Miracles Out of the Mundane
Luke 2:22-35
Today’s scriptures include the story of Simeon with the baby Jesus. We only see here this few minutes of his life. But three separate actions (rested, revealed, and guided) are attributed to the Holy Spirit with him. He was righteous, and devout.
What kind of ongoing, mundane, trudging, normal, ups-and-downs, glorious, humble life must he have led? If he was old, as is traditionally assumed, how did he feel, decade after decade? What did he think was happening in his life? The day before they brought Jesus in, what did he think his descendants would say about him, would give as the thing he was most remembered for? Did he have children? Grandchildren?
We walk through our days, mundane, step after step, wondering what kind of significance our life has or will end up having. But who knows what few minutes will be remembered? Who knows what God will do in those few critical moments that would have been impossible without the "long obedience in the same direction" that is the only preparation for those powerful, amazing, God-glorifying moments?
Love God More: A Communion Meditation
Your name is probably not Ishmael. And your mother’s name is probably not Hagar.
But you have spent time in the wilderness. You have been rejected and betrayed by those you trusted. You took the scraps of bread and water with you, alone, and those scraps ran out. The water ran out. You were ready to give up. You gave up. You had nothing left.
And maybe, when you joined the community of Christ, you don’t remember “dying.” But you have found, over time, that you really need to push certain ideas, practices, or people away from you, because you realized that they weren’t what God had in mind. You knew that, to make space for the miraculous life of the Spirit, you had to clean house, to cut ties.
You probably haven’t been called a “prince of demons.” But someone has insulted you because of the living, breathing commitment you have made to follow Christ. Maybe it was someone in your family. Or someone else who was close to you. You loved them, deeply, immensely. That love never faded. But the pain was just as great as the love.
When you are rejected, God hears you, and gives you what you need.
When you submit to Christ, and die to sin, God is present with an endless fountain of life.
When you are insulted, the Holy Spirit is with you in it.
God is trying, always working, to draw you closer. He allows and uses these hard, sometimes very hard, things to pull you to Him, so He can hold you. And heal you.
He doesn’t ask you to hate those you have loved. He asks you to love Him more. And He fills you, to empower you, to do just that.
One of the ways He fills you is this invitation, to this table. He offers Himself, body and blood, for you. We, the empty, the betrayed, the broken, the isolated and alone, are invited to His table, which is set for us wherever we might be. He draws each of us to Himself, in love. And in doing so, He draws us together.
For this is what the Lord himself said, and I pass it on to you just as I received it. On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant between God and you, sealed by the shedding of my blood. Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it." For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord's death until Jesus comes again.
Offering Meditation:
God has been working to create and redeem from the very beginning. That vibrant, creative, exciting work will continue until all His purposes are accomplished. But He doesn’t leave us on the outside of that work. He invites us to join Him in it. Maybe you have money you can give to the work He’s doing here, in this congregation. But that money isn’t a substitute for your participation in His work. It’s just a small part of you. And that’s what He really wants: you.
So if circumstances these days mean you don’t see any way to give money to this congregation, that’s fine. We trust that God will provide what we need. Start with yourself. Give yourself to God, listening for His guidance like a trust fall, leaning all that you are into His strength, provision, joy, and love. He will let you know what He wants you to give.
Today's Normal
I once went on a hike with some men from church. It was normal, until one of them slipped into a waterfall and didn't immediately come back up. Suddenly it wasn't normal. The normal hike became an event we still talk about over 25 years later. He and the rest of the group all survived, thankfully.
The same kind of thing is happening now. We're joining those generations who just happened to be alive when things suddenly stopped being normal. The challenge is to maintain and defend the dignity of all people, to maintain our integrity, and to look for ways we can build trust among all people. Circumstances (and the enemy of us all) will work to break the trust we might otherwise have, to separate one person from another, them from us, the winners from the losers.
Take an extra moment to think clearly, to look for how you can love and serve others, for how God is working in every moment (for He is). Tomorrow will not be yesterday's normal. But in every day's normal is the opportunity to look, listen, and love.
Joseph: A Listener and Obeyer - A Communion Meditation
The way we each individually see the world has been slowly built, over decades, in a million tiny ways. What we thoughtlessly assume to be true has been proven to us over and over again. These observations and beliefs slowly get proven or disproven until they merge together, and are seemingly etched in stone. If we are to unbelieve one thing and start believing something different, the new thing has to disprove all those little proofs. This isn’t an easy thing to do.
