This is another look at a post first published here last December. It is the story of the first ones to hear the announcement that the Messiah had been born and placed in a manger. It’s a great reminder to us all that losers are welcomed by our Lord.
8 That night there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. 9 Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared among them, and the radiance of the Lord’s glory surrounded them. They were terrified, 10 but the angel reassured them. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. 11The Savior. yes, the Messiah, the Lord has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David! 12 And you will recognize him by this sign: You will find a baby wrapped snugly in strips of cloth, lying in a manger.”
13 Suddenly, the angel was joined by a vast host of others. the armies of heaven, praising God and saying,
14 Glory to God in highest heaven,
and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.
15 When the angels had returned to heaven, the shepherds said to each other, “Let’s go to Bethlehem! Let’s see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”
16 They hurried to the village and found Mary and Joseph. And there was the baby, lying in the manger. 17 After seeing him, the shepherds told everyone what had happened and what the angel had said to them about this child. 18 All who heard the shepherds’ story were astonished, 19 but Mary kept all these things in her heart and thought about them often. 20The shepherds went back to their flocks, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen. It was just as the angel had told them. (Luke 2: 8-20 NLT)
We love to romanticize the role of the shepherds at Christmas. We make them handsome and rugged and virtuous. Obviously they must be godly and good, because the angel gave them the birth announcement of Jesus. Right? Plus, they get prime spots in the crèche—so they have to be righteous, right?
Today, I had marvelous conversation with an African-American woman who had grown up in Mississippi, moved to Indianapolis, whose family had relocated to other rust-belt cities like Chicago and Detroit in the 1960’s and 70’s. She could talk about picking cotton, participating in civil rights marches, employers who were members of the Ku Klux Klan, and what it was like to take part in the great migration of southerners to the north to look for good jobs and a more prosperous life. Her family had also experienced many of the sad events associated with the black American experience. Families had broken up and were separated, young men like her son had been victims of crime and violence, those who at one time found employment in manufacturing industries later found themselves out of work, their descendants plunged yet again into poverty.
Yet this woman was full of joy. Despite the hardships she, her family, and the members of her community had suffered, she smiled and said she felt blessed. She knew that God was with her, and that God would continue to make a way because that’s just who he is.
In his book, The Real Mary, Scot McKnight likens Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) to African-American protest songs like “We Shall Overcome.” It is an theological-social anthem expressing confidence that ultimate justice will come — indeed, God’s justice has come — because of the events that he has put in motion, starting with two humble Jewish maidens, Elizabeth and Mary.
You see, Israel was an oppressed people in those days. Yes, they had returned from exile in Babylon and were back in the Promised Land. However, a series of nations had overrun Palestine and in Mary’s day, the Romans were its rulers. They used local “kings” like Herod, a brutal dictator, to administrate the region. Israel found itself under the thumb of its enemies on its own home turf. They had returned from exile, yet found themselves still captive. And like my friend from Mississippi, who could describe what it was like to be knocked down by the blast of a fire hose and to lose her job because she showed up at a civil rights rally, Mary and the common citizens of Israel faced daily insults and indignities as they lived in a Roman police state, were fleeced by tax collectors, and were treated like second-class citizens in their own homeland.
Long before I read N.T. Wright and other contemporary authors, my eyes were opened to what Scot McKnight calls “The King Jesus Gospel” through the work of the great Roman Catholic Biblical scholar, Raymond E. Brown.
His two little books, A Coming Christ in Advent, and An Adult Christ at Christmas, though considered “liberal” by some because of Brown’s use of critical methodology, show Brown’s remarkable insight into the Biblical and cultural contexts and subtexts of the Christmas story.
Today, a quote for your meditation on the public and political implications of Luke’s account of Christmas (Luke 2).
