Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of a new Christian
year. The four-week spiritual journey toward Christmas has already been
preceded on the secular front by Christmas advertisements (some
appearing before Halloween!), TV commercials with Christmas carols as
background music, and of the course the annual paean to unmitigated
consumerism, Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. It's a new
Christian year, but how much is really new? The Great Recession slogs
on toward its fifth year, and though big investment banks and Wall
Street have recovered nicely, unemployment still hovers around nine
percent, several European countries teeter on the precipice of economic
default, and the U.S. housing market continues to be set on an unstable
foundation. In the past the federal government and ordinary consumers
have been able to spend themselves out of recession, but there is
something particularly intransigent about the Great Recession, by far
the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression. How can
we escape this economic morass we've created for ourselves? How can the
unemployed, the poor, and the ever-growing population of homeless cope
with the despair that is only highlighted at this time of the year in
contrast to the mercantile message that pervades the airwaves? "O that
you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains
would quake at your presence!" begs the prophet in today's reading from
the book of Isaiah. Set in the early Second Temple Period, the last
eleven chapters of Isaiah portray the hopes and desires of a people who
had been delivered from the grip of the Babylonian Empire and allowed to
return to their ancestral homeland, only to discover that life there was
hard, and their dreams of a life of ease led by a descendant of David
were blunted by the harsh Persian bureaucracy of the Achaemenid Empire.
In the face of this reality, many Jews began to believe that their only
hope lay in an apocalyptic intervention of God into history, a Deus
ex machina on a grand scale, a sentiment shared by many Christians
today. Such an intervention, however, was not in the cards for the
Second Temple Period Jews, nor is it likely for modern Christians. Hope
lies elsewhere. After entreating God for a spectacular intervention,
the prophet falls back on a more realistic and, in the long term,
effective source of hope: the expectation that God continues to walk
alongside them, guiding them and molding them as a potter molds the
clay. The acknowledgment that "we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand" contains a seed of hope that promises
much more fruit that a single, dramatic intrusion into the world ever
could, for it reminds people of faith that life is a gift to be lived in
the presence of a God who never abandons us, not in times of plenty, not
in times of despair, and not in times of seemingly endless plodding
along the path that lies before us.
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19 (first published 27 November 2005)
Recent advances in cloning technology, coupled with new techniques for
extracting DNA from specimens thousands or even millions of years old, may
one day call into question the permanency of extinction, as least in the
case of some species. We probably won't be seeing quaggas, dodos,
passenger pigeons, thylacines, or other recently exterminated animals in
zoos or in the wild anytime soon, however, and it is very unlikely that
we'll ever see mastodons, giant ground sloths, or brachiosauruses. One of
the main problems is that DNA degrades over time, even when it is stored
in circumstances that are most favorable for preservation. I hope some
day to see a living dodo or quagga, but if scientists are able to
reproduce them, they'll just be the exception that proves the rule:
extinction is forever. When the northern kingdom of Israel fell to the
Assyrians in 722 B.C.E., faithful worshipers of Yahweh asked themselves
whether the nation could endure. As years gave way to decades, lasting
more than a century, the descendants of those who remained behind in
Israel despaired of ever seeing their relatives who had been taken into
exile. Furthermore, the likelihood of ever being reconstituted as a state
grew ever more remote, until finally the hope died, and the Northern
Kingdom really did become extinct. That's not to say that many
descendants of the northern tribes didn't survive in the land. Still
others survived by fleeing south to Judah, taking along their history,
their songs, their theology, and their hopes. Psalm 80 is a psalm that
was probably written about the time of Israel's fall to the Assyrians.
The psalmist's references to the nation as Israel and Joseph and to the
tribes of Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh clearly indicate the northern
origin of this psalm, one of a few such psalms preserved in the Psalter.
The cry of the psalmist is poignant: "Restore us, O God; let your face
shine, that we may be saved." This refrain is repeated three times in the
psalm, each time with a slightly more elaborate attribution to God.
Assuming that many of the references to "God" originally said "Yahweh" (as
is true of the other psalms in the "Elohistic Psalter," Psalms 42-83), the
progression is as follows: "Yahweh" (v. 3), "Yahweh of hosts" (v. 7),
"Yahweh God of hosts" (v. 19). The progression in titles may have been
introduced for purely stylistic reasons, or it may indicate an
increasingly desperate tone in the psalmist's plea, particularly as the
final refrain is delayed by so much intervening material. The psalm's
final cry is for God to recognize the vine that God transplanted from
Egypt and for God to have special regard for "the one at your right hand,
the one whom you made strong for yourself." "The one at your right hand"
is undoubtedly a reference to the king (cf. Psalm 110:1), but it is also a play on the name
Benjamin, which means "the son of the right hand." Perhaps this reference
is a wistful reminder of Saul, Israel's first king, who was regarded with
much greater affection in the north than in the south. If God will only
restore the nation, the psalmist says, "Then we will never turn back from
you; give us life, and we will call on your name." This is the same
promise that we make God today: give us life, and we will call on your
name. We don't always live up to our promise, not by a long shot, but
it's good to remember that we have made the promise. Advent is the
commencement of the church year, a time of new beginnings, new promises,
new commitments to God and to our fellow human beings. Let's commit
ourselves to lives of calling on God's name, of speaking God's name, and
especially of living God's name, not waiting until calamity strikes and we
find ourselves, our nation, and our way of life on the verge of
extinction.
