Jason Micheli's Blog, page 56
December 24, 2023
Saint Jesus
Titus 2.11-14, 3.4-7
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Merry Christmas, friends!
I’m not preaching Advent IV so, instead, here is the virtual sermon I preached for the pandemic.
Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the appWhen it comes to human nature, I’ve got what’s called a low anthropology.
So I’ve got my suspicions about how this whole online worship gig goes.
Am I supposed to believe you don’t scroll through the sermon?
Really?
My mom even admitted she does “sometimes.”
I mean—
I remember what it was like on Christmas Eve.
I remember you stirring restlessly in the pews while you shushed your kids, who were miserable in their holiday outfits. I remember you shushing your husband, who was there against his will and also miserable in his holiday outfit. I remember you stealing glances at your Apple Watch (an early Christmas gift) and stifling yawns until the time came to pass the light of Christ.
Am I now supposed to buy the notion that you’re going to track along with a sermon under these conditions, with your teenager downstairs on the PlayStation and the dog barking at the UPS deliveryman, and your spouse huffing and puffing on the Peloton? By the time you view this worship service on Christmas Eve, those will almost certainly be the circumstances in my house.
Look— the Razorcrest might’ve been destroyed, but Disney+ not only still has Grogu (and he’s adorable) but also The Muppet Christmas Carol. I may be better than Joel Osteen, but I can’t compete with The Great Gonzo. So in case you’re going to scroll past my sermon in order to get to “Silent Night,” I’m going to hand over the goods here at the top of the sermon.
I’ll give you the gift up front.
As a preacher, I’m not here to talk about God.
Why would you waste your time listening to someone speculate about God? Especially on Christmas? You’ve still got presents to wrap, in-laws to FaceTime (and isn’t that one upside of 2020?), and, if you’ve got little ones at home, Santa’s John Hancock to practice a few more times.
You don’t have time to waste listening to someone speculate about God.
So it’s good that I am not here tonight to speak about God.
As a preacher of the Gospel, called by the Risen Christ and commissioned by his— adulterous— Bride, the Church, I am here tonight to speak for God.
As Martin Luther said, not one of us can self-apply the promises of scripture.
They’re simply too good to believe.
We need a preacher.
So as a preacher— before you fast forward to the candle light— permit me to speak for God. What could ameliorate all the doom-scrolling and misery of this year more than having your very own Word from the Living God? Here it is, the present-tense, here-and-now Word of the Living God for you, no matter who you are or who you pretend to be, no matter what you’ve done or what you’ve left undone, no matter if you believe this promise or if you disbelieve it, no matter what you do with this promise or if you cast it aside like so many other holiday gifts.
Here is God’s Word tonight for you:
In the name of Jesus Christ and by his authority alone, I declare unto you the entire forgiveness of all your sins.
No one gets coal in their stocking tonight.
What takes Luke five scenes and an Aaron Sorkin’s cast of characters to convey, where Matthew requires magi, a 23andMe report, and the slaughter of the innocents, St. Paul distills down to just a couple of verses that even your brain on 2020 can remember, “When the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy.” Heck, the prophet Isaiah and the heavenly host are like the Marie Kondo of scripture. Tonight, they minimize the Christmas message to a single, put-it-in-your-pocket verse, “For unto us, a child is given.”
For us— that is, for you— he is a gift.
Jesus Christ and everything that belongs to him (all of his mercy and love, all of his faithfulness and righteousness) is gifted to you. And everything that belongs to you (all of your sin and shame, all of your regrets and failures) are his now.
By grace, you are enough.
You are forgiven and free to be.
You are free to love your neighbor not because you fear God but because you love your neighbor. For that matter, it’s a rotten way to use the gift, but you are free not to love your neighbor. And, you are free to scroll past the rest of this sermon if you so choose.
Go ahead— the gift, you really are free to scroll ahead.
I’m not joking. I’ll even give you a moment.
———————-
Still there?
If so, Merry Christmas.
And welcome!
If you are a teacher and coronatide’s wake has left you feeling like a failure, welcome— I’ve got some good news for you.
If you are a Zoomed-out parent, frustrated by virtual learning and exhausted from teleworking, welcome— I’ve got some good news for you.
If you are married and ten months of covid-induced quality time has exposed cracks in your relationship, welcome— I’ve got some good news for you.
If you are single and sick of hunkering down, if you’re lonely and depressed, welcome— I’ve got some good news for you.
If you fell off the wagon during the quarantine, welcome.
If you’re a person of color and find it increasingly hard to forgive— much less love— your white neighbors, welcome, I’ve got some good news for you.
If you’ve felt shamed on social media for how you’re spending the holidays this year, or if you’ve done some shaming on social media for how others are spending the holidays this year, welcome— I’ve got some good news for you.
If you’re secretly relieved that you don’t have to sit next to your Trump-loving neighbor in church this Christmas, if you’re secretly relieved you don’t have to sit next to your Trump-hating neighbor in church this Christmas, welcome— I’ve got some good news for you.
If you texted or posted or tweeted or forwarded anything during this election that you regret, if you’re embarrassed about how much emotional energy you invested— or are still investing— in the election’s outcome, if you’re too 2020’d out to care about the ongoing culture war, welcome— I’ve got some good news for you.
If 2020 has left you tired and anxious and with no energy to do anything but punch your time card in your jammy pants, welcome— I’ve got some good news for you.
If it feels like EVERYONE ELSE IS HANDLING THIS PANDEMIC BETTER THAN YOU, right down to their covid beards and sourdough starter, welcome— I’ve got some good news for you.
If you skipped worship tonight and you’re listening to this sermon in Spotify on Epiphany, a full nine days after Christmas, because, when it comes to discipleship, that’s just the best you can do right now, welcome.
I don’t have any helpful advice or life hacks or timeless wisdom, but I do have some good news for you. What comes into the world through Mary’s womb tonight is not one more responsibility for you to manage. It’s not another burden for you to shoulder. It’s not another task to juggle or another To Do for you to fail to do. The incarnation is the opposite of expectation.
God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.
God gives you Christ.
To hold onto.
God comes to you in this way; so that, you will search him out nowhere else than in this gift— so that, you will search him out in no other way than as a gift.
———————-
In my twenty years of ministry, other than tonight, the only Christmas Eve I have spent out of the pulpit was five years year ago.
My family and I were forced to hunker down for most of 2015 after I was diagnosed with a rare and ultimately incurable cancer that January. Christmas that year came after exhausting, frightening, and often demoralizing months of surgeries and blood treatments and rounds of intensive chemo I’m still convinced violated the Geneva Conventions. With my white blood count ground down to zero, I spent many weeks of that year wearing a mask when I went outside. Most of the time, however, I spent quarantined at home or in the hospital, cut off from friends and family, and feeling isolated from the rest of the world. The deeper I journeyed into that year, the more I judged myself for not handling the disease as well as other victims of it. By the time Christmas came that year, I felt like all the hope had been poured out of me, and I was worn out from the constant anxiety that the smallest of neighborly gestures would mean the death of me.
I was restless and weary.
My mind felt cob-webbed by the chemo.
I couldn’t pray or otherwise practice my faith.
It was at the end of that terrible year, the night before Christmas Eve, that it hit me.
I was at our home in the Blue Ride Mountains. I was in the kitchen, struggling to make dinner, and, while I did so, I was listening to the London Philharmonic’s performance of Handel’s Messiah.
I’d listened to the album scores of other times, but suddenly, I heard this gospel promise from the prophet Isaiah, “For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given,” and it struck me.
With the force of an epiphany, it hit me that as a preacher I had defined what it means to be a Christian in terms that now disqualified someone like me. Hearing God’s promise on the lips of the preacher Isaiah, it stuck me that I had defined what it means to be a Christian according to the Law; that is, I had defined Christianity in terms of doing.
But now—
I couldn’t stand up for social justice. I was a shut-in. I was too sick to roll up my sleeves and serve the poor. I didn’t have the strength to be anyone’s samaritan.
I was too tired to do much of anything much less do the things that Jesus did. I was too anxious to emulate Jesus in my own life. Change the world?! I didn’t have the energy to change my Netflix password. I was too overwhelmed by the little piece of the world called me and my life.
In other words, it took a cancer quarantine to remind me of the Word the Lord gives through the Apostle Paul to Titus tonight; namely, that before Jesus Christ is your example, he is your gift.
———————-
Look for it—
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all…through Jesus Christ who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession [Gift] who are zealous for good works [Example].”
Gift, example.
Listen for it—
“But when the goodness and loving-kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in our righteousness [Gift]…so that, being justified by his grace, we might live as heirs according to the hope of eternal life [Example].”
Gift, example.
About tonight’s “beautiful text,” the Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, says, “If the fire of this promise doesn’t stir you, then you are colder than cold,” because the promise is that we have everything through him. Everything that ultimately matters we already have through him who has been gifted to us— that’s the promise delivered tonight to the shepherds.
We have righteousness— his own, his permanent perfect record according to God’s Law.
We have justification. That is, in the Lamb’s Book of Life, next to your name it does not read “Not Guilty.” It reads “Totally Innocent.” And nothing you do can undo it.
We have everything through him.
We have salvation. He saved us, Paul writes. It’s accomplished. Salvation is received not achieved. Everything has already been done. He has set you free from Death and given you eternal life not as your wage— something you earn— but as your inheritance— something gifted to you by another.
We have everything through him who has been gifted to us.
It’s laying ahold of this gift that changes us according to Christ’s example. This is what St. Paul means in verse twelve that the gift of God’s grace trains us to live holy lives in the present age. The reason you must take Christ as your gift before you take him as your example is that the gift— the Gospel— is how God changes you— from the inside out— to live into Christ’s example.
Gift, example.
When it comes to understanding the Gospel, these two words— gift and example— are the most important words and precisely in that order because when you reverse the order— example, gift— you are left with no Gospel at all. The example of Christ would be in vain if Christ were not first a gift because no one can truly follow the example of the one born tonight unless they are born again by the gift of God’s grace. As Paul explains the importance of this ordering in his Letter to the Romans, the Law— the example— is powerless to produce what it prescribes and, thus, it only accuses us. Only the Gospel, the gift of God’s grace for you, can create in you what the Law commands. Only the promise that everything has been done for you has the power to get you to go and do.
Gift, example.
This is why we do not call him Saint Jesus.
No, the message the angels declare is, “For you, this day, in the City of David, a Savior is born.”
In a culture of lies and mendacity, fake news and alternative facts, that longer appears to recognize truth or moral absolutes, it can be tempting to turn the child born to Mary into a New Moses, a dispenser of oughts and shoulds. But the logic of our text tonight is that broken sinners do not need instructions in ethics. Sinners broken by the Law of God (and that’s what you are whether you realize it or not) need a word from God that rescues them from the misery of their sin and restores them to peach with God through faith in his promises.
Five hundred years ago, as he worked on translating the New Testament into German so that the scriptures would be accessible to ordinary people, Martin Luther, wrote a brief preface entitled, “A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels.”
In it Luther writes, “Be sure, moreover, that you do not make Christ into a Moses, as if Christ did nothing more than teach and provide examples as the other saints do, as if the Gospel were simply a textbook of teachings or laws. Therefore you should grasp Christ, his words, works, and sufferings, in a twofold manner. First as an example that is presented to you, which you should follow and imitate. Thus when you see how Christ prays, fasts, helps people, and shows them love, so also you should do, both for yourself and for your neighbor.
However this is the smallest part of the Gospel, on the basis of which it cannot yet even be called gospel. For on this level Christ is of no more help to you than some other saint. His life remains his own and does not as yet contribute anything to you. In short this mode of understanding Christ as simply an example does not make Christians. It only makes hypocrites.
You must grasp Christ at a much higher level. Even though this higher level has for a long time been the very best, the understanding of it has been something rare.
The chief article and foundation of the Gospel is that before you take Christ as an example, you accept and recognize him as a gift, as a present that God has given you and that is your own. This means that when you see or hear of Christ doing or suffering something, you do not doubt that Christ himself, with his deeds and suffering, belongs to you. On this you may depend as surely as if you had done it yourself; indeed as if you were Christ himself.”
This is what it means to have a proper grasp of the Gospel, that is, of the overwhelming goodness of God. When you have Christ as the foundation and chief blessing of your salvation, then the other part follows: that you take him as your example, giving yourself in service to your neighbor just as you see that Christ has given himself for you. Therefore make note of this, that Christ as a gift nourishes your faith and makes you a Christian. But Christ as an example exercises your works. These do not make you a Christian.”
Before Jesus Christ is your example, he is your gift.
And for all those wearied by this odd and trying year, that’s good news.
It’s good news because when Jesus is your gift before he’s your example, it takes earning out of the equation. There’s nothing you have to do to deserve the gift because it’s already been given to you.
———————-
I don’t know how you’ve spent your quarantine time, but during the pandemic I’ve hunkered down and watched two classic, quality television programs— maybe you’ve heard of them— called the The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, all twenty-four and sixteen seasons respectively.
See, aren’t you glad you stayed through to the end of the sermon?
Who had “a Bachelor reference in the Christmas Eve sermon” on their 2020 Bingo Card?
If you’re aware of this shameless and tacky dating show, then you know that every episode concludes with the rose ceremony wherein the bachelor or bachelorette gift a rose to the girl or guy they believe earned it. The gift protects the recipient from elimination.
What makes The Bachelor and The Bachelorette such a guilty pleasure is how contrived and inauthentic are the dates. The prospective mates are all performing because they’re trying to earn the rose and not to be eliminated. They’re trying to measure up to the bachelor’s ideals and therefore they are not free.
Example, gift.
However, once in a while, the rose ceremony comes at the very beginning of the show. For example, in season fifteen of The Bachelorette Hannah gave her rose to Cameron— I mean, Cam— before the season even began. And so Cam entered the relationship knowing there was no chance he would be rejected, no fear he would be eliminated, no threat he would be sent home. And if you watch the dates where the rose has come at the beginning— where the gift has preceded any earning— they’re normal. The two are at ease with one another. They’re free to laugh and cry, and they begin to open up and reveal their true selves.
“For unto us a child is born.”
Unto you.
God gives you the gift up front, right at the beginning of the story.
And God gives you the rose that is Christ himself again and again, including tonight, in his Word, in Water, and in Wine and Bread, which remind us that by our baptism in to his suffering, death, and resurrection, you were irrevocably removed from the naughty list.
You’ve got the rose already. You don’t need to impress the Bridegroom.
You’ll never be sent home.
So no matter what 2020 has dealt you, you’re free to be. You can live your life in the grace of God, you can live your life, at least for moments, at ease, in the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, without fear, and in perfect love.
And remember, I’m a preacher.
This isn’t me talking about God.
This is me speaking for God.
This is God’s promise to you tonight in this baby.
December 23, 2023
It’s Better to Receive than to Give
(image by Chris E.W. Green)
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“Get dressed in something nice,” my mother said through my bedroom door, “We’re going to church.” I was a teenager, somewhere between my learner’s permit and my license to freedom, and somewhere, I’m sure, a needle scratched clear off a record. Save for a Holy Roman shotgun wedding, where even elementary-aged me could sense the bride and groom were about to make a terrible decision, I’d never gone to church before.
It was Christmas Eve, and, as a teenager, I had a few expensive (and awesome!) gifts on my wish list. None of them was what I ended up receiving.
