Christmas Sunday 2008

I: — I played hockey for twelve seasons. I never weighed more than one hundred and fifty-five pounds. I regularly played against two hundred and ten pound gorillas who were as mean as a junk-yard dog. I survived the twelve seasons inasmuch as I always knew how to protect myself on the ice. I took to heart the advice which Ted “Scarface” Lindsay gave to Stan Mikita when Mikita moved from junior hockey to the NHL. Mikita, a smaller fellow, had voiced his fear that he wasn’t tough enough to play in the NHL. “Stan”, Lindsay said, “as long as the stick is in your hand you are as tough as anyone on the ice. Never drop your stick.”

Because I could always protect myself on the ice I was all the more surprised to learn, years later, that I couldn’t protect myself politically, institutionally. Politically I was as defenceless as a first-time skater standing on wobbly legs at centre ice: he’s unable even to get out of the way, never mind run down anyone else.

Subsequently I learned that not only could I not protect myself politically, institutionally, I couldn’t protect myself psychologically. I seemed to get bushwacked emotionally — or felt I got bushwacked — in a way that most people seemed to avoid, or at least disguise. I seemed unable either to avoid it or disguise it.

I concluded that I had to learn to protect myself. Detachment was to be my first piece of armour. “Be laid back”, I told myself over and over. “Be detached (by now it was a mantra); stay cool; keep your gut unhooked.” It all went exceedingly well, and I thought I was really progressing at remaking myself psychologically; it all went well, that is, for three hours. Then the phone rang. A forty-three year old woman had called me from Mississauga ’s Credit Valley Hospital out-patient department. She needed a ride from the hospital to work. Take a cab? She wanted to talk to me. She was riddled with tumours, skinny as a broom handle, and had just had her pain-killer dosage increased. Her skin-colour was a ghastly yellow-green-brown and she was struggling to keep upright a marriage that was close to capsizing. End of detachment. End of being laid back. Gut hooked all over again.

Then I recalled the words of Gerald May, MD. Gerald May is an American physician, now living in Washington , who has written much in the field of spiritual direction. (A spiritual director, different from a pastoral counsellor or a psychotherapist, is someone who helps individuals discern and assist the movement of God’s grace within them and God’s way for them.) Professionally Gerald May is a psychiatrist who served, at one time, with the United States Air Force in Viet Nam . In one of his many books May has written, “Some wisdom deep inside us knows it’s impossible to love safely; we either enter it undefended or not at all”. We can’t love safely; either we love defencelessly or we don’t love. Instantly I admitted to myself what I had known in my heart all along, despite my short-lived efforts at detachment and coolness: I admitted that a disciple of Jesus Christ whose preoccupation is survival is no disciple at all. Dr. May is correct. We can’t love safely.

Next I pondered the two lines from the poet, William Blake, which May quoted in his book, The Awakened Heart.

And we are put on earth a little space

That we might learn to bear the beams of love.

Gerald May says only three things about this quotation. We are to bear love in the three dictionary senses of “bear”. (i) We are to grow in our capacity to endure love’s beauty and love’s pain. (ii) We are to carry love and spread it around — “as children carry and spread measles and laughter”, he adds. (iii) We are to bring love to birth. When I read this I was so startled that I didn’t move. Slowly my mind spun out what it is to bear love in this three-fold sense.

II(i): — We must grow in our capacity to endure love’s beauty and love’s pain. Love’s beauty we understand. But love’s pain? Does love pain? Can it? Yes. And in my older age I have come to see that beauty brings with it its own pain.

When the Shepherd family was last in England we travelled into the Yorkshire moors. Everyone has some picture of the Yorkshire moors, thanks to the writings of the Yorkshire veterinarian, James Herriott. He hasn’t exaggerated. We Shepherds walked together upon the moors as the sun was setting. I shan’t attempt to describe it. Suffice it to say it was so beautiful as to leave us dumbfounded. The beauty was so exquisitely beautiful as to border on the surreal. In the next instant the beauty seemed so intense as to make us ache. The beauty surrounding us contrasted so very sharply with the unbeauty we find on so many fronts in life that this wordless beauty brought with it a peculiar kind of pain.

In the midst of the unlove which we find on so many fronts in life we are startled when we find ourselves loved with a love whose intensity is beautiful, to be sure, and whose beauty makes us ache. When we are loved not because we are useful to someone else, not because we are needed or convenient; when we are loved for our own sake, loved for love’s sake — this is when we learn what it is to endure the exquisite beauty and ache of love.

It’s easy to confuse love with other linkages. My adult daughters love me; they are also counting on an inheritance. My wife loves me; she is also legally bound to me. My mother loves me; she is also old and sick and has made me executor of her will and granted me power of attorney. What’s more, all of these people to whom I am related by blood or marriage would be considered nasty, deficient themselves, if they didn’t love me. At the same time, none of this means that they don’t love me for my sake, love me for love’s sake.

Still, there are circumstances where the love with which we are loved can only be love for our sake, love for love’s sake, because we aren’t linked in any way to those who love us. I marvel at the love with which I am loved when this or that person who loves me will never profit from my estate, never be the beneficiary of my life-insurance, never have any legal tie to me; when in fact there is no material advantage to loving me, no social advantage — no advantage of any kind in loving me. Yet they continue to pour upon me a love whose beauty is so beautiful as to make me ache. Not only is there no advantage accruing to them; there is every disadvantage. For I have embarrassed them in public on occasion. I have committed social gaffes in their presence that left them wishing (for a few minutes, anyway) that I was at someone else’s party. I have plunged them into emotional anguish just because they were so closely identified with me in my emotional anguish. And I have perplexed them as they stood speechless before my incomprehensible spasms of irrationality.

The longer I live the more amazed I am at all of this; which is to say, the longer I live the more I must grow in my capacity to endure love and not flee it, not find it so strange as to be foreign, not resist it inasmuch as I can’t control it, not allow its singularity to diminish its glory. The longer I live the more I must cherish it and grow in my capacity to endure it.

We must bear love in the sense of growing in our capacity to endure love’s beauty and love’s pain.

(ii) — In the second place we are to bear love in the sense of carrying love and spreading it. Surely we are to carry it and spread it chiefly unselfconsciously. I know, there are situations where we have to clench our teeth and resolve that contempt won’t consume our love. There are days when we have to fight the temptation to despise or hate as surely as our Lord fought assorted temptations in the wilderness. But we can’t be fighting all the time. We can’t have our teeth clenched and our resolve clothesline-taut all the time — or else we’d be grim, grim as death. We carry or spread love chiefly unselfconsciously.

Ever since Louis Pasteur published his discoveries we have known about the transmission of communicable diseases. Such diseases move throughout the human population by means of germs; invisible to the naked eye, but no less real for that. In a fallen world disease is naturally contagious. And in a fallen world contempt is naturally contagious too. No one has to be taught to despise others; left alone, humankind does it naturally in this, the era of the Fall. Then love can be spread only by an infusion of God’s Spirit. Only the Spirit (everywhere in scripture the Spirit is the effectual presence of God) can cause the love we pour out on others to do something besides run off them like rain slicking off an umbrella. Only the Spirit of God can cause love to stick to others, to penetrate, to swell, and to declare that love has brought forth its increase in someone (all of us) who is, in some measure, love-deprived.

The body’s immune system is a good thing. It keeps us from falling sick with scores of different diseases in the same day. Yet there is one place where the body’s immune system is counter-productive: when we need a heart-transplant. Here our immune system has to be overridden or we shall reject the one thing we need most.

We human beings have an immune system, as it were, of a different sort as well. It keeps us from being “suckered” by every last fad, notion, idea, ideology, ploy, scheme, deviousness. And yet there is one place where our beneficial immune system (it renders us rightly suspicious) must be overridden by the Spirit of God if we aren’t to reject love. Only God himself can do this. And this is precisely what he has promised to do. We shall leave him to do it, even as he leaves us to what we must do: bear love in the sense of carrying it, spreading it.

(iii): — We are to bear love, finally, in the sense of bringing it forth. Once again it’s the case that of ourselves we can’t. Just as we, of ourselves, can’t make our love for others adhere to them, so we can’t, of ourselves, quicken love in them, bring forth in them that love which is soon to be love from them. Of ourselves we can’t render someone else a loving person. Once again only God can; and once again he has promised to do this as he takes up and honours our unselfconscious commitment to people who find in our commitment to them what they have found nowhere else.

