assyria is on the rise in the ANE.  Egypt’s power has begun to wane; Persia and Greece are still a few centuries away from their respective dominations of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean basin.  Assyria is the two-ton gorilla that is striking fear into the hearts and minds of everyone not a citizen.  To us, they would be like Russia or China.  To our modern enemies, they would be like us.  They have the best armies.  They have the best weaponry.  They have the most wealth.  And they are ruled by one of my favorite names in all the ANE histories, Tiglath-Pilezar.  Gosh I love that name.  As we had more children and ran out of boys’ names, I lobbied Karen hard for that name for David and Joshua.  When Karen would not go for that, I lobbied for one of the cats to get that name.  It’s not as bad as it sounds, right?  The nickname would be Tiggy.  It would stand out.  When people asked him why his parents named him Tiglath-Pilezar, Tiggy could say that his parents named him for a guy not unlike Alexander the Great.  He ruled an empire at its height in world affairs.  See, some of her eye rolls directed at me are well-earned!  But I digress.

     Assyria has been flexing its muscles.  In fact, as Isaiah has been being called and accepting that call, some battles have been occurring.  A number of smaller kings have banded together to fight the Assyrians.  And they have lost.  That is the position in which Rezin of Aram and Pekah of Israel find themselves.  Remember, the kingdom of Israel has had its civil war.  Shortly after Solomon’s death, the kingdom has been divided into the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom, Israel and Judah.  So Israel and Aram, smarting from a recent defeat at the hand of the Assyrians, have banded together to fight Judah, who declined to support the war effort.  Israel and Aram have decided to conquer Judah “to teach it a lesson” and to recoup some of the tribute and prestige recently lost.

     Judah is worried about these two armies coming together.  Although we do not read about the initial worry today, Scripture teaches us that the King and people of Judah were worried about their impending doom.  Isaiah, in fact, is sent by God to Ahaz to tell him to ignore the kings and armies.  They are all bluster and hot air, and their attack will not overthrow Ahaz.  Ahaz refuses to accept the comfort of the prophet.  Instead, he strips the Temple of all its silver and gold and sends it to Tiglath-Pilezar.  He calls himself Tiggy’s son and asks Tiggy to come and save him from the impending doom.

     Perhaps that bit of background might help you understand why God is wearied by Judah’s pretense at faith and piety.  Ahaz may not be willing to put God to the test, but he sure as heck is not willing to put his trust in God.  Ahaz would rather depend on what he knows, bribery and flattery, to save himself and his kingdom than upon the grace and strength of the Lord.

     To His credit, God does not respond like you or I likely would.  How do we tend to respond when we offer help and it is refused?  Are we quick to offer to help again, or do we tend to let the one offered help suffer for their rejection of our aid?  Do we treat them as those in need or as squanderers?  God sends Isaiah again to Ahaz and asks the king to demand a sign of Him?  Now, Ahaz plays the part of the righteous king.  “I will not.  I will not put the Lord to the test.”  The way our editors shape the reading, it sounds like Ahaz is a good king.  But we know better.  Ahaz has an outward piety, “I will trust in the Lord,” even though he plots and schemes to save his own skin by sending the gold and silver of the Temple to Tiggy for protection.  No wonder God is wearied by him.  No wonder God is wearied by us.  How many times do you and I responded with an outward piety while inwardly distrusting the Lord our God?  How many times do we answer “it is in God’s hand” or “No thanks are necessary, I was just doing what I was supposed to” when, underneath, we are convinced God needs our help, that God’s plan cannot work without us?  Like ancient Israel, you and I need circumsized hearts.  We need our inner beings aligned with our outward expressions; otherwise, we are much like the whitewashed tombs that Jesus criticizes in His ministry.

      Two weeks ago, when I stood among you and preached on Advent, I reminded us that we were called to be a looking back and looking forward people.  All Christians are called to look back at what Christ has done for us even as we look to the future He has planned for and promised each one of us, but it really should be in our spiritual DNA at Church of the Advent.  After all, we claim a “patronal season” rather than a patronal feast.  Another characteristic which ought to define us as a parish is our incarnation of God’s grace in a world that is so much like that of the Ancient Israel in our story today.