From the discreet remove of the balcony, I learned “Silent Night” had more than one verse and I discovered that the magi were conspicuously missing from the gospel lesson the woman in the guady holiday sweater read for us. I’d seen the bumperstickers, of course. I knew Jesus was the reason for the season, but that Christmas Eve it wasn’t at all clear to me what was the reason to keep on fussing in the here and now about somehow locked away two thousand years in the past.
Not until the pastor held up a loaf of bread, broke it, and gave thanks to God and then, pouring wine into a silver cup, he taught us a word that not even this A+ English student knew: incarnation.
Lifting the cup of wine and showing it to us like Vanna White revealing a hidden vowel, he explained what lay not so self-evident in the familiar story of Mary, Joseph, and the heavenly host. God takes flesh in Jesus Christ, I heard for the first time. Our flesh, the preacher proclaimed.
God became what we are, the preacher preached so that we can become like God.
Here’s the thing—
As an adolescent, I had suffered acne so severe the dermatologist prescribed me medication I later learned had been used initially to treat Hanson’s Disease; that is, leprosy. What I was, I believed, was unlovely and therefore unloveable.
To hear that God would put on my blemished skin, that Love itself would take on my unloveliness, become what I was, take my body as God’s own body…
That first worship service on Christmas Eve was like a wardrobe into Narnia. I’d been given a gift I didn’t realize I needed and wanted until I had received it.What was that gift?
Let me ask a better question.
And it’s an important question because, let’s be honest, most of us would feel far more guilty if we neglected our Christmas shopping than if we neglected to go to church on Christmas.
So here’s my question:
Why should we go to church on Christmas?(For that matter, why should we go to church at all?)What can you receive at church on Christmas that you can receive nowhere else?What can you get at church no one else can give you?The answer, of course, is Jesus Christ.Only at church, only where the Word is preached and the sacraments are rightly celebrated, can you receive Jesus Christ himself.
And everything that belongs to him.
I shouldn’t have said “of course” because, of course, preachers like me mess it up all the time. We make it seem like what Church has to offer the world is politics or behavior modification, purpose or principles for daily living when, in fact, the gift we have to offer the world is Jesus Christ himself and everything (his righteousness, his sonship, his faithfulness, his resurrection, his Father’s eternal love) that belongs to him.
At the heart of so much Christianity is a strange and self-negating sort of absence. We gather on the sabbath only to hear about what happens elsewhere. In both overt and unintended ways, many churches signal that revelation happens everywhere but here, at the font, at the altar, on a preacher’s imperfect lips and in your sin-hardened hearing.
God’s out there, on the move, and it’s our job to find him and join him, preachers like me exhort. God happened in Jesus Christ, we say— and note the past tense, whose teaching and example we can imitate in our own personal lives and for our social causes. Just think about how many sermons you’ve heard over the years that implied the real stuff of Christianity happens not on Sunday morning but Monday through Friday, on the frontlines of the “real world.”
But those sorts of reductions of Christianity misunderstand what kind of word— fundamentally— is the Gospel. The Gospel is not a timeless set of ideas we can apply to our politics or personal lives. The Gospel is not a school of philosophy or, even, a way of life. The Gospel is not a means to make us or our children more moral.
The Gospel is a promise.
The Gospel is a particular kind of promise, in fact.
The Gospel is the promise by which Christ gives himself to us.The Gospel works like a wedding vow, Martin Luther said. The Gospel is a promise by which the Bridegroom gives himself and everything that belongs to him to his beloved. What makes Christ present in creatures of bread and wine is the same promise of the Gospel proclaimed from the pulpit— the same promise we sing in our Christmas carols.
The reason this is the season of comfort and joy is because the promise itself gives us Christ himself.Of all the times of the year, Christmas is the season when Christians should be insisting that it’s better to receive than to give.
What all our other versions of Christianity obscure is how what’s present to us in the promise of the Gospel, even if we are nothing but unimpressive, ordinary Christians, is greater than all the possible experiences in the world. Nothing less than Christ himself, Luther wrote, is what all believers receive by faith alone. By faith in the promise we are united with Christ. Through the promise of the Gospel— whether the promise is proclaimed from a pulpit or sung by a choir or placed in your mouth on bread and wine— Christ lives in you and you in him. Through that promise, Paul writes, the Maker of Heaven and Earth dwells in your heart. God is not far away in heaven nor is God off at work in the world busier with someboday other than you. God is in his Word and the Word that takes flesh in the virgin’s womb still takes up residence among us.
The Gospel is the promise by which Christ gives himself to us.
This is why the Bible teaches that salvation comes by hearing because Jesus Christ is salvation and he comes to us the same way he came to Israel, by the announcement of a promise.
What I received that first Christmas Eve, in my ears and on my lips, it wasn’t an idea.It was God himself.That’s why the church is necessary.
We only have one gift to give, as the Church, but it’s a gift that can be infinitely distributed. And because only Christ is without beginning or end, he’s the only gift you can receive that will keep on giving.
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December 22, 2023
The Hands and Feet Pushing on the Inside of Her Belly are the Promises of God
(Annunciation by Raphael Soyer)
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Luke 1.39-56
Her hands kept shaking even after he departed from her.
She gasped and only then realized sheʼd been holding her breath, waiting to see if heʼd reappear as suddenly as heʼd intruded upon her life. His words had lodged in her mind just as something new was supposedly lodged inside her.
He must have seen how terrified she was.
“Donʼt be afraid,” heʼd said to her.
In those moments after he departed, she just stood there, looking around her bedroom. The posters on the wall, the books on the shelf, the homework on the desk, the dirty laundry on the floor in the corner- in the aftermath of an angelʼs glow, it all seemed very ordinary.
It was an unlikely place for a “visitation.”
There wasn’t anything there in her bedroom to confuse it for a holy place. It was just ordinary. Looking around her room, she caught a glance of her reflection in the mirror. And so was she: ordinary, not anyone that anyone else should ever remember or notice, not someone youʼd pick out like a single star in all the sky.
Yet, thatʼs just what heʼd told her.
Sheʼd been chosen.
Elected.
Somehow, in the days ahead of her or already right now, God would come to exist in her belly.
The thought made her shake again.
She looked out her window, up at the multitude of stars in the night sky.
“Do not be afraid,” heʼd told her.
Those same words, she knew, had been spoken long ago to Abraham.
Do not be afraid, Abraham had been told in the moments before God pointed to the stars in the sky and dared Abraham to count them, dared Abraham to imagine and believe that for as many stars as there were in the sky so his descendants would be.
She liked the thought, as unbelievable as it sounded, that through her and her baby the whole world would be blessed.
Still, she knew enough scripture to know that the angelʼs words, “Do not be afraid,” were auspicious words. She knew the child promised by God to Abraham and Sarah was the same child whose sacrifice God later required.
She knew the story.
It was the sort of story you canʼt forget even if youʼd like to— how God one day told Abraham that the promised son would have to suffer and be sacrificed on top of a mountain. How the son obeyed and followed his fatherʼs will all the way up the mount, carrying wood. How they built an offering place up there. How the son was spared only when it was clear how far the father would go.
She used to wonder how God could ask anyone to give up something so precious.
But now, looking out at the stars and rubbing her belly, she wondered about Sarah, Abrahamʼs wife, the boyʼs mother, and what Sarah would have done if God had asked her to follow her boy to his death.
December 21, 2023
Everything Beautiful in Its Time
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Here is the offering for tonight’s Longest Night service by my friend Katy Padilla. I’ve long appreciated her thoughtfulness, and I have recently come to admire her courage. Here she makes herself vulnerable in a way that witnesses to her trust in grace.
Our culture’s mandated cheerfulness during this season can be isolating for those going through hardship and heartache. I think her proclamation provides a space for our true selves and actual feelings.
Below is her text.
Here is her money line:
It’s not that He could make this place beautiful.
He IS making everything beautiful in its time.
I want to be clear up front: my only qualification for standing up here tonight is the only qualification you needed to come.
I’m a person in pain.I’m not a pastor. I didn’t study or go to seminary to say this.
I’m not a theologian. I can’t give you a sophisticated explanation for God or any answers for that matter.
I’m not a poet. I don’t have perfect or lyrical words.
I’m simply a person in pain. All I have is a reflection of my experience in the pain.
And even worse, I had a wisdom tooth removed last week. So whatever I am, I am a person still in some physical pain, who has a little less wisdom now than I did before!
Rarely do I have the right thing to say, but I am continually learning that it’s better when I say something even if I lack the right thing to say.
Like last week, getting ready for my tooth extraction, I sat down in the chair and the dental assistant handed me a clear pair of glasses. “Some people prefer these,” she said. I slipped them on, trying not to think about why I should need eye protection from a tooth, when the dentist came in to greet me. He turned from the X-ray on the screen to me and asked, “So how’s the rest of your day been so far?”
There it was. One of those split second moments when I ask myself “Do I just say ‘Oh, fine’ with a fake smile or ‘Terrible, thanks for asking?’”
As one of you recently told me “When someone asks you ‘How are you?’ the immediate response is ‘Do you want the easy answer or the real answer?’”
Well, last week, I went with a real answer.I mean, he was about to pull my tooth out, so truth for a tooth, right?
“Actually, this might be the best part of my day,” I said. “I’m going through a divorce and today was one of those ugly days. I wish extracting a husband was as easy as extracting a tooth. I mean, at least I get pain medication for this!”
To my dentist’s credit, he didn’t flinch. He just said, “I’m sorry to hear that. The good news is this procedure should be fairly straightforward, even if the other part isn’t.”
“Great. Well, this pain is also giving me a good excuse to hide on the couch for two days, so I’ll take it,” I replied.
Because there’s no hiding from the other pain.
Divorce may not be death or disease but it is every part grief and drawn out pain. Just pain, more pain, and no relief.
The only balm I’ve found recently is listening.
Listening to audiobooks, podcasts, music - anything to help drown out the voice in my head.
One of the books I listened to recently was poet Maggie Smith’s “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” all about her divorce and self-rediscovery. My sister read it at the same time and couldn’t help pointing out the many similarities between her story and mine. It was a strange kinship, although, I can’t say it was pleasurable reading about someone else’s pain. It was good, however, to hear someone else put words to an experience that I don’t always know how to share with others. Like explaining how similar and yet profoundly different death and divorce are. She describes it this way:
“Mourning a living person is different from mourning the dead.
A woman whose husband dies is a widow.
But there is no word for a person who grieves a living person. There is no name for what you are when a part of your life and identity dies, but YOU go on living.
There is no name for what you are when you outlive the life you expected to have and find yourself in a kind of afterlife.
Chaos would be a good way to describe the afterlife with my kids these days. I have ridden more of their emotional roller coasters in the past 6 months than I have their entire lives. It’s like a season’s pass with no idea when the season actually ends.
If Ecclesiastes says there’s a Time for Everything and a season for every activity under the sun, then I think they skipped a few lines for the season of Kids’ Emotional Pain:
A time for screaming and a time for cursing,A time for shredding love notes from mom and a time for tearing up journals,
A time for jumping on furniture and a time for refusing to move
A time for beating and slamming doorsA time for breaking objects,A time for writing “I hate you” notes to mommy,A time for throwing stuffed animals
A time for running away
‘Tis the season of struggle.
My daughter told me all about blackholes and how they don’t let any light through. In my journal that night I wrote all about how a blackhole might be a great way to go. I even contemplated booking a flight to Bermuda and hoping for the best. In this case, “the best” would be getting sucked into a blackhole and just disappearing into nothingness. I made a list of all the things I’d be free of if I could escape into total black. Just the thought was freeing.
It was a blackhole kind of day when my youngest sister called this summer. She lives in Europe and our schedules rarely align, so there was no choice but to answer when her name popped up. I got on the phone and immediately told her “Sorry, you’ve caught me at a bad time...or maybe you called at just the right time.” I burst into tears as I recounted the latest unpleasant events and how crushed I was feeling.
She listened as I sat in my car and vented.
“I hold it together for everyone else so that they can fall apart. But sometimes I want to be the one that falls apart! Sometimes I want to be the person who slashes tires and breaks glass and just lets it all out!”
The next morning I awoke to an email that said “Congratulations, Katy! We are pleased to let you know that Rachel has gifted you a free “Controlled Chaos” session at our rage room!”
For the uninitiated, a rage room is a dedicated space full of breakable things where you can literally “lose it.” After putting on protective gear, you can break, smash, throw, and utterly destroy anything in the room. And even better, when you’re done you get to just walk away and leave it all there on the floor. In the gift card was a note from my sister that said “It may not be exactly what you want to smash, but hopefully you can use your imagination and still enjoy some stress relief. Love you!”
Best. Gift. Ever.
We may not all smash things, or visit rage rooms, but we all find our own ways of coping with the darkness.
Poet Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones” went viral in 2016 after one of the many mass shootings in our country. It was her attempt to express the angst she felt as a mother watching her children grow up in an increasingly conflicted world. Her way of trying to cope. It goes like this:
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
You could make this place beautiful.
The last line of the poem inspired the title of her divorce memoir. On the surface, the poem is comforting. The idea that you… I… we could make this place beautiful - just by putting in some solid effort and elbow grease. Sounds so inspiring. And I probably agreed with that sentiment when I first read it... before now.
Now, I’m thinking Maggie got it wrong.
Sorry, let me clarify. She nailed the dark part.But me - make this place beautiful?
No. I can’t.
I can only hurt, break and destroy what’s around me.
Look, I want to smash things to feel better! Sure, it may feel good at the moment, but it’s just more destruction.
I’m a rock with sharp edges sliding towards the bottom and doing some real damage on the way down.
And let me tell you about rocks. I’ve taught the rock cycle to 5th graders enough to know more than I need to know about rocks. You know what rocks do?
Break Crumble Weather Fall Erode Change Slide Compact
But see, the rocks don’t actually “do” any of those verbs. They are passive participants, not actors. The actions are being done to the rocks not by the rocks.
They are acted on by external forces.
Rocks weather and erode due to water and wind.
Rocks compact because of exerted pressure.
Rocks slide and roll because of gravity.
Rocks get kicked, tossed, moved around, broken... all because of someone or something else.
They take a beating just for existing in the world.They have no control. Rocks do not independently make the world beautiful.
On a recent trip to Placerville, California I gave each of my kids $10 and said they could buy whatever they wanted in the old hardware store. ANYTHING. And you know what they chose?
A bag of rocks.
Well, to be specific, a bag of polished gemstones. You know, the colorful kind where for $10 you can take as many as you can fit into the little black pouch.
I was shocked. They had a store full of random treasures and they both chose the same thing. When I asked them about their selection my daughter said, “I like how smooth they feel and how they shine.” And my son said, “It’s cool to lay them out and see all the different colors at once.”
With that interest in mind, I got a book all about gems for us to learn more together.
Here’s some of what we read:“If someone asked you to look at a rainbow, you would look up to the sky. Likewise, if someone asked you to think of something that shines, you would think of the sun. But not every rainbow or everything that shines can be found in the sky. Sometimes they are right under your feet.”
“When you look into a gem, you’re looking into time itself.
Time, pressure, heat, and sometimes erosion very slowly change the rock. If conditions are just right, the product is a rough gemstone that took thousands of years - or more - to form.
