Wake up! An Advent Reflection

So…be honest….how many of you enjoy coming to church? I mean, really enjoy waking up and getting ready for to come to church? If you have kids, you know that this is a weekly struggle of getting them roused and out of bed, dressed to be somewhat acceptable for societal standards and then throw some breakfast down them and throw them in the car to get them to church on time. 

            In my house, Sunday morning normally begins something like this:

            Me: Owen…wake up.

            Owen: uhhhhhhh…….(rolls back to bed)

            Me: Owen…WAKE UP!!!! We have to go to church!

            Owen: uhhhhh……..why do we have to go to church?

            Me: Because God said so!

            Owen: I don’t want to go to church!

            Me: I don’t care what you want to do….you are going to church! Now GET UP!!!!

            So, this conversation probably sounds familiar in your household.  Church has never been a place that most people have bounded out of bed and headed towards.  Even time is different at church.  I can watch a movie and it feels like no time has passed at all, but a 15 minute sermon….oh my!

            In a lot of ways, I can sympathize with kids…and others…that don’t find church enjoyable.  Growing up, I never wanted to go to church.  Of course, I was an atheist, so maybe that had something to do with it.  I remember one Christmas when my friend really wanted to bring me to church.  He mustered all his nerve up to ask me to go to church.  When he finally did, I simply responded by saying, “Church? Church? It’s Christmas Eve, why would I want to go to church?” (Irony is not lost on me now)

Most of us are probably not morning people...

            My attitude was a long way from the Psalmist’s attitude: “I was glad when they said to me, let us go up to the House of the Lord.”  Glad?  As a kid, I never went to church gladly.  I always resentfully and never found it joyful….simply boring.  I mean, after all…what does the Church have to say to me? To us? To the World? Anything? What can the Church offer?

            This really is the question that the Church asks itself again at the beginning of Advent.  As we begin a new year, the church asks itself, “why do we exist? Do we have any meaning? Is there a purpose to this?”  In the midst of the holiday season, after the busyness of the year, the Church often forgets why we are here and what we are about.

            It’s almost like every Advent, the Church needs to be reminded about its purpose, its vision and its destination. 

            That’s why Advent starts off with these magisterial images of a new world.  Isaiah kicks off our new year with a vision of a different world…a world renewed…a world changed…by God.

In days to come the mountains of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.  Many peoples shall come and say, ‘come let’s go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in its paths.  For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.  He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples.  They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn for war anymore.” (Isaiah 2:2-4 NRSV).

            Now talk about an unbelievable picture! Not only will there be world peace…but people will ask…and WANT to go to CHURCH!  Seriously, though, we see that the world is to be transformed into a different place…different from the one we know…the one filled with anger and violence, warfare and strife.  It sounds almost too good to be true.  But it’s not…it’s the Gospel in action.

            Isaiah’s vision is meant to inspire the people of Israel…and the world…to look forward to a new dawn.  The time of Advent is a time to refocus on where we are going as a people.  We have been wearied by reports of World events…of wars and rumors of war…that it is hard for us to imagine that anything else could be different.  One of the reasons perhaps that many people find church ‘boring’ is because we have forgotten this vision of where we are going.  We have forgotten the message that we are supposed to be living out.  We have forgotten to offer people the very thing they are looking for: peace.

            The vision of Isaiah offers something completely different than anything the world can offer.  We often speak of ‘peace’ in political terms.  And while the vision definitely encapsulates this, it is much more expansive than this.  It is for the Hebrew word ~wlv that captures the sense here.  This means ‘completeness’ or ‘wholeness.’  People will be so at peace that disarmament will be an individual project, where people will give up their weapons and contribute to the common good by providing food for all.  

            But how is this supposed to come about?  We sometimes read a passage like this and we think that this is going to happen overnight, as if we don’t have to do anything.  We can sit back and let nature take its course and peace will magically appear.  But that’s not how it happens, is it?  This vision of Isaiah is the destination to which we are heading. It is God’s promise, but the way we get there is to live ourselves into it. 

            That is why Paul, in his letters to the Romans, tells people to ‘wake up.’ “you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep’ (Rom 13:11 NRSV).  What does he mean by this?

