Through the Fire

So how are we doing one week into the season? Are you feeling the magic? Or are you a stressed-out wreck? Are you finding space and time to observe the small things and to appreciate God’s presence in them? Or is it already feeling like a mad dash to the December 25^th finish line? Is it beginning to look a lot like Christmas? Or do you feel like Grandma just got run over by a reindeer?

If you’re like me it’s a little bit of both. I’m still reading Gerard Manley Hopkins every day and he’s helping me slow down and see God everywhere. We’ve got the Advent candles out at home and the Christmas music is playing. But I’m still a little overwhelmed sometimes.

I think it’s starting to show, too. Twice recently I have been working out at the Y in the high school with Matthew Henry, who has been a great personal trainer for me. Sadistic at times, but great. And once I walked out with somebody else’s glasses. Then a second time I had someone else’s workout book and another person’s keys. I wasn’t stealing these things – it’s just the way my brain is working these days. Overload.

So I’m not here today to try to deepen your anxiety about the season or to chastise you for failing to ‘do Christmas right.’ I’m here today for the same reason that you are – to try to keep ourselves listening for a word from God. We are waiting, like a Navy spouse for a returning ship, like a migratory bird for the unseen signal that tells them to fly north once more. We are waiting for Jesus in Advent and for God’s sake we want to do it right.

I began to get a little worried about Advent when I watched the tail end of the Macy’s parade in New York City on Thanksgiving morning. It was great to see the bands and the giant balloons and the floats. I like the parade. But the thing that really caught my eye was on the side of the main Macy’s department store where the parade ends at 34^th Street. In bright Christmas lights was one word – “Believe.”

It’s the Macy’s slogan this year and you see it in their advertising. They are inviting us to believe – but they are not saying in what. They leave that for us to fill in.

I went to the website to try to find out what they mean by “Believe.” There was a Believe meter at the top of the page and it had four words with a little needle to indicate where we are in our belief. At the low end it says “Imagine.” And then it moves up in degrees to “Wish,” “Dream,” and finally “Believe.”

The company released a statement about the campaign and they said, “'Believe' is the articulation of everything we treasure about the holiday season and is an authentic celebration of the Christmas spirit. We felt strongly that this year it was important to remember and embrace the real sentiment of the season. We'd like to inspire all of America to believe."[i] And I keep wanting to say…in what?

It’s not their job to say what, of course. They are a national store chain serving a very diverse group of Americans. I’m not expecting them to start holding candlelight communion services in the toy aisles. But the simple word leaves me wanting more.

So how are we helping the world around us to see a savior worth believing in? What sort of messengers are we?

Our scripture readings for today lift up the role of the messenger who was to come before the Messiah. The Old Testament prophet Malachi talks about the messenger who will come to clear the way for God. But it’s not going to be a comfortable experience. Malachi says of the messenger, “Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and the lye of the launderer. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.”

In other words, God’s advent into the world, God’s coming among us, is going to go against the grain of our expectations. God is going to straighten things out. God is going to restore the religious practices to what they should be. But it’s going to require us to change, to be transformed. To get ourselves aligned with God’s new reign will be like being washed with lye soap or purified like the fire that separates pure silver from the surrounding dross.

The passage from Luke confirms this. In introducing John the Baptizer, the one who came to prepare the way for Jesus, Luke goes back to the prophecies of Isaiah. Isaiah was talking to the people of Israel who had been taken off into exile and who were living in oppression far from their homeland in Babylon.

“A new day is coming,” Isaiah said, “when God will make a path through the desert to take God’s people home. The way things are now will be turned upside down.”

John the Baptizer had a similar message. Speaking to his people in a new day he saw that things were not the way they were supposed to be. The historical setting at the beginning of this passage tells us that things weren’t right. A Roman governor was sitting on the high places in the south. In the north there were corrupt Jewish kings. The high priesthood, which was supposed to be help by one leader, was held by Annas and Caiphas who will play a big role in Jesus’ crucifixion. But after listing all these rulers, where does Luke focus our attention? On a man out in the desert wearing animal skins and eating locusts and wild honey. Because that’s who was telling the people to repent, to turn around, to seek forgiveness of their sins. Because God was coming.

