Are you the one?

It's a bit played out by now, but do you remember Neo from the Matrix?

Hopefully you remember Neo.  He was a big deal in the early 2000s, with the extreme popularity of the Matrix series, and by that, I mean extreme popularity of the first matrix movie, and then the middling popularity of the second movie, and then the massive unpopularity of the third movie.

The plot of the movie revolves around Neo, and the name 'Neo' is a very clever anagram.  I'll let you run it through an online anagram solver before I tell you the answer. The answer, of course, is One.  As in, Neo is the one.  This is a theme that runs through a number of films, stories, radio dramas, all that, the idea that there is a one chosen hero who is foretold, who will come to save the people from their existential angst and temporal troubles.  A, dare I say it, Messiah, who will come.  

Now, if you know your Old Testament, you will know that there are a lot of references to the Messiah, to the Lord's anointed, the one who will come to save Israel, not just for a time as though he were Judas Maccabeus,  but for eternity.  There are a lot of prophecies about the Messiah who would sit on the throne of his father David, and of his kingdom there would be no end.  This is a wonderful prophecy, one that all the people of Israel certainly wanted to be fulfilled, but there is always a question about that, which is 'are you the one?'

You have to ask this question very carefully, and listen very carefully for the answer, for even Jesus tells you that many will come appearing as false Messiahs, and he has been proven to be right, as he always is, by the sheer number of people claiming to be the Messiah from Israel and beyond.  With all these people claiming to be THE Messiah, people had the healthy question, asking 'are you the one?' You could ask each of these Messiahs this question, asking them one at a time if they are the one or not, and finding out what the answer would be.  Because if you are going to have faith in the Messiah, if you're going to follow the Messiah wherever he leads, if you're going to ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name, and if there is one and only one, you're going to want to make really sure that the one you're following is the one.

Do you know that John the Baptist had this exact same line of questioning? He certainly did, and for good reason.  Unlike you or I who can shake our heads and cluck our thick tongues and think so very delicately on the subject of which church to join, that kind of thing, John the Baptist was in jail. He had been locked up in jail because he spoke truth to power, and had the gall to mention to Herod that his relationship wasn't on the up and up.  And while John was in jail, while he was behind bars, he sought word about Jesus of Nazareth.  If you're going to be behind bars, if you're going to be stashed away, far from polite company, imprisoned by the powerful  who want you and your morality to be obliterated, you're going to want some words of assurance that the one you're following is the one.  And when the disciples of John come to Jesus, Jesus tells them to tell John what they had seen:

Luke 7:22-23 ²²So he replied to the messengers, "Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. ²³Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me." Jesus shows his majesty through what he does, not just what he says.  The work that he does is phenomenally important, given the ability for him to do what he does.  But it goes one step further, because the work of Christ is important not just for what it is, but for what it says. Think for a second about that popular Christmas carol 'Joy to the world.'  Think most especially about the third verse:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.


There was a curse placed on humans in the garden, once they had fallen from Grace.  They had sinned, and through their sin, death, disease, illness, blindness, deafness, all those things entered into the world.  You know, everything that the people who came to Jesus were suffering from. All the things that were signs and evidence of the curse of sin: illness, scarcity, injury, sinfulness itself, and death itself, are all things that Jesus comes to solve.  And when Jesus exhibits his power, he shows himself as being God with us.  He shows himself as the Messiah, the only one who can undo the curse that had plagued us.  He is the one whom the wind and waves obey.  He is the one who absolutely unpicks all the stitches, who untangles the barbed wire, who shows that for the first time since the fall God and man are on the same side. This is shown most firmly and concretely at the cross, when Jesus dies, and the temple curtain is torn in two.  At that moment, the visible barrier between God and man was removed, at the death of Christ.  But that curtain was just a visible marker of the spiritual separation between us and God.

That barrier is gone now.  And now, eternally, God is with us .

You're a mean one

It can't just be me, and I don't think that it is, but at this time of year, I seem to be genuinely thinking that the grinch has a point.

Specifically, it's about the noise.  Everything is noisy at this time of year, and not the nice sort of sleigh bell noise.  No, it's the noisy noise.  A long, long time ago, I saw a performance by the Calgary philharmonic orchestra of 'Emily saves the Orchestra,' which is a show that I'm not entirely sure anyone else remembers.  Anyhow, the point that I'm trying to get to is that the villain of the performance was a monster called Cacopholous (the monster that I saw was 40 feet tall, but had to be retired due to not traveling well).  Back then, I'd never heard of the concept of cacophany, but it was in the show, noise personified.  Cacopholous was a monster who lived to remove music and replace it with cacophany, with noise, for the sake of noise.  No rhythm, no music, no tune, nothing.  Just noise, grating noise.  

And yeah, at this time of the year, the grinch has a point.  There's a lot of noise. The noise isn't tuneful, rhythmic, or pleasant.  It is, honestly, noise.  It's loud, and it's unpleasant - and there's plenty of it.  And that's what makes the start of Advent so jarring - this first week in Advent doesn't start with noise at all.  It starts with silence.

In the Advent and Christmas seasons, we tend to focus on a few people who carry forward the spirit of Advent.  We think about John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ who prepares his way.  We think about the family of Jesus, of Mary and Joseph and their journey to Bethlehem.  We think about Andrew and Peter, the men who were disciples of John before they were disciples of Jesus, but we rarely think about someone very special, and very specific. We very very rarely think about the father of John the Baptist - Zechariah.  It's easy not to think too much about Zechariah, of course, given that he has very few lines in the Bible, and he is quickly overshadowed by other people in the Gospel account. But hold on just for a second, because Zechariah's story is pretty important as far as these things go.

