Advent 3: Waiting for Jesus’ Birth

Yesterday was the third Sunday of Advent. Here is a short piece I wrote for our church. It’s the third of four pieces that I’ve written that seeks to answer the question, What is Advent? (Here you can read the first and second installments.)

The most common way the season of Advent is celebrated is as preparation for the birth of Jesus.

We understand what it means to wait.  Usually, waiting is a very frustrating process.  We know what we want, but we know that we can’t have it yet.  We have to wait until Christmas before we can open our presents.  Anticipation is built in to the holiday season.  But the anticipation of Christmas we experience every year is different from the anticipation the season of Advent invites us to experience.

In the season of Advent, the thing that is coming is not gifts and music and family and food.  The thing that is coming is relief, redemption, salvation.  Just as Christmas is more than gifts and Santa Claus, Advent is more than waiting for the gifts and Santa Claus.  During Advent, we join with the ancient people of Israel, waiting for the one who will redeem not only Israel but the entire world.

We wait like Simeon was waiting (Luke 2.25-35).  The Holy Spirit had revealed to him that he would not die before he had seen the Promised One.  He waited with eager anticipation for the coming of the one who would be salvation (2.30), a light to all the nations and the glory of the people of Israel (2.32).

We wait like Anna was waiting (Luke 2.36-38).  She, like all Israel, was waiting for their holy city Jerusalem to be redeemed (2.38).  Redemption means that God is choosing to be family to his people once again, to relieve their suffering, to save them from their oppression.

There is a lot of hurt and pain in the world today.  And so we wait as well for the coming.

Outside, Christmas decorations are going up: Christmas trees, lights, candy canes, Santa Clauses, nativity scenes.  We have a lot to get ready for.  But nothing is more important than preparing for the coming of the Christ Child.  And the only appropriate way to prepare is to wait with eager anticipation for the redemption of the world.

Advent 2: Preparation

This past Sunday was the second Sunday in Advent. It was also the middle of an ice storm in the Dallas area. Our church–alongside many churches in our city–cancelled all morning services. I wrote this piece which would have been distributed to everyone who came, continuing to explore what Advent is. It’s the second of four pieces that I’ve written that seeks to answer the question, What is Advent? (You can read last week’s introductory piece here.)

The word “Advent” literally means “coming.”  We’re looking forward to the coming of the Child who will be born, the One who has been promised. There is an inclination when we use the word “waiting” to think we are sitting passively, maybe thinking, maybe just biding our time. But Advent waiting—waiting for the Coming One—is anything but passive. Advent waiting is preparation.

When we talk about preparing for the Coming One, we don’t mean making sure the milk and cookies are out or being sure our decorations are all in place. Advent waiting is about self-preparation. We make ourselves ready to receive the One who is to come.

And really, that is the journey we find ourselves on year-round. Are we becoming ones who can receive this King? Are we people who celebrate the subversive, upside-down kingdom that is announced to shepherds instead of kings? Is the Jesus Way our way, or do we more readily follow the way of Herod or the Pharisees?

With the coming of Jesus, God invaded the world: not with an army to establish his reign, but with a helpless peasant family who, at the whim of an emperor thousands of miles away, are forced to take a trip and fulfill scripture. The story of the coming of Jesus is one that subverts our expectations, that surprises us if we’ll let it.

Part of our task in Advent is to prepare ourselves to receive this King, this Coming One who, in the words of his mother, “pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed” (Luke 2.52-53). Let us reorient ourselves to this startling and alternative kingdom.

Advent 1: Happy New Year!

Advent began today. Here is a short piece I wrote for our church that was given to everyone who attended this morning. It’s the first of four pieces that I’ve written that seeks to answer the question, What is Advent?

Happy New Year!

Did you know that a new year begins today?  For many centuries now, Christians all over the world have chosen to celebrate the passing of a year differently from the world around them.  While almost all Americans will celebrate the New Year with parties and festivities on January 1, many Christians ring in the New Church Year a bit more solemnly.  No ball dropped in Times Square; few stayed up until midnight, counting down the seconds; there were probably no new year’s resolutions made.  And yet, the New Year is upon us.  And it has begun as quietly and as unpretentiously as Jesus’ life began that day in Bethlehem long ago.

