Advent: Preparation, Anticipation, & Hope in Christ’s Coming
Dr. David McDonald
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Copyright 2010 Dr. David McDonald
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Table of Contents
Chapter
1: What Is Advent About?
Chapter
2: Who Is Coming and Why?
Chapter
3: How Did It Get This Way?
Chapter
4: How Will It Get Fixed?
Chapter
5: Advent Changes Things
the
elements of spiritual formation
Section Two: Preparation for Christ’s Coming
Chapter
6: Be Ready
Chapter
7: The Cynics
Chapter
8: The Antagonists
Chapter
9: The Co-operants and Visionaries
the
elements of spiritual formation
Section Three: Anticipating Christ’s Coming
Chapter
10: Christianity Is Eschatology
Chapter
11: Parousia
Chapter
12: Stranger in a Strange Land
Chapter
13: Anticipating the End
Chapter
14: Living in the Present-Future
the
elements of spiritual formation
Section Four: Hope in Christ’s Coming
Chapter
15: A New Hope
Chapter
16: Hope for Healing
Chapter
17: Hope for Restoration
the
elements of spiritual formation
Foreword
Advent heralds Christ’s coming, whispering to us his promise of a fresh start. The Evangelical church, however, often has focused narrowly on Christ’s Second Coming to the neglect of his first coming and almost to the exclusion of his perpetual coming within us and among us. Spiritual formation, the Spirit’s work of shaping us more into the image and likeness of Christ, could be described simply as preparation: as preparing us for Christ’s coming. Advent invites us into deeper spiritual formation.
One of the strangest requests from a church member I ever received as a pastor was when twenty-four year old Andrea traipsed into my office, settled into the chair across from my desk, and boldly asked for permission to have an affair with her doctor. Her husband didn’t understand her; her doctor did. What was she looking for, a signed note from her pastor? After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I stuttered something completely unpremeditated: What would you do if you knew Jesus was coming back at the end of the week? Andrea’s eyes narrowed with annoyance: I wouldn’t do it, she exclaimed. I should have paused longer to help her process her inner struggle, but both her question and her answer surprised me. She believed in Jesus; she wanted to follow him; ultimately she wanted to do what would please him. In light of eternity the choice was clear to her. Case closed.
If we only knew the hour of Christ’s arrival we would be prepared, wouldn’t we? Unlike the Foolish Virgins, we’d have our lamps trimmed, right? What I began to realize after my encounter with Andrea, however, is that we face this situation of Christ’s coming daily. Whether Christ returns in cloud-splitting glory at the end of next week or we get struck by a falling asteroid, the result for us remains the same. Prepared or unprepared, we face God. This realization prompted me to adjust the introduction to the undergraduate spiritual formation class I teach—so that I now begin with the following question: What would you do if you knew you had only one year left to live? Our answer to that question reveals much about the current state of our soul and our spiritual formation.
Bucket List, the movie staring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, illustrates the point. Two older men meet in a hospital room, and after they each discover they have terminal cancer, they decide to live out their “kick the bucket list”—what they hope to do before they die. First human instinct: experience the thrill of life, go for the gusto, taste the wine, see the sunset. So the two men sky dive, race stock cars, and tour the world. Second human intuition: mend our broken relationships. Nicholson struggles through the last part of the film to reconnect with his estranged daughter.
Dave tells a story in this book about his wife Carmel and her reconciliation with her mother Katherine before her mom died. Katherine had hurt her daughter deeply. But the opportunity came to make peace. It was an important day, Dave recalls, because it was Katherine’s last day alive. Yet it was only because Carmel had already been working on forgiving her “mum” that she was able to make peace with her when the time came. Dave explains: That’s the power of recognizing Christ when he comes: no regrets, no missed opportunities, no moments of self-doubt during which time we wonder if we’ll ever get the chance to make some long wrong right. Within that illustration of “brokenness mended” we see both the fragility of the human condition and the beauty of Christ’s coming to heal. Every time we climb into a car we stare our frail mortality in the face. Psalm 39 describes human existence as a passing shadow. We never know the number of our days. The reality of such a vulnerable existence could cause us either to despair or to live with a new awareness of the preciousness of life. Early Christians lived precisely with this hope, calling each other to vigilance, alertness, prayerfulness, and joy. Awake, sleepers, cries Paul, and Christ will give you light!
