It Was a Holy Night

It was not a silent night.

It was a holy night.

All was not calm 

In labor far from home 

With not so much as a bed to call her own.

Have you been at a birth? 

They are not calm.

All was not bright. 

He was born in the night, 

Surrounded by animals was Mary’s cursed plight. 

“In pain,” Eve was told,

That’s the point.

She was a virgin, he was a child. 

He was an infant. Was he tender and mild? 

Is it a sin for a baby to cry and wail? 

Thrust into a world of darkness does he not flail? 

He knew utter peace and light for all eternity

Should “mild” be the word 

To describe the way he arrived?

Did he sleep that night in heavenly peace? 

Isn’t that what he left behind to bear our griefs? 

He slept in the sorrow of the world, 

It was cold and dark in the trough where he was curled. 

Herod sent his soldiers out to drench their robes in the blood of babies, 

Joseph ran and snatched his newborn babe 

From dripping teeth of Hades.

Yes, heaven’s glories streamed, 

But because they flowed towards the cross. 

This was why he came: to make our gain his loss. 

But the heavenly hosts did come to sing, 

Halleluiah to the death-bound King! 

The Anointed One, the Savior of the world has indeed been born, 

And praise is all that’s fitting 

To the one who bears our scorn.

Love’s pure light? 

Never brighter shone. 

But not because of silence, far from his heavenly home. 

This was the dawn of redeeming grace, the sun was finally rising. 

But there was nothing that made us look on him, 

No radiant beams surprising. 

Jesus, Lord at thy birth, 

Lord of love and infinite worth, 

Because you left the calm of joy and glory, 

To enter darkness, to redeem our story, 

Because you left the radiant beams behind, 

To come and make your blood our wine,

Oh Lord, because you bore our sorrow, 

We will bask with you in glorious beams 

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. 

It was not a silent night.

It was a holy night.

Following Jesus Involves Committing to a Local Church

I meet lots of people who tell me they are Christians but are not interested in the church.  I want to make the point that following Jesus involves committing to a local church.  There are lots of ways this point could be made, but I will focus on just one simple flow of thought here.

First, Jesus once asked a helpful question, "Why do you call me 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I tell you?"*  This is a good question.  If Jesus is lord (a fundamental confession for the Christian) then we are his subjects, we are to worship him and do what he says.  This is not a burden, it is our joy.

By his Spirit, Jesus tells us "to consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near."**  Jesus is lord, and he tells us not to neglect meeting together with God's people.  How can we say we are following him if we unrepentantly ignore this command?

Some consider themselves to have done this because they have believing family members or friends that they spend time with.  But by his Spirit, Jesus also tells us, "Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls as those who will have to give an account.  Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you."*** 

If we are Christians, then we confess Jesus as lord.  If we confess him as lord, we are to do the things he says.  He says not to neglect meeting together with God's people, to stir each other up to love and to encourage each other.  He also says to submit to and obey leaders who watch over your soul.  These leaders are pastors of churches.  Which ones are you submitting to?  Is it clear to them?






*Luke 6:46 
**Hebrews 10:24-25
***Hebrews 13:17

Getting Specific about Community

In my last post called Clique or Community I talked about embracing the beauty of the other.  I made some general applications to marriage and the local church, and wanted to chase those applications a little further this week.  Before getting to that, I want to first take a minute to show that this kind of approach to others comes from the nature of God himself.  So first a theological foundation, and then some pretty specific applications.

The idea of being united with people who are different from you is beautiful because it is an expression of the nature and character of God.  God himself is perfect and cannot be improved upon.  You could say that the nature and character of God embody the best of all possible situations.  God is good and he is the standard of goodness.  There is no other standard to compare him or anything else to.  In other words, it is not possible for things to be better than they are with God.  But why do I say that being united with diverse people is an expression of God's nature? Well, God is one.  And that one God eternally exists as three distinct persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  The Father is fully God.  The Son is fully God.  The Holy Spirit is fully God.  And, the Father is not the Son.  The Son is not the Spirit.  The Spirit is not the Father.  Here you have something of a mystery, but what we can see clearly is unity and diversity held together in perfect harmony.  God is not more one than three.  And he is not more three than one.  He is one God.  He is three persons.  Neither side of this equation diminishes the other.  So what all this means for the topic at hand is that in the most perfect situation possible (the nature of God) you have perfect unity existing alongside perfect difference.  You don't have uniformity, you have unity.  This being the case, God sets up community life down here in a way that we are shaped by unity with the other.  Thus, the examples last week from marriage and the church.  So let me chase those applications down the trail a bit further.

