“Surprises”

Micah 5:2-5; Luke 1:39-55[1]

At this time of year, it seems that many of us are concerned with surprises. We want once again to surprise those we love with gifts that convey our love, and we want to be surprised again with gifts from them that convey their love. I’m not very good at surprising people. I’m too predictable. I find it amazingly challenging to try to understand a woman’s heart and mind, and then try to figure out what I can give her that will really surprise her. I think I’m not alone in that dilemma.

As we come to the celebration of Christmas, we need to be reminded again that we worship a God of surprises. The story of Jesus’ birth is one that is full of surprises—but then, so is the story of his life! The Savior of humankind comes to us not as a Roman aristocrat, but as a Jewish peasant! He is born not in the finest villa but in a cave cut out for livestock! He is worshipped not by the “high and mighty” among his people, but by the down and out, simple shepherds (I think about the guys who stand around at certain convenience stores in our area waiting to be hired for the day; or the guys who sell the Houston Chronicle on street corners 365 days a year, whether it’s pouring down rain or blistering with heat.) Those nobles who do pay homage to him are foreigners; they are astrologer-priests from Babylon whom we call “wise men” but who would have been considered magicians, enchanters, diviners, and sorcerers by the Jewish people (see Daniel!).

The story of Jesus’ birth is the prime illustration of God’s surprising mercy and love. It is a story of grace for sinners and restoration for the outcasts. Jesus reveals to us the God of love “who commits himself unreservedly to [humanity], to their needs and hopes: who does not demand but gives, does not oppress but raises up, does not wound but heals; who spares those who impugn his holy law and consequently himself, who forgives instead of condemning, liberates instead of punishing, leaves grace to rule instead of law.”[2] For some reason, that comes to us again and again as a surprise. But It’s the fundamental revelation of God’s nature: Throughout the Scriptures, God reveals himself as the God of unshakeable, indestructible, inexhaustible, unchangeable, unconditional love.

Perhaps the greatest surprise in the story of Jesus is that he shows us definitively once and for all that God is for us. In all that God does, God is “for us.” “For us” defines God’s essential nature. God has always worked to show himself as “the Father of the forsaken, the God of the godless and the refuge of those without hope.”[3] That’s the nature of God’s love. Whether it’s disobedient Israel or godless, ruthless Nineveh, God’s steadfast love prevails, even through an unwilling prophet like Jonah. He reaches out to those who promise to obey him but who disobey instead. He forgives those who seem to have no interest in God in the first place. He loves those who are hostile toward him—yes, even his enemies. God is the one who has always been “slow to chide and swift to bless.”

As one of my favorite theologians puts it: “The God who makes Himself known to us in His revelation, who above all, discloses His Name to us in the Incarnation of the Word in Jesus Christ, is the God whose whole revelation is one sole movement of gracious condescension to man, and act of saving Mercy.”[4]

The surprising story of Jesus’ birth is the most dramatic part of the ongoing story of God’s surprising way of redeeming us all. God redeems us through suffering shame and rejection, not by taking an earthly throne and winning over the power-mongers. God redeems us without any fanfare whatsoever. As the hymn puts it, “How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given”! And yet that is how God always works to redeem us—“so God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven”! And God redeems us humbly, by taking his place among us as one of the least, one of the last, one of those cast out and brushed aside. God redeems us not by coming with ten thousands of his angel armies; he does it by taking the form of a helpless infant lying in a feed trough. He does it by becoming God in flesh, God with us, Immanuel.

We must not fail to hear the challenge this surprising story poses to all of us. This surprising story of non-heroes and nobodies, the weak and the foolish, undercuts our traditional values and our pecking orders. But this surprising reversal occurs precisely “so that the integrity and worth of every person, thing, and moment—however lowly—may be defended and become the object of special wonder and delight.”[5] To some this seems absurd, but by this “marvelous absurdity,” we come to see that our God of surprises “opens up the future to a world where everything is possible, including the final setting of things right.”[6]

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[1] A sermon preached 12/24/06 at First Presbyterian Church, Dickinson TX.

[2] Hans Küng, Does God Exist? , 675.

[3] Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 94.

[4] Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God, 184

[5] Conrad Hyers, “The Nativity as Divine Comedy” The Christian Century (Dec. 11, 1974): 1168-72; http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1590.

[6] Glen V. Wilberg, “God’s Surprise” The Christian Century (Dec. 7, 1994), http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n35_v111/ai_15974911 .

“An Open Door”

Hebrews 10:19-25[1]

Religion is not generally known for its openness. To the contrary, it would seem that most religions are defined more by the boundaries they prescribe, or by the barriers and restrictions they impose.

