It Takes A Church...

Angelic Understatement

One of my favorite lines from the "annunciation to Mary" gospel text (Luke 1:28-36) is when Gabriel assures Mary that if she agrees to become the mother of the savior, that she’ll have at least one person who will understand (v. 36). “And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren.  For nothing will be impossible with God.”

Talk about an angelic understatement. 

"Mary, don’t worry, your relative Elizabeth is going to have a baby too.  Everyone thought she was barren, but God opened her womb.  Of course, Elizabeth and her husband did this thing the old-fashioned way but this is still a little miracle from God. You, on the other hand, are doing something a little different.  No Joseph, just God. I know this seems impossible..." 

If Elizabeth's pregnancy seemed impossible, Mary's was impossible.  And that is ultimately the great hope of Christmas.  God does the impossible.

In many ways, what we most need to get is impossible. What every human soul is longing for can’t possibly be gotten or grabbed, bought or earned.  What the world needs is something impossible so that they will make no mistake that God is up to something.  Because “nothing will be impossible with God.”

Advent is to be a season where we reflect on all the things that we CANNOT do, so that we become even more aware of what we need God TO do.  And nowhere is this more clear than we consider the usual Christmas wish about “peace on earth”, or “joy to the world”.  We have to remember that CHRISTMAS does not bring or inspire peace or joy, but instead celebrates that which only God can accomplish. 

But perhaps even more personally, what is the impossible thing that you need God to accomplish in your life?  Could this Advent be a season where you continually yield to God’s word and will, trusting the Spirit to do what we cannot?  Because while God’s ways are certainly not our ways, “nothing will be impossible with God.”

As we enter into Advent, let me encourage you to prayerfully consider this question: What is the thing you need to stop doing so that God can do what only he can do in your life?

Waiting

"Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life."  Simon Weil

     "Most of us think of waiting as something very passive, a hopeless state determined by events totally out of our hands.  The bus is late? You cannot do anything about it, so you have to sit there and just wait.  It is not difficult to understand the irritation people fell when somebody says, 'Just wait.' Words like that seem to push us into passivity.
     "But there is none of that passivity in scripture. Those who are waiting are waiting very actively...Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it.  A waiting person is someone who is present to the moment, who believes that this moment is the moment." Henri Nouwen (from Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, p. 31)
      

"The World Itself Holding Its Breath"

First Day of Advent

The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton.  In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen.  You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you've never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment. 

(Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark, pp. 2,3)

For those who would like a nice introduction to the Advent and the Christian year, please see Mark D. Roberts series from 2004. 

Better Off

My Thanksgiving gift to my small cadre of readers is to recommend a book that has been a gift to me.  It is a book called Better Off by Eric Brende.

Brende graduated from MIT and then spent eighteen months with his new bride living in a community of people who even the Amish think are quaint and backward.  They had no technology, not even running water and electricity.  His goal was to determine the amount of technology that actually enhances life.

The irony of writing a recommendation of a book questioning the value of technology on my laptop to post on my internet weblog is not lost on me.  But this little snippet of Brende’s first experience attending the Anabaptist worship service of his new neighbors (he and his wife are Roman Catholics) and listening to their singing is so worth sharing that I’ll overcome my uneasy conscience, share it with you and pray that God will have mercy on my technologically-addicted Calvinist soul.  I’ll have more to say on this topic, I am sure. But for now, I remain thankful that there are some of you who actually read what I write in these posts and that I have a laptop, the internet and other gizmos like my ipod and espresso machine to help me do it. 

Here’s the quote, enjoy, and please consider getting and reading the book.  Happy Thanksgiving.

(T)here was a long history behind the music, a history of precarious Anabaptist fortunes among religious enemies.  Present company could not escape the memory of their predecessors’ suffering any more than they could ignore their uneasy relationship with the world around them today, a world that challenged them on almost every front.  This strange melancholy chant perfectly expressed that discomfiture.  The music eerily wavered somewhere between the harmonious and the off-key, yawning over the edge of tonality one minute, circling back for a resolution the next.  (They) were not tone deaf.  The course they charted among the hazards and temptations of modern society created dissonance.
Yet what the singers remembered was no less important than what they forgot: themselves.  This music reached for something higher. (p. 82)

Credible Evangelism Today

“How can this strange story of God made man, of a crucified savior, of resurrection and new creation become credible for those whose entire mental training has conditioned them to believe that the real world is the world that can be satisfactorily explained and managed without the hypothesis of God? I know of only one clue to the answering of that question, only one real hermeneutic of the gospel: Congregations that believe it.”