Gerald May once more, the psychiatrist whose work has meant so much to me: May was with the United States Air Force in Viet Nam where he worked in the psychiatric ward of a military hospital, then returned home where he worked in an American prison before moving on to a state psychiatric hospital. Working in these three venues occupied twenty years of his life. He says these twenty years were bleak, indescribably bleak. Every day he drove to work wondering what on earth he was doing, even what on earth he thought he was doing. For instance, every day he spoke with a woman, a patient in a state hospital, who never said a word. This patient not only said nothing; she appeared so vacant as not even to notice him when he was speaking to her. Still he didn’t ignore her (even though it’s difficult not to ignore someone who is utterly unresponsive) but always did his medical duty by her, changing medications and writing up charts, speaking to her every day, mute though she remained. This situation continued for six months. One day, in the course of the same hospital routine, he was fishing in his jacket pockets for a “light” when this unspeaking woman walked out of the room into the corridor and wordlessly, silently beckoned a nurse to her. “Dr. May needs matches for his pipe”, the psychotic woman said. Only God can bring love to birth; and God does precisely this as he takes up and honours the commitments we make to others.

III: — It is Christmas Sunday. Today we praise God for incarnating in the babe of Bethlehem that love which God is himself, for the Incarnation is the outer expression of the innermost heart of God.

Unquestionably the Incarnate One bore love in the threefold sense of “bear.” Jesus most certainly received love from others; he endured that love which is so exquisitely beautiful as to ache. When the adoring woman poured the costliest perfume on his feet he remarked, “She has done a beautiful thing to me…. she has anointed my body beforehand for burying.” (Mark 14:6,8) (There we have both love’s beauty and love’s pain.)

Just as certainly Jesus carried love, spread it, spread it with his crucified, spread-out arms. As the gospel writer attests: “Having loved his own who were in the world, Jesus loved them to the end.” (John 13:1)

And just as certainly Jesus brought love to birth. Matthew was a tax-collector who had “sold out” to Rome and now stood to gain financially by collaborating. Simon was a zealot, a terrorist who had vowed the assassination of every last collaborator he could safely stab. What kept these two men in the same apostolic band except the love which Jesus had brought to birth in both? What else kept Jews and Gentiles in the same congregation when Gentiles had always regarded Jews as anti-intellectual and inflexible, while Jews had always regarded Gentiles as bereft of God and shamelessly immoral? What else keeps any congregation in one fellowship?

You and I are to “bear the beams of love”, in the words of the poet, William Blake. We can bear love in the three-fold sense of enduring its beauty and its pain, carrying it and spreading it, and committing ourselves to those in whom God will bring it to birth; we can do this just because he whose birth we celebrate in this season has done it already and done it in us.

Then come, let us adore him, for he is Christ the Lord.

The Reverend Dr Victor Shepherd
Advent IV 21st December 2008
Church of St. Bride, Anglican Mississauga

The world is always looking both for good news and for great joy. The world also knows that there won’t be great joy unless there’s first good news. Everyone wants good news. Everyone is aware that newscasts are 90% bad news. “All we ever hear on TV or radio is bad news” people complain. “Why can’t we hear good news for a change?”

The answer isn’t hard to find. We live in a fallen world. The “prince” of this world, says Jesus (not king, to be sure, but certainly prince) is characteristically a liar and a killer. Omnipresent evil means that lethal falsification riddles everything. Sophistic savagery is always ready-to-hand. It’s no wonder that newscasts announce troubles of every sort in every place. Nevertheless, we long to hear good news.

But we don’t want “good news” that’s make-believe. We want good news that’s good because true. There can be such good news only if in the midst of evil and evil-quickened conflict there is the profounder reality of God’s definitive incursion into human affairs. There can be good news only if he who is prince of this world is bested by the one who is king.

Christmas is this good news. Christmas isn’t wishful thinking or sentimental froth or saccharine make-believe. Christmas is that good news which is true, real, profound; good news good enough to engender great joy – and all of this just because there has been born to us a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.

“Christ” the Lord? What does “Christ” mean? The child whose coming among us we celebrate in Advent isn’t named Jesus Christ in the way that I am Victor Shepherd. “Christ” isn’t his family name. It’s a description. It means “anointed”. Our Lord is the anointed one, anointed by his Father for our blessing.

Throughout Israel ’s history three figures were anointed: priests, prophets, kings. When we are told that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one, we know that he gathers up in himself what priests and prophets and kings embodied, as well as that to which they pointed as they too looked for the coming one.

Since we have good news and great joy only because of the anointed one, Christ, we must probe what it means to say that in him priests and prophets and kings find their fulfilment.

I: — Let’s begin with the priests. Priests ministered in the temple, where sacrifices were offered daily. The sacrifices were the core of worship inasmuch as sincere worshippers knew themselves to be sinners. They knew that defiled sinners had no right to approach the holy God. They knew that defiled sinners couldn’t survive approaching the holy God. The temple sacrifices were the God-appointed means whereby people who could claim nothing and merited nothing except God’s judgement could nonetheless find a Father who cherished them and a Forgiver who pardoned them – and all of this without in any way compromising his holiness or denying their unrighteousness. The sacrifices in the temple gave people access to God precisely where they knew their sin otherwise barred them from him.

Today, of course, we are fastidious people. We are careful to use deodorant, perfume, shaving lotion, cologne, air-wick. Today we should find the temple scene repulsive. Think of the sounds that animals make when they know their end is upon them; the smells they make. Think of the priest gathering a basinful of blood and throwing it over the steps surrounding the altar.

Alas, I fear we are too fastidious. We are shallow in our self-understanding: either we don’t think ourselves to be sinners at all or we think our sinnership to be trivial. We are cavalier in our approach to God: of course he’s going to forgive us, since that’s the business he’s in – said Voltaire on our behalf.

Ancient people knew better. They knew that sin is lethal. (Exactly what sin kills you and I could list for the next six months.) They knew that sin breaks God’s heart, provokes God’s anger, and arouses God’s disgust. And because it does all this, the forgiving of sin is never cheap. Forgiveness is always and everywhere costly.

Costly for whom? The animal brought to the temple was the best the worshipper owned. It cost a great deal to give up. And because it was a male animal, invaluable for purposes of breeding and therefore lucrative for the owner as well, when that animal was offered up to God the worshipper knew she had renounced her ticket to superiority of all kinds and was casting herself and her entire future on God.

What’s more, as the priest sacrificed the animal in the temple the worshipper placed her hand on it as a sign of her personal identification with the life offered up on her behalf. Sobered now at what her reconciliation to God cost, she surrendered herself anew to him in gratitude and adoration.

The day came when the woolly lamb in the temple was no longer the sacrifice. The day came when the curly-haired baby in the manger grew up and offered himself as the Lamb of God. Plainly he is the sacrifice by which a rebellious world is reconciled to God. Yet because he has offered himself, he is also the priest who offers up the sacrifice. As priest he’s the anointed one.
Because he’s the anointed one offering himself for our sakes, you and I all humankind have access to God. We have an access to God we don’t deserve yet which God has fashioned for us in his mercy, thanks to his Son. While our sin breaks God’s heart and provokes his anger and arouses his disgust, the sacrifice our “great high priest” offers up for us gathers up God’s heartbreak and anger and disgust and defuses it all, thereby allowing any and all who want to go home to go home.

“Oh, Shepherd”, someone objects; “Why do you get into something this heavy at Christmas? Why don’t you say something light at Christmas and save the ‘heavy’ for another day?” As a matter of fact there are several reasons why the Advent sermons should be substantial.

[1] There are usually people in church at this season who won’t hear the gospel announced for months, and they should hear something besides froth.

[2] We always administer Holy Communion in Advent. The service of Holy Communion graphically depicts our Lord’s sacrifice. Surely no one is going to tell me that the truth of the cross may be seen in the Lord’s Supper at Christmas but it mustn’t be heard in the sermon at Christmas.

[3] We sing carols at Christmas, and the best hymn on our Lord’s sacrifice happens to be a Christmas carol, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”. Listen to the words:

Hark! The herald angels sing ‘Glory to the newborn king’.

