Advent 2012: Light

Can it be good again?

The first few articles in this advent series have focused on the state of our world: created in beauty, rhythm, symmetry, and order by a good and loving God. Man is made in God's image, male and female; tasked with reproducing the image and exercising dominion over God's creation. This edenic world stands in sharp contrast to the world we see around us. The imago dei that fallen man still bears enables us to make great strides in technology, but the technology we design mostly enables us to lie, steal, and kill more efficiently and create more and faster means to receive the news telling the latest manifestation of man's rebellion.

Advent is a time for acknowledging that darkness has entered a world that God created for light and recognizing the ways this darkness manifests itself in and around us. Doing so causes us to realize how desperately we need the light restored. The lighting of a simple candle in a darkened room is a way of remembering. It's dark. We need light. We need the kind of light that reveals everything as it truly is and dispels the evil that currently inhabits God's good world. We need light that no longer suffers the oppression, injustice, hate, murder, abuse, sickness, poverty, and death that currently lurk in the darkness of our world.

St. John's telling of the Gospel opens with a unique perspective of the advent of Jesus Christ. Rooting the coming of Christ in Old Testament prophecy, he tells of John the Baptist's proclamation of the imminent appearance of the Messiah. This is how he describes it:

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. 

The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believe in his name, he gave the right to become children of God - children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God. 

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. 

(John testified concerning him. He cried out, saying, "This is the one I spoke about when I said, 'He who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.'") Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known. 

John 1:6-18

I started writing this article on the evening of Monday, 10 December. I got caught up preparing to preach on Waiting with Joy and didn't sit down to finish the article until last week. Since that date, shooters have terrorized a shopping mall in Oregon and devastated a small town in Connecticut. Mankind's capacity for evil seems to know no limit. Certainly the evil one's appetite for cruelty knows no boundaries. If we are ever to know life the way it should be, the way God intended it, we must have a Messiah - one who can break sin's hold and overpower the evil will that devastates our world. We don't know how to fix things on our own. We desperately need a Savior. We need a power greater than us who can set us free and show us what shalom looks like. Light that can dispel the darkness.

The law that shows us what's wrong with the world and why came from God through Moses. Grace, the Divine ability to do what is otherwise impossible, and truth, the revelation of the true character of God lived in the image-bearer, came through Jesus Christ. Light has come, the very light we desperately needed. Life can be good again. Will it be? When?

Advent 2012: Exposure

We are exposed.

In the last post we imagined, with difficulty, being as we were before the Fall: naked yet unashamed. We equate nakedness with shame. True shalom exists when we are fully known to one another and fully accepted and loved all the same. Sin has dealt a heavy blow to shalom. To be seen is to have our failures, misdeeds, and gross imperfections put on display. If others were to know who we really are we would be completely and utterly rejected. After all, we reject others when we find out something about them that is offensive to our sensibilities. It is obvious that others would do the same to us.

Shame is not the only problem with exposure, however. Scripture compares humanity, in its current state, to sheep. Sheep are not very high on the food chain. They are easy prey to a variety of predators and possess neither cunning nor claw to protect or defend themselves. Being that most sheep are white, they are endowed with nature's worst camouflage. In addition to being easy prey, they easily wander into precarious situations, far removed from food and water. They need community, but unlike many other animals who run together, they don't seem to recognize it. Ants, elephants, bees, lions, and wolves have no need of a pen to keep them together. Many a wolf has had an easy meal thanks to the wandering of a sheep.

In the Fall we took upon ourselves a self-centered awareness. We think of everything in terms of how it affects us, aids us, hurts us, threatens us, entertains us, or changes our situation. Where we once enjoyed the presence of God and the harmony that comes from embracing our reality as a creature made in God's image, we now know the disharmony that results from being gods unto ourselves.

This proclivity to egocentrism puts us in a precarious situation. In the church we often speak of a three-fold threat: the world, the flesh, and the Devil, though I think we have them in inverse order. We'll discuss them briefly in their logical sequence.

