Surprised All Over Again--December 10, 2025

Surprised All Over Again--December 10, 2025

"A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

     and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,

     the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

     the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

     He shall not judge by what his eyes see,

or decide why what his ears hear;

     but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth..." [Isaiah 11:1-4]

I used to think the cat was out of the bag with Jesus, and that I could no longer be joyfully surprised by the coming of the Messiah. But God always has a few tricks up the divine sleeve.

Honestly, I think sometimes we church folk think we've got all the plot twists of the story of God figured out, and that they can't catch us off guard anymore. This time of year is one of the reasons. We Christians re-read passages from the prophets and say, "They were predicting the Messiah, but he's already come now, so there's nothing left for us to glean from these ancient poems." We have a way of dismissing all of this Advent tension of delayed gratification as just a game we play every year--since we know that the baby will be born in a manger, and we are no longer surprised that the angels show up to see shepherds working the night shift. We sometimes even treat the whole idea of a long-awaited messiah with a "been-there-done-that" attitude, like watching the same old Christmas movies year after year and pretending you don't know whether the hero will "save Christmas" this time or not.

I know I do this myself--it is tempting to think we are masters of these ancient texts, and that we have wrung every drop of meaning from them already.

But then I read these well-worn words again, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, and I discover that I am not nearly as in control of them--nor of the God to whom they witness--as I had thought. The old poets and dreamers have things to tell me that I was not expecting... or maybe that I had never paid attention to before.  The prophets keep reminding me that God reserves the right to catch me off guard and leave me surprised all over again.

Take this for starters: the prophet here doesn't simply promise that there will be a new king one day who will come from David's (and Jesse, David's father) family line. Honestly, that wasn't much of a headline in the days of Isaiah the prophet, since he lived during a time when there was a Davidic king already, and there would be more Davidic kings for another 150 years or so, give or take. The surprise wasn't the announcement of that there would be more kings in this particular dynasty.

But what makes this promised coming "branch" from the family tree of Jesse and David special is that for once in the world's history, this new sort of king won't be swayed by appearance, won't be motivated by the need to hold onto power for power's sake, won't be directed by greed or fear, and won't put his own personal interests over the interests of his people. For once, Isaiah says, there will be a ruler who won't be fooled into caring only about surface appearances or what "plays well," but rather will be guided by righteousness, by equity, and by wisdom. For once, in other words, there will be a ruler whose power is seen in serving those who are most vulnerable ("the poor" and "the meek of the earth," as Isaiah puts it) rather than trying to extract benefits from those who are most influential.

The real surprise, in other words is not the sentence, "There will be another king coming," but rather, "There will be a good one for once--a ruler who is genuinely and truly good, all the way to the core." The world has been waiting for such a thing. The world is waiting, still. The prophets were not suckered by the official royal propaganda coming from the palace in their day that just assumed God blessed and approved of everything the kings of the day did. Isaiah had seen half-decent ones and terrible ones, but never one that was wholly good, just, and wise. The prophets saw through the spin-doctoring and PR management offered by king after crooked king, and they recognized how the powerful people of their day were all more or less entangled in getting themselves more power and keeping it. And so the prophets kept on daring to dream of a better way... a better kind of king. A completely different kind of king, honestly: one whose power is revealed in self-giving, and whose authority is used to lift up the lowly. Sometimes I forget just how radical an idea that really is for a ruler.  Most folks in our time have given up that such priorities could be possible; we are so used to ego-driven demagogues only interested in winning the next election rather than actually striving for the common good that it is hard to believe another way is possible.  Isaiah tells us it is.

I think what surprises me and my cynical heart is the hope that Isaiah holds onto that things could really be different. It is so easy any more to see rottenness everywhere that we just assume that's how things must always be. Heads of state, heads of corporations, and heads of institutions all seem bent on holding onto their power, or enriching themselves, or gaslighting their supporters, or making empty promises, and it is terribly easy just to assume that it must be OK because "everybody is doing it." It feels any more like even just asking, "But what is the truth here?" is precariously close to being an out-of-fashion question, because so many pundits and experts seem only interested in what is popular, or what can be gotten away with, or what plays to a particular base. In a time when we are all so tempted only to listen to voices or watch the channels that will tell us what we already want to hear, it is hard to imagine the Coming One whom Isaiah says will not act based on what tickles his ear, what plays to a "base," or what makes for the best sound-byte on social media, but on what is just and right and true.  