Peace on earth, and mercy mild; God and sinners reconciled.

Or listen to another stanza:

Mild he lays his glory by, Born that man no more should die;

Born to raise the sons of earth, Born to give them second birth.

The baby in the manger was born precisely in order that he might become the offering on the cross. He is the lamb of God, given us by the Father for the reconciliation of any and all who place their hand on the anointed one himself. Jesus our Lord is sacrifice and priest together.

II: — Not only were priests presiding at sacrifices anointed; prophets were too. Prophets were those who spoke for God and thereby acquainted their hearers with God. Prophets teach; as they teach about God, God himself takes over their teaching, as it were; God himself surges over hearers so that hearers are overtaken, then overwhelmed, and finally constrained to confess that God-in-person has addressed them.

The prophets were aware of much that modernity has forgotten. For one, the prophets knew that no amount of gazing inside ourselves will ever inform us of the truth of God or acquaint us with the person of God. They knew that every last human being is a bundle of contradictions. Looking inside ourselves, therefore, will only inform us of a bundle of contradictions. Two, the prophets were aware that no amount of gazing outside ourselves will ever inform us of the truth of God or acquaint us with the person of God. Looking outside ourselves informs us of what’s “out there”: suffering, grief, propaganda, treachery, waste, and war.

To be sure, the prophets never denied that self-contradicted people living in a convoluted world could nevertheless do much that is marvellous; they would readily have admitted that we can do, and do superbly well, philosophy, engineering, science, music, poetry, mathematics. The prophets denied, however, that we can inform ourselves of the truth of God or acquaint ourselves with the person of God. For this to occur something else is needed; specifically, what’s needed is someone who has faced God, has heard him, and now turns to face us to speak for God.

One thing above all else makes the Hebrew prophets “tick”: they have heard God speak. Having heard God speak, they find themselves constrained to speak on his behalf. All the Hebrew prophets are aware that they have been admitted to the Besoth Yahweh, the council of God. They’ve been admitted to the throne-room of the heavenly court. They aren’t presumptuous, engaging God in casual chit-chat. In fact once admitted to the throne-room, they don’t speak to God at all. They describe it all as overhearing; they overhear God talking to himself, as it were. They listen in, reverently, attentively, while God thinks out loud. Suddenly God takes notice of the prophets and speaks to them directly. At this moment the truth of God is stamped upon the prophet; the judgement of God is seared upon the prophet; the mercy of God and faithfulness of God and patience of God are imprinted upon the prophet indelibly.

At this point the prophet turns around from facing God in the throne-room and faces the people in the community. “The Word of God is fire in my mouth”, Jeremiah cries to his people; “I have to let this word out or my mouth will ignite.” Amos says laconically, “God has spoken. Who can but prophesy?”

And so the prophet speaks. He has stood in the council of God. For this reason he can speak authentically of God. As the prophet speaks on God’s behalf, God himself empowers the prophet’s word and renders the prophet’s word a vehicle of God’s self-giving and self-communication. At this point hearers become aware that they aren’t hearing one man’s religious opinion; they aren’t even merely hearing someone speaking on behalf of God. At this point they are hearing God himself.

Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one. He stands in the tradition of the prophets. He speaks for God. Yet as the Incarnate one he speaks for God in a way that no Hebrew prophet could; he speaks conclusively for God just because he is God, Emman-u-el, God-with-us.

A prophet to be sure, yet more than a prophet, Jesus Christ speaks for God as God. Then he is the one we must hear and heed and cling to if we are to know the truth of God and remain fused to the person of God for ever and ever.

III: — Kings were anointed too. Kings were anointed to rule. People today don’t like the sound of “rule”. It sounds coercive, tyrannical, dictatorial, heavy-handed. It sounds as if the king has colossal clout while subjects can only cower. Nobody wants to live under such an arrangement.

In Israel things were different. In Israel the first responsibility of the king wasn’t to boss (let alone tyrannize); the first responsibility of the king was to protect the most vulnerable of the people of God. Vulnerable people might be vulnerable on account of monetary poverty or social oppression or raging disease or military attack from outside the community; they might also be vulnerable on account of treachery from inside the community. Regardless of the source or nature or occasion of the vulnerability, the king’s first responsibility was always to protect those most at risk.

Some kings in Israel met their major responsibility. Most didn’t. Little-by-little it appeared that the only king who would honour this mandate consistently would be the king who was also shepherd, a shepherd-king. David was the shepherd-king in Israel ’s history. David defended the marginalized and vindicated the exploited and protected those at risk for any reason; in addition, in the course of doing all of this David brought glory to his people. At least David did this more consistently than anyone else. But even David proved treacherous.

Little-by-little Israel came to see that God’s people were going to be protected, vindicated, and exalted conclusively only if a shepherd-king appeared who acted with the power of God himself. Then what was needed most was a shepherd-king – human, to be sure – who was also God Incarnate. And this is precisely what we were given at Christmas.

We are the people of God. We need to be safeguarded. Since the world is a battleground of all sorts of conflicts, all of which are at bottom manifestations of the primal conflict, spiritual conflict, we are always at risk of becoming a casualty.

In military engagements casualties include the wounded, the missing and the slain. In the assorted struggles in which we find ourselves and must find ourselves we are going to be wounded from time-to-time. But missing? How could any of God’s people be missing, unlocatable, when God-Incarnate is their shepherd-king? And slain? Wounded as we are from time-to-time, God’s own people can never be wounded fatally. He who is our king, anointed such from eternity, is also resurrection and life. Before God we can’t be slain and we can’t go missing.

We make far too little of this truth, for undeniably events overtake us where we feel we’ve gone missing, and gone missing just because no one seems to miss us. And events overtake us where we feel ourselves slain, unable to rise, unable to go on. But in fact we aren’t slain and we can go on. Our shepherd-king is resurrection and life.

When I was a young man and diligently reading the psalms because I’d been told I should read them, I used to grow weary of reading about the psalmist’s enemies. In every third psalm we heard again the trouble his enemies were causing him and how treacherously they had bushwhacked him and how close they had come to vanquishing him. I began to think the psalmist paranoid. But I see now that he wasn’t paranoid. He was simply aware that nobody has life domesticated; nobody has life tamed; nobody has life under control, despite the fact that we’re all control-freaks. We can find ourselves clobbered on any day, from any quarter, for any reason (or no reason.) Life remains fragile.

Not so long ago I was asked to deliver a guest-lecture at the University of Toronto on John Calvin, progenitor of all English-speaking evangelicals. When I had concluded, the questions came quickly. The ultra-feminists in the audience tried to paint Calvin as anti-woman. I fended that off. The Marxists tried to paint him as uncritical capitalist. I fended that off. On and on it went. Plainly the special interest groups were looking for some way to dismiss him. Finally someone asked, “What is the lens through which Calvin views life? Since all of us have a psycho-social determinant, what’s his?”

“Calvin was a refugee”, I replied; “and like all refugees Calvin knew that life is precarious, earthly rulers can’t be trusted, betrayal is always at hand; above all, Calvin knew that like refugees we are haunted by an outer and inner homelessness that will be overcome only in the eschaton.” The room fell silent. I understood why. Everyone in the room identified with what I had just said about Calvin the refugee.

Because we are finite and fragile, we are physically vulnerable. Because we are wounded, we are emotionally frayed. Because we are sinners, we are spiritually “in a far country” and need to get home.

Who will get us home? Who will safeguard us on our way home? Who will ensure that our innermost core, our identity, remains intact? Only he who is shepherd-king, and effectual shepherd-king just because he is God-with-us, Emmanu-el, shepherd-king-Incarnate.

“Be not afraid”, we are told; “there is good news of a great joy, for to you there is born a Saviour who is Christ, the anointed one, effectual priest and prophet and king.” This one is Lord now, and ever will be.

Victor Shepherd
Advent 2005

1st John 4:8
John 3:16
Galatians 2:20

There are few thinkers more profound than Augustine. Born in the year 354 and living until 430, he was philosopher, theologian, political theorist, cultural commentator, and all of these at once; and not only all of these at once, but all of these superbly. His words are always weighty and need to be heard again and again. He wrote much about love, approaching the topic of love the way an appreciative jeweller approaches a gem, glowing over the different lustres it radiates as light shines on it first from one angle and then from another. One word from Augustine that we are going to linger over tonight is as brief as it is brilliant: “Love means ‘I want you to be.’”