1.  We should be laboring and praying for unity among different denominations within the Christian church.  This unity should be sought along the lines of the truth.  I am not advocating a kind of lame group hug where we pretend we don't disagree on important issues.  The church in our day needs more truth and more conviction about the truth than most of us have ever even smelled in a church.  However, we also need incredible humility to see the strengths of our brothers and sisters who are different from us.  Imagine a single church with the intellectual rigor of the presbyterians, the zealous affections of the charismatics, and the fervent mission practice of the baptists.  We miss the beauty of the diversity when we act like the strengths of our own denomination are truly the best and the others just don't get it.  We miss the beauty of the unity when we divide up into our separate camps with suspicion of one another.  Pride will keep us apart as we focus on our own strengths and everyone else's weaknesses.  Love would bind us together in humility, as we consider the strengths of others and the weaknesses of ourselves.

2. We miss these things when we form culture based ministries and churches.  Baptists are surprisingly adept at this.  We have skateboarder churches, artist churches, cowboy churches, and even country churches for those who are country but not cowboy.  We have been doing it within our churches, and we are now gunning it into the fractured future of the church.  We have divided up internally for years along lines of age in our "traditional" and "contemporary" services.  We are now starting whole different churches for everyone under the sun.  Next is the church for rodeo clowns who prefer pop country music to bluegrass or more classic country and who jump over the fence with their left leg first instead of their right.  "None of those nasty right leggers in this fellowship!"  We should grieve over the disunity we are sowing into the church, which is supposed to be made up of different people united in Christ alone.  "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body--Jews or Greeks, slaves or free--and all were made to drink of one Spirit."

3. We do it in marriage as well.  She is upset that he isn't more sensitive.  He is upset that she isn't stronger.  We forget that she is his glory and he is her strength.  She wishes that he payed more attention to details of their life.  He wishes she payed more attention to the big picture.  And so resentment grows.  Again, this happens because we think it is better if others are just like us.  Why?  Because we are proud and we think our gifts and our strengths are the best ones.  But love would have us consider others as more significant than ourselves, and learn from them in the perfect unity of love.  

4. Homosexual "marriage" is the institutionalization of this.  It is a turning away from the other to someone just like you.  It is uniformity rather than unity in diversity.  It may seem new and thrilling and different, but at the end of the day when the buzz fades it is a clique instead of a community.  It is peanut butter and peanut butter instead of peanut butter and chocolate. 

5. Racism is a classic example of missing this.  We see people who are different from us and either from fear, hatred, greed, or whatever else, we resist them.  We marginalize, oppress, abuse, exclude, and separate.  The lines of separation grow deeper and we all lose out on the cultural richness of the other as we shrivel in our fearful pride.  Love would compel us out towards the other to labor through the misconceptions and cultural barriers to increasing laughter, understanding, and riches.

Let me conclude by clarifying a few things I am not saying.  

1. I am not saying that all religions are true.  It is love that will bind us together in our differences and love rejoices in the truth.  If it doesn't rejoice in the truth, it is not love.  All religions and views of where we came from, what went wrong, and how it is going to be fixed are different.  The different religions are contradictory and cannot all be true.  This is evident to anyone who looks deeply into them.  

2. I am not saying that all interpretations of the truth are accurate.  When someone says something, they mean some specific thing, and not anything that their words can be twisted to communicate.  Anyone who has sought to understand another human being truly understands this.  The Scriptures are no different.  They mean something, and language is functional enough that we can come to discover what that meaning is.  There are disagreements because of our biases and confusion.  The more we listen to each other and talk through different biases, the closer we will get to the truth, provided that we love and therefore actually rejoice in the truth.  If not, we will remain awash in what we wish it to say in order to justify some other end we truly have.

3. I am not saying that every opinion is equally valid.  Many opinions are wrong and should be humbly submitted to correction.  If you disagree with me on this, then you actually agree with me.  Think about it.  The problem most of us have here is that we nod our head, and go on our way assuming that it is other people's opinions that are wrong and should be submitted to correction to mine.  This is where humbly living in community with people that are not like us bears so much fruit.   We commit to love people who see differently than we do, and over time we come to realize that they may be on to something.  This corrects our faulty opinions, humbles us, and grows us to see more of the beauty of truth and goodness.  

4. There is a dividing line.  That dividing line is truth and lies; goodness and evil.  Lies and evil do not represent diversity to be learned from and embraced, but rather enemies to be resisted.  Understanding where to draw the lines is crucial, drawing them is even more crucial.  People unlike me help me to do this better.

Clique or Community

People that are like me are the easiest to be around.  They tend to reinforce my biases and assumptions because they share most of them.  People that are different than me are harder to be around because they challenge my assumptions.  They have a different angle on life.  My view broadens when I am around people that don't think like me, that look at things from a different angle, that have different strengths than I do.   I am not talking about issues of truth, those are fixed and provide the necessary bond of unity.  But I am talking about cultural preferences, strengths, gifts, etc.