What would you do, then, if you discovered you had only a year left to live? Would you alter your life much? If, for instance, you would work less and laugh more, or spend more time with family and less time accumulating stuff, the question becomes why don’t you start doing that now? Someone approached St. Augustine while he was planting his orchard and asked what he would do if he knew Christ was going to return at the end of the day. Augustine replied laconically that he would finish planting his orchard. Because Augustine lived “in Christ,” he did not need to change his course radically in order to meet Christ without embarrassment. He lived ready. He prepared to die by the way he lived. What would it mean for us to begin living without regrets, living in way compatible with our highest ideals? If Advent nudges us awake, telling us to prepare for the coming King, it also reveals our longing to be well, whole, and “right with God” when Christ does show up. We long to live in such a way that we don’t disappoint ourselves. You will discover in this book that Christ comes to teach us what a fully human life looks like when it’s lived out under the canopy of God’s love. Brokenness spills out everywhere in the world. Brokenness spills out in us, but Christ comes to bring healing.
The answer to the question of what we would do with the last year of our life is really another question: What is it we really want? What is it we’re really longing for? Advent is about longing, about waiting—about Israel yearning and waiting for the Messiah, about the Church vigilantly waiting for the return of Christ. So what are we waiting for this Advent season? Not for more stuff under the tree I suspect! What are the things worth waiting for?
Advent is a soul-shaping season. Winston Churchill suggested that first we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us. We could make the same claim about our worship: first we shape our worship—our seasons like Advent—afterwards our worship shapes us. Let the reflections in the following pages challenge you to re-shape significant things in your life—into a more holy, more human, more Christ-like form. Advent trumpets Christ’s coming: Christ has come, Christ is coming, Christ will come again.
Robert
Moore-Jumonville, Ph.D.
Professor of Spiritual Formation, Spring
Arbor University
Introduction
Our whole life is Advent – that is, a time of waiting for the
ultimate, for the time when there will be a new heaven and a new
earth, when all people are brothers and sisters and one rejoices in
the words of the angels: on earth peace to those on whom God’s
favor rests.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 20th C German pastor and
Nazi antagonist
I confess. Despite having spent a great deal of my life in church ministry, I know nothing about the liturgical calendar. I’m a liturgical virgin. But a couple of years ago a friend of mine showed up at work on Ash Wednesday wearing a smudgy gray cross on her forehead. Like thousands of others, she had attended an early morning Mass and received the sign of the cross on her face as a reminder to carry the sacrificial death of Jesus with her all day (and all year…and all her life) long.
Because I knew my friend wasn’t nuts, her actions intrigued me.
A few months later, another of my friends – a gal I knew from high school – proudly announced on Facebook that she was leaving her “contemporary” church in favor of a liturgical one.
There was that word again. Liturgy. I found it that it means “the work of the people.” In real-life it means that both the services those people attend and when they have traditionally chosen to attend them are largely scripted according to theme, season, and meaning.
I’m not keen on scripts, but I am especially keen on theme and meaning. So this book represents my efforts to get on board the liturgical train and ride it all season long.
Advent.
Christmastide.
Epiphany.
Ordinary Time.
Septuagisima
et al.
Lent.
Holy
Week.
Easter
Tridiuum.
Eastertide.
Ascension.
Pentecost.
Trinity.
Even as I write these words, each representing the big seasons of the liturgical calendar, I have no real clue what they mean. I trust I will. I trust that the process of excavating better than a thousand years of Christian history and tradition will hold some real-world relevance for me. And for you, be ye virgin or matriarch (in the liturgical sense, of course).
I begin with Advent, with the coming of the Savior. I suppose that’s only appropriate.
For most of my Christian experience, any and all speculation or imagination surrounding Christ’s coming centered on the next time he’d show up, not the first time. Whether with movies like Thief in the Night or books like Left Behind, it seems we love to fantasize about the Second Coming, but the first one seems too quaint to bother with any longer. Don’t get me wrong, there are still pageants at plenty of churches and lots of songs and turkey stuffing; but there’s no imagination to Christmas anymore, and that’s a bit sad.
It’s like all of our fervor goes into imagining the Second Coming, while the First Coming is relegated only to sentiment.