Adoration of the Shepherds, Campin
Luke speaks of an edict that went out from Augustus Caesar when Quirinius was governor of Syria. He thus gives the birth of Jesus a solemn setting, comparable to that which he would give the baptism of Jesus by John — under Tiberius Caesar when Pontius Pilate was prefect in Judea (3:1). In the instance of the baptism Luke was hinting that the ripples sent forth by the immersion of Jesus in the Jordan would ultimately begin to change the course of the Tiber. He is hinting at cosmic significance for the birth of Jesus as well. The name of Augustus would evoke memories and ideals for Luke’s readers. In 29 B.C., one hundred years before Luke wrote this Gospel, Augustus had brought an end to almost a century of civil war that had ravaged the Roman realms; and at last the doors of the shrine of Janus in the Forum, thrown open in times of war, were able to be closed. The Age of Augustus was propagandized as the glorious age of pastoral rule over a world made peaceful by virtue — the fulfillment of Virgil’s dreams in the Fourth Ecologue. In 13-9 B.C. there was erected a great altar to the peace brought about by Augustus, and this Ara Pacis Augustae still stands in Rom as a monument to Augustan ideals. The Greek cities of Asia Minor adopted September 23rd, the birthday of Augustus, as the first day of the New Year. He was hailed at Halicarnassus as the “savior of the whole world”; and the Priene inscription grandiosely proclaimed: “The birthday of the god marked the beginning of the good news for the world.” Luke contradicts this propaganda by showing that paradoxically the edict of Augustus served to provide a setting for the birth of Jesus. Men build an altar to the pax Augustae, but a heavenly chorus proclaimed the Pax Christi: “On earth peace to those favored by God” (2:14). The birthday that marked the true beginning of a new time took place not in Rome but in Bethlehem, and a counterclaim to man-made inscriptions was the heraldic cry of the angel of the Lord: “I announce to you the good news of a great joy which will be for the whole people: To you this day there is born in the city of David a Savior who is Messiah and Lord” (2:10-11).
McKnight rightly commends Holcomb for an excellent presentation of a certain kind of “Gospel” teaching — “Justin Holcomb says many things here that I would agree with: a focus on Jesus, a telling of the whole life of Jesus (including his teachings, etc), substitutionary atonement; he affirms the focus of the gospel is not about us but about God; he states the gospel makes us right and transforms. I like that he says we never move ‘beyond’ the gospel.”
As fine a summary as Holcomb’s article is, it represents what Scot has called a “soterian” approach to the Gospel in his book, The King Jesus Gospel. A primary purpose of the book is to point out that this way of defining the good news is biblically and theologically inadequate.
Here is a sample of Holcomb’s Gospel:
Christian theology is about the gospel, which is focused on who Jesus is and what he said and did. Jesus is the hero of history and the centerpiece of the entire Bible.
God made us to worship him. He was our Father, living and walking among us, giving us everything we needed to live, and yet we chose to sin against him—a cosmic act of treason punishable by death. As a result, we were separated from God, and we try to be our own gods, declaring what is right and wrong, and living life by our own standards.
Despite our pride and ignorance, Jesus, who created the world and is God, lovingly came into human history as a man. He was born of a virgin, and he lived a life without sin, though he was tempted in every way as we are. Because of his great love for us, he went to the cross and took on the punishment of death that we justly deserved. Before his death and after his resurrection, he preached that the good news of God’s kingdom, love, promise, forgiveness, and acceptance was fulfilled in him, in both his life and death.
Our first parents in the garden substituted themselves for God, and, at the cross, Jesus reversed that substitution, substituting himself for sinners.
This soterian Gospel, in contrast to the “King Jesus” gospel, is good news presented as a personal plan of salvation. It ignores the narrative context of the Gospel, separating it out from the Story told in the Old Testament, and presenting it as a bare theological message about God, sin, Christ, and redemption. One of the consequences of this is that the message usually skips right from Genesis 3 (Fall) to the New Testament (Jesus). Did you see how Holcomb did that? Note his last sentence again: “Our first parents in the garden substituted themselves for God, and, at the cross, Jesus reversed that substitution, substituting himself for sinners.” Straight from Genesis to the Gospels, from the Garden to the Cross.