Sometimes you'll hear Respectable Religious types join the cynicism, too. They'll say, "You don't have to hope for someone who is decent and honest and just and wise. You don't need a Boy Scout in charge--you just need someone who will do the favors on your wish-list in exchange for your allegiance. Just make that kind of deal and you'll get things that you want, too." But Isaiah doesn't let us off the hook for hoping for just making deals or selling out like that. Isaiah dares us to hope this surprising hope--that at the last, God's intention is for a world ordered by justice and peace, rather than self-interest and competing hatreds. Isaiah dares us not to be satisfied, and not to settle, for pinning our hopes on anybody or anything less than the promised shoot that comes out from the stump of Jesse, the One we know by the name Jesus.

Christians are people who have come to name Jesus as that king of whom Isaiah and the other prophets dreamed. That's the central defining feature of our community of disciples--we are convinced that Jesus is the One in whom God's Reign is most clearly seen because Jesus is the One in whom God is fully present. In that sense, we are in on the secret--nobody expected in Isaiah's day that the king will be laid in a used food trough on the day of his birth. Or that his royal entourage will be made up of illiterate fishermen, outcast tax collectors, undervalued women, notorious sinners and little-faithed doubters. Or that he will reign from a cross, executed by the empire of the day, before he breaks out of his borrowed grave.  We have been told these parts of the story, which prophets like Isaiah didn't even dream of.

But just when I think I have gotten these old words of the prophets wrestled into submission and that they have no more surprises for me, Isaiah comes along and pokes at me just where I wasn't expecting it. The prophets pull me out of my cynicism to look with hope to Jesus. They call us not to settle for accepting rottenness, and to call it out wherever we see it. They dare us keep holding on to the longing that at the last God will set all things right, and that we can anticipate it now in the ways we live, and love, and serve, and spend our selves.

Even now, all these centuries later, the surprising word from the prophets is, "Hold on. Don't settle. Justice, mercy, and peace really are on the way."

Lord God, keep us stubbornly hopeful, all our days, as we watch for your Reign among us.

In Recovery Together--December 9, 2025

In Recovery Together--December 9, 2025

"Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to John [the Baptizer], and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins." (Matthew 3:5-6)

All those people who lined up by the riverbanks, those crowds who left their villages and towns and went out to the middle of nowhere to hear John and have him wash them in the flowing waters of the Jordan, do you know what they had in common?

Only this: they were mess-ups.  They were wrongdoers who felt trapped in dead-ends, looking for a new beginning.  They were, in a word, sinners.

The people who went out to John were manifestly not the role model/good example types on the cover of Respectable Religion magazine; if they had been, they would have been perfectly content to follow the traditional instructions of the Torah for addressing little offenses and minor infractions, and they would have been content to listen to the advice of the official priests and credentialed rabbis for making amends to their lives.  You went to John if you were at the end of your rope--if you were ready to admit that you needed more than a little spiritual pick-me-up or minor course-correction to your life, but a complete overhaul of your life.  You went to John, maybe not unlike those who show up at their first Twelve Step meeting, because you had hit rock-bottom and you were ready to admit that your life had become unmanageable.  All those folks at the river's edge were brave enough--or desperate enough--to declare publicly by their presence that they were royal screw-ups aching for the chance to start over.  That's the kind of people that John--and the God for whom he spoke--drew to himself: an assembly of sinners.

In a way that seems obvious: after all, if the people who went out to the river to be baptized by John came "confessing their sins," they must have had some hefty guilt about their failures and trespasses to deal with.  But we are so used to hearing the word "baptism" and picturing it as a ritual of respectability and polite piety.  For many it's a ceremony to be proud of these days, not like standing up in that church basement AA meeting and saying, "Hi, I'm Steve, and I'm an alcoholic" (there's a reason that the Twelve-Step groups and programs all have "Anonymous" in their titles, after all).  We might easily (and wrongly) imagine that the people who went out to John in the wilderness were doing the socially accepted thing to do by being baptized, but it's really just the opposite. John didn't fit the mold of a well-appointed and highly respected priest, or the formal schooling and bona fides of a rabbi.  He shows up like one of the prophets of ancient Israel, claiming no more for himself than that he was a "voice crying out." And his invitation was for anybody and everybody who was finally done with pretending that they were perfect. The people who came out to John were ready to give up the act that everything was fine and be turned at last in the right direction.  Those are the folks who went to the Jordan: people who were willing to set aside the cookie-cutter routines of their regular lives to go out to the middle of nowhere looking for a new beginning.