You know one thing these passages tell me? They tell me that God is after a whole lot more than just me. God wants to change me, but God is going to change the world. God loves the world and wants to see it transformed. God would like me to go along for the ride, but it’s not just about me. Slaves will be set free. The blind will be able to see. The poor will have good news preached to them. And those who are oppressed will see their liberation. God is doing all these things and wants us to join in what God is doing.

It reminds me of the story of Esther. Do you remember this story? Esther has become the queen, the wife of the Persian king, and an order has gone out from the palace that all the Jews should be killed. So Esther’s uncle Mordecai comes and tells her, “Do not think that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter…Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this [Esther 4:13-14, NRSV]. Mordecai tells her that God is going to deliver the people. The question for Esther is whether she will use the position she has to cooperate with God, painful as that might be for her, or whether she will let this moment pass by without participating.

So what would it mean if we took this opportunity to be participants with God in the new day coming? What would it mean if our identity as Christians was not something that we took for granted but something that led us to doing something different in this world? What if we found ways to give of ourselves and our resources in touching the people of our community who are truly suffering? What if we changed our Christmas spending so that we didn’t feel compelled to give presents beyond our means?

What if we invited our friends and neighbors to experience the story of Christmas with us by inviting them to church or to Wednesday night or an Advent gathering? It’s a risk, I know. We have to risk being open about what we care about and believe. We have to risk that by announcing our faith others might start to think of us as one of those kind of people. But if God is truly changing the world, wouldn’t it be a shame if they and we didn’t respond somehow?

What if we searched our hearts to see those places that still need to be burned by the refiner’s fire? Where are those places that still need to be given over to God? What is keeping us from experiencing the fullness of God’s love for us and for the world? That’s what needs to be burned away.

We’re going to have some failures along the way. It’s inevitable. But I’m learning not to be afraid of failure. In my physical training sometimes Matthew will have me do an exercise to the point of failure. But every time I stretch and utilize those muscles until they can’t do that particular motion any more – every failure leads to a stronger muscle. If we are not stretching ourselves in following Jesus, then we won’t be prepared to see him, to greet him, to know him in his advent here.

Some of my Methodist clergy colleagues in northern Virginia have been having a series of discussions they are calling holy conferencing. This week I noticed they are having a conversation on the emerging church – a loose term for new expressions of church in our day. In their promo for the meeting they quoted Leonard Sweet, who is a provocative writer about the church. Sweet looks over the landscape of troubled churches and says, “God is not so much dechurching Christianity as re-Christianizing the church. The crisis of the church today has little to do with dwindling number, aging congregations, outdated facilities, financial crises, and lace-by-day/ leather-by-night priests. Today’s church crisis stems from one thing: Jesus Deficit Disorder. The church’s narrative is biblically, theologically, and spiritually bankrupt. The church has been busy telling stories other than God’s story, dreaming other dreams than God’s dream as revealed by Jesus.”[ii]

What if we have been too captivated by the circus in the city, the madness at the mall, and have forgotten to tell our story – the story that God is changing the world and wants us to be a part of it? Christmas is coming. Do you feel the burn? It’s the sign of something new about to be born. Thanks be to God.

Malachi 3:1-4

“Look, I am sending my messenger who will clear the way before me. And suddenly Adonai will come to his temple, the one whom you seek; and the messenger of the covenant, in whom you delight, will surely come,” says Yahweh, Lord of Hosts.

But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and the lye of the launderer. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. He will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to Yahweh as in the days of old and as in former years.