That seems backwards, doesn’t it? I mean, our best theologians and biblical scholars have loudly proclaimed for years that the popular conception of the Second Coming in the Western church is not rooted in the Bible at all but – instead – on a bunch of campy B-movies and that old book The Late Great Planet Earth. If anything, our scholars and teachers tell us that we ought to hope for God’s great “cleanup of the world” while simultaneously not being too particular about when and how that happens.
In short, we ought to appreciate the real hope that he is coming again, but understand that our ideas about how that will occur are likely sentimental.
On the flip side, though, these same learned dons tell us that we know for sure how Christ came the first time around and can take tremendous inspiration and prophetic verve from his meager birth, humble beginnings, and triumph over opposition. They tell us that our cartoonish renderings of cute stables and kingly visitors miss the point completely of Christ and his Kingdom Come, and that – if we really understood the power and provocation of God’s re-entry into humanity – it would change everything about how we treat one another and how we hope for the future of the world.
In short, we ought to figure out – fast! – how and why he really came, because doing so will change everything.
To sum up: we’re sentimental about the truth that changes everything, and fervent about a speculation we invented fifty years ago.
Fervor and sentiment. We’ve got them confused. We should change.
Christ’s coming affords us that opportunity – not just his First Coming, mind you, or his final coming, but his coming now.
There are three advents:
He
came.
He comes.
He is coming again.
He
came in a manger, incarnate.
He will come again, glorified.
But
he also comes to us now,
to
live in us,
to guide and lead us,
and to help us change from
the people we are
into
the people we were always designed
and destined to become.
The present is the collision of Christ’s comings, a sacred sandwich of sorts.
This book is about exploring that transformation. It is about Christ’s Advents. This book is about preparation, anticipation, and hope in God’s plans to give us a new beginning and to make ours a better world.
To help us better understand the implications of Christ’s comings in real life, I want to start by more fully answering the question, What is Christmas really about? From there, I’d like to explore the ways in which we might appropriately prepare for his coming, paying specific attention to the ways in which we become hospitable to him now. I’d also like to delve more deeply into the relationship between Advent (Christ’s First Coming) and the Parousia (Christ’s Second Coming, the Rapture and all that jazz), so we don’t mess things up the next time, the same way our spiritual predecessors messed things up the first time. Finally, I want to take a little space at the end of the book and talk about hope. If our faith is rooted in God’s character – that is, in who God is – then certainly our hope must be rooted in God’s promise – that is, in what God will do. What good is a God who does nothing? Thankfully, we’ll never have to know because our God is fantastically active.
That’s the scope of this book: the reason, the preparation, the anticipation, and the hope. And the point? Well, I hate to beat a dead liturgical horse, but the point really is theme and meaning. I want you to better understand your Savior and his comings, so you can recognize him when he shows up and pitch in to help so that when he shows up again, you’ll hear him say: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
May Christ be glad with the work of his people.
Section One: Christ Is Coming
Chapter
1: What Is Advent About?
Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! 7
John
1.29
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.
John 1.4-5
When I moved to the United States from Canada in 2005, I went through a bit of an adjustment period. Most of that adjustment concerned American holidays, with which I was very unfamiliar. Thanksgiving, for example, is a much smaller affair in the Great White North--especially considering we had no pilgrims and, unlike Michigan, wild turkeys did not roost on my front porch.
At any rate, getting used to these holidays – Veterans Day, Presidents Day, etc – meant that I almost constantly found myself asking the people around me: What are we celebrating and why?
As a joke I asked one of the grocery baggers at our local supermarket why we celebrated Christmas. Her answer was very funny (to me, at least). She said: It’s Jesus’ birthday. I pressed her further, asking why that was important, and she replied: Because he died on the cross for our sins.
I found that answer amusing because I imagined what mental images I would have conjured up had I not known the full story of Jesus. Think about it. If her explanation about the importance of Christmas was the basis for my entire understanding of the holiday season, I’m more likely to have a vision of Cupid thumb-tacked to a totem pole rather than God’s plan for the salvation of the world.
Jesus was born and then he died on the cross for our sins.
All of that is true, and all of that is truly important, but I think that much like my friend the grocery bagger, many of us have forgotten some significant details about the birth of Christ, the purpose of his coming, and the significance it has for us today.
So let’s tease
this out a little further, beginning with Advent – the ”coming”
of Jesus.
WHAT ADVENT REALLY MEANS
If Advent means “coming,” we might wonder: Who is coming?
