Lenten Reflection

During this Lenten season many of us have, of course, taken on special fasts and disciplines.

Lent is appropriately understood as a season of self-denial, and I think most of us experience that pretty well. Whether it be reaching out for that offered chocolate chip cookie only to remember you gave up sweets, smelling some savory meat dish as you pass one of your favorite restaurants on Friday or dragging oneself out of bed an hour early to keep a special prayer time, the disciplines of self-denial and self-sacrifice often heightened for us during the Lenten season. And it is certainly my experience that I learn a great deal from these private temptations, private victories, and private sacrifices. These things teach all of us more about our desires own desires, our love of pleasure and the difficulty we sometimes have moving away from pleasure towards sacrifice.

But it is also true that after years of Lenten practice, the disciplines can grow stale and start to seem “same old, same old.”

Or maybe the fasting was fresh and spiritually enlightening for the first couple of weeks, but now that there are only a couple of weeks left it seems like you have learned all you could possibly learn from not having that morning cup of coffee.

What I want to do today is just briefly suggest a few ways of thinking about the fasting and disciplines of Lent – ways of thinking that are, in fact, especially appropriate to the last few weeks of the season. These are not new or original or clever. But they were very helpful for me as I thought through them and served to reinvigorate my own Lenten season. I hope they will do the same for some of you.

First of all, Lent can be not only a time of private discipline but also a time of corporate understanding, understanding who we are as the People of God.

Take Jesus’ forty day fasting in the wilderness (the model for our own Lenten fast). It is clear that in that fast and in his temptation, he was thinking beyond himself.

When he answers the devil’s first temptation, for instance, by saying, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God,” he is identifying with the People of God and their wanderings in the wilderness, quoting from this passage in the book of Deuteronomy:

And you shall remember that the Lord your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord. Your garments did not wear out on you, nor did your foot swell these forty years. You should know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you.

Jesus’ is identifying in his hunger and in his temptation with the hunger, temptation and discipline of the entire People of God during their wandering in the wilderness.

And when you read the gospels and the encounter the controversies that swirled around Jesus’ ministry, it is clear that the issue of feasting and fasting was an issue of group identity, a serious consideration in living out what it meant to be the people of God in that day and time.

At one point the disciples of John come to Jesus and ask, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” Other groups of Jews in Jesus’ time considered his feasting inappropriate. He gained the reputation of one who “ate and drank with tax collectors.” And it wasn’t just the company he was keeping that bothered them. It was the fact that he was not fasting in a way that others considered essential to a people who were still in exile, who still were not experiencing the fullness of the promise God had made to them.

His answer to those disciples of John is illuminating not only for what he was doing, but also for what it might mean for us to fast in the twenty-first century.

“Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?” he asked them. “The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.”

What does that answer mean for us and our fasting?

We live in the light of the victory of God over death. We have become the body of his Christ. We are full of the Spirit of God. The bridegroom has come.

And yet, we are a still people “between feasts” so to speak – between the feasts that Jesus held with his disciples inaugurating a new way of Kingdom life and the feast that he will one day preside over again, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb.

We live as a people in a time between times.

We live between the Jesus’ victorious “It is finished” of the cross and his promised “Behold I make all things new” of Revelation.

With its self-denial and self-discipline, Lent is an excellent time for us to look forward together to the time when he will truly be all in all.

A second thing we might meditate upon during Lent is closely related to this.

Lent can be a time not only of sacrifice but of deep, joyful hungering, longing and anticipation. When we do consider that we are, as the people of God, in a time between times, it should fill us with longing for what God has in store for us and for his creation, for what is at the end of the road we are on.

Here are two familiar passages from the book of Revelation, but perhaps we can hear them afresh in the context of Lent and this reality of living in a “time between times.”

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

And, of course, John ends his great visionary apocalypse with these words: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.”

So Lent can be a time when, looking forward to Easter and beyond to all that Easter promises, we are filled with longing and joyful anticipation in the midst of self-sacrifice and self-denial.

Finally, Lent can be not only a time of self-denial, but in that self-denial and self-discipline a time of preparation and readiness for action. For even in Lent, when we remember that the Easter victory follows the Lenten fast, we can also be mindful that Pentecost follows hard upon Easter.

This time of sacrifice is not only a time of testing and not only a time of stirring up longing in us for the complete victory of the Lord, but also a time to strengthen us for the Pentecostal work to which God has called us.

In the forty days of Lent and in the Passion Week, we enter into Jesus’ sacrifice. In Easter, we enter into the victory of his Resurrection. And in Pentecost we are commissioned in the fullness of his Spirit to do his work in the world – not only to wait for the fulfillment of all things but to work for it.

In fact, it is the very things that we are filled with longing for that we ought to prepare to enact in the world.

As we wait for God to wipe away every tear, we ought to be a people who wipe away the tears of the world.

As we wait for the day when there will be no mourning, crying or pain, we ought to mourn with those who mourn, weep with those who weep, and heal those who are in need of healing.

As we wait for the tree of life to be restored, we ought to bear the fruit of life in our world.

As we wait for the time when night will be no more, we ought to strengthen ourselves to be a light in the darkness that still is.

As we wait for the City of God to come down, we ought to work to be that city on a hill that Jesus spoke of.

So Lent offers us an opportunity not only for sacrifice and discipline, but also for fellowship, for joyful longing and for training in the work of the Lord. And perhaps in the next two weeks, we might look for ways as a people to fill our Lenten disciplines up more and more with the spirit of the Lord.

May the Lord pour out his blessings upon us the remainder of this Lenten season, teach us to long for Easter in its fullness and prepare us for the work ahead.

Amen, come Lord Jesus.

Hedge of Protection

In honor of Ben R., friend of mine and blog reader, who did an excellent stand-up bit at our People of Praise men's retreat that reminded me of Tim Hawkins -- as far as I can tell, one of the funniest decent comedians around at the moment.

Christian Engagement in the World

The following is a teaching I gave at a recent men's retreat for the People of Praise.
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This morning it’s my job to provide a few principles for you to think about regarding Christian engagement in and with the world.

This is a tricky topic. There are a lot of ways in which Christian engagement with the world can go very wrong and has gone very wrong in the past. But we have also come to one of those exciting if somewhat frightening times in history when a lot of creative work needs to done. For 2000 years we’ve been working out what Christian engagement in the world should look like. But what is it going to look like in the new millennium?