That is one of the great aspects of the church calendar.  It’s designed each year, season after season, to mirror the life of our Lord Jesus.  The same themes that we find in his life recounted in the Gospel stories we find as we walk intentionally through the church year.  And really that’s what the church calendar is: a journey, a pilgrimage.  Instead of looking at a calendar as days clicking on by, the church calendar invites us to look at each day, at each season, as a participation in the life of Jesus.

The first leg of the journey every year is called Advent.  Advent, as almost every marker in the church calendar, is not a day: it’s a season.  It’s a journey in and of itself.  We want to invite you to walk with us in this journey of expectant hope, deepening love, exuberant joy, and full peace.

This week, spend time every day orienting yourself to the counter-cultural, counter-imperial, and counter-intuitive reality of the coming King.  A good daily devotional online that may help you journey through Advent particularly can be found at www.d365.org.

A Depressing Statistic

Christianity Today posted a web-only article yesterday featuring some new research from Todd Johnson that says that one out of five non-Christians in North America doesn’t know any Christians.

That’s almost 13.5 million people in the communities in which we live who don’t know a single person who identifies herself or himself as a follower of Jesus.

What does this mean? It means, as Johnson says, that those of us in Christian congregations have done a poor job of hospitality. Jesus calls it loving our neighbors. We have a tendency—and it’s a human tendency—to stick with those who are like us. We create enclaves, we have our own school, our own grocery stores, our own housing developments. And, of course, these Christian schools and other institutions do wonderful things. But they’ve created a situation in which we no longer have to relate to people different than ourselves. And that is emphatically not the way of Jesus. Jesus constantly crossed lines and busted up borders. The kingdom of God breaks down barriers and moves toward “the other” in love.

I’d invite you to consider just one way that you can meet someone in your community who is different than you. Maybe go to a particular ethnic grocery store. Volunteer at an ESL program. (FBC Richardson’s International Friends is one of the largest ESL programs in Texas and gearing up for a new year right now.) Take your kids to a park in another part of town. And talk to people. Ask them where they’re from. Get to know them. You don’t have to be ready to share the plan of salvation with them. Just be kind to them.

Christian hospitality, as with everything in the Christian life, does not happen automatically. Make something happen. And pray for God’s Spirit to direct you.

Prayer | The Praying Life

What is prayer? The answer we learn as children is that prayer is talking to God. Ask my children, and you’ll (hopefully) get a different answer. What we’re trying to teach our children is that prayer is being with God.

If prayer is being with God, then there must be many ways to pray, many forms prayer takes. The dominant form that prayer takes in most Christian traditions is intercession. Intercession is coming to God on behalf of a person or situation and asking God to intercede, to bless the course of events. Our friend gets cancer or we sit down at a meal or we leave for a car trip or we start a Bible study, and we ask God to be present, to bless those involved. In our quiet times of prayer, we have our list, and we work through it, presenting our petitions before God. When we gather together to pray, we list off the people who are ill or dying, possibly an upcoming election or problem in our country, and then close our eyes and barrel through, rehearsing all the names and issues we just mentioned. Then we say, “Amen,” and get on with our lives.

And intercession is important. It’s good. But it ought not be the sum total of the praying life. I’ve become convinced that many of our issues with prayer (Does God really hear? Why doesn’t God answer me? Why do my prayers not do what I want them to do?) come about because we don’t live lives of prayer.

Paul has this tiny, enigmatic verse that has mesmerized Christians throughout our history. At the end of his first letter to the Thessalonians, he says, “Pray without ceasing” (5:17). That little verse has captured the imaginations of Christians ever since Paul wrote it. Saying it like that, Paul seems to see prayer as not just a part of life, but as life itself; not just a few minutes of concentrated words to God, but the very breath of our lives.

And the question the church has wrestled with for as long as we’ve read that little verse is, Is it feasible? Is it really possible for a person to pray without ceasing? One ancient Christian monk took Paul’s command so seriously that he strove to be in conscious prayer at every waking moment, and when he slept, he paid someone to pray for him.

