Be prepared

Hey, it's Christmas.

Not really.  But it seems like it.  I know my american friends will complain about Christmas prep starting before Thanksgiving, but here in Canada, we don't even have that buffer.  The last thing to fall is Halloween, which tumbles before our eyes, and is replaced with Santa and tinsel at the beginning of November.  Now, I'm not going to call Christmas a selfish hog of a holiday, but I would like to remind you that with the start of Christmas prep at the beginning of November, and the last of the boxing day sales and such wrapping up in January, this glutton of a holiday has taken up, ready for it, almost a quarter of the year.  No jokes.

But like most other reasonable people, my problem isn't that the Christmas prep is starting early, but that it isn't prep.  Not properly, anyway.  The thing about modern life (and I do mean modern life) is that there is pretty much always a jarring shift in tone.  Between everything.  Have you ever noticed that the commercials are always much louder than the show you are watching?  Or that when a show ends, it is followed up by something vastly different than it? There is no bridging, no shift in tone between the two.  It just goes from one to the other.  In our lives these days, there's nothing even vaguely like downtime.  It's just thrill of the minute from one moment to the next.  Rapid succession.

The shift from Halloween to Christmas is perhaps one of the most jarring in terms of tone, seeing as how it moves from ghosts and skeletons to santa and elves with absolutely zero transition.  But that occasion should give us some time to think and to reflect on the concept of preparation.  It's not just holidays that we're bad at doing transitions with, it's everything.  We move so quickly, and transit is so rapid, that there's no real time to shift in tone or thought between the things we do.

Now, as you heard on Sunday, part of my problem was that the preicope cut off too early.  It didn't go all the way it should have, and it dropped the last bit.  Here it is, for our better understanding of everything:

50 Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the Council, a good and upright man, 51 who had not consented to their decision and action. He came from the Judean town of Arimathea, and he himself was waiting for the kingdom of God. 52 Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body. 53 Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid. 54 It was Preparation Day, and the Sabbath was about to begin.

55 The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it. 56 Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes. But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment.

                                                                                       Luke 23:50-56

This is key to understanding, advent, lent, and gosh, the Christian life in general.  As Christians, we tend to not think too much about the rest of Jesus in the tomb, or the time his disciples spent between his death and

his resurrection.  We do the same thing, moving from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, moving with rapidity between the crucifixion and the resurrection.  But that day of rest, the one that the women experienced, resting according to the Sabbath, is huge for us, we just rarely think of it!

Consider it this way - when God made heaven, earth, and everything in them, he did so in six days, and he took the seventh day, the sabbath day, to rest.  And then he made it a commandment in the book of Exodus, giving the ten commandments with a firm notation of the sabbath.  And the people of Israel took that to heart, and began to make the sabbath a huge part of what they did, creating rules about how far to walk, what you could cook, exactly what was or was not work.  And it was a mandatory, nation and people wide day of rest for everyone, great to small.  And the punishment for breaking the sabbath was dire indeed.  

32 While the Israelites were in the wilderness, a man was found gathering wood on the Sabbath day.33 Those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and Aaron and the whole assembly,34 and they kept him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. 35 Then theLord said to Moses, “The man must die. The whole assembly must stone him outside the camp.” 36 So the assembly took him outside the camp and stoned him to death, as the Lord commanded Moses.

                                                                              Numbers 15:32-35

Did you catch that?  The deal with breaking the Sabbath rest was so severe that gathering wood, picking up sticks on the Sabbath day was enough to get you killed.  Just going out to grab firewood!  Nothing major, no massive crime, and yet that man was stoned to death.  You see, people got a little strange about the Sabbath as time wore on, and it became more of a curse than a blessing.  It became a total disaster, because the blessing became the law, you couldn't do anything whatsoever.  Pretty much.  Within reason.

With this limitation, we run into some issues that end up being rather major.  The time spent in shifting tone is actually vital.  You have the sabbath day in place during holy week, and it isn't any accident that the resurrection of Jesus, on the Lord's day, happened on the day after the sabbath.  After the day of rest.  After the time specifically set aside by God himself to rest.  

Here's the deal - without that day in the middle, without that hallowed sabbath rest, then I'm not too sure that Easter would have meant anywhere near as much.  Oh sure, had Jesus just hopped back up to life as soon as he was taken off the cross, well, the resurrection would still have taken place, but it certainly would have looked much different.  It would have looked different for us.  That day of preparation, that sabbath rest, that time of watching and waiting, of getting prepared and resting according to God's laws, that made the entire thing much greater, and still does today.  