As Scot McKnight says,
This skipping of Israel’s Story is why there’s no concern in this gospel that Jesus is the Messiah/King, no concern for how God works in human history, no redemption of creation, and no new heavens and new earth. The Bible’s message is reduced to salvation, but there’s more to the Bible’s Story than that. There’s not enough Old Testament Story in this sketch … the “according to the Scriptures” theme of the gospel statement of 1 Cor 15 (and the sermons in Acts, and the Gospels) is not given adequate grounding.
I want to point out that this is the most significant difference between the soterian gospel and the Story gospel of Jesus and the apostles. I do not believe this is a matter of “We can’t cover everything” but an issue of how to tell the Story that the gospel resolves.
I agree wholeheartedly with Scot, and want to expand upon these thoughts over the course of this week.
So, in preparation for Christmas, we will share a few articles on Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55). In this song of praise, Mary proclaims the Gospel. As we will see, it is no mere “personal plan of salvation,” no “steps” by which we find peace with God, no “bridge” to reconciliation with God, no set of “laws” or principles by which we must make a decision. Mary’s song proclaims the climactic moment in a Story, the resolution of issues larger than my personal sin, a hope that stretches beyond the bliss of heaven.
I encourage you to read and meditate on the Magnificat as we prepare to discuss it in days to come.
Monday Merton Musings, December 19, 2011 Go Forth to Meet Him
The week before Christmas has arrived.
The words we hear from Thomas Merton today for our weekly meditation are brief but searching. For Christmas will come this year, just as it did long ago in Bethlehem. As on that occasion, some will be ready to welcome the infant King, while others will be unprepared.
“What is uncertain is not the ‘coming’ of Christ but our own reception of Him, our own response to Him, our own readiness and capacity to ‘go forth to meet Him.'” (Seasons of Celebration)
I love this quote. This quote terrifies me. I believe these words. I cannot believe these words.
On the one hand, since we know the story so well and have celebrated the Christmas feast so often, it is not hard to feel that one is preparing to “go forth to meet him” by simply participating in the annual preliminaries. We all know such activity gives no guarantee that our hearts will be receptive.
Annunciation to the Shepherds, Bassano
It is also scary when I remember that few, if any, went forth to meet him at his first coming. Certainly none went of their own initiative. It took a heavenly host of angels to get the shepherds’ attention. The magi would never have made their journey without a certain astrological alignment. Those who housed visitors in Bethlehem did not make room for him. Even those faithful people who were “ready” — Mary, Joseph, Anna, Simeon, and so on — were approached and surprised by God’s intervention.
So, I want to be ready. I long desperately to be ready. With God’s people I fill my heart with divine promises, lift up my prayers, sing carols, light candles, and decorate my home. I prepare a room for the Holy Family. Through confession and absolution I sweep it clean, and by the word of the Gospel it is made ready. Within my heart and life I build a cradle in which the infant King can find rest. I watch out my window and prepare to go forth to meet him.
When suddenly — through the back door? — he appears! How did he get in? And how did I miss his arrival? What happened to my carefully prepared words of welcome? I am stunned to silence. Overwhelmed, I fall to my knees. My Savior is here, and I did not know it!
All my carefully devised hospitality plans are moot. There will be no going forth to meet him, for he has met me first. The greeting will not be my “Welcome!” but his “Fear not!” I will not be his host, but his favored guest. I planned a wonderful meal in his honor, but he sits down at the head of the table, breaks bread, blesses it, and gives it to me as though this were his home and he is feeding me.
And so, brother Thomas, I hear what you are saying. But in the end, my response will always be uncertain, my readiness and capacity to “go forth and meet him” always overwhelmed by his epiphany — sudden, serendipitous, startling.