Is that what Paul is asking of us? If we define prayer solely as “talking to God,” then that’s the only conclusion we can arrive at. But I think conscious prayer directed solely to God at every moment misses the spirit of what Paul means. I’m persuaded more by what Henri Nouwen said in his little book Clowning in Rome.

Nouwen said that, as human beings, we have unceasing thoughts. Even when we are sleeping or when our thoughts are in our subconscious, our minds are always working. So Nouwen said that unceasing prayer is the conversion of our unceasing thinking.

That is to say that at every moment we are in the presence of God. So every word that we say, whether to another person or to ourselves is said in the presence of God and can become prayer. Every thought we think is thought in the presence of God and can become prayer with God.

So prayer is more than talking to God. Prayer is communion with God, being—actively being—in God’s presence.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be highlighting here on my blog a few different ways to pray, ways to be with God, practices that the church has employed for centuries. This will be practical in nature, something like a workout plan that you would receive from a personal trainer at a gym. There will be practices that work well for you, exercising prayer “muscles” you didn’t know you had. There may be some that never connect with you. That’s okay. It’s good to be exposed to a variety of practices.

For now, consider what it might mean for you to convert your unceasing thinking into unceasing prayer. What does it mean that God is always present to you? And how can you seek to be always present to God?

 

A Story on Perspective

I first heard this story on the TED Radio Hour, as told by Amanda Palmer, on this episode. (I should say here: if you don’t listen to the TED Radio Hour from NPR, please let me highly recommend it. It takes the already amazing resource of TED, with its conferences and other events, and amplifies it with interviews and further insights. If you like to learn new things and to think outside the box, check out the TED Radio Hour on you public radio station or download the podcast.)

In Native American culture, gifts were circular. A chief of a tribe would visit another chief and bring a pipe. They would smoke it together, and the first chief would leave the pipe with the second chief. Then that second chief would visit the chief of another tribe and bring the same pipe, passing it along.

When white Europeans arrived on the scene, there were a variety of clashes between European and Native American cultures. One was in the realm of gift-giving and -receiving. The chief would bring over a beautiful pipe to share with the white pilgrim, and the pilgrim would think he’s scored a new treasure. Another Native American would come and assume he should have it back, and the pilgrim for whom this custom was foreign coined the term “Indian giver.”

Lewis Hyde, in his book The Gift, suggests a better name for this phenomenon might be “white man keeper.”

It depends very much where you stand.

FBCR’s Response to the Oklahoma Tragedy

How can we respond to this tragedy in Oklahoma? This is the question on all our minds and hearts.

First, we want to invite you to pray. If the church isn’t praying on behalf of the world, then who is? Pray for peace, for healing, for rest, for help, for strength, for courage, for God’s nearness. Please pray.

There are also some ways you can give your words flesh.

FBCR is sending a truck with supplies to our partner church in the area, First Baptist Church of Oklahoma City this Friday, May 24. We are collecting these supplies, starting at 2:00 pm today (May 21) in the Activities Center at our church. We’re in need of the following:

• Bottled water
• Non-perishable foods
• Diapers
• Hand sanitizer
• Can openers
• Plasticware

We’re asking that you consider what would be most helpful in a situation like this. What would most bless you if you suddenly lost everything? We will be able to hand-deliver these to the people affected by yesterday’s tornado.

Activities Center Donation Hours:

Tuesday: 2pm – 8pm

Wednesday – Thursday: 7am – 8pm

Friday: 7am – Noon

We also need volunteers to help us in the Activities Center to receive and organize all the donations we receive. If you’d be willing to help at the Activities Center at any point this week, email Renetta Montgomery at the church office.

If you want to give money toward relief, we’re recommending three organizations with whom we have strong relationships.

TEXAS BAPTIST MEN

The Texas Baptist Men heads to Oklahoma tomorrow, Wednesday, May 22. They are a go-to first responder in situations like this, equipped to take the lead in disaster relief of all kinds. They organize quickly to give need immediately to those who have lost everything.

Give

CBF DISASTER RELIEF

The CBF Disaster Relief effort provides assistance on a more long-term basis. They are not “first responders,” but will constantly provide aid—through their partnerships with local churches—after the initial help leaves. They work with those affected to provide long-term planning and assistance.