But even before we start thinking about the Christian and the world, we must first recognize that all humanity is God's special creation. Not only are each of us are individually created in his image but as humankind we have also been given by God unique authority and power in his world.

This is what Genesis 1 is getting at when we are given a glimpse into the purposes of God in creating us:

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

And God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food." And it was so. (Genesis 1:26 – 29)

That’s for everyone – whether they know it or not. God intended humankind to be the world-shaping agents of his ongoing activity in creation, so whenever and wherever we see this world-shaping activity, we see the purposes of our God being worked out! There is something of the stamp of God so permanently upon us that we cannot erase it. We are builders, makers, shapers, problem solvers because God created us to be!

When federal investigators researched and studied the collapsed 35W bridge to find out what had happened and why, they were doing the work of God in the world. When a team of people sat down to design a new bridge over the Mississippi, one that would be safe and that would beautify the city, they were doing the work of God in the world – no matter how many of them were professing Christians. When the contractors and builders and craftsman worked to finish the project ahead of time so traffic flow could improve, so that people could get home earlier and more peacefully from work to spend time with their families, they were doing the work of God in the world – even if some of them were doing it unknowingly.

Our Father wants us to have good bridges, good government, healthy lives, to create beautiful music and art, and to live in peaceful societies. And those are the things He has set for us to do.

And yet, we also know that we have fallen from the original beauty and integrity of that purpose. Turning away who we were supposed to be and what we were supposed to do, we turned to our own interests or even the interests of the enemy. Pride, rebellion, chaos, violence, envy and destruction then entered our pattern of life and infected our work.

Because of this, the cities we have built, the systems we have constructed, the work we have done in the world is sometimes dangerously faulty and even evil.

The first expression of this in the scriptures takes place on the plain of Shinar, when the inhabitants of that area say to themselves "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth" (Genesis 11:4) They did make a name for themselves. It was Babel. And it is not hard to hear echoes of their plans in our present own hunger for a man-made security.

Similarly, the book of Daniel records this boast of Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, as he looked upon the city he ruled over: "Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?" (Daniel 4:30). Hear again, it’s easy to hear echoes of this in our sense of everything we have accomplished in the last hundred years or so.

And so in the scriptures, Babylon becomes the great symbol for every instance of humankind shaping for itself a whole system of power and authority that opposes itself to God by turning away from Him to serve its own interests. Think of how this has continued throughout history.

Roman imperial pride.

Nazi nationalism.

South African apartheid.

Nor are we free from this in our own United States.

Sometimes as Americans, we have mistaken our liberty for the right to do whatever we want in whatever way we want to do it. We have turned the good principles of democracy and freedom into a radicalized individualism that is in the end only self-destructive.

We have taken an effective economic system, free-market capitalism and made for ourselves a golden idol of consumerism and a fantasy of the American dream.

Because we believe we have pulled ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we have neglected the poor, saying to them, “You have two hands. If we did it, you can do it, too.”

And even the good things of the world – the 35W bridge for instance – are not complete until they are recognized them as part of God’s providing for us – and that is not often our attitude.

Of course, here’s where it gets tricky. What is a Christian man to do in and with this kind of world? How should we relate to the larger project out there, to all the good, world-shaping activity that is often laced with sin, corruption, and self-destruction? How is Christian society to respond to that tension?

Well, the first thing we must do is to constantly remind ourselves that God is at work in the world. It is far too easy and no help at all to just stand outside the circle and throw stones. But don’t need to do that. In a very real way, we are not opposed to the world. We are for it. When Joseph was in Egypt, a pagan country with many false gods, it was his wisdom that saved not only the nation but the entire region from a devastating famine. Similarly, when Daniel was in Babylon itself with all its imperial pride and arrogance, he rose to the position of King’s advisor and helped shape public policy for the empire across administrations. We have a similar responsibility not to abandon this aspect of God's work. We must be salt and light in the world.

On the other hand, we must also be aware of the corrupting powers at work in the world's systems. We do no good either if we naively participate in the world’s project on the world’s terms in the world’s way. Everyone knows how easy of a trap that is to fall into and how tempting it is if we are not careful.


But we are a new creation in Christ. And in the world we must be agents of new creation. We can and must work with and alongside the world, but as agents of new creation we cannot compromise with the principles of the old. We cannot sacrifice justice, righteousness and our first responsibility to Christ our Lord. If the salt loses its saltiness, it is good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled upon.

Jesus Christ, our Lord, our savior, and our older brother, is renewing and will renew all things, and so all things must eventually come up against his standard. And it is us, full of the Holy Spirit, who bear that standard with us and bring it into the world.

When you go into the world, you carry Jesus Christ with you as your ally, your advocate, your friend and the one who is behind you, cheering you on in your own world-shaping activity. This should give us tremendous confidence to simply be sons of our Father in his world. As the apostle Paul asks, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" (Romans 8:31). It is not easy to be at work in the world as sons of God, but we do so with the example, the help and the promises of Him who has gone before us and has conquered even death.

Finally, there does also come a time, with discernment, to act counter-culturally. When some aspect of the world's system is failing, there comes a time for Christians to create something new. When the world's way of doing business collapses into nothing but greed for profit, perhaps we have to find a new way of doing business. When the education system fails to accomplish its mission, perhaps we have to find a new way of doing education. When communities lose their way and cease to be communities, perhaps we need to find a new way of building community.

But even as we act counter-culturally, we act for the world. We shape a Christian life together so we can hold it up as a good example of how God wants the whole world to be. It’s never a perfect example, but it is one full of the Holy Spirit, one that really works. We want to say to the world, “Look how good life together can be!”

Everything we do together or individually in the world, full of the Holy Spirit and supported by our life together, is for the world, both as an example and as an invitation. In this way, our men’s groups are for the world. Our areas are for the world. Our businesses are for the world. Our school is for the world. "A city that is set upon a hill, cannot be hidden" (Matthew 5:14). And we are a city set on a hill – not a hidden compound, tucked away and protected.

There’s a lot for us and for Christians everywhere to do in working these things out with discernment, freedom, conversation and courage.