Luke 3:1-6

In the fifteenth year of the reign of the Caesar Tiberius, during the reign of Pontius Pilate over Judea, and when Herod was tetrarch over Galilee and his brother Philip was tetrarch over Iturea and the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He came through all the area of the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance and remission of sins.

As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his path. Every valley will be filled and every hill and mountain leveled. Every crooked way will be straightened and rough places made into a level way. And all flesh will see the salvation of God."

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[i] Sarah Mahoney, “Macy’s ‘Believe’ Campaign Rings Truer than Ever,” MediaPost Publications, 3 Nov 2008, http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=94000.

[ii] Leonard Sweet, So Beautiful, [David C. Cook, 2009], p. 20.

8 Crazy Things Christians Do: Give

Last Monday I was standing next to a field near Sedley, Virginia. It was an ordinary looking field filled with corn stubble. My dad and his brother, my uncle Bill, were there, too, but they saw something different when they looked out at that corn stubble. Where I saw empty space, they saw an old house where they used to live.

It was back in the Depression when both of them were young boys. My dad said, “I remember the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls.” My uncle remembered the comics of the newspaper that was tacked up on the wall as primitive insulation. They both remembered how the snow would filter down into their bedrooms some nights through the slats in the ceiling so that they would wake up with a dusting like powdered sugar on their blanket.

They’d been telling stories like this all day. My uncle was up from Florida, where he lives, and we took the three of us took this opportunity to go on a tour of their boyhood homes. And there were a lot of them. Their father, my grandfather, was often sick. He had tuberculosis and eventually died when my dad was only 9 years old. So my grandmother and the three boys she had spent most of the Depression and the 40s moving from place to place, sometimes staying with family members, sometimes with other friends, sometimes in small rental houses like the one out in that field where they would stay until they couldn’t afford to pay the rent and they moved on. My dad could count about sixteen different places they lived. He also talked about my grandmother walking seven miles one way to go to work, about picking cotton in the fields and milking cows at a dairy farm every day before school. You know these kinds of stories that older generations like to tell younger ones. “You kids have it easy! Back in the day we had to walk twelve miles to school in the snow and it was uphill both ways.” But I think in my dad’s case, it was actually true.

Here’s the amazing thing, though. Even as they were telling all these sad stories of hard times, they also were remembering it as the best times of their lives. We sat in one spot for about twenty minutes as they talked about friends they had known, playing Junior Commando in the woods and selling their dog to a neighbor family for a radio, only to have the family decide that they didn’t like the dog so they ended up with both the dog and the radio. They reckoned it had been the plan all along so that my grandmother wouldn’t have to feel she was getting charity.

What it confirmed for me was that it is possible to live with joy without much stuff. Happiness, as the Bible tells us, is not dependent on our things. “Riches do not last forever,” Proverbs says, “nor a crown for all generations” [Proverbs 27:24]. In fact if we lay up treasures for ourselves here and count ourselves wealthy because of it, Jesus warns, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment. “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,” he says, “where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” [Matthew 6:20-21].

I hope your heart wasn’t on Wall Street this week. The stories of the Great Depression were on my mind a lot this week as I watched the stock market plunge and commentators talked about a global economic crisis. Maybe you thought about it, too. It was a good reminder that the whole modern financial system is built, to a large degree, on trust. As long as banks are confident that customers will pay back their loans, they will extend credit. As long as banks are confident that other banks have good lending practices, they will lend to each other. As long as investors are confident that businesses have good potential to make profits, they will keep investing. But take that confidence away and the whole system looks like it is built on nothing more than smoke and mirrors. They tell us $2 trillion dollars in wealth vanished this week on Wall Street. Where did it go?

This leads to dire predictions. Global leaders are meeting in Washington to try anything they can do to restore trust in the markets. What hang in the balance are homes and businesses and jobs and retirement accounts. I picked a heck of a Sunday to talk about giving then, didn’t I?

We don’t know a whole lot about Malachi. In fact even the name Malachi is more of a title than a name. It means ‘my messenger’ and the book that bears this name seems to have been written at a time of great soul-searching for God’s people. They had returned to Jerusalem from exile and they had reestablished a semblance of the kingdom they once had, but they were under the thumb of the Persian Empire.

Some of the old problems the older prophets had complained about were starting to creep into their life, too. They were putting their trust in sorcery instead of God. They were committing adultery and bearing false witness against each other. They were mistreating their hired workers and not offering them the wages they had earned. They were ignoring the plight of the poor and they were shoving to the side the immigrant aliens in their midst. In general, they were once again wandering away from God.

But there was one more way that they were failing to live up to expectations and it was related to their other sins. God says to the people, “You are robbing me?” And the people say to God, “How are we robbing you?” God says, “You are not bringing in your full tithe to the storehouse.”

Now the tithe is a biblical standard for giving. It goes all the way back to Abraham the ancestor of all the Jews who was blessed by the king and priest Melchizedek when he came into the land God promised him. Abraham responded to the blessing by giving the priest a tenth of all he owned. His grandson Jacob, as he was establishing a holy site at Bethel, promised to give a tenth of all that he owned to God. The Israelite people were supposed to bring a tenth of all that they had to the priests and they were supposed to feast with them as recognition of how God had blessed them. Deuteronomy tells us that every third year the people were supposed to bring a tenth of all they had to the town and put it in a storehouse for the priests and widows and orphans and the aliens in their midst. It was one way for them to live out the justice that God was asking of them.

This tenth, or tithe, of all they had is a standard we see throughout the Bible. It was a way for the people to worship God with their ‘stuff’ – with their material goods. It was a way of saying, “Hey, God, I know that I have been blessed and I know that there are others who depend on this gift to experience your blessing, too. I know that all I have, including my life, is to be given to you, and this tithe is just the beginning of what I owe you.”

This is what God chastises the people for not giving. “You have robbed me,” God says. “Put me to the test. Bring the full tithe and see if I won’t open up the windows of heaven so that blessings won’t flow down on you. See if I don’t take care of you. See if you don’t have enough to eat. See if your crops don’t provide for your needs. See if I am not sufficient for you. Will you trust me?”

Now don’t get me wrong. This is not a prosperity gospel. There are preachers out there who will tell you that if you give extravagantly you will prosper beyond your wildest dreams. I saw a preacher on TV last night telling his listeners to give a seed of faith of $2400 and they would get a much larger financial reward. That kind of gospel is no gospel at all because it is not about God, it’s about you. If you are giving in order to be rewarded by God with financial blessing, then you are making God into an investment banker. Tithing is not about you and your financial success. Tithing is about God.

What God says here, though, is that there is blessing in giving. People who tithe routinely say that it is one of the most important spiritual disciplines they have taken on. Tithing creates space for God to do something new in our lives. Tithing connects us to those who benefit from the giving and gives us a stake in the work of God in the world. Tithing allows us to live a life trusting that God really is what we say God is – able…sufficient…trustworthy.

Bishop Robert Schnase, our United Methodist bishop in Missouri, has been writing a lot about the practices of fruitful congregations and one of the key practices is extravagant generosity. He writes:
Every sanctuary and chapel in which we have worshiped, every church organ that has lifted our spirits, every pew where we have sat, every communion rail where we have knelt, every hymnal from which we have sung, every praise band that has touched our hearts, every church classroom where we have gathered with our friends, every church kitchen that has prepared our meals, every church van that has taken us to camp, every church camp cabin where we have slept – all are the fruit of someone's Extravagant Generosity. We have been the recipients of grace upon grace. We are the heirs, the beneficiaries of those who came before us who were touched by the generosity of Christ enough to give graciously so that we could experience the truth of Christ for ourselves.[i]

This extravagant generosity makes no sense at all. It’s like that woman who takes an expensive jar of perfumed ointment and breaks it over Jesus’ head for no good reason except that it was the best gift that she could offer. It’s like that those crazy magi who traveled across the desert with gold, frankincense and myrrh and lay it at the feet of a baby for no good reason except it was the best gift they could offer. It’s like that man who gave himself up to be beaten and whipped and spit upon and nailed to a cross and who died for no good reason except that it was the best gift he could offer to show how much he loved you and me. Extravagant generosity.