Give

FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OKLAHOMA CITY

These are the folks living there full-time, seeking to provide help and hope to their neighbors. Pastor Tom Ogburn blogged about their church’s response.

Click on the link on the bottom left of their Main Page that says “Click to Donate to FBCOKC” to give to FBC Oklahoma City’s disaster relief fund.

Thank you for your prayers and partnership in all of this as we seek to SERVE those affected.

You can keep up with FBCR’s response on our website as well.

FBCR members, feel free to pass this along to others in the North Texas community who might want to respond directly.

Stay tuned for a furniture drive. We’ll be collecting pieces of furniture that we’ll transport up to Oklahoma as people begin rebuilding their lives. We’ll let you know when we begin to collect the furniture.

Update:

Read Pastor Ellis’ blog response to the tragedy here.

Save the Shoes

I first heard this story recounted on the TED Radio Hour, a weekly public radio program I can’t more highly recommend. You can listen to the original entire TED talk here.

A volunteer fire fighter named Mark Bezos got a call in the middle of the night to go to his very first fire. The professional firemen were already on the scene, and the woman who owned the house was outside, watching her house burn, standing in the mud in her bare feet. Mark was the second volunteer to arrive. The first volunteer asked the fire chief for his orders, and he was told to go find and save the woman’s dog who was still inside. Mark recounts being jealous. This is why a fire fighter fights fires: to save helpless creatures, to walk away from the fire a hero.

When Mark got to the chief, the chief told him to go inside and get the woman’s shoes. He was deflated. What a small job. He got the woman’s shoes, gave them to her, and she didn’t even really look him in the eyes to say thank you. She was obviously still overwhelmed about her house and concerned for her dog.

Mark went home, not really much of a hero, no big story to tell his kids about. A few weeks later, the fire station got a note from the woman, effusively thanking them for their diligent and compassionate work, for saving her house and her dog. And then she noted that someone had even taken the time to go into the building to get her her shoes, which had really touched her.

Mark said it so beautifully: “It’s so easy to dismiss the opportunity to do something good because you want to do something great. … There are opportunities dozens of times a day to make a difference in someone’s life.”

“Don’t wait. Don’t wait until you make your first million to make a difference in somebody’s life. If you have something to give, give it now. … Not every day is going to offer us the chance to save somebody’s life, but every day offers us an opportunity to affect one. Get in the game. Save the shoes.”

This, it seems to me, is a beautiful picture of the Jesus Way. As one of my mentors is fond of saying, lean in. This present moment is all you have. Why not be fully there, ready to give yourself in whatever way might be available to you? We do good not because of the recognition it gets us, but because of the love we’ve received from Jesus that flows in and through us. There are no small acts of love.

Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard, philosopher, writer, theologian, mystic, graduate of Baylor University, was received fully into Christ today. Few writers have impacted me as Dallas did. The Divine Conspiracy, his book on the Sermon on the Mount, continues to be one of the most important books I’ve read.

Dallas was a philosopher. His academic specialty was in phenomenology, particularly as articulated by German philosopher Edmund Husserl. But most of us knew him for his simple articulations of Christian discipleship, his love of Christian mysticism, and his insistence on the practice of Christianity.

In one of my most formative seminary classes, a class we called “Missional Formation”—in which we met not in a classroom but in a coffee shop, in which our beloved professor capped the class at ten, in which we had no papers, no tests, no quizzes…just reading, discussion, and a presentation—the one book we all read together to set up our class was the newly-published The Great Omission by Dallas Willard.

Dallas’ writings gave our class direction, a context, a starting point for our discussion. Though it was a collection of shorter essays, the thread that was woven through The Great Omission was this idea that the Christian faith is a thing to be practiced and lived, not just believed in. For Willard, the great omission that most evangelicals make from the Great Commission (Matthew 28.18-20) is the insistence on making disciples.

I love the way Dallas paraphrased the Great Commission: “As you go throughout the world, make apprentices to me from all kinds of people, immerse them in Trinitarian reality, and teach them to do everything I have commanded you” (Renovation of the Heart, 240).