I want to end by simply putting one of the prayers of the Psalmist as a banner over our work. It’s a prayer that should probably be unpacked and meditated upon. But for now, just listen to it as you think about your work and our work in and with the world.

Let Your work appear to Your servants,
And Your glory to their children.
And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us,
And establish the work of our hands for us;
Yes, establish the work of our hands. (Psalm 90:16 – 17)

Campus Area Sledding Extravaganza!!!!

OK, it was the Cunninghams, Shelley Lambrecht and us ... but it was fun nonetheless!


Here's one of my favorite shots


And this has a 'fun' story behind it ... sort of. There's a ridiculous, straight shot, violent ride hill right near where we sled. And if you're not careful, you can drift over into that area. And if you're small and you're sledding by yourself you can just sit there not knowing what kind of danger you're in. And if a couple of boys who don't know better see you but don't bail out before they hit you ...

It was like something from America's Funniest Videos, only it's not funny when you're thinking of your four year old with a serious concussion. As it was, just a few scrapes and bruises.

OK, and maybe a lifelong fear of sledding.

Thanksgiving the Psalms

the following is excerpted from a teaching given at a meeting of the People of Praise as a part of a series on learning how to pray the Psalms

I’ve got to tell you, when I began this teaching on the Psalms, I was really frustrated when I went to the Psalms of thanksgiving. I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I wanted something that I could apply in certain way to my life so that I could stand up here and say something that could help you pray the Psalms and apply them to your life.

I wanted to find a couple of Psalms that I could pray in the evening that would help me be thankful for the grace that God had poured out and me and on my family. And honestly, I couldn’t find them. I found some things I might be able to stretch a little bit. I found a couple sections I could have pulled out of context. But I could not find a consistent, sustained “Thank you God for the blessings of this day, for live and for health. Thank you for giving me a job that I love and helping me to provide for my family. Thank you for the way you continue to save me.”

It was a real frustration to the nice three point outline I had already formulated in my head under the pressure of a deadline.

But as often happens with the scriptures, when I stopped looking for what I wanted them to say and started listening to what they were saying, I actually found something much richer.

When you read the Psalms, what you find most often is the Psalmists thanking the Lord for victory in battle, for rescue from the plots of evil men and nations, for deliverance from oppressors, and for freedom from slavery in Egypt.

The Psalms of thanksgiving are almost all celebrations of the ways in which God acted for his people Israel. Over and over again, the Psalmists say, “We recount your wondrous deeds” or “we praise you for your marvelous works.”

What initially frustrated me was that these Psalms weren't about me. What was I supposed to get out of these Psalms? How was I supposed to pray them?

But in reading them again and again, trying hard to listen for what the Lord was saying, what I came to delight in was precisely the thing that had so frustrated me – that these Psalms aren’t about me. They are about us.

This was how the people of Israel thought. Therefore this is how their songwriters wrote. To think of themselves as one people with one identity was the air they breathed.

One of the creeds that the people of Israel recited when the brought their first fruits before the Lord is recorded for us in Deuteronomy:

Deuteronomy 26
5 And you shall make response before the Lord your God, A wandering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. 6 And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor. 7 Then we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8 And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. 9 And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10 And behold, now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground, which you, O Lord, have given me.

Hundreds of years after their deliverance, the people of Israel still came to the Lord saying, “A wandering Aramean was my father,” “the Egyptians treated us harshly,” “but God brought us into this land, a land flowing of milk and honey.” Hundreds of years later, they wanted to think of the slavery in Egypt as if they had been enslaved; they wanted to remember the great Exodus as if they had walked out with their own feet and tasted with their own mouths the milk and honey that flowed in the promised land.

This is the same thing that is going on in most of the Psalms of thanksgiving. In them, we find the Jewish people renewing their identification with the history of God’s faithfulness to them. It was not just that God had been kind to Abraham, their great, great, great, great, great grandfather, but that God had been kind to them at that same moment.

So what are we as Christians supposed to get out of these Psalms? How can we pray them?

Well, for at least three reasons, I think we can take the Psalms and pray them exactly as Israel prayed them.

First of all, the history of Israel is our history.

Knowing I was working on a teaching on the Psalms, my wife passed this on to me. It’s from a book by Ben Patterson called God's Prayer Book: The Power and Pleasure of Praying the Psalms. He writes:

“It took a while for me to appreciate what Paul meant when he said we Gentiles, by the grace of God, have been grafted into the vine of Israel. But when the lights came on, I was stunned and delighted to realize that their story is my story, too. It's our story. What happened to Israel at the Red Sea and Sinai and Meribah is as much about me as it is about them. I began to see my name written into the whole biblical story. I started reading and praying the Psalms like a child learning how to read, learning a new "vocabulary, a grammar, and a plot line"—discovering a family tree I didn't know I had.”

So praying the Psalms is an education of our mind, heart and spirit, an education that changes our perspective and broadens our vision. For me to say, “I thank the Lord that he brought us out of Egypt,” brings me into a huge story of God’s powerful work. And as we learn to pray them more and more, that larger story stretching back to creation becomes more and more a part of who we are, and we become more and more a part of it.

The second reason we can take these Psalms just as they are and pray them to God is this. Just as the history of the house of Israel is the history of God’s past faithfulness to us, so we are the ones who carry that same story forward.

At the end of the famous “role call of faith,” the author of Hebrews writes:

Hebrews 11
32 And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets” 33 who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, 34 quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. 35 Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. 36 Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. 37 They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated 38 of whom the world was not worthy wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. 39 And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, 40 since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect.

When we own the Psalms that recount God’s faithfulness, when we pray them for ourselves, we recognize and honor the ongoing story of what all those faithful men and women worked for. Our work for the past 2000 years and our work in the people of Praise for the last 30 plus years our work and our life honors their labor. Our work and our life take up the work of 6000 years of faithfulness. And just as their work reaches out to us, so our work continues and will bring to completion theirs.

12:1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

A final reason why we can and should pray the Psalms this way ties back to our last teaching on the Psalms of distress. One of the things I noticed going over those Psalms is how often they begin in isolation. The Psalmist feels cut off, abandoned, alone. Like Elijah in the wilderness, the Psalmists cry out: “I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.”