Just about every religion, it seems, has some sort of prescribed ritual for entering the presence of the deity. [2] Only the authorized priests may conduct the ritual, and they must exercise meticulous care to follow the prescribed ritual to the letter. Not only is it forbidden for an ordinary individual to approach God, it is positively dangerous. Sometimes it’s even dangerous for the priests! They and only they can enter the sacred places to conduct the ritual of worship.

All of these boundaries and limits presuppose God as someone or something unapproachable. Many religions developed animal sacrifices in order to resolve this problem of approaching an unapproachable deity. Animal sacrifices were believed to have a kind of magical power to soothe God’s demeanor and render God favorable and gracious toward humanity that falls short and goes astray.

While all of this would seem to run counter to the New Testament lesson for today, the reality is that the Christian religion hasn’t been very different from other religions in this regard. Priests and meticulous rituals and sacred places with boundaries have been a regular part of the Christian religion throughout history.

But the letter to the Hebrews reminds us that they are not a part of the Christian faith. Hebrews offers in place of all that a “new and living way” that has been opened by Jesus the Christ. It is new in that there are no sacrifices you have to meticulously follow in order to enter this way. It is living in that it is a way that truly leads to life (cf. the “path of life” in Ps. 16). Through Jesus’ death on the cross, the path that leads to life is open for anyone and everyone.[3] There is no gate-keeper who has the authority to keep out those who don’t belong. There is no special password you have to learn in order to be allowed to follow Jesus on the path that leads to life.

This message is the heart of the Christian faith, yet it has puzzled humankind for 2000 years. How is it that the death of this Jewish rabbi on a Roman cross in a backwater Mediterranean country makes it possible for us to have an open door to God? Throughout history, there have been many theories proposed to explain just exactly why Jesus died on the cross and what his death accomplished. But through the ages the best theological minds have not been able to explain the cross in a way that has satisfied the whole church so much that we have embraced it in something like the Apostles’ Creed. [4] It is a “truth which cannot be demonstrated but which is not without witnesses.”[5]

I think the best we can do is to stick with what the New Testament does—the Apostles were content to describe the effects of Jesus’ death on the cross without being able to explain all that it involved.

Our Study Catechism puts it well, I think, when in response to the question “Why did Jesus have to suffer as he did?” it says: “Because grace is more abundant — and sin more serious — than we suppose. … The cross in all its severity reveals an abyss of sin swallowed up by the suffering of divine love.”[6] Essentially, Jesus died to break the power of that which keeps humankind from the life God intends for us to have—call it sin, or selfishness, or alienation.[7]

But Jesus also died to open the door to a relationship with God that is meaningful and fulfilling.[8] The biblical idea of sin is not just that our lives are marred, but also that we have broken the relationship God intends for us to share by our willfulness, our resistance, our violence, our pride, and our greed. The good news of the Gospel of Jesus the Christ is that God takes the initiative to heal the breach. We are the offending party, yet we are the ones who need to be reconciled. God holds no grudges against us; God does not need to be softened up toward us. God already loves us unconditionally and irrevocably.[9] God is the one who seeks us out like a shepherd searching for a lost sheep. God does not need to be reconciled to us—we need to be reconciled to God. [10]

But because of the seriousness of the breach, our restoration requires “the cross in all its severity” as our catechism puts it. What that means is that God takes on the consequences of our willfulness and pride and greed. God endures the pain of our sins, but by so doing it becomes a pain that heals us (Isa. 53:4; 1 Pet. 2:24: “by his wounds we are healed”).[11]

I don’t think that we have to endorse a certain theory of atonement that involves some sort of substitution or satisfaction to recognize that Jesus’ death on the cross restores our relationship with God that was broken by human sin. Much of that kind of thinking seems to me to boil down to a return to the belief that a sacrifice involving blood has some special power to soothe God’s demeanor![12]

We don’t have to go there to recognize that Jesus has opened a door so that we can have the kind of relationship God has always intended for us to have—one that leads to life.[13]

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[1] A sermon preached 11/19/06 at First Presbyterian Church, Dickinson, TX.

[2] Harry Emerson Fosdick, A Guide to Understanding the Bible, 208-210

[3] Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1:92.

[4] Hendrikus Berkhof, Christian Faith, 309. Paul Tillich expresses this idea by saying that the Cross and the Resurrection must be seen as both events and as symbols; Systematic Theology II:150-58.

[5] Otto Weber, Foundations of Dogmatics II:169. He adds: “He who persists at the level of the verifiable will miss the truth which breaks through our untruth, therapeutically lays bare our hybris, and corrects our perversity.”

[6] Study Catechism, q. 45.

[7] J. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, 181-83; cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1:97.

[8] Moltmann, in The Way of Jesus Christ, 188-89, points out that this is not merely a restoration of life to its original state, but rather it is the transformation of life that points to a new creation; cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV. 1:13, 110.

