Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus

One of the best Advent hymns. It sounded amazing at church today.

Come, Thou long expected Jesus, born to set Thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us; let us find our rest in Thee.
Israel’s strength and consolation, Hope of all the earth Thou art;
Dear Desire of every nation, Joy of every longing heart.

Joy to those who long to see Thee, Dayspring from on high, appear;
Come, Thou promised Rod of Jesse, of Thy birth we long to hear!
O’er the hills the angels singing news, glad tidings of a birth:
“Go to Him, Your praises bringing; Christ the Lord has come to earth.”

Come to earth to taste our sadness, He Whose glories knew no end;
By His life He brings us gladness, our Redeemer, Shepherd, Friend.
Leaving riches without number, born within a cattle stall;
This the everlasting wonder, Christ was born the Lord of all.

Born Thy people to deliver, born a child and yet a King.
Born to reign in us forever, now Thy gracious kingdom bring.
By Thine own eternal spirit rule in all our hearts alone;
By Thine all sufficient merit, raise us to Thy glorious throne.

St. Andrew

Almighty God, who gave such grace to your apostle Andrew
that he readily obeyed the call of your Son Jesus Christ, and
brought his brother with him: Give us, who are called by
your holy Word, grace to follow him without delay, and to
bring those near to us into his gracious presence; who lives
and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and
for ever. Amen.

from the Book of Common Prayer

God on Trial

Blue Raja at the Boar’s Head Tavern encourages us to see the movie “God On Trial“:

The entire movie takes place in one of the dilapidated stalls of Auschwitz that housed a collection of Jews from all different walks of life. When one of the prisoners invokes the name of God a conflagration is ignited between those who would persist in defending the character of their God and those who are outraged at His abandonment of His people. The result of the conflict is a trial in the venue of a formal Jewish court. The conversation is a heart-rending embodiment of what theodicy looks like on the ground; the problem of evil in flesh and bone as opposed to the safe, satellite view that often characterizes both Christian apologetics and atheistic bluster.

He gives three good reasons why to see it here. I think the most poignant point he makes is that the movie calls us to question God and the problem of evil not within a framework of philosophical abstractions about God but from within the story that Israel (and subsequently, the Church) told about God. Not the monotheistic “God of the philosophers” but instead the monotheistic God of “Abraham, Issac, and Jacob,” YHWH himself.

It reminds us that questions about God need to take into account which “God” we happen to be referring to. In this case, we are referring to the God who is the Creator of the good creation. It is the God who seeks to restore his people and his creation which have fallen. It is the God who is not too “spiritual” for matter but the one who came to take on literal flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. Finally, it is not the God who is too aloof for suffering but the one who suffers himself for the life of the world on the cross. Thankfully, it is also the God who defeated the powers of death and evil by his resurrection, sealing the promise that one day we and all creation will be renewed in him.

Anecdotal Evidence

My church was extremely privileged to host Ravi Zacharias this past Sunday to preach during two of our services. I highly recommend you listen to the sermon; it’s downloadable as a podcast from http://www.parkstreet.org/sermon_audio

In the message Ravi preached he told a story about a ministry partner of his that was caught by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, and the amazing tale of how when he had just given up on God he discovered that the commanding officer in the prison where he was held was using pages from an English Bible as toilet paper, and eventually how his friend managed to escape (you can hear the whole story at the end of the sermon). It’s a power story of God’s provision for his servant, even in moments of severe doubt.

I am sure that many Christians in attendance yesterday at Park Street were heartened to hear this story and it bolstered their faith. I wholeheartedly agree. I’m sure many of them wonder, “how can you not believe after hearing such a testimony like that?” This is such an easy and innocent-sounding thing to think that it would be difficult for us to imagine otherwise.

Well, it’s wrong.

Do I doubt that it was God working in that situation? Not for a minute. The problem is that there were doubtless many situations where faithful believers never made it out of those prisons alive. Perhaps even some people did lose their faith in those prisons. If this had happened to his friend (and he had known about it), Ravi would not be telling the story today (at least not for the same reason), and he couldn’t be blamed for it either. A friend of mine the other day said that in a particularly terrible sermon the preacher told stories of people who had financial burdens lifted just because they prayed. My friend skeptically snorted, “if it hadn’t happened we wouldn’t have heard about it.”