      

      Paul has been talking about how different the Christian life is in light of the promises of God.  He is trying to get the people to live into those promises of God.  He says that we should lay aside the ‘works of darkness’ and put on the ‘armor of light.’ What ‘light’ is Paul talking about? It is the same light of Isaiah. The early Church theologian Origen says, “the light is dawning everywhere, and the reign of darkness is rapidly coming to an end,’ which is because of the decisive work of God in Jesus Christ. 

            Paul declares that it is a ‘new day’ and because of this new day, people are changed people.  What is remarkable is that even in the midst of preaching the gospel of grace, Paul declares the ethical imperative for the people to enact the gospel promises of peace. We are to become ‘peace’ people…a community of Shalom.  We are to ‘walk in the light’ and to encourage others to live into the gospel values of peace and love and wholeness.

            I love when the church gets this right…and we do!  We have to remember that it was the Church that built and developed many of the early hospitals.  It was the church that retained a love of education and sought to educate much of the world.  It was the church that led the way in developing orphanages and it was church that has helped many people get back on its feet. 

            Personally, I remember a time when my church personally helped a young family get back on their feet.  It was near Christmas time and this family was living out in their car.  They had a very small child and another child on the way.  Our small church, with its budget stretched beyond imagination stepped up and provided a place for them to stay.  We were able to get the young man a job so he could work and provide money for his young and growing family.  This was a time when church ‘worked,’ when we were able to be that community of shalom.

            But too often, the church has lost sight of this.  I mean, how often have you heard of a church that has been a shining example of shalom to the world?  Too often, we get bogged down in internal conflict within the church.  We fight over…well everything! We fight over what type of music should be played, we fight over the color of carpets and we fight over who said what to whom.  Forget ‘world’ peace…often times we would like to find peace in our own church!

            And yet, isn’t this the entire point of what we have been celebrating? Isn’t this what Jesus, Paul, and Isaiah point us to during this time…during every time?

            What would happen if we took these passages seriously? What would happen if we truly began living in peace? What would happen if we became a ‘shalom’ people?  Sound too good to be true?   Maybe…but when people become captivated by the message of peace…with the message of the gospel…anything can happen…at any time!

            There is a reason that Jesus warns his disciples that the kingdom of God can break out and occur at any point.  Advent should be for us a time to stay alert for new possibilities, for new signs of the coming of the kingdom.  Jesus warns his listeners that life may seem to go on normally, as if nothing would ever change.  But here…and there…change can happen! The kingdom of peace can break in at any moment.

            You may have heard the story that happened during WW1 on Christmas Eve, but it is worth telling again.  The trenches of France were hardly a place where peace could reign…it was hardly a place that peace could have a foothold! People had been shooting at each other, killing each other and it seemed like there would be no end.  Then Christmas Eve came around and there was a ceasefire.  Somebody began to sing ‘Silent Night’ and before you know it, others joined in.  The German lines heard the singing and then they began to sing the song.  In that moment, dreaded enemies…people who had been shooting and killing each other just moments before, were joined together in their hearts and in their voices as they sung of eternal peace.  After this, hockey games happened between the two sides and there was, for a brief shining moment, a living realization of Isaiah’s vision.  Peace had come into the world! 

            As Advent begins, we hear the Gospel call back to the vision and promise that God has for the world.  We are called to come awake and to live out the gospel values that help embody the kingdom of Peace that Jesus has come to establish.  We are called to look out for signs of that peace that is breaking into our world.

            People have learned to ignore the Church because we have strayed from our vision.  Instead of a kingdom of peace, they see a people who have lost their way, who no longer know what they are living for.  The church has often times lost its excitement and passion for the coming kingdom… to embody the promises of God.  They may hear us singing our Carols and our Hymns, but they don’t think we mean them. 

            Advent is a time for us to renew ourselves and our Church.  At Advent, God calls us to

Wake Up! 

            But the message is not, “Wake up, we have to go to church.”

            No, instead, the message is and always has been, “wake up…it’s time to be the Church.”

