False Hope

Are you a Christian?  What makes you say so?

Many people who identify themselves as Christian say so because it’s their religious preference based mostly on their place of birth.  Born in a country where Christianity dominates the religious landscape, it’s the easiest option.  Some are born into a more religious family, and therefore simply adopt the family faith.  Others remember coming to a decision at some point when they went through some sort of a process of discovery that led them to make a profession of faith that they believe in God understood through the lens of Christianity.  Some remember choosing Christ as a personal savior.  All of these things lead people to declare themselves Christian.

When Jesus was about to make his entrance on the world with his ministry, Christianity didn’t exist.  Judaism, however, did.  Jesus was Jewish, as was his cousin, John the Baptist.  John saw himself as a precursor to Jesus, and his ministry was to prepare people for Jesus’ work to come.  Lots of people in their neck of the woods were hoping for God to send a messiah – one anointed by God – to deliver them from Roman oppression.  A few self-proclaimed messiahs popped up before and after Jesus performed his ministry in the world.  The apocalyptic hope they all had included God rewriting the script humanity had penned.  Judgment would come on those who were enemies of God, and salvation in all its fullness would come for the Jewish people.

John, in his preaching, certainly asked his audience in a variety of ways, are you Jewish?
Most would say yes.  They were born in the Jewish homeland, to Jewish parents.  They went through the paces that kids went through back then to discover the tenets of their faith.  They professed their faith.  Of course they were Jewish.  Right?

Take a moment and read Luke 3:7-17.

John obviously missed the course on speech writing, right?  Insulting your audience is generally a bad way to begin a speech…  What was John getting at?

Short and simple, John was telling his self-proclaimed Jewish audience that they weren’t as Jewish as they thought.  Their DNA, their family ties, even their childhood profession really amounted to nothing.  God was about to deliver something new and big, and those who thought they were going to be on the winning side were about to be swallowed up in a consuming fire.  Their hope based on their religious affiliation was false.  John was challenging a human tendency that we face today: is faith about having the right belief?

John was telling his listeners that they were missing the point.  The rabbis of their day would study the Law, and use it to interpret who should receive grace and mercy.  This approach lent itself to interpreting the scriptures to suit their own worldview, biases, preferences, and prejudice.  They were known for determining who was in and who was out.  This way of thinking was not really what the Jewish faith was all about, however.  What was being perpetuated was rule following as a means to keep God appeased.  It was a way of earning God’s favor.  And it was fundamentally off point.

Jesus would continue this line of thinking, turbo-charged.  It was not that the Law was wrong, but that the rabbis reversed the process, which was causing lots of problems.  The way Jesus taught was that grace and mercy were the lens through which we interpret the Law, not the other way around.  One way sees people’s neediness as a sign of their sin and justification of their plight and therefore a means of rationalizing our lack of support, stinginess, apathy, and even disgust.  The other way sees helping people in need as in sync with the heartbeat of God, which forces a different rendering of the Law.  One starts with the Law, the other starts with a merciful spirit.  The Apostle Paul would later say that the Law leads to death, while the spirit leads to life.

John was livid with some in his audience who were resting on their laurels of right belief while people around them suffered as they looked the other way.  John was basically saying that they weren’t Jewish at all – at least not the kind of Jewish that would have any saving effect on them.  If they wanted to be saved, they needed to be Jewish, not just give intellectual ascent to Jewish theology.  Furthermore, the action he called for, while at first glance seemed easy enough, actually forced a break in his audience’s belief system.  John’s demand required a level of sacrifice that forced people to come to grips with who they really were and what they were really all about.  The Jewish label was worthless.  What mattered was how Jewish they were.  For regular people, this meant that if they had an extra coat when someone around them needed a coat, they had to give it up – because that’s what being Jewish, being in sync with the heartbeat of God was all about.  For tax collectors who had purchased the right to gouge people for whatever they could get, it meant they scaled back their lifestyle to accommodate fair taxation.  For the soldiers who enforced that taxation who had been known to use their position to beat money out of people to line their own pockets well beyond the salary they agreed to. Being Jewish required them to stop such things and live with integrity.  Each and every demand required a significant level of sacrifice.  A level that challenges comfort.  A level that pushes a person toward deep thought.

I used to have a fairly callous attitude toward “idiots” who didn’t take faith at all seriously.  They were offending God, missing the point of life, and making the world a worse place, not better.  My distance from them allowed me to judge them easily.  That didn’t change until I lived enough to become an idiot myself.  After I lived like those idiots for some time, and realized that my decisions were based on my brokenness more than anything else, I didn’t see them as idiots anymore.  I saw them as people really struggling with life.  I related to them, and I began caring about them.  The longer I live, the more I relate to different kinds of people.  When I struggled years ago feeling like a failure and the depression that brings, it helped me relate to those who struggle with the same.  When I had a serious back problem a few years ago, I related to people with chronic pain in ways I never could have imagined.  All of this relating to people’s situation resulted in greater compassion.