“Unlike rocks and minerals, gems are elusive. Though many are found beneath the earth in mines where few of us dare go, some find their way to the surface and are exposed by weathering and erosion. Gems, in fact, are plentiful in areas prone to earthquakes and volcanoes, where many are formed.”
So according to Scholastic, We find the most precious gems in the darkest spaces and disaster zones.
A couple of months ago, my therapist proposed the term “diamond hunter” for me. She said I had a pattern of sharing my darkest moments, pausing, and then naming something beautiful that came out of it. Essentially, I would work my way through the darkness and come out with a diamond on the other side. While I agreed with what she saw, I laughed and said, “Well, ‘diamond hunter’ might not be the best nickname when there isn’t one on my finger anymore. Could be misinterpreted...”
But thinking of my kids I offered up “gem collector” as an alternative.
A time for rocks and a time for gems.Our God is a God who shows up in the dark.“There are all these hidden gems I’m discovering,” I told her. “Gems right under my feet that have been here all along and I just didn’t see them before. Now my eyes are open and I see them everywhere. They’re giving off glimmers of hope and it makes me feel a lot less alone.”
“In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
Our God came down to us and he was battered, broken and bruised just like us - FOR US. But he was not destroyed by the darkness.
That’s why even in the deepest darkness we still see him. And I’ll go even further and say that’s where we see him most clearly.
My son explained to me recently that our eyes are built for light. The darker it gets the more our pupils dilate in order to detect even the slightest hint of light. Our eyes open wide in the dark.
Tonight may be the longest night and it may be dark, but we are not in a blackhole.
The light still gets through - we haven’t been left in total darkness.
Jesus, “the true light that gives light to everyone,” has come into the world and I see him in the light of glimmers.
Emmanuel - God WITH us. God with ME.
See, I didn’t tell you the full story of my tooth extraction last week. After I made the crack about my divorce and extracting my husband, the dentist gave me the local anesthesia and left the room.
After he walked out, his assistant turned to me and said, “I’m so sorry. I know it’s hard - I’ve been there. It’s a lot of pain right now, but you’ll get through it. I’ve been with my second husband 20 years now and he’s amazing - more than I ever imagined. Just hang in there.” I grabbed her arm and tried not to cry as I whispered, “Thank you. I needed that glimmer of hope today.”
Emmanuel - God WITH me
Or just the other day, in the midst of a painful reunion with my kids, I had to pretend to use the bathroom so I could go sit and cry. Right then a text from my neighbor popped up that said, “Want to come over for a cup of tea?” When I got to her door she greeted me with a hug and said, “When I took the dog for a walk he stopped at your driveway and just stared at your house. It was the strangest thing, I couldn’t get him to move. I figured he sensed something I didn’t and I should probably check in.”
Her dog laid at my feet the whole time I sat at her kitchen table and bared my bruised soul.
Emmanuel - God WITH me
Or the coworker who only shows up to our office once a week and just happened to be there on the exact day when I felt my world flipping upside down. He casually asked how I was doing before the rest of the team joined our meeting, and I turned to him and said, “Honestly, not great. I’m going through a divorce and can’t think straight. I haven’t really told anyone but I’m too tired to hide it today.”
“I’m so sorry," he said. “That’s stressful. Let’s get lunch afterwards.”Since that day he has gotten lunch with me every week on the day he’s in the office. When he returned from a two week vacation with his husband he brought me a fish keychain and said, “I saw this in the gift shop and immediately thought of you. You’re a fish out of water right now, but you’ll learn to swim again.” I hugged him and then said, “How did you know? I have all these new keys to keep track of now and no good keychain.” I use that gift everyday.
Emmanuel - God WITH me
See whenever I have shown up as a HOT mess - the honest, open, transparent mess that I am - I’ve been met with unexpected love and grace. A reflection of the light - a reminder that I'm not alone.
I started writing them down when I first started noticing just so I wouldn’t forget. But now I’ve seen so many glimmers that there are too many to recount.
I mentioned the list to my aunt, a widow for many years, and she half laughed and half caught her breath. With a knowing smile and tears in her eyes she said she remembered keeping a similar list when my uncle died. “There was something every day,” she said.
My hunch is you see them, too. Those of you who are out on the longest night, experiencing the darkness, you’ve seen some glimmers.
But you haven’t just seen them, you are the glimmers. Hidden in rock, broken and exposed in the rubble. You are the colorful gems that reflect the light. Gems don’t shine because they have their own internal light. They shine and shimmer because they reflect the presence of an external light in the same way John says “he was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light.” You witness to and reflect THE light in the smallest of moments - in ways you may not even realize. Warm welcomes, listening ears, understanding head nods, bear hugs, offers of support, shared meals, phone calls, “just checking in on you” messages, or sharing your own HOT mess stories. In each small way, you reflect the light.
Fleming Rutledge said:
“The mystery of God’s activity in the world is that the tiny signs of faithfulness and love and mercy and hope, the tiny signs enacted by the Christian community, are the pointers to the glory that will come when the Lord takes his power to himself. This is not the way I would have done it; it is not the way you would have done it. No wonder we take offense. You and I would have made it obvious, so that it would have stunned everybody and made argument and questioning irrelevant.”
She’s right. This isn’t the way any of us would have done it. Let’s be honest, we want a blinding, piercing light so obvious that we all fall to our knees.
God chooses glimmers. And rocks.
Rocks that break and crumble. Rocks that have no control, no power. But rocks that He transforms through heat and pressure and water and wind…and time. Exposed gems that reflect his glorious light into the darkness.
Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
Christmas Should Come in a Burst
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Hello Friends,
As your time wanes into the holiday rush, I want to thank you for welcoming me into your inbox and earballs and, through your feedback and questions, making this a thoughtful community.
And in the spirit of the season, don’t forget to:Seriously, if you’re a Christian whose sphincter gets tight at the mention of the word evangelism, then go the easy introvert’s route and:
Merry Christmas to all of you!
My gift to you is this conversation with Fleming Rutledge.
Here is her prayer at the end:
Lord,
We are no longer slaves, but free. Free in our knowledge of the future of your son and his kingdom. Make us citizens of that kingdom, Lord.
Take hold of us in our darkness, in our fear, in our culpability, our mutual culpability. Take hold of us, Lord.
Turn our face to the light, the light that comes at the end of all time and all that is, to remake your entire creation into a new order, a new order of love, grace, mercy, transformation and eternal citizenship in your presence.
Lord, make the city of God so real to us that we can slog through our days with what Christians call hope. The hope that is beyond hope, the hope that places all its resources in the promises that you have made to us in your beloved son.
Grant, Lord, that we may not fear to look at the darkness and take an inventory of it and say to ourselves, this Lord is what you came to conquer and banish forever.
And so in this time between, this time between the first coming of our Lord Jesus in humility and his second coming in majesty and glory, let us live in this present time according to our citizenship in that future time, our merits, but placing ourselves entirely in your hands as recipients of the grace which has no conditions whatsoever, except your eternal love. In the name and in the power of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.
Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the appHere is the rough transcript:
I don't think anyone was prepared for it to be so popular. I sold out, as you probably know, and had to be reordered, and that took a while. I feel a little sad that Advent is coming to an end, not only because I love it so much, but also because the book sales will plummet until next Advent, God willing. I do think it's interesting, very interesting, because it's not, these are not easy themes. This is not a likeability book.
doesn't rank high on the likeability chart. It's challenging. And I am very happy and pleased that so many people seem to have found it helpful, interesting, provocative, whatever, a lot of people, but not as many Episcopalians as I would have liked. In fact, I'm more than a little discouraged. I was in Boston just a week ago and...the great Trinity Church Copley Square had Christmas wreaths with red bows on the front. And that made me sad. It really did because we just didn't use to do that. The Episcopal Church is falling prey to the culture just like everything else. Just can't resist, can't resist the pressure of the commercial culture. And I do think that's a pity. It's not all that easy to persuade people that in the end, in the last analysis, focusing on the darkness is healthy, truthful, strengthening, and ultimately provides the right setting for the explosion of joy, the completely unexpected nature of the miracle of the incarnation. So I'm sad that even the Episcopal Church, which has been known for Advent observance, as long as I can remember, is in a lot of ways just giving up and going for the expectations of the multitudes. I think there's still some residual commitment to the Advent mood, but I don't think having an Advent wreath does it. I have an Advent wreath. I like to have an Advent wreath.
It means something to me, but it is a medieval, I mean, it is not a medieval custom. It's a 19th century custom like Christmas trees. So it doesn't have a very deep resonance in church history, liturgical history. I was at a funeral at Shiloh Baptist Church, DC, and I was surprised that they had a wreaths out. I'm surprised too. But that's also an example of how individual traditions are losing their particularity and I'm sad about that. It's hard now to find a second, third, fourth generation Presbyterian or Lutheran. I just saw a poll about that. The numbers of people who still practice in the tradition they were born into is shrinking all the time and I think we're losing something there. I think being an old school Presbyterian or Lutheran Methodist has a certain preciousness about it because each of these traditions has something to offer to the great church. I like for Catholics to be Catholics. I don't want to try to make them into Episcopalians. Or maybe I do, actually. Maybe I want to make the whole world into Episcopalians, but the Episcopalians are stuck…going to stop being Episcopalians, then it doesn't make any difference, what's the point? But Jason, I have something else on my mind. I picked up the New York Times a few minutes ago and saw this stunning headline on the front page. Russian election effort focused on influencing the African-American vote. What more can we expect our African-American population to endure?
They are the butt of everything. I have a wonderful new young friend, African American friend, whose name is Dante Stewart and he's called Stu, you know. And I had lunch with him recently and he spoke so poignantly about the difficulty of loving white people…committed to loving white people from the bottom souls of his feet. You can just see that in watching him operate in a restaurant full of white people. He's just full of joy and full of friendship and full of goodwill. But he says it's extremely costly to maintain that because of the daily, many times daily assumptions that people make. And above all, the lack of willingness of white people.
I to try to enter into and understand what black people go through. And then here's this insult that the Russians, for God's sake, the Russians, of course I don't mean the Russian people, I mean the Russian operatives, whoever they are, are cynically focusing on disenfranchising the African-American vote so as to get Donald Trump elected. Now, regardless of who they're trying to get elected,
It is just evil. And to do it on the backs of the descendants of slaves just seems to me to be the most particularly horrible piece of news to receive this morning. Now this is Advent. This is a piece of Advent news. This is the way it is in this world riddled with sin and under the thumb of the adversary. How would you give it from Advent?
And that story to preaching Christmas. Well, on Christmas day, you mean, or Christmas Eve, oh, that's a little side comment. I'm sorry that people don't still say Christmas Eve and Christmas day, because Christmas is 12 days. So when we say on Christmas, what we mean to say is on Christmas day. I love that in the Dickens Christmas Carol, when Scrooge sticks his...head out of the window says, what day is this? And the person in the street says, it's Christmas day. I love that. Anyway, I believe that Christmas preaching, Christmas time preaching, Christmas Eve preaching, Christmas day preaching, I don't think many people preach on Christmas day, do you? Mostly it's Christmas Eve, right? Well, I've often quoted my beloved mother who, when I was asking her about why we didn't decorate the tree until the last minute, she said, Christmas should come in a burst. And I have always thought that was a wonderful way to explain what Christmas is.
The good news of Christmas does not grow incrementally.
It comes as a call from heaven in the night, it tempers the lowest form of humanity.
People don't realize what horrible job being a shepherd was in those days and how only the most crude and uneducated and underprivileged people would be shepherds. And the fact that the message comes to shepherds is very important. God designed that. Glory to God in the highest. All of a sudden a sign from heaven in the dark, a star in the dark. You can't see a star in the daylight. So I think that it is just critical if we are to understand what God has done for us to immerse ourselves in what we have done to ourselves in sin and in death. It's not right for Christians to talk about joy and peace all the time during Advent, as if when Christmas is coming, as though it's something that we deserve, something that's just part of the atmosphere. It's not part of the atmosphere. The atmosphere is full of demonic forces. The scripture makes this very clear, the New Testament and the later parts of the Old Testament. I don't like to keep quoting the same things all the time, but I do, very much, I was very much struck years ago by Susan Sontag writing that after a certain age, no one has a right to innocence. What she meant was no one has a right to ignore the dark things in life and pretend as if all is well. And that theme has come up lately in my purview because I went to a, I went to speak at a diocesan conference in Texas
And there was a young man there, a professor from Rice University, a young black man named Alexander Byrd, B-Y-R-D. And he passed out copies of James Baldwin's letter to his nephew. And we all divided up into groups and talked about the letter. And the subject of the letter is the false innocence of white people. Actually, I don't think he says innocence. I think he says ignorance.
And his point is that white people have willed, we have willed ourselves to be ignorant of the struggle of the black community in our midst. We have trivialized what they go through. We have ignored it. We have paid no attention to it. We don't understand it. We don't try to understand it. And I've been doing my little best to plead about this over the years.
I don't really feel a whole lot of response. I don't think very many white Christians are making an effort. Some are, mostly in the so-called liberal churches. I don't like that term or that idea, but the overall picture of American white Christians is not encouraging in that regard. I think that we could make so much more effort and we could, above all, we could stop being ignorant, as Baldwin discusses, we could stop being ignorant of what it's like to endure slight after slight after slight all day every day. The sense that people are just taking you for granted and assuming that you are something that you're not. I just think that would be incredibly difficult and it would create so much anger. I don't know why black people aren't angrier than they are. Well, anyway, I'm here today to try to talk a little bit more about. Do you think that points out the danger and the danger for white Christians in particular to celebrate Christmas with such sentimentality? Well I think it's a component of understanding life in its depths and in its pain and in its insolubility from the human side.
People are always talking about making the world a better place. That's a cliche that we hear all the time. There's a scene in a very fine movie called A Most Wanted Man. It's the last film that Philip Seymour appeared in. He plays an under... What would you call it? He's an intelligence. He's a spy, basically, in Germany. He is trying to work with Robin Wright, who is a...totally corrupt American agent. And they're sitting at a table in a tavern and he asks her, why are we doing this? Why are we doing what we do? And she says with this utterly cynical air, to make the world a better place. And the film ends tragically, tragically. And I think for us to talk in this glib way that we do about trying to make the world a better place, ought to be brought into sermons and in order to make it clear, dear people out there who are listening, in order to make it clear that God has done something that we could not do. We could not make the world a better place. In the beginning of Facebook, people thought it was going to make the world a better place. One step forward, two steps back. I realized that people need to be encouraged. And I believe and I know and I'm committed to encouraging people, let's say Christians. Christians encourage each other as the episode of the Hebrews says, encourage one another in the works of the spirit. That's from relations, of course. Part of our role as Christians together in our body is to encourage each other to practice the works of the spirit. And one of the works of the spirit, I think,
Well, I know if I might say so, is to see the other person and not rush past the person, whether it's a black person on the street or whether it's your own family member, not rush past the person's suffering. I read something just a couple of days ago about how difficult it is to just stay with a person's suffering instead of trying to move on. Instead of trying to...make it all right or think of something happy, think of something positive. You can't talk to a depressed person like that. It's as though people think you can will yourself out of a clinical depression, just to give an example. There are dark forces at work in the world and we have the Holy Spirit's gifts to fight against those dark forces but it's not ever going to be easy. And we need a lot of help from one another in order to stick with the subject of suffering and darkness and national and international corruption and crime. McKinsey and Company is making it possible for the world to be more unethical. McKinsey and Company, the great firm that...was always admired so much and now we read that they are deeply enmeshed in corruption all over the world. That's an Advent story. That's the story of the fall of man, the fall of humanity, fallen away from God. And we couldn't help ourselves. That whole God who helps those who help themselves, that is rampant in the churches. I heard a CD of a speech given at a parish stewardship done by a very prominent and committed churchman. And he began the speech by saying, now we all know that God helps those who help themselves. Now that should not be allowed to be said in a church because it leads people in precisely the wrong direction. Paul says in Romans 5, while we were still helpless, Christ died for the ungodly. That is the gospel in a nutshell. And to corrupt it and reverse it by saying that God helps those who help themselves is really distressing to hear that from someone who is a churchman or church person. I had a Methodist pastor, I had posted one of your quotes from your Advent book. I got a lot of pushback, but one of the pastors told me, grace has conditions.