The answer, obviously, is Christ. But we might further wonder: Who is Jesus Christ?
In
the Christian Bible,
Jesus Christ was and is
God of the Cosmos,
Above Whom There is None Other,
Peerless Peer and
Everlasting Lord of All.
He was born under supernatural circumstances to a teenage girl during her engagement to an older, respectable man who likely only-half believed her explanation of the Holy Spirit impregnating her and planned to divorce her quietly once the baby was born.
Jesus (his name is Joshua in Aramaic) was born under a cloud of suspicion, but later came to be called Christ (which means “anointed one” and relates to an ancient belief by practicing Jews in a military hero known as the Messiah who would deliver them from their national and spiritual enemies).
Christ wasn’t his last name, but his title.
Great, we think, before asking: And why is he coming?
He is coming, simply, because something has gone horribly and persistently wrong with his creation. God created the world and placed us within it as a well-ordered and developing ecosystem, complete with interpersonal and interspecies interaction that would have sustained life abundantly and joyously. We were created to be something akin to planetary horticulturalists or zoologists, while simultaneously being given the directive to establish ourselves into society and govern the earth.
Long, long ago our spiritual parents, Adam and Eve, abdicated our responsibility to the world, and we have all suffered greatly since then.
War.
O-zone
depletion.
Diminishing natural resources.
Species extinction.
Prejudice.
Genocide.
Terrorism.
Hate.
There is a great corruption in the world, for which – sadly, yet inescapably – we must all acknowledge our own culpability. None of us are guilt-free concerning the human condition, nor the condition of our planet. Our world is deeply wounded, and Christ came to fix it.
Geez. I read that back to myself and think: What a lot to absorb. But, of course, it begs one further and final question: How does he plan to fix all this?
To begin with, Christ wants to start by fixing us. Jesus came to live in this world as one of us and show us how we were always meant to live. He demonstrates what it means to be human, while simultaneously giving us a reference for what it means to be godly. He was, and is God, who lived as one of us, showing us how we might behave, love, interact, and aspire to live like God.
In an important sense, Jesus re-lived all of human history – resisted every kind of temptation, confronted every kind of evil, even figuratively reenacted every one of humanity’s great failings up until that point without, himself, failing – and showed us what God has always intended for his people and for his world.
(Note: I’ve written extensively on the divinity of Jesus in two other publications and will not rehash those arguments and claims here. It is central to the Christian story that Christ made claims to be God, and the Christian faith is founded upon the truth of those claims. For more info, see Doxa: what you believe matters and Down to Earth: Why We’re Really Here and Why It Really Matters available on in print and e-book Amazon.com and Smashwords.com.)
Jesus has done for humanity what I often find myself doing for my children: He dismantled our mess and put things back together again properly.
My son Jake loves Lego. He loves to buy Lego with his allowance, but has no real concept of the age-appropriate rating on the Lego box. Consequently, he often buys Lego for kids age 10+ (he is only 7) and has a difficult time putting it together. It’s fairly common for me to enter his room, see him sitting on his mat disheartened and frustrated, and take a few moments to help him with his project. First, I take apart the stuff he’s already done and strip it down to the last time he got something perfectly right. Then I rebuild it, showing him step by step what to do and where to find the answers in the instruction manual when he hits a problem.
That’s what Christ has done for us, and that’s why he came.
Advent, then, means the coming of a savior to heal the wounds of the world caused by sin. Advent gives us a new starting point, a new beginning, by bringing to us a new model – a new Adam, if you will.
We all recognize the world is in trouble.
A package of explosives was recently found in a UPS container heading from Yemen to a synagogue in Chicago.
A woman in our community recently caught her son-in-law inappropriately touching his two daughters in the bathtub.
A gay college student just jumped off a bridge after being humiliated by his heterosexual peers.
We all want things to be better, to be different. We want a do over.
We want a chance to start over, to leave our old mistakes and regrets behind.
We don’t want to run into our old boyfriends, because we’re trying to forget that part of who we used to be.
We don’t want to see the bullies from high school, because we’re not willing to be reminded of a time when we fit into lockers at recess.
We want a new beginning.
We want a world of peace and rest, happiness and laughter. God promises us that world in the future, just as he ennobles us to work toward that world in the present.
