Advent Reflection 2015: Week Three

[John] said,
“I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,
‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’”
as the prophet Isaiah said.

Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. They asked him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?” John answered them, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.”

“ I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’” (John 1:23-27, 33)


John the Baptizer committed the ultimate heresy: Telling the power brokers of the dominant culture something that they didn’t already believe.

This kind of behavior is what got both John and Jesus in trouble with the local religious leaders. John’s call to repentance seemed to bother them, not necessarily because they didn’t appreciate the idea, but because John lacked adequate credentials. If he wasn’t the Messiah or Elijah or “the prophet,” then what was he doing in his ragged garments and crazy hair telling people to turn their lives back to God before it was too late?

But John knew who he was and who had authorized him to do what he was doing. More importantly, he knew who he wasn’t. He wasn’t the Messiah. He wasn’t the one long awaited by Israel to renew their destiny as the people of God. In the meantime, John served as sign and wonder, pointing through his actions toward a new and better thing that was to come. He drenched people with common river water in the act of baptism; someone was coming, he claimed, who would drench people’s lives with the very spirit of God.

In this Advent season, as we consider and reconsider the coming of Jesus, it might be good to reflect on how our lives are also intended to be sign and wonder for the sake of the world. In all that we do as followers of Jesus—gather together for worship, care for the poor, pray for the sick and hurting, work for justice in the world—we give evidence to Jesus’ claim that the kingdom of God is near (Mark 1:15).

Forty or so years after John’s death, the Roman army wiped out Jerusalem, destroying the city and its center of worship. John’s ministry pointed to something better that was to come, and still the world carried on in its self-destructive cycles. John was not about altering that inevitability.

Perhaps, in a similar way, followers of Jesus may not be able to divert the disastrous course of the world, but our lives—both individually and corporately—should serve as sign and wonder, pointing to God’s intentions for a new heaven and a new earth, one in which his justice, healing, and peace will be established.

Mother's Day and the Evisceration of Meaning

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day. You can learn all about this special day by going into any number of gift shops and see that it’s all about loving and grateful sentiments toward our moms. It’s a day to give our mothers (and wives, and daughters, and sisters, and so on) a break from their routines and show them that they are special.

Yes, that is exactly what Mother’s Day is about. Except it’s not. Not really.

Sure, we’ve made it that way. But at it’s inception, Mother’s Day had nothing to do with sentiment. It was not about expensive cards and flowers and days off and special church services that honored The Mother of the Year.

Mother’s Day began as a social activism movement. It was a social activism movement led by mothers.

A woman named Ann Jarvis, whose father was a Methodist minister, organized mothers in the mid-1800s in West Virginia to work toward improving sanitary conditions in their local communities where diseases like tuberculosis were common. When the American Civil War broke out, Ann encouraged her mothers groups to declare neutrality, and they committed themselves to bringing care to sick and wounded soldiers from both sides. After the war, her groups reached out to mothers from both the north and south, helping them to put aside old animosities and heal the deep wounds from the war.

In 1870 a woman named Julia Ward Howe, inspired by Jarvis’s work, wrote a proclamation calling on mothers throughout the US to demand an end to all war. Mothers had long tired of giving up their children to bloody battlefields, and Howe’s influence spread to groups in 20 different cities before dissipating due to lack of financial support.

By the early 20th century, Mother’s Day became a recognized holiday through the efforts of Jarvis’s daughter, Anna. Soon however, it lost its original purpose and became highly commercialized and sentimentalized. Anna spent the rest of her life attempting to fight that trend, and was even arrested in 1948 for staging a protest against the now-culturally-sanitized Mother’s Day.

Anna, of course, lost that fight, and we lost the real power of Mother’s Day, just like we’ve lost the real power of things like Christmas, Easter, and virtually all the seasons of the Church year. It’s tragic how the overall cultural acceptance of important celebrations and remembrances often result in commercialization, sanitization, and the evisceration of meaning. And we—followers of Jesus, who ought to know better—often join in.

Sure, I’ll call my mother tomorrow and wish her a happy Mother’s Day. But I’m not buying a card or flowers or anything like that. I think, instead, that I’ll get her some blank signboards, a few marking pens, and maybe even a bullhorn, and encourage her to go out and protest against something like war or poverty. No police officer would have the courage to go toe-to-toe with my mom. She could reduce any burly cop to tears in about three seconds.

Of course, I do run the risk of having her protest that it’s Mother’s Day, and all she got was my lousy phone call.



Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Jarvis; http://www.wvculture.org/history/jarvis.html; http://www.momsrising.org/blog/the-feminist-anti-war-roots-of-mothers-day/

The Preposition of Hope

The seasons of Advent and Christmas create environments of joy, celebration, and anticipation for many people. In churches we light candles that symbolize different aspects of the nativity story and sing about the arrival of the child who will change everything. It can be a warm, wonderful, time of the year.

But it won’t be that way for many families in Newtown, Connecticut. Religious or not, the month of December will never be the same for them. Not ever.

Within short order we’ve been offered reasons for this horrible tragedy: Lousy gun control laws, say some. The removal of prayer from public schools, say others. One has to marvel at the swiftness of the conclusions drawn that bring such certainty to a place where deep, fathomless grief is the only real and present experience.

And we, who follow Jesus, have the audacity in this season to announce,

“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.” (Matthew 1:23)

God is with us. What an odd thing to consider when a young man, barely out of his teens, guns down twenty-two first graders and six adults in one tragic day. What an outrageous thing to declare when people inevitably ask why God didn’t stop the gunman in the first place. What a potentially empty thing to say when people immersed in grief feel as though they have been dropped into a black hole of pain.

But we still say it and we still believe it. God is with us.

There is something unnerving about the idea that God would enter into the reality, grittiness, and danger of human existence and experience it from start to finish. But we believe that God has done exactly that in the person of Jesus, in whom

. . . all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell . . . (Colossians 1:19)

In Jesus, God entered into human birth, life, suffering, and death—the whole range of human existence. And he remains with us, alongside us, in all aspects of life and death.

I have no answers to the question of why? when it comes to tragedies like this. The apparent randomness of evil and suffering might conjure up multiple speculations, but in the end the adverb why truly remains unanswered. It is only the preposition with that can help us.

I believe that God is with us. And I still grieve.