This sense of being alone and abandoned, or something like it, is a feeling that many of us know and are familiar with.

But when we pray the great Psalms of Thanksgiving, God says to us, “You are not alone. You are not abandoned. Nor will you ever be. In your loneliness, I am the same God who called Abraham out of Ur. I am the same God who rescued Joseph. I am the same God who fed Elijah. And there are not only 7000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal, but millions who make up my faithful people. I have been faithful to them. I will be faithful to them. And I will be faithful to you.

The Last Great Summer Weekend of the Year?

Well, it was officially the last weekend of summer and this time it might have coincided with the last felt weekend of summer. The weather was perfect and we just had to take advantage of it.

Saturday was a great day. We started at the St. Paul Farmer's Market (well ... we started at the Black Dog Coffeeshop, but then walked across the street to the market). The habaneros are getting there but not quite ready yet. I think we got some zucchini. I'm waiting to buy a whole basket of habaneros for my Jamaican hot sauce.

We had enough 'points' at Super America to buy lunch, so we let the kids pick out whatever gas station food they wanted (surprisingly healthy), and from there we headed over to Minnehaha Park. The falls are but a trickle



However, this allowed for some crawdadding at the bottom!!! Dietrich and Anna went after crawdads while Nora and Emily mostly played in the water and Jen and I read. (We're reading N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope for a faculty seminar next week. I forget what Jen was reading.)

Dietrich got two crawdads before we headed home, and with those and some stuff he picked up off of the ground at the Farmer's Market (a piece of lemongrass, some small peppers and some sort of leaf) he made a soup at home.

Here's a slideshow of those goings on:



Saturday evening we had some friends over for a Lord's Day opening celebration and had a very nice time eating, drinking and talking.

Sunday after church Dietrich worked his hands to blisters edging the lawn to earn enough money to buy himself a new Clone Wars Ultimate Lightsaber and the rest of us watched the Vikings get their first victory, having dumped the thoroughly useless though apparently very nice Tavaris Jackson.

And last night we had perfect weather for a People of Praise (Campus Area - East Area) hayride on Sunday night in Prescott, Wisconsin. Lots of corn and soybeans. Anna started an apple roasting fest. Everyone got some smores. Here's a slideshow.(Don't miss the kids on top of the silo - Jen's idea, I was on the hayride.)



And here are a few of my favorite pictures from the weekend. (Yes, I know they're all of Nora, but what am I supposed to do????)

Listening to the Lord and Opening Our Eyes

The following is adapted from a discussion I led at a People of Praise area meeting a while back.
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If we wish to live the Christian life well, it is not enough to know what God wants in theory. To be well formed in virtue and to have a sound world view are important. To have sound doctrine is important. But in order to be guided by the Lord daily, we must also be able to discern what he wants here and now – at this time and in this place and with these people. In other words, we have to be able to hear from the Lord in real time as well. We have to be able to put one foot in front of the other, confident that we are walking with the Lord.

There are many ways of hearing from the Lord – the scriptures, wisdom, the teaching of our churches and communities, the circumstances of life, answers to prayer, discernment, the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit, peace and unrest in our hearts, the words of friends and perhaps many others. All of those are ways the Lord can speak to us and many of them can occur in real time. But to hear from the Lord in any of those ways, we must be fully awake. Passively waiting for the Lord to speak to us can leave us less aware of his guidance than we really need to be. So if we really want to hear from the Lord, we need to stop listening for him to speak and start listening to what he's saying.

Listening for the Lord means we believe he might speak to us; and that is good. But listening to the Lord means we believe he is speaking; and that is even better.

I do not listen as faithfully as I would like, but I have begun more and more often to get up in the morning and simply ask, "Well, what do you have for me today, Lord?" When I take my morning walk, I begin with that question and it tends to set the table for the day. Even when I know I am just going to be going through a normal routine, this practice establishes a pattern of listening that tends carries over into the day, having expressed my faith that this will be a day full of what the Lord has for me.

Furthermore, when a situation arises that is difficult to manage, or one that calls for any response from me for that matter, I have found that the small distinction between asking "What do you want here, Lord?" rather than"How should I handle this?" is beginning to make a big difference. When I ask "How should I handle this?" I am assuming that some previously internalized set of ideas is sufficient to figure out what I should do. I have 'the map', so to speak, I just need to take a moment to consult it. But when I ask, "What do you want here, Lord?" I acknowledge, in addition, that the Spirit is guiding me at that moment - not might guide me, is guiding me. I acknowledge that the Lord is near to me and near to the situation. I acknowledge that He is with me in real time.

So far, it is not so much that I am coming up with radically different solutions by following this way as it is that I am developing a different way of thinking about what it means to listen and obey. Maybe the Lord sends me back to that map, but I go back not in pride, naivete, ignorance or stubborn dependence upon a prefabricated system, but in humility and obedience to the Lord's real time guidance. Maybe the Lord suggests a way of looking at the map that I would not have thought of. Maybe the Lord gives me something completely off the map. One way or the other, it's me and the Lord in it together, real time.

A while back for some reason we were in the Har Mar Mall and I ducked into Northwest Christian Bookstore's storefront clearance store. Attracted by the cover, I picked up a book that turned out to be a version of Bono's speech at the 2006 National Prayer Breakfast with some accompanying photography. Among other interesting things, Bono had this to say:

A number of years ago, I met a wise man who changed my life. In countless ways, large and small, I was always seeking the Lord's blessing. I was saying, you know, I have a new song, look after it... I have a family, please look after them... I have this crazy idea...

And this wise man said: stop.

He said, stop asking God to bless what you're doing.

Get involved in what God is doing—because it's already blessed.

I think something similar happens when we ask the Lord what he has for us and believe that the day we receive is an answer to that question. In an act of faith, we say to the Lord, "This is the day that you have made." We acknowledge that "with you is the fountain of life" and only "in your light do we see light." Having expressed that faith, having opened the eyes of our heart to a world lit by the light of God, the day unfolds before us as if through his eyes. Seeing as he sees, we are able to respond as he responds. We are able to do what God is doing. God is able to be more fully in what we are doing.