Back in the day, Zechairah is visited by Gabriel, that great angel, and Gabriel announces to Zechariah that his wife will conceive a child, and will give birth to an incredibly important person in history. "He will be great before the Lord ... he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.'  And you know what Zechariah's response is, of course.

It seems unlikely that Zechariah and Elizabeth will have a child in their dotage, and Zechariah doubts this message openly when Gabriel informs him of what will happen. And Gabriel has a stiff rebuke for Zechariah when he hears it: 'Behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time."

And thus begins the perfect pregnancy for Elizabeth.  For once, while a woman is with child, her husband isn't talking about how tired HE is, isn't whining about how hard the pregnancy is on HIM, isn't discussing how he would much MUCH rather be watching sports than buying gravol, etc. Instead, he's completely silent all the way through her pregnancy, all the way until the naming of John, as the law requires in the scriptures.  

And this is the part that is interesting, is important for us, especially this time of year.  The grinch, when he reacts negatively against the noise, we can feel him on that, we truly can.  But more than anything else, Zechariah does what so few of us do, especially not in Advent: He listens. And this is genuinely important, given who Jesus is and what Jesus is all about.  For at this time of year, in the hustle and bustle, it's really easy to want to look at Jesus, to observe him from the outside, to see him as a baby in the manger, and then to take in all sorts of other things. But it's not as easy to do what the voice of God from the cloud counsels all of us to do, in all circumstances and in all seasons - "This is my son, my chosen.  Listen to Him." In the Christian faith, we are people of the word, people who listen.  At this time of year, we are told to listen to John the Baptist, the voice of one crying in the wilderness.  We are told to listen to Mary, who speaks the magnificat, the song of response to Gabriel's annoucement of her own pregnancy.  We are told to listen to the Old Testament prophecies of prediction of Jesus Christ, and what he will do.  

And in all this, the only way we are going to get to do any of this is to follow what happened to Zechariah - spending Advent listening.  

Now it isn't that Zechariah doesn't talk, though.  He sure does.  But when he talks, thanks to the silence, he really only speaks when he has something remarkably important to say.  He only speaks when he has something vital to say, and after he names his own son what Gabriel had told him to, his tongue is loosed, and he exults forth with such a magnificent song of praise that it forms part of Morning Prayer in our Lutheran liturgy even today.  

So it's not about silence for silence's sake, nor is it about noise for noise's sake.  It's about taking the time to listen for what is important, and then responding with words of equal importance.  It's about fulfilling the directives in the book of James, that we should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.  For if we listen to what God's word says at this time of year, if we hear the voice of one crying in the wilderness, we will hear of sin, of pain, and of redemption and sacrifice. We won't hear about the meaning of friends and family, of food. We'll hear about a fallen creation, a wounded world, a world straining against darkness and desperately seeking a light for the nations.  And as Christmas approaches, we will see that light come into the world - Christ the Lord, the propitiation, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  

You'll catch all that.  If you listen. 

The end

This last Sunday, we talked about the end.

Not just the end of the service, which people were sad to see arrive, nor the end of the church year, which happens this weekend, but the end of everything.  Because the end of everything is something that is spoken of many times in the scriptures, something that is discussed quite frequently in the scriptures, we know that the world had a beginning, science and theology will both tell you as much, but another area in which they both agree is that the world is also coming to an end. Slowly, perhaps, not as fast as people have been expecting, but coming to a close nonetheless.
 

But the absolute classic trope that comes up every time that we consider and contemplate the end of everything is that nobody knows when it is going to be.  Now the scriptures are very very clear that nobody gets to know when this is going to be.  Absolutely nobody gets to know when that is going to be, and not only that, but there are no clear clues as to when this will happen.  There are unlcear clues, of course.  Unclear vague clues that will tell you that things are happening, that the world will be concluding, but any of the things that you are told to take to heart are so vague that not only are they happening now, but they've been happening every year since the time of Christ.
 

Jesus talks about the signs of things to come, and in doing so, the signs that he gives are things that happen all the time.  In the reading that we had from Mark 13 for this last weekend, Jesus talks about wars and rumors of wars, with nation rising against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, with earthquakes and famines in various places.  And all these things are happening all the time.  When was the last time that you woke up, consulted the newspaper, and saw that none of those things were happening? When was the last time that there was no war, nor rumor of war,  that there were no earthquakes, nor famines, that everything was fine all the time, has there ever been such a day?  Odds are that if you can think of that day, odds are you weren't paying attention.  That is, there are always going to be wars going on, constantly, and earthquakes and famines to boot.  This is happening all year every year, and if you're looking to these things for a guarantee of a sign of the end of all things, you'll be thinking that we are for sure living in the last days.

And that's the point.

It's the point that you, and I, and all those generations that came before us, ought to be living as though the return of Jesus Christ of Nazareth was absolutely and clearly imminent.  A clear and present danger, if you will.  The proximity of this return should absolutely make you think that you are living on borrowed time, and that the window that we are living in is narrowing day by day.  The concept of this windows of time should be something that we all know about too, you know, perhaps more now than ever.  Think about how you shop, and bear in mind that you're reading this blog online.  Odds are amazing that nobody has printed this off for you and put it in a duo-tang.  If you are reading this online, there's a good chance that you have purchased things online, and if you buy things online, you know that it gets delivered to you.  And when things get delivered to you, the nice people at Amazon or ebay or best buy or zappos, or whatever, they'll all send you your goods that you purchased to your house.  These stores will also tend to tell you the window in which they are going to ship the goods to your house.