I am reminded of another quote:
Then the Lord you are seeking will suddenly come to his Temple. The messenger of the covenant, whom you look for so eagerly, is surely coming,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. “But who will be able to endure it when he comes? Who will be able to stand and face him when he appears?” (Malachi 3:1-2, NLT)
One might as well go forth to meet the whirlwind. Or a baby that takes your breath away.
Where meek souls will receive Him still
The dear Christ enters in.
• “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” Brooks
I am not good at working with my hands to fashion beautiful artistic creations. Never have been and probably never will be. I’m better with books and people and such, and have not developed the fine motor skills, keen attention to detail, and patient perspective and work ethic demanded of a craftsman who works in wood or another medium. I admire those people and what they make. I am not one of them.
Something I do know about is getting ready for babies. My wife and I have had children, four of them, along with three grandchildren, so I have some idea about the process of anticipating and preparing for a newborn in the house. Somehow, a lot of other “important” things get pushed aside when a baby’s on the way, especially if it happens to be the first child.
One’s attention gets riveted on the due date and what must be done to prepare for the new arrival. A room must be readied, furniture procured and arranged. A whole list of “baby stuff” grows and grows as you come to understand what you will need. Doctor appointments must be kept. Mom’s diet and other aspects of her health must be carefully monitored. Inexperienced parents take birthing classes to help them grasp and get ready for the delivery process. Questions fill our minds and conversations: Boy or girl? What will we name him or her? Natural birth? Which doctor? Or should we use a midwife? Which hospital or birthing center, or should we consider a home birth? What are the rules for mom’s maternity leave, for dad’s work, and how can we prepare financially for the changes to come? Breast or bottle feeding? Cloth or disposable diapers? These and a thousand other related matters fill our minds during the season of pregnancy and childbirth.
When a baby is coming, we get focused. We alter heart, mind, and behavior to welcome new life.
2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Luke 1:46b-55 or Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26
Romans 16:25-27
Luke 1:26-38
Prayer of the Day Stir up your power, Lord Christ, and come. With your abundant grace and might, free us from the sin that would obstruct your mercy, that willingly we may bear your redeeming love to all the world, for you live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
“…let it be with me according to your word.” (luke 1:38)
• • •
sonnet for advent IV
there are few words t’express the warmth i feel
now as i sit before my christmas tree
and know that “all is well and all is well…”
the lord indeed has done great things for me!
i’ve been through winters deep with discontent
the winds have chapped my face and froze my tears
i’ve dreaded dark’s determined hard descent
might overtake the turning of the years
but now the lights are clear and sharp and white
on branches full of fair and fragrant green
the ornaments hang still and golden there
and i, caught up in reverie serene
can only cling to hope, and peace, and grace…
the soon appearance of my savior’s face
Classic iMonk Post by Michael Spencer From December, 2007
I want to start this post with a quote from a typical ambitious evangelical church that wants to grow. Get big. Add lots of people. Become “mega.” Get the crowds and their kids in the doors.
But I’ve decided not to insult you. If you don’t know the vast majority of American Christianity is about churches getting bigger, and bigger…and bigger if possible, then where are you? Iceland? Mars?
Then I want to tell you what a friend is doing this week. He’s in Hurricane Katrina country, building houses. He’s with a group of Christians that moved down there after the hurricane and planted a church. The thing is, this church doesn’t have a building and all the usual church programs. They don’t have that single-minded church growth ambition focus. They are different. These Christians are basically building houses, cleaning up, rebuilding. They are a servant church. “Missional” for those of you who can say that and think good thoughts.
They’ve come into the ruins and incarnated Jesus, the carpenter, by serving and loving the homeless. They build and repair houses. The reputation of Jesus in that community is not displayed on a neon sign, but in the finished houses and tears of those who will live in them.
Those Christians are a different kind of church. A footwashing, gospel-living, Kingdom-embodying, incarnational movement of Jesus followers.
I’ve got a prediction: They never will be big.