Lesslie Newbigin, Word in Season, p. 42.  Cited in Tim Stafford, In Jesus’ Steps.

“The gospel does not present the church as a savior.  Rather the church is the place where the Savior lives.  The message can be heard rising out of the church: ‘Jesus is changing the world.  Come and join us as we follow Jesus.’”  Tim Stafford. 

Wide to Narrow and Back Again

I know that for many of us today, the biggest problem with Jesus teaching is the narrowness of it.  We really do live in a “small world after all.”  There are so many different paths, so many different ways, it really can’t be about following the words of one, just one man, one teacher, one carpenter from Galilee that has been dead for 2000 years.  That is so…narrow.  I know it may seem really hard to believe this, but it’s really, really true: Only the narrow gate leads to the wide grace of the Kingdom.

Listen again to Jesus’ teaching here.  What echo do you hear in this story?  What theme is being played out here?  What is the music that is reverberating in this passage?  “Hear my words and act on them…” The God of the universe is coming to us like he did the first humans in the Garden of Eden and asking us to trust him. 

Remember, life with God didn’t start out so narrow.  God made humans and told them that they could have everything, everything.  All of creation was theirs to enjoy and take care of.  Be fruitful and multiply! Enjoy the world and each other.  It’s all sex and gardening.  Intimacy and enjoyment, freedom and responsibility. 

We were to live together in perfect love and peace, perfect enjoyment.  God the Creator would be the King of a good, delightful and lovely world.  The grace of God was so wide, so vast, so immeasurable.  There was only one thing, one command, one prohibition.  They had to trust God by not eating from the fruit of one tree.  That was his word to us.  Enjoy all the wide, wide world that I have given you except this one tree.

But we didn’t listen to God’s words.  We didn’t act on God’s words.  Humans listened to Satan’s words and acted upon his words not God’s words and everything in Creation was turned inside out. 

Now in Jesus, God himself comes to show us the way, to be the way, to take us from the tree in the garden that brought our condemnation to the tree on Calvary where he would atone for our sins. 

In Jesus we are offered a chance to regain the Kingdom, to begin now to live under God’s reign and rule, to be assured of the day when peace and beauty, enjoyment and loveliness will be the experience of every person, but there is but one door, one gate, one road and it is simply the way that Adam rejected.  To do God’s will.  To hear the words of Jesus, the son of God and act on them.  To follow Jesus and live out the Kingdom.

Eden was the widest life with one narrow way to death.  And we took it.
Jesus offers us the narrow way out of death that leads to the widest way of life
  …if we will take it. 

My friends, in the same way that my Father’s voice had to break through fog of my fear and grab my attention when I was rock climbing as a teenager, Jesus is doing the same thing at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.  Maybe he saw their furtive glances, maybe he knew their hearts, maybe he just knew his own heart well enough to know the temptations that awaited all who would seek the Kingdom that is only possible through the cross. But before he leaves that mountainside and takes his disciples in into a new season of ministry, he speaks to them directly.

Enter the narrow gate. (Jesus)
Do the will of (Jesus’) Father in heaven.
Hear these words of (Jesus) and act on them. 

When it all comes down to it:  Do we trust Jesus?  Will we build your lives on Jesus? 

Citizens of Heaven

I'll return to the posts on Matthew 7, but as we worship this Lord's Day, I wanted to share a snippet I found on the resurrection, heaven and what being a Kingdom community is really all about.

(T)he resurrection stories in the four Gospels aren't about going to heaven when you die. In fact, there is almost nothing about "going to heaven when you die" in the whole New Testament. Being "citizens of heaven" (Philippians 3.20) doesn't mean you're supposed to end up there. Many of the Philippians were Roman citizens, but Rome didn't want them back when they retired. Their job was to bring Roman culture to Philippi.

That's the point which all the Gospels actually make, in their own ways. Jesus is risen, therefore God's new world has begun. Jesus is risen, therefore Israel and the world have been redeemed. Jesus is risen, therefore his followers have a new job to do.

And what is that new job? To bring the life of heaven to birth in actual, physical, earthly reality...

Jesus' resurrection is the beginning of God's new project, not to snatch people away from earth to heaven, but to colonize earth with the life of heaven.

NT Wright

The Narrow Gate to the Solid Rock

After telling his disciples that the Narrow Gate to the Kingdom is “(doing) the will of my Father in heaven.”  Jesus then launches immediately into a word picture to describe it.  Frankly, he reveals that “doing the will of the Father” is so basic, anyone can do it.

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock.The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!”