Once you get the indication from the company that the package is out for delivery, then you start a very modern dance, and that dance is the dance where you spend your time rushing over to the window every time a car or truck drives by.  You do the thing where you hop over to the window to check out what is happening, and to see if this is your package.  Every vehicle that goes by reminds you that there is a package coming to you, and that this could be the one.  It probably isn't.  It's probably your neighbor's truck backing up into his driveway, and not your goods or services running to you. But as I say, each one that drives by reminds you that there is a package on the way to you.

Understanding this means that you can also understand the possibility of the return of Christ, and the signs that he has submitted to you.  He has given you these signs to look at, and we should hopefully take these signs seriously.  And it's not that these are the end times signs for sure, but rather that you should look at each sign as it arrives, and have it remind you of the fact that this world is drawing to a close. 

The signs are vague not so that you can feel cheated, not so you can know for sure when the end times are coming, but rather that you can see these issues, and understand that the world is going to end, and that you are going to have to meet God, one way or another.  Either you're going to him, or he's coming to you, but one way or another, the world that you're living in is on borrowed time, and is likely running out.  So, to ask this old Lutheran standby, what does this mean? It means that because the return of Christ could come at any moment, you have to live as though it was coming right now.  If you understand that Jesus is coming back, and could be coming back at any time, then you should really, genuinely act as though he is coming back now. 

Because, of course, if you did in fact know that Jesus was coming back tomorrow, what would you change? What would you do differently? And if it is anything, I might ask you when you are planning on getting that going? And it's not about living differently, necessarily, in the style of the Millerites, selling all their goods and waiting for the world to end.  Instead, it's about thinking differently, and believing differently.

For if Christ were to come back tomorrow, would there be enough time to start behaving completely differently? Odds are not, even if you were able to do so, which you are not.  So what to do? If Christ were to return, perhaps you should be believing differently, understanding that you're not as good as you feel other people should be, and that you have to get your head towards repentance, and not towards changing definitions of right and wrong.  Your job is not to think about being perfect, as all that will do is lead you to change what you think of as perfect to include pretty much you.  No, your job is not to think about your perfection, but about Christ's perfection, and how he applies that to you.  You need to be thinking more about the work that Jesus Christ does for you as a sacrifice, a full oblation for your sins, the sins you genuinely have.  For us, as Christians, understanding that you're supposed to be prepared means that you're living in a state of grace. Confession and forgiveness are key, and the more of that you do, the more likely you will be to view the Advent of Christ, whether first or second time around, with joy instead of trepidation, welcoming him as the coming king.

Chains and liberty

In the Gospel reading, Jesus tells the Jews who had believed in him ‘if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples.  And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’  This simple sentence has a lot in it for you to consider, for all of us to consider. We are people who are not always exactly brilliant at continuing in the word of God. Franz Pieper, in his 4 volume work on Christian Dogmatics, frequently quotes this passage, reminding us that we are people who need to continue in the word of God in order to know the truth. We have to live in it, abide in it, if we visit it, it just doesn’t work. You won’t know the truth if you’re just a visitor.

Think of it this way: When you consider possible vacation destinations, you don’t only want to eat at McDonald’s, do you? I know that they have McDonald’s in Paris, in Belgrade, in Tokyo and in New Delhi, but seriously, work on things in this capacity – if you’re going to bother going to all the effort of finding yourself in a new space, with a new culture, you’re going to sort of want to go where the locals go.  You’re going to want to find the quaint little out of the way eateries dotted throughout the city, not where the tourist traps are, not where the fast food joints are, but the places where the people who eat in Paris, or in Rome, or in Moscow actually go themselves.  They live there, they’re not just visiting.  So when they get to know a place, when they get to experience an environment, they truly know what the life in that city is like.  Even if you like Hawaii, even if you visit it every other year, you’re not going to be as well acquainted with it as someone who lives there, dwells in it, and is shaped by it.

Now, when Jesus says to abide in his word, to live in it and to continue in it, he does so for a good reason, that we ought to be living in it, shaped by it, and consulting it daily. God’s word should inform our direction on almost everything that we do, for the intention behind what we do ought to be governed by what God has commanded.  In the decalogue, God told you firmly and neatly what you ought to do and ought not to do, and yet, and yet, we stray far far away from living and dwelling in those simple words.  You ought to know that in daily prayer, as Dr. Martin Luther set it down in the catechism, we ought to go joyfully to your work, singing a hymn, like that of the Ten Commandments, or whatever your devotion may suggest. This is in the office for daily prayer, and it doesn’t deviate based on the season. It does so because we need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed. 

If you depart from God’s word, if it is foreign to you, and you don’t live in it, if you only visit it once or twice, you will come away with a very different idea of what is in it compared with what is actually there.  You will come away with the same idea that the people of Israel did when Jesus told them that they could be set free, when they replied ‘We are children of Abraham, and have never been slaves of anyone.  How can you say that we will be set free?’

The truth of the matter is, and always has been, that we are slaves to our passions.  We are held captive by what we want to do, even when we don’t enjoy it.  Our vices call the shots, and we service them like a debt that we can never pay down, and yes, it is exactly like that, where people would make the minimum payments on owing ten thousand talents – you can make the minimum payments all day, but it’s not going to pay it down by a dime.  When Jesus says that if the son sets you free you will be free indeed, he’s talking about being set free from sin, and being set free from sin is a tricky matter.  It’s a tricky matter because you can’t be free from a captivity that you don’t think exist.  If you don’t think that there is a cage, then you won’t care if someone opens it for you.

So the Jews who had believed in Jesus and we today have the same issue; we are being told that Christ comes to set us free, but we all deny captivity.  We all deny that we are enslaved, that we are captive, and that we are working for something and someone other than ourselves.  And we can do this because we remain ignorant about the word of God, and what it says about who we are and what we do.  We remain ignorant about what God says about what we ought to do, and who we ought to be, and as such, we lose track of the slavery that we are experiencing constantly.  We lose track of the sinfulness that we have, and because of it, we forget, and we believe that we are free.