Not with goals, attitude and actions like that. They won’t ever have to worry about where to put the crowds or how to finance a worship center to seat the thousands and thousands who want to worship with them.
There are a lot of churches and ministries that won’t ever get very big. Here in the mountains we have what we use to call “Baptist Centers.” Little “social ministry” operations, aimed at mercy ministry for the poor. Ours around here is called the “Friendship House.” We give away clothes to poor people in the community. Sometimes we give away food. We don’t ask any questions. That ministry won’t ever need to worry about stadium seating. Or replacing the audio-visual gear before next year’s Christmas pageant.
In a large city in our state, there’s a mission downtown that’s ministered to the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill for many years. They’ve got better facilities than they did twenty years ago, but never enough resources for the need. They could use better facilities, but they won’t be moving to the suburbs any time soon. Like most ministries of their kind, they use a lot of volunteers. few people are paid. Except for those holiday groups and the occasional youth group doing a project, it’s usually a bare bones crew serving the meal and handing out the blankets.
What a busy week it’s been here at the iMonastery. It is like a miniature Santa’s workshop around here! Martha O’Ireland has been busy making fudge with a wee bit of special Irish “juice” in them. Damaris has knitted us all scarfs. Adam is composing a Christmas opera. And Joe Stallard, our erstwhile webmaster, is still trying to untangle all those Christmas lights. Meanwhile, Chaplain Mike made us a pitcher of nearly non-alcoholic eggnog to go with the gingersnaps First Lady Denise just pulled out of the oven. So what say you and I take a stroll past all of the wrapping paper, bows and scotch tape into the land called Saturday Ramblings.
You might say this is the science edition of Ramblings. Let’s start off by looking into the future—what our children’s children will have to look forward to. I for one love the idea of a “space elevator.” Of course, I’ll want to stop at every floor on the way up. I’ll be like Buddy the Elf and push all the buttons. (I know—you’ll wait for the next elevator, right?)
Eagle-eyed rambling reporter Adam Palmer (we’ll hear more from AP in just a minute) alerted me to this earlier this week. Scientists are that much closer to finding the elusive “God particle” using science fiction-esque equipment. Just what is this “God particle”? You can read a good overview here. Yes, it was commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation. But as you read this, see if your heart does not soar in praise to the God of this particle. I know mine did.
I have been waiting to make this available to you for awhile. Earlier in the fall, Ben Witherington posted an address spoken by President Timothy Tennent for the Fall Convocation at Asbury Theological Seminary. I’ve wanted Internet Monk readers to hear his words ever since I first read them. In the light of Jeff’s post yesterday, here is an example of a parallel perspective given by a leading contemporary evangelical leader.
Note well: this critique comes from the heart of the church, not from people on the outside looking in, who became hurt or disaffected and are now spending their venom on all things evangelical. This is a church leader, who feels responsible for sending out a new generation of pastors and church leaders into an evangelical culture that he believes is in serious crisis. Whereas Michael Spencer spoke of evangelicalism’s coming “collapse,” Tennant warns even more dramatically: “The whole evangelical house will soon be engulfed in flames.”
Tim Tennent is sounding an alarm, loud and clear. And this is, indeed, one of the clearest, boldest, most damning critiques of evangelicalism that I have read.
Here are some excerpts from this prophetic message. To read the entire address, go HERE.