So Jesus wants his disciples to get this clear point before they head down the hill and try to live like Kingdom people.  That narrow gate that most people will not choose is doing the will of the Father in heaven.  And the will of the Father, Jesus says is to “hear these words of mine and act on them.”

In other words, to do the will of the Father, it is not enough to simply show up for the sermon, you must live the Kingdom.  You have to hear the words and then live them out.

My friends, so often when we hear passages like this one, we hear them with the voice of judgement.  It is a stern voice, a harsh voice.  A voice of ultimatum.  But that is not the voice I hear.  The voice I hear in this text is sober, and urgent and indeed a bit confronting.  It is a voice that is trying to get our attention, warning us of the precariousness of our position and trying to break through the fearful haze that so many of us live in each day.  Like my Father’s voice calling up at me.  “Tod, do you trust me? Tod, if you do, you must move, now, you must act on my words.  You must do what I tell you.” 

My friends, this is the voice of love, the voice of grace.  Jesus looks at those whom he has gathered at his feet, who has listened to him tell of the Kingdom and I believe he says, pleading with us, “I know there are a lot of teachers out there.  I know there are a lot of spiritual options.  But, do not take the wide road.  Do not build on the sand.  For that is the way of destruction.  I warn you, I beg of you.” 

My friends, when the storm comes will you be those who are on the hard firm road, the rock of truth?  And notice that I say when, not if, the storm comes, because it will most certainly come. 

As one fine theologian, Bono, lead singer of the rock band U2, said in a Rolling Stone interview last month: “I want to build my house on a rock because even if the waters are not high around the house, I’m going to bring back a storm.  I have that in me.”   

Some of us get that don’t we?  We may not be in the middle of a storm, right now, but we are certainly capable of blowing our lives to pieces, aren’t we?  My friends, where are you this morning?  What are you building your life on? 

What gate are you entering, what road are you taking?  This is your opportunity today.  Do you trust Jesus?  Do you take him at his word?  You have heard the word, indeed we hear it every week. 

Do we believe it, does it change the way we live and work, and spend our money, and use our time?  Does it change our marriages and parenting style, our choices we make about the future and friends?  Do we put the Kingdom first, do we live out the righteousness that only Jesus the King can bring in our lives?

My friends, Jesus is telling us that in every life a moment of truth will come.  A storm will appear on the horizon or well up within your heart and at that moment the fruit of your choice of gates and roads and rock or sand will be evident.  Jesus comes with a sharp word that is meant to get our attention so that we will not miss it, but it is a word of love, of truth, of caring. 

To enter through the narrow gate that leads to life, to build the house of your life on solid rock, to do the will of the Father who loves us is nothing more or nothing less than to hear the words of Jesus and do what he says.  To hear the words of Jesus announcing the Kingdom and to live out the Kingdom in our lives.  Starting now, at this moment, God helping us by the power of the Holy Spirit that he offers.

The Problem with Narrow

There is no other way. 

That’s our problem isn’t it.  That’s what makes this Christianity thing, this Kingdom thing so hard, isn’t it?  The narrowness of it all.

I can tell you that was my problem on the rock that day.  I wanted any other option besides having to leave my foothold and leap to the next ledge.  I didn’t like the narrowness of needing to trust all of me to one scary option.

And in many ways that is the problem many of face in taking the leap to Kingdom living.  We balk at the narrowness of the way.  Jesus?  Sure.  Only Jesus? 
Jesus is really the only gate, the only entry point, the only way to the life that God intends for his creation? 

How about the huge crowds of people who are not following Jesus?  What do we do with about a billion Chinese who aren’t followers of Jesus? What about a billion Hindus in India and another 2 billion or so others who are happily marching along in the throng that is “going there own way” and claiming to find all kinds of roads to the spiritual whatever that we all are looking for?

To believe that Jesus is the only one with the words of the Kingdom, that Jesus is the only one that leads to real true eternal life, that Jesus is the only one who is the rock to build our lives on, is so…well, narrow. 

What is interesting is that Jesus never explains or defends his brash assertion, he never solves our problem with his exclusive claim.  But, this is exactly the point of the parable in v. 13-14.  Jesus says, “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it."

Jesus tells his followers that following him is going to be hard because it is narrow.  The imagery here is one of a city like Jerusalem that had both narrow gates for foot traffic and big wide gates for commerce, for carts coming to market, or for armies to enter.  But on festival days and the like when crowds would come to the city the throngs would sweep in through the wide gates.  It was easy to get swept away in the crowd.  And in Jesus’ day, as much as today, there were all kinds of options for the earnest religious seeker. 