But we’re not.  Now, the truth of the matter is that it is only Christ who can set you free from this slavery, precisely because he knows that your sinfulness has to be addressed, you have to keep standards, you have to keep belief in truth and honesty, but you have to be honest in that you’re not meeting up with those standards.  And so, you need to be forgiven, to be shriven, to be absolved of your sins which will allow you to be free as well as to acknowledge your sins, and not change the standards that you know to be true.  This is so important that it gets forgotten, and it gets forgotten very quickly.  We forget that this sort of arrangement is possible, that perfection is possible through forgiveness and redemption is possible due to faith in Christ.  And more than anything else, we forget that the Christian faith, that great power that exists in our lives, is something that works forgiveness of the sins we actually commit.  And this is why the news is so good, because there are some real problems that we are carrying around with us, and the way they plague us must be eventually dealt with.

Now we can talk properly about the reformation.  And to do that, let’s talk about some stats.  I know I know, but please bear with me. Women in this great nation were granted the right to vote in elections beginning in 1916. That was just over a hundred years ago, and it was a hard fought right that was difficult to attain from the powers that were there at the time.  You’d think that with a right that important, granted relatively recently in terms of history and all that, that you’d see people cherishing it, and truly exercising their right to vote.  Well, the most recent elections in Winnipeg, Ontario and BC have something to say about that.  We’ve gotten to the point where 57% of eligible voters turning up and casting ballots is seen as a pretty major victory, but it really should be much much higher than that.  You can cast advance ballots, you have to be given time off to vote on election day, you can easily get a ride to and from the polling station, but the one thing that they can’t get through is apathy.  If you don’t care, you’re not going to vote.  And the biggest issue that you’re going to have as a Canadian elector is not guns, bombs, terrorism or aggression towards you as a voter, instead, it will be your complete lack of enthusiasm.  I know we’re not talking a hundred years for this next topic, more like five hundred, but the reformation, the great gift of Dr. Martin Luther to the Christian people, was partially to make the Bible known to them for the first time. They didn’t have to trust someone else to read it for them, they could read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the scriptures for themselves, and they should be on fire for it. They should be doing as Christ recommended, and continuing, living in it.  But they’re not. This is just like the issue with voting, you know, that you have a great gift, and what is stopping you is not the might of the organized church, threat of dungeon fire or sword, not AK 47s, but just your own apathy.

This reformation day, arise, and read the scriptures.  Understand that you are a slave to sin as someone who commits sin, and then learn of the great gift of Christ’s forgiveness and salvation.  This is what he does for you, you understand.  He sets you free from these sins, and when the son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

g their right to vote.  Well, the most recent elections in Winnipeg, Ontario and BC have something to say about that.  We’ve gotten to the point where 57% of eligible voters turning up and casting ballots is seen as a pretty major victory, but it really should be much much higher than that.  You can cast advance ballots, you have to be given time off to vote on election day, you can easily get a ride to and from the polling station, but the one thing that they can’t get through is apathy.  If you don’t care, you’re not going to vote.  And the biggest issue that you’re going to have as a Canadian elector is not guns, bombs, terrorism or aggression towards you as a voter, instead, it will be your complete lack of enthusiasm.  I know we’re not talking a hundred years for this next topic, more like five hundred, but the reformation, the great gift of Dr. Martin Luther to the Christian people, was partially to make the Bible known to them for the first time. They didn’t have to trust someone else to read it for them, they could read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the scriptures for themselves, and they should be on fire for it. They should be doing as Christ recommended, and continuing, living in it.  But they’re not. This is just like the issue with voting, you know, that you have a great gift, and what is stopping you is not the might of the organized church, threat of dungeon fire or sword, not AK 47s, but just your own apathy.

This reformation day, arise, and read the scriptures.  Understand that you are a slave to sin as someone who commits sin, and then learn of the great gift of Christ’s forgiveness and salvation.  This is what he does for you, you understand.  He sets you free from these sins, and when the son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

Brothers

I’m going to ask you to send your minds back in time just a little bit, back to the heady days of 2006, which , my goodness, was more than a decade ago.  Don’t time just fly?  But back in those days, we had a little something called the DaVinci code that came out, that seemed poised to blow the lid off of the entire Christian tradition.  And what was the shocking revelation that the DaVinci code, er, revealed?  Simply that Jesus had married a lovely lady, had fathered children, and that those children continued on to be royalty in France, and are still alive today.  Oh, and mickey mouse watches, those too.

I’m bringing this up because of the bizarre fetishization of the bloodline of Jesus leads people to some strange conclusions.  That is, people would happily look for a surviving member of the bloodline of Christ, of his family in the world today, for….. some reason? I don’t really know.  Even if Jesus, the Christ, were to have reproduced, which he did not, what would that child tell you? What would they reveal to you that you would want to know over and above what Christ has already revealed.  Or, I suppose a better question to ask is if you desperately want to listen to a member of the family of our Lord, would you listen to what they said?

This is a great question because our Lord’s relative has spoken.  And perhaps predictably, you will find that people loathe the message that our Lord’s brother brings forth.  You may think that Jesus is a bit of a cuddly kitten, and you’d be wrong, but you may think it.  But there is no way that you can hold that to James.  James the Just, James, the lion of the early church, the figure who looms so large that even Luther himself struggled with his words.  All sorts of people love the words of Jesus, but few love the words of James, who pushes, who pulls, who desires to see the people of God live lives worthy of the calling, the mantle to which they have been called.  And this is a big job, it’s an enormous job, and it’s a job which weighs heavily on even the most relaxed Christian.  The words of James cause you to tremble.  They do this because they expect a lot of you as an individual Christian, probably more than you’re interested in providing. 

As children we tend to think of ourselves as being relatively easy not even to forgive, but to condone, and those are two different things. That is, if you are looking to your activities to be justified instead of forgiven, well, that’s just the way most of us would want things. Most of us want and crave the Lord our God to condone what we do, and to look kindly upon us with a smile, saying to us ‘you are the chosen people, because you’re you.’  Well, that’s really not how it works. 

When James calls us brothers and sisters, he’s being very serious, and because it’s him saying these words, they mean more than they would coming from any other apostle, any other disciple.  It’s not as though Peter calling you a brother or a sister would mean quite this much, and James means it more than just a term of endearment – rather, James is being literal.  You are literally in the family of Jesus Christ.  You are literally one of his siblings.  You have been adopted into God’s family.  The New Testament is laced through with that kind of conversation, the language of us being in the family of God. We are supposed to call him Father according to Jesus, who refers to him as our father not just in the famous prayer, but also talks about him as our father numerous other times.  And the language of the scriptures becomes a language of family, extended family.  Not just the family that you were born into, but the family that you have been adopted into.  

But there’s a problem with this, and the problem will help you to understand what’s up with the book of James.  Ready?  Have you ever heard this refrain from children: “why can’t you be more like Bobby’s mom? She serves us ice cream for dinner and lets us stay up as late as we want!” Sure, that old chestnut.  And that old chestnut comes to grips with the problem we have with love, especially serious love.  Why was it that your parents didn’t let you do that? Why was it that they served you fish, liver and fish livers all the time instead of kraft dinner and hot dogs? Surely if they loved you, they’d serve you tasty treats all the time.  They don’t though; instead they serve you junk like cauliflower, broccoli, and fish liver.  Now, when you leave the nest, and get out to your own place, you realize that you can’t actually get away with eating nothing but kraft dinner long term.  You can’t genuinely get a hold of those kinds of groceries and keep a go of it.  And so the perception of your parents as people who were just out there to kill you buzz, well, you tend to reassess when you realize that they were doing what they were doing not because they wanted to be mean, but instead because they actually love you . And a parent, a family that love you aren’t just going to give into every single whim that you have.  That’s not what real love looks like.

This gets reinforced not only through the book of James, but numerous other points in the scripture as well.  That is, if you read through the New Testament, Jesus reframes the relationship that we have with God as one in which we’re not talking about Abraham as our father, we’re talking about God as our Father.  Oh, sure, Abraham is the father of the faith, and that’s fine, but God is our literal, adoptive father.  He’s the one that takes us into his family, and adopts us as children, and heirs.  And if we’re going to be in his family, you have to understand that he’s going to care how we turn out.  People have the opposite idea about God and our relationship with him, which is too bad because he frames it distinctly in a parent / child motif.  He tells you straight up that his relationship with you is equivalent in every way to that of a Father to a child.  And the thing about your parents is that the more they love you, the less they’re going to let you get away with

If there are children that aren’t yours, whether they’re well behaved or skunks, it doesn’t really matter that much, mainly because you’re not going to see them again, and they aren’t your responsibility.  It doesn’t really matter too much if other people’s children are bad news, as long as they don’t hurt your kids and essentially stay out of the way, then they’re sort of fine, and you’re not worried too much.   But if it’s your children, all of a sudden you care desperately if they’re doing their math homework or not, if they’re riding a two wheeler, if they can read, who their friends are, and how much newly legalized plant matter they’re consuming.  This is a huge issue, and it makes perfect sense as long as you consider it in exactly this way – that when James calls us brothers, we are literal adopted brothers of Jesus Christ. We share the same father, and he cares a lot.

The story of the entire Bible is a story that tells us that proximity to the divine isn’t an easy thing, to be close to God, close to Jesus, imbued with the Holy Spirit, that’s a daunting issue.  It isn’t a sort of ‘Jesus and I are best buds’ kind of thing, it’s close, intimate contact with the divine, with the whirlwind and thunder and the creative force behind the universe.  It’s close contact with the one who requires perfection just as he is perfect, and that’s a big deal.  This is essentially what makes books like the book of James, the book that the brother of our Lord put together so difficult for us to deal with and read, which is that this book in particular has standards, James tells you a lot of things that you’re supposed to care about.  James will tell you all about how hearing the word and doing what it says are different, sometimes miles apart.  He will tell you all about impartiality, all about how faith without works is dead.  He tells you to tame your tongue, and warns against worldliness, and in all these things and all these issues, the standards are incredibly high, as befits a perfect family. 

And here’s where things get absolutely interesting.  Think about your own family for a moment, and how you joined it.  Did you get to join once you were good enough, once you had earned their trust? Did you get to join your family once you had kept to their standards for long enough, or once you had toed their line often enough? Or, more likely, were you born or adopted into your family, and then the expectations were leveled.  That doesn’t mean that if you do get the family standards wrong that you’ll be kicked out, far from it.  Instead, the story of James doesn’t tell you how you join the family, rather it tells you how you are expected to behave now that you are in the family. The reason the book of James is so taxing is because it talks about the standards that the family of God has, and those standards are desperately, impossibly high. 

And this is where you need to think about your own family again.  The closer you are to your own family, to your own children, the higher your standards are going to be.  You’re going to expect much from them, much more than you’re going to expect from the neighbor kids. But you’ll also forgive more from your children than you would from the neighbor kids too.  If they’re your children, you will put up with a lot, because it’s your family, and you care what happens, even if they’re not keeping up with your standards at the moment. This is super important, given that this unlocks the lock of the book of James.  By the time James is writing, you’re already being addressed as brothers, you’re already in the family. There is much that is expected of you, but as members of the family, there is much that will be forgiven, too.  And this letter doesn’t tell you how you get into the family, but it does let you know how you stay.  You are able to stay because someone fulfilled all these incredibly high standards for you.

Rich and Young

And who wouldn't want to be rich and young? Sure, we all would, what a wonderful confluence of, well, the top two things people would like to be. Works out pretty well for the rich young man who approaches Christ and asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. And this seems like a great setup – rich young man goes up to Jesus, asks him what he has to do to inherit eternal life, rich young man does it, and then everyone's happy. But unbelievably enough, that's not how this story ends, as though you didn't know. The fact that this story didn't end in the predictable way shouldn't surprise us, after all, when the rich young man approaches Christ, he was likely doing that same trick from the Gospel according to Luke that brought about the parable of the Good Samaritan: when the man is asking about who he should love, the answer was that he should love his neighbor, and he, seeking to justify himself, asked "Who is my neighbor?"

The problem, if you'll bear with me, starts from the first word, the very first word that the rich young man says: "Good." Jesus pegs on this as a problem right away, and in fact, is gently setting the rich young man up for the inevitable fall. The framing of the question starts with the idea that Jesus is good (good start so far), but then collapses when the ruler fingers Jesus as a good teacher. A good Rabbi, but just a man nonetheless. The rich young man doesn't start with the idea that this is God himself that he is talking to, he figures that Jesus is a good, ethical teacher. And so the rich young man approaches him with that perspective, and the perspective that if Jesus is a good teacher, then he can teach the young ruler to be good too.

And that's where it gets dangerous. Hopefully, you can see the cracks forming already. If not, then I invite your attention to the Old Testament reading we had for Sunday from the prophet Amos, in which we are enjoined to: "seek good, and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, as you have said. Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gates." And here's where the problem starts. I want you to have a look at these two people here, nice and closely, and then I'm going to tell you something absolutely unbelievable about both of them. Ready?

Here's the funny thing about both of these individuals: They represent different political positions, they represent different worldviews, they stand for completely opposite things, and both of them believe absolutely sincerely that they're the good guys. This isn't a grade school pantomime play, in which the villain is some moustache twirling stereotype of a bad guy, this is real life, and in real life, the motivations that people have are a bit more complicated than that. This is why readings like the one from Amos that enjoin you to hate evil and love good aren't really useful if you just leave them there, without the singularly vital additional piece of info that Jesus gives in addition to that – "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone." That bit of information is vital to getting through the dichotomy between not just these two groups, but any oppositional groups of your choosing. You can't just tell everyone to be nice already, without understanding that to the vast vast vast majority of individuals, they're already being as nice as they can be. They're the brave freedom fighters, bravely standing up to opposition, bravely engaging in street warfare against the forces of darkness. And this works whether they're tankies or nazis.

We do this because we lack perspective. The way I discussed it on Sunday was to essentially steal a joke. When you're driving along, you tend to feel like your speed is the right speed. People who drive slower than you are too slow, people who drive faster than you are too fast. It's all a matter of perspective. And this is true with morality as well. Because we lack perspective, we tend to think that what we are doing is the right thing to do, because we are the moral centre of our own universe. We are the centre, everything else tends to get judged by whether we agree with it or not, or whether we profit from it or not. In other words, things are good or bad only in relation to us – they aren't good and bad on their own, or able to be measured against an external yardstick. But wait. Wait wait wait. They actually are.

As Christians, we believe in an external standard for holiness, for righteousness, that doesn't depend on us and our activity. The basis for it can be found in Exodus chapter 20, in a list of commandments that are so simple that we teach them to children. The ten commandments that are outside of our input, and more importantly, outside of our control. The immediate space around the Ten Commandments in the scriptures should really make you think a bit more about how this works. Consider the case of the Israelites who bowed down around a golden calf while Moses was up on Mount Sinai. When he returned, a subjective morality would have just told them that this was their new god now, and it was right to worship him because he was the object of their worship now. But what actually happened was a bit more extreme, and they were pulled back into the fold, perhaps even violently. In other words, the commandment to worship one god was tied to the worship of the One True God, and didn't change based on who they happened to be worshiping at the time.

Once you get this, then you will understand why both of those people pictured above are able to think of themselves as the good guys, even while they're beating each other up. They can't both be good guys ,can they? Of course not, which is why the truth is that neither of them are. They're both the bad guys, given that they're both falling short of the glory of God due to their sins. Neither one of them keep up with the law that has been handed to them by God, but as long as they both frame themselves as good guys, and adjust their morality accordingly, then neither of them will really change. So when Jesus discusses morality and eternity with the rich young man, he does so by reminding him that no one is good but God alone. When the rich young man insists that he has kept all the commandments from the time of his youth, Jesus look at him, and loves him, and tells him that he only has one thing left, which is to be perfected. And as a sinful human, that's the one thing he can't do. He can be a nice guy, he can think of himself as being a nice guy, but he can't be God, even though admission to eternity depends on him being perfect ,as his heavenly father is perfect. So what to do? Leave sad because you have many possessions, or confess and be forgiven? That's the ultimate problem that we are dealing with in this issue, which is where does your perfection come from? If you're the standard person who adjusts their morality to fit their behavior, then your perfection is already there, according to you. But if you're realistic, if you can see where you sit next to the objective morality that exists outside you, well then, you will understand that your perfection, your salvation, your mercy, your forgiveness comes from outside you as well. Alien righteousness, and it's given to you by Christ, because he chose to.

