Christmas 2013

Christmas 2013 A new beginning. A baby born into a world where he did not belong. How can a baby be doomed or destined to a world that could not tolerate or accept the core of who he was? For the core of the baby was perfect obedience to his father's will. This core of obedience was so foreign to the fallen world that it threatened the most powerful conventions of the times. The ultimate convention was for human beings to make laws, conventions and structures according to their own understandings of the knowledge of good and evil. On Christmas one baby came who would never be pulled into the deadly tides of human understanding. On Christmas so many of us get gifts we don't want. Somehow we think that there is something wrong with Christmas. Now we know how the Pharisees felt. Jesus was indeed first unwanted Christmas present. More than a thousand years of prophecy and the expectations of an oppressed people made the arrival of the Messiah as anticipated as winning the Super Bowl, the Presidential election and the newest and biggest war on the same week. The problem for the Pharisees, the other Jewish leaders and the nation as a whole was that the tiny and vulnerable baby was never meant to satisfy our earthly fantasies. The baby was and has always been the way back to a time and a place that predates our very first human fantasy. The Jesus baby was and is the way back to Eden, God's domain. Are we like the Pharisee who asked how a man could be reborn? Must we crawl back inside our mothers' wombs? Are we like the Pharisee, wondering how we could ever enter the garden of Eden while we are aware of the deadly curse inside us? "On the day you eat of it, you shall surely die." The fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil runs through our veins, our hearts, our minds and our souls. Apart from the baby Jesus it is blasphemous to even contemplate entrance to God's domain. We are by our nature profane to God. As the Jesus baby grows and more perfectly expresses God's perfect will, he starts a spiritual civil war. That part of us knows we were always meant for the garden embraces him and his miracles as if we are starving people savoring the most delicious meal. The other part, the part that embraces our autonomy of choice and actions recoils at the the audacity of God's trespass into the human domain. We scream that God should go back to heaven, because he knows nothing of earth, nothing of the ways that we humans count good and evil. We stay in this civil war until the best of us, the religious scholars, the political leaders and the ruling class nail the baby to the cross. Then the curse is fulfilled. The curse that runs through our blood, the knowledge of good and evil, convicts and executes Jesus Christ the son of God. When we can't send Jesus back to heaven we send him to hell. For three days we go about our religious ceremonies grieving or exalting in the work of the curse. Then on the third day the baby rises from the grave bearing the wounds of the nails and the spear. The curse has killed, but God has overcome the curse. The curse that runs in our veins and poisons our hearts toward God is powerless against the risen and inoculated Christ. The blood of the lamb cuts through the obscenities of a society manically working to hide the redeeming work of God with feasts, gifts, ceremonies and tradition. For those who believe/have faith the light shines brightly and the lamb leads us to the green pastures despised by the curse. The Christian's gift, made possible through the blood of the lamb, is our ability to seek and accept God's perfect will in our life.

Burning Bush

Burning Bush

Burning bush is a commitment to living and proclaiming the salvation made possible by Jesus Christ through the lens and environment of the wilderness.

The wilderness is where people go to experience God unfiltered by human rulers, societies or institutions. In the wilderness people seek to meet God as Moses meet God, without the protection and insulation of society. We go to the wilderness by following Jesus Christ’s first teaching: “The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe in the good news.”

1.      Many people wait for death or a more spiritual time in their lives to embrace intimacy with God. Jesus says that this is the time for intimacy with God. We take our first step toward the wilderness by accepting Christ’s invitation this minute, the next minute, the minute after that until accepting God’s invitation to intimacy becomes habitual.

2.      Many people think of the kingdom of God as a post death heaven or an impossible utopia. As the Lord’s Prayer teaches us, the kingdom of God is that place/domain where God’s will is done. When we embrace God’s will, praying to God for his will to be done in our lives instead of our will, we enter the kingdom that has become so near. At first our entrances to the kingdom maybe flickers or episodes. As submission becomes more habitual the kingdom becomes more real to us than this thing we call reality.

3.      We are human. We act, think and perceive reality through a faulty paradigm: the human understanding of the knowledge of good and evil. We are like pilots using inaccurate radars to pilot their airplanes. If we are to survive we must turn from our disastrous course and accept the guidance of God.

4.   The point of going into the wilderness is not austerity or so called purity in its self. We leave the walls, rules, lights and so called safety of human beings God’s garden/kingdom cannot long grow inside those confines. In the wilderness we believe the good news that Jesus Christ opens windows and doors into the garden where humans once enjoyed perfect harmony with God and animals. By habitually believing in this restoration we move from being estranged children of God to content heirs to God’s legacy of love.

Wilderness

People think that the wilderness is a mountain, a dessert or another remote region. They think that they can get to the wilderness in jeeps, helicopters, dogsleds, camels and whatnot. I woke up in the wilderness this morning, not even remotely close to a remote region. The wilderness is the place where you realize that human customs, institutions and hierarchies are treacherous vipers that will poison the soul. I went to church on Sunday, a week after feeling deeply hurt and betrayed by the same church. There was still a part of me that wanted to take the pastor aside and explain just how deeply I’d been hurt or how it was worse because I’d made myself spiritually vulnerable at that church. I’d made the mistake of putting my whole heart into a ministry, when I should have known that the hatchet’s fall was inevitable.

About halfway through the service I realized that the pastor did not want to hear from me or understand my pain. I realized that pastors, by necessity develop defenses against people like me. If they heard and understood the pain their institutions inflicted they would be unable to get up in the pulpit each Sunday. That’s when what I wanted to say changed. I went from wanting to share my experience and explain my concern that something like this could be very damaging to the faith of a less mature Christian to wanting to say, “It’s OK you’re just a pastor and this is just a church. It was my mistake for ever believing you could be anything different.”

It’s Tuesday and I wake quite certain that human institutions abhor the burning bush I proclaim. My journey to the wilderness has been a thousand hammer blows to the soul. At first the fragments cut like kidney stones. I bled inside while I writhed in pain. I don’t regret the scars. They remind me that God will eventually send me back to be hammered and crushed again. The wilderness, however, is a place to be savored. I breathe the clean air without that whiff of sour smogginess. The good wind comes as it wills and goes likewise. I hold my fingers my heart and my soul out to the wind and feel its embrace.

The Time is fulfilled

Father let this be the time in which I embrace intimacy with you.

Father let all my time be devoted to you.

Father let the illusion of my time become the reality of your time.

The kingdom of God has come near.

Father, give me new eyes to see your kingdom.

Father, give me a new heart to love the ways of your kingdom.

Father, give me a new brain to understand the ways of your kingdom

Father, give me a new stomach to hunger for your will and your love to be done in my life, the life of my family and the life of my community.

Repent

Farther, turn me from my path to destruction.

Let the eyes, heart, mind and stomach that lead me toward destruction fall away in the face of your light.

Teach me to run earnestly toward you and your kingdom.

Believe in the good news

Father, help me to know with my heart, mind and soul that your son Jesus Christ gives me access to your embrace.

Help me to accept your invitation to walk with you in the original garden of harmony.

Help your kingdom to become more real to me than the reality of men.