The Death of a Good Man

“Why do you call me good? No one is good, except God”—Jesus

When I was a kid….heck…even when I had grown up…I knew what I wanted to be.  I wanted to be good.  I wanted to be a good kid…a good man…a good person.  I wanted to be that person that when they spoke about me, they would say, “Bob was a good man…”  For the longest time, to be recognized as good was the only thing I wanted.  I have realized that this is a dream that will never be realized.

What does it mean to be good? There are so many ways to answer this question.  We can be good at our jobs, as in having competent skills.  We can be good, meaning we have an inner morality that helps us excel at things.

When I was a child, I would think about my heroes and want to be like them.  I was a child of the 80s, so we had Luke Skywalker and Michael Knight as some of our heroes, but there were also a number of good people that I knew.  My scout master was a good man and teacher was a good guy.  There was something that set them apart from other people that they just exuded ‘goodness.’ There wasn’t anything in particular you could quantify, it just was.  And I knew that I wanted to be good like them.

The problem is…it never worked out the way that I wanted it to.  Maybe I didn’t try hard enough…maybe I didn’t want it enough…or maybe….I’m just not good.

It has seemed that life has put me in roles where I am forced to choose.  The question is not whether or not I will hurt somebody…the question always seems to come down to who I will.  I never feel like I can adequately please all the people all the time and when the great choices have to be made, I always feel like I am on the wrong side of them.

When I was a kid, I read Les Miserables.  It took me a long time to get through it.  I remember being puzzled over Jean Valjean’s quest to be good and the trouble it got him in.  He tried to take care of his nephew and wound up in jail.  Then he tried to take care of Fantine and it cost him his life, essentially.  He spends his entire life trying to do the right thing only to be stopped time and again by being forced to choose between impossible situations. Although he is clearly redeemed in the book, I found myself struggling along with him.

One of the reasons I think I am attracted to the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer was because he struggled exactly with this issue.  Was Bonhoeffer a martyr? Perhaps not in the clearest sense of the word, but he was a man who struggled to be good.  Clearly in prison he struggled with the question, “Who am I?”  In his poem, Bonhoeffer struggles with what other people say he is and the struggle he knew that was going on underneath.  He did not want to be labeled as a good man because he knew himself to be otherwise. 

Bonhoeffer also struggled with the decisions he knew he had to make.  Should he participate in the plot to kill Hitler? Does this make him a murderer?  Does it contradict the values and the ethics that he had clearly taught?  Bonhoeffer was a strict adherent to nonviolence and pacifism.  But he is willing to compromise this to end the war by killing a man.  It might be the right thing to do, he argues, but it does not make him a good man.

            However, I do not struggle with anything so powerful as this.  Nor do I think of my life in terms of such grand schemes.  I am simply a man, struggling to understand what it means to serve my God and my family and my country at the same time.  Maybe somewhere there might be clarity but it always seems that no matter what, I am disappointing someone…or something. 

            I find it interesting that Jesus poses this question.  The man who asks it was simply trying to address Jesus in a polite way.  “Good teacher…”  Jesus immediately responds pounces on this and points out something that we might not even have thought about.

            “Why do you call me good? Only God is good.”  Now theological positions aside (I believe that Jesus is fully God and fully man), this is an interesting statement. 

            First... Jesus asks, ‘why do you…’ while not wanting to get into the weeds…is Jesus asking this because he knows the man has a grasp of what it means to be good? Or is He pointing out that the man is not good and it is hypocritical for the lawyer to call Jesus ‘good.’  I tend to think that Jesus is pointing out the man’s ungoodness and suggesting that this words may not mean much coming from him. 

            Perhaps we should evaluate this in our lives.  Who call us good? Who do we allow to confer the title of ‘good’ on us?  Who do we give the moral authority to say whether we are good or not?  If the answer is a bunch of people that are not good…well then maybe we ought to think about that.  Maybe, their definition of ‘good’ is flawed and perhaps they don’t see all of us.

            Second, Jesus reminds the man that only God is good.  What a powerful statement to say.  We have here a very dismal view of human achievement and we can almost see psychologists and psychiatrists having a field day with Jesus here.  We are, after all, the society that keeps asking, ‘why do bad things happen to good people.’  But here Jesus explicitly says that only God is ‘good’.  To put it in very distinctive talk, there is only person that knows what good is, and that is God.  Our definition of GOOD then has to reflect this, that only God, then, has the right to call us good. 