We need that Sabbath rest more than ever now.  We need that time to rest, to be still and know that God is God.  We need that because our lives, our days, are crammed full of more stuff than ever before.  There's always something going on, there's always the next thing to think about, and rarely any time just getting yourself prepared, ready for the next thing.  We never switch off, we never get over ourselves, we never shut down off of anything we're up to, and we move seamlessly from one thing to another, from hit to hit to hit, and we somehow keep on ignoring the simple advice from God to take our rest, and to know that God is God.  

Now, to the thieves on the cross.  Yes, that tired old trope.  I know they've been discussed to death already, but here's something you might not have heard (unless you were in church on Sunday).  The thing about the two thieves, is that they were both asking for the same thing - salvation.  They were both saying to Jesus 'save yourself, and save us.'  But in two strikingly different ways.  The one wanted things done immediately.

 He wanted things done, and by things I mean everything, done on his time, right away.  He says 'If you are the Christ, save yourself and us!'  As in, hop down off this cross, today, right now, and spirit us away.  But the thing about the other thief, is that he says simply to Jesus 'remember me when you come into your kingdom.'  And Jesus promises salvation for the second thief, and promises it today.  Today you will be with me in paradise.

That's the funny thing about the way your faith works.  If you rush it, you will be frustrated.  The only way to move fast is to take it slow, there simply is no other way.  The only way to progress is to say to God 'thy will be done.'  The only way to move rapidly forward is to stop struggling and to let God do what he is going to do.  The only way to be perfect is to stop trying, and the only way to be forgiven is to sin boldly.  It's a funny old thing, and honestly, it all comes down to one simple thing - grace in Christ.  This is why the cross of Christ is foolishness, because it is presented to us all as something we don't do.  The sad irony of the thief on the cross was that had he taken his foot off the accelerator, then he would have recieved his reward as well.  

The way CS Lewis posits it is that we have to love God for his own sake, without any threats or promises involved.  He frames it in the sense of a very rich, very powerful prince, who goes about in his kingdom in disguise.  He wants to meet and fall in love with, and woo a lovely lady, but there is a real risk, with him being a well known prince and all, that she will pursue him for his money.  So, he goes about in disguise, because the truth of the thing is that if the woman goes for the money, she will get nothing, but if she falls in love with the man, then she will get everything, money, prestige, and the man as well.  Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then all these things will be added unto you.  How do you do that?  You take that time to prepare, to rest, to listen and to reflect.  You behave like the second thief, and say to Jesus 'remember me whenever you come into your kingdom,' and you find with joy that it ends up being today.  If you say to Christ 'thy will be done,' you find that your will is being done too.  If you stop hiding your sins, you find that they are taken away.  And, perhaps most ironically of all, if you focus on thelife to come, you will find that your life here is enriched in many powerful ways.

This is the way of things.  Wanting Christ for your own sake will lead to ruin.  Loving him for his own sake will bring joy and life.  Though this may seem difficult to do, this is why we need that time of rest, stillness, and prepartion.  Moving from us to him, as we away the coming of the King into the world.

Blessed Advent, everyone.  Let every heart prepare a throne, and every voice a song.

PJ.

Remembrance Day

As you know, if you live in Canada, the US, or Great Britain, it was Remembrance Day / Veteran's Day / Armistice Day yesterday.  A time for us to spend a moment remembring and thanking those who fought and died for our freedoms.  And there are a lot of those people to thank.

But here is a question ahead of us: what do we do with all this remembrance?  Well, we set aside two minutes for silence on the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour, and then what?  Huh.  Then we sort of go about our day, I suppose.  For us, that was a trip to the Agribition, because really, why wouldn't you?  All that egg council swag isn't going to pick itself up, you know.

Joking aside, what do we do after we remember?  The book of James tells us: "If one o fthe brother or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not enough food to live on, and one of you says to them 'I wish you well; keep yourself warm and eat plenty' Faith is like that.  If good works do not go along with it, it is quite dead." - James 2:15-16.

On Remembrance Day, it's good for us to remember the words of the Gospel reading from this last week, in which Jesus says that God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.  And we Christians are not people of the dead, we are people of the living.