Though I feel right now like I've just cracked the door to something, I can say that this praxis has begun to result for me in a changing attitude towards my students and my time in the classroom and hallways, greater peace in relationships with my co-workers that might not have otherwise been there, greater freedom and love in my family and a greater ability to see strangers around me with the Lord's eyes not my own.

In fact, when I am not practicing this as well, I sometimes come to the end of a long stretch of blindness and wonder, "My God, what have I missed?"

But even that sense of my own inadequacy is ceasing to be a cry of despair at my own weakness and beginning to become an acknowledgement of hope, hope for a time "When all things are subjected to him ... that God may be all in all." Because even our limited ability to listen to the Lord, see the all-in-allness of God, to exercise our faith, are forerunners of that future reality.

Heavenly Father, keep us in your grace! Keep us in your light! And bring us at last to that place where there is no need of the sun because the Lamb is the light of the City of God!

Community Celebration

Here's a slideshow of a just a few pictures from our People of Praise, Servant Branch community anniversary celebration last Saturday.

Holiness

I would say that for the past five to ten years my entire mental framework has been undergoing a re-centering process. I have been moving from a world view centered on the individual in relation to God as a punisher of the unrighteous and rewarder of the just to a world view centered on the incarnational and relational love of God for, in and through his people.

It's not that these two are mutually exclusive (not at all), but when one is more central than the other it makes a big difference in how I live my life, what I think about justification and sanctification, how I think about and live in the body of Christ, how I view the Arts, culture, society and politics and probably a thousand other things I haven't even discovered yet.

This is a version of a talk I gave this spring at a community meeting, but I've been thinking about it quite a lot since. I wouldn't say this talk represents the full fruition of more incarnational thinking, but it does represent a step in its development.

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What is the purpose of our holiness?

Holiness at the most fundamental level means 'set apartness.' To be holy is to be set apart.


Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

The Sabbath was more than just a vacation. All creation was good, but the Sabbath day was holy, set apart from the other six.

The Temple was more than just a space where the Israelites could have church. The whole earth is full of His glory, but the Temple was holy, set apart as the place where God's glory would dwell uniquely.

The Israelites were more than just one nation among many. All the nations are subject to the Lord of the Universe, but Israel was a holy nation. God set them apart.

But when God sets something or someone or some people apart (both calls them holy and calls them to live according to this 'holiness') it is always a part of his larger purposes.

The Sabbath was to be a holy memorial to the goodness of the creation and the divine rest at the end.

The Temple was to be a place to which the nations would come to be healed.

The prophet Isaiah writes:

It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: Come, let us 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 his paths. For out of Zion shall go the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and 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 war anymore. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord.

The Israelites were to be the people in the world through whom God would work his purposes to bless the rest of the nations.

God said to Abraham:

I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.

Through Moses he said to the people:

Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.

God wanted to get at the world through the holiness of his people Israel. He set them apart and called them to live out their holiness in order that he might use that holiness for His glory, for their good, and for the renewal of the whole world.

Things go badly when the people of God forget the larger purposes of their holiness.

Jonah ended up in Nineveh angry with God for the repentance of the Ninevites. He wanted then to be blasted. God said to him:

"You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?"

The Pharisees forgot what the Sabbath was about, why it was holy and what God was trying to do with it. And when they criticized Jesus for his Sabbath activity, he had to tell them:

If you had known what this means, I desire mercy, and not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath. He went on from there and entered their synagogue. And a man was there with a withered hand. And they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” so that they might accuse him. He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath”. Then he said to the man,” Stretch out your hand.” And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other.

Jesus also told this story:

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get. But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, God, be merciful to me, a sinner! I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

It is very important to get our own holiness, our own 'set-apartness,' right. Our holiness is not for ourselves. It is not something for us to take pride in. “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?” the apostle Paul reminds us.

We are in the tradition of the temple and of the Israelites. God wants to get at the world through us. He set us apart, made us holy and called us to holiness, for the same purpose he set Israel apart.

Just as Moses said to the Israelites Peter says to us:

You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Furthermore, the realities of Good Friday, of Easter and of Pentecost – of God’s uniting himself with us – gives us a renewed purpose and new creation power. The God who once dwelt in a temple made by human hands now dwells in human hands.

The initial charge God gave humanity was to "Be fruitful and multiply!"

He repeated this charge to Noah when he came out of the ark. He repeated this charge to Jacob when he promised to bless all the nations through him. And he repeated it as a promise to the Israelites in exile. Through the prophet Jeremiah he said:

Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, declares the Lord. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

We are those who have the first fruits of this promise. We both live out this reality, this coming to fruition of God’s purposes, and we represent the hope for its final accomplishment.

The end of our story is written in the book of Revelation:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

The apostle Paul writes in anticipation of that new dawn:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

This is why Jesus said to his disciples:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

He is with us always. We do what we do in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

The renewal of the world -- the whole human world: our cities, our politics, our businesses, our neighborhoods, our grocery stores, our backyards -- is God's business. And wonder of wonders, he has chosen us to accomplish that business.

It is true that the world is often our enemy, that it sometimes hates and persecutes us, but like Christ before us, we are called to pour out our lives for that world. It is a broken world that, despite often being against us, desperately needs us to teach them to obey all Christ has commanded us.

Knowing the reason for which we have been set apart, then, how should we live here and now? What then is the purpose of our holiness in this time and at this place? How does God want to use our peculiar set-apartness? As we think about what the world is now and who we are, what does God have for us?

We do have a lot to offer to the world.

Consider Christian forgiveness and reconciliation, as imperfect as it is. Consider what the world of counseling, psychology and self-help could learn from that.

Consider Christian community. What could the world of national nights out and neighborhood watches learn about real life together?

Think about our covenant relationships, the value we place on Christian unity, and the value we place on ordinary life.

We really do have a lot to throw into the renewal of this world.

One day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. The world needs to bow its knee to Christ, to turn aside from its power politics, from its devaluing of human life, from its love of material things.

But someone needs to show them the way, baptizing them in the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey what Christ has taught us.

There are many ways of bringing the gospel to a world in need of healing, hope and peace, but let us consider, as one way of evangelizing the world, letting our holiness shine forth – not to our glory but to the glory of him who has called us out of darkness into light and who wants to extend that call to the whole world.

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.