I: — Let’s think first about the creation. On the one hand God doesn’t need the creation; i.e., doesn’t need the creation to be God. God is without deficit or defect. Therefore he doesn’t create in order to find in the creation what he somehow lacks in himself. On the other hand we know that God is life and God is love. God is the one and only “living” God in that God alone has life in himself. Because God is life God alone can impart life. Because God is love he appears to delight in creating and vivifying creatures who aren’t God themselves but who are made to live in love with the God who lives and loves by nature.

To say that God conceived us in love and fashioned us in love and constantly visits us with his love means, says Augustine, that God is forever saying to us, “I want you to be.” Be what? When God creates mountains and monkeys he says, “I want you to be that thing.” When he creates humankind, however, he wants us to be what monkeys and mountains can never be: creatures whose purpose, delight and fruitfulness are found in a living relationship with him, which relationship is love.

The apostle John has said most pithily, “God is love.” Less pithily but equally profoundly Augustine would say, “God is the one who longs to have us be; God longs to have us love him; God longs to have us reflect back to him the love with which he first loved us and continues to love us. This is what it is to be.”

The problem is, as everyone knows, that the creation didn’t remain “good” without qualification. Instead the creation was undone (in some respects) by the fall. We who were created to find our purpose, delight and fruitfulness in a living relationship of throbbing love for God now look everywhere else. We who are to reflect back to God the love with which he first loved us and continues to love us now do everything but that. For this reason God can no longer say, “I want you to be.” Now he must say in his judgement, “I want you not to be.” Insofar as God wants us not to be he plainly isn’t the creator; he’s now the destroyer. Anyone who reads scripture attentively knows that as soon as the creator is presumed upon or traded on; as soon as the attempt is made to exploit God or test him, as surely as God is disdained or merely disregarded, the creator becomes the destroyer. Scripture speaks like this on every page.

We’d like to think that if God were displeased with us, justly displeased with us, it’d be enough for him to ignore us. But destroy? Destruction sounds like “zero tolerance.” It’s odd, isn’t it, that we fault God for “zero tolerance” when we insist our legislators implement it everywhere in our society. We insist on legislation that guarantees zero tolerance for wife-beating, drug-trafficking, sexual exploitation of children; zero tolerance for income tax evasion and impaired driving. We insist on social policies of zero tolerance because we know in our hearts that tolerance isn’t a sign of generosity or magnanimity or large-hearted liberality. Tolerance is ultimately a sign of confusion, blindness, and spinelessness – none of which can be predicated of God. His tolerance, in the wake of our primal defiance and disobedience, would be only the shabbiest character defect in him.

Israel always knew this. To the prophet Amos God said, “I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel.” (Amos 9:7) A plumb line is used in house construction to expose deviations from the upright. The house of Israel was found deviant. And the result? When the plumb line is spoken of in 2 Kings 21 the conclusion is stark: “Says the Lord, ‘I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down.” It’s over! “I want you not to be.”

II: — Yet to another prophet, Hosea this time, God spoke as anguish-riddled a word as we shall ever overhear in scripture: “How can I give you up? How can I hand you over?…My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender, for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy.” (Hosea 11:8-9) Not even the destroyer will come to destroy. Then what will he come to do, given his recoiling heart and tender compassion? He will come to save. “For God so loved the world”, is how the apostle John speaks of this truth. “World”, in John’s vocabulary, doesn’t mean what it means in the Oxford English Dictionary; “world” for John is the sum total of men and women who blindly yet culpably disdain their vocation of reflecting back to God the love in which he created us. The “world” is the sum total of men and women who slander God’s goodness and slight his patience and scorn his blessing and ridicule his truth and laugh at his judgements even as they lecture him, “Don’t tell us what to be; we’ll decide for ourselves what we’re going to be. We forge our own identity, and our identity has nothing to do with you.” And then with a love that will forever remain incomprehensible God so loves such ungrateful rebels that he will submit himself to the humiliation of a stable and the horror of a cross. Plainly he’s saying, once more, “I want you to be.”

But there’s a difference this time. On the day of our creation God loved into existence the glorious creature that he had conceived in his own image and likeness. So glorious were we as we emerged from God’s own hand that we mirrored his glory. It was grand, then, when he said to us, “I want you to be.” In the wake of our rebellion and subsequent disfigurement, however, when his image is defaced in us and shame attends us and we are as loathsome as we formerly were resplendent, his loving us now isn’t akin to Adam’s loving Eve on the day of their primal splendour; God’s loving us now is akin to Hosea’s loving his wife when Hosea found her, now a prostitute with three illegitimate children, shamed and disgraced and valued commercially at 15 shekels, half the price of a slave. It is for broken down creatures like this that God now breaks his own heart. “How can I give you up? How can I give you up when I want you to be?”

The love with which God created us appears to have cost him nothing; but the love with which God so loved the world manifestly cost him everything. Christmas clearly cost God everything, for the sole purpose of Christmas is the Christmas gift crucified. John Calvin was fond of saying that the shadow of the cross fell upon the entire earthly life of Jesus. And so it did. The shadow of the cross fell even upon his birth. His birth? Even upon his conception, for on the day that Mary learned she was pregnant she was told, “a sword will pierce through your heart too.” (Luke 2:35) It appears not to have cost God anything to have us come forth in primal splendour. But to have us be born anew, to have us made afresh, to have us be, at last, what we were always supposed to be; this entailed that child, born for us, who from the moment of conception gathered into himself the eventuality of the cross. Christmas, therefore, costs God everything.

III: — “God is love.”(1st John 4:8) It means, “I want you to be, be those made in my image whose love for me reflects my love for them.”

“God so loved the world.”(John 3:16) It means, “I still want you to be, even though you are a disgrace to me and disfigured in yourselves; I still want you to be those whose love for me reflects my love for them, regardless of what anguish I must suffer in the person of the cruciform child of Christmas.”

“He loved me, and gave himself – for me! (Gal. 2:20) Listen to the apostle Paul exult. “He loved me!” If love means “I want you to be”, then “He loved me!” can only mean, “I am. At last I truly am. I’m finally alive.” Is this the same as mere existence? If love means “I want you to be”, could we ever substitute, “I want you to exist”? Never! “He loved me!” will never mean, “I exist.” It will always mean, “I am! I truly am! I’m profoundly alive!”

“He loved me!” But didn’t God so love the world? Of course he did, and Paul knows he did. Then why the exclamation, “He loved me!”? It’s because the purpose of the Christmas gift has been fulfilled; fulfilled in this one man at least. The purpose of God’s so loving the world is to have this individual and that individual and yet another come to be: come to abandon herself to the one whose love incarnate for her has brought her to spend the rest of her days in love for him. Yes, God did so love the world; but only the individual can respond. “He loved me!” is precisely the cry of someone who has responded. And in such an individual the Christmas gift has proved fruitful.

We can’t help noticing that when the cry, “He loved me!”, was torn out of the apostle, it wasn’t merely that one matter was settled (he thereafter knew himself loved); ever so much more was settled. In fact, everything was settled. Thereafter he never groped and guessed as to what life means. He never hemmed and hawed, wondering what he was supposed to do with his life. He never drowned in doubt over the significance of his toil and his suffering. He knew what life means, knew what he was to do, knew the significance of his toil and suffering even if those for whom he toiled and suffered didn’t know. And his future? “Life means Christ”, Paul told the Christians in Philippi, “and my dying can only mean more of him.”