What are the characteristics of the wide road?  It seems easy, smooth, effortless.  Like drafting on a bike in a peleton.  You are just pulled along by the sheer momentum of the pack.  It’s filled with lots of people and entertaining teachers who are saying nice things but in reality are fleecing the flock for their own gain.  It is filled with those who give honor to Jesus, (“Oh Lord, Lord. Oh Teacher, Oh wise Jesus…”) And who are even committed to doing good things, great things, even miracles, maybe, but really live to go their own way.  The wide road is for everyone who is interested in doing everything but the one thing that is really necessary. 

Look at v. 21 with me: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.

Doing the will of Jesus’ Father.  That’s the narrow gate.  Living each day with one purpose: To fulfill the prayer, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” 

Okay, so what exactly does that mean?  What does it mean to “do the will of Jesus’ Father in heaven” really?  Isn’t that hard to figure out?  We’re talking “the will of God” here.  This is a mystery, isn’t it?

Actually, no.  Which is where we will pick up next post.

“Do you trust me?”

I heard the voice from below my feet.  My legs were wobbling, my heart racing, the layers of skin rubbed raw on my fingers.  I felt a bead of sweat roll down my face and took a deep breath.  The voice again, “Tod, do you trust me?”  It was my Dad holding on to the belay rope that was yo-yoing through the protection and attached to my harness.  Seventeen years old, I was climbing a face at Big Rock by Lake Perris in California.  I was on a very thin hold and close to peeling off.  I could feel myself beginning to panic.  More than anything, I needed to move.  I need to leap off the little ledge and try to hold myself on something that looked as solid as the edge of a quarter.  I needed to jump and grab and pull and push my weight out on the small nubbin of rock that would propel me further up the face. 

But I just couldn’t.  Fatigue and fear now messed with my mind and sapped my strength.  I was convinced that I was going to fall.  And I feared that the rope or my Dad would fail and then…The voice again, “TOD, DO YOU TRUST ME!”  Dad was yelling now.  “Of COURSE I DO.”  I yelled back mostly to get him to shut up so I could focus on my panic. 

“Then MOVE, son.  I will not let you fall, I’ve got you.  If you trust me you have to act now!  There is no other way.”

And so I did.  In one motion I gave a final push on my trembling legs and lunged for the handhold.  I felt the rope stiffen to secure my safety and my fingers hook on the micro ledge that was, for the moment anyway, my new perch.  But that was all it took.  Once I got moving I kept moving until finally I pulled myself over the top and yelled.  “Belay off!” 

I looked down and saw my Dad’s smiling face.  I knew what he was thinking.  “All you had to do is trust me.” 

If you have been following along in this series of posts in the Sermon on the Mount, then you know that when we get to the close of Chapter 7, we are in same place.  But instead of being on the face of a climb we are about to descend down from the safe place at the foot of Jesus where we have been taking in his teaching. And the question is, “Do we trust him?”

In Matthew 5-7 we have learned what Jesus meant when he announced, “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near.”  The invitation, the promise, the revealed “Good News”, the gospel, is announced to all who would receive it: God’s Kingdom, his reign and rule that will restore this broken world to the way it was intended to be is now present in Jesus.  Through Jesus we are offered the grace of invitation to live in God’s Kingdom, to be one of Jesus’ disciples, to find life, real life, true life as God intended it if we will only have faith, if we will only believe it, if we will only trust him. 

And in Matthew 7:13-29, Jesus takes his hearers to their moment of decision.  What will they do about the announcement that God’s Kingdom is available in Jesus?  What will you and I do about it today? 

As we prepare these final posts in this series, and face what it means to follow Jesus, keep this thought rolling around in your soul: Jesus’ word is his grace, our actions are our faith.  Jesus’ word, his teaching, his revealing to us the truth of the Kingdom in our midst is grace to us.  We don’t deserve his attention, we haven’t earned our spot at his feet, we don’t merit the revelation that we are receiving, but Jesus has given it to us.  It is grace. 

Faith is not just given intellectual assent or emotional preference to something, faith is leaning on it, faith is trusting it enough to do something about it.  Jesus’ word is his grace, our actions are our faith.

In rockclimbing or in Christian living, the maxim we have learned from Dallas Willard is the same: To believe something is to act as if it true.  And specifically, “Believers are those who act as if the gospel is true.”   

Just as I did on that rock so long ago, over the next few days you and I will have a chance to test our faith, to check our beliefs, to face a moment of truth. Jesus is saying, “Do you trust me? You have to act.  There is no other way.”

Next post, we'll look at the problem of this very narrow way.