     Earlier, when I asked how you and I would respond to the duplicity of the king, I heard a few evil laughs.  I get it.  My inner monologue had an eviler and louder laugh.  How many of us, were we faced with Ahaz betrayal and duplicity, would maybe send a host of angels to help make sure the armies defeated Judah?  How many of us might nuke Ahaz for selling our stuff and trusting in Tiggy?  How many of us would feel betrayed at our “child” rejecting us and calling another “father”?

     How does God respond in His weariness?  How does God respond in His justice?  How does God respond to the betrayal?  The duplicity?  The hurt?  He sends a baby.  You and I might be tempted to throw angels or lightning bolts at the problem, but God sends a baby! In fact, in this particular story, God has sent two.  We do not read it today, but how does God confirm His prophesy with Isaiah?  He promises a son, Shear-yashub.  We do not speak Hebrew, but we know that Hebrew names in the Bible often have significant meaning.  In this case the name means “A remnant shall return.”  Is Isaiah called to deliver hard messages?  You bet.  Are things going to be hunky-dory for all the people of Judah and Israel in the near future?  Nope.  How does Isaiah know that God has not given up on him or his people?  Because “A remnant shall return.”  Yes, there will be suffering.  Yes, there will be pain.  But a remnant shall return.  Every day Isaiah sees his son, he will remember God’s promise.  When people look at you and me, they, too, should remember God’s promise, but that is through the second child promised in our passage of Isaiah.

      One of God’s instructions to His people is “your ways are not My ways.”  Is that anywhere more evident than in how God responds to Ahaz and to you and me in this passage of Isaiah?  Is that anywhere more evident than in the birth of that Baby we will celebrate next week?  You have joined me in rueful laughter as we considered how we would each respond to Ahaz.  But God sends a baby.  You and I are deserving of the same fate we have planned out in our heads for Ahaz, but to us God sent a baby.  The world is shrouded in darkness and rejects its Creator at every turn; still, God sends a baby.

     As Adventers, you and I are called to that looking back/looking forward whiplash.  We are called always to be reminded of what God has done for us even as we look expectantly to the fulfillment of all His promises.  We remember His death.  We proclaim His Resurrection.  We await His coming in glory.  That’s the proclamation of all Christians in the liturgy, but it defines our mission as Adventers.  It shapes our spiritual DNA.  Hopefully, it reshapes, dare I say transforms, how you and I incarnate God’s grace in the world around us.

     Think of the preposterousness of sending a baby into the world to fight evil.  Who, but God, would think to do such a thing?  And, yet, consider the significance of sending a baby rather than the lightning bolt or company of angels or whatever idea you and I had.  Babies are cute.  Babies are helpless.  Babies need time to grow up.  In sending a baby, God reminds us that He came as approachable, as fully human.  The notion would have been even more preposterous in the ANE than in modern America today.  God’s sojourned briefly with humans in the ANE cosmology.  The gods could not spend much time among humans because our fleshy ickiness rubbed off on them.  We do not speak much of it around here, but think of the significance of God becoming fully human as a baby.  God was dependent upon a faithful mother and father to raise the child, to protect the child, to nurture the child.  That child, of course, has all our experiences.  I’m guessing He got a splinter or three helping dad around the shop.  He probably caught colds and coughs.  He experienced the raging hormones of pre-teen and teenage years.  Jesus lived through every stage of human development.  You might dismiss this focusing exclusively on His divinity, but the Scriptures and the Creeds remind us that He was fully human.  He cried when Lazarus died.  He had compassion on the people because they were like sheep without a shepherd.  He was indignant toward suffering and injustice and the conflict between the inner hearts and outward expressions of faith.  He experienced everything you and I experience.  He is, in a sense you and I cannot begin to grasp, empathetic to our condition.  And He came to save, not to judge (at least this time).  Unlike the ANE pantheon, He came to take on the entirety of our experience, to remind each and every one of us that He created us good, that only our sins separated us from Him!  He came to serve, to live a pattern of life for all His disciples, that we might honor and glorify Him and our Father in heaven.  He is, to use the language of John from next week, the Word of God become flesh!  Shadowy and imperfectly, you and I are now little incarnations of Him.  You and I are empowered by the Holy Spirit to do those things He has given us to do.  Yes, we might say we are the baby that He sends into the darkness.  We are the compassionate, empowered disciple through whom He fights evil day in and day out in our lives.  It is we who are called to fight homelessness.  It is we who are called to fight racism.  It is we who are called to fight poverty.  It is we who are called to fight all ism’s that seek to enslave others in darkness.  And we fight that battle as His little children, trusting He will glorify Himself through our labors and cause us to shine with that light He has planted in each one of us.  We Adventers ought to be particularly attuned to that aspect of His call on our lives.  We are looking back at what He has done even as we await all that He has planned for us!