Phillip Yancey sees these two paths as the difference between a club and community.  He says, "we often surround ourselves with the people we most want to live with, thus forming a club or clique, not a community.  Anyone can form a club; it takes grace, shared vision, and hard work to form a community."*  While genuine community does take much more grace and effort, it brings with it so much more benefit.  Cliquishness shrivels the soul and promotes self-righteousness in the boundary markers of the clique.  Community stretches the soul and challenges our assumptions about how right we are in so many of our preferences and judgments.  

You see this play out in marriage.  Two people come together who are different from each other.  They are a man and a woman, and so they deal with things and think about things differently.  They also come from different families and so they bring certain biases and assumptions about what is normal to the relationship.  These are good things.  As the years increase, and the couple faces different issues together, they learn that the other does not always share their deeply help ideas and preferences.  They can either come to despise those differences, and slowly drift apart; or they can come to delight in them and slowly stretch each other to a higher vista.  This new and higher vista is then passed on to the children who will likely one day take it into their own marriages and go through the same process.  Where it is delighted in and embraced, this results in a process of generational maturity.

You also see it play out in the church.  There is a trend to build clique churches around certain shared cultural assumptions.  This is easier up front, but it will result in a narrow church over time.  As people reinforce one anothers' shared assumptions, those will grow deeper into the life of the community.  The way the "inside" of the community will increasingly be defined by default will include the shared cultural assumptions of the culture the group is built around.  Those who don't hold those cultural assumptions will increasingly be seen as "outsiders."  The more this happens, the more the group becomes rooted in the kind of legalism that led Peter to withdraw from the Gentiles during lunch.  Paul didn't think this was a small issue, but got in his face to show him that his conduct was out of step with the gospel.  Why?  Because part of the good news of the gospel is that the boundary of the community is Christ alone.  That is it.  If you are in Christ by faith you are a full member of his body, cultural differences and all.  And the Bible tells us that God purposely builds this community from different types of members, all united by one Spirit.  If everyone were an eye, how would the body hear?  If everyone were a foot, how would the body think? 

So this is a challenge to value the beauty of the other.  This takes humility and grace.  It takes time for understanding.  It takes commitment to be together.  And it has glorious results. 

*Quoted in Total Truth by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, 111

Shame Off You

There is an enemy who wants you to live in shame.  There is an enemy who delights in your shame.  His goal is to keep you chained up with it.

And he is clever.  So he doesn't tell you plainly this is what he is doing.  He just offers you ways of escape that he knows will keep you chained to it.

Shame comes from your conscience.  You know what is right and wrong.  When you do wrong, you feel it.  Sometimes you can't sleep because of it.  Sometimes old wrongs come back up into your mind to plague you.  You feel like you can't be totally honest with anyone about who you are and what you have done.  You worry that someone will find out.

Your enemy offers ways out: 

1. Justify your wrongs.  Adopt arguments that what you know is wrong really isn't.  Then feel enlightened that you have silenced that silly conscience with the shining light of reason.  Just don't examine those reasons too closely, and keep doing those things if you can.  You are truly a champion, you don't really do bad things, you are a defender of rights.  When that conscience speaks up in a quiet moment,  just stuff it back down, surely it is wrong. 

2. Glory in your shame.  Shout it from the rooftops and from hashtags.  Announce to yourself and the world that you are proud of what your conscience smites you for.  That will silence that silly conscience.  That will stuff that bothersome shame.  Surely feelings of shame are part of some warped collective consciousness, or some antiquated thing you were taught.  Just don't think about that too long.  Don't entertain other possibilities.  Don't imagine your conscience is a divine guide to goodness.  Why would a divine guide to goodness ever want you to feel bad about yourself.  Only people who do bad things should feel bad about it.  Surely I don't do bad things.

These are dead ends.  They will not silence your conscience.  They will not cover your shame.  They will keep you locked down in it until the day you die and go to answer to the one who gave you your conscience.  At best they will blunt the voice of your conscience so that it becomes merely a faint nagging feeling in the back of your heart.  But there is a Friend who wants you to be free from shame.  There is a Friend who delights in removing your shame forever and giving you the glorious gift of a truly clean conscience.  

He offers a way out.

1. An atoning sacrifice.  A true Friend came and acknowledged the depth of your wrongdoing and shame.  He looked into the darkest corners of your heart, knew what you have done and desired, and then he looked you in the face and told you he loves you.  And then he asked you to see how much he loves you, and he took the blame for all your wrongdoing on himself.  He took all your shame like a coat and put it on and went out into public with it where he was mocked, spit on, and killed for what you had done.  He took it all into the grave, left it there, and rose to new life.