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Going over this again I was also struck by an unsettling thought that probably shouldn't be unsettling. If my holiness and the holiness of the particular people of God I am a part of, if that holiness (without exploring the intimate connection between the two more closely today) is not visible to our neighbors, what good is it? What do we think it's for if not to serve as an incarnation of God's love in the world and his purposes for his creation? To make us better? To please God? To make us happy?

If God were to come down and say to us, "Your holiness is no good to me if your neighbors don't see it," would we re-orient our way of being in the world?

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.

Sibley Part Two

Here are some more shots and thoughts on our week at Sibley State Park.

First of all, here's a little slideshow of Dietrich and his friends getting ready to go out tubing:

And here they are coming back in:
(Note who's not on the tube in the last shot.)

And here's Dietrich's first shot at getting up on water skis. These shots are about all she wrote:

Overall, he had a really good time in the water.

Thursday morning we had a pancake breafast. The dads cooked and the boys and a couple girls helped serve through the window.

We got to play a nice softball game one morning and Anna even managed to get a hit all by herself!

Charis mostly hung out, including with our kids' regular babysitter Katy.

Jen got to fire a potato cannon ... well ... a potato cannon modified into an apple cannon because we were out of potatoes. The look on her face is worth clicking to the Picasa web-album.

This is Martha, who came along as a guest of our family and was a tremendous help with the kids:

Jen learned how to play 500, a card game with an interesting history that remains something of an upper-Midwest phenomenon.

Charis got to be held by Jesus, who just came up for the weekend.

Emily got addicted to Tintin and, as you can see, drew other kids into her addiction.


And I got enough good clouds and free hours at night to play around with my photography!

Sibley Update

We're having a great time here at Sibley State Park.

This is an annual camping trip for us that we take with several People of Praise families -- about 70 people in all. It is a great way to live God-centered, ordinary, bratwurst, beaches and morning prayer life together.


We sleep in cabins, eat in a common lodge and spend a good deal of our time down at the beach of Lake Andrew or fishing for smallmouth bass, walleye and sunfish. Other activities include ping-pong, 500, pig and other tournements, a skit night, taco night, pancake breakfast, and chasing wildlife.

Here are a couple of slideshows



The weather the next few days promises to add some movie viewing and a heavy dose of card playing to the agenda.

Arrows Campout

The anual Arrows Father-Son campout was this past weekend at the Reinhardt Farm near Nelson, WI. (Arrows is the People of Praise ministry for boys in first through sixth grades.)

It was cold and rainy Friday night, so Dietrich and I took our sweet time getting down there and, rather than set up a tent in the rain, decided to sleep in the back of our van. With the seats out a queen size mattress fits in there and it works really well.

We got to read a long section of The Lord of the Rings, and Dietrich only had to kick me for snorring once.

In the morning the rain tapered off and we were able to play a little baseball:

In the afternoon the weather improved considerably. One group took a trip to climb the bluff on the Mississippi River.

Dietrich and I stayed for the activities at the farm.
The activities included a .22 shooting range for the older boys and men and a BB and pellet gun range for the younger boys. (I helped run that.)

Also popular was damming up the culvert through which the little stream in the valley flows.

Afterwards we all went to the Nelson Cheese Factory for the best $1 ice cream cones you can imagine.

We finished the evening with a Lord's Day Opening celebration and an honoring of the sixth graders who finished Arrows and will be moving on to bigger things next year. It's hard for me to believe Dietrich is now only two years away from that.

And we capped the night off with some illegal-in-Minnesota-but-not-Wisconsin fireworks. I got into a discussion about politics and personal freedom before I remembered I wanted to take some long exposures of the fireworks, so this is my last second attempt to get something. It would have been a great shot :-(

Here's the shot of the valley as Dietrich and I were leaving to head home.

Girls of Praise Sunday

I'm a couple major events behind here, so I'm going to post a couple weeks back to the Girls of Praise honoring Sunday! Girls of Praise is People of Praise's ministry for girls in K - 6th Grades (or is it 1st - 6th? I don't remember). At any rate, Anna's group is above in the green kerchiefs. I couldn't get a good shot of all of Emily's group but Emily did give a little sharing about what she enjoyed most in Girls of Praise this year, so here's a shot of Em's first public speaking engagement. :-)

John the Baptist

I have had a particular affection for John the Baptist since high school ... though I don't remember exactly when or under what circumstances that affection developed.

I love Caravaggio's renderings of John.

When I taught the gospel of Matthew at Bethlehem Baptist I spent a lot of time with John.

But this weekend as I was preparing for a meditation on John, I learned so much more about him from a talk on Revelation and the weekend's overall emphasis upon 'hope'. Now I have more questions, more interests and an even deeper devotion to John as one of my heroes.

Below is the meditation with some of these insights woven in (but by no means with full integration--that will take a couple more years.)

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John the Baptist

One of the things I have always loved about the Kingdom of God as it appears in the Scriptures is how real it is. There are very few men and women in the Scriptures who fit the profile of “Superhero Christian.” They struggled – really struggled – with their own sin, with doubt and despair, with confusion about how God was working in their lives and in the world around them. They were really real people.

When Abraham started thinking he was getting too old for God to fulfill his promise of a son, he worked out an arrangement whereby his wife would give him her concubine to sleep with. And all sorts of chaos erupted in his family life. He ended up exiling the faithful servant and his own son because of all the jealousy and trouble that caused. And yet he is the father of our faith.

David had continual problems with women, his sons turned against him, his generals were not men of integrity and he was unable to rein them in. And yet this is the one of whom God said, “Here is a man after my own heart.”

Jesus asked three of his closest disciples, at a critical moment, to pray with him in the Garden. They fell asleep. Jesus called an hour long prayer meeting (and these were young men) and they fell asleep. Peter, James and John. Along with Paul these men became the leaders of the first century church.

Paul himself wrestled his entire life with some unknown “thorn in the flesh,” something so significant that he begged God three times to take it away. But bearing that thorn he spread the gospel throughout Asia Minor.

In the lives of these men, in the things they built and the works they accomplished, the Kingdom did come, God did work.

And that gives me tremendous hope.

One of my favorite characters in this mix is John the Baptist, someone who demonstrates both this full and flawed humanity as well as the power of hope in the life of a believer.

As you listen to his story, put yourself in his shoes. Get caught up in his hopes, his disappointments, and his relationship with Jesus.

We don’t know anything about it from the scriptures, but John must have had a pretty interesting childhood.

He must have heard time and again the story of how his father was struck dumb by an angel while serving in the Holy of Holies and had regained his voice only at the time of John’s consecration in the temple.

People probably said to him on more than one occasion, “The Lord must have plans for you, young man!”

And with his father having been a priest, he may have grown up around the temple and the temple ministry; helping out, observing, taking things in.

Some scholars think it is more likely that he was orphaned at a young age and grew up in the desert area outside of Jerusalem, in one of the prophetic communities that had sprung up out there.

One way or another, John seems to have been a young man who loved the scriptures, especially the prophets. He saturated himself in the vision of a restored Israel, of YHWH’s eventual triumph in the world.

And sometime in his mid 20’s the Holy Spirit put a word for his people into John’s heart. John started to realize that, just as in the days of those prophets he loved, all was not well in Israel – especially not in the Temple or in the Synagogues. He saw just what the prophets of old had seen – sheep without true shepherds, wolves who devoured the flock, leaders who either made peace with Rome and allowed themselves to be used by the Empire or who went to the opposite extreme and talked about Rome as if the real problem in Israel was foreign soldiers rather than idolatry and a loss of spiritual vision for the work of the Lord on the part of the People of God.

So John set up camp in the wilderness – because that’s where you went if you were anti-establishment. That’s where you went if you were a prophet. And that’s where you went if you thought God was going to judge those in the city and you wanted to make a point. It’s safe out here.

When the Pharisees and Sadducees later came out to see him, John sarcastically quipped, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Who told you to come out here?”

In imitation of the prophet Elijah, John wore camel’s hair and a leather belt

He ate locusts and wild honey.

And he had a message.

John believed that YHWH was on the move.

He adopted the mission of the prophet Isaiah:

Prepare the way of the Lord; Make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted And every mountain and hill brought low; The crooked places shall be made straight And the rough places smooth; The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, And all flesh shall see it together; For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

The Messiah was coming, and he was coming on a highway of holiness.

He believed that what was written in the prophet Isaiah would be fulfilled:

In that day the heir to David's throne will be a banner of salvation to all the world. The nations will rally to him, for the land where he lives will be a glorious place. In that day the Lord will bring back a remnant of his people for the second time … The LORD will make a dry path through the Red Sea …He will make a highway from Assyria for the remnant there, just as he did for Israel long ago when they returned from Egypt.

And this must have been particularly sweet to John:

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb sing. For waters shall burst forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert. The parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water; in the habitation of jackals, where each lay, there shall be grass with reeds and rushes. A highway shall be there, and a road, and it shall be called the Highway of Holiness. The unclean shall not pass over it, but it shall be for others. Whoever walks the road, although a fool, shall not go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast go up on it; it shall not be found there. But the redeemed shall walk there, and the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy on their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

He believed that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. He believed in a New Exodus. He believed in a fully realized return from exile. He believed it was a new day for his people, Israel.

This was John’s vision. This was his hope. This was the stuff he believed in. He wanted to see it happen and he believed that it was happening.

But John also believed that there had to be Judgment and that Judgment was coming, as the prophet Isaiah had said:

When the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and purged the blood of Jerusalem from her midst, by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning, then the Lord will create above every dwelling place of Mount Zion, and above her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day and the shining of a flaming fire by night.

Or as Malachi said:

And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple, even the Messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight. Behold, He is coming," Says the Lord of hosts. "But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears?

….

For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, and all the proud, yes, all who do wickedly will be stubble. And the day which is coming shall burn them up," says the Lord of hosts, "That will leave them neither root nor branch. But to you who fear My name The Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings; and you shall go out and grow fat like stall-fed calves. You shall trample the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day that I do this," Says the Lord of hosts.

John’s message was this: “YHWH is on the move. But he is coming as a refining fire. Therefore repent. The kingdom of heaven is at hand! Repent and be baptized. Join it! Join it right now out here in the desert! “

“And start living right, because if you don’t bear the fruit of repentance, YHWH will cut you down like a barren tree, and the one who is coming after me will sift you like chaff.”

Before long, he was getting attention. Crowds were pouring out of Jerusalem to be baptized by John. They asked him what they should do to be saved. He was a regional phenomenon. Some people started following him around to help out. He had disciples! He had a ministry!

Then one day, Jesus showed up in the desert.

His cousin.

From Nazareth.

And John knew what he had to do. The Holy Spirit showed him that this was the one.

And so, even though he believed that he was not fit to untie his cousin’s sandal, John baptized Jesus in the wilderness, anointing him for his ministry. “He must increase, and I must decrease.” He turned it all over to the one he believed was the Messiah, the Savior of Israel, his cousin, Jesus, from Nazareth.

Maybe it was bittersweet but if so it was more sweet than bitter. After all, this was what he had been waiting for! This is what it had all been about!

Immediately, Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to undergo his testing. And when he came out and began his own formal ministry Jesus picked up right where John had left off. He even borrowed John’s message:

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”

John continued to preach and baptize, now pointing people in expectation to Jesus. And he must have heard of the incident in the synagogue where Jesus had read the passage from Isaiah and announced its fulfillment.

He must have inwardly cheered. That was a nice piece of work.

He must have watched eagerly to see how Jesus would be received, how John’s own legacy would move forward.

But then things got a little confusing.

To begin with, John had gotten himself in hot water, speaking out against the marriage of Herod to his brother's wife and calling it not a real marriage but adultery. The wife in particular was upset and John ended up in jail. But he wasn’t killed (no instantaneous martyr’s death; no quick, sharp final words.) He was simply left there to rot.

And then John started hearing things.

Rumors.

Jesus wasn’t quite stacking up.

There were squabbles between John's followers and the followers of Jesus.

It seems, for one thing, that Jesus’ followers weren’t quite as careful in their obedience to the law as John’s were. They ate with unwashed hands for one thing. And they didn’t fast as John and his disciples did and as even the Pharisees did. In fact, they seemed to be found more often feasting than fasting and praying.

Then there were these people he had gathered about himself – Zealots and tax collectors and fishermen. And worse than these were hanging around the fringes – prostitutes and Roman soldiers.