     One day the mission will change.  One day, He will send His Son in glorious, apocalyptic majesty as Judge and as Savior.  One day, we will be given rest from all our labors.  But this day, a day we call Advent 4, is not that day.  Until He comes again to judge the living and the dead, you and I are called to model the faith of a little child, to go forth in His Name to love others into His kingdom, and to remind the world that He truly has pitched His fleshy tent among us and desires us all to trust in His unfailing promises rather than to die in our sinful scheming.  We are called, like Isaiah and countless throngs before us, like all who claim to look forward while looking back, to remind the world He came as a baby that we might all have the chance to live forever with Him in glory to the ends of the ages.

Peace,

Brian†

Spiritual Alzheimer's and the antidote

     I was drawn early in the week to our Psalms, 42 and 43.  Mindful of our celebration of Morning Prayer and my need to make this a homily, it seemed a good choice.  Except, I could not for the life of me think of an illustration that might make these psalms make sense to us in 21^st century Nashville.  I read 8 or 9 commentaries looking for an illustration that would bring the separation felt by the psalmist in these psalms into something with which you and I could relate.

     Separation is not something upon which we modern Americans like to dwell.  It’s ironic, given our complacency in the destruction of neighborhoods and communities.  How many people do we have in our own families who value on-line or “social media” relationships more than the person sitting or standing in front of them?  When we go to restaurants, do we see people engage in intimate or vibrant conversations with one another, or are we more likely to see people showing their devices to one another when something catches their attention?  When’s the last time you sat on a porch catching up with a neighbor?  When is the last time privacy fences were not put up to keep the neighbors out?  We laugh, but it should be a painful laugh.  How many of us grew up in neighborhoods where, if we did something particularly nasty or dangerous, mom and dad were going to find out?  How many of our children or grandchildren, though, have that same connection to those where they live?  My guess is very few.

     The psalmist in our psalms today understands separation all too well.  He or she knows himself or herself to be cut off from God.  The initial image is one of a deer craving water when there is none in the brook.  But the psalmist moves quickly to his or her perceived separation from God.  I pour out my soul when I think on these things: how I went with the multitude and led them into the house of God, with the voice of praise and thanksgiving, among those who keep holy-day.  What causes this separation?  I think it likely that it is the Exile, but it could be more personal situations which causes the psalmist to feel cut off.  He or she looks back wistfully on Temple worship with the faithful, how the Temple was packed and full of praise and thanksgiving.  Maybe you relate to that memory?  Maybe you remember a time when you had to be at church at 10am to get a seat for the 10:30am service?  Maybe you remember when the choir was far larger, the number of attenders was far greater, the songs more heavenly, and the praise more joyful?  Still, we probably do not get the sense of isolation conveyed by the psalmist.

     I say I believe these psalms are written during the Exile because the psalmist speaks of the heavy soul, speaks of the time when he or she went to Temple with the faithful throng, speaks of a confrontation with the enemy, but speaks of God having forgotten him or her.  I have shared with you many times these first couple years that Israel viewed possession of the Land every bit as important as you or I view the sacrament.  Possession of the Land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the outward sign that God was with them, just as the eating of the Body and drinking of the Blood is ours.  There is a sense of “cut-offedness” that can only be explained something catastrophic.  Could it be Absalom’s rising up against his father, David?  Yes.  But David knew he was the cause of that rebellion.  Could it be David in his battles with Saul?  Possibly, but then the Temple was not built, so there was no “great old times” upon which he could look back.  The psalmist compares this feeling to that of a deer which finds a brook dry.  How do we understand such cut offedness?  Do we?