1 Corinthians 1:3-9 (first published 27 November 2005)
I've belonged to several different churches over the years, and I'm
familiar with many others. Each church has a different set of talents and
gifts, and each is involved in a different set of ministries.
Interestingly, the churches that have the most potential to draw on are
not necessarily the ones that have the largest number and variety of
ministries. I've seen small churches that reached out to their
communities in many different ways, and I've seen large churches that did
very little to reach their communities. I've seen churches whose ministry
portfolio was varied and healthy, and I've seen churches whose ministry
focus was quite narrow and, to my mind, unhealthy. When Paul writes to
the church in Corinth, he tells them that they are not lacking in any
spiritual gift. Later in the letter he discusses various spiritual gifts
and their use and abuse. Some people take Paul's list of spiritual gifts
in 1 Corinthians--sometimes augmented by similar lists in Romans and
Ephesians--as exhaustive, but I think the lists were meant to be
representative rather than exhaustive. For example, the gift of using
music in ministry is not mentioned in any of them, and I have definitely
known people who used music to minister to others. The same goes for
gifts that involve drama and other artistic expressions, construction, and
counseling, just to name a few. When Paul says that the Corinthian church
is not lacking any spiritual gifts, I think what he means is that they
have sufficient quantity and variety to minister effectively in their
city. I think the same can be said of every church that wants to make a
difference in their community and in the world as a whole. God will bring
the people and the gifts to any church that is willing to put the gospel
into practice. Too many churches use lack of financial resources as an
excuse not to do ministry, but many ministries require little or no money.
I was once a member of a church that had the opportunity to start a new
ministry, but they had just paid off their mortgage, and a majority of
members were unwilling to commit themselves financially to a new venture.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the church died not too many years later, only
to be revived by a new group of people who actually had a vision for their
community. Whether your church is large or small; urban, suburban, or
rural; rich or poor; God has called you to live out the gospel among your
neighbors, in your city, and in the world. God has also gifted your
people to minister effectively, and more people with additional gifts will
come to be involved in your church as you start new ministries and improve
the ministries you already have. Your building, finances, and history may
be great resources for ministry, but your greatest asset, the source of
your ability to minister, is your people. Use them wisely.
Mark 13:24-37 (first published 27 November 2005)
I've always been amused by those Christians who claim to have special insight into end time prophecy. It's not just professional eschatologists, either. A friend of mine a couple of weeks ago told a story about teaching the book of Revelation in his church. As he introduced the subject, he informed his congregation that several different approaches to the subject of eschatology in general and to the book of Revelation in particular were possible and that a wide variety of opinions existed concerning the sequence of events leading up to the end of the world, according to biblical prophecy. After the session, a man approached him and said, "Preacher, if you have trouble understanding the end times, just let me know, and I'll explain the subject to you. It's all here in my Scofield Reference Bible, with charts and everything." What this person didn't know is that the Premillennial Dispensationalism that the Scofield Reference Bible advocates is a fairly modern invention, originating with John Darby in the early 19th century. It was popularized by Scofield, whose introduction and especially footnotes in his edition of the King James Version proved immensely influential among many Christians who made little or no distinction between the authority of the text of scripture and the notes. Dispensationalism became a mainstream phenomenon with Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970 and, more recently, with Tim LaHaye's Left Behind book series. Despite the current popularity of this eschatological system, it has made little headway among non-evangelical scholars (many evangelicals reject it as well). One problem relates to its idiosyncratic reading of today's gospel reading from Mark. Jesus tells his followers, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place." Since the Second Coming obviously didn't occur in the first century, dispensationalists, contorting the passage to fit their eschatological scheme, interpret "this generation" as referring to some future generation during whose lifetime all the events described in Mark 13 will occur. This reading ignores the clear meaning of the passage, that the generation contemporary with Jesus would observe these events. The fact that the three Synoptic Gospels all include a version of this verse suggests that the evangelists--or at least Matthew and Luke, whose gospels were written toward the end of the first century (Mark is variously dated between 65 and 75)--saw the fulfillment of Jesus' words in the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 C.E. and the chaos surrounding that event (Jewish ostracism of Christians and the First Jewish Revolt against Rome). If this interpretation of "this generation" was good enough for the evangelists, it should be good enough for contemporary Christians as well. I find particularly amusing the attempts of various modern interpreters to locate the Second Coming definitively within the present generation, if not to a specific date. Although I'm amused that these interpreters think they understand the future better than Jesus did (cf. v. 32), I'm alarmed that so many laypeople buy into it. Clearly scholars and churches are doing a poor job of producing biblically literate congregants. The primary application of this passage for the present generation is not the arbitrary linking of current events with biblical prophecy but the final words of Jesus in this section: "Keep awake." Be aware of world events and their root causes. Don't rejoice in wars and rumors of wars because you think it signals the beginning of the end, but work toward making peace between enemies. Above all, look for ways in which God is working in the modern world, and get involved in that work.