I’ve had thousands, possibly millions, of dreams throughout my lifetime. And once in a blue moon I’ll wake up from a dream and it will change my plans, if ever so slightly. I woke in the middle of the night one night this past week because I had dreamed that our three-year-old son was sitting on a couch that caught fire. I woke up, knowing instantly that it hadn’t really happened, but still, scared by the image spawned by the dream, got up and walked through all of the house, just to make sure the dream didn’t somehow indicate something about our waking world. Of course, I didn’t find anything, and went back to bed. That image of our son threatened by fire on a couch was just a dream.
So what was it about that dream Joseph had? What was it about that angel that was so compelling, so convincing, that Joseph chose to immediately obey it? His plans before he went to bed had been based on this new apparent betrayal by his betrothed, Mary. They were reasonable plans, given the bizarre, unexpected circumstances. Common sense said that she must have been fooling around! He presumably had every right to publicly shame her for this. Everything he had ever seen or known piled up into proof and support for this one conclusion: it was a generous, merciful thing for him to do quietly what was obviously the right thing to do: divorce the dishonorable woman.
But that dream … that angel … must have been very powerful. We don’t have a record in the Scripture text of a discussion, a disagreement, any friction on Joseph’s part. As far as we’re told, he just got up, and obeyed. All that common sense, that lifetime of learning social norms and scriptural interpretations, was quietly set aside, or at least dramatically reinterpreted, in the face of this dream, this angel.
The only way I can make sense out of Joseph’s immediate obedience is that God had been speaking to him, revealing Himself to Joseph in little ways, for years. Listening, and obeying, had become a habit. So God knew, from seeing the habits Joseph had developed, that Joseph was a listener, and an obeyer.
All of Scripture, and especially the gospels, challenge the understanding of the world we’ve received, both from the world at large and from other Christians. When we come to this table, hear the Word spoken and preached, receive our instructions to go out and make disciples, all of our conventional wisdom gets tested.
So how do you handle that challenge? When you step into this sanctuary, look up at the body and blood of Jesus—of Jesus!—sitting here on this table, do you expect to be changed? Even a little? Have you made a habit of listening for God’s direction, listening with your life, as Buechner puts it, and then obeying what you receive?
Maybe the angel visited Joseph because Joseph was ready for a visit, open to the God of Creation, his ancestors, his world, building on God’s work and story in the past, but in unexpected ways. Are you ready to be visited? Are you ready to obey? Or would God be wasting His breath to send you an angel?
For this is what the Lord himself said, and I pass it on to you just as I received it. On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant between God and you, sealed by the shedding of my blood. Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it." For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord's death until Jesus comes again.
This Table is Not Magic - A Communion Meditation
This table is not magic. We do not force the hand of God to heal us, or gift us, or save us, by returning to this table. We serve a wild, untamed, and yet deeply loving, God. He longs for our complete healing, it’s true. But we don’t control the ebb and flow of His healing power. He does.
We return to the table each week, just as we return to Him in prayer throughout each day, return in worship with the people of His body, week after week, year after year. We return in the hope of healing because we have seen that only He has the words of eternal life. But the reality of that regular returning is that we may see weeks, even years, without healing. And yet He is faithful.
Elijah was afraid. His fear was, on the one hand, reasonable. Jezebel was a bloodthirsty murderer who clearly hated him, and threatened his life. On the other hand, after all he had seen of the hand of God, did He really think God would abandon him? In his fear he said, “I’m done. I’ve had enough. I’m a failure. I’m no better than my ancestors. Let me die.”
My own history with depression goes back some thirty years. I didn’t know that the way I saw myself and the world wasn’t just normal. In college I had a hard time believing that happy people were sincere, that they had integrity. Over and over again, though I never acted on it, I was pummeled with an overwhelming sense of worthlessness, hopelessness, that I wanted to die.
Elijah fell asleep in the shade of a bush. Many times for me as well, sleep was enough to shake off the darkness. When he awoke, an angel gave him food and drink, sustenance he had done nothing to deserve. For me the long-term healing really took off after college, when I was put on medication and started some serious counseling. Elijah slept again, and was nourished again. The angel said, “The journey is too much for you.” He needed the nourishment. He needed the grace. The pathway out of despair requires nourishment, and grace.