Maybe that's really the only kind of people God gathers: folks whose only thing in common is that we bring mistakes and mess-ups, sins and transgressions, into God's presence, desperately hoping that God will take them from us and bring us up out of the water as new people.  Like the lyric of Jon Foreman puts it, "We are a beautiful letdown, painfully uncool/ The church of the dropouts, the losers, the sinners, the failures, and the fools." Or as the old cliche goes, "the church isn't a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners." That's the only kind of community you'll find out there with John in the wilderness, because honestly, it's the only kind of community God can work with. And when we show up on Sunday mornings, it's not because we are there to model our holiness like a fashion show, but to be honest about our brokenness like we are all in recovery together.  We are.

This is the kind of community we belong to, and the good news is that in that kind of community--the found family we call "church"--there's no need to pretend anymore that we've got it all figured out or that we're better than anybody else.  There is instead the freedom to admit our failings, let go of our sins, and be pulled up back on our feet to walk in a new way.

There's a place for each of us there in the wilderness... just like there's a place for us on Sundays.

Lord Jesus, take us as we are, and make of us what you will.

What We've Been Waiting For--December 8, 2025

What We've Been Waiting For--December 8, 2025

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,

 “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
 ‘Prepare the way of the Lord;
  make his paths straight.’ ” (Matthew 3:1-3)

Do you remember the total eclipse visible in much of the United States back in the spring of 2024?  Do you remember where you were?  Do you remember interrupting your usual routines and schedules to go outside and look up at the sky?  Do you remember wondering before it all happened whether it would be worth all the fuss, all the changing of plans, going outside, and staring upward?  

And do you remember when it finally happened, and the sky turned dark in the mid-afternoon, and you could see the shining corona around the darkened sun?  Do you remember the eerie responses of birds, the odd stillness and awe of those few minutes?  Do you remember thinking to yourself, "Now I get it--now I know why everyone was making such a big deal about making the effort to see this"?

I'll confess that my own reaction followed along something like those lines: from hesitancy about whether all the hullaballoo was going to be worth it, to rearranging the day's usual plans and blocking off time for an eclipse-watching event at the church yard, to utter amazement when it finally happened. The realization that something I had never experienced before was about to happen, and that it would not happen again in this place for the rest of my lifetime, made this an event I was glad I didn't miss.  It would have been an awful shame if I would have kept to my usual schedule and stayed inside at work during the eclipse, and it was absolutely worth it to rearrange my plans and turn my attention up to the sky for those few minutes.

I know it might not seem similar, but I hear the John the Baptizer's opening message in the gospels, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, in a similar spirit.  So often we cast John as a furious firebrand scaring people into good behavior (and to be sure, he does have a way of coming on pretty strong), but maybe we are misunderstanding him.  When John announces that "the kingdom of heaven has come near" or "the reign of God is at hand," it's with the same hopeful urgency of all those folks who told us to clear our calendars on the afternoon of eclipse day, because something really good was available to us--and they didn't want us to miss out.  When everyone from the local news to your friends on Facebook to the school superintendents who cancelled school so kids wouldn't miss out all told us, "You don't want to miss this event--look up at the sky, and don't keep your attention on a screen indoors for these minutes!" they weren't trying to scare us or threaten us.  They wanted us to get to share in something wonderful--something that we had all been waiting to see happen for a very long time.  John speaks the same way.  The coming of God's Reign was a hope of God's people for centuries. The arrival of God's Chosen one--the "Anointed" or "Messiah"--was a moment they had looked forward to for generations.  And after seeing so many empires and conquerors sweep through their land going back as far as anyone could remember (from the Assyrians to the Babylonians to the Medes and the Persians to the Greeks and now the Romans!), the notion that God was going to come near in a new way, and that God's Reign would unfold right under the noses of Caesar and his underlings was thrilling!  This was something you didn't want to miss.

So when John says, "Repent, for the Reign of God has come near!" it's less like a threat and more like an invitation.  It has the feel of saying, "The thing we've all been waiting for is finally here--just turn your focus away from the usual routines and look in the direction I'm pointing toward! I promise it will be worth it."  If you can remember how awestruck and fulfilled you felt when you got to look at the shadowed sun, and if you can remember feeling like, "This was worth the change in my plans for the day!" then you can understand why John takes his message so seriously.  The coming of God's Reign is obviously a bigger deal than a few minutes of dazzling sights in the sky, and John wants to make sure the people around him are not so preoccupied with their usual busy-ness and same old routines that they don't even look up to see the One they've been waiting for. John isn't trying to frighten us when he shouts, "Repent!" He's trying to ensure we don't keep our focus pointed in the wrong direction. The word has the feel of "Change your orientation!  Redirect your attention!  Look up from the things that had captured your focus and see the thing that you've really been waiting for!"