And I just, I don't even know how you engage a conversation like that when you just have the terms wrong. That's really something. That, well that, but you, Dorothy Martin, the psychoanalyst in New York who had a great deal of influence in the Mockingbird, among the Mockingbird people and other ministries in the church, she said once to me, we deeply despise God's grace. And that was a shocking thing to hear. It was strongly worded, obviously.
I think she's onto something very important. We resist God's grace wherever we see it because we want to believe that we have contributed something to it. And so we want to put conditions on it. Gosh, conditions on grace, that really blows my mind. That is the most startlingly uncomprehending blind comment that I can possibly think of.
It's hard when there's so many people in the church that are speaking a different language. Well, it's extremely hard. We just have to keep on keeping on. The pointing, always pointing away from ourselves, pointing to the Lord, pointing to those in Christian history who have gotten this message and who have spread it. This is the quote from your book that generated so much blowback. I'll read it.
Sermons that end with statements like we are called to be the hungry celebrate inclusivity seek justice and so on or self-defeating When sermons end that way here's feel defeated and powerless except of course the few who are already doing whatever it is Then and can then feel superior for that reason hortatory sermons are the least inclusive sermons. They are divisive sermons in the mode of promise in power Every hearer should feel a promise has been made to them by God unlike us
God keeps his promises. People didn't like that. Well, gosh, I start to stand by that. I do too. I don't really understand why people, I don't understand why people are not thrilled to hear that God's grace is utterly unconditional. I would think people would be thrilled to hear that. But the people who, I don't want to sound putting down the people I'm talking about. So I have to be very careful about that because I realize that all of us are trapped in some frame of mind or another. I'm trapped in certain frames of mind and I wish I were not. It causes me a great deal of distress and anxiety to be trapped in a certain frame of mind for my whole life. So I have to be sympathetic to people who have a different kind of entrapment.
But we don't have to encourage it. As preachers and teachers of the faith, we don't have to encourage this idea that unless people are told what they ought to do, they will somehow become worse. Making life into an anxious slog is not what the gospel is supposed to be. The gospel is empowerment. Imagine, for instance, working with a hoarder. You are the pastor of a woman who is a hoarder. And you go over and you help her clean up. And then within a month or so, it's back to the way it was before. Hoarding is notoriously difficult to treat. So you say, well, why don't you just...
These kinds of approaches always begin with, why don't you just, why don't you just get rid of the things you want and that you really need and get rid of the things you don't really need. And then you go back a month later and it's back to the same situation. I would like to have a dollar for every time a person has said to me about my procrastination and forgetfulness and absent-mindedness. Why don't you just make a list? What a brilliant suggestion.
Make a list. I have lists all over my house. I lose the list. Did they think I hadn't thought of that? To me, that's what an auditory sermon is, is like being told, just make a list. Just get out there and feed the hungry, get out there and, you know, eliminate racism, just do it. No, it's not that easy. Maybe it's easy for the person speaking. The person speaking maybe is not absent minded. The person speaking may not be a hoard or a procrastinator. So that person can take a lofty and superior stance over against the procrastinator and the hoarder and the drunkard and so on, because he or she is free from these things. But if you know that you're not free from these things except in God, then you don't take the superior position of being able to exhort other people. Now the kind of exhortation that works, I would say isn't really exhortation, but the kind that works is the sort of thing that Martin Luther King used to do. I guess in a way you could call that hortatory, I guess. But it really wasn't. He was channeling power in his great sermons. He wasn't exhorting people to go out and demonstrate. He was empowering people for the struggle. It's quite different from exhortation.
You know, that's really something that person who said grace is conditional. That I think I'll probably will quote that for the rest of my life as an example of what we've gotten ourselves into as the church. What would you say to Christians and pastors who want to push back on what they would perceive as a dualistic worldview that your apocalyptic perspective brings?
Well, it's not dualistic in the true sense of the term dualism. Zoroastrianism was a true dualism. Christianity is not a true dualism because the two powers are not equal. The struggle that goes on between the people of God and the powers of evil is not an equal struggle. It certainly seems to be. Sometimes it seems to be equal in the sense that the demonic powers are stronger.
But they're certainly stronger than we are, but they're not stronger than God. And to people who question this, we just pointed to the New Testament. Jesus came exorcising demons. That's one of the things he did. One of the most important things that he did. Always talking about how Jesus came to heal the sick and raise the lowly and minister to the lost.
I don't mean that to sound sarcastic, I'm sorry. A different tone of voice. Jesus came to heal the sick. He came to seek the lost. He came to raise up those who have fallen. All of this is central to his ministry, but Jesus also came to drive out Satan, and he did exorcisms. And the New Testament is permeated with language about the adversary the evil one, Satan, the devil, the Elzebub, the prince of the power of the El, the ruler of this world. Even Christmas carols, as far as the curse is found, what would it, God rest you, Mary Edelman. Oh, it's all, I've made a study of that and I made a long list, I think it's probably in the Advent book, where I went through all the collection of hymns that I have, which is vast. And the references to death and sin and darkness and evil and Satan and so forth are manifold throughout the history of Christmas carol writing until the 19th century comes to an abrupt end and does not recover. It's really interesting to listen to the medieval carols and their words.
I think it's probably 18th or 19th century, sounds like it, but it does say that Jesus has come to rescue us from Satan's power. When we were going astray. That's the gospel. You really can't talk about the gospel in biblical terms unless you talk about Satan, about evil, about the demonic powers. But not evil is something out there. Has nothing to do with me personally because I'm such a good person.
Evil is insidious. It's out there and it's in here. Oath. And we all must struggle with it all day, every day of our lives. And anyone who thinks that he or she doesn't have to struggle every day against the power of the evil one is sadly mistaken and placing his or her power somehow, however subtly in his or her own capacity to overcome the powers of sin and death. The whole message of everything Paul ever wrote is that we cannot do it by ourselves. Something has to be undertaken from outside this mortal sphere, and that is what God has done. God has undertaken to invade the occupied territory with His annihilating power except that the annihilating power does not annihilate. It only annihilates the demonic powers. It does not annihilate the victims of the demonic powers, that is to say you and me. But the idea that there is some good place inside of us that we can reach if only we can dig down deep enough, this idea of going inside to find the kingdom of God is a very serious misreading the New Testament. There isn't any place, there is no component of the human being that has not been tainted by the reign of sin and death. That's the original meaning and the best meaning of Calvin's much misunderstood idea of total depravity. It doesn't mean that we're totally depraved in the way that we would understand that phrase. What it means is that we cannot expect to find some pure and uncontaminated part of ourselves which we can then nurture and bring into being in order to overcome the forces that are set against our flourishing. That's not the way it happens. Although so many people think it is, it's just rampant in the atmosphere of people believing that there is some preserved inner core of ourselves that if it can only be reached, that can be our salvation. The gospel is that we were dead in our sins, but God, who is rich in mercy, has sent his Son Jesus Christ to deliver us from this dominion of darkness confuses in the gospel as a message about what God has done versus defining that preaching the gospel as saying the things that Jesus said? Well, yes, I think you understand well enough the way I think that you can say things that I would say sometimes better than I would say them. Yes, I do harp on this quite a lot that sermons like the Bible are based in what God has done. The story of the Bible is the story of what God has done, who God is and what God has done. It's not a story about human potential. It's not a story about human possibility. With men it is impossible, but all things are possible with God, said the son of God. I think that might be quoted a lot more often than it is quoted, because we really want to believe in possibility.
Jesus flat out declares it impossible. With humans it is impossible, but all things are possible with God. Maybe we should make that verse central to our preaching. Just a thought. Yeah, I love talking to you, Jason, because we do seem to think similarly about these matters. I really try to be patient and understanding when people talk about how important it is to emphasize what we should be doing. When I try to do that in my preaching and teaching, I try to give examples of what we can do. I think that is more helpful in the long run than telling people what they should do. Give examples of what other people have done. There are so many stories in just the daily news. And I don't think you get this so much on television, although some, you have the CNN heroes, those are good examples. Although some of those people seem beyond my can. I can't imagine being as energetic in well-doing as they are. I admire it tremendously. But it has also often been said that it takes a saint to live with a saint. And I just think holding up saints to be examples is not very productive. Saints in quotation marks, because of course, speaking from the point of view of the New Testament, we're all saints and sinners at the same time. Simul pe car to'a eustis. And that's very comforting, I think. Forever holding up people like St. Francis and St. Teresa and Mother Teresa I meant, Saint Teresa too. Holding them up as examples that we're supposed to emulate is not helpful in my opinion. They had their struggles too and that should be, and Saint Francis is not just somebody who went around preaching to birds. There's a lot more to him than that. He's been sent a mental think, oh, St. Francis, isn't he wonderful? Who's going to be like St. Francis? Who's going to give up every single thing and embrace poverty? It's just not realistic. I think it's important in preaching to give accessible examples, little things that anyone can do so as to help people understand that the little things they do can be enormously important.
I think that's much more effective than exhorting people. Because to give an illustration, specific and concrete illustration, like the illustration I love about the people who went and put menorahs in their window after their neighbor's menorah was destroyed, something like that, just a little thing. But it had to took some energy and some imagination to get those menorahs in the windows the next day as a protest against anti-Semitism.
It's not as if we all have to suddenly give up and give up our livelihoods and our families and go overseas to address anti-Semitism. So what are you hoping for this Christmas? You mean me personally or? Both. Well, every year I just hope, you know, I hope the same thing everybody hopes for Christmas. I hope we get through it and I hope we get through it without fights.
That's what I hope. And probably my husband and I were sitting at the dinner table last night praying that we could get through Christmas without any fights, family fights. It's just Christmas tends to be disappointing. Invest it with non-theological significance. I mean, that's kind of an Advent theme too, though, that our expectations for Christmas never quite measure up. Our expectations are poorly conceived.
They're not, they're conceived with a distorted and sentimental view of human nature. The same could be said for how we enter marriage. Oh, indeed. Oh my goodness. So, oh Lord, that is a perfect example of the way we walk into things with rosy spectacles on and expect things to stay that way. It's really, we really are pitiful creatures.
And we do it over and over and over and over and over. But Advent is training. It is a training ground for the church in which the church disciplines itself to look at the darkness and identify inside oneself and outside oneself, to look at the news or read the paper. Who reads the paper today? Only people over 80, I think.
But I think it's very important to read newspapers and to read analytical articles about what's going on instead of just getting it on cable television. It's so important to step away from cable television and read something more in depth. That's where you get a sense of the intractability of sin and death in the world. And you are summoned to focus intellectually and emotionally on the terrible mess that we're in the world. Everywhere you look. The New York Times also has inserted into its pages a section, let me see if I can find it. No, it's only once a week. It's good news of the week. And it's practically obvious that they're concerned about the fact that there's nothing but bad news. So they have good news of the week and they list 10 things and they amount to things like this baby elephant born or something equally trivial. I mean, it really is kind of pathetic. They can't seem to think of anything that's really good to talk about. And it's sort of pathetic that they have to have a special section of good news to counteract an entire newspaper for sections of bad news. I do think, here's an example that I would celebrate. The Nobel Peace Prize this year went to a group of women who have worked hard to declare, I'm not quite clear about the details, but they have worked hard to raise the definition of rape, especially in war, rape is a weapon of war. They have worked hard to bring attention to this. And just by paying attention to this, we can participate in their work just by even mentioning the fact. A lot of people probably don't realize that these women have won the Nobel Peace Prize. We can participate in some small way just by paying attention to that, to what they're doing. Acknowledging it, taking an interest in it, doesn't mean we have to go out and become rape counselors, but the fact that they have taken up arms, figuratively speaking against this terrible weapon of war is encouraging. That's an example of something that's encouraging as long as it's not cast into, in the terms of you should do exactly what they're doing. No, we can not do what exactly what they're doing, but we can do small things. And by the way, when I just said we can do small things, I think that's not the same thing as exhortation. That's more of a declarative statement, an indicative statement as opposed to an imperative.
That's helpful. Well, I hope so because it's really a problem for preachers and it's a problem for biblical interpretation and for the church in general. There's such a gulf in the church. I just find it almost unbearable to see how far apart we are and how people of goodwill have misunderstood each other and had contempt for one another and written one another off, really.
It's just, it's grievous, it's heartbreaking to see the church, to see that it happened like this. It wasn't so obvious in the past as it is now with the prosperity gospel reigning over so much of what we call Christchurch. And with the liberal churches, what shall I say, the churches that are so committed.
I'm deeply committed to social justice. I write about it and talk about it all and read about it all the time. But it's not in and of itself the gospel. And many of the mainline churches have made it the gospel. And they talk all the time about being inclusive, but they're not including me. Even though I have worked very hard to make social justice prominent in my preaching and teaching, that's not good enough for the...typical mainline church. You have to do it more, or you have to do it in a different way, or you have to include every conceivable issue and have a position of political correctness on every single issue. It's very discouraging. We're not trying to understand each other. Well, this is an Advent situation. So we go into Christmas damaged. We go into Christmas, as C.S. Lewis said, bent. We go into Christmas...as broken, sinful, outrageously sinful people who have contempt for one another. And we put other people into niches and boxes and prisons and places where we think they belong because we are so high-minded. It's just endemic in human nature to be like that. We should go into Christmas understanding that and then we see what God has done.
When Jesus was born, he was born into Adam, as Paul says. He was born as the second Adam to participate in Adam's servitude and Adam's bondage and Adam's utter desolation and inability to help himself. And of course, I'm speaking of Adam metaphorically, Adam and Eve, they are us, they are us.
And Jesus takes on our lives, the second Adam, and lives it from beginning to end as God, the right way, as the one whom God created to be an image of himself. Jesus taking the entire race of Adam into himself and offering it up to Satan and emerging victorious. As a Christmas hymn, I can't remember how to quote it about Christ taking on Adam's helpless race, that's us. God helps those who help themselves, no. He took on Adam's helpless race. That's exactly what Christmas is. And if we think of ourselves as making the world a better place to live, then we don't need Christmas. We can just have commercial Christmas. That's a good place to end. I've been told that when you don't pray at the end of our episodes, people feel cheated. So if you could pray:
O God, our Heavenly Father, we come before you in this latter part of the Advent season, knowing ourselves to be enslaved by sin and by the powers of death. Accept, accept, O Lord, for the great but. We were enslaved by sin and death. But now.