That’s what we’re
celebrating at Christmas, during Advent: We don’t have to live
like this anymore. We no longer have to be corrupted by our hate
or governed by our prejudice. Christ’s coming means we get a new
beginning, that the world is beginning to heal, and that we –
finally – can feel like our old selves again.
FEELING LIKE THE ‘OLD ME’
Do you know what I mean when I say, “our old selves?” I mean that feeling you get when you’re living in such a way that it doesn’t matter what others think – you’re living without any sense of compulsion, or anxiety, or fear. I mean that sensation that, even though what you’re doing might not be cool or popular somehow, that it’s right and it feels like you’re fulfilling some kind of higher purpose.
A friend of mine went through a very difficult season a few years ago, marked by deep depression and mental illness. She received excellent therapy and was on several medications, but – despite all that – she came very close to losing her marriage and her sanity. Eventually, by the grace of God and the combined efforts of her family and her psychiatrist, she came through that difficult season and is now living healthy and well, claiming she now feels like her old self again.
That’s the feeling Christ gives us: the power and sensation to live now like we were always destined and designed to live.
To
live with courage.
To live in love with the people we care for.
To behave in ways that honor others,
that
sacrifice for them and lift them up,
to interact with the world
as an agent of God’s healing
instead of a victim of the
world’s corruption.
Advent is about Christ coming into the manger of the mind,
the
Bethlehem inside,
and about God incarnating himself in each of us
so we get to start over.
It is from that interior nativity that his mission to heal the world begins. He wants to restore us to our rightful position.
Chapter
2: Who Is Coming and Why?
[ Jesus Christ], being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death. even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory
of God the Father.
Philippians 2.6-11
My dad is a bishop of a denomination in Canada, and as part of his ecclesial duty, he often has to travel across the country and help churches through seasons of great difficulty. One such occasion sticks out in my mind. A little church in a rural community in Saskatchewan had a long-term, dearly beloved pastor who had been caught in adultery. The pastor was unrepentant, and Dad was forced to remove him from his pastorate, but the people were very angry with Dad, because he was an outsider making decisions that affected their everyday lives.
They felt like Dad couldn’t understand them, because he was a “city-slicker” all decked out in his three-piece suit, and as a result he quickly became the enemy, while their former, adulterous pastor became a martyr to real love instead of the perpetrator of a marital crime.
I’ll always admire the way Dad chose to handle this scenario. He was already in this little backwater town, patiently working with these people, and he decided to fly in an old friend of his – Walter. Walter had grown up on a farm in Saskatchewan and knew what these folks were like. Walter had also pastored in many small towns like theirs and knew about the strong bond people form with a church leader in a small community.
Walter showed up at the town hall-style church meeting and sat beside my dad on the platform. Dad was in his suit; Walter was in overalls. Dad’s hair was neatly combed; Walter removed his baseball hat as he entered the church, revealing a sweaty ring left around his ears.
Dad convened the meeting amidst a ruckus of coughs and scoffs, mutterings and misgivings, and then turned it over to Walter. Walter got up and in plain, simple speech, told the people he was real sorry about what had happened there and was willing to step in and be their pastor for a few months until things got sorted out.
Problem solved.
The people immediately loved Walter and felt him to be credible – both as a Saskatchewinian and as a former pastor – and with Walter at the head, they were free to ignore Dad’s urban airs as well as their fallen pastor’s pleas for victimization.
Walter came to them
as one of them, and the common people responded to him well.
JESUS IDENTIFIES WITH US
That, by the way, is how God came to us. He did not come as a king or a conqueror. He was not fancified or gussied up. In fact, Matthew’s genealogy (see Matthew 1.1-17) shows Jesus to be a person of low birth, descended from incest (Perez), mixed marriage (Boaz), and adultery (Solomon).
Furthermore, Jesus shows up on the scene like Walter – complete with (the first-century equivalent of) overalls, a plaid shirt, and some muddy boots. Contrary to popular belief, Jesus was not a carpenter per se (making tables and fixing eaves, etc.) but a tekton (a Greek word for a stonemason or perhaps a building contractor, from which we get our words “technical” and “technology”). Rather than working locally, Jesus would daily have walked the three miles each way to Sepphora, giving him a panoramic view of his hometown and all the Judean countryside. Sepphora had been destroyed by the Romans in 4 BCE, and had since been rebuilt and gentrified by Herod in an effort to appease the Emperor. Jesus was more an itinerant laborer than an established artisan, a get-paid-by-the-hour kind of guy, rather than a local tinkerer and jack-of-all-trades.