Of course, it's one thing to hear someone tell you, "This will be worth it," and it's entirely another to experience the thing-that-is-worth-it for yourself.  Words fail me, even now, to capture the awe of the total eclipse--and that was just a few minutes of my life.  The arrival of Jesus really does change everything.  Jesus' coming shows us the beating heart of God in this unarmed itinerant rabbi who welcomed outcasts, healed the sick, lifted up the lowly, cast out evil, challenged the assumptions of the religious experts, and washed feet.  Jesus' presence was compelling, his teaching was eye-opening, and his love was life-changing.  When people were in the presence of Jesus, whether he was feeding the multitudes, speaking up for the overlooked, or just striking up a conversation with a stranger, people felt they were in the very presence.  When they saw the way Jesus put others before himself, and when they saw how he lifted up those who were bowed down, they knew they were getting a glimpse of what it looks like where God's will is done. They were experiencing, in other words, the Reign of God--the kingdom of heaven.

And that's what we are a part of, as well.  We are a part of the new community that continues to be transformed by Jesus' presence.  We are a part of that new family of faith where God's Reign becomes visible, even if just in moments and glimmers.  If we are so consumed with what the world tells us is important--money, power, status, "winning," getting recognition, or getting the next piece of technology to make our lives better--we will miss out on what is right in front of us.  John doesn't want us to miss out.  John keeps shouting to get our attention and pointing at the sky.

He's speaking to us today, too: "Hey everybody!  Look up from your screens and schedules and see the reign of God right in our midst!  I promise it will be worth it."

Will we look up from whatever else we have been focused on to see the presence of Christ and the kingdom of God today?

Lord Jesus, help us to listen to the voices you have sent to get our attention so that we will be turned to you today.

A Change In Our Walk--December 5, 2025

A Change In Our Walk--December 5, 2025

"Let us walk decently as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in illicit sex and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires." (Romans 13:13-14)

There came a point a few years ago when my sore feet at the end of the day finally forced me to admit it: I had reached the age where in-soles in my shoes might help me get through the day better.

It was hard, I will confess, to face the facts that this body of mine was showing more wear and tear than I realized, and that my preferred shoes (Chuck Taylor high-tops, coordinated with the color of the season of the church year) do not offer nearly so much support as they offer color.  It was an unpleasant realization that on my own, my footfalls were wearing me out, and that unaided, even the way I walked, stood, and stepped was going to end up causing pain.  

So I got some insertable in-soles designed for "work," and immediately I noticed two things:  one, for starters, my feet weren't aching nearly as much at the end of the day.  And number two, the relief and the redirection brought by the in-soles literally changed the way I walked. The thin soles of the stylish but unsupportive old sneakers were leaving me flat-footed, and I was rolling my steps in a weird way... but I had grown so accustomed to it over time that I didn't even notice that I was walking funny.  And that meant, further, that the more I walked improperly, the more I wore down the shoes in the wrong spots, which exaggerated my problem and made it even worse.  Slowly but surely I had made this problem invisible to myself over the course of an ordinary day, but painfully obvious by the end of it. And the change to my shoes' in-soles changed all of that, because it literally changed the way I walk.

In this passage from Romans which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, the apostle Paul talks in curiously similar terms about the change that happens in our lives because of the presence of Christ in our lives. Jesus isn't just a fashion accessory or a brand logo we flaunt in order to look religious; his presence changes the way we walk through the world. Instead of being bent inward on our selves--seeing other people as objects to be used or seeking our own gratification for "Me and My Group First"--Jesus turns our orientation outward in love that seeks the good of the other.  Jesus, maybe not so unlike a set of good in-soles, brings a change in our walk--and for the better.