If we take our faith seriously, we will know a couple of things.  First of all, that people are supposed to know that we are Christians by our love.  I'm not sure how immediately apparent that would be for most people on the outside looking in, but that's how you're supposed to know Christians.  By looking at them, from the outside, you should be able to tell a Christian from a non-Christian.  But almost nobody can. Secondly, as the book of James tells you, Christians probably have a funny idea about what religion actually is.  We think that religion is a set of beliefs that we assent to and say 'this is most certainly true.'  But that's not what the Bible says that religion is.  The Bible tells us that "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: To care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world." -James 1:27.

We are very tempted, as Christians, to turn God into a God of the dead.  That is not to say that we are Saducees and doubt the resurrection, but it is to say that we end up fixated on the end result.  Do we get into Heaven.  Do people we like get into Heaven?  How do you get into Heaven?  These are the questions that we ask, and that we end up fixated on, to the extent that when people are starving and dying of dyssentery, we give them Bibles instead of food or medicine.  We want to be so sure of their belief, because we believe sincerely that this is the be all and end all of our religion.  Which it isn't.

You see, we, as Lutherans know about Grace, about the love of God, and about forgiveness of sins.  We know that inside and out, we are well versed in it.  But as far as everything else goes, what the heck else do we do with our time?  What do we do with ourselves, and how do we realistically see ourselves as Christians?  God takes people to Heaven after they die, but what does he do with them while they're alive?  Well, God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.  At remembrance day, it's not enough for us to solemnly say 'we will remember them.'  Yes, we should, we absolutely should.  You know what else we should do?  We should visit widows and orphans in their distress; that's the deal.  We should visit widows and orphans in their distress, including, but not limited to, widows and orphans of war.  By now, we should know that there is always going to be war.  We, as human beings, claim 'never again,' but naturally, there is always war somewhere.  There's always a war going on on planet earth somewhere, usually multiples.  There is going to be war, there is going to be calamity, there is going to be disaster, there's no escaping that.  As I mentioned on Sunday, back in a time when there was only four people on earth, there was a murder.  If we can't get along even in a nuclear family, what are the odds of world peace.

So we as Christians have two jobs.  First, quite simply, to be peacemakers.  Blessed are the peacemakers, says Jesus, and he's right to do it.  We are called upon by the Prince of Peace, to be peacemakers.  Global
peace?  Not likely, that's not something we can do.  But we can make peace around us, by following what Jesus says to do - to love our neighbors, to love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us.  You know, the actual words of Christ.  But there's more than that.  The second job is to bind the wounds of the world, to help families as they are cracking apart, as husbands and fathers have been torn from wives and children.  Whose job is that to look after orphans and widows in their distress?  Why, that's our job, isn't it?  I would find it very difficult to look through the Holy Scriptures and come to the conclusion that it is anyone else's job to care for these people.  It's our job, as the body of Christ, to care for those left behind, those who have been abused and robbed by war.  That's our job.

And finally, on the subject of remembrance day, you may think that these quotes from the book of James are all a little bit heavy, and they are.  James is a heavy book.  It's one of the shorter books, but also manages to be one of the heavier ones.  All that stuff I said, about caring for the poor and the widows, about feeding the hungry, and not just wishing them well, do you do all that?  No?  Then you have two choices: to either forget I ever said anything about it, and carry on with a man-made religion in which Jesus loves what you love, hates what you hate, and is generally in your corner about everything, or realize what Jesus actually died for.

This is of utmost importance: Jesus died on the cross for sins.  For looking at internet porn, yes, but also for you neglecting to do what he has called upon you to do.  For all the many times and moments in which you

had the chance to do the right thing, and squandered it.  That's what he died for. We remember all those who fought and died for our freedom, and we also remember the one who died for our souls.  Because Christ died once, the righteous for the unrighteous, we have courage and confidence and hope that war is not the end.  That death is not the end.  That although war and death and calamity may seem unjust, that there is hope to be hand in the blessed reuinion in heaven.  That doesn't absolve us of our jobs to do here, obviously, but it does mean that no matter how hideous the conflict, no matter what the death toll is, there is hope to be had.  We believe in a God who promises to put everything right, who has overcome the world, and who is preparing a place for us.  We're not there yet, so we still have some work to do here.