Think And Let Think

Over and over again in scripture, and in life, God chooses the unexpected to bring about the Kingdom. God plucks people out of complacency and says, in different ways, shapes, and forms, “I’ve got a job for you!” God stirs up our understandings of the world, flips them upside down, and calls it Good News.

The very best worship services are those from which we go forth not to more of the same, but to more of the name that is above all names: Jesus the Christ. For, in him, we begin to see that the Good News really is good.

Advent, for better or worse, is a time set apart in the church when we make a conscious effort to recover some of the strangeness from the strange new world of the Bible - and John embodies it all. Because, like J the B, Advent is rather peculiar. It’s out of sync with time.

The authentically hopeful Advent spirit is not looking away from the darkness, it is not filling our lives with fluff in order to deny the truth. It is, instead, praying for Holy Spirit to give us the courage and the conviction to look straight into the muck and mire of this life. For, in the end, that’s exactly where God chose, and still chooses, to show up for us.

Our King, counter to every other king in the history of all things, looks upon our miserable estate, takes all of our sins, and nails them to the cross upon which we hung him. And he leaves those sins there forever. No one can earn or deserve salvation. No one can even know that he or she is saved. We can only believe it. We can only trust it.

This is a parable of judgment. However, the only reason that judgment comes at all is the sad fact that there will always be fools who refuse to trust a good thing even when it is handed to them on a silver platter.

The shut door is an image that us well-meaning Christians don’t particularly enjoy, but it is God’s answer to the foolish wisdom of the world. For, in the death of Jesus, God closed forever the ways of winning and rightness. But the wise bridesmaids, those who are foolish in the eyes of the world, who were willing to trust God more than themselves, were found in their lastness, leastness, lostness, and even deadness to rejoice and celebrate at the party. And all of the do-gooders who were so sure they could save themselves when it really came down to it, they’re stuck out in the dark with an unusable invitation.

Perhaps we’d like to blame our politicians for our current tumultuous season. But the problem goes far deeper than those running, and selected, for office. The problem is us. Rather than seeing one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, we’ve viewed each other through the names on our bumper stickers. Rather than listening to and praying for those of different opinions, we’ve just shouted louder into the fray. Rather than confessing Jesus as Lord and living accordingly, we’ve fallen prey to believing that what happens on Tuesday is more important than what happens on Sunday.

Jesus is Lord and we are not. Lord, importantly, is not a democratic title. We confess Jesus as Lord because he is the One to whom we owe our fullest and truest allegiance. And this, the lordship of Christ, is a fundamental challenge to the status-quo. It means that our assumptions about power and prestige are all messed up. It forces us to reckon with a world of our own design rather than the Kingdom wrought on earth in the incarnation. It compels us to open our eyes and ears to the people we would otherwise ignore.

Love, at least according to the strange new world of the Bible, doesn’t look like what happens on Valentine’s Day, or even suggestions from a local civic organization. Instead, love looks like the cross.

We Christians might believe that we’ve got everything all sorted out in our lives and in our culture but, as Christians, we know we have a problem when we do not have a problem.

In the end, there is no good in us. In spite of our attempts to be gentle, we mostly rest contented to do nothing or we take it too far and use our faith as a bludgeon against others. But the gentleness Paul writes of does not begin or come from us alone - It’s from Jesus.

No mistake, no sin, no disappointment, no failure, and no rebellion can hold a candle to the love of God in Jesus Christ that draws us home and refuses to let us go.

Grace works for losers and only losers, and no one wants to hang out with losers. No one, that is, except for Jesus. The world of winners, people like us, will invest in myriads of moral absolutes, and truck loads of self-improvement seminars, and heaping baskets of do-goodery. But the world of winners, people like us, refuses to opt-in for free forgiveness because that threatens to bring in all of the disreputable types. Thankfully, however, the Holy Spirit has a knack of reminding us, all of us, that we’re all unworthy, that we’re all up the creek without a paddle, that we’re all in need of some saving. And we can’t save ourselves.

God in the flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, forgives those who haven’t a clue in the world and those who know exactly what they’re doing. God eats and drinks and cavorts with the very people we wouldn’t be caught dead with. Which is kind of the whole point. God chose to die, even death on a cross, out of love for the sinners we are.

“Look, I know the empire seems powerful and that there’s no way you can get away from it. But as disciples of Jesus, if there is a conflict between your politics and your faith, your loyalty is to Christ and your heavenly citizenship is what’s most important.” - Paul, paraphrased

The Lord dabbles in unexpected deliverances, in surprising turns of events, in providential happenstances. All of them are echoes of the great reversal that began that first Easter morning. They are foretaste of the world yet to come. They are the bread and the wine at the table, the undeserved invitation, the unmerited forgiveness. They don’t always fit and fall when we want them to, but when God’s up to something, the best thing we can do is get out of the way and say “thanks.”

The world says, “do this and do that.” Grace says, “It’s already done.” The cross of Christ, hanging empty in the sky, is a stark declaration and reminder that God stands against sin, evil, and death. It is, problematic language not withstanding, God’s war on our behalf. Grace invades into existence not because we believed in God just enough, or because we said the right prayers, but simply because God is merciful. And grace never stops coming.

The world is forever telling us to do more to be better to earn and produce and reform and things largely stay the same. Jesus, on the other hand, is forever telling us that the most important thing has already been finished, the only thing we have to do is trust him. Peter, like us, wants so desperately to be the master of his own fate, he wants to be in control of what happens and to whom. His imagination of the Kingdom of God is limited by his imagination of earthly kingdoms. But Jesus didn’t come to bring us more of the same. He came to raise the dead. And the dead can’t raise themselves.