Full Contact Christianity

“The Kingdom of God is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until all was leavened.” That’s the way Jesus taught us to think about the Kingdom: it grows like yeast. Ever made bread? You put the yeast in, make the dough, and then go about your business. There are some variables you can tweak to help it rise a little faster or slower, but yeast is alive, and it does its work even when you’re not looking. Slowly. So slowly, in many cases, that it’s hard to see. 

Jesus sent His followers to heal the sick, and we’ve cared for the sick and dying everywhere we’ve ever gone. We stayed in the plague-ridden cities to care for the sick when Galen fled to the countryside. We founded and staffed leper colonies at risk of our lives. We scoured the hillsides for unwanted babies abandoned by their parents (a crime now, but common practice in the ancient world). We literally invented the concept of public hospitals. We’ve been so successful that today, everybody just thinks having hospitals is common sense. Nobody thinks of hospitals as a peculiarly Christian thing. But even in a city as young as Denver, most of the hospitals were founded by Christians: Rose and St. Joseph’s (Catholic), Swedish (Lutheran), Porter and Littleton (Adventist), Presbyterian/St. Luke’s, and so on. 
This is Christmas working its way out across history: God incarnate in Jesus offers us all access to the divine nature. That being the case, humanity is unitable in principle; in an important way, we are already one, and should treat each other accordingly.

Merry Christmas! 

So to review: God incarnate in Jesus destroys our certainty about who we are and how we relate to the world; calls us to abandon our respectability; challenges us to forsake simplistic decision-making and listen to God’s voice. He renders angelic powers and allegedly divine human rulers un-worshipable, and in their place gives us a direct relationship with God as our Father, effectively forcing us into spiritual adulthood. Add it all up, and it’s profoundly destructive. “You want to know why you’re so unhappy?” my mentor Rich once bellowed at a crowd. “Because Jesus ruined everything!” 

So He did. Where’s He going with all that? Jesus told us: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed; to proclaim the favorable year of the LORD,” and again: “If I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the Kingdom of God has come upon you.” 

The old world dies so that the new world can be born – a world of freedom and healing that Jesus calls the Kingdom of God. What will that be like? The prophets Jesus quoted talk of a time when the lion lies down with the lamb, when disease, hunger, and war are no more. We are obviously not there yet. Do we have to wait until then? Jesus says no; if He’s the real thing, then it’s already here. Fully here? Of course not. But truly here nonetheless. How would you like to live there? 

You can – it’s what Christmas is all about. Merry Christmas!

Christians often think of the Old Testament as focused on the Father in the way that the New Testament is focused on Jesus, but they’re wrong. The Old Testament focused on the First Person of the Trinity as Creator and Judge. While fatherhood is hinted at, we don’t really come to know Him as our Father until Jesus shows us how.   

Everywhere the news of Jesus spread, certain things inevitably followed. Once Jesus showed us what God is really like, it became much harder to worship angels. Once Jesus showed us what incarnate God is really like, we became unable to take “divine” kings seriously, and they slowly ceased to be. Likewise, Jesus showed us the Creator as our Father, and this gave us a standard by which to measure human fathers. 

Your father might have been great, or terrible, or somewhere in between, but he certainly wasn’t perfect. When you meet God the way Jesus shows Him to us, you meet a Father who covers the gaps your father left, whatever they might be. He stands ready to restore what was lost. But don’t take my word for it: let Him show you. Merry Christmas!

In the modern world, we have a deeply impoverished view of spiritual powers. When we think of a cherub, we picture Michaelangelo’s naked babies with wings and halo. Ezekiel actually saw them: legs like an ox, with hooves shining like burnished bronze, four wings, four faces (ox, lion, eagle, and man), glowing like burning coals. Imagine one of those showing up in your bedroom. No wonder when an angel appears to someone in the Bible, the first thing it usually says is “Don’t be afraid!”

No wonder, too, that fallen angels were able to demand and get human worship. Can you imagine refusing? It’s something even Israel struggles with throughout the Hebrew Bible. The Babylonian captivity forever cured Israel of worshipping lesser gods, but what about the Gentile world? You would expect the cure for idolatry to be some transcendent display of world-breaking power…and in a way, it was. But nothing like you’d have predicted.

Like an adult squeezing through the door of a child’s play house, infinite God became man and entered our world the way we all do, through a birth canal, bloody and squalling. So it is that St. Paul cheerfully concedes there are “many gods and many lords,” and then continues “but for us there is one God, the Father from whom are all things, for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we exist.” Once we’d met the real thing, however counterintuitive His appearance, it no longer made sense to dally with impostors. Merry Christmas!

Jesus was frequently unpredictable; He surprised the disciples constantly. That means if we’re following Jesus, we should expect surprises. In American folk culture, when we ask “What would Jesus do?” we’re conditioned to think in terms of money (give more), sex (don’t), and power (be nice). I promise you, if all you do is be nice, be generous, and keep your genitals to yourself, you will not inspire the kind of resistance that Jesus did. 

Jesus operated in a different set of categories: He acted as priest, king, and prophet. Priests present people to God and convey God’s blessing back to the people. Kings order the world. Prophets call people to turn their hearts back to God. Jesus acted out of this rich set of options, choosing (or combining) as the situation called for it. You could never be sure, going in, what Jesus was going to do: bless, impose order, call for a change of course, some combination of those? 