Grrrrr-atitude

For those of you to the south, it was Thanksgiving this weekend. I know, you think Thanksgiving is in November, but in order for these holidays to mean something, they have to be attached to something real, you know. The celebration of Thanksgiving is a celebration of the harvest, of the riches of the earth being brought in, and in Canada, you can't celebrate the harvest in November. There'll be nothing left to harvest by then, unless you're planning on harvesting snow from your driveway.

The idea of celebrating Thanksgiving in November in Canada is silly for that reason, that you would get together, eat turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce, in order that you may let the tryptophan hit you nice and solid and make you sleepy. But if this is the case, if that is all that the day is about, about family and friends and togetherness, then consider this – to quote our Hebrew friends, 'what makes this night different than any other?' If the true meaning of Thanksgiving is getting together with friends and family, and celebrating the season, then how is that different from secular Christmas, secular Easter, or any other of these celebrations? In fact, the only two celebrations that we have are 'eat a big meal' or 'have a day off.' In order for these days to mean anything, they really need to be attached to real things, a celebration of something, you know?

Thanks isn't a concept that exists in a vacuum. Just like love, it needs to be attached to something. It reminds me of the riddle from the book 'Professor Egghead's book of riddles:'

How is a reptile like a number?

Neither one is real.

That riddle seems silly on its surface, but it makes sense. The way Professor Egghead explains it, is that a garter snake is real, and so is a box turtle, and you can bring either of them home and make pets of them. But you can't bring home and make a pet of the class 'reptile.' Aside from actual reptiles, the class just doesn't exist. Now, having said that, a number isn't real. 6 as a concept isn't anything, unless it is attached to 6 cakes or 6 hats. The Number on its own isn't a real thing. It's the same with love, and with thanks. The concept of love isn't a real thing, you know. It's an abstract concept – it can't knock down stuff. Thanks is the same thing. You can't just be grateful in general. You have to be thankful in specific. You can't be thankful for family and friends in theory. You have to be thankful for the family and friends you have. And this is where the problems start.

There's a tired old meme out there right now, the meme that says that Thanksgiving dinner is something that you have to suffer through. You'll get questions from your family all about how you aren't married yet, when are you going to have kids, when are you going to get a real job, blah blah blah blah. All that is going to happen, and as you live and suffer through the Thanksgiving season, you will really begin to question the truth that is on essentially page one of the Bible, that "It is not good for man to be alone." This statement shows up right at the beginning of the scriptures, it is the first thing that God acknowledges as less than good, and we all know that it is true, we really do.  And this is how you know it is true: One of the few ways you can still punish someone is to place them into solitary confinement.  You can't use the rack, or the thumbscrews, but you can still place someone into solitary, and that immediate reaction is to understand that it really is desperately not good to be alone.  But that brings us right up against the truth that even though we don't want to be alone, and it isn't good to be alone, but in order not to be alone, you have to be around other people.  And that's hard.  To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the only thing worse than being alone is being with other people.  Other people don't do what you want them to do, they will be difficult, they will be burdensome, they will have other opinions, political or otherwise, and they will have their own motivations.  And if all you're looking for is a group of people who will agree with you, then you're going to rush towards being alone as rapidly as possible.  

It makes sense, of course, that this would be the case, that we would be in tension between wanting to be alone and wanting to be together, but this is more important the more you think about it. I'll explain what I mean.  People don't want to be alone, but they also don't want real people around them.  That's why there is a constant retreat to the online world, to the world that you have curated for yourself, the world that you have constructed carefully, the world that you have made and formed, the world in which your newsfeed shows you the things you're interested in, in which you have curated your friend feed to only people whom you want to hear from, who agree with you, and who like what you say.  In other words, there's a massive tension between the real flesh and blood people you have to have dinner with on Thanksgiving, and the online world in which everyone agrees with you, shares your politics, and shares your views about when to have kids, what jobs to have, all that sort of stuff.  If you can curate that space to only say what you want it to say, why wouldn't you do that instead of talking to real people.  Heck, if you could craft a god who only agreed with you all the time, why wouldn't you just take that over the God who inconveniently tells you to smarten up semi-frequently?  Why wouldn't you just carve an idol for yourself as a god, in the same way as your online presence is largely an idol of a family, of a community, a group who agrees with you, carved out of 1 and 0 instead of out of wood or metal.  Once you realize that, then you start to figure out a little better the heaven / hell dichotomy. 

Think of the way that heaven is described in the scriptures, as a feast, as a banquet, as a thanksgiving celebration that lasts for eternity.  It's not just with food and wine though, although that is involved, but it also implies togetherness.  Hell is frightening because you get to surround yourself with the fake god you constructed for yourself, and the fake family that you did likewise with.  Hell is terrifying because you are on your own, cut off from God, cut off from the family of faith, finally getting your wish of being surrounded by people who agree with you and finding out that it leads to you only being by yourself.  And it is truly not good for man to be alone.

So in this Thanksgiving season, it's important to understand, to realize that if you're going to be thankful for things, they have to be real things.  You can't be thankful for the concept of god, you have to be thankful for the God of the Bible, what he has done and how he works. You can't be thankful for the idea of family, you have to be thankful for your family, warts and blowhards and disagreeable folks and all.  Be thankful that they put up with you, that they love you in spite of your failings, and want to be with you for eternity as well.  Be thankful for the gift of friends, not of people online who will only ever agree with you, but with people who want to sharpen you, who want you to be your absolute best.  And be thankful for Christ, the lamb of God, who takes away not the concept of sins, but your actual sins.  It's real, and it applies directly to you.  The more you understand that, the more thankful you will be.

Happy thanksgiving, everyone.

hit the bricks.