Jesus came to us as a peasant and a tradesman, but he also came to us as a person of religious and family embarrassment.
Remember, even though contemporary Christians have been touting the virgin birth for millennia, once upon a time there was a young girl telling her fiancé’s family that God made her pregnant…and by all accounts, they didn’t buy it for one second. More on that later, but for now, suffice it to say that Jesus grew up as the illegitimate offspring of Mary and somebody other than Joseph.
Christ came to us poor, tired, and mocked so we could identify with him.
Who came at Advent? God – yes!
But
God chose to come to us in such a way as to identify
with our
poverty,
our humiliation,
our embarrassment,
our
struggle,
our jobs,
our family squabbles and issues, our
sense of betrayal, our relational frustrations, and our wounds of
every stripe.
He
could have come as an angel,
as an emperor,
as a fiery flying
serpent,
a vision,
an oracle,
a website on some steampunk
terminal
that would have wowed the masses,
but he came as
nothing remarkable.
He came like us.
Sometimes people question God’s wisdom in all this. They wonder if maybe God didn’t misplay his cards by coming as something so understated, like maybe it’s God’s fault if we miss him, or misunderstand him, or consider ourselves misfit for religion.
I understand where that sentiment comes from – even the Saskatchewinians love a good Michael Bay movie – but it is a short-sighted version of an all-too familiar history.
The history in question?
The
First Testament –
complete with its burning bush,
its flood,
its pillars of salt and columns of flame,
its midnight
wrestling matches
and metaphysical priests from Selah –
gave
us all the wham! pow! the world could ever desire
of its supreme
deity,
and few people took God seriously then.
God, in his infinite
wisdom, knew that the way forward was the Walter-way, the way of
overalls and sheep-dip shoes.
WHY IDENTIFY?
And as to why God felt it was so important to identify with us? Five reasons that I can think of:
God is coming to
identify with us in our wounds and in our suffering so we know we’re
not alone. When we are hurt, sad, or confused, many of us often
wonder how a good and loving God could allow us to go through such
misery. We ought to take comfort, knowing not only that Christ
endured this kind of misery and overcame it – living with great joy
– but that God is with us in those miserable moments, teaching us
to hope and giving us the courage to live with joy in spite of the
world’s troubles.
Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should
follow in his steps. He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in
his mouth. When they hurled their insults at him, he did not
retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he
entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins
in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for
righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. For you were like
sheep going astray, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and
Overseer of your souls.
1 Peter 2.21b-25
God is coming to
model for us what it means to be truly human. So many times we
find ourselves in situations that are difficult to navigate. Today,
for example, a woman I didn’t know approached me in the parking lot
of my son’s elementary school and asked for advice concerning her
son. She had heard him use a derogatory term for people of an
alternative lifestyle as an insult on the playground and wanted to
explain to him why it was so bad…but couldn’t. Her son is six and
doesn’t even know what sex is, let alone what sexual orientation is
or why prejudicial remarks concerning homosexuals can be deeply
alienating. Jesus is our model for how to love others. Jesus is our
model for how to live well. When there are no clear-cut rules, and
when life seems like so many varied shades of gray, we can find
wisdom and guidance by studying the life of Christ and emulating his
postures, behaviors, and convictions. In the case of this woman and
her son, I encouraged her simply to focus on the hurt words like this
can inflict without exposing him any earlier than necessary to sexual
mores and preferences. This response resonated with her, and she went
away affirmed that God had given her an answer based upon the
compassion of Christ for children in a broken world.
…you were taught in [Christ] in accordance with the truth that is
in Jesus. You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to
put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful
desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on
the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and
holiness.
Ephesians 4.21b-24
God is coming to
incorporate us back into his well-ordered creation as image-bearers.
We were once made by God to be like God (I have written on this
subject extensively in Shadowing God: Living With Dignity and
Humility in God’s Image, available on Amazon.com).