It can also require new habits. For me, the next decade or so was a time of recalibration, adjusting to things that had always been true, but for which I had not had eyes to see. By the time I met my wife, Danielle, depression was not a cold wind blowing through me every day, but more like a faint draft, coming through invisible cracks around the windows.
But recently, with no warning, the doors and windows opened again to that cold wind. The irrational despair, the sense of worthlessness and hopelessness that seemed as certain as a scientific law—it was back. For the few days it weighed me down, I tried the tricks that had helped me so much over the years, but my vision wouldn’t clear. The lies seemed true.
But I told friends. I journaled exactly what I was feeling and thinking. I kept putting one foot in front of the other. My drive to be present and whole for my children, which is normally so strong, was weakened—but still there. And after a matter of days, the darkness receded.
I may never completely shed this burden. Sometimes the burden is no more than a handkerchief, thin, insubstantial, not getting in the way. Other times it’s like a 100-pound backpack, making each step forward a challenge. But I step. And I step. And I step again. I wake up in the morning. I go to work. I serve my family. And I come here. To this worship. To this music. To this table. And no single step takes me out of the darkness, but each step is part of the way out, part of the healing.
I can’t make God heal me completely, with the certainty of a magic spell. But I can believe that He wants to heal me, and plans to heal me, like Jesus healed the demoniac. With the psalmist I can “go to the altar of God,” whether or not I can see “His light and His truth." Here I can “hope in God,” and “again praise Him."
For this is what the Lord himself said, and I pass it on to you just as I received it. On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant between God and you, sealed by the shedding of my blood. Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it." For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord's death until Jesus comes again.
What He Knows and We Don't
A common question or challenge about prayer is, why tell God what He already knows? If He knows everything, including your every thought and feeling, what's the point in possibly wasting His time by repeating this information to Him?
One assumption people usually have when asking this question is that we have sufficient, if not perfect, knowledge of our own thoughts and feelings. Because we have a front row seat, because they are our own thoughts being thought within our own mind, we think it reasonable to assume that we have the best awareness anyone could have of those thoughts and feelings.
But what occurs to me now is that we don't have the best awareness that anyone could have of our own thoughts and feelings. We are fooled on a regular basis regarding our underlying motivations for doing, thinking, or feeling a given thing. We hide motives and rationales from ourselves on a daily basis.
But God knows. In the physical realm, God maintains in existence every force and subatomic particle in the physical realm, and thus knows in every picosecond the exact location, force, direction, (and probably other characteristics we don't know about) of every one of them. When we give the best account that we can of a given physical situation, God's understanding and utterly immediate awareness of that same situation has an immensity far greater than any we could have. If there exist in the spirit realm the equivalent of atoms, then He also keeps every unimaginably tiny element of that realm in existence by His continual free choice, and knows everything that can be known about that realm as well.
So He knows everything that's happening within us as we move through the chain of thoughts that lead us to offer a given prayer to Him. So even though we feel like we know what we're praying to Him, and out of our ignorance often approach prayer in the same way as we approach telling a human, finite, mortal friend about this or that, He already knows immensely more about what we're talking about than we do. Unless He voluntarily blocks some knowledge from some part of His awareness (if that's possible), it's impossible for us to know more about anything, even what happens within us, than He does.
And so, often God enables the experience of prayer, of our genuine personal encounter with the one true living God, primarily so that we can learn what we really think and feel, who we really are. In prayer we become more of who we really are, especially as we seek and accept His revealing of such things to us.
Holy Humans
Humans are holy. Whether freshly conceived and struggling for survival, or dancing at a party, looking for adventure and connection. Whether riding on society's highest accolades and levels of success or trembling in fear under an anonymous bridge somewhere, everyone is sacred. This should impact the way we see everything, and everyone.
The Tension in Listening to God
In listening to God, as in so many other areas of life, there is a tension.
On the one hand, God is sovereign. He makes the rules. When we think about listening, attempting to hear Him, attempting to receive the communication He offers, we need to be humble. We need to keep in mind whatever He has said about listening and approaching Him, and obey Him with those things in mind. He is holy, non-contingent, and in some sense, in His essence, wholly other. With Uzzah in mind, there should be a healthy measure of fear and trembling in how we approach the listening.