I'm not sure I realized until recently how big a deal this would have been to the first century listeners in Rome, who were used to seeing countless shrines, temples, and devotees of countless gods and goddesses, but who never would have expected that worshiping their gods was supposed to make a difference in the way they lived their lives.  So much of the religion of the Roman Empire, including the gods and goddesses of the peoples and nations it had swallowed up, was reducible down to giving the appropriate offering or sacrifice to the deity of the moment in exchange, presumably, for the favor or blessing of that deity, but with no practical impact on what you did with the rest of your day, your family, your work, or your life. You didn't find people saying, "You are a worshipper of Zeus--therefore you should be a devoted spouse and parent!" because in all the myths Zeus, the "king" of the Greek gods, was a terrible parent and a perpetually cheating husband!  You never heard people say, "I used to steal and cheat my neighbors, until I started worshipping Poseidon the sea god!"  There was almost no connection at all between the gods you worshipped and the virtues you practiced, much in the same way nobody in our culture connects your character with your favorite fast food restaurant or flavor of soft drink.  Those things just don't relate in our eyes, and in the culture of the 1st century Roman Empire, there was virtually no connection between your acts of ritual worship to the gods and goddesses and the kind of person you strove to be.  Your devotion to your gods made no difference, practically, in your walk.

But Jesus was different, as Paul told it, because following him wasn't merely a matter of muttering a few words to a statue and moving on with your day unchanged. To follow Jesus is to be shaped by Jesus, all the way down to our actions, words, and choices.  Jesus will affect the way you walk, in other words.  The instruction for Paul's readers to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ," like an article of clothing, or a pair of good walking shoes--or maybe like extra-supportive work in-soles for your Chuck Taylor high-tops--is a way of saying, "The presence of Jesus will change us; he will affect the way we live, speak, act, and love."  And of course, he's right.  Following Jesus will change our footsteps. Jesus' presence in our lives will turn our hearts outward rather than only selfishly inward. His abiding Spirit will give us courage rather than fear, and compassion rather than apathy.  His living voice will direct us to see other people as neighbors to be loved rather than enemies to be conquered, objects to be used, or competition to be defeated.

We may not realize how much our daily walk in life has been slowly getting worse--the same way I didn't realize how much a worn-down pair of shoes was contributing to pain at the end of my work day and crooked steps in the meantime.  When we keep Jesus at a distance or treat him as just a bit of outward decoration, we don't let him shape our steps or re-form our daily walk.  But when, as Paul says, we "put on the Lord Jesus Christ," something begins to change in us. We may sometimes slide back into our old, crooked patterns or slouch back into the malformed footfalls that we were used to, but Jesus keeps working on us, both to relieve the places we have been hurting, and to point us in his direction.

Maybe that's really what it is to be the church: we are the people who are collectively learning to let Jesus change the way we walk and to reshape our footfalls.  We don't always get it right. We sometimes clumsily step all over each other.  And sometimes we still get worn down in all the wrong places.  But he is persistent, this Jesus of ours.  And he keeps training our steps to walk rightly--to walk in ways that look like love, and to leave behind us tracks that invite others into the goodness of God.

How might Jesus shape our steps... today?

Lord Jesus, clothes us in yourself and dress us in your goodness, from head to toe.

Trust the Alarm Clock--December 4, 2025

Trust the Alarm Clock--December 4, 2025

"Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near." [Romans 13:11-12a]

These days, when the alarm clock starts buzzing at our house, it is an act of faith to believe that it's really morning. The light on the display says it's 5:00am or 6:00am, but the absence of light outside the window makes it look identical to midnight. And from time to time, I will confess, I almost have to talk myself into accepting the fact that it's time to get out of bed. After all, to my eyes, it looks like the dead of night, and to my perfectly comfortable arms and legs, staying in bed seems like the ideal plan.

My guess is that you have been there, too, before. I suspect you are more disciplined than I am and can will yourself out of bed even on a very dark morning with less self-persuasion, but you probably know what it's like to have to tell yourself it really is morning even when it's still dark outside. And you probably have had to remind yourself that you do need to get up and face the day.

But for that one moment, the decision to put your feet on the floor and begin the day flies in the face of the outside evidence. Choosing to arise, do your morning workout routine, take your shower, get dressed, and step into the day is, at least in that moment, a sort of defiant hope that a sunrise really is coming. Waking up and getting out of bed is an act of faith in spite of the external circumstances outside your window and your own internal impulse to stay as comfortable as possible for as long as possible.