[9] J. Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 87, 95-96.

[10] A. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation; cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1:88-89, 122-23.

[11] Tillich, Systematic Theology II:174-75; cf. also Moltmann, Church in the Power, 86: “man’s sufferings become Christ’s history, and Christ’s freedom becomes man’s history.”

[12] Fosdick, Guide to the Bible, 254.

[13] Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1:14, 22, 36, 38, 47, 113

“Vulnerable Messiah”

Hebrews 5:1-10; Mark 10:35-45[1]

We don’t like vulnerability, not in our dog-eat-dog world where it seems so often that you have to fight to survive. Vulnerability reminds us of two facts that we would rather avoid: other people often have the power to take advantage of us, and we are powerless to do anything about it.

Yet vulnerability is a part of what it means to be human. As C. S. Lewis observed, “to love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one …. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; …. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”[2]

The last thing anyone in the First Century was looking for was a vulnerable Messiah. They expected a conquering hero to come riding in on a stallion—the ancient equivalent of an armored vehicle like a Humvee. They expected the Messiah to be a powerful warrior who would overthrow their enemies and give them back the “good old days.”

But the New Testament insists that Jesus came not as a warrior but as a servant. Jesus came to hope to the hopeless, to bring freedom to captives, to bring healing to those who were “inoperable”, to give acceptance to outcasts, and to bring God to the godless.[3]

We catch a glimpse of Jesus’ vulnerability in the book Hebrews: “while Jesus was on earth, he begged God with loud crying and tears to save him” (Heb. 5:7, CEV). It sounds like Jesus’ experience in the garden of Gethsemane. After his Last Supper with the disciples, he went out of the city to the garden to pray. He took Peter, James, and John with them and said, “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me” (Matt. 26:38).

There, the Gospels tell us that Jesus prayed fervently, asking God to take away the suffering he was facing. Some ancient versions of Luke’s Gospel add, “in his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Lk. 22:44). It suggests that Jesus was so anguished about what lay ahead that he was drenched with sweat!

Of course, that is only one episode from Jesus’ life—a life that was lived under the motto, “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk. 10:45). And because he came as a vulnerable Messiah who called into question the hypocrisy of a religion that promised blessing and security and prosperity, they crucified him.

Why would anybody have followed a crucified Messiah? As Paul explained (1 Cor. 1:23), a Savior who was lynched like a common criminal was utterly foolish to the civilized world. And to Jewish people it was nothing short of blasphemy to claim that one who was accursed enough to be strung up was in fact God’s anointed one.[4]

Why would anybody follow a Messiah who was vulnerable enough to be executed? We spend our time running after things like safety, happiness, and status. How can a crucified Messiah possibly help with that? We hedge everything in our lives, from redundant computer systems to insurance up to the neck—all to stave off the inevitable losses of life. How does that fit with faith in a Messiah who calls us to lose our lives?

We follow a vulnerable Messiah because he reveals to us a vulnerable God. [5] As one contemporary prophet puts it, “Only those who stand beneath the cross and watch him suffer and die will be convinced that at the heart of reality is One who enters into suffering.”[6] For most of our lives we have revered and feared a God who was so exalted as to be remote, so supreme as to be incapable of personal relationships, so all-powerful as to be untouched by our heartaches and struggles.[7] But in Jesus, the vulnerable Messiah, we see the God who “has moved into … our guilt, our alienation, our suffering, our death”[8] and has overcome them all!

God’s vulnerability doesn’t mean that God is not majestic or powerful. God is exalted, but not remote! God is supreme, but that does not stop God from being supremely capable of personal relationships![9] God is all-powerful, but God is also deeply touched by our struggles.[10] God is not separated from us, but loves us so completely that God is intimately involved with every aspect of our lives.[11] God is both majestic and merciful.

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[1] A Sermon preached 10/22/06 at First Presbyterian Church, Dickinson TX.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 121.

[3] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, 242-45, 248, 276.

[4] F. F. Bruce, Paul, Apostle of the Heart Set Free, 70-71

[5] William C. Placher, Narratives of a Vulnerable God, 15, 17-19; cf. Clark Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness, 27, 58, 81-2, 88-92, 94.

[6] Bishop Kenneth L. Carder, “Why Follow a Crucified Christ?” The Christian CenturyAugust 27, 1997:753, accessed at http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=655.

[7] Emil Brunner, The Christian Doctrine of God, 139-41, 183-84, 187, 242-43.

[8] Carder, “Why Follow?”

[9] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 75, 96, 127, 157, 178, 209-212.

[10] Moltmann, Crucified God, 246-47, 277. Moltmann, Trinity, 38-39, 57, 60.

[11] Cf. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover, 57.