     I had prayed all week for a good illustration.  God was silent until last night.  Now, when it popped into my head, I realized the truth of it, but I wrestled a bit with God because it was too personal and I had not cleared it with my family.  The first homiletic rule of using your family as an illustration is Don’t!  The second rule is see rule #1.  Somewhere down around rule 10 is the “if you absolutely must violate rule #1, make sure you ask permission of the family first.”  I did not do that, so you all will have to pretend not to know this about my family if you ever meet them.

     A few years ago, my paternal grandfather decided to remarry.  There is nothing special in that declaration except for the fact that my grandmother had not yet been dead a year when he made this decision.  My father had called to share the news and was upset.  Even lawyers know you are not supposed to make important decisions so early in the grieving process.  Naturally, I was surprised.  Grandpa had made no mention of dating other women in our conversations since my grandmother’s death.  So, like Dad, I was a bit worried about his state of mind.

     I called my aunt and uncle just to get a sense of this woman.  It turned out I had met her a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.  It was so long ago that I could not remember her, but I remembered her husband and Grandma and Grandpa stopping by in Dallas for a quick visit during one of their road trips.  To make a long story very short, both my aunt and uncle were happy for Grandpa.  No one thought anything untoward had happened.  His new wife was someone who had known him for years, was financially secure, in good health, and had a good relationship with her family.  She was more active than my grandfather, and both hoped some of her activity would rub off a bit on Grandpa.

     So, I called Grandpa.  When we finished pleasantries and I asked about the new wife, he knew my dad had encouraged me to call.  I reminded him that lawyers see such mistakes all the time and that Dad would not want to see him fall into the same trap.  Besides, my grandfather is a deacon in the Baptist church and had given this advice to others in the past.  He chuckled a bit and then began to relate his side of this announcement.  I won’t go into all the details, but Grandpa shared how Grandma’s Alzheimer’s had taken her from him years before she finally passed.  It started slowly, to be sure, but it progressed to the point where she did not know him.  He was a strange man living in the house with her.  If he got lucky, she thought he was one of her brothers or father back in Nova Scotia.  More often than not, she thought he was his mother in rural West Virginia.  Now, my grandfather loved his mother dearly.  He just would rather not be mistaken for her by his wife.  Between fifty and sixty years of a life together was wiped out by that horrible disease.  She was his bride.  She was the mother of his children.  And she knew him not.  Sometimes, it really crushed him to see her recognize others.  He wasn’t being small or petty in that hurt.  He just wanted his wife to know him, to remember him, to love him.

     Looking around the pews I can see that illustration was the perfect one to explain the psalmist’s feelings today.  Even as I wrestled a bit with God last night about that illustration, I knew you all would understand it.  Heck, some of you understand it in ways I will not.  We have far too many doctors and nurses who have seen the ravaging effects of Alzheimer’s on individuals and on their families.  Right?  Modern medicine can do some amazing things for those who are sick, but not much of that amazing work does not extend to those who love them and suffer because of their suffering.  Some of you have experienced that same cut-offedness with loved ones in your life.  Some of you have had the misfortune of losing a loved one to Alzheimer’s.  A couple have already expressed to me a story not unlike my grandfather’s.  Like the psalmist, the loved ones have felt hurt, anger, shame, pettiness, isolation, unloved and any number of other emotions that arise when we are unrecognized by our own mothers, our own fathers, our own sisters, our own brothers, our own husbands, or our own wives.  How much more so should we experience those feelings when we listen to the whispers of the Enemy that we have been forgotten by God?

     And make no mistake, those whispers constantly bombard us.  Wolves in sheep’s clothing proclaim on television and radio that “God wants to bless all His sons and daughters.  If you are not blessed, it’s because you lack faith.”  That’s certainly a theme getting more coverage thanks to our new President-elect.  When something bad happens, the whispers still occur.  “Oh, did you hear So-and-so has cancer?  I wonder what she did to get that?”  And what of those people who have that storm cloud constantly over their lives, who just seem never able to catch a break?  What do we say and think about them and their relationship to God because of their circumstances?