While I don't know what time the apostle Paul would have set his personal alarm clock for, I do get the sense he's thinking along the same lines for us as the followers of Jesus. Except it's not just the start of another workday that he wants us to wake up for--it's the dawning of God's new day and the coming of Christ. Paul sees--and wants us, his readers, to see as well--everything in our present life illuminated by the hope of Jesus' coming in glory and the fullness of God's Reign. For Paul, the coming of Christ is as sure and certain as the arrival of the sunrise. And just as the world looks completely different once the dawn has come, he knows that all creation is in for a transformation at the coming of Christ's Reign of justice and mercy. For now, of course, the world looks like it's stuck at midnight, weighed down with gloom outside and the tempting impulse to just pull the covers over our heads and go back to sleep. But Paul is convinced that it is worth it, right here and now, to begin to live in light of the promised future for which we are keeping watch. It is worth it, even if the rest of the world thinks we look utterly foolish for doing so.

Of course, in Paul's day, it would have been laughable to suggest that the Roman Empire wouldn't last forever and that some new rightful figure would arise on the world scene. It was even more preposterous to say that the one they were waiting for was actually the same one the Empire had crucified. Even still today, it sounds like nonsense to many to suggest that there is another way of living, rather than the Everyone-For-Themselves, Dog-Eat-Dog, Shoot-First-And-Ask-Questions-Later kind of "logic" that passes for conventional wisdom these days. Paul doesn't deny that all of that crookedness, violence, and greed is how an awful lot of the world operates right now--he just dares us to live out of step with it, by starting to live in light of the new way that is beginning through Jesus. The apostle dares us to be ahead of the curve: to start now while it still looks like midnight outside to wake up now in anticipation of the dawn the world can't see yet. In spite of the evidence (it looks like the dead of night), we live now in the kind of self-giving love, enemy-reconciling peace, and open-handed generosity that will be the order of the day in God's new creation. And we do it even if the world thinks we look like "losers" or "weaklings" for doing it.

It reframes our whole understanding of the Christian faith, and our entire life, really, to see things this way. It means that our way of life--what we sometimes call "Christian ethics"--isn't so much about controlling bad behavior in order to avoid punishment in the afterlife, but more about beginning to live now in the kinds of right relationships we look forward to in the new creation. When Christ comes, we believe that there will be no more greed, violence, and hatred--so we begin to practice living now without those vices, like people who know to leave behind their pajamas and put on clothes for the day ahead. It's less about fearing punishment and more about stepping into God's promised future.

What if we changed that piece of our thinking today? What if each day now was begun with the question, "How will we live and act in the fullness of God's reign when Christ comes?" and then we started to step in that direction? What if we no longer worried about how we look to the rest of the world, but rather saw ourselves trying to live ahead of the curve? What if we believed Paul's alarm clock voice telling us the night is far gone, even we can't see the dawn yet when we look out the window?

That's the challenge for this day. It's time to put our feet on the floor, to trust the alarm clock... and to rise to greet the new day.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage and strength to live in light of your coming reign, even when that makes us seem out of step with the violence and greed of the world around.

The Light We Travel By--December 3, 2025

The Light We Travel By--December 3, 2025

 O house of Jacob,
  come, let us walk
 in the light of the Lord! (Isaiah 2:5)

Maybe you know the old joke. There's a drunk guy standing outside a little ways down the block from a local bar underneath a streetlight, and he starts crouching down and looking around at the ground frantically, like he's searching for something.  After a long enough time, an observer passing by asks him what he's doing, and the drunk says, "I'm looking for my keys; they must have fallen out of my pocket."  The passerby asks, "Do you know for sure that they fell out over here?"  And the drunk says, "No, they fell out of my pocket down the block back by the bar, but it's too dark to see them over there.  The light is much here under the streetlight."  Insert rimshot on the drums.

Okay, it's a pathetic joke, but there is something oddly real about the conundrum.  What if you're in the dark, trying to find your way without stumbling, and the light you would need to illuminate the ground beneath your feet is fixed and far away?  We are used to carrying little portable lights with us wherever we go nowadays, at least with our phones that have built-in flash lights.  But even before smartphones, we have all lived at a point in history where inventions like flashlights have been around, and before that, there were lanterns, and I suppose before that people had oil lamps and candles.  We invented these things, even going back to distant ancestors who made their bonfires portable by turning them into travel-size torches they could carry with them, so that we could carry the light with us.  Without those kinds of light sources, whether ancient or modern, we would be left in the pitiable spot of the guy from the joke, looking beneath the streetlight for lost keys even though he knows they are somewhere further back down the block, because the light is fixed in one place.

Maybe that's worth keeping in mind as we consider these words, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, about walking "in the light of the Lord."  What, precisely, does the prophet Isaiah have in mind with that image?  What's the point of this particular metaphor, and what would it mean to walk "in the light of the Lord," practically speaking? And is this kind of light set in place like a streetlight, or is it portable?  Does the light of God require us to come to it, or does the light of God go with us?