We are no longer slaves, but free. Free in our knowledge of the future of your son and his kingdom. Make us citizens of that kingdom, Lord. Take hold of us in our darkness, in our fear, in our culpability, our mutual culpability. Take hold of us, Lord. Turn our face to the light, the light that comes at the end of all time and all that is, to remake your entire creation into a new order, a new order of love, grace, mercy, transformation and eternal citizenship in your presence. Lord, make the city of God so real to us that we can slog through our days with what Christians call hope. The hope that is beyond hope, the hope that places all its resources in the promises that you have made to us in your beloved son. Grant, Lord, that we may not fear to look at the darkness and take an inventory of it and say to ourselves, this Lord is what you came to conquer and banish forever. And so in this time between, this time between the first coming of our Lord Jesus in humility and his second coming in majesty and glory, let us live in this present time according to our citizenship in that future time, our merits, but placing ourselves entirely in your hands as recipients of the grace which has no conditions whatsoever, except your eternal love. In the name and in the power of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.
December 20, 2023
Abstinence: 99.99999% Effective
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Matthew 1.18-2.2
Many Christmases ago, after feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and singing “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Silent Night” service after service after service and after having a distracted parent spill hot wax on my hand, service after service after service, on Christmas morning Ali and I took our boys into New York City to see the tree in Rockefeller Center and to gaze into the windows on 34th Street and to run after the boys as they ran wide-eyed through FAO Schwarz.
We were nearly there, nearly into the city, at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, on the Jersey side, when outside my window I spotted a large billboard depicting the manger and the magi making their way by the star over Bethlehem.
Only on this billboard were the words:
“You KNOW it’s a MYTH.”“This season celebrate REASON.”Just so you didn’t miss the point as you sped by into the city, “Reason” and “Myth” were spelled out in all caps on the billboard.
My son, Gabriel, saw it, or saw me staring at it. He pointed at it through the window and asked me what it said.
“It says atheists are irritating, unimaginative killjoys.”
Yet too young to read, Gabriel nodded his head and said, “That’s what I thought.”
The Lincoln Tunnel billboard I later learned (thanks to Google and NPR) had been paid for by the American Atheists Association, whose president, David Silverman explained the billboard as an attempt to encourage atheists to come out of the closet. “Many people do not actually believe in God but go through the motions of religious practice,” Silverman said in an interview, “Plus, every year, atheists get blamed for having a war on Christmas, even if we don't do anything so this year, we decided to show Christians what a war on Christmas looks like.”
Paul Myers at Science Blog applauded the American Atheists Association “bold billboard,” saying he hoped not only that it would “silence preachers all across the land” but that it would “sting Christians and stir up a little resentment among them by reminding Christians that not everyone can follow the same path to God as them. Not everyone can come to a belief in something like the Christmas story. Belief doesn’t come easy for some people.”
Leave it to a dues-paying atheist to believe it’s somehow news that it’s difficult for folks to believe the Christmas story. Only someone who never goes to church would suppose that card-carrying members of the Christian faith don’t still struggle with that faith.
I’ve been preaching Advents and Christmases for almost twenty years now, and every year at this time more than a few pew sitters ask me about the historicity, about the truth, of the virgin birth.
Sometimes it’s a life-long question for a doubting pilgrim. Sometimes it’s a point of argument for a hardened skeptic. Sometimes it’s an intellectual hurdle for a student just home from college armed with just enough philosophy to innoculate them against the real thing.
Sometimes it’s a question from someone at a holiday cocktail party, someone I’ve never met, someone who finds out, despite my subterfuge, that I’m not an architect after all that I’m a pastor and then is determined to be a pain-in-my-you-know-what and asks me like I’m as dumb as potted plant or a member of congress: “Do you really believe in the virgin birth?”
I can see alot from up here in the pulpit, and, over the years, I’ve spotted more than few pairs of fingers— some tiny and smooth and many wrinkled like paper and bruised from blood thinner— get crossed when it comes to that part of the creed, “I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.”
“Do Christians really expect right-thinking people to believe in something as preposterous as Jesus being born of a virgin?” David Silverman asked a reporter. It seemed not to occur to the president of the American Atheists Association that the angel’s news would have been every bit as unbelievable and preposterous for Mary.
And Joseph.
In Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph is the first person to learn that Isaiah’s 800 year old promise would finally come to pass in a much less tidy and much more complicated way than Isaiah ever let on. Joseph is the first person to hear the news that God had decided to trade in his power and might for diapers and a bottle. He’s the first person to realize that his fiance would never be able to prove how it happened exactly. He’s the first person to know that it had nothing whatsoever to do with him.
And Joseph is the first person to struggle with believing that abstinence only works 99.99999% of the time.Matthew reports in his nativity narrative that upon hearing the news of Mary’s pregnancy “Joseph resolved to dismiss Mary quietly...” Matthew leaves it to us to imagine just how long it must’ve taken Joseph to come to that decision.
But it’s not like Joseph’s happy about it.
The word in the next verse, where Matthew writes “But just when Joseph had considered to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream,” the word “consider” in the Greek comes from the root word thymos.
It can mean “to ponder” as in “to consider” or it can mean “to become angry.”
It’s the same word Matthew uses in the very next chaprter to describe King Herod’s infanticidal rage when he learns the magi have escaped and returned home by another road.
It’s the same word Luke uses right after his nativity story when he describes how the congregation in Nazareth reacts to Jesus’ first sermon by trying to kill Jesus.
Joseph’s initial response to the annunciation is anger.Why is he angry?
Because prior to the angel appearing to him, Joseph only had Mary’s testimony.
Joseph only had Marys’ word to go on, and Joseph did not believe her. Joseph did not believe in the virgin birth. Joseph did not believe the word was made flesh in Mary; therefore, Joseph knew what the word required Joseph to do with Mary.
Matthew says that Joseph was a “righteous man.”
In Hebrew the term is tsadiq.
And it’s not just an adjective for someone. By calling Joseph a righteous man, Matthew’s not simply saying that Joseph was a good man or a moral man or even a God-fearing man.
Tsadiq in Matthew’s day was a formal label. An official title. Tsadiq was a term that applied to those rare people who studied and learned and practiced the Torah scrupulously, applying it to every nook and cranny of life.
When Matthew tells you that Joseph was a tsadiq, he’s telling you that Joseph knew what the Law required he do with Mary. Dismissing her quietly was no more an option for a righteous man under the Law than healing on the sabbath.In Mary and Joseph’s day, betrothal was a binding, legal contract. Only the wedding ceremony itself remained. Mary and Joseph weren’t simply fiancees. For all intents and purposes, they were husband and wife. For that reason, according to the Law, unfaithfulness during the engagement period was considered adultery. Actually, according to the Mishna— which is Jewish commentary on the Law— infidelity during betrothal was thought to be a graver sin than infidelity during marriage.
According to the Book of Deuteronomy, Joseph must take Mary to the door of her father’s house and accuse her publicly of adultery. If Mary doesn’t deny the charge, then the priests and elders of Nazareth will stone her to death.
That’s what the Law commands.
Of course, if Mary does protest, if she denies that she’s sinned, if she’s foolish enough to tell people something as ridiculous as her child being conceived by the Holy Spirit, then Joseph, as a tsadiq, certainly knows what course of action the Torah requires.
According to the Book of Numbers, Joseph is commanded to take Mary before a priest, who will compel Mary to stand before the Lord. The priest will pour holy water into a clay jar. Then the priest will sweep up the dirt from the synagogue floor and pour it into the jar of water. Then the priest will write and read out the accusation against her. Finally the priest will take the accusation and the ink in which it was written and mix them into the water and then command Mary to drink it. The bitter waters.
If it makes her sick, she’s guilty and she’ll be stoned to death.
If somehow it does not make her ill, then she’s innocent.
Her life will be spared though, in Mary’s case, her life still will be ruined because she’s pregnant and Joseph’s not the father. She will be considered an outcast on par with lepers and tax collectors and shepherds. And as a tsadiq, someone who lives the Law inside and out, Joseph certainly knows her sin will become his sin.
He’ll be an outcast too, righteous no more.
That’s why Joseph’s angry— whether he shows Mary grace or he hammers her with the Law, either way he’ll suffer. He’ll either lose his wife or he’ll lose his life. But it’s a choice— notice— determined by his disbelief.
The Church has never quite known what to make of Joseph, treating him like an extra in a story starring his wife and her child.It’s Mary whose song we hear at Advent. It’s Luke’s Gospel, not Matthew’s, that’s the most popular this time of year. It’s the annunciation to Mary that artists have always chosen to paint. You don’t see many Renaissance paintings of an old man snoring on his sofa as the angel Gabriel whispers Isaiah’s promise into his whiskered ear, which is a shame because, righteousness aside, barring a miracle, Joseph is all of us.
If his mother is his first disciple, then his father is his first doubter.Joseph is the first skeptic.His are the first fingers that get crossed at the news of the virgin birth.Prior to the angel of God appearing to him, Joseph distrusts her.
Joseph is a red-letter righteous man, but before God’s messenger brings him the news, Joseph doubts the Christmas Gospel. That is, it takes a revelation of God— a revelation from God— for Joseph to have faith in the news of Mary’s pregnancy ex nihilo. This is why we shouldn’t get too hung up crossing our fingers over that clause in the creed about the virgin birth.
Every little mustard seed of faith is a virgin birth.God creates Jesus ex nihilo, but God also creates your trust in Jesus ex nihilo.Joseph is the model for how God works faith in us. Joseph’s asleep. Joseph’s completely passive, as cooperative as a corpse. And from nothing, God implants faith in Joseph’s heart through his ear; such that, when Joseph wakes up he does the very opposite of what he had previously determined to do. God burrows into Joseph’s heart through his earballs. Only then can Joseph profess, “I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.”
The Small Catechism (a catechism for children) explains the work of God the Holy Spirit this way:
Faith, the Bible says again and again, is a gift.“I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel.”
It’s not an attribute innate to you. It’s not an accomplishment won by you. It’s not an answer you arrive at through investigation. It’s a gift— extra nos— that comes from outside of you.
Faith comes by hearing a promise, the Bible says.
The Gospel is the promise by which Christ plants faith in you.
Promises like this is my body broken for you, this day in the city of David a savior is born for you, a promise like the one we sing in the carol, “Child for us sinners, poor and in the manger.”
The promise called Gospel is the device by which Christ delivers faith into the empty womb of your heart.
This is what David Silverman at the American Atheists Association gets so wrong. Unbelief in the Gospel is our natural predisposition. Apart from the gracious work of the Living God upon us, all of us believers in the Gospel teeter on the verge of unbelief. It’s not that Christian faith is easy. It’s that it’s harder than even atheists imagine.
To believe that the baby in the ark of Mary’s womb is the Maker of Heaven and Earth, to believe that Jesus has wrapped himself in our flesh and through his body and blood has done everything necessary to save you and make you holy, to believe that he will come again, bearing your every sin in his body, to make you his own beloved— that sort of faith is no easier for us than it was for Joseph. That sort of faith— it takes an act of God.
It’s not that Christians are trodding a path up to God that others with their reason and doubts cannot abide. There is no path to God for any of us— that’s the point of this season. God, Zechariah reminded us this morning and the Christmas carols remind us year after year, must come down to us.
And that’s why, contrary to the American Atheists Association’s stated desire, all of us preachers— you and me— we cannot be silent. Because the Word that took flesh in Mary’s womb, comes down to us still in the lowly manger of ordinary words and, apart from the auditory assault of God in his promise called the Gospel, we’d all be atheists.
I didn’t seen it until we were leaving the city, on our way home. On the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel was another billboard, another nativity image, put there by some evangelical group.
This one said: “It’s true.”
Gabriel saw that one too and said “Look, it’s the same picture.”
And I said “No, that one’s different.”
“What’s the difference between them?” he asked.
“A miracle,” I said.
When it comes to that miracle—
Maybe you’re still clutching an IOU from God. Maybe it feels like porch pirates stole it right underneath your nose because the gift for you still hasn’t arrived. Maybe Christmas is a time when you think everyone else here has it all together and you’re the only one with more questions than clarity.
So remember, Joseph is the model. And neither Joseph’s faith nor his doubt changes anything from God’s side. Joseph’s belief in the incarnation does not activate anything in God that wasn’t already true just as Joseph’s disbelief did not negate what God was already up to in the world for him. The Holy Spirit had already overshadowed Mary whether Joseph believed it or not. God had already taken flesh in Mary’s womb— even if Joseph doubted it, God had already determined to become Jesus and in Christ’s body and blood to die for Joseph’s sins and be raised up from the dead for his justification.
It’s all already true.
The only thing Joseph’s faith in it changes is Joseph— his life.
By believing in it, Joseph gets to share his life up close with Christ.
May God wind his way to your heart through your ear whether your fingers are crossed or not. Hear the good news. The great good news of the Gospel is that God has already decided to do something about our lives— whether we let him into our lives or not— whether we do anything about it or not, whether we believe it or not. He has sent his Son to live for us the faithful life we cannot live and to die for us the sacrifice we cannot offer and raise us up with him forever.
That’s really good news!
And believing it is what makes all the difference in our lives.
Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app
December 18, 2023
In Him There is No Darkness At All
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“I wonder how many of us do talk just in a simple way about loving Jesus.”
Glad Advent, Friends—
From the vault for you brood of vipers, I have a conversation I shared with my mentor and muse, Fleming Rutledge, back in Advent 2021.
Here is her closing prayer:
Thank you Lord Jesus for these promises, for these assurances. For these...it's not just an invitation, it's an assurance Lord. I hear you making...
Your voice known to all who will listen and sometimes to people who won't listen because you have that power. Speak today, tomorrow night, Christmas Day. Speak, speak Lord.
Come close to us. Shake us out of our disbelief, our lethargy, our depression. bring us, O Lord, into your light and let the festivities of the season point us to you, to your glory, the glories of your righteousness and wonders of your love.
Let us know you, Lord Jesus. Love you, come to you, seek you, and find you.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen.
Get more from Jason Micheli in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the appHere’s a rough transcript:
Fleming, it is a delight to have you on the podcast again. We heard from thousands of listeners demanding that you return. And so having you on again is an early Christmas gift. And we are talking the day before Christmas, which puts us during the week focused on hell during Advent, right before the light dawning on Christmas Eve.
The world seems a pretty dark place in many cases. I know many churches in my area have decided not to have in-person Christmas Eve services after all. Oh, no. There's all sorts of climate change stories in the news. Inflation is up. The January 6th committee has grim news every day. It's...
This Christmas seems darker than normal. And so I wonder, this has been a major theme in your preaching and writing. And so I wonder what thoughts you have this year.
Jason, I couldn't agree more with your assessment of the situation that we're in. I was alive during World War II, much too young to really understand the gravity of the situation, but it's hard for me to imagine a darker time in my sentient lifetime than we are in now. I have highlighted in my thinking three areas in which I think we are in great, great danger. So I will have those sort of at the forefront of my mind as we talk. And the first is climate change. And I will say that as a lifelong, well, adult life anyway, an adult lifelong convert to the importance of doing something rescue our planet from the ravages we've wrought upon it. I speak with considerable background when I say that the article that shook me up the most in the last two weeks was the front page article in the New York Times about the Ant-Octid current and how vital it is to the Earth and how disturbed it is. That shook me up more than any other single story.
And just our general heedlessness is almost indescribable. A lot of us recycle and a lot of us are careful about what we buy, but the greater forces that are at work among us are stronger than we are as little individuals. So climate change, number one. Number two, racial division. I'm so grieved about this because the black church can be faulted for many things as all church groups can be, but they continue to produce people who are released from prison after 20 or 30 years of being incarcerated for crimes they did not commit and they come out in a state of forgiveness. Now I just don't understand that. That is a miracle homage to the black church for the fact that we are not all cowering in our closets for fear of being shot by a rebellious force. I just don't understand how the black community goes on being so focused on redemption, but they do. And then third, the whole matter of truth.
Never in my lifetime have I ever heard people talking about your truth and my truth. And now we hear this all the time. So-and-so is going to speak their truth. He is going to speak his truth, as though the truth were simply an individual matter for self-determination. This is preposterous and it's scary. Yeah. And the whole matter of something…some huge percentage of Republicans are said to believe that Biden was not elected. I find that hard to believe, but I keep reading it again and again. And the whole QAnon conspiracy and all the related conspiracies that we're hearing about, just the mindset. It's the mindset that's so frightening because once a whole group of people is persuaded that there are various types of conspiracies.
That's an intoxicating idea. People like that feeling that they know about a conspiracy. And it's very, very difficult to convince people. That's a form of narcissism. Oh, good point, Jason. Yes, we know the secret. We are part of the inner circle who know. That's what narcissism is. Good for you. That is a great insight. I hadn't thought of it that way.
And that's been the enemy of the Christian faith since day one. As we know from reading some of the epistles, Gnosticism was there at the beginning. And the conspiracy theories are very much like that. They confer status on those who are in the know. And I don't mean to sound contemptuous of that because I know people that I like personally who are into conspiracy theories. And it dismayes me because it's very hard to argue with them.
Yeah, I think I read this. This is the 30th anniversary of this is the 30th anniversary of JFK, the Oliver Stone's JFK film, actually. The 30th anniversary of what? Oliver Stone's movie, JFK. Oh, which I have never seen, but I gather it's full of conspiracies. Isn't that right? Yes. Yes. Yeah, it was founded on a whole conspiratorial idea, as I recall. Yes, he was fond of that. So those three.
The categories, climate, race, and truth are just three that I would like to highlight as being not unique to our time, but uniquely rampant and dangerous. I've been reading a biography of, the biography of Alexander Hamilton, and it's eerie how many echoes there are in the very, very early days of our republic of the kinds of things that are happening now and how alarmed Hamilton, especially, but other founders, were about the shaky foundations of our democracy. It's eerie to read today these pages. And when we think of the triumph of our Constitution over the last 200 plus years and think that all of a sudden we're not so sure that it will hold.
I didn't pay any attention to those, to people who said that at first, but when I started reading about all this redistricting and just the fact that Congress people now feel that they have the right to insult each other and refer to each other as liars, I never thought I would see that day. So it's a...
And then there's another factor. And yeah, I'm speaking directly, I think, to most of your listeners, if that's what a podcast person is. We are, I guess, mostly Christian believers or would-be believers or hoping to be believers or considering the possibility of being believers. And presumably many of you listening congregations or some kind of Christian community. I hope you are anyway. And the church can do so much more than it's doing to testify to the light in the midst of this darkness. And so I hope in the minutes we have to talk about how Jesus is light and how the Christmas message teaches us that how we can pay more attention than we usually do to what it means to say that Jesus is light, the light, the light that lightens every man, I'm quoting the King James, sorry, the light that lightens every man and woman and child. Oh, my goodness. I'm starting to get lost.
I was just going to raise a quote from the Epistle of James where we read that, in him there is no darkness at all. Maybe we could just hold that for a minute. In him there is no darkness at all. I think that we all need to think deeply, and by all I mean Christians of all stripes, need to be thinking, rethinking that we are related to Jesus Christ. I had a visitor from England, Sarah Yardley, last week, and she speaks openly of loving Jesus. And I was struck by that because I don't hear that all that often. Maybe I'm in the wrong circles. The direct way of speaking of love for Jesus grabbed me and I think we need to think more about loving Jesus and loving our love for Jesus. Excuse me, Jason? Is it in the friendly beef carol that refers to Jesus as our brother, strong and good? I'm not sure. Tell me. I know it's in one of the carols that refers to Jesus as our brother. I can't recall which...
Well, I can't at the moment either. I've got some carols to refer to here, but that one I don't remember that one. But I'm sure you're right, of course, but I just can't pull it up. She spoke of how she's one of seven children, Sarah Yardley. And she said, we all love each other and we all love Jesus. And that simple statement struck me. I wonder how many of us do talk just in a simple way about loving Jesus.
I wonder if I do. I wonder if I talk about that enough. I think my grandmother, who I talk about all the time, and her daughter, Mary B, I talk about them because they are the ones who taught me to love Jesus. If it hadn't been for them, in my very youngest years, three, four, five, six, I don't think I would have had this feeling of Jesus as a real, live person, the way I do.
And I think it's because they talked about him as a real living, present person who could be loved and who loved me. And I think we need to talk more in that way. Because Christian says…is about perceiving his living presence.
Day in and day out, throughout darkness, throughout perplexity, throughout danger. I didn't even mention the coronavirus. The coronavirus is such a blunt instrument of Satan. He keeps changing its shape and popping up here and popping up there. And we think we have a handle on it and we don't. It's really devilish didn't even mention that. We will probably get through the plague eventually, although they say it'll always be with us like the flu. But there's not as much that we can do about that as there is that I think we can do about the climate. I think there's a lot we can do about the climate, and we're not doing it. I think there's a lot we can do about the truth. I think there's a lot we can do about racial division.
And I think the churches need to be the front line. And I just don't see it happening. I think people, church leaders, are afraid of digging deeply into these crises unless it's just done. I don't want to be misunderstood here. I started to say superficial. And I don't mean that. I mean if a church, for instance, if a congregation goes all out for combating climate change. That's a good thing, a very good thing. But the trouble is that churches who essentially present as being various, as being in favor of various initiatives, whether it's Rainbow Coalition or climate change or Black Lives Matter, all these are important
But when the churches present themselves to the world as being essentially social agencies, who's talking about loving the living Lord? Jesus is not just a man who happened to be more religiously and spiritually gifted than other human beings. He was God incarnate.
He was the living Word of God tabernacling among us.
And I'd like to call attention to the hymns and carols of Christmas, because I don't have hearing anymore. But my hearing is so distorted now that I can't listen to music at all, which is a terrible affliction, I can tell you. But the only time I do listen to music in my car, I have a couple of recordings of Christmas carols. And I put them on in the car. And instead of listening to them, sing them loudly so as to drown out the discordant sounds coming from the disc. And I do know all the words, and because I know all the words, I can focus on the words and what they mean, and it just jumps out at me over and over and over again these wonderful words. For instance, in the bleak midwinter, Christina Rossetti, who was a deeply faithful Christian woman.
She writes this verse, our God, heaven cannot hold him, nor earth sustain. Heaven and earth shall flee away when he comes to reign. The hymn begins in the bleak midwinter, this baby is born, and we listen always, I think, to the first verse. Most of us know the first verses of all these songs.
But it's in the second, third, fourth, and fifth, and sixth verses that the deep theology comes out over and over and over again. And I'd like to urge everyone who might be listening at this time of year to pay attention to all the words of these carols. For instance, everybody I think who knows anything about English church music knows the hymn once in Royal David's...because it's the one that the boy soprano always sings at the outset of the Christmas carol service, and everyone is oohing and awing about how adorable he is and how he didn't know he was supposed to be singing until the last minute and all that kind of thing. And so they know the first verse, Once in Royal David's City, but they don't listen or know to listen to the words of the last two verses. I'd like to read them.
There are three or four or five, there's four verses about the birth and the wonder of the birth. And then the fifth and the sixth verses, which are very short, go like this. And our eyes at last shall see him through his own redeeming love. For that child who seems so helpless is our Lord in heaven above. And he leads his children on to the place where he has gone.
Not in that poor, lowly stable with the oxen standing round shall we see him, but in heaven, where his saints his throne surround, Christ revealed to faithful eye, set at God's right hand on high." Now that's an amazing, just as I read it I was thinking, this is amazing. This little ditty that people think belongs to children's choirs ends with this eschatological vision. And it takes aim almost at the stable and the oxen. Not literally, of course, but I mean it just says, look, if you're looking at the stable and the crush and the oxen and all that, just remember we're going to see him in heaven at God's right hand on high.
Friends in Christ, always to be reminded and to remind others that this is what we see. Now, that doesn't mean that we skip over the wonder of the incarnation. But too many sermons that I hear, at least at Christmas time, stop there. They talk about the wonder of babyhood.
Christmas service in a famous church and a preacher started the sermon by telling the story of the birth of his own child. And it was very elaborate and very long. And it was just very disappointing because there was no elevated Christology in it. It was just about babyhood and how precious it is, which it is, of course. I love babies. I'm crazy about babies.
But to stop there is to rub that Christmas Eve audience.
of the majesty and glory that has been born among us. There is no darkness in him at all. He was born into darkness and the darkness has not overcome him, cannot overcome him so that when we go out of the church, into the dark, we shouldn't go out carrying this notion that a precious little baby was born and there were nice animals and shepherds. That's all true. I love the story, but the story is told by the evangelists in the service of the greater message. And that reminds me of...one of the most remarkable verses in the Christmas music. Let me see. I'm looking for it. Oh, yes, I think most people know the first Noel. And I remember as a child liking the idea of going up high in the last repetition of the word Noel. I'm not trying to try to sing it.
But that was kind of a fun thing. It was like waiting for the high note of, oh, holy night. So the First Noel is pretty popular. And I think almost everybody knows the chorus, maybe the first verse. But listen to this last verse of the First Noel. Then let us all, with one accord, sing praises to our heavenly Lord that has made heaven and earth of naught and with his blood mankind has bought." Now just imagine that if everyone who was singing the first Noel really paid attention to the last verse, a lot of people would have to stop singing because they just don't believe that. But others might be someone to understand what it is we are celebrating. Now let's do this again.
Sing praises to our heavenly Lord that hath made heaven and earth of naught." Now that can mean two different things. It means that heaven and earth, which are part of the creation, are really, in a sense, nothing because He is the one who holds creation, heaven and earth, at His will. And so, compared to the...everlasting being of God, Heaven and Earth, or not much. But it meant something even more profound. It means that He made Heaven and Earth of nothing, of naught. The famous doctrine of creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing, which is stated so magnificently by Paul in Romans 4. I'm not going to be able to quote it right now. This is my age showing. But at the end of that, in Romans, you can.
Well, no, I was. So since you were quoting Christmas carols, I was reading, I was reading a church dogmatics recently and I came across Bart quoting a Christmas carol that I'd never heard of by Paul Gerhart. And it goes, thy love, O Lord, before my birth, thou did elect to show me and for my sake did come to earth before I erred did know thee, yea long before thy gracious hand created me.
Thy grace had planned to make Thee mine forever.
Paul Gerhardt must have been one of the great hymn writers of all time. I wish we had more of his work. Maybe he's in the Lutheran hymn more than he is in ours. I only became aware of Paul Gerhardt fairly recently, but he must have been one of the very best. Of course, it always loses a lot in translation, but that's a good, that's a great example of the way that he apparently, from what I've been able to pick up is able to bring the deepest theology into these simple verses. I would like to remind everyone that for those who will be in church on Christmas Eve, and I don't know how many people will be able to do that, but for those who are all who are worshiping online, most services, at least in the circles I move in, are singing, Oh come all ye faithful at the beginning of the service. And for those like Episcopalians who sing all the verses. There's so much, there's Nazian doctrine in the, in, oh come all ye faithful, begotten, not created. Now people sing that and they don't know what they're saying because they haven't had a chance to be taught or learn it. Jesus is begotten, not created, that's a way of saying this is the Son of God. He was not a creature of God. He is God, therefore unbegotten. And that's a sophisticated point that was made in the early Church fathers, but it's just as important today as it was then that Jesus is not a creation of God or derived from God in some way. He was God in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
That's the lesson for Christmas Day, Christmas Morning, Christmas for grownups. But one of my favorite themes for Christmas is I don't know who said this. I don't know whether it was Bart or someone way, way, way back before Bart in the early centuries. That Christmas is the feast of the Nativity dogma.
Now of course that's terrifying to most people, but very off-putting at the very least. But when it's expounded...
It's the greatest news that we have ever heard or ever will hear, that God himself has become part of our story in such a world as this. Now that's a line that I just love from the hymn. It's not a hymn, it's more of a carol. Let's see, it's from the winter snow, something about winter snow. Let's see. I've not got it here. I think I can remember it.
The song is called, Be Amidst the Winter Snow. It's on a lot of the English choir carol service albums. And it has this one line that arrests me every time I hear it about how Jesus was born into such a world as this. The rest of the carol is just typical sort of Christmas sea atmosphere. But when it says, born into such a world as this, that brings us, that snaps us back into the darkness in which we must live. This is a world in which we hate each other, tell lies to each other, deceive each other, ravage our planet, divide each other up
Such a world is this, a world in which an innocent person can serve 20 or 30 or 40 years in prison, a world in which the living Son of God is tortured to death in public. Such a world is this.
That's what Advent teaches us, to look at this world and understand the forces of darkness that operate in it.
I was reading this morning about how there have been several initiatives in housing codes to build shelters in the middle of large industrial operations like Amazon's warehouses, where if there's a tornado, people can be sheltered and saved. And the point of the article is that this has been brought up over and over.
But it isn't ever done because it costs too much money. And the companies want to save money. And so these life-saving measures, which is not all that expensive, apparently, only $15,000 to create a shelter, is deemed to be not important. That's just built into the way we operate. It's all about money. It's all about getting the most money out of whatever the situation is that we possibly can. And this is the way business operates for the most part, with some rare exceptions. Same thing with the homeless shelters in New York City, which are mostly run by some other man who is considered the worst landlord in New York City, but he runs all the shelters for the city. It makes sense of that, if you will. It's crazy. It's insane.
It doesn't take much looking to see how much we are in the grip of forces that are greater than we are. This is what Jesus came to suffer. Excuse me, go ahead, please. No, so you're a Calvinist. How would you think or preach about God's providence at Christmas time? Because it does feel as though the world is out of...control.
Well, this is where...
eschatology is so crucial.
Christian faith really requires us, in the last analysis, to hold on to the promise, the promise of God Himself.
That there will come a new day and the city of God will come down from heaven and that God will make his home among human beings and there will be no night there. And there will be no need of any sun for the Lord himself will be their sun. I'm sort of struggling to recover some of the wonderful phrases in the book of Revelation.
Eschatology, a shorter word for it, an easier word, is simply the word promise. And I, over and over and over, recommend to people who are interested, every sermon should contain a promise.