Let’s come back to one question Paul never asked. In the wake of “He loved me!” he never asked, “What’s the meaning of life?” He didn’t have to ask it. He wasn’t puzzled. The Christmas gift ends bewilderment here. The Christmas gift embraced restores us to that immediacy and intimacy we crave in our hearts. The Christmas gift cherished finds us no longer asking about the meaning of life, but not because we now have a 10,000 -word answer complete with footnotes. The Christmas gift, rather, has brought us to live in a love to God that reflects the love he has always had for us. Living in such love, in the immediacy and intimacy and contentment of such love, we need neither arguments nor explanations nor demonstrations. When the writer of Proverbs records, “He who finds me finds life!” (Prov. 18:35) we shout, “’Tis true!” When the prophet Amos records, “Seek me and live!” (Amos 5:4), we exult, “Yes!” When the prophet Ezekiel records, “Turn [repent] and live!” (Ez. 18:3), those who have turned to face God simply know it’s true. No longer are we expecting only the detachment of an abstract idea; now we glory in the immediacy of a concrete encounter. “What does life mean?” Those who have embraced the Christmas gift and henceforth resonate the Son’s love for the Father aren’t left asking the question. Those, on the other hand, who are impelled to ask the question are also unable to recognise the answer.

Forever unable? Of course not. Phillips Brooks, author of O Little Town of Bethlehem, writes, “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given. So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven.” The gift is wondrous; that is, it transcends human comprehension. It is given “silently”; that is, the manner of its impartation is a mystery. Because the gift transcends human comprehension, and because the manner of its impartation is a mystery, you and I are ultimately speechless before the secret work of the Holy Spirit that prepares anyone’s heart for the blessings of heaven. We can’t describe or explain the secret work of the Holy Spirit that moves the person who is incapable of recognising the answer to no longer needing to ask the question. But that there is such a work of God’s Spirit, and that such a work we can’t measure or control or describe or explain; this we never doubt. And therefore we give up on no one; we dismiss no one. Instead we pray, and continue to pray, then pray some more, knowing that in the mystery of God’s secret work “where meek souls will receive him still the dear Christ enters in.” And where Christ enters in someone has come to be. Where Christ enters in the purpose of the incarnation is fulfilled. And the love wherewith that person was created and redeemed is now reflected in her love for our great God and Saviour, who is rightly said himself to be, to be eternally, even as he guarantees as much for all who hold – and hold on to – the infant born in Bethlehem.

Victor Shepherd
Christmas Eve 2002

Do you remember when you were a child and you couldn’t wait until Christmas? My sisters and I counted the days. By Christmas Eve we were beside ourselves. On Christmas morning when our parents finally gave us permission to get up, we children were down the stairs like the Kentucky Derby field leaving the starting gate.

There is a man, an old man now, whose anticipation of Christmas is as fresh as a child’s. What excites this old man isn’t the store-bought present wrapped in shiny paper; it’s the manger-born child wrapped in diapers. The old man’s name is Martin Luther. His Christmas exuberance is child-like. No one in the church catholic glories in Christmas in quite the way that Luther does.

There is good reason for this. Luther was no armchair spectator. He was immersed in life. Life had whirled him up into ceaseless turbulence and conflict. He was also immersed in Jesus Christ. And Christ was that luminosity which loomed before him and seized him and leant him righteousness and resilience; a righteousness and resilience that allowed him to resist the deadly forces which otherwise spewed destruction wherever one looked. When Luther spoke of temptation he didn’t mean titillating notions that lingered in one’s head like a catchy tune; he meant something so visceral, so gut-wrenching that even the strongest person shook. When Luther spoke of love, he didn’t mean benign sentiment; he meant the most passionate, self-forgetful self-giving. When Luther spoke of evil, he knew first-hand a horror as grotesque as it was terrible. Many people who are daintier than they should be are put off by Luther’s earthy language. They find it shocking. Do you know what he found shocking? – people who are so naive, so superficial, so clueless that they fail to understand that the world swarms and seethes and heaves. Luther knew that the world is the venue of a cosmic conflict which surges round and about, claiming victims here and there, while from time-to-time the front of this cosmic conflict passes right through your heart and mine. When it does, only the earthiest language is adequate.

Everyone knows what Luther said at the famous confrontation in the city of Worms , 1521. “Here I stand. I can do no other. I cannot and will not recant. God help me.” But few people are aware that he said this not in a spirit of petulant intransigence or puffed-up arrogance. He said this in anguish – anguish for many reasons, not the least of which was this: from that moment until the day he died, twenty-five years later, there was a price on his head. Even fewer people know what his opponent, Emperor Charles V, vowed in the face of Luther’s stand: “I have decided to mobilize everything against Luther: my kingdom, my dominions, my friends, my body, my blood, my soul.” In other words, the opposition Luther would face for the rest of his life was total, relentless, and lethal. And we find his vocabulary exaggerated and his delight in the Christmas gift childish? We should know what he knew: the world is a turbulent and treacherous place for any Christian in any era.

Creatures of modernity like you and me think we live in an ideational world. If we pass a motion at a meeting, we assume that a problem has been dealt with. If the House of Commons passes new legislation, we assume that injustice has been rectified. We assume that to discuss a social problem dispels the problem. We mull over different philosophies and compare them with “Christianity.” Luther didn’t speak of “Christianity;” he was possessed by the Christmas babe himself. He didn’t finesse theories of evil; he was confronted with powers of darkness so intense and so penetrating that either he looked to the One who is indeed victor or he unravelled.

I understand why Luther delighted in Christmas, why he looked forward to December 25th with a child’s tremulous longing. Then what is it about the manger-gift that sustained the Wittenberger then and sustains us now?

I: — First, he who adorns the manger is the Son of God. “Son of” in biblical parlance means “of the same nature as”. To behold the child who is Son of God is to behold the nature of God; or at least as much as can be beheld. Luther didn’t dispute the truth that God is magnificent, mighty, (almighty, in fact); God is resplendent, glorious, incomparably so. Luther never disputed this. He also said that we never see it. The God whose majesty is indescribable is hidden from us. But Christmas celebrates not God hidden but God revealed. And God revealed appears in the world as we are in the world: weak, vulnerable, suffering, bleeding.

The Nicene Creed says that “for us and our salvation the Son of God came down from heaven…” Came down? Yes. A condescension. Came down. Self-abasement. Humility? Certainly. Yet more than humility: humiliation. There’s a difference.

It is wonderful that God humbled himself for our sakes; wonderful that he didn’t confine himself to his splendour but accommodated himself to us his creatures. Yet immeasurably more wonderful is it that for our sakes he knew not merely humility, but even humiliation. We read in the gospels that the detractors of Jesus hissed that our Lord was illegitimate. “Why should we heed — or even hear — a bastard like you?” they taunted contemptuously. When he died, the same people quoted the book of Deuteronomy: “Cursed is he who hangs on a tree.” “That proves it!” the head-waggers chattered knowingly, “We were right to shun him. He was cursed by God all along. What insight we had from the start!” Humiliation? Crucifixion was a Roman penalty reserved for those deemed scum: military deserters, terrorists and rapists. Jesus is lumped in with that crowd.

Then there’s the cry of dereliction, “Why have you forsaken me?” It’s the most anguish-ridden cry that Jesus ever uttered. Yet since the Father and the Son are of the same nature, the cry of the Son’s dereliction is simultaneously the cry of the Father himself. It’s the cry of someone who has voluntarily undergone enormous wounding for the sake of those he holds dear. The cry of dereliction is really the cry of God himself over the pain of his torn heart, suffered for the sake of us whom he plainly loves more than he loves himself.

Not the hidden God (splendid, magnificent, majestic) but the revealed God (suffering, humbled, humiliated, slain;) only the revealed God can help us, said Luther. For only the revealed God has identified fully, identified himself wholly with the grief and guilt, turbulence and turpitude, conflict and slander and suffering that surround my life and yours. Only this God is of any help to us.

Luther used to say that the most comforting words in all of scripture are the six words – what do you think the six most comforting words are? – of the preface to the Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord your God.” If we really understood these six words, he said, we should be invincible. And who is the Lord our God? The God of manger and cross who will go to any length to seize, save and secure those whom he has named his own.

II: — Yet there is more to the manger-gift. Not only is he Son of God, he is also son of Mary. Jesus isn’t apparently human or seemingly human but actually human, fully human. “Tempted at all points as we are”, is the way the NT speaks of him. The one Greek word, PEIRAZEIN, means tempted, tested and tried all at once. Tempted, tested and tried like us but with this difference: he was never deflected in his human obedience, trust and love for his Father. He didn’t capitulate in the face of either the tempter’s threats or the tempter’s seductions.