     We are now two weeks in to this season we call Advent.  Stores have been playing Christmas music since Halloween.  Commercials are really ramping up.  “Buy a gift you cannot afford to prove to a loved one you really love him/her.”  I know, there’s no ad that blunt, but listen to the subtle message of the ads.  Our gifts show our love of those to whom we give them.  Parents must give up sleep and large amounts of cash to wait in line and get the “in” gift for their kids.  Heaven help you if you are married or, worse, engaged!  The sign of your affection?  Debt!  This season is meant to remind us of the love that God had for each one of us, for every single person we encounter in our daily life and work.  The world, in its rebellion, has turned it into crass opportunism and marketing.  Given the message of the world, it is no wonder so many people are depressed this time of year.  It’s no small wonder that suicide rates tick up.  It’s no wonder that there is a need for so-called blue Christmases in our churches.

     Our psalmist today reminds you and me that our circumstances do not reflect our relationship with our Father in heaven.  Never.  Never.  Never are you and I cut off from Him!  How do we know?  If we are existing, if we have our being, He is willing it.  He is remembering each one of us each second we are.  But far more importantly, He has already demonstrated His love of and His commitment to each and every one of His sons and daughters.  As we celebrate Advent and look expectantly at His Incarnation and His Second Coming, you and I are reminded that it was His love for us which led Him to that humble manger in Bethlehem, which caused Him to walk that path that led to Calvary, that gave Him the will to remain on that Cross even when we tempted Him to come down, that died in our place so that we might, like Him, be resurrected and reconciled to Him for ever!  That Gospel story is His reminder of His love for you and me and His testimony that we are never truly separated from Him!  Unlike my grandmother, who forgot my grandfather after so many years of life together, He never forgets us, He never stops loving us, He never even gives up on us!

     In the coming weeks, infrequent attenders or CEo’s (Christmas Easter only) will show up among us.  There will be a temptation on our part to whisper about them, to, in the words of the Pharisee, thank God that we are not like them.  The truth is, brothers and sisters, many approach these services with enough guilt, with enough heaviness, and with enough isolation that they do not need us to add to their burdens.  What they need, what you and I need, like the psalmist says, is to be reminded by the congregation that God loves them just as he loves each one of us!  Sometimes, it falls upon us as a congregation to remind those mourning the recent death of a loved one, those diagnosed with a horrible disease, those in broken relationships, those suffering from a lack of provision because of job loss, and all those wo for whatever reason feel cut off from God, that He loves them and us and that His memory, His works of power and salvation, is alive in each one of us!

     The Enemy wants nothing more than for us to buy into the lie that we are the masters of our own domains and captains of our own ships.  The Enemy wants this because He understands, better than many of us, that with that isolation comes the possibility of forgetfulness, the possibility of a spiritual Alzheimer’s, if you will.  If we buy into the seductive lie of self-determination, we can be convinced of our own cut-offedness.  It is our job, corporately, to speak against that lie, to speak that Word of forgiveness and grace, to speak God’s word of healing and power each time we gather, so that those who do not know Him or those who have forgotten Him, might once again be drawn into the arms of His saving embrace.  Why is gathering each week so important, some of you often ask me?  Is it the Sacrament?  Is it the preaching and teaching?  Do you need to feel you have earned your pay?  There may be elements of those thoughts in the answer, but the real answer is that corporate worship is the only antidote to the spiritual Alzheimer’s propagated by the voice of the world and the Enemy.  It is in corporate worship that we, and those who join us, are reminded that we are never alone, that we are never forgotten, and that we are loved beyond measure!  It is in corporate worship, brothers and sisters, that you and I and all who join us, whether our spiritual cisterns are full or running on empty, are given hope in the face of hopelessness, light in the darkness that threatens to overwhelm us and those around us, and strength to bear those crosses thrust upon us, certain that our Father in heaven will use us to His glory!

In Christ’s Peace,

Brian†