Here comes a fun question: If you resist the devil and he flees from you, then why is he still around?  If it was as simple as the book of James says it is, then why do you still have problems with temptation as the rest of us do as well?  These are solid questions, clearly, and people have good reasons for asking them, especially in times of temptation and grief.  That is, people do want to know, and fairly seriously too, what they should do in times of sin and temptation.  James seems to make it too easy, doesn't he? Resist the devil and he will flee from you? Seems too simple, as though you could just tell the devil to hit the bricks, and he'd be gone.  It seems almost facetious, and it would be a lot more useful if we could see an example of this being carried out.  What does it look like to tell the devil to hit the bricks?  Well, if you want to know about that, go and look up the interaction between Jesus and the devil from the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew.

In the Gospels, Jesus is driven by the spirit into the wilderness following his baptism, and he fasts and prays, and is tempted by the devil while he is out there.  And in doing so, the devil assails Jesus where he is weak according to his state of humiliation.  That is, the devil tempts Jesus according to his hunger, according to his human desire to live, and his leadership and ownership of the world.  And here are the words that make up the final rebuffing of the devil.

"Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.  And he said to him, 'all these I will give you if you will fall down and worship me.'  Then Jesus said to him 'Be gone, Satan! For it is written ,you shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.'  Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and were ministering to him."

 Matthew 4:8-11

Now, I'm going to do this nice and slow, so you can all gather it quite nicely, and so I'm not leaving anyone behind.  Jesus said to him "Be Gone, Satan!" … Then the devil left him.  Emphasis mine.  But you see here that Jesus puts what James was talking about earlier into practice - "resist the devil and he will flee from you."  Jesus resisted the devil, and he fled!  Easy enough, right? So here's the question that you will likely have at this point, which is that if it was that easy to do (which the Bible says it is), then how is it possible for all of us to be tempted so much so frequently? Well, let's keep it basic, shall we? If the Bible says that if you resisted the devil and he would flee from you, and the devil is still around, then it must mean that you're not resisting him.

Don't get shocked, because you should all know that this is true by now.  You should be well aware of the veracity of this statement, because the devil, like absolutely all of your most insidious friends, is the sort of guy who you want to keep around, mainly because of how much fun he is.  The classic, well known, and wonderful enabling friend.   The one who will say 'do you want another drink?' The one who will hand you a cheesecake slice and a fork after you have specifically turned one down.  The friend who will encourage you to enter into a new, illicit relationship, or to seek a divorce, to watch you go down dark paths and who will encourage you to do so.  You should know that this is true, and part of the way you can tell is by the preponderance of likes you get on facebook or twitter or whatever for the various decisions that you make, your status updates that you post, that kind of thing.  People don't tend to disagree with you even if the decisions you're making are bad ones. Your friends want to enable you constantly to make these sorts of poor decisions, and you tend to be more than happy to comply. 

Fast forward to now, of course, and we're in the midst of some trickery.  It's some next level trickery, of course, because the devil is happy to convince you that your sins are entirely in your own best interest.  That is, you should commit these sins because they're a good idea, and you're happy to believe him.  He wants you to listen only for confirming voices, and to judge them by that nature.  Ultimately, what the devil is looking for you to do is to hear only the voices that tell you to do what you want to do already.  He's looking for you to make decision based on where you already want to be, and to curate your news feed, your friend list, your passages of scripture entirely around that.  He wants you to be fat and happy, and doing what seems best to you.  Because what you want the most is what you need the least.  

So, let's think about resisting the devil, and having him flee from you.  Go ahead.  Now, this is where you fight me on the issue, and tell me that you're not really up to it for a large number of reasons.  The temptations are too good, they're too on point, the devil knows what you want too well, and his voice is too beguiling.  I get that.  I fully understand that.  And I know that if you're exposed to non-stop messaging from any source, it will begin to wear on you, and to change your thinking.  So if that's the truth, then perhaps it's time to diversify who you're listening to.  Maybe it's time to listen to more than just sources that confirm what you were thinking in the first place. Maybe it's time to listen to God on this one. Remember how Jesus rebuffed the devil, by putting him in his place with scripture.  When he does that, the devil's taunts, his temptations cease, because there isn't an opening to exploit.  The devil can't get an opening in because there isn't one there, and it can't be abused.  Jesus calmly, yet firmly responds to the temptations by rebuffing them with the word of God.  He can do that because he knows the word of God, because he's been listening to those words, and handling them for a long time.  He's immersed in God's word and knows what to say to temptation.  Can you say the same? Can you say that you know enough about God's word to know what he would say in the face of temptation from the evil one? Or, more likely, are you probably going to come back with platitudes and opinions.  Because that's usually what happens.  Believe it or not, the Bible knows what you're going to encounter, given that there's nothing new under the sun, but if you don't know what the Bible says on the subject, it's like having a gun for self defense in your purse, which is in your house, in another continent because you're on vacation in Brazil.  Jesus wants you to be immersed in his word, to abide in it, so you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.  The truth is your weapon against the devil, it's what you use to counter him, and it's what you put his temptations through, the colander, to see what is a lie, and what is the truth.  He may use scripture himself, he may just make you think things are a good idea, he give you a notion, and may whisper in your ears what seem like good ideas, it's all in there.  The only way to sift out the truth, is to use Gods word to do so. 

So live in God's word, abide in it. That's the only equipment that you have, and you need to have access to it, to own it, to know it inside and out, so that when the storms come, when the days are short and the chips are down,  you'll be ready to fight.  And if reading God's word is daunting, if it's a lot to do, then start with worship in God's house.  Start with worship, with hearing God's word read, hearing the preaching, and taking part in the sacraments, where the word of God comes directly to you.  You're not going to hear what you want most of the time, but that's the point.  You'll hear mollycoddling voices everywhere else, but you're only going to hear the absolute truth from God.