John, and Jesus after him, were shouting as loud as they could to stop looking at people from a distance and come close, understand and relate, and respond in sync with God.  That’s being Jewish.  That kind of Jewishness offers real hope, because it is founded on relationship with God, not simply rule following.
When the fire of judgment comes, it is welcomed by those who seek to be in sync with God, for it means that all of our personal chaff – the sin that hinders and entangles us – will be burned off, making us more pure, more able to be in relationship with God.  We long to get rid of these old clothes and put on heavenly clothes, as Paul stated.  For those who don’t really want to be burdened by relationship with God – just let me follow the rules – the fire of judgment is pure hell, because all that we cling to that is not of God gets fried.  We don’t really want God or the God-honoring parts – we cherish the stuff that helps us be isolated and comfortable.  Our greed, our selfishness, our convenient worldviews that prop us up in opposition to whoever we deem our enemies – we identify ourselves with it all.  But since those things are out of sync with the heart of God, it’s toast.  In this line of thinking, judgment and grace are two sides of the same coin, both are parts of the same refiner’s fire which is here and coming.

The fire is always burning, and we feel it all the time, really.  It melts away areas we are grateful for, yet scorches where we are defiant.  We can all tell stories about this reality that has been in play throughout our lives.

So, are you a Christian?  Do you know what I am asking?  Are you truly a little Christ – the literal meaning of Christian?  Or are you banking on the false hope provided by being born in a land where Christianity is the prevailing religion, or into a religious family, or lip service uttered at some point?  Do you get that these do not deliver anything at all?  That banking on this false hope just makes the flames hotter and higher?  Are you truly born again into a new way of being in relationship with God and in a graceful relationship with the world?


Are you a Christian?  Do those in myriad form of need sharing life with you on this planet think you are a Christian?  Do your actions speak of a close relationship with God which in turn takes you into relationship with those who struggle which in turns leads you to compassion akin to that found in the very nature of God?

Prepare the Way

Advent is about preparation.  Preparing ourselves for a special Guest who is entering the world.  Our preparation is a relational thing.  When we prepare, something happens to us, something is set up in our future, and something is communicated to the one we are preparing for.  Have you considered what Guest is coming, what preparations might be helpful, and what preparing might do for you, your Guest, and your world?

What time is it in your world?  It was May 18, 1997.  Anybody excited yet?  Do you remember that day?  Tell me about your experience on May 18, 1997.  It was a life-changing day for me (and by extension, for you who read this as well).  But simply giving you the date doesn’t help you much, does it?  Let’s try again…

It was a dark and stormy night in the small town of Princeton, Illinois.  Literally.  My very pregnant wife and I were getting ready to spend a tense evening in our basement, where we would wait out the storm.  We were listening to the radio for the latest reports.  A tornado was seen touching down just West of town.  As the center of the storm approached this Normal-Rockwell-like county seat in Northern Illinois, the threatening tornado’s menacing tail in the sky hopped over town to the East.  Being so close to the eye of the storm, the entire region experienced a sudden, major drop in barometric pressure.  This drop is related to why windows blow out in times of tornadoes – the pressure inside homes literally explodes houses at their most vulnerable points.  We would not have been aware of this drop were it not for the presence of water on our floor.  Technically, it was the fluid inside my wife’s body that was serving to protect my child.  Her “water” broke.  We were only 7 ½ months into a 9 month term.  Not good.  When you hear the details of my May 18, 1997, your experience of the day changes, doesn’t it?

Luke, a medical doctor in his day, begins the story of Jesus’ adult life with enough specificity for folks a generation later (and later and later) to emotionally identify with the timing of Jesus’ entrance into his adult ministry.  It wasn’t just, for instance, April 4, 30 AD.  It was when Tiberius was emperor.  When Pontius Pilate ruled over Judea.  When Herod Antipas – that creepy snake – ruled over Jesus’ home region.  It was when Annas – or should we say Caiaphas? – was high priest, ruling over Judaism itself.  It was a time of despair.  Being oppressed by the Romans was bad enough.  Being oppressed by those who claimed to hold sway over your relationship with God was even worse.  The overwhelming majority of people were very poor, while those who held power – in politics, the military, or in the religious system – enjoyed luxury at the expense of those they ruled.  You struggle to scrape up enough food to eat in your thread-bare clothes while you hear reports of lavish parties for a very select group who are dressed really well and who are overfed.  How do you think the majority of people felt about their situation in 30 AD?