Let’s talk about temptation for a minute. We modern types always assume that temptation is primarily temptation to do something wrong, temptation to commit a misdemeanour, temptation to contradict a code. But in scripture temptation is primarily temptation to deny the goodness of God. First we deny the goodness of God; next we deny the goodness of God’s claim upon our obedience (his claim upon our obedience, is of course our blessing;) finally we spurn the claim and disobey him – as we violate him and thereby violate ourselves. It’s not that we have done something wrong; rather, we have cast aspersion on the goodness of God and the goodness of his claim; the bottom line is that we have violated our relationship with God even as we have violated our very own person. It’s no wonder the Anglican Prayer Book reminds us, “And there is no health in us.”

He who is the son of Mary has been given to us as the one human being who doesn’t succumb to temptation; the one human being whose obedience to his Father is uncompromised, whose trust in his Father is undeflected, whose love for his Father is unrivalled by any other attachment. Then by faith I must cling to the Son of Mary, because my obedience is compromised a dozen times per day; my trust is fitful, and my love for God is forever being distracted by lesser attachments. The human response to God that I should make and even want to make has been corrupted, since I am a creature of the Fall.

Then of myself I can never render God the obedience and trust and love which befit the child of God. Nevertheless, there is provision for me: I can identify myself with the one whose human relationship to his Father is everything that mine isn’t. In faith I can cling gratefully to the son of Mary.

In the last few years family-therapists have come to appreciate the damage sustained by adults who came from what are called “shame-bound families.” We’re speaking now of the adult whose childhood unfolded in a family where the all-consuming preoccupation was the deep, dark family-secret that had to be kept secret. If the secret were told, public shame would spill over the family. Therefore any number of lies, evasions, and smokescreens were invented to cover up whoever it was in the family, whatever it was in the family, that threatened the family’s artificial reputation. The adult child of the shame-bound family now finds herself guilt-ridden, fearful, inhibited.

To belong to the family of God is to be relieved of being shame-bound. In the Son of God God has identified himself with me completely; all that is or might be shameful about me God has taken on and absorbed himself. In the Son of Mary, on the other hand, I have identified myself with the man Jesus. Whatever is genuinely shameful about me is taken up into the righteous humanness of Jesus himself. In his humanness he is the one with whom the Father is well-pleased. In faith, then, I cling to him, and in him my shame is bleached and blotted out.

III: — Lastly, the manger-gift is also the son of David. When people hailed Jesus as the son of David they were recognizing him as the Messiah. David had been Israel ’s greatest king, despite his undeniable feet of clay. David had valiantly tried to redress the injustices that pock-marked the nation. David was a harbinger, a precursor of the day when the just judge of the earth would no longer be defied and a topsy-turvy world would finally be righted.

Make no mistake. The world is topsy-turvy. A man who fails to hit a baseball seven times out of ten is guaranteed ten million dollars per year for the next five years. Meanwhile homemakers are selling daffodils on street corners because cancer patients needing treatment have been told that there’s a six-month waiting list for the equipment. The public education budget increases every year – and so does the incidence of illiteracy. Please note: concerning illiteracy Canada has surpassed both the United States and Italy . Canada is now, per capita, the most illiterate nation of the west – and all of this despite unprecedented billions spent on public education.

Anyone who struggles, like King David of old, to redress the injustices of the world learns quickly how frustrating, absurd and heartbreaking the struggle can be. A friend of mine who administers a facility for battered women was invited to duplicate the facility in another municipality, simply because of that municipality’s need. (In other words, wife-beating shows no signs of going out of style.) The institution she represents was offered free land by a developer. She spoke to municipal civil servants as well as to elected representatives. They promised to support her. When a public discussion was called concerning the project, however, both municipal staff and elected representatives sniffed the political wind-direction and turned on her. They didn’t merely withdraw the support they had promised; they faked surprise, as though they were hearing her for the first time, and then they denounced her, as though what she proposed (a facility for battered women) were antisocial and irresponsible and even patently ridiculous. (You see, a facility for battered women attracts creepy males as surely as a garbage dump attracts rats – so she was told.) I saw my friend two days after the event. She was still punch-drunk. She was shocked at the betrayal, the savagery, the greasy opportunism of it all. Luther wasn’t shocked at this. He was shocked at ignorant, fastidious people found his language shocking when he tried to address it.

The whole world cries out for the son of David, however inarticulately or unknowingly, just because the world cannot correct itself. As a matter of fact, the world is not getting better and better, however slowly. Then is hopelessness the only sensible attitude to have? Not for a minute. The manger-gift is the son of David, the Messiah promised of old, the royal ruler who will right the capsized world on that Day when he fashions a world in which righteousness dwells.

Then you and I must never capitulate to hopelessness. Neither do we disillusion ourselves with naiveness. Instead we faithfully, patiently, do whatever we can in anticipation of that Day when justice is done. And if what we do in anticipating this Day plunges us into even greater conflict for now, then our friend Luther will smile at us and say, “I could have told you that; I always knew that the appearance of Jesus Christ provokes conflict.” And at such a time we shall have to find our comfort and cheer in that manger-gift, the child of Bethlehem , who made Luther’s eyes light up like a child’s on Christmas morning.

He who has been given to us is the Son of God, the son of Mary, and the son of David.

As the Son of God he is God humbling himself, even humiliating himself in seeking to save us.

As the son of Mary he renders the Father the proper human response that we should make but can’t, and therefore we must cling to him in faith.

As the son of David he is the long-promised Messiah who guarantees us a righted world in which righteousness will one day be seen to dwell.

The Reverend Dr Victor Shepherd
Advent II 7th December 2008
Church of St Bride, Anglican, Mississauga

Luke 1:46-55
Genesis 3

I: Why is there unrelenting tension between men and women? Women feel set upon by men, victimized, violated even. In the wake of the feminist protest men feel misunderstood, maligned, even conspired against.

Why is the struggle for survival just that, a struggle? We wouldn’t mind working hard if we knew that fruitfulness followed our work as surely as night follows day. But whether we are farmers or physicians, office-workers or educators, something is always going wrong; we are never clear of frustration; we are forever having to scramble and scrabble.

Why is it that mere difference between groups of people becomes the occasion of lethal hostility? As slight a difference as the difference between brown skin and white skin and black skin shouldn’t precipitate mayhem and murder. But it does!

Why are we profoundly discontented ourselves? We thought that the new house would make us happy — and it did, for three weeks or so. The new car lifted our spirits — until our neighbour drove up with a costlier car.

Why is it that humankind never advances? To be sure, we make progress in the realm of science; that is, we progress insofar as we harness nature. But humankind itself makes no progress at all. Our foreparents sinned and suffered and slew; we sin and suffer and slay. History, we have learned, is the history of warfare. Having learned this, however, we still are powerless to do anything about it.

Why is it that everyone blames everyone else for what’s wrong? The socialist blames the stony-hearted capitalist with his exploitative greed. The capitalist blames the masses with their pleasure-loving shortsightedness and their irresponsible undependability. Everyone points the finger and says, “It’s your fault!”

Our foreparents contended with bubonic plague; then with smallpox; then with tuberculosis. Now we contend with aids and its social aftermath. Is humankind on a treadmill?

Here is my last question, a different question. Why is the gospel “good news”? Wherein is it good news? If it’s genuinely good, it has to be more than news, because the last thing we need is more words. If it is genuinely good, then it has to be a new reality.

II: — Today is the first Sunday in Advent. Today we begin looking ahead to the birth of him whom St.John describes as “the remedy for the defilement of our sins.” In order to understand our defilement — its nature, its scope, its inescapability — we must go back to the old, old story of the Fall.

Adam and Eve — “humankind” and “mother of the living” is what their names mean respectively. This story is a parable of every man and every woman.

In this profound saga God has placed Adam and Eve in a garden; Eden, it is called, the Hebrew word for “delight”. Life is blessed here. Everything they need to nourish themselves is ready-to-hand. God’s provision attests his goodness, kindness, helpfulness. There is one thing, however, which they are to avoid. They must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now “good and evil” is a Hebrew expression meaning, “everything you can think of; the sum total of human possibilities.” Imagine yourself doing anything at all; I mean anything. The sum total of these “anythings at all” is what the Hebrew mind means by “good and evil”.n Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for one reason: God loves them, God blesses them, God protects them. Among these “anythings at all” which we imagine ourselves doing; among these are a great many which do not bless: they curse us. Among these are many which do not enrich us; they impoverish us. Many do not protect us; they expose us to influences and powers which are ultimately fatal.