            When Bonhoeffer ended his poem and his struggle, he ended up exactly where I am.  He wrote:

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

God has answered the question and He does not call us good.  He call us, His. 

            So I can stop trying to be good…I was never really good at it anyway.  In fact, I know that I will never be the type of man that I wanted to be when I was younger.  I know that I am deeply flawed, horribly contradictory and all together, ungood.  But what matters is that God knows me and claims me.  I, like Bonhoeffer cast up our lives to God and trust that He knows what we are…good or not.

When Jerusalem Burns

Lamentations 3:1-23

It was a bright beautiful end of summer afternoon…the kind that makes you want stay out forever and run and play in the grass and just enjoy life.  You can imagine the kind of anticipation that we had while we waited painfully for that school bell to ring and we could escape the shackles of an societal prison, the school.  When it finally rang, we bolted out of the school faster than a streak of lightening, each to their individual homes to frolick the last vestiges of summer.

The school bus never saw Kevin…and Kevin never saw the school bus.

In the blink of a moment, a young boy’s life was ended and a family’s world was destroyed.  I remember sitting in our classroom, trying to absorb the news that our friend and our classmate was gone, never to see him again.  His desk sat as an empty reminder of this lost life and as an awareness that life was so much more fragile than it had appeared to be.  We all understood the rules of the game: old people die, not young ones.  10 year old boys are not supposed to die…EVER.  And if they did, there was always some miracle, some new drug or some new medical power that could bring him back to life and everything was going to be alright, all the time.

I remember going to the viewing and seeing Kevin’s family.  What do you say to a family that is mourning the loss not only of their loved one, but of their future, of the world they once knew, and their entrance into a new world where things no longer make sense, where ‘God’ no longer operates in the rules they are accustomed to.  Somehow the words, ‘sorry for your loss’ when I finally managed to utter them out of my lips didn’t seem to help or even begin to address the issues that were going on.

What do you think when death and destruction haunt our doors? What do you do when your world crumbles around you and becomes a devastating mockery of the life you once knew? Where do you go when Jerusalem burns to the ground, never to be restored again?

\

This is much more than an academic question, and the answer has life and death consequences to it.

We live in the midst of suffering, sometimes more and sometimes less,  but the reality of suffering surrounds us and at times threatens to overwhelm us.  We see it in the death of children, the destruction of families, the scars of warfare, and the struggles of the sick.  We always don’t know what to do with it, and so at times in the Church we pretend that it doesn’t exist.  We put our church faces with our big smiles and we enter the door of the church and we pretend for a couple of hours that our suffering doesn’t exist, that we are happiest people on earth.  We are afraid, sometimes that the Church…or God…might see us in our weakness or in our struggles and we may be laid bare before it all.  We sing praise songs we don’t mean to ensure that nobody will discover the pain and the anger that all too close to the surface. 

Where do you go….when Jerusalem burns?

This is the reality that Jeremiah faced when his world ended.

Jeremiah is one the most fascinating people in Scripture, for me anyway.  He is the longest of the writing prophets and he is the prophet that we know the most about, emotionally.  He is not ashamed, as here in this passage to express the full rains of emotions.  It is interesting that when Jesus asked who the people said that he was, “Jeremiah” was one of the answers (Matthew 16:14), and that says a great deal about how people viewed Jeremiah…or Jesus for that matter.

But Jeremiah lived in a time of great suffering.  He lived at the end of the Southern Kingdom.  Jeremiah prophesies for over 40 years.  At the end of his ministry, Jeremiah suffered the most devastating loss one could imagine.  The Babylonian army came in and crushed Jerusalem.  They put Israel’s leaders to death, they exported the brightest, the best and the beautiful to Babylon, and they burned Jerusalem to the ground.  At first Jeremiah was put on the Exile train out to Babylon, but then he was given a choice and he chose to return to the ruins of Jerusalem, and to live minister among the people.  It is in this situation that Jeremiah writes the Lamentations.