What time is it for you, today?  If you were to write autobiographically about this season in your history, what keywords would you include, and what hints would you give the reader about the state of your being?  How would you describe this time in world history that would help the future readers understand your context?  Hint: unless and until we come to grips with our “time”, we will not really appreciate what time it is, and what time may come.

Times are changing.  We humans do an interesting thing when we feel like we can’t take it anymore, especially if we’ve tried by our own power to change our situation.  We look to God to take care of business.  We pray harder.  We give of ourselves more.  We try to determine who is with God and who is not to make sure we are on the right side.  We do what we can to make room for God.  We look for those who can speak to us and for us about what we hope will come.

John the Baptist, we learn from other Gospels, was just the kind of person for the job.  The way he dressed and acted spoke to Jews and non-Jews alike.  For Jews, he resembled the prophet Elijah in his choice of clothing – camel skin, leather belt, eating whatever food he could get for free from the land (locusts and wild honey: good protein, sweet, and a nice crunchy mouth-feel…).  Looking like a prophet, Jewish people wanting more came to hear what he had to say.  For non-Jews, he looked like a Stoic – a wild man dressed to make a statement of contrast to the power structures of the day.  By choosing to look and live extremely poor, John was challenging those who claimed to be in control who ignored the plight of the masses around them.  He didn't go to the Temple (center of Jewish power) for an audience, either.  John came from the wilderness in prophetic fashion, and chose to preach where the people lived, breathed, and traveled.

Luke set the stage before he gave us John’s words by tying what was about to unfold to a prophecy (Isaiah 40) given for a similar context hundreds of years beforehand that still resonated and applied to that time: prepare the way for the Lord’s coming!  Clear the path!  Make the way easy and straight!  Then God’s glory will shine all the more brightly!  When this took place, apocalyptic hope was fever-pitch.  They were anticipating God’s coming at any moment.  Luke’s reference to Isaiah’s words were timely in their original context, in John’s and Jesus’ context, and still today.  The new day is coming, so get ready! 

The power of preparation.  The words of Isaiah and John both passionately communicated two things.  First, God was going to show up and redeem the awful situation in which people lived.  Second, that preparation was necessary in light of what was coming.  The first part is easy and wonderful news that people of all times and places like and understand (even if they don’t fully realize that implications of God’s coming).  It’s the preparation part, I think, that gets lost on us in our present time.  I think it’s hard to think about preparing when we know the story already: Jesus came.  We know way more than John’s original audience.  Why prepare?  Why not just celebrate it for a couple of months instead of waiting for Christmas Eve?  I also think it is hard for us to appreciate this aspect of the story because we don’t like waiting in our culture.  We want God to redeem everything yesterday.  But there is great power in preparation.  This is why knowing the time in which we live is so critical.  When we understand our time, we are clear on what we long for.  When we’re clear on what we long for, we gain clarity on what to prepare for.

My wife’s parents are coming for a visit in a week.  In spite of whatever in-law jokes I’ve made, their visit is always one I look forward to.  They are wonderful people who I dearly love and highly respect.  But before they get here, we have to prepare for their coming.  Of course, we will clean and clean and clean.  I also will need to change out our leaky garbage disposal before they come.  I need to finish a small drywall project with knockdown and paint.  We might even move forward on the next leg of some remodeling we’re doing at our house if we can squeeze it in.  All of this in preparation for their coming.  Stuff we would do anyway at some point, but now, because of their arrival in just a matter of days, we have urgency.

Truth be told, if we don’t get the repairs done before they arrive, they won’t really care.  They are not coming out to behold our new garbage disposal.  And, I would venture so far to say that if we chose to do absolutely nothing in terms of cleaning or getting a room ready for them, they may be surprised, but no less eager to be with us.  In light of these truths, should we bother preparing for their coming?  It's a ton of work - huge downside.  Is it worth the trouble?  What’s the upside?

Preparation saves time.  A very practical reason for moving forward with our preparations simply has to do with time.  We don’t get to see Lee and Carolyn very much.  We know we will have less than two weeks with them this visit.  We want to make the most of that time.  Spending a day when they are already here cleaning and getting a room ready would be a terrible waste of those hours we would much rather enjoy simply being together.  We prepare for the sake of the time we want to have with them.

Is it much different in terms of our looking forward to Christmas, the dawn of Jesus’ entrance into human history, or John’s time along the Jordan, heralding the coming of Christ’s work in the world?  If we hope for that dawn to come, for Christ to come visit us more powerfully, for the incarnation to be all the more significant, what preparations could we do so that we don’t have to spend those moments upon God’s arrival in our time?  Just like the list of things we need to clean and repairs that we hope to make, there are things in my life that I want to clean up.  There are roads in my life that need to be straightened out.  There are sections that need to be leveled.  Stuff I know I need to do but put off for another day because I don’t sense the urgency of Christ’s coming.  It’s not like he’s coming next week, I tell myself.  So, I will not replace childish ways of thinking with new, more adult constructs, even though my childish ways are leaking all over the place.  I will put off repairing that relationship that I’ve known has unfinished business for some time.  I will not clean up areas of my life that I know are not hospitable for Christ.  Because I can wait, right?