A physician-friend of mine dropped over to see me one evening. He asked me if I knew what the single largest threat to public health was in the world today. I didn’t. He told me: promiscuity. Then we talked about “crack”. The first wave of crack-babies has entered school. Already it is incontrovertible that these children have attention spans so short that they are not going to learn anything; they bristle with the ugliest hostility, and they are unable to form any conscience at all. Does anyone still doubt that there are some “anythings at all” which really are ruinous? The two I have mentioned are dramatic and glaring. There are other “anythings at all” which are far more subtle; discernment is needed to recognize them. Yet discern we should, since in eden, Eden, God wants only to protect us and bless us.

In our ancient story (as relevant, of course as today’s newspaper which confirms it one hundred times over) temptation is personified by a talking snake. (Don’t laugh; even fairy tales are always profound.) Temptation personified says softly, “Now about this tree whose fruit you are not to eat; did God really say you were not to eat it? Did he really say that?” In other words, temptation casts doubt on the command of God. And since God loves us, to cast doubt on the command of God is to cast aspersion on the love of God and the goodness of God. At this point all of us are whispering to ourselves, “God didn’t say it; or if he did, he had no business saying it; he must be a spoilsport; he is certainly arbitrary.” First we doubt the goodness of God’s command; then we deny that violating it will turn blessing into curse.

In our old story the woman replies to the serpent, “God says that we aren’t to eat of this tree; furthermore, he said we aren’t even to touch it.” She is lying! She exaggerates. As soon as she exaggerates she lies! God never said they weren’t to touch it. She is making this up herself. First, doubt of the goodness of the command of God; second, denial that violating it (violating God himself) turns blessing into curse; third, inventing a law of life for ourselves. We make ourselves lawgivers; we decide by what code we should live. The living voice of the living God isn’t heard at all now, because we are telling ourselves what we think renders life blessed.

The serpent has all of us on the slippery slopes now. The serpent says, “I’m aware that God said you would die; that is, be estranged from God himself, with horrible consequences — I’m aware that God said you would die if you extended your lives into those “anythings at all” which he says are ruinous. But what does he know? You won’t die! Just the opposite! You will be exalted. Your consciousness will be altered. Your mood will be elevated. Life will be beautiful. You will be freed up as never before. Your self-awareness will be expanded until you feel you are the centre of the universe. Your self-confidence will be inflated until you feel there is nothing you can’t succeed at. You will have a perspective on life that you have never had before — the same perspective as that of God himself.”

Adam and Eve eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “Yada”, the Hebrew verb to know, doesn’t have the force of “to acquire information”. We modern folk assume that to know something is to have information about that thing. To know automobiles is to have information about horsepower and wheel bases. But for our Hebrew foreparents to know always has the force of personal acquaintance with a reality. To know sorrow is to be personally acquainted with grief. To know pain is to be in pain. To know God is to be personally acquainted with God himself. Not to know God is to thrust off God himself; to repudiate him and spurn his goodness and his protection and his blessing. Not to know God, therefore, is to know ‘good and evil’. It is to have personal acquaintance, intimate acquaintance with that reality which impoverishes life, curses it, and ultimately destroys it.

AND THIS IS WHERE WE ALL LIVE! We are — every one of us — profoundly alienated from God, hauntingly alienated, fatally alienated.

III: — And then the question which God puts to Adam, to everyone: “Where are you?” Well, where are you? Where am I? Speaking for all of us Adam says to God, “I’m hiding from you.” How silly! As if anyone could hide from God! Adam is now as ridiculous as the four year old playing hide ‘n’ seek who thinks that because she regards herself hidden away no one else can see her or find her.

To be a fallen human being (which all of us are) is to flee God, flee into hiding, ridiculously thinking that we can hide from God. Our situation fails to be humorous simply because it is tragic. After all, life is not a game. We have said to God, “We don’t want you.” And God has said to us, “You don’t have to have me. But then neither do you have to have my goodness, my protection, my blessing. To do without me — your preference! — is to be stuck with the consequences of doing without me.”

There is something we must understand clearly. To thrust away the only righteous ruler of the earth is to be stuck with manifold unrighteousness and its spinoffs. To cast aspersion on the goodness of God is to wade around in wickedness. To disdain God’s protection is to be defenceless against exploitative evil. To assume that God’s wisdom can be improved upon is to be poisoned with the unwisdom of folly. In a word, to forfeit blessing is to be stuck with curse. AND THIS IS WHERE WE ALL LIVE!

“But can’t we go back to Eden?”, someone asks with more than a hint of desperation. Many attempts are made. All utopias are an attempt at recovering Eden. All such attempts are going to fail. Marxism was such an attempt. Its failure is writ large. Every pronouncement that men and women are only the product of their environment reflects another attempt. Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” — that primitive peoples were somehow intrinsically virtuous and were corrupted only by civilization — another attempt. Anyone who disagrees with Jeremiah — “The heart of many is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt” — anyone who thinks that Jeremiah exaggerates assumes that Eden can be recovered. In our ancient story an angel with a flaming sword bars the way to the tree of life in the garden. We can’t go back and seize the tree of life ourselves and undo the deadly curse we have brought down on ourselves. We cannot resurrect ourselves. We cannot restore ourselves. The flaming sword which turns every which way in the hand of the angel fends off any and all who are so naive and foolish as to think that they or their scheme can undo the Fall and its consequences. Eden cannot be recovered. Looking back is pointless just because going back is impossible.

IV: — Today is the first Sunday in Advent. Advent is the season of longing, of waiting, of expectancy. What are we longing for? We long for Eden. Not everyone uses this vocabulary. Most people long for they know not what. In truth, nonetheless, they long for Eden. What are they waiting for? They are waiting for someone who can undo Eden’s curse. Why the expectancy? Because deep down they want to be delivered from the dis-ease which keeps gnawing at them. They are mature enough to realize that the grab-bag of grown-up trinkets and toys does nothing to the halt the dis-ease which haunts them. But since there is no return to Eden the entire world must be doomed to unending frustration.

Not so! Advent reminds us that we are not to look back, but ahead. In Advent we stand on tiptoe anticipating the very blessing which we cannot give ourselves. In Advent we await Christmas as eagerly as the youngster awaits opening the first gift. THE gift of Christmas for us all, of course, is that new addition to the human family which is more than an addition; the gift is he himself who is both humanity renewed and lord of the renewed humanity.

Advent recalls another woman speaking. Not Eve rationalizing her capitulation to temptation; this time it’s Mary exulting in her service to the world. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour… henceforth all generations will call me blessed.” Generations to come will call her blessed, for in her child what we have lost and cannot recover ourselves God has given us just because in his mercy he will suffer anything himself to save us from our self-inflicted misery.

Adam and Eve succumbed to the blandishments of the tempter. But the Christmas child, grown up, will resist the tempter in the wilderness, resist throughout his ministry, resist again in another garden (Gethsemane, this time), resist finally on the cross when mockers tell him he might as well unhook himself since he is not doing any good in any case.

In the garden of Eden we were barred from storming the tree of life in an effort to save ourselves. We are not allowed to arrogate to ourselves what rightly belongs to God alone. Yet by God’s mercy there is another tree. Concerning this tree no angel with flaming sword bars us access. Instead access is guaranteed us and the invitation is sounded continuously: “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” What hangs from this tree we are urged to taste and so to see for ourselves that God is good indeed.

The apostles discerned that in Jesus Christ we were given not only that saviour whom we need individually. With him we are introduced to a new world. In other words, our Lord brings a renewed creation with him. All who cling to him in faith find their renewed life unfolding in a new world, a new environment.

For this reason Paul says that in Christ there is neither male nor female. He doesn’t mean that gender-distinction is eliminated in a unisex muddle. He means that gender-distinction is preserved and enriched just because gender-hostility is overcome. In Christ there is neither Jew nor gentile. He doesn’t mean that the distinction is eliminated. (Paul was always aware that the gentile world never lets Jews forget that they are Jews; he was also aware that God requires Jews not to forget that they are Jews. He insists that in Christ (and in Christ alone is what he means) the deepest-grained hostility anywhere in the world — the hostility between Jew and non-Jew — is overcome. And if this hostility is overcome in Christ, any hostility is as well. What other instances of renewed life in a renewed world can you share with the rest of us?