On the other hand, God wants us to hear Him. In addition to being holy, He is also love. He longs for relationship with us, is always taking efforts to reach out to us, serve us, accommodate us in various ways, starting with the very consistency of the physical universe.
He knows your particular weaknesses (and mine). He often adapts what He wants to communicate to us so we are more likely to receive it. We are not dealing with Someone who is trying to trick us, trying to trip us up, hoping we'll make a mistake so we don't hear Him. The true and living God is always with us. He always wants us to live our lives with the continual acknowledgement of His loving presence, not so we'll be frozen by perfectionism, afraid to choose and act because we might make a mistake. He wants us to live actively and boldly, knowing He is with us, guiding us, cheering us on. Our awareness of His presence should add both peace and confidence to how we see each moment.
We cannot forget that He is God, that He is sovereign. We are not the masters, the ultimate owners, of our own lives. But He is joyful, eager for our active involvement in the world He made, the world He continues to make, the world He continually keeps going. He looks at us with eyes of love, not demanding perfectionism, or critical trickery.
These two poles--holy sovereignty and joyful love--are always in tension, always true, and should shape how we see the world, how we live our lives, and how we continually listen for the comforting, guiding voice of God.
Soft and Drifting
There's an astounding arrogance that is common among many people today. It is the assumption that generations that came before us were essentially stupid. Yet in many (most?) cases those people had more knowledge and wisdom than we do. They were constantly exercising their brains to store and retrieve information, while we only know how to ask our phones for answers.
If you took even people we call "ancients" and raised them today, put them on the shoulders of the giants we're camped out on today, I have every confidence they would do just fine. And I even wonder if the people of greatness from the past were great in part because of their struggles. Raised in our cushy environs, they would become like us, soft and drifting.
Turning to a Trustworthy God
When I sit down or lay down to just rest for a moment, I don't look to myself for guidance, for stability, for directions as to what I need most in that moment. I turn my attention to the living God, ever-present with me. And I trust that He who loves and cares for me like no one else can will do whatever He has to do to guide me to what I need most. I make myself open, in however imperfect a manner, and He honors my intention by meeting me where I am. He is faithful, that is, He is trustworthy. He will give me what I need.
Neighbor and Sin
The sinner is my neighbor
The sinner is myself
Love the lowly sinner
Love the lowly neighbor
The pasture and stream of the Shepherd
Belong to my neighbor and me
However undeserving He knows we are.
The Scent and the Truth
On the rare occasion I run into a scent like what my first girlfriend wore in 1988, I am delivered back to that time, whether I want it or not.
I have a desire, perhaps idealistic, that my life could have been monolithic, been a single story, consistent, moving in one meaningful direction, without diversion or division. But those days, months, and years that I committed myself to ideas and people who ended up being, at least in my life, dead ends, are for me segmented parts of my history, inconsistent, non-contiguous with the rest of who I am today.
The point I take from this is that as much as the whiff of that ancient scent takes me back to a good feeling, it takes me back to a connection with someone I didn’t commit my life to. I see, so clearly now, what a bad idea it would have been for her to have married me, in the immature and relationally destructive state I was in at the time. I look back and wish everything in my life, my decisions, my choices, my commitments, could have all flowed consistently and naturally into the commitment I made to the woman who ended up as my wife some fourteen years later, and the life she and I have made together. Those broken-off segments of my life are some of my regrets.
If I teach my children to hold back, to not commit to people and ideas that might be false, would that be foolish? Are we better served by more of a risk-taker’s attitude that always tries different things? Or is this another area where tension serves the Truth? Maybe the best answer is in the tension between striving for purity, for a narrative of our life indicating deep and consistent commitment to Christ and following His leading, on the one hand, and on the other hand realizing the value of trying and failing, to learn more about who we are and who God is, learning in ways we couldn’t learn without the risk.
We All Will Die
We see lives limited only by age and medicine, shaking our heads to throw off thoughts of tragedy. We have our reasons, our assumptions about these lives, this era, this country and culture, that lead us to conclusions about our future. Sure, bad things can happen, but we can't live by assuming the paranoid worst, day after day. Or so we say, raising the straw man of an extreme.
The answer, perhaps, is in how we hold on lightly, cradle our vision of the future gently in a balanced hand. We have to assume something. But can we assume a spectrum instead of a point? Can the point we stare at be the faithfulness and loving companionship of the Father, and not a narrow pattern of comfortable circumstances where we are in control?