Christmas is a promise. Epiphany coming is a promise. Isn't it something that Epiphany is January 6? From now on, January 6 is going to always be known as the time, the day in which an insurrection occurred in the United States Capitol, January 6, the feast of the Epiphany. And yet Epiphany continues to be a feast of Christ's glory, a feast day in which the promise of God holds stronger than any human reality, any human reality. And the only guarantee that we have of that is faith in the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord and our love for the man Jesus who undertook to make this journey through such a world as this even unto death and abandonment and degradation, humiliation, torture, and the tomb, and raised again on the third day, and never to die again. And death shall have no dominion over him, or over those who belong to him.
I don't know who belongs to him in terms of unbelievers and people who don't know and people who've never heard. I don't know about them because God knows that. But what I do know is that Jesus has promised to those who believe him and believe in him. He has promised the life of the city of God. And you know, one of the famous…
One of the most important themes of the Epiphany season, which begins on January the 6th, is the wedding at Cana. Apparently, not only did Jesus enjoy going to dinners, he went to a lot of dinners, we know that. And he invited his disciples to have dinner with him on the night before he was betrayed, the night that he was betrayed.
But not only that, apparently he also wanted people to have a good time. And he wanted them to have fine wine to drink. And all of this, I think, is reminiscent of the passage in Isaiah where it is promised that God will lay out a feast for his people and the wine will never run out. So when we think about it,
The promise that lies within the Christian message, we think of the adult Jesus working this miracle of the wine at the wedding and it ends this way, the story. And his disciples saw this first sign that Jesus did and they believed in him. They could see that Jesus...held the power of the promise that when he promised something he could make it happen, and that he will make it happen, that he will lay a feast, that will last forever and that he will invite all those who love him into that feast in the middle of the night.
The bridegroom cometh. The great cry at the beginning of Advent, wake, awake, the night is flying. The watchman on the height is crying. Awake, Jerusalem, arise. All of that is present in the Christmas message. And those who have truly observed Advent will appreciate it so much more, and will be strengthened to look ahead to what lies ahead of us, God knows. Every sermon should contain that promise. We're not just talking about wishful thinking here. We're talking about God Almighty in the person of this infant that comes to us incognito. He's still incognito. But those who know Him and love Him...
Recognize, at least from time to time.
Recognize in others who love him. We know him. We knew him. We know him. We wait for him. We trust him.
We love Jesus. We trust Jesus. We wait for Jesus Christ. He will come again.
And in the meantime, he is with us.
In this present darkness.
But I don't want to end there. I want to return to the theme of what the church is called to do and be. I don't think we're doing a very good job of it except in little small nooks and crannies. I think about the church during World War II, the church in Czechoslovakia, the church in East Germany, or just Germany, or East Germany during the communist regime, the church in India today.
That today is on the front page of the New York Times. Christians are being ruthlessly persecuted in India. But on the other hand, in Hungary and in Poland, where Roman Catholicism is a sort of state religion, state religion is holding itself up as a deity greater than God himself.
So we've got two churches here. We've got the martyr church and we've got the dictatorial church, the tyrannical church, the church that oppresses and suppresses and tells lies and won't tell the truth. I just don't know what the answer is about the American church because it's
It seems to be a choice between churches which are founded almost entirely on social gospel ideas without a corresponding Christology and churches which have no social justice concerns whatsoever but concentrate on individual something. I'm not sure what it is. It certainly doesn't surprise me as real love for Jesus. It's
Or love or knowledge of the Bible, it certainly appears to have something to do with Jesus and the Bible, but I don't recognize it. And in the middle, then, we have all my friends, and probably, you know, I'm not in the ministry, I'm not in active ministry anymore, so it's easy for me to talk, but I have so many dear friends and younger pastors and...faithful laypeople who talk to me and nobody seems to quite know what to do because we don't want to alienate people and drive them out of our congregations and we don't want to lose our family members and our friends who will sit up in the middle of the table and start talking about you know who. I shouldn't have said that but I do think that something was sick in the United States before Donald Trump became the president. And he had an evil genius for milking that, drawing it out. And he continues to have this power, and it has taken hold. And that's why we have so many people openly talking about overthrowing the country, the democracy, and openly talking about insurrection, because the church just doesn't even know what to do.
Except for a very few courageous people. What are you doing, Jason? I know you, Jason. I know that you are preaching substantively. You can put that out on this podcast. This podcast is substantive and I know you're doing something. So you can't edit that out. You have to keep that in. So, Funding, imagine, let's say that you are preaching on Christmas Eve to a congregation full of preachers and church leaders.
What would you preach to them? Well, I would do what I always do, because I have no help within myself for this. I would select a text or be selected by a text from scripture. Probably not the Nativity story. Probably some passage.
I always avoid Luke because of something you said in an earlier podcast to me. What did I say? That I should preach on Christmas Eve and avoid the Nativity story. Well actually, I do love the first three chapters of Luke and I recommend to everyone Raymond Brown's book, The Birth of the Messiah, which is quite a chunk of reading, but it is a wonderful commentary on Luke's story but it's a three-chapter story and all the part about Zechariah and Gabriel and Elizabeth and the whole thing, the whole three chapters is very important. It has the most wonderful atmosphere and it includes the purification of the presentation. Those chapters are really wonderful. If they can preach theologically then go for it by all means, but I just think it's very chapters theologically on Christmas Eve, because the sermon can't be too long. I think I would pick something from the traditional Christmas readings from the epistles, maybe. But something about how this, look, people, this is God. We are not talking here about religious feelings and sentimental hopes. We are not talking about...
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. I heard this long program this morning while I was doing my exercises on Irving Berlin's song. And it was interesting to hear. It was all about nostalgia. And that was why it was such an important, and why it's been such an incredibly popular song for so long, because it milks nostalgia. The church cannot afford to be nostalgic. And that's why I think preaching on Christmas Eve can be very, well I started to say it can be very challenging, but it can also be extremely exciting for the preacher to reject nostalgia. I have this old box from, I think it's Land's End. It came with some Christmas present in it and it's several years old and it says something to the effect that the only thing I want for Christmas is just make me a child again just for tonight. To be a child again just for tonight maybe other people feel that way. I don't want to be a child again. I mean, I'd like to live my 20s and 30s over. I would love to live my 20s and 30s over, but I don't want to be a child running around on Christmas Eve. I want to be a grown-up understanding what's happened. What has happened in history?
That God has done. God has done something that we can point to and identify as His unique work. God the Creator has entered the creation. This is incredible. There isn't any other story like this in the world. There are stories about God coming to earth, but that's not the same thing. That's why the theology is so important. We have to focus on the
Let's see, oh come all ye faithful, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not created. A lot of churches omit that verse, but that's the most important verse. That's what makes the whole hymn. And it was originally a Latin hymn, so it was in all those beautiful Latin phrases, but it's fine in English. God of God, light of light, very God, a very God begotten, not created. Oh, come let us adore Him." That's very exhilarating. I want people to know I would like the preachers to let... It's not what I would like, never mind what I would like. I think the church needs to hear preachers say, come let us adore Him because...
This baby is the Word of God incarnate. And the Word of God is living and active sharper than a two-edged sword piercing through the core of joints and marrow. And as God says in Isaiah, my word shall not return to me empty. Preachers, remember that. My word shall not return to me empty. It shall accomplish that for which
I have purposed it, says the Lord. If you're preaching strictly, not strictly, that sounds too disagreeable. If you're preaching ardently, ardently from the Word of God itself and not from your own ideas or what the society is telling you should be saying, if you are preaching warmly from the living Word of God itself, something will happen to you.
Something will happen to you as you preach. You should expect that. You should expect to be converted by your own preaching. I mean that quite literally. A lot of preachers have said that, that they were converted or reconverted by their own preaching because the Word became alive. I'm gesturing wildly as I say this. The Word becomes alive in spite of us. It
In spite of us. It's not our possession. It escapes from us. But only if we stay close to our text and not start embroidering it with a lot of personal notions or illustrations that go on too long and that are not really illuminating. I guess I just want to say over and over, commit yourself to the gospel.
Ask God before you start writing the sermon. Ask God to be present with you, to write it for you, so to speak, to allow you to be a vessel. Oh, Lord, make me a vessel. Make me a vessel tonight for your grace, your mercy, your creative power, your promise, now in the time of this moral life. In such a world as this, in the darkness, has not overcome the Word of God. I remember… You talked about loving Jesus and being loved by Jesus. I'm wondering, at this time in your life, how do you feel loved by Jesus?
Well, I certainly don't feel it in a vacuum. I feel it when I hear other people talking that way. I feel it when I read the scriptures with real attention, which I'm not necessarily all that good at, because my attention is so scattered now.
I feel it when I'm talking to you in this podcast and knowing that people will listen to it. I feel it as though it were a personal presence working through me that doesn't belong to me. Jesus, His love, His conquering love, the way He addressed every single individual with profound understanding of who they were and what he gives them.
It just blows the mind. I keep thinking if only people could understand the depth of the way he interacted with people and see themselves as the various people he spoke to and walked with and taught, we can see ourselves in all of these people, male and female, young and old, believers and unbelievers.
We sense Him, a real person who is alive. Jesus is alive. That's the message.
I wish we could hear that so much more from the pulpit. Jesus is alive, He is at work, He is not waiting for us to be good and come to Him. He has come to us. There's just too much exhortation in sermons. There's too much if-then instead of because, therefore, that's from Philip Ziegler and Aberdeen, or over in Aberdeen I should say. It's not if-then, it's not if we are good, then Santa Claus will come.
It's because Jesus is good, therefore we can do things we never thought we could do. We will be directed in directions we thought we could never move. We will see light where we never saw light. We will be restored where we are failing.
That's been my experience all my life. I find myself drifting 95% of the time right now, just trying to get through the day. But then there are these breakthrough moments when I... A lot of times it's from singing a hymn. It should be more often from reading the Bible, but I'm not very disciplined. It's from hearing the Bible read in church sometimes, if the reader is good.
If I didn't go to church, either virtually or in person, I would drift away very quickly. I have to be with God's people, listening to the Word, singing the hymns, receiving the Eucharist. But most of all, listening to the Word, singing the hymns being focused on, I'm putting it in the passive voice, being focused by the power of the Living Word. I just don't think the Eucharist by itself does it. My sister and I both both have talked about that. We've talked about the fact that we grew up in a parish, a low church parish in Virginia where we only had communion once a month. And therefore we don't feel deprived if we don't get communion every Sunday.
In other words, if we just listen to a sermon online, what we miss is being with the other people of God. But we don't feel deprived, my sister and I have talked about this, we don't feel deprived of not having communion because we're not used to having communion every Sunday, we weren't. And we were nourished by the hymns particularly, by the readings and sometimes by the sermons, not all the time, but some of the time.
And so if you have really nourishing preaching to listen to, it's not as grievous a loss not to be able to take communion in person, because the living Word of God is food. Jesus said that. His Word is food. His Word is nourishment. His Word is what we live by.
So I am always hoping for more Bible, more reading of the Bible, and more attention to the powerful presence that is being made known to us in all the passages of the Bible one way or another, even Ecclesiastes and places where there doesn't seem to be any presence of God at all.
It's all there if we open ourselves to the fact that God's Word is living.
There's so much to say, Jason. I just feel inadequate to say it. I just wish I could explain more powerfully. What? You've done a great job. And I want to respect your time. Can you pray for all of those who might listen to this? Yes, I'll be glad to try. Let us all gather our thoughts expect God to work through our meager thoughts about Him, because it is He who thought first about us and who thinks about us now, far ahead of where we are.
Because our destiny is in Him, and He has already prepared our destiny.
That's why Advent is such a wonderful preparation for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, because it tells us how God has...planned our future as part of his beloved family. Thank you dear Lord. Thank you Lord Jesus for these promises, for these assurances. For these...it's not just an invitation, it's an assurance Lord. I hear you making...
Your voice known to all who will listen and sometimes to people who won't listen because you have that power. Speak today, tomorrow night, Christmas Day. Speak, speak Lord.
Come close to us. Shake us out of our disbelief, our lethargy, our depression. bring us, O Lord, into your light and let the festivities of the season point us to you, to your glory, the glories of your righteousness and wonders of your love.
Let us know you, Lord Jesus. Love you, come to you, seek you, and find you.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen. Plumbing, it's so good to talk with you again.
Well, as often happens, I am rather overcome by what I'm saying. I hope that means that the Lord was present in it.
December 17, 2023
2 + 1 = A Fourth
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Third Sunday of Advent — Daniel 3.8-25
Ten years ago, around supper time, I was in the Emergency Room, standing behind the paper curtain, holding a mother, who wasn’t much older than me, as she held her little boy, who wasn’t much older than my boys. I had gotten a call that Jack, one of our confirmands, had been taken from his bedroom by ambulance.
“Maybe he was already dead,” the caller whispered through tears.
When I got there, he was gone.
Jackʼs mom was on the bed with her arms around him and was telling him how much she loved him, how much everyone loved him. Jackʼs grandparents had their arms around her. For I donʼt know how long, I held Jackʼs hand and rubbed his hair and tried to get the words out. I tried to tell him how funny and special and alive I thought he was.
The boy’s mom wasn’t crying so much as gasping like you do when you’ve sunk all the way to the bottom of the deep end and have just come up for air. She was smoothing her boy’s cow lick with her hand. Every so often she would shush him, as though if she could just calm him down she might convince him to come back.
It was Opening Day.
While her little boy was contemplating the inconceivable, my boys and I had been watching the Nationals lose to the Braves. I still wore my red baseball cap and I still had popcorn crumbs in my sweater and mustard stains on my pants.
Which is to say, in that moment I didn’t look like pastor or a priest.
I looked like just another mourner thrown in to the fire of grief.
So when the mother got up and went into the hallway to try and get a hold of her husband and left me with her boy and when the hospital chaplain stepped in to the room and saw the hat on my head and the mustard stains on my pants and the popcorn crumbs on my clothes and the tears in my— now red— eyes, the chaplain did not think I was a pastor or a priest.
She just thought I was part of the boy’s family.
I sat on the bed where his mother had been sitting. I held his hand in my lap.
The chaplain put her hand on my shoulder and, after a few moments, she said to me:
“Everything is going to be okay; you are not alone.”
It was like she had slapped me.
“What?” I said, stunned, and gripped the boy’s hand harder in my own.
In the moment, it felt like the precise wrong thing to say.
“What did you say?”
Unfazed or unaware, she actually repeated herself:
“Everything is going to be okay; you are not alone.”“Look,” I said not at all politely, “I’ve got the same gig as you. When there’s nothing to say, shut up and say nothing.”To her credit, my anger did not fluster her. Nor did my reproach flummox her. And in the years since I have arrived at a sort of second naïveté about that evening in the ER. A decade of faith stretches between then and now.
I’ve outgrown the pseudo-sophistication that disguised a lack of conviction as pastoral care.Just so, I suspect I was wrong.
Christians do not practice silence because there is nothing to say, no word from the Lord.
Christians practice silence because God has spoken so much we do not know where to start with the saying of it.
Perhaps she picked the wrong word from the Lord to speak. Maybe her timing with the speaking of it was off.Nevertheless, I was the one who was wrong. Because, of course— God has promised it— she was right, I was not alone. If Mary’s boy managed to appear in an oven half a millennia before his birth, then certainly a cold, bright ER stall was no hurdle for him.
At Christmas, the church ventures a claim far more audacious and, just so, more deeply offensive than the birth of Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim.