Ah, that's the question, isn't it?  Maybe the whole Christian faith really hangs on that question: is ours a faith that depends on us going out of the dark and into some central illuminated place in order to have access to "the light of the Lord," or does God's light come to find us where we are, no matter how chilly the December wind or how dark and starless the clouded sky above us might be? Does God require us to go somewhere else to be where the light is, or does the light come to us, and then go with us?

It seems to me that the witness of the Scriptures over and over is the latter: ours is a God who doesn't wait to be discovered up in some sunny celestial spot for us, but comes to us in "this benighted sphere" as the old hymn puts it, and brings the light to where we are.  This God of ours comes to us as we are, even when are intoxicated, inebriated, and looking for our lost keys in the wrong place, and then accompanies us all the way home.  The Light of God goes with us, in other words.

In a way, that's really what the good news of the Incarnation--the coming of God in human flesh in Jesus--is all about.  The Gospel's declaration is not that God has set up a streetlight in the universe, and if you can grope your way in the dark to reach it, you can bask in its radiance there.  Rather, the Good News is that God has come to meet us precisely where we are, befuddled and benighted, and shares both our own humanity and our journey as the Light we travel by.

Whatever else this season brings, and whatever other things have been piled onto your calendar and to-do list, don't forget that promise.  God isn't waiting for you to come to the light first; God brings the light to where we are, and accompanies us all the way home.

O God, our Light, meet us where we are today, as we are, and be the lamp for our feet.

Letting God Disarm Us--December 2, 2025

Letting God Disarm Us--December 2, 2025

For out of Zion shall go forth instruction

  and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

 He shall judge between the nations

  and shall arbitrate for many peoples;

 they shall beat their swords into plowshares

  and their spears into pruning hooks;

 nation shall not lift up sword against nation;

  neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:3b-4)

In all honesty, I am not sure we really want this vision to come true.

I am not at all convinced that we really desire not to teach our children to learn war any longer. Just the opposite, rather--I fear that the voices around us, the voices we have all agreed to nod along with as "common sense" and "conventional wisdom," would rather teach our children to continue in the ways of violence, hatred, and self-interest.

We do not want our children to cease learning war anymore--we simply want them to learn it better than the children in the next group over. And then we would like permission to baptize that bloodthirsty mentality so that we can somehow call it "God's will."

Ultimately, this is the problem: not that the living God does not offer a bold enough hope; not that we have tried the way of God's peaceable Reign and found that it just wasn't as good as it was billed to be; not that the Scriptures are unclear about what sort of a future into which God calls us. But rather, that we know perfectly well that the living God is going to pulls us out of our narrow self-interest, and we don't want that to happen--no, not when we could get an edge or an advantage over someone else and "win" against them, instead. To borrow a line from G. K. Chesterton, it's not that the peaceable way of Jesus has been tried and found wanting--it's that it's been found difficult and not tried.

And this, I have come to believe, is the heart of the matter. It is not that Jesus or the prophets are vague, ambiguous, or unclear about how God intends human beings to relate to one another. It's not that we are unclear how God feels about us killing each other, or inventing and stockpiling new and different ways to kill each other more and more efficiently. It's not that the Scriptures are hard to understand when it comes to whether or not to endorse a "Me-and-My-Group-First" way of thinking and acting. The Scriptures are painfully clear. The prophets like Isaiah here, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, or its parallel passage from Micah 4, speak with terrible simplicity and directness. The problem is not that we can't figure out what the Spirit-filled dreamers, poets, and activists that we call the prophets were trying to say to us. The problem is that we know--and we do not like what they have to say. We are not ready to stop teaching our children the ways of war. That much is clear, because we are not ready yet to stop teaching our children to see themselves as of greater importance than someone else's children.

There's the rub: deep down, we have built a way of life, we humans--in every country, in every hemisphere, in every culture, so nobody gets off smelling like a rose here--we have built a way of life that depends on the assumption that my life is of greater importance and worth than yours... that my livelihood is more important to protect than your own life... that my comfort is more important to safeguard than your subsistence... and that my feeling of security is more important than someone else's ability to live. We have built our ways of life on all agreeing that each of us is going to be as damned self-interested (and I mean that profanity--it is damnable) as we please and committed to self-preservation as possible, and we are all OK with it as long as we all agree that those are the rules we are going to play by.