In God's Womb
We come to a certain intimate awareness and knowledge of our birth mother while we are in the womb. Do we obtain a similar knowledge and awareness of God before He releases us into this life, this existence, before we enter the womb?
Speculation.
Poverty and the Government
If the primary actor in society that is caring for the poor is the government, they will ultimately fall back on the threat of violence (the very essence of government) to address poverty. The system functions, not because the wealthy reach out relationally in love to the poor in ongoing, face to face interactions, but because the government's implicit threat of violence forces the wealthy to pay their taxes.
If a society is relying on the government to address poverty, it has already failed. The government is not equipped for this task.
Poverty is never a simple problem. It is always and everywhere complex, emotional, and messy. Financial poverty is often just a way to externally measure a whole host of deeper, bigger problems. And usually there is more than one underlying problem. There is a tangled mess of problems.
Love, that is, the ongoing sacrifice of oneself and one's resources for the benefit of another over the course of time, all from a position of privilege in one or more areas, is the only basis for effectively addressing poverty.
The enemy Loves the Welfare State
- The enemy wants to hinder the work of the church.
- Fighting poverty, leading people to glorify God by helping them fulfill their created potential, is part of the work of the church.
- To the degree that the government takes the lead in fighting poverty, the church is lulled into neglect of their role in this part of their mission.
- Paying taxes is immensely more passive and less participatory in the work of helping the poor than "getting one's hands dirty" and loving the poor face to face.
- Therefore, the enemy wants the government to take the lead in fighting poverty.
Of course, this is consistent with "Give to God's what is God's, and to Caesar what is Caesar's," and the commands in Matthew 25 that say caring for the poor is a role that belongs to the body of Christ, not the body of Caesar.
Listen
Listen.
You're sure they're wrong, but listen anyway.
Just listen.
You'll discover more about them by listening to them unburden their soul. And maybe they will learn more about themselves as well. We often learn what's inside of us, who we really are, when someone opens the door to letting us open up.
So listen.
If you don't understand, ask clarifying questions, not to cross-examine them, but to open the door further, to shed more light, to see more details of what they care about, how they see the world.
Exert your strength through generosity. Give them the space to bloom, to open up and show you the beauty that God has planted within them.
At the end of it all, maybe you'll be just as convinced of how wrong they are. But hopefully you'll understand more of why they believe and think and act the way they do.
Maybe you'll never see eye to eye with them on these matters. But knowing someone on the other side, someone you know as a person and not just an anonymous slur, will enrich your soul. And if you are challenged by the person and ideas you encounter, perhaps through the process you will be stronger, and just that much more aligned with what is, just that much more deeply rooted in the Truth.
So listen.
Accurate Thoughts
The thoughts that naturally occur to a person are not always the most accurate, do not always align with what exists.
Part of My Vision
I'm sympathetic to liberals and others who feel like society is always ready to fall apart at the seams, that chaos is shaking and tearing at our country all the time, and that the government seems like the skeleton, the structure, the source of stability that will prevent a complete meltdown. In that worldview, the effort of conservatives and libertarians to reduce the size and reach of government feels like an attempt to abandon the future and promise of society to the forces of selfishness, to a dog-eat-dog, Darwinian natural selection that can only result in the destruction of civilization, the victory of the vicious over the vulnerable.
But my vision of society contains an element, makes central an element, that cannot be assumed by secular theoreticians, philosophers, and politicians. I assume that the church will be the church, that Christians will step up and accept the responsibility of obeying God's commands of us. Selfishness can motivate us to work hard and earn a high income, but so can biblical principles of duty and financially ethical behavior. And once wealth has been earned, a society of those earners and others who are looking for ways to truly build up others in their community with love can make an enormous difference in the lives of the poor and vulnerable. A real and lasting benefit can be brought to such lives via a long-term, serious commitment by followers of Christ.
Unlike the image held of conservatives by liberals and progressives, I don't oppose things like single-payer health care or a social safety net because I want to see the poor and vulnerable suffer. I want to see the vulnerable do better than they're doing today. I believe that Christians who are committed to the well-being of all people in their communities can work together, pool resources, and build relationships to bring an uplifting and positive change to a degree that is impossible for tax-funded government work.