We can begin to understand the devastation that Jeremiah must have felt as he looked at the ashes of his city and took in the horrific sights around him.  And as we look at this text, we can’t simply read it and explain it.  We must experience it.

‘I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath.” (3:1) This dark and ominous beginning should haunt us.  As we read on, he has driven me and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.” (3:2) There is a reason why Lamentations doesn’t make it into too many devotional books and this is it!

His entire world has turned to darkness.  Surely we know people for whom this is true…surely this has been true even for us at times. Later on he will say, “my soul is bereft of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is”(3:17)

Why? How could Jeremiah….I mean Jeremiah is a prophet, a righteous man…how could he say these things?

It goes back to the destruction of Jerusalem.  For us, Jerusalem may be just a city on a map, far away not only geographically but culturally.  We don’t think much about Jerusalem and we sure don’t think about the temple in any significant way (for right reasons). But for Jeremiah, Jerusalem was the very heart of the kingdom of God.  The death and suffering of people was horrible enough, but the destruction of Jerusalem was something else entirely!

Jerusalem was the place where God lived. It was his physical location among the people and it was the proof that God had indeed blessed His people with His presence.  Great things had happened there and greater things were yet to come.  Micah and Isaiah prophesied about a time when Mt. Zion will be exalted above all other mountains and the nations would swarm to the Temple and learn about God and the Word of God would go forth into all the world.  The people of Israel, it was claimed, would rule the nations of the world, from Jerusalem, which would be the center of the world.  Jerusalem would be the place where the divine and the human intersected and now it is burning to the ground, reduced to rubble and ashes.  How can that be? How could God do this?

God had crossed a boundary for Jeremiah…a self-established rule that God must not break.

We all have them, if we are honest with ourselves.   We impose rules on God and we expect them to be followed.  Rules such as, I will worship God as long as children do not die.  It’s perfectly fine for adults and old people to die, because after all, that’s how things work.  But not children! I will worship God as long as my marriage remains intact and everything is financially good.  I will worship God  as long as I don’t lose my job.

But the moment any of these things happened, God has crossed a line that we cannot bear and we will not tolerate and we will run away from him and take refuge in our despair.

Look at the source of Jeremiah’s despair:

            He has driven men and brought me into darkness

            HE has made my flesh and my skin waste away

            He has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago

            He has walled me about so that I cannot escape

            He is a bear lying in wait for me

            He turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces

            He has made me desolate

Translate this: God has taken away my life and left me empty and bereft of happiness. “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.”

Ever meet anybody like this? I know I have.

I remember going to visit a lady at one of the churches I’ve served who was stuck in the past.  Her husband and her daughter had died, only a few months apart from each other.  Her world was completely devastated and she could not recover.  Her heart broke every moment of every day and no matter how much she cried it was never enough.  There was no light, only darkness.

I’ve talked with fathers who have lost their children whose only words that I could distinguish between sobs were “my baby boy….” No light, only darkness.

I’ve seen marriages shattered on the altar of reality where a husband or a wife realizes the type of person they married and life will never be the same again.  No light, only darkness.

And sadly this is where so many people stay.  They can’t get out of these thoughts and they can’t go anywhere with them. 

I remember watching my mother die of Parkinson’s disease.  Parkinson’s is a cruel type of disease because it not only robs you of life, it takes away every ounce of dignity you possess as a person.  I was a relatively new Christian as my mom got sick.  I used to pray every day that God would ‘fix’ her.  That God would perform a miracle, that God would come down from heaven and cure her.  I used to make ‘deals’ with God, that if He would fix her, then I would be a missionary and go the ends of the earth, or that I would make sure that everybody would have a copy of the Bible and I would do my best  to make sure that everybody believed in God.

It didn’t work. 

Mom died, and I remember being broken.  God had broken the rules.  And I began to think, maybe if I had prayed harder or maybe if I had done more or maybe if I wasn’t just a screw up that maybe God would have healed her.  I remember the darkness creeping in, threatening to overtake my soul. I remember feeling like Jeremiah.  “My soul is bereft of peace.  I have forgotten what happiness is.”

Where do you go, when Jerusalem burns?

Jeremiah gives us an answer. “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.  The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.”