Again, please don’t read me as casting aspersions on Christians who credit God when things go well, especially in the face of dire circumstances. It is the only right reaction for a faithful person to have. The problem comes in when we start telling these stories in order to give people reasons to believe in the God we know in the person of Jesus Christ. A skeptic would rightly point out that many of these things that happen to people, yes even possibly including the moving story of Ravi’s friend, are well within the realm of probability, and God is not needed to explain such things.

Also, we have this nasty tendency as Christians to claim God’s work when things go well for us, but don’t seem to be as quick to do it when things go wrong. I saw this when my uncle passed away a couple of years ago. We prayed and prayed for God to rescue him from the disease that was taking over his body and shutting it down. It didn’t happen. Understandably, my family was confused, even though we knew better. Wasn’t God listening? Doesn’t he hate death? Doesn’t he love us, and my uncle? Wouldn’t it have been a great story to tell of God’s faithfulness if he had lived?

Yes, it would. You can bet I would have been trumpeting it. However, Christians believe that God is sovereign, and he was there just as powerfully despite the fact that our prayers were not answered the way we hoped. The skeptic may protest, “How does that work? If he saves him, he’s there, but if not, he still is? Sounds too easy.” If that’s all that we were going on, then yes, it would be too easy.

The Christian faith is not based on my personal experience. The Christian story is one of a man who lived two thousand years ago, engaged in public ministry with preaching, signs, and healings, was put on trial before a historically verified Roman governor, died on a cross, placed in a tomb, and rose bodily from the dead three days later. We don’t believe these were private experiences. We believe they are the facts of public history. Many have taken up investigations of these facts and come to the startling conclusion that these events are indeed what occurred in Palestine some two thousand years ago. We believe that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, death has lost its sting, and that God’s future has invaded the present, a future which culminates in the resurrection of all flesh and a renewed heaven and earth.

Which then brings into sharp focus our personal experiences. I know that Ravi’s friend was rescued by the power of God because the death and resurrection of Jesus verifies that the Hebrew Creator-God is indeed sovereign over all creation and will come to his people in need. The same goes for my uncle. We prayed for his healing, and even though it takes faith to understand, God said “yes.” Death will not have the final word over him. On the last day he will be resurrected into an incorruptible body, and with all the saints past, present, and future will reside in a renewed creation. It is the historical fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that forms the backdrop of all of the experiences that we have, good and bad, and reminds us that one day that God will return to this planet and universe to set everything right. It is only in the light of this confidence that we can take the experiences of our lives and realize that the One who is sovereign over all creation is busy at work, readying the world for its redemption.

Easter and History

In a book that is just too good to put down, The Resurrection of the Son of God, N.T. Wright, the Anglican Bishop of Durham, says this:

The early Christians did not invent the empty tomb and the ‘meetings’ or ’sightings’ of the risen Jesus in order to explain a faith they already had. They developed that faith because of the occurrence, and convergence, of these two phenomena. Nobody was expecting this kind of thing; no kind of conversion-experience would have generated such ideas; nobody would have invented it, no matter how guilty (or how forgiven) they felt, no matter how many hours they pored over the scriptures. To suggest otherwise is to stop doing history and to enter into a fantasy world of our own, a new cognitive dissonance in which the relentless modernist, desperately worried that the post-Enlightenment worldview seems in imminent danger of collapse, devises strategies for shoring it up nevertheless.

There were 700 pages of historical investigation that came before this bold statement. The footnote for this line is also apropos:

The natural/supernatural distinction itself, and the near-equation of ’supernatural’ with ’superstition’, are scarecrows that Enlightenment thought has erected in its fields to frighten away anyone following the historical argument where it leads. It is high time the birds learned to take no notice.

I hope in the next few weeks to unpack the lines of evidence that these comments are based on.

Wise Words from St. Augustine

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

From St. Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis