rainbow

One of the great joys of my life at this point is watching Dawn read Bible stories to the grandkids. Somehow that simple thing shows me the covenant more than any other experience I’ve had. This woman who committed herself to God and then later to me is more than just the biological matriarch of our little clan. She’s also the spiritual mother who shows in her every-day faithfulness to God and us what can be done by those who live in God’s will.

I’m also able to see with my five decades of perspective that all of those Bible stories are the same story, and the Bible is really one story. So it seems entirely appropriate this morning to read about Noah as part of Advent devotions. In fact, I now wonder why I’ve never seen a rainbow Christmas ornament.

Look at this from Genesis 9:12-13: “And God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.’”

That echoes for me God’s promise in the Garden and through all of time to send a savior. The destruction that I deserve for my sin is the same as the godless people of Noah’s day, the ones destroyed by the flood. On that occasion, all creation paid the price. Later on, God himself, the God-man Jesus, would pay my price. 

God promised Noah that from this point there would always be life, always be hope. He marked that promise with a rainbow. 

It’s kind of sad that these days the rainbow means something so different in our society; it has been coopted by a movement that denies and defies God’s created order for sex. Yet even in that there seems to me a message of hope. My own sin is no less offensive to God, yet his sign of the rainbow is for me. 

Maybe rainbow Christmas ornaments are bad idea, but maybe they aren’t. God’s promise of covenant to Noah is no different than his covenant with Abraham and curse on the serpent and all his promises to his people through all of time: No matter how bad your sin, there will be a way out. The rescuer is coming. Watch and wait.

on our side

I watched an interview with a famous actor recently who is an atheist. His basis for rejecting the possibility of a God is that to him the world looks like no one cares. He sees pain and evil as proof that there couldn’t possibly be a God who is love. My reaction is to imagine a world where God actually didn’t care, and to think how much different things would be. My life experience is full of times when God’s love was evident.

I thought of that man again this morning as I read my devotions, because Psalm 124 raises that same question. The first four verses of that Psalm go like this: “If the Lord had not been on our side— let Israel say— if the Lord had not been on our side when people attacked us, they would have swallowed us alive when their anger flared against us; the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the raging waters would have swept us away.”

It seems an odd Psalm to associate with Advent, but I think the main question is quite relevant: What if God hadn’t been on our side? What if he decided to wash his hands of us? What if he opted out of the struggle we have with Satan and unbelievers and left the world to do to us whatever it wishes? Or worse yet, if he abandoned me to my sin?

The reference to raging waters of course immediately brings to mind Noah, and how God’s people were miraculously saved during the flood. That story reveals God to us as a God who saves, a God who would never leave us or forsake us. Our God goes to extreme lengths to restore us to him. 

If the Lord had not been on our side, he certainly would never have sacrificed his son. But God is on our side, so he called his people and led them, and fought for them against the corruption of sin and the attacks of sinners. And he promised a Savior, and urged the people to watch and wait. One day the rescue would be complete. 

So I watch, and I wait. As it should, it all gets jumbled in my head. Christmas is coming, the Savior has come, Jesus will come again. I and so many others take this annual walk in the sandals of God’s people who lived before the first Christmas because nothing else grounds us in our true hope like this story that begins with a manger and some shepherds and a virgin birth. 

What if God hadn’t been on our side? The flood would wash over me, every day, and then finally when I die. Hope would have left the same day Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden. But Hallelujah, the promised Savior comes.

watching

I wonder if I would do any better than the Pharisees and Saducees when it comes to being ready for Jesus to come. They pretty much blew it; they weren’t looking for Jesus, despite the prophesies, and when told by the Magi that he had been born, they didn’t bother to look for him themselves. 

Other than Jesus’ statement that he will return, I don’t have the helpful indicators of prophesy to help me. In fact, Jesus says I should expect to be taken by surprise:  “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.

“Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.” Matt 24:36-42.

In defense of the Jewish religious leaders, the prophets had been silent for four centuries. It would have been easy to grow complacent, to move from wondering if he would ever come to that place where you just really don’t think it will happen any more. With a few minor exceptions, it seems most of the Jews felt that way.

On the other hand, even with scripture to remind me and faithful pastors to call me to be attentive, it would be easy for me to start thinking the same way. After all, Jesus last spoke on the subject a couple of centuries ago. What would make me think that his thief-in-the-night return is coming in my lifetime?

So if Jesus does come soon, will I do any better than the Pharisees and Saducees did at that first Advent? I want to; it would be worth taking some time to think about what might have to change to make that true.

beginning

Once Thanksgiving is past, we move to Advent. We start looking toward Christmas, and that often involves looking back into the Old Testament. I was reminded this morning that the entire Bible is the story of Jesus, so in a way it’s all about Christmas.

So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock

and all wild animals!

You will crawl on your belly

and you will eat dust

all the days of your life.