Now if he had said this to me, I would have responded with “ARE YOU KIDDING ME? GOD DOESN’T LOVE ME, GOD HATES ME! HOW COULD YOU EVEN THINK THIS?”

But the amazing thing is that Jeremiah doesn’t respond like this.  He has a very different reaction.  He is able to go through the pain of the first nineteen verses of the chapter and end with this absolute and wonderful declaration.

Notice that there is no theological discourse here.  There is no prolonged discussion of the nature of evil or any answers to the question of “If there is a good God, why do bad things happen?” This is because Jeremiah’s purpose is very different.  He is showing us two things: (1) when bad things happen, we need to be honest to God with all of our emotions and (2) we need to root our hope in God and His love.  The only thing that keeps us out of the darkness is knowing the reality that no matter what happens, God’s love is constant.

Jeremiah says, “But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope”(3:21).  “Hope” in Scripture is not an abstract term.  We often use the word “hope” as a “wish” or a “longing”.  If I say when I’m at work, that “I hope that Marilee will bake a pie today,” I am expressing a wish that there will be pie when I get home.  I have no basis on which to base this hope, unless Marilee said “I am making a pie” before I left for work. 

But in Scripture, the word ‘hope’ has a different connotation.  “Hope” refers to a definite knowledge that you have within you.   The Hebrew literally means ‘to wait’ because ‘hope’ is about seeing beyond our current circumstance and seeing beyond the present reality.  It looks to what we know God will do in the future.  It is this that shapes and frames the present, because we know that no matter how bad things are now, no matter how terrible or even how horrific, God wild deliver us from it.

            “But I will hope continually and will praise you more and more”-Psalm 71:4

 “But as for me, I will look to the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.” Micah 7:7

Even the New Testament understand this:

“According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead..” 1 Peter 1:3

And so Jeremiah reminds us that in the midst of all this terror, in the midst of this darkness, there is hope, because of who God is and what he has done.  We may be so captured by our reality that we don’t think there is any possibility that things could change.  But the gospel calls us to hope in God, to know, beyond the shadow of any doubt that things will get better.

But how do we know?  When we are faced  with suffering, with pain, with death, how can be sure that things will change?

Jeremiah again gives us the answer.

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.” (3:23)

There is no greater statement in the entire First Testament than this verse! And we are usually in such a rush to get to this verse when we get to this chapter that we ignore the preceding twenty verses.  Devotional books cutout the surrounding material in order to highlight this verse.  But if we do that, we actually miss the point of how great this verse truly is.  In light of great suffering, the ‘steadfast love’ of the Lord never ever ceases. 

The Hebrew word dsx is our anchor in this passage.  There is no one word in English that captures the meaning.  What it refers to is that deep, covenantal love of God that will never be shaken.

            “…His steadfast love endures forever.”-1 Chronicles 16:41

“O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keeps his commandment.” Nehemiah 1:5

“Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens; your faithfulness to the clouds.” Psalm 36:5

The way that the Apostle John puts this statement is, “God is love” (1 John 4:8).  The idea is that God’s love is so closely attached to his character that there is no distinction between the two.

But how do we know this?

Because God proves this over and over again to us.  Scripture is one big story about how God’s constant love prevails.  God loves the people of Israel and proves himself again and again. Jesus reminds us of this love at the end of the gospel of Matthew by declaring that “I will never leave you nor forsake you..”

But most of all, we know God’s steadfast love never fails because of the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In fact, we could re-read this chapter in light of, and from the perspective of Jesus and God the Father.  We can hear the anguish of Jesus as he approaches the cross.  We can picture the anguish of God as he looks at His Son on the cross and looks at the true Jerusalem and the true Temple lying in ruins, shattered on the cross.

God is not far away, a dispassionate deity who is unconcerned with our suffering.  He is a God that knows what suffering is like, who understands our pain and who understands what is to see dreams shattered.  He is not a cruel God who throws us into a world of pain  haphazardly or with no concern.  He is a God who stands right with us in the midst of shattered dreams and broken worlds.  He is a God who hears our grief, and grieves with us.  