2. Faith and repentance.  He says this is yours if you believe him.  Your shame and guilt can be gone, and your conscience can be delightfully clean, as clean as if you had never done a thing wrong.  You don't have to slay your conscience in order to silence the shame.  The shame has been owned and worn, punished, and is dead.  We come to experience this through repentance from our wrongdoing.  This means admitting it, all the way down to the bottom, throwing away all the excuses and self-justifications for why it really wasn't that bad in your circumstances, and calling evil what it is, even when you find it in yourself.  And then you turn away from it, telling God you hate it and don't want it anymore, and asking for his help to be free from it.  Faith and repentance:  Admit your wrongs, tell God sorry, believe that he loves you still, and that Jesus wore all your shame and there is none left for you, and then walk in freedom and gladness.

This is not a dead end.  This is the path to eternal life and joy.  Jesus will cover your shame and give you a clean conscience.  Repent and believe, and be saved.

Panegyris

Last weekend we went to a folk music festival in the forest.
As we walked up a dirt trail through the trees outside of Pagosa Springs we were greeted by a lively doe and her spotted fawn.  They saw us from a distance and ran over to the hill beside us to watch us climb the trail.  It was a good welcome.  

We knew we were getting close when we could hear the picking of stringed instruments and singing.  The trail ended in a large camp full of smiling people sitting around campfires playing music together.  We made our way to the entrance tent.  The lists were checked and the bracelets put on our right arms by a smiling helper in an almost formal welcome ceremony.

We wandered through the open glade towards the sound of the main music stage, moving through another narrow passage where we were asked to leave behind any drinks from the outside, only to be presented freely with clean water on the inside.  Once inside we saw a smiling friend, his eyes wide with excitement as he showed us around.  Dancing over here, shelter over there, kids playing freely down here, good beer under that tent, food up there.

The music was amazing, fun, and full of energy.  The highlight was the Oh Hellos, who had nine people on stage with band members running and jumping around throughout their long set.  Music from a fiddle complemented an accordion, a banjo mixed with two drum kits, and all the varied instruments blended together to lift us all out of our chairs dancing.  The raucous set ended with the whole band lined up humming the tune of Come Thou Fount in beautiful, haunting harmony.  The whole experience echoed for me the climax of the Silver Chair when Jill finally came out of the underworld right into the middle of an all-night Narnian forest festival under the moon, during the first snow, with music and dancing and a complex game of throwing perfectly timed snowballs between dancers.

Being part of this festival reminded me of the unique beauty of festal joy.  It is what we Christians aim for Sunday after Sunday in what could be called Resurrection-Fest; where we gather to sing, worship, hear about, and eat and drink in celebration of the death of death in the death of Christ, and life into the ages through his resurrection.  And then with all of this still ringing in my heart, I happened to read that we "have come to mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel."  Mysteriously, in Christ, we are already there with the angels in panegyris, in "festal gathering."  Soon all this darkness will be shaken loose and we will open our eyes and find ourselves, like Jill, in the middle of the greatest festival the world has ever known.  We will have dumped out our tepid water, and will be welcomed to drink deeply from the river of life forever.  There everlasting joy will crown our heads in the presence of the Chief Musician.

*Image credit: Folk West, http://www.folkwest.com/#!home/zoom/mainPage/i01mcc

Excitement, Butterflies, and Church Membership

I get excited about stuff.  The world is full of things to be interested in and excited about.  This summer I got excited about teaching one of my sons to play the guitar, and that excitement carried us through several weeks of spontaneous lessons.  Maybe you are like me in that getting excited about things is great for awhile, but it doesn't seem to have sustaining power.  Now I am trying to figure out how to schedule time to do lessons regularly, to commit to it, so that even on weeks when neither of us are excited about it, we do it anyway.  I know that in the long run, this will lead to the most reward for him in playing the guitar.  I have years and years of deep enjoyment from the guitar that came from excitement turning into commitment, leading to enjoyment and more excitement.

Marriage is this way too.  Romantic love is one of the most exciting things in the world, and it can sustain lots of activity, time, and devotion for a long time.  But even the butterflies of romantic love fly away some mornings, some winters.  Marriage is a way for the excitement to lead to commitment that lays the groundwork for years of deep enjoyment and more excitement.

A Christian's relationship with a church is this way too.  It is fun to get excited about a certain ministry, a certain type of preaching or mission, a certain group of people, or whatever.  And that excitement is good.  And that excitement is meant to lead to commitment to that local church, even when it doesn't feel exciting, even when it gets costly at times.  This is why we practice what we call church membership at Gospel Church.  To our culture it can feel overly formal and strange.  It can feel like an inauthentic element of true community.  But we believe that a solid, formal commitment to a specific community of people will in the long run lead to a deeper level of true community and enjoyment in that community.  Membership is an act of giving yourself to a community of Christians.  It is an act of committing to stay through seasons when the excitement wanes, to push through difficulties with people so that in the long run true community, deep connection, and seasons of great excitment sprout up.  If excitement is a butterfly, commitment is building the butterfly a home to return to year after year.