And I will put enmity

between you and the woman,

and between your offspring and hers;

he will crush your head,

and you will strike his heel.” Genesis 3:14-15

This is where it  really starts. The moment God realized Adam and Eve had made that original bad choice, he started to make it right. They chose evil and corruption; they listened to that first lie from the Father of Lies, and as a result their relationship with God was fractured and their souls were in jeopardy. And all descendants of Adam and Eve, including me, from that moment were born with a bent toward sin.

But God was determined from the very start to redeem his people. The first prophesy of the Messiah came from God himself, in the Garden of Eden, at that moment when original sin was revealed. Everything else in scripture was the detail of how God’s plan was worked out.

All of history from that moment was about the enmity between the offspring of Eve and of the serpent. All the wars, all the poems and paintings, all the yearning and searching and exploring, all of the scientific inquiry relates to this cataclysmic struggle, this realization that we’ve been banished, this longing to find our way home. And opposed to that is Satan and everyone he can pervert to his cause of destroying God’s goodness wherever they find it.

But the offspring of the woman would one day crush the serpent’s head. And that hero, our Messiah, would be born at Christmas. One day I’ll live eternally the glory of that historical fact; until then, I look forward longingly toward Jesus’ second coming just as the Jews did for the first.

God with us

This morning I finished my annual read-through of the Bible. I try to wrap up by Thanksgiving because reading Revelation during the Christmas season seems a little odd. But this morning, I decided that the end of Revelation is an awesome transition into Advent.

Take this excerpt from Revelation 21:1-4, for example: “Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death” or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’”

God with us – Immanuel – is the name of my church. It’s one of the names by which Jesus is prophesied in the Old Testament. And here, in this vision of heaven, is the key fact that what makes it heaven is that God dwells with his people. 

This is the basic promise of Christmas – that after centuries of separation from God, begun with the original sin in the Garden of Eden – we will once again be re-united with God. That chasm created by our waywardness, bridgeable only by our blood, has been spanned, or better yet, filled in by the cross. God walked with Adam and Eve in the garden, and he will be with us again in the new heaven and new earth. 

In the words of the children’s bible we read to our grandkids, this is the start of God’s great rescue plan. We enter the Advent season, pointing us toward Christmas. God with us, the promise, became reality – that’s what we commemorate. We live that reality in part now, with free access to an ever-present God and the constant companionship of the Holy Spirit – that’s the outcome of Christmas. And all of it is a foreshadowing of what awaits us in the new Jerusalem. 

No more death or crying or pain. God dwelling among us. The amazing ending to the greatest story ever told – our story.

thankful

It’s Thanksgiving – happy Thanksgiving, everyone! By now I’m sure your kids have brought home their pilgrim crafts, and the turkey is on its way to the oven, if not there already. 

This year, I’m having a little trouble with the holiday. I’m discouraged that for so many, it’s a day of food and football. A lot of people won’t make it to church today, and devotions won’t be a prominent part of many meals. In fact, an informal poll I took at work showed that the most common thing people are thankful for is a long weekend. What happened to being thankful for a job?

I’m so well off that sometimes I forget to be thankful. But today, tinged with a feeling of sadness for the secular way most of the country observes the holiday, I feel profoundly grateful.

I’m spending my first Thanksgiving in a brand new house, something I never thought I’d own. Together, my high-school sweetheart and I are making it a home, the fifth in our 34 years of marriage. 

She and I will go to church in a while - she plans worship and plays piano, and I’m going to help lead. I know it will be a wonderful service. My best friends will be there, as well as my mom and dad and my daughter and her family.

Then I’m going to spend today with family, people I love one and all, and even though we probably voted for at least three different candidates we won’t care enough to talk about it. The fellowship is going to be as great as the food. 

These are blessings I’ll enjoy today, but they’re part of my life always, along with good health, a great job, and peaceful community, and material wealth. But the greatest blessing of all is the one I read about this morning, in Revelation 20:11-12 “Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life.”

So I just want to take a moment and say, “Thank you, Jesus, for writing the book of life and putting my name in it. That would have been more than enough, but thank you too for all these amazing things in this awesome life I have.” Amen.

lady

Once, years ago at a business seminar, I heard a speaker talk about how he achieved exemplary service at the hotel chain he worked with. He explained that all of the staff, from the managers to the maids, were rigorously trained in one key concept: “We’re ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” That was a powerful idea for people not used to being seen in those terms. It implied a level of behavior that came to define the entire chain of hotels.

I thought of that this morning as I read from 2 John. John starts his second letter this way, in chapter  1 verses 1-3 “To the lady chosen by God and to her children, whom I love in the truth—and not I only, but also all who know the truth— because of the truth, which lives in us and will be with us forever: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son, will be with us in truth and love.”

I love it that John addresses the church as “the lady.” If that’s who we are, we should act like it.

Ladies are well-mannered and gracious, even with – especially with – those who can do nothing for them. Ladies are modest. They are a model of appropriate deportment, in dress, appearance, and conduct, in all situations. 

One of the defining characteristics of a lady is that she welcomes everyone, is kind to everyone, and therefore is admired by everyone.

Today I’m thinking of the great ladies I’ve known, and seeing in them a model for the church. I think that captures what is meant by doing things appropriately, and with good order. If we’re a lady, let’s act like it.