Christmas is not merely the Messiah's birthday.
Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation.
Christmas is the Nativity of God.At Christmas, the church dares to announce a revelation; namely, the Maker of Heaven and Earth is a Jew who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly. Mary, the Council of Ephesus decreed in the fifth century, is the Theotokos, the God-bearer. Jesus is the God-who-is-human. His finite flesh contains the infinite. Of course, this claim immediately begets the question the creed attempts to answer.
How?
How is this so?
How is it possible?
As stubbornly as it persists, how is not the best question to ask about incarnation.Because God is the Condition that conditions all conditions, we cannot condition what God can do based upon what we take to be the givens of the world.
For example:
The dead don’t rise— that’s a given of the world.
And yet, Jesus lives with death behind him.
God is the Condition that conditions all conditions. The God who raised Israel from slavery in Egypt can resurrect Jesus from the grave.
God is the Condition that conditions all conditions; therefore, how questions are seldom the best questions to ask when it comes to God.
Rather than ask how—
How did God become man?
How can the finite contain the infinite?
How is it possible for Mary to give birth to her Maker ex nihilo?
Rather than ask how—Advent is the perfect occasion to inquire about the alternative.What is the opposite of incarnation? What would be the alternative to an incarnated God?If the Word did not take flesh, what sort of God is God?The genuine alternative to an incarnate God would be a God who has no spatial location whatsoever. The true opposite to incarnation would be total, absolute monotheism. If God is not incarnate, then God is sheer spirit. Corporeality would be totally foreign to a God who is spirit. The defining essence of matter is that it takes up space; therefore, if God is totally non-corporeal, then there can be no spatial location of God.
Once you understand that exactly this God— the God who is sheer spirit and occupies no space— is the opposite of an incarnate God, you realize two implications.
This God— the God who is sheer spirit and occupies no space— is precisely the God in whom most Christians in fact believe.
This God— the God who is spirit and takes up no space— is incompatible with the God of the Old Testament. The God of the Hebrew Bible does have spatial location. He walks in the Garden of Eden. He has a dwelling place in the world. From the pillar of cloud by day to the pillar of fire by night, from tent to tabernacle, from temple to the holy of holies therein, the Old Testament just is a history of God’s dwelling place in the world.
"Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it,” Jacob says fearfully in Beersheba, ”How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
As Michael Wyschogrod, a Jewish theologian at Yale, writes:
“Now of course [God’s dwelling in the temple] does not exclude the truth that he also dwells everywhere else. He also dwells in any part of the universe. There is no place in which God is not present. But this truth must be combined with the insistence that there is a place where God dwells and that place is Jerusalem. He dwells in Number One Har Habayit Street— Number One Temple Mount Street. It is a real dwelling and for every Jew, the sanctity of the land of Israel derives from the sanctity of Jerusalem, and the sanctity of Jerusalem derives from the sanctity of the temple, and the sanctity of the temple derives from the sanctity of the holy of holies where [still] God dwells.”
Just so, the God who is the opposite of the incarnate God— the God who is sheer spirit and takes up no space— is not the God of Israel and thus is not the one whom Jesus addresses as Father.
Of course, it’s not simply that God occupies space in the Old Testament but so does Jesus of Nazareth.And not just there.
Jesus shows up in far more places than the scriptures.
About the same time I sat with that boy in the ER, Sayed Mussa sat in a jail cell in Kabul, Afghanistan and told a reporter about his journey from Islam to Christianity. Nine years earlier, after a bomb struck his neighbor’s home in Kabul killing seven, two foreign women arrived to dig through the rubble while gunfire flew past them in both directions.
“When I saw these women and their compassion for my people, it affected me,” he told the reporter.
“I asked people who they were and they said they are the followers of Jesus Christ.”
Shortly thereafter, Mussa met another Afghan Christian in his community. The neighbor gave him a copy of the Bible and eventually baptized him. Mussa was arrested under Sharia law after a local television studio broadcast footage of Afghans being baptized and praying in Jesus’s name. Sitting in prison and awaiting a death sentence, Mussa spoke to a reporter about his conversion to the incarnate God.
When Mussa distinguished between appreciating the Koran’s teachings but believing the Bible’s witness, a prison guard, thumbing Muslim prayer beads, stood up and asked his commander, “You want me to beat him?”
After he was arrested, Mussa confided to the reporter, prison guards beat him with sticks. At another jail, urged on by Taliban inmates, prisoners assaulted him and raped him. He recalled them shouting, “He is an infidel, he is filthy and he needs to be killed.”
Mussa confided to his interviewer that he longed to see his wife and children again and he admitted that he desired either his release or his execution. But, as terrible as the conditions were in prison (“Staying in here is like dying every minute.”), he testified that he was not alone.
“The Lord Jesus is here, in this place, with me. It’s like he’s taking up space, like just another prisoner.”
“Oh, how foolish you are,” the Risen Jesus gripes to the disciples on Easter, “and how slow of heart you are to believe…all of the Bible is about me.”
That is, it’s not just that God became incarnate in Jesus Christ; it’s that there are incarnations of Mary’s son in Mary’s own scriptures.For instance—
When the Lord beckons Moses to the Burning Bush, the Book of Exodus reports that “There the Angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire out of a bush.”
Angel of the Lord with a capital A.
This Angel is an other from the Lord but related to the Lord prepositionally, “of the Lord.” But— pay attention— when Moses responds to the Angel’s summons, it turns out to be God who speaks to Moses out of the Burning Bush.
Is this Angel of the Lord another than God?
Or God?
Straightforwardly, in the scriptures he is both.
Or, for example, the Binding of Isaac in the Book of Genesis. Abraham is about to offer up his promised son as a sacrifice to God. Just as Abraham is about to plunge his blade into his boy’s throat, “the Angel of the Lord called out to Abraham out of heaven.” After Abraham answers the Angel of the Lord, the Angel replies initially in the third person, “Now I know that you fear God…”
Next—
In the second clause of the very same sentence, the Angel shifts to the first person, “Now I know that you fear God since you have not withheld your son…from me.”
There are incarnations of Mary’s boy in Mary’s own Bible.“In the beginning was the Word,” declares the Gospel of John’s nativity, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Both one who is other than God and also one who is identical with God and is God’s speech-act. What the Gospel of John calls the Logos, the Old Testament calls the Angel of the Lord.
But also, alternatively, the Old Testament refers to this figure who is both other than God but likewise identical with God the Shekinah. The Shekinah is the glory of God which inhabits the holy of holies in the temple without simultaneously displacing God from his heaven. The Shekinah is the one on the cherubim throne to whom Israel directs her prayers and sacrifices even as God the Father is enthroned in heaven.
The Shekinah is the incarnation of God settles within the life of God’s People.
And so, the Jewish aggadah claims that when God redeemed Israel from exile in Babylon, thereby returning the Shekinah to the temple, “He would rescue himself.”
Once again—
It’s as straightforward as it is astonishing.Captive in Babylon, Israel spoke of Yahweh as both the Lord who would redeem them and as a hostage to be included in the rescue.
Among those Jewish exiles in Babylon are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Conscripted into the civil service under Nebuchadnezzar, the pagan King of Babylon, they’re given new names that pay homage to Babylon’s pagan gods.
Shadrach (his Hebrew name had been Hananiah) is named for the pagan god of the moon.
Meschach (his Hebrew name had been Mishael) is named for the pagan god, Aku.
And Abednego (his Hebrew name had been Azariah) is named for the pagan god of wisdom.
For a Jew bound to the first commandment, to so carry the name of a pagan god is to expect that the true God has forsaken you.
In the story, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are denounced for refusing to submit to the gods of Babylon and, by implication, for refusing to submit to the authority of Nebuchadnezzar. So Nebuchadnezzar orders the three exiles gagged, bound, and cast into a fiery furnace but not before the king instructs his men to crank the oven up to seven times its normal heat, and seven— you should note the surprising clue— is the biblical number for perfection or completeness and, thus, it’s a number that foreshadows the presence of God. The furnace gets so hot that the heat obliterates the guards who come close enough to the fire to toss the prisoners inside but not Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
According to Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar and his courtiers can see Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, walking around, unbound and unburned.
What’s more surprising, the bystanders report seeing a fourth person there in the fire.A fourth person.One who is both God and human.Even before he is Mary’s in utero, Mary’s boy is present in Mary’s Bible.And not just in the scriptures— the Lord Jesus shows up, takes up space, and is present with his people when they are in extremis.
The Shekinah shows up not just among and in the people of Israel.
The Shekinah shows up as an individual Israelite.
“The fourth has the appearance of a son of God,” the counselor reports to Nebuchadnezzar. The story in Daniel ends with a typical Old Testament flourish when King Nebuchadnezzar, having brought Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego out of the fire, unscathed, throws off his former affections and declares: “…there is no other god like this Son of God!”
It’s not until Christmas that we discover King Nebuchadnezzar was even more correct than he knew.As Daniel Boyarin, a Jewish theologian at UC-Berkley, writes:
“The theology of the Gospels, far from being a radical innovation with Israelite religious tradition, is a highly conservative return to the very most ancient moments within that tradition, moments that had been largely suppressed in the meantime— but not entirely. The ideas about God that we identify as Christian are not innovations but may be deeply connected with some of the most ancient of Israelite ideas about God. These ideas at the very least go back to an entirely plausible reading of Daniel and thus to the second century B.C. at the latest. They may even be a whole lot older.”
“And the Shekinah became flesh and lived among us…”
On Thursday evening, shortly after learning he was terminal with cancer, I visited a parishioner and his partner in the hospital. I knelt by his bed for a while and I held his hand and I tried to help her encourage him.
Before I left, I stood up. I put my arm around Pam. And I held Steve’s bruised and bandaged hand, and I prayed for the Holy Spirit to help him die well, tethered to the promise of resurrection.
All together we prayed.Pam and Steve and me and…the Lord Jesus.There were four of us in room 492.“For wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there I AM.”
Jesus promises.
We have to be conditioned by the superstitions of a secular age not to take that statement straight up— as literally the gospel truth.It’s no spiritual metaphor.
It’s as sure and certain as math.
1+1 or 1+2 = 4
Two or three amount to at least a fourth.
“There is no other god like this Son of God!”
“The Lord Jesus is here, in this place, with me. It’s like he’s taking up space, like just another prisoner.”
All those years ago in the ER, after the chaplain learned my name and my line of work, we spoke briefly about the funeral service I’d lead for the boy.
She ran a hand through her gray hair and nodded gravely.
“My advice?” she offered, “If you can’t make it happy, make it beautiful.”
I must’ve looked like I didn’t follow her because she repeated herself.
“If you can’t make it happy, make it beautiful.”And then she added, “Give them Jesus. You can’t take away their grief, but you can give them company. Give them Jesus so they won’t have to endure it alone. Give them Jesus— hallow their place of suffering.”
Traditionally, the Third Sunday of Advent features John the Baptist, the Forerunner and Friend of the Bridegroom, who preaches repentance and baptizes in the Jordan River. The ancient church fathers all taught that Jesus was baptized not to wash away Jesus’s sins but to sanctify the waters for own washings. Likewise, Jesus was tempted not to prove his sinlessness but to consecrate our places of tribulation. And Jesus died not to satisfy the Father’s wrath but to make death no longer an enemy we need fear.
“Nothing from his birth to his death happens to him, the Word,” Chris Green writes, “but what his Father wants to happen differently for us.”
Just so, Mary’s boy shows up in Mary’s Bible.
Jesus accompanies Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego into the fire; so that, we will know there is no crucible of fear or heartache, there is no place of pain or anguish, that is vacant.Each is as occupied as the Burning Bush or Mary’s belly.The true God takes up space.The Shekinah is a squatter who dwells in our suffering.Until he comes again and the sea is no more— mourning and crying and pain no more— the Lord cannot make everything happy. But he can make all things beautiful. After all, God is Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. And in Jesus Christ, God is determined to add himself to every ugly instance of our lives.
Incarnation continues.
So whatever scars and singe marks life has given you this week, come to the table and I’ll give you Jesus.
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December 16, 2023
Every Jew Lived the Real Story of Hanukkah This Year
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Here is my latest conversation with Rabbi Joseph Edelheit. Below is a snippet of the article which informed our discussion. Click above for the transcript of the talk. Thanks once again to all of you who have sent me your thoughts, questions, and encouragement.
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Various municipalities and public institutions in North America and Britain have decided to cancel Hanukkah celebrations such as menorah lightings in their towns and cities. It's hard to blame them. They have seen how, since the Hamas massacre on the previous Jewish festival two months ago, any signs of Jews or Jewish life around them have become targets for violence and hatred. So why establish new targets?
Hanukkah this year reminds us of grim lessons we preferred to forget. Perhaps it's better for Diaspora Jews to shelter in place and relearn them. Because if we're being honest with ourselves, the story of Hanukkah is so unclear to us that we've chosen to replace it with rather bland and meaningless candles and doughnuts.
Most years, that's fine. Western society has done more or less the same is commercializing the birth of Jesus out of Christmas. There's no reason for Jews to be more precious about their winter festival. It's not like the Jewish calendar lacks for other meaningful dates.
But this isn't any other year.
Pictures of Israeli Hamas hostages appearing on a screen during the ceremony to light the Hanukkah menorah at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin on Thursday.Credit: Markus Schreiber /AP
If you visit the kibbutzim around the Gaza border and the evacuated city of Sderot, here and there you can still spot sukkahs that were built a week before the October 7 massacre, and their owners haven't been back to dismantle them. If they ever will return.
We've gotten so used to calling it the "October 7 massacre," partly because we all use the Gregorian calendar, and partly because there's something ery jarring about using the name of the festival on which it took place: Simhat Torah, or "Joy of Torah." How can we use that to note such a dark day?
December 15, 2023
Nice Girls Don’t Change the World
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Luke 1.39-56
One day, years from now, when the promise in her belly is all grown up, Mary will sit down in the grass along a hillside, her knees too tired and old and stand. She’ll sit there unnoticed, anonymous, among a multitude of seekers who’d come out of curiosity and outcasts and riff-raff who’d come seeking something much more specific. If the sea of people had anything in common it was all that of them, like her, were poor. Many of them were sick or troubled. Most of them were weary of the world as it was and just wanting a chance to have a touch at him. If they’d already had all the answers, they wouldn’t be there on the mountainside. If life was already everything they’d ever dreamed, they wouldn’t be there, among the crowd, listening to a different dream.
One day Mary will sit in the hillside grass and listen to her boy— her first, most unusual child— grown up now. And grown certain in his vocation. Her youth now turned to middle age, Mary will sit and listen to her boy teach this fragile people:
“Blessed are you who are poor, yours is the Kingdom of God. And blessed are you who hunger now for your bellies will be filled…but woe to you who are rich for you have already received your comfort and woe to you who are well-fed now for you will go hungry.”
And Mary will watch this desperate crowd listen to her boy’s words, listening as if his words themselves had the power to change their circumstances, listening as though his words alone could fill them and their emptiness.
And if people asked where her boy got such teaching, he might say: “the Holy Spirit has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” Or, he could confuse them with some cryptic language about how he and the Father were one in the same.
Or, he could say simply, for it would be true, “My mother taught me.”Jason Micheli's Blog
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