In his 1937 landmark book, TheKingdom of God in America, Richard Niebuhr memorably described the message of Protestant liberalism as “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” In the ensuing years Niebuhr’s statement has become one of the more well known summaries of the failure of Protestant liberalism to properly reflect the apostolic message. Tragically, Niebuhr’s devastating critique is on the brink of being equally applicable to contemporary, evangelical Christianity. Who has lost sight more of the depth of human sin, the certainty of God’s judgment and the call to repentance and transformation at the feet of a crucified savior than today’s populistic, evangelical churches?…
It may be true that the house of liberal Protestantism has nearly burned to the ground and we’ve been standing there screaming with our water hose for almost a century, but, brothers and sisters, we must recognize that our own kitchen is on fire and within one generation, the whole evangelical house will soon be engulfed in flames. If liberalism is guilty of demythologizing the miraculous, we have surely been guilty of trivializing it. If liberalism is guilty of turning all theological statements into anthropological ones, surely we must be found guilty of making Christianity just another face of the multi-headed Hydra of American, market-driven consumerism. If liberalism can be charged with making the church a gentler, kindler version of the Kiwanis club, we must be willing to accept the charge that we have managed to reinvent the gospel, turning it into a privatized subset of one’s individualfaithjourney. I realize that there are powerful, faithful churches in every tradition who are already modeling the very future this message envisions, but we must also allow our prophetic imagination to enable us to see what threatens to engulf us.
…Evangelicalism is awash with the constant drumbeat message of informality, the assumed wisdom of consumerism, reliance on technology, love of entertainment, pursuit of comfort, materialism and personal autonomy – all held together by easy-to-swallow, pithy gospel statements….
…Evangelicals are, of course, masters at dodging any criticism that we ourselves could ever be co-opted by culture. We disguise our lack of theological reflection by our constant commitment to “relevance” or saying that we are reaching people “where they are.” Of course, who would deny that the church needs to have a profound understanding of “where people are.” That is not the problem. We are quite adept at measuring where people are culturally, but we are at best careless in any sustained theological reflection about where they shouldbe culturally. So, for example, if the wider culture has become apathetic about ritual, tradition, symbolism, poetic expressions, the value of history, or the necessity of intergenerational relationships, then, no problem, we say, it is the evangelical version of the prime directive to always adapt to culture. But what if these very prejudices are actually part of the cultural malaise to which the church has been called to provide a stunning alternative? How easily we seem to forget that the gospel doesn’t need our help in being made relevant. The gospel is always relevant, and it is we who need to be made relevant to the gospel.
…If today’s evangelical church is really marked by shallowness, thinness and cultural sameness, then, to use the phrase of Jack Davis, perhaps it is time we become “deep, thick and different.”
A deep church is one which takes the encounter with a holy God seriously and is shaped by spiritual disciplines, holiness and catechesis. A deep church is the opposite of a shallow one. We are to exhibit a deep understanding of the holiness and weightiness of God. In Hebrew the word for honor and glory is kbd (kabod), meaning “heavy.” God has become far too lightweight in contemporary evangelicalism. The great sense of God’s transcendence and holiness must, once again, overtake post-modernity’s sense of over familiarity and casualness in God’s presence. Indeed, we are profoundly in need of recapturing the sense of God’s presence. Nietzsche’s madman who described churches as “the tombs and sepulchers of God” does, in fact, capture something of the movement from the real presence of Christ to the real absence of Christ in the experience of many churches today.
A thick church contrasts with a thin one and is characterized by thick relationships and commitments and where worship is not a product we consume, but the great ontological orientation of our lives. We are the people of the Risen Lord. The consumeristic, therapeutic self of modernity is, through the gospel, the trinitarian, ecclesial self of the New Creation.
A different church is one not marked by cultural sameness, but, instead, is a manifestation of the in-breaking of the New Creation. A visitor should feel somewhat out of place when they walk into our midst, as they encounter people with a radically distinctive orientation. A different church is one which is profoundly distinct from the culture in its “ontology, theology, worship and moral behavior.” To be different is to be a community marked by metanoia.
Brothers and sisters, may the shallowness, thinness and cultural sameness of our churches become churches, under God and your leadership, which are deep, thick and different.
8 That night there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. 9 Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared among them, and the radiance of the Lord’s glory surrounded them. They were terrified, 10 but the angel reassured them. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. 11The Savior. yes, the Messiah, the Lord has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David! 12 And you will recognize him by this sign: You will find a baby wrapped snugly in strips of cloth, lying in a manger.”
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