But he is also a God who pushes us beyond our grief and our current situation.  That is what is amazing about the Resurrection.   It is not just proof that there is life after death (there is that), it is that God’s faithfulness, God’s steadfast love, God’s hesed is faithful to us beyond all the darkest moments of our lives.  He proves that for every world that is broken and every dream  that is shattered, there is a hope to be had by all people.

So…where do you go when Jerusalem burns, when your hopes and dreams are shattered and the darkness threatens to overtake you? You run into the arms of the Savior, whose steadfast love never ceases and whose mercies are new every morning.  

New Orthodoxy

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

--William Butler Yeats

To say that we live in the ‘post-Christian’ era is simply to acknowledge what we all know to be true: that Christianity has ceased to be the dominant cultural narrative in Western Culture.  While we may not know exactly when this came to be, the dis-establishment of Christianity is now almost complete.

            But our culture has also been living with a fiction that it can exist without an over arching narrative, that it can live without a cohesive set of principles to unite it together. We call this disbelief in truth ‘postmodernism’ and it’s failure has nearly been complete.  People are now beginning to realize that if society is going to function, there needs to be a common consensus on at least a few important truths. 

            In fact, societies have always lived with an ‘orthodox’ narrative, one that has shaped and framed the debates that occur in broad popular culture. Often times these ‘orthodoxies’ are in place long before they become the dominant culture.  They work at a popular level and become something like the air people breathe.  Often times, without knowing it, it creeps within the minds of people and expresses itself in popular culture.  There is usually no huge Council that affirms the truth of a particular worldview, until the worldview is firmly in place.

            For instance, the ancient Greeks and Romans had long abandoned the worldview of the old gods long before it was replaced with Christianity.  The medieval world had long abandoned the ancient cosmologies before they were replaced with more modern sciences. 

            Today the same principles are at work.  Societies are in constant states of change.  As Christianity has been dismantled as the dominant story, the new Orthodoxy has been coming into being.  The weaknesses of the Church have been exposed and exploited and ultimately the Christian answer was found wanting.  It took nearly two centuries to displace Christianity on many different fronts.  Biblical criticism, philosophical relativism, exposure of the sins of clergy and lay alike, and an advancement of scientific knowledge have all worked together to demonstrate to Western Culture that Christianity did not work.

            The vacuum that has existed  for the last fifty years has hardly worked any better and we are now at last seeing the failure of the postmodern project.  The fatal flaw for postmodernism is that it simply doesn’t work.  You cannot say that “all truth is relative,” but then act as if there are absolutes.  For example, if everything is permissible, then the more extreme cases of murder and exploitation are permissible.  But no modern ethicist can possibly say that and culture will not accept this.  We may be fine with murdering our babies in the womb, but there is no way that killing five year olds is ever morally permissible.  Thus our modern world has been living with a hypocrisy that it has not wanted to own up to.  It was almost as if we were saying, ‘everything is permissible….that we want to be…,” but we ignored the larger philosophical implications of such logic.

            But at last, we are beginning to see the New Orthodoxy emerge from the ashes of postmodernism.  The following is a brief sketch of some of the major overtones of this New Orthodoxy, as I have seen it.  Remember that is just a sketch.  The New  Orthodoxy has not yet been completely or authoritatively recognized, but there are some of the themes that will be.  This is also not an attempt to evaluate the right or wrongness of these positions, but merely to describe the position.  Bias is certainly inevitable, but not intended.

Explicit Atheism. In the Renaissance, God was relegated to the place as a ‘watchmaker’ who may have created the earth, but surely had  nothing to do with the day to day operation of the earth.  Jesus was taken off the throne so that he may take his seat among the great moral teachers of mankind.   The supernatural was scientifically outlawed and turned into fables and  myth.

Today the underlying assumption in Western Culture is not that God is not involved…it is that He does not exist.  Atheists at one point were the minority and only a brave few would dare to suggest that God does not exist.  Today, all of science, physical and social, operate under the presupposition that God does not exist. People have become increasingly hostile towards the religious people.  Modern books hold the titles of God is Not Great, The God Delusion, and Is Christianity Good for the World.  Social scientists do all they can to explain religion as a part of religious anthropology. 

