Think And Let Think

The great gift of the church is that God in Christ makes our lives far more interesting than they deserve to be. You see, Christianity is neither a religion nor a club nor a civic organization - Christianity is an adventure.

Jesus has taken the cleanup of the cosmos entirely into his own hands, hands with holes in them. He does not hang from the cross until we confess our sins, he doesn’t wait in the grave until we get our lives together. He does what he does without us having to do anything - which makes the Gospel the most radical thing in history.

Usually, when we picture Jesus, he’s this hippy-dippy character who throws up a peace sign every once in a while, he asks us to all get along, and above all he is nice. But Jesus wasn’t nice. You don’t crucify someone for being nice...

The devil wants Jesus to do what we want Jesus to do. Or, perhaps better put: The devil wants Jesus to do what we want to do. But here’s the Good News, the really Good News: Jesus is able to resist temptations that we would not, could not, and frankly do not.

A reminder for Lent: we are forgiven not *after* we confess our sins, but right smack dab in the middle of them. (But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us - Rom. 5.8)

Jesus is not just some ethical teacher who wants us to behave ourselves. Jesus is not some political revolutionary whose words we can cherry pick to suit our needs. Jesus is not a new David come to elevate us to the places of power and prestige. Jesus is God! In himself he is the new creation.

Contrary to how the church so often functions, Jesus isn’t really trying to convince us, or the crowds, of anything. He simply stands to deliver story after story giving us glimpses behind the curtain of the cosmos and dares us to do nothing more than believe.

Stanley Hauerwas: “Beware when you hear a Methodist minister quote his/her twelve-year old in a sermon. When that happens you know you’re fixin’ to hear some baloney.” Though, when he says it, he uses a much saltier expression than baloney...

Jesus’ parables are intentionally designed to pop every circuit breaker in the minds of those who receive them. And yet, they are all confounding and head-scratching Good News - They declare that God saves losers and only losers. God finds the lost and only the lost. God raises the dead and only the dead.

The hiddenness of God is revealed in the person of Christ. The incomprehensibility of God is made known through the life, the teaching, the parables, the miracles, the healings, the feedings, and ultimately the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Which, when you think about it, is rather confounding. Or, perhaps it would be better to call it offensive...

What wondrous good news it is that, when Jesus showed up proclaiming the beginning of God’s new kingdom, he did so not with sermons about the Trinity, or the atonement, or justification, or any other big and abstract theological mishmash. Instead, Jesus began by pointing right at our stomachs, to that gnawing, unsatisfied, emptiness within and then invited us to dinner.

Jesus has a temple tantrum, flipping over tables and calling out the powers and principalities all as a commentary against what the faith of God’s people had become. Jesus was nothing if not zealous.

Jesus did not belong to the nice clean world of all the worst Hallmark Christmas movies, he did not belong to the reasonable, or honest, or sincere world of decency that we all too often claim for ourselves today. Jesus belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, scoundrels, adulterers, and liars. Jesus belonged to people like us, and he came for people like us.

We often present Christmas as something spiritual or mystical. Or, on the other hand, we criticize others for making this time of year too materialistic. But Christmas really is a reminder that Christianity is inherently materialistic. God becomes material in Jesus. God becomes us. How Odd.

Over and over again in scripture, and in life, God chooses the unexpected to bring about the Kingdom. God plucks people out of complacency and says, in different ways, shapes, and forms, “I’ve got a job for you!” God stirs up our understandings of the world, flips them upside down, and calls it Good News.

The very best worship services are those from which we go forth not to more of the same, but to more of the name that is above all names: Jesus the Christ. For, in him, we begin to see that the Good News really is good.

Advent, for better or worse, is a time set apart in the church when we make a conscious effort to recover some of the strangeness from the strange new world of the Bible - and John embodies it all. Because, like J the B, Advent is rather peculiar. It’s out of sync with time.

The authentically hopeful Advent spirit is not looking away from the darkness, it is not filling our lives with fluff in order to deny the truth. It is, instead, praying for Holy Spirit to give us the courage and the conviction to look straight into the muck and mire of this life. For, in the end, that’s exactly where God chose, and still chooses, to show up for us.

Our King, counter to every other king in the history of all things, looks upon our miserable estate, takes all of our sins, and nails them to the cross upon which we hung him. And he leaves those sins there forever. No one can earn or deserve salvation. No one can even know that he or she is saved. We can only believe it. We can only trust it.

This is a parable of judgment. However, the only reason that judgment comes at all is the sad fact that there will always be fools who refuse to trust a good thing even when it is handed to them on a silver platter.