When you get right down to it, we’re not very good with money. We don’t even understand how this meltdown happened and we struggle to know what will help to get us out of it. As for what we do with what we have, Dave Ramsey says, “We buy things we don't even need with money we don't even have to impress people we don't even know.”[ii] Isn’t that true? Surely there’s something better we can do with our money. Surely there’s something better we can do with our lives. Surely we can model in our lives the giving that Christ did in pouring out his life for the life of the world.

Last year at the Annual Conference, our annual gathering of United Methodists in Virginia, an amazing thing happened. On the last night of the conference there was a presentation on the “Nothing but Nets” campaign which we have entered into with the NBA. For $10 we can provide a mosquito net for children living in malaria-prone areas and the program works. Lives are saved. 10 bucks. So Martha Stokes, one of our Conference staff, reported that the Conference had raised $26,000 for mosquito nets and presented the bishop with a basketball to recognize the campaign. It was a good report.

Then something amazing happened. Mike Mayton, a pastor in the conference, stood up at a microphone and offered $50 for the basketball with the money to go to Nothing But Nets. Then the Cabinet got up and as a group all of our District Superintendents offered $100 each for the basketball. Then Jim Ullian, another pastor, got up with another bid. Kenneth Carder, a retired bishop offered $1000. Larry Tingle got up and pledged $3,000 from his church. Section 26 made a donation. Somebody said pass a bucket. The bishop offered kisses for donations. The northern Virginia churches pledged $6000. The Richmond District superintendent, Marc Brown, said, “We’re not going to let Northern Virginia outbid us, we pledge $10,000.” The Norfolk District pledged $15,000. Marc Brown upped the pledge for Richmond to $17,000. The bishop said, “I’m getting hot flashes.” By the end of the night we had raised $23,000 in cash and had $80,000 in pledges. Nobody knew what happened to the basketball. But $100,000 buys a lot of mosquito nets. And lives were saved. And I have never seen the annual conference so happy. Or the bishop.

It is a crazy thing to think about giving in a world like we live in. When the stock market crashes you just want to pull everything in and make sure that what we have doesn’t slip away. At least that’s what you do if you’re not paying attention to gospel. Because what the gospel says is, “Give.” Open your hands. Open your hearts. Trust that even when everything seems to slipping away, God is not going anywhere. Trust that Jesus Christ who was there for you yesterday is there today and will be there tomorrow. Trust that the Holy Spirit still blows through this tired land with a promise that we will have everything we need to be the people we were made to be.

Who knows what this week will bring? Who knows where the stock market will go? Who knows what the future holds? But we are not going any place that God’s people have not been before. And we can trust that God is in the future already preparing the way. So we are free to give. To be confident. To be loved. “Give and see what will happen,” God says. “See if I will not open the heavens and send down showers of blessings.” Bring it on. God’s bigger than Henry Paulson. God’s bigger than our fears. God is able. Thanks be to God.

Malachi 3:7-12 [NRSV]

Ever since the days of your ancestors you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the LORD of hosts.

But you say, "How shall we return?"

Will anyone rob God? Yet you are robbing me!

But you say, "How are we robbing you?"

In your tithes and offerings! You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me-- the whole nation of you! Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing. I will rebuke the locust for you, so that it will not destroy the produce of your soil; and your vine in the field shall not be barren, says the LORD of hosts. Then all nations will count you happy, for you will be a land of delight, says the LORD of hosts.

[i] Robert Schnase, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 2007), p. 116.
[ii] http://www.fcccanyon.com/pdf/102107.pdf.