Dallas always felt that we misunderstood what disciples were. Disciples are not converts to a religious system, not church-goers. Disciples are apprentices, students, learners, followers. The aim of Christian discipleship ought to be obedience. And that’s why the spiritual disciplines figure so prominently in his writings. Discipleship is not something that happens automatically because you’ve prayed a prayer or walked down an aisle. In the spiritual life, nothing happens by accident. We must practice, work, plan. Dallas’ hope was that churches would actually take Jesus seriously when he told them to teach others to obey everything that Jesus had taught. “I do not know of a denomination or local church in existence that has as its goal to teach its people to do everything Jesus said. I’m not talking about a whim or a wish, but a plan” (The Great Omission, 61).

Because of this “great omission,” our churches are now filled with what Dallas called “vampire Christians”: those who are only interested in Jesus for his blood, “who only want a little blood for their sins but nothing more to do with Jesus until heaven” (The Divine Conspiracy, 403 n. 8).

Of course, to some this emphasis on work and obedience smacked of “works righteousness.” But no one articulated the distinction Dallas was trying to make better than Dallas. He said, “Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort” (The Great Omission, 34, passim). The things we do give us no merit before Christ. And yet, Christ calls us to work.

Thank you, Dallas, for your consistency in calling us to listen, to obey, to follow, to be apprenticed to Jesus.

RIP

Intro

I’m calling this blog “The Jesus Way.” It’s a phrase that I’ve been living with for about seven years now, a phrase that succinctly articulates my hope for the church and the church’s mission. The phrase was given to me and filled with meaning by one of my favorite writers, Eugene Peterson.

In a lecture I heard from Peterson several years back, Peterson borrowed from John 14:6, where Jesus says, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.” Peterson said, “The Jesus Truth, only when it is wedded to the Jesus Way, produces the Jesus Life.”

The Jesus Truth, only when it is wedded to the Jesus Way, produces the Jesus Life.

In conversations about the gospel, we in the evangelical church have a tendency to talk about content, about formulations, about Jesus Truth. And that’s good. We need to know what Jesus taught, what Jesus accomplished, what the Bible says.

But a myopic focus on Jesus Truth reduces the gospel to a proposition to be believed, an event that accomplished something for me, a truism. And it makes the announcer of the gospel into a mere mouthpiece.

The earliest metaphor for Christianity (before there was even an idea of some separate religion called “Christianity”) was “the Way.” The Jesus Way was just what the image evoked: a path, a journey, a following of Jesus. It wasn’t something to be merely believed, but to be walked, lived, embodied. The Jesus Truth, only when it is wedded to the Jesus Way, produces the Jesus Life.

We’ve done a fine job considering and preaching and teaching and discussing the Jesus Truth, and we still have plenty more to do. But we need to expend just as much energy considering what exactly the Jesus Way is, reading the Gospels for insight into the Jesus Way, and actually walking the Jesus Way.

So what is the Jesus Way? Peterson himself has written an entire book on the subject, as have others. It’s difficult to articulate the Jesus Way too succinctly, but when pressed, I’ll say that the Jesus Way is the way of the cross. It’s the way of self-giving, sacrificial love, the way we see Jesus live and die.

Why is it important for us to keep the Jesus Truth and the Jesus Way wedded together? In discussions about world evangelization, it’s common to hear rhetoric like, “We will use whatever means necessary to bring the gospel to people who so desperately need it.” There’s a great urgency, a great need, and we need to use “whatever means necessary” to get the word out. The ends of world evangelization and saving people’s souls, so to speak, justify the means.

But the Jesus Way insists that there are appropriate means and inappropriate means when the gospel is being proclaimed. In the church’s past, we’ve done things like force conversion at the threat of death, combine the proclamation of the gospel with the colonial expansion of Western empires, manipulate emotional experiences to bring people to something we called faith. We did these things—even continue to do these things—with good intention. The Jesus Truth…but not in the Jesus Way.

But when the church has been at its best, it has taken not just the message about Jesus but also the life of Jesus into its very life. It has embodied the way of the cross in its movement toward the world instead of preaching a disembodied gospel. It has both proclaimed a message of good news and led the way to the path that leads to life. When it has done this, it has seen the life of the new creation burst into our world. Because only when the Jesus Truth is wedded to the Jesus Way will we see the Jesus Life.