And once we have all agreed to that, then everything is simply a matter of strategizing how get better advantages for myself to outmaneuver you and everybody else. So... if I determine that having more swords and spears (or whatever--pick your weapons) will help me look out for Me-And-My-Group-First, well, then, it's my "right" to get more, have more, threaten to use more, and develop more and better swords and spears than you have, so that I can "win." Isn't it?

And as long as I agree that you can also acquire as many ways to kill me as possible, we all will pretend that's a sensible "common-sense" way to live our lives. We did that on a global scale, if you'll recall, for three or four decades in the late 20th century, and we called it mutually assured destruction. Whether it's nuclear missiles during the Cold War, swords and spears in 8th century BC Palestine, or the modern armaments of today, regardless of what weapons we are using, the deeper problem is that we have all collectively agreed that it's OK for each of us to guard for our own feeling of security at the cost of someone else's life--that it's OK for me to weigh the value of me and my comfort more highly than another human being made indelibly in the image of God. Once I've told myself that I and my interests take priority over anybody else's, I've already given in to learning the way of war--and to making it my way of life. The root of our problem is our bent love of self over against everyone else around me, and then the problem is made increasingly worse by technological leaps in our ability to destroy each other in the name of "keeping myself secure."

Well, there it is--that's the bottom line here. The conventional wisdom is that we should all be "free" to be as self-centered and self-interested as we want to be, or can get away with being, and from there, it's every man for himself to shore up whatever things we can in order to look out for me-and-my-group first. And all of that makes perfect and total sense once we have started from the assumption that my life is of greater value than yours. Once we accept that premise, then we also have to accept the corollary that, well, hey, some people are expendable... collateral damage... or must be sacrificed for the sake of MY comfort, MY feeling of safety, MY way of life, or MY superiority. In fact, once I've bought the lie that MY life is of greater value than YOURS, it is a just a matter of simple math that my interests have to be protected at the expense of yours.

That's why I say that sometimes it just seems that we don't want to give up teaching our children the ways of war--whether on the grand scale of nuclear missiles and drone strikes, or the collective agreement just to get used to mass shootings as part of our way of life, or the small-scale daily choices we make to grab more for ourselves and edge someone else out. We are deeply invested in the ways of war, the myth of redemptive violence, the lie that more swords and spears can make us "safe" from danger, and the logic of me-and-my-group-first. We are entangled in them, so deep down, we are threatened when prophets start painting pictures of being disarmed and having our weapons turned into plowshares and pruning hooks. We are so enmeshed in defining our "success" in terms of having more ways to threatening our neighbors--er, enemies--that we are troubled by Isaiah's vision of turning weapons into farming tools.

Let's just be honest here: Isaiah and the other prophets can talk all they want, and for the sake of looking pious we will nod and say our "Amen" when their words are spoken in church, but deep down our problem is that these self-absorbed hearts of ours don't want to have to listen to them. We are afraid to stop learning the ways of war, and we are afraid letting God disarm us.

But here is grace for us on this day. Despite our "children's warring madness" as the old hymn puts it, God refuses to give up on speaking this vision to us. God refuses to accept our self-destructive self-centeredness as the last word. And just at the point where we are all collectively willing to accept that death and violence are "just how it is," just at the point where we are all getting oddly comfortable with tuning out our attention from news reports about boats in the ocean being blown up without giving anybody a trial, or the grinding war in Ukraine, or the terrible violence in our own country, God keeps saying, "There is coming a day--and you can dare to step into it now--when swords are beaten into plowshares, and spears into pruning hooks." The living God keeps saying, "There is a life of peace and wholeness, a life beyond being ruled by fear, on the other side of swords and spears and missiles and rifles. There is a way to live with one another the way I intended all along." The same living God keeps interrupting our war lessons to our children and saying, "You do not have to see yourself as more important than everyone else on my green earth. And you do not have to be threatened or afraid that I love your neighbor as much as I love you. You do not have to feel insecure that they can have their own life under their own vines and fig trees while you have yours. You do not need to be ruled by fear any longer."

If we are honest, there is much inside us that doesn't want to listen to such words from the prophets, because we cannot imagine how a world that isn't driven by such violence and fear would work. But here is good news on this day: God doesn't stop speaking what we need to hear.

There is a good life beyond our bloodthirsty self-centeredness, beyond our swords and spears and everything else. And God invites us on this day to be a part of letting it begin among us now.

Lord God, pull us into your future, beyond our self-centered indifference.