We were made as God’s stewards, his looking-after creatures, and we
were given authority and responsibility over the earth. With that
cultural mandate came a certain bearing, a dignity but a humility
also, and we lived in this world like God’s shadows – tethered to
him and cooperating with him in the care and cultivation of the
created world. Somewhere along the way, we left all of that behind
and chose to live for ourselves instead. We’ve neglected God, the
world, our true selves as godly people, and one another in the
process. Jesus came as the perfect Image of a human being, and when
we embrace Jesus that Image is reprinted within us and grows inside
of us like some benevolent infection.
The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all
creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on
earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or
authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He
is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is
the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the
firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have
the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in
him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether
things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his
blood, shed on the cross.
Colossians 1.15-20
God is coming to
heal the world for us and with us and through us. Since we’ve
made such a mess of things over the last few thousand years (give or
take), and since God loves this world he created (as well as all who
live in it or on it, and certainly with it), God has revealed a plan
in which every wrong thing will be set right. Some of that can be set
right now, though much will need to be set right later on. But the
point remains that God is interested in our beginning to live now
like we were originally intended to live and will one day live again
in his well (re)ordered creation.
See, I will create new heavens and a new earth.
The former things
will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.
But be glad
and rejoice forever in what I will create,
for I will create
Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy.
I will rejoice
over Jerusalem and take delight in my people;
the sound of
weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.
Isaiah
65.17-19
God is coming to
usher in his kingdom rule and reign. Much of the language of
wound and decay in the Bible is quite scary. The brokenness within
ourselves and within our world is known, theologically, as sin. And
sin, for all our own complicity with it and in it, is seen as the
great instrument of a dark and menacing power. That power, a
personality really, is known in the scriptures as ha-Satan
(literally, ‘the accuser’), and ever since sin first entered the
world through the first act of disobedience against God, much of the
authority in this world has rested with Satan. The time has now come
for God to reclaim this authority and restore it to his people. And
though now we experience some measure of reclaimed authority, a time
will come in which God will fully rule and reign over this earthly
kingdom, and the kingdom of Satan will be utterly annihilated.
I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to
overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.
Luke
10.19
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you
will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and
to the ends of the earth.
Acts 1.8
So, to rephrase and recap our original question: Who is coming and why?
We must now answer that God is coming as a humble tradesman, living under a cloud of suspicion, in order to identify with us
so that we might take comfort when we suffer, learn to be humane, find our purpose in this life, figure out what we’re supposed to do
while we’re alive,
and to break the power of darkness over us and give us – instead – power over that darkness forever.
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is
found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse
is found.
He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations
prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His
love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His
love.
Joy to the World, stanzas 3 & 4
Chapter
3: How Did It Get This Way?
Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin,
death came to all people, because all have sinned.
Romans 5.12
In the Nickelodeon cartoon Avatar, episode 11 (“The Great Divide”), there is a story about Ang (the hero, the Avatar) needing to settle a dispute between two warring tribes. One tribe is dirty and uncouth, the other is refined and snobbish. Their tribal feud goes back hundreds of years, with neither side having a clear or accurate memory about when the two brothers – one of whom founded each of the two tribes – began to hate each other and become adversaries. All these tribes people know is that they’ve hated each other for a long time, because their parents hated each other, and their grandparents, and so on and so forth.
Family feud, anyone?
Of course, these cartoon characters aren’t the only people to be adversely affected by the prior generations’ grudges and wars. The Protestants and Catholics in Ireland – both of whom claim to worship the Prince of Peace – have fought famously, as have the Palestinians and Jews in the Holy Land, and the Serbs and Croats in the Balkans.
While we are not
necessarily doomed to follow in the footsteps of our parents, there
do seem to be an awful lot of Montagues and Capulets running around
the world’s theatre of war.
OUR SPIRITUAL PARENTS
Given
what we know about this kind of long-standing animosity,
is it
really so hard for us to believe
that a long, long time ago there
were only a handful of people –
a man and his wife, their two
sons –
who lived in peaceful harmony –
enjoying nature,
eating sweet fruits –
and that in this blissful existence
there was no strife
and no distance
between God and
humanity?
Isn’t that the sort of story upon which all our fairy tales are based?
But like every story since, I suppose, that one incubated tragedy.
Adam,
the first man –
created by God to be a steward of the world –
and Eve, the first woman –
created to be a helper for Adam
in the way God himself was
considered a helper to the cosmos –
disobeyed.
They sinned.