Religious people of all faiths are mocked and ridiculed and the sacred has become profane.  It is only a matter of time before the majority of the world will have ‘moved on’ from belief in God and to make sure that it believes in only scientific and rational things.

Religion is viewed as evil and a (or in some cases, the) cause of all evil in the world.  From something as innocuous and benign as a “COEXIST” bumper sticker which subliminally suggests that religion causes all war.  No  mention is made of the millions who have died in atheism’s name.

But the New Orthodoxy claims atheism as it its creed.

Extreme feminism The New Orthodoxy has no place for maleness in it.  Being male is seen as a disfunction.

Older cultures have always viewed that there is a unique existence in being male.  While in some cultures, men unjustly dominated women, there was always something different about being a man.  Men were supposed to live up to the traditions of honor and courage and to act in a way to protect the family from foreign powers.

We can debate all day whether this is right or wrong, but what is important is that in the New Orthodoxy, men are to be the second class citizens.

In our popular culture men are declared to be imbeciles.  Fair depictions of courageous men are few and far between.  Even in a children’s book series like the Bernstein Bears, men are seen as incompetent and must wait for the Mother Bear to fix everything.  Political columnist Maureen Doud recently wrote a book entitled Are Men are Necessary? in which she gives a negative answer to the question.

What is it about men that must be replaced? In the New Orthodoxy, we must emasculate any image of men as heroes, or of men as providers, or of men as protectors.  These images, in the New Orthodoxy’s wisdom, has only led to war and violence and imprisonment.

In the Lord of the Flies, we see the complete de-evolution of men from a working society to a group of savages killing each other.  William Golding, the author of the book, could not conceive of the same thing happening to a group of young girls, for the female mind would work together and build a society and work towards a solution.

And so we see the elimination of anything ‘masculine.’  Our heroes are becoming effeminate men who recognize that women are almost always right.  Or, the heroes are becoming women who act in ways that men used to.  With the rise of homosexuality, we see the decline of the traditional role of men.

The New Orthodoxy embraces the female as the ideal for society and we must do the same.

Aligned to the Left.  The era of conservatism in the West is over and the political Left has won the battle.

The 2008 Presidential Election has been heralded, rightly so, as a watershed moment.  This moment, above any other demonstrates the defeat of the conservative movement as any real force in American Politics.

In the past, differences of politics were cast in light of political conversation.  Today, one’s morality is tied up with one’s political stance.  Rush Limbaugh is seen by many as an evil man because he advocates for a free market economy.  Thomas Sowell is misguided at best and manipulated at worst.  Even political moderates such as President George W. Bush are seen as evil and hateful men.

Those who have aligned to the Left are seen as heroes and people who have overcome injustice.  For example, Bill Ayers, a man linked to bombings in the Pentagon and other public buildings, is heralded as a hero for standing against the conservative mainstream of America.  Even today, the Boston Bomber, has his face plastered on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine in an attempt to ‘hear his side.’

We see this alignment taking place everywhere in our culture.  In popular culture, the villians almost always wind up being white business men who want to make a profit by killing either an endangered animal or tree or just innocent people.  

The causes of the Left are seen as moral and just.  Many of these causes see the increase of government power in order to ‘level the playing field’ or to ensure equality.  The advocates of limited government are seen as hateful people who are only self-interested and self-motivated and must be defeated for the sake of civilization.

A Warning  The time of the New Orthodoxy is upon us and I think that it is high time that we recognized this. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is yet to be seen.

But there is always a warning to behold.

Whenever there is an Orthodoxy, there is always heresy.  Heresy is almost always the teaching against orthodoxy.  And wherever there is heresy, there is always an effort to rid the culture of the stench of heresy.  Because Orthodoxy always carries with it the lure of power and of authority.

To my dismay, I look up on Church history and see the efforts to stamp out heresy.  The Nazis, too, attempted to eradicate heresy.  Stalin, Mao, the Spartans, the Shi’a, the Sunni, Che and all others have attempted to rid the world of heresies.  Always with violence and always with prejudice.

And so, we have the beginning of a New Orthodoxy, and I will pray that it’s reign will be peaceful.  But if the shadows of history teach us anything, along with a New Orthodoxy come the “re-education” camps to beat the heresy out of the people it holds sway over.