How did He choose? He tells us: “I do nothing on my own; I do what the Father taught Me. The One who sent Me is with Me.” It’s not a recipe you can execute on your own; it’s a voice you listen to as you go. If Jesus’ life teaches us anything at all, it teaches us that humans can hear God’s voice, because God is present with us. Merry Christmas!

Following Jesus is a daunting prospect. The religious elite rejected Jesus; the populist street-preachers hated him too; the political realists balked at Him. Later, the philosophers would be equally scandalized. Over the objections of all the Respectable People™, Christianity asserts this promise: that you, as you are, can partake of the divine nature, as it is. That in so partaking, you will not lose your humanity, but gain all that humanity was meant to be. 

We know this is possible because it has already happened. In Jesus, we meet undiminished humanity and undiminished deity in perfect harmony. Following Jesus doesn’t mean striving to check an impossible list of boxes; it means being united to the power to act as God’s hands and feet in the world. If Jesus’ life is any indication, this will not be a popular way to live. 

So bring out your respectability and set it on the dining room table. Treat it like Marie Kondo would treat an extra jacket: thank it, then put it in the box of thrift store donations. It’s someone else’s now. For you, it has become an encumbrance, and it’s time to let go. Merry Christmas!

After Jesus, it’s burned into the world’s consciousness that God might have business with you, a calling that has nothing to do with the role your family and community have assigned you. But why did Jesus change that? Wasn’t it always true? 

In a sense, yes. When Jesus came, the Hebrew Bible was already chock-full of unlikely people God had business with. Amos was (by his own famous admission) “neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but a sheep-breeder and a tender of figs” – and then, for one day, God called him to be a prophet anyhow. David was a shepherd, and about as far from the throne as you could get, but he ended up there anyway. Samuel wasn’t born to the right tribe for the (Levitical) work God had for him. Gideon wasn’t born to the right family either, nor Jephthah, Moses was a bad speaker, and so on. But under the Old Covenant, those people were a small minority. They were ordinary people called to extraordinary things, and we tell their stories precisely because they stepped up to the challenge.

In the New Covenant, Jesus was a human (like we are), submitted wholly to the Holy Spirit (like we’re often not), and He calls us all: “Follow Me!” Jesus destroys the expectation that extraordinary callings will remain extraordinary. We object, of course, as God’s people — Moses and Gideon among them — have always objected to extraordinary calling. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “That long way round which Dante trod was meant/for mighty saints and mystics and not for me!” But no. Jesus speaks to us all: “Follow Me!”

Martin Luther’s father planned for him to become a lawyer. If Martin had been born 1500 years earlier, he’d have had little choice. Born in Christendom, Martin had another option: he took orders and became an Augustinian friar. Many saints’ stories begin similarly, with a teenager avoiding an odious arranged marriage by becoming a monk or nun instead. 

In the old world, any member of your village could predict with reasonable accuracy your trade, where you would live, which family your spouse would come from. It was a world where you could plan your kids’ lives before they were ever born. Through the story of Jesus (who was supposed to be a construction worker, whose followers were supposed to be fishermen, tax collectors, etc.,) another possibility was forever burned into the consciousness of the world: God might have business with your kid. 

The church instantiated that new consciousness first in the desert hermit tradition, then in organized orders, then in blessing all lawful work, but across the centuries, the message is the same: your complacent certainty of who you are, of your role in the world, is an illusion. God might at any time call you in a different direction.

For us Christmas day often turns out to be a long day. This year, it landed on a Sunday, which made it all the more glorious, but also even more complicated than usual –organization, worship, cooking and travel, cookies, ham, and egg nog, multiple houses and friends and gift exchanges, ending in a game night that lasted into the wee hours of this morning. Every last bit was worth it. It was good to revel together in the goodness of all that God has given to us. And now, with 11 days of Christmastide remaining, we settle in for a different kind of celebration: what was it all about? 

Imagine being among the sheep that night. Suddenly the air above you is alive with an army of angels, and when you recover from your terror, they send you to find the baby. It wouldn’t take much asking around. Bethlehem is small, labor is loud, and the unwed and shunned teen mom forced to give birth in a barn would be the talk of the town. You round the corner, and there they are: a frustrated construction worker unable to provide better for his bride-to-be, an exhausted girl, and a baby: tiny, bloody, bundled in rags against the cold. 

Improbable as it seems, that unremarkable sight is the root of many of your struggles and discontents today. That tiny child – the incarnation of God Himself – is the beginning of the end for the old world, and the seed of a new world that is even now being born – and birth is a messy, painful process. “Every warrior’s sandal from the noisy battle, and the garments rolled in blood will be fuel for the fire, for unto us a child is born; unto us a Son is given.” This year, let’s reckon with the costs of Christmas.

The most important thing about the Advent wreath is the unlit candles standing in mute testimony that the object of our longing has not yet arrived. One by one, we light them, until finally, here we are. Christmas is far too important to confine to one day, but we’ll talk about that tomorrow. 

Today is a day of raucous celebration: plentiful meals, special treats of food and drink, relaxation and play, watching the delight in children’s eyes. All these things are gifts from a good God – feast on them by faith, in your hearts, with thanksgiving. Tomorrow we contemplate; today, we taste and see that the Lord is good!