To be fair, they didn’t sin right away. Who knows how long they enjoyed paradise before they lost it. Ten minutes? Ten thousand years? Maybe Eve really was Mitochondrial Eve, our famous ancestor that anthropologists tell us was the mother of humanity almost 200,000 years ago in East Africa. Maybe not. That’s not really the point of the story, though, is it?
The point of the story is that Adam and Eve, charged by God to look after the earth, to fill it, and to subdue it, eventually grew dissatisfied and broke one of only two injunctions, eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
They sinned, and through their actions, sin entered the world like so many mice in a barn.
Coffee shop philosophers and moleskin-journaling college students love to debate about whether or not it’s even possible for the sin of Adam and Eve to truly infect humanity with the condition St. Augustine called, “Original Sin.” Those discussions are sometimes fun, but most of us living in the cold light of day know that even if Adam and Eve hadn’t sinned, we still would have.
Sin
enters the world through me,
every time I disobey,
every time
I wander,
every time I am careless or hurtful,
bitter,
resentful,
or angry.
Sin
enters the world through my shortcomings,
through my judgments,
and through my hypocrisy.
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
Romans
3.23
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not
in us.
1 John 1.8
SIN IS A RELATIONAL WORD
Properly understood, sin is distortion in any direction. That means that any time we do anything wrong – big or little, accidental or intentional – it’s sin.
Ouch.
When faced with this touchy little fact, most of us respond by justifying our sins. We call them “little white lies” or “indiscretions” or whatnot, but according to God, those things are sin.
That doesn’t mean
that all sin is equal, however. Some sins have much farther-reaching
consequences. An extra-marital affair, for example, is going to cause
you a lot more heartache than a half-truth spoken to an acquaintance
at the grocery store. It’s worth mentioning that most of these
consequences are unintended, no matter how foreseeable they may be,
and that we never really enjoy the moment when our debt comes due.
The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and
debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits
of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy;
drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that
those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Galatians 5.19-21
These consequences
need to be suffered and dealt with; they cannot be ignored. As I’ve
written extensively elsewhere (see Sin Monkey, available on
amazon.com), sin needs to be put right. We need to make restitution
in order for that sin to be removed and the conditions of our lives
repaired back to their original state.
The law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and
without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.
Hebrews
9.22
Now, “sin” is a relational word. In every instance in the Bible where sin occurs, it becomes very clear that some things are called sin and are therefore abhorrent to God because those behaviors/attitudes/associations ruin our relationships – either our relationship with God, our relationship with others, our relationship with our true selves as shadows of God, or our relationship to the world around us.
Murder, for example, is a sin in three directions:
it
is a violation against another person,
thereby breaking our
relationship with them entirely;
it
is a violation against God,
who made that person and loves them
unconditionally;
and
it is a violation against ourselves,
for we have abdicated
(again) our responsibility
to those around us and to creation,
for which we are stewards.
Theft is a sin, likewise, in at least two directions:
against
the other person,
from whom we’ve stolen, again fracturing (at
least)
our relationship (or the possibility of our relationship)
with them;
and
against God,
who loves that person and values their protection.
Everything is about relationship.
Consider this passage from Romans, in which Paul describes the ultimate rebellion of humanity against God in almost exclusively relational terms:
For although [the
Israelites] knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor
gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their
foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they
became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for
images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and
animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful
desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their
bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a
lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the
Creator—who is forever praised.
Romans 1.18-25 (italics
mine)
THE SOLUTION TO THE SIN-PROBLEM
The point that I’m trying to make here is two-fold:
First, we have all contributed to the corruption of this world, either knowingly or unwittingly;
Second,
the “sin problem” we all share isn’t so much a question of
lawbreaking as it is of heart-breaking. The real issue behind
our sins is not our failure to obey, but our failure to love in the
appropriate ways with the appropriate priorities.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and
with all your strength and with all your mind; and love your neighbor
as yourself.
Luke 10.27
Taken together, all of this means that the solution to our sin problem must also be two-fold:
First, it must be a solution that benefits and cleanses us all;
Second,
it must be a relational solution, meaning it has to reconnect us to
God more than it has to keep us in line with a bunch of religious
rules.
It must be a solution that reconnects us to each other, to
the world, and to our true selves as shadows of God, rather than just
being a better kind of holy legislation sketched out by a heavenly or
intergalactic parliament.