The reality is that I don’t want to waste time that Christ could be using to take our relationship deeper.  I don’t want to miss out on God’s insight for my life and my living because my toilet scrubbing distracted me.  I want to be ready for what God has for me.  Preparation creates that readiness, and helps my walk with God to be more efficient because we don't have to keep going over the same issues time after time.

Jesus spoke of the need to be ready in multiple parables.  The ones who were prepared enjoyed the reward it brings, while those who disregarded such things were left severely wanting.

What do you know you need to be doing right now so that you won’t waste time when Christ comes calling?

Preparation communicates respect.  My in-laws would certainly be gracious even if we didn’t prepare our home for their arrival, especially if their visit was prompted by an urgent situation.  This trip, however, has been long in the making, and we want to communicate to them love and respect.  When we make sure everything is clean and working properly to the best of our ability, when we buy special food and plan fun trips for their time with us, it communicates our love and respect to them.  We value them, which shows in our preparation for their coming.

Similarly, when we take time to prepare ourselves for God’s coming into our lives, we communicate love and respect.  When we take pause in anticipation for God’s coming and consider what needs replacing, repairing and refreshing in our lives, we are saying that we love and respect God as evidenced in our preparation.  Would God be gracious if we didn’t?  Of course.  Sometimes God comes into our lives in urgent situations when no preparation has been made, and God works hard to help replace what’s dead, repair what’s broken and refresh and restore wherever needed.  When we are looking forward to God’s moving into our lives, however, why would we want to communicate anything except that we look forward to God’s moving in our lives with great anticipation – and preparation?

As a way of communicating love and respect to God, what replacing, repairing, and refreshing do you want to pursue in anticipation of God’s visit on your life?

Preparation changes us.  Because I look forward to Lee and Carolyn’s coming, preparing for their visit may be physically taxing to a degree, but the bigger reality is that as we prepare, we simply get more excited.  As I think about our time with them, my mind begins anticipating good conversation, shared moments, new discoveries, and great memories of the visit of December 2013.  My interest and passion increases with my preparation.

So it is with my faith.  When I anticipate and prepare for God to show up in my life, I get excited about it, I think about it, and it serves only to increase my hopeful readiness all the more.  When we take time to prepare, we are changed.  Changed as we replace, repair, and refresh.  Changed as we dream about what God might do next in our lives.  Changed as we consider what we might do next with God.

In anticipation of the reality that God comes, what are you looking forward to?  How is your preparation for God’s coming affecting you?

From darkness into light.  That dark and stormy night, by the way, was followed by the dawn of a new day.  My son was born incredibly healthy as far as premature babies are measured.  Our hearts were enlarged with a new level of love we could not have anticipated – a love only a baby can bring.  We were as ready as we could be, and yet discovered quickly how truly unprepared we were as soon as we got home.  It was a new day, a new beginning, with new things to think about and new ways to live.  It was Christmas on May 19, 1997, and our lives have been better ever since.

This Week’s Prayer (Terra Pennington)

Mighty God,

Our preparer who establishes the way to come,

you have not left us hopeless.

We confess our hearts are cluttered.

We are impatient and distracted.

We fill our ears with the sounds

from a busy world.

We cannot hear you cry out to us:

“A new world is coming,

a new way is coming,

prepare your hearts,

your salvation draws near!”

Help us unclutter

our hearts and minds,

hear you in whirlwind and in whisper.

Change us into advent people,

who wait with great joy,

setting all other things aside

to welcome you into the world.

This Weeks Text | Luke 3:1-6 (New Living Translation)

It was now the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, the Roman emperor. Pontius Pilate was governor over Judea; Herod Antipas was ruler over Galilee; his brother Philip was ruler over Iturea and Traconitis; Lysanias was ruler over Abilene. ² Annas and Caiaphas were the high priests. At this time a message from God came to John son of Zechariah, who was living in the wilderness. ³ Then John went from place to place on both sides of the Jordan River, preaching that people should be baptized to show that they had repented of their sins and turned to God to be forgiven. ⁴ Isaiah had spoken of John when he said,

“He is a voice shouting in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord’s coming!
Clear the road for him!
⁵ The valleys will be filled,
and the mountains and hills made level.
The curves will be straightened,
and the rough places made smooth.
⁶ And then all people will see
the salvation sent from God.’”