Where was the winnowing fork he was supposed to bring?

Where the judgment?

Where the baptism with fire that John himself had promised?

What exactly was going on here? Some of the people in John’s circle began to wonder. Began to grumble. John himself started asking whether or not he had done the right thing to baptize this Nazarene, cousin or not.

So from prison he sent a couple of his followers to Jesus with this simple question:

"Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?"

Can you imagine what it must have cost John to even ask that question?

John had baptized Jesus.

John had functioned as credibility for Jesus’ fledgling ministry.

Jesus had even used his connection with John as a foil against his critics.

But John saw what was happening and as committed as he had been to Jesus, his commitment to YHWH was stronger. If this was a false Messiah, he needed to know. He needed to move on. But after all that prep work in the desert? And what was he going to be able to do from prison?

"Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?"

Here is Luke’s account of Jesus’ response:

And that very hour He cured many of infirmities, afflictions, and evil spirits; and to many blind He gave sight. Jesus answered and said to them, "Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.

Jesus spoke into John’s confusion and doubt. And he did two things for John.

First of all, he acted in power and in a manner recognizable to anyone who knew YHWH as YHWH at work. He healed people, he cast out demons, and he opened the eyes of the blind.

Then he gave John – sitting in prison, frustrated, confused, but still faithful to YHWH – a winsome answer that must have spoken straight to John’s heart:

The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them.

Jesus took John right back to Isaiah, to the prophets he loved, to the hope he had for Israel and the trust he had in YHWH.

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb sing.

Jesus probably knew that John was not long for this world. Living in a cell in Herod’s palace was not good life insurance. And Jesus probably knew that John knew. They weren’t dumb.

And into the midst of all that, he said:

“Cousin, open your eyes. Open your eyes not only to the present, but also to the future.

“The blind see, John. The lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised. The poor, John, have the gospel preached to them.

“And the ransomed of the Lord shall return. They shall obtain joy and gladness. Sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

“Keep hoping, John. These are but the first fruits. The Kingdom is coming.”

And he had one more word for John:

“Blessed is he who is not offended because of me. Keep hope and keep faith, John. Keep faith with me.”

Within a year, John was dead, his undignified, back-alley beheading the tragic outcome of a sick tale of lust and politics.

But he died in hope. He died looking forward to what YHWH was going to do in his cousin, Jesus. Maybe even as the sword fell he was able to say with Simeon, “Now you are letting your servant depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation, a light for the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

Whether or not he washed his hands or hung out with prostitutes, this was the man through whom the prophecy would be fulfilled:

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy on their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

And here we are.

That’s us.

We are the ransomed of the Lord.

We live in a different world from John the Baptist in some sense. We have Jesus. We know what God was doing in Him. And we are all full of the Spirit.

But sorrow and sighing have not fled away. There is still more to come. Like John, we live in a time between times. We live in the already and the not yet. The Kingdom has come but the Kingdom is still coming.

So like John, we sometimes end up in circumstances that are not of our choosing. Like John, we sometimes face frustration and confusion. And like John, we sometimes question at a very deep level what the Lord is doing and sometimes whether he is doing anything at all.

Briefly, I want to offer three things we can learn from John’s story that might help us not only in those times of frustration and confusion, but at all times when we are looking for what the Lord is doing or working to understand how the kingdom is coming in our own day and age.

First of all, consider the unexpectedness of what the Father was up to in sending Jesus.

The expectations of the Israelites in Jesus’ day were all over the map. Based on the things YHWH had promised them, some expected that he would judge Israel with fire from heaven. Some thought he would send a Messiah who would lead a political revolution against Rome and usher in a new era for the Jews in the holy land, and they were on the lookout for just such a leader. Others thought that God was waiting on his people to faithfully keep the Law and then he would act.

Jesus was an amazing frustration to all of these expectations and at the same time, the Father really did fulfill all his promises to Israel in Jesus.

It just didn’t look like what they thought it would look like.

And God still operates that way. He is still a surprising God. What he is doing by the power of the Spirit still catches us by surprise and takes our breath away even as we are a part of it.

Remember that.

Expect to be surprised by God.

Desire to be surprised.

Otherwise, we stand a good chance of missing what He’s doing.

In fact, ask the Lord to surprise you again, especially if you are feeling discouraged or confused or simply worn out or spent, but even if you are not.

Secondly, learn from the faithfulness of John. Even in prison, confused and frustrated by this would be Messiah who seemed to have started so well but gone down a strange path, he asked, “Are you the one, or should we look for another?” He didn’t say, “Are you the one, or has God failed us?” He said, “are you the one, or should we look for another?” He kept faith with his God.

Even in his confusion and doubt, he believed what YHWH had promised. Presumably if Jesus has not been the Messiah for whom John was waiting, he would have kept looking, even in prison, listening for rumors, sending out his disciples. He would have continued to believe in the promises of his God, in the word of the prophets, in hope for the future of the People of God.

So have faith in what you know of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Trust that He is being faithful to you now and that he will continue to be. Trust that he will never leave you or forsake you.

Finally, learn from this encounter that one of the best ways to grab a hold of the hope that God wants to work in you, the kind of hope that will sustain you through joy, fear, gladness, confusion, disappointment and even death, is to open your eyes to the work of Jesus now.

So pull back the veil of whatever curtain threatens to keep you from seeing how wonderfully God is at work all around you.

Behold!

The dwelling of God is with men!

Today, brothers, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

The dwelling of God is with you.

In this hour and in this place, Jesus is working.

And he wants to say to you, “Brother, think of all you have seen in the years you have followed me. Think of all you see me doing now. Keep faith, brother. Hope in God.”

Tonight, when you come back in for the opening of the Lord’s Day, prepare yourself to pull back the veil and see over 150 men sitting down at table together in the Lord.

Pull back the veil and see high school students, college students, men who are the fathers of young families, men who are the fathers of those high school students, and men who are the fathers of those fathers – all together in the same work.

The blind see.

The lame walk.

The lepers are cleansed.

The deaf hear.

The dead are raised.

The poor have the gospel preached to them.

The message of hope, like the book of Revelation we heard about earlier, is a message in three tenses, a message of faith in the God who IS and WAS and IS TO COME!

Amen!