The Devil
Peter puts believers on alert. "Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour." (1 Peter 5:8) Jesus once warned Peter of the Enemy's intentions. "Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat..." (Luke 22:31) We first came face-to-face with this Enemy in the Garden. We were innocent; he was initiating the next phase of an assault upon God himself. Having been thwarted in his initial rebellion in Heaven, he set his sights on the bearer of the Divine image and the dominion entrusted to the image-bearer. By yielding to the enticement of the Devil we adopted his character and handed over our will. We died to God yet lived in the flesh. Our relational existence was replaced by a new and unnatural self-focus. Since the Enemy knows this character all too well, he knows how to manipulate it. He is a deceiver, an accuser, and a destroyer. Whatever is destructive to what God has ordained, through lies and deception causing relationships, societies, communities, and cultures to fail, has the Devil's fingerprints. How long would you have to look for an example where one person's self-interest combined with lack of wisdom or true knowledge led to a choice that ruined a marriage, a family, a friendship, a business, an enterprise, a church, a city, or a nation? "Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil...In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one..." (Ephesians 6:11, 16) He knows where to shoot and his aim is precise. Our inherent desire for self at the expense of others makes us easy targets.

The Flesh
Lest the Devil take all the blame, we are culpable as well. We make choices on the basis of our own lusts. In our fallen, broken state we take rather than give. We hurt rather than help. We serve ourselves and leave our neighbor to fend for himself. We see ourselves entitled to much and responsible for little. Our problem is not environmental, though our environment is affected by it (as we'll see momentarily). According to Jesus, "Hear and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person...For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person..." (Matthew 15:10b-11, 19-20a)

The World
Imagine seven billion people, each individually enticed by a crafty Enemy to gratify the desires of seven billion self-deifying hearts; seven billion people simultaneously trying to be God, to orient our world and the people in it to meet our own needs and serve our desires. Some achieve a large measure of this power, and most are not largely benevolent in their use of it. At the very least the benevolence wanes as we pass through concentric spheres radiating from self: family, tribe, race, creed (religious or political), guild. The way of the world is the amassing of power and/or alignment with those who possess it (get within a sphere close enough to benefit!). See an agitating enemy and billions of willing participants and it is not difficult to understand why our world is the way it is nor to become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem, despairing of a solution.

"O Lord, how long?"

Advent 2012: Loneliness

We are alone.

"And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed." Genesis 2:25

This is hard for most of us to imagine. How could a human being live in such a state - fully exposed in his/her world and free from any sense of fear, shame, guilt, or embarrassment? We are familiar with a common dream that many of us experienced probably somewhere around the middle school years. We are at school or some other place where we are surrounded by our peers. Everything seems normal until we realize we are wearing nothing but our underwear (if that)! No one seems to have noticed it, but how could they not? It is only a matter of time before everyone recognizes your state and ultimate humiliation ensues! There is, however, no remedy. No spare clothes in your bag. Nowhere to hide. No means of escaping the situation. Wondering how on earth you left the house without getting dressed! It's a bit strange that you got to this point without anyone noticing. Hopefully you wake up before the situation deteriorates, but you've experienced the emotions that belie our intense fear of exposure. Such a state of innocence that would allow us to be fully seen and fully known without fear and shame is a fully foreign notion.

Our innocence was lost right there in God's garden. In the very place where man and woman enjoyed the Creator's presence and were surrounded with his loving provision, they chose rebellion. They ignored his limits and reached for being and knowledge never intended for them. The consequence of their choice was immediate and catastrophic. Their eyes opened. Their nakedness realized. Like 7th graders in a nightmare, they reach in desperation for anything that will protect them from the humiliating gaze of others or the convicting, damning justice of an all-seeing, holy God. Yet because humanity chose the enemy's character, he received the enemy's fate: banishment. No longer would she enjoy God's fellowship, nor would he enjoy God's blessing. Desire for the giving and receiving of human love and friendship would be tainted by self-love and an insatiable thirst for gratification. The ground that so readily gave us everything we needed would withdraw its cooperation. Life was easy, but now it's hard. We were friends, but now we're enemies. We were open, but now we're closed. Exposed, with nothing to hide, now everything to hide but scantily covered.

As God pronounces judgment on humanity's rebellion, he includes a promise. It is the tiniest glimmer of hope in the darkest situation. Never has so much been lost so quickly. Yet the enemy who drew us to follow him with lies and false promises would one day be crushed by one who would proceed from the woman. God would take responsibility for the consequences of man's evil and bear on himself the wrath of his own justice. This would happen in a matter of time. In the meantime we would wait, doing our best to live in this broken world while shielding ourselves from God and neighbor.

Advent 2012: Responsibility

We broke it.

In an earlier post we discussed how God made a good world and placed humans, made in His image, in His creation to enjoy it and exercise dominion over it.  Yet, God's created order is broken.  Though there is still beauty, love, provision, and other parts of life we can enjoy, evil is everywhere.

The existence of evil in a world created by God has troubled philosophers and theologians for centuries.  If God is good, why does evil exist?  If God is all powerful, why doesn't he eradicate evil? End suffering?  Put a stop to all war, genocide, oppression, abuse, hunger, homelessness, sickness, poverty, and estrangement?  Some outside the Christian faith see the problem of evil as Christianity's Achilles heel, an unanswerable question that debunks the entire concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present God who created the world and loves his creatures.

Libraries could be filled with the books, essays, and articles that have been written on this subject, so for me to attempt to answer it in a few words might seem a bit ambitious.  There will be much more that could be said, but the answer to this question is to be found humanity's creation in the image of God.  This image of God in man and woman is not a physical likeness for God is not a physical being.  Rather, bearing the image of God means possessing his attributes encapsulated (and thus limited) in a physical body.  We can think, reason, will, imagine, create, build, relate intimately, and manage resources.  These are attributes we share with God and are unique in his creation.  These qualities are often cited when theologians and Christian anthropologists try to quantify the imago dei in man.  However accurate the assessment may be, it does not quite answer the question of why there is evil in the world.  For this we must turn to another quality of being made in God's image.

Like God, we are capable of making choices that have real moral consequences and do so through our use or misuse of the faculties enumerated above.  We can give and another feels joy.  We can speak encouraging words and others become courageous.  We can touch and another feels loved.  We can also pull a trigger and someone dies.  We can hoard and others suffer.  We can withhold love and another experiences the devastation of loneliness and isolation.

Since the Fall of Humanity, described in Genesis 3, we have developed and deeply embedded systems of oppressive power, endemic poverty, and every kind of abuse and injustice into our societies.  Slavery in America, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge, the Trail of Tears, September 11, genocide in Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Darfur, the Syrian government terrorizing and murdering its own people, the loss of millions of lives via abortion on demand; we could go on and on.  These events are limited simply to the past 150 years or so, not during the Dark Ages, but during our Age of Reason and Enlightenment.  In a previous post I referenced Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire."  While Mr. Joel's recap of world history in the latter half of the twentieth century is stark and stirring, his theology isn't quite correct.  We did start the fire.  Human beings are responsible for the state of our world.  We are both victim and perpetrator.

Seeing how we introduced sin into our world--we sin and are sinned against--how then can we see shalom restored?

What if there were someone to show us a better way?  One who demonstrated real humanity according to the Creator's design?  One who could break sin's slavish hold and empower humans to live in shalom?  Would anything less have any chance of enabling us to reach the state of justice and peace we intrinsically know should be ours as creatures made in the image of the Divine?

Advent 2012: Broken

The world is broken.

In yesterday's post, we learned that the world in which we live, including the human beings in it, were created by a good God in perfect order. There was, at the time of Creation, perfect harmony between God and humanity, among the members of the human family, and between humanity and the physical world that God made and gave them to rule and enjoy. This state of perfect relational and environmental symmetry has a name. It's called shalom. Shalom is a Hebrew word/concept that is almost always rendered as "peace" in English translations. We typically think of peace as the absence of hostilities, but shalom is the state of such harmonious union that hostility is unthinkable. Perfect shalom is demonstrated in the union of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons so integrally united war is inconceivable. We were designed in and for shalom. We hunger for it. One of the most loved songs of the past century is "What a Wonderful World" (I love the original Louie Armstrong version!).

I see trees of green, red roses, too
I see 'em bloom for me and you
And I think to myself...what a wonderful world

The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky,
Are also in the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands, saying, "How do you do?"
They're really saying, "I love you."

We love this because, beside the fact it is a beautiful work of art skillfully performed by a series of great musicians, we wish this were a true description of our world. We wish this were the whole story.

Billy Joel wrote and recorded "We Didn't Start the Fire" in 1989 (we're in my generation now!). It is a bit like Forrest Gump in five minutes: a panorama of American history from 1949 to '89, the span of his life at that time. It includes references to some good things, some novel things, and many things evil and tragic. I'm not much of a fan of looking at any period as the "good old days" (the only good old days are the ones in Eden, and no one alive today was there!), but '89 looks pretty good right now. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. We helped Osama Bin Laden kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan (oops). I had a full head of hair. There was no fiscal cliff in sight. The nation was not politically polarized (if you peruse here, however, you will see these weren't exactly rosy times, either).

What is our world really like? Israel, Gaza, Syria, Egypt, Greece, Spain, American politics. How are things where you work? Is your job a source of meaning where you work in harmony with others to produce meaningful and helpful outcomes? How is your marriage? How much work is it? How hard has it been at times? How are your finances? How are your children, your extended family? How is your neighborhood? Do you feel close to God? Are you in perfect harmony with Him? Some of these may be well, but most of us are experiencing struggles in some of these areas or can remember when we did. A few are blissfully ignorant, or at least pretending to be. The psalmist wasn't (cf. Psalm 12).

We intuitively sense something is wrong with our world. Philosophers have developed systems for identifying good and psychologists have built programs for behavior modification. Chemists have concocted remedies to alleviate suffering, and politicians promise us better days if we elect them (and complete chaos if we elect the other guys). What is the answer?

In Advent we are remembering Israel's darkness while waiting, hoping, for the coming of the promised and prophesied deliverer. It is an opportunity to reflect upon the dark state of our world as well. Shalom is broken and we live in that brokenness. We experience it every day. When we yearn for shalom, we are acknowledging we were made for better than this. There must be some way to make it right.

Advent 2012: Good

The world is good.

If you are a Christian (perhaps even if you are not), I've probably already started an argument with you.  You'll immediately want to reject this statement because, as we've been taught, the world is a source of sin; a corrupted place awaiting destruction which we are not supposed to embrace.  Satan is called the god of this world in Scripture.  Anything ruled by Satan can't possibly be good.

Indeed, you have to roll back the clock several millennia to find a time when the truth of this statement was beyond dispute.  There was such a time, however.  With creative genius surpassing the combined talents of every great architect, precision beyond the abilities of the most brilliant engineer, and beauty that could only be feebly copied by the most renowned artists, God created the heavens and the earth.  There came a day when God stepped back and assessed His work.  "God saw that it was good."  The addition of humanity, male and female, made in His own image, prompted God to go further in His assessment.  "God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good."

Our discussion of Advent and contemplation of its themes must begin, as with any other discussion of the biblical narrative, where God starts it.  In the beginning, God created.  He did it.  Of His own initiative.  For His own reasons.  For His own glory.  It was, at one time, empty.  It was dark and lacked form and order.  But God brought light, form, and order; mountains, lakes, oceans, deer, roses, spiders, zebras, sagebrush, and salmon (even cui-ui).

Creation is the beginning of God's revelation of Himself to humanity.  Some scholars, considering the question of why God created the universe, have surmised that Lucifer had already rebelled against God, setting in his heart an ambition to "be like the most high."  God ended the insurrection and followed it up by showing His sole and unsurpassed power in creating a material, physical universe from nothing but His own mind and will (your turn, Lucifer!).  In His goodness, He then created man in His own image and instructed this good creature to propagate His good image throughout His good creation.  The Man and Woman were also given what Lucifer lusted after: dominion.  God created a physical realm and made a physical creature who would become a race to rule that realm and fill it with more of His artistic beauty, constructive creativity, and loving relationships modeled after and enjoyed with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  We can only imagine what an uninterrupted history of such humanity on earth would look like.  It's fun to try to imagine it, though.  Such an episode is coming.

The world might be ruled by evil (more on this in the next post), but it was created and certified as good by God Himself.  As we consider God's coming to earth over these weeks of Advent, let us begin by thinking about the character of the God who came and what He had planned for the world to which He came and the people to whom He came.  He is good.  What He makes is good.  What He does is good.  Advent acknowledges the darkness that precedes the light, but without the introduction of light there is no way to know it is dark.  We know it's dark because we were made for light.