A few minutes ago we saw that to do without God, to want to do without God, is to do without God’s blessing and therefore live under curse. But in the One who is God incarnate there is blessing only. How could there be anything else? And therefore in his company that disease which can neither be named nor denied is eclipsed by gratitude for him whose name we now know, whose name, Yehoshuah, means “God saves”, and whom we have no wish to deny.

In Christ our dust-to dust exile is overarched by the promise of resurrection: our destiny is not death, decomposition of body and dissolution of personhood. Our destiny is eternal life at God’s own hand.

The last question I left with you in introduction of the sermon was, “Why is the gospel good news?” It’s good news not in the sense that it is up-to-the-minute information (like Barbara Frum’s broadcast.) It is good news just because it announces a new reality so winsome as to breathe its own invitation.

In Advent we don’t look back in nostalgia and regret; we look ahead in eagerness and confidence. For there is given to us the one whom all humankind craves, whom Christians know to be Jesus the Christ, and who caused Mary’s heart to sing, even as he will make our hearts sing for ever and ever.

F I N I S

Victor Shepherd

1 Samuel 1: 12-20
Galatians 4:4-7
Matthew 1:18-25

There are some expressions of human suffering so terrible that the pulpit can mention them only with fear and trembling, in view of the fact that sitting in the pew are those who are suffering the anguish under discussion. One such anguish is childlessness. I have been a pastor now for 32 years, and I have concluded that there is no anguish like the anguish of childlessness.

If it is less than wise for me to discuss this publicly, what I am going to say next is even more foolish, since it may be pilloried as sexist. I think that while it is husband and wife together who are childless, women suffer more, and suffer in a way that is difficult for men to understand. When Hannah was tormented by her childlessness her husband, Elkanah, no doubt heartbroken himself over their infertility, no doubt near-frantic at his wife’s inconsolability, and no doubt clueless as to what to say next; Elkanah finally blurted out, “Am I not more to you than ten sons?” (1 Sam. 1:8) No, he wasn’t more to Hannah than ten children. He was her husband; she was his wife. But she wasn’t anyone’s mother. Wife is categorically different from mother! Elkanah was her husband; he couldn’t be more to her than ten children; he couldn’t even be more to her than one child.

Today, in this Advent season, we are going to look at four childless women — and at four children (sons) whom the world will never forget, as it will never forget their mothers.

I: — The first we shall look at is Sarah. She was to be the foremother of all God’s people. God had promised her and her husband, Abraham, descendants as numberless as the sands on the seashore. Before there can be numberless descendants, however, there has to be one; yet Sarah was childless. It’s difficult to believe in God’s promises, isn’t it, to keep on believing year after year!

Then Sarah was told she would conceive. She laughed. Being told, at her age, that she would conceive was as ludicrous as my being told that I am going to be the next middleweight boxing champion of the world. Laughter befits the ludicrous.

But Sarah did conceive, and gave birth to Isaac, the Hebrew word for “laughter”. Now it was easy to believe in the promises of God.

Or was it? For the day came all too soon when her faith in the promise-keeping God was tested. Her husband was told to offer up their son Isaac as a sacrifice to God; Isaac, their son, their only son.

Their dilemma was this. God had promised numberless descendants within the household of faith, generation after generation. Two things were needed for the fulfilment of the promise concerning the household of faith: people who were descended from Abraham and Sarah, and people of faith who were descended from Abraham and Sarah. If Ab. and S. obeyed God and offered up Isaac, then their faith was intact but their descendants were snuffed out. On the other hand, if they second-guessed God and preserved Isaac, then descendants were guaranteed (biological descendants), but in their second-guessing and disobeying God faith was snuffed out — with the result, of course, that there would be no descendants of faith.

In other words, if they obeyed God in faith, the promise was null and void since there would be no descendant. If, on the other hand, they disobeyed God in unfaith, the promise was null and void since there would be no descendant of faith. Regardless of what they did, the promise was null and void — when all the while they had been called to faith in the promise-keeping God. So what were they to do?

With unspeakable anguish of heart they elected to obey God and trust him to keep his promise to them even though they couldn’t see how God was ever going to keep his promise! Rather than second-guess God and try to sort out for him what he couldn’t seem to sort out for himself, they elected to trust God and trust him to sort out for them what they couldn’t sort out for themselves. And so with breaking hearts they trudged up Mount Moriah, knife in hand, determined to trust God to fulfil his own promise in ways beyond their imagining — only to find that a ram had been provided for the sacrifice.

God has made many promises to us. One is that the powers of death will not prevail against the church. But right now the powers of death seem to be prevailing against the church. So what are we going to do? We can trust God to keep his promise, in ways that we can’t see at this moment; or we can second-guess him. We can continue to hold up the gospel, even though it is steadfast allegiance to the gospel-message that seems to keep contemporary secularites out of the church, or we can develop a new message, a new attraction, new entertainment, new gimmicks — all of which we hope will keep people here even as the gospel has long since gone. So what are we going to do?

Ten times per year I am asked why I won’t approve of raffles or other games of chance for church fundraising. Wouldn’t a raffle bring in truckloads of money? (And everyone knows it takes truckloads of money to maintain any congregation.) Wouldn’t a raffle get us past our chronic financial squeeze and let us concentrate on other matters? Concentrate on what other matters? Certainly not on the gospel, because by the time we got around to the raffle the gospel would have been long given up. What answer would Sarah give to us, even as she wept over Isaac?

A friend of mine, a pastor in Montreal, “locked horns” with his congregation (the conflict ended in his dismissal) over the Sunday morning prayer of confession; confession of sin. They told him they didn’t believe they were sinners; at least they weren’t sinners in the real sense of the term. Furthermore, in an era of declining turn-outs on Sunday morning they needed to attract upwardly mobile young couples. How were they ever going to do this as long as the pastor told “wannabe” social climbers every Sunday that they were sinners? What would Sarah say to all this? We know. She was willing to give up the son she had awaited for decades.

Sarah trusted God to keep the promises he had made, even though she couldn’t see, at this minute, how it was all going to work out. Sarah trusted.

II: — Hannah longed for a child so ardently and prayed so intently and wailed so incoherently before God that her clergyman, Eli, thought she was drunk. “Put away the bottle!”, Eli rebuked her. “I’m not drunk”, Hannah had said, “I’m troubled; I’ve been pouring out my soul before the Lord.”

And then it happened. A child. Samuel. “Samuel” is a Hebrew expression meaning, “His name is God.” What an unusual name to call a child! But before Samuel was born Hannah had consecrated him to God. She didn’t give him up to death as Sarah had done before her; nevertheless in the profoundest sense Hannah gave up her son unconditionally to the service of God. “As long as my son lives”, Hannah had cried, “he is lent to the Lord.” (1 Samuel 1:28)

Samuel became a prophet, one of those uncompromising truth-tellers who made politicians and rulers wince when the truth was made public. Samuel anointed Saul the first king of Israel. Upon witnessing Saul’s disobedience, however, Samuel deposed Saul and anointed David king. Plainly Samuel wasn’t one to waste time.

Samuel grew up in the town of Ramah and lived in Ramah for the rest of his life. “Rama” has a familiar ring these days. Rama is a town near Orillia; Rama is one more site of the provincial government’s protracted disgrace: casino gambling. What do you think Samuel would say if he were to visit the Rama casino? What do you think he would have said (or done) if he had gone to Casino Rama on opening day several summers ago when the parking lot was crammed with milling children, neglected, while their parents (chiefly single moms), were inside squandering the money they keep telling us they don’t have? What would Samuel have done when the public address speakers kept pleading with mothers to go to the parking lot and take charge of their children — all to no avail?

The province of Ontario will sell anyone a return GO-rail ticket (Toronto-Rama return) for only $29.95. Plainly the ticket is heavily subsidized. The government (the tax-payer) subsidizes the poorest people in our society to squander their money on a set-up rigged in favour of returning six billion dollars per year to the provincial governments of Canada. The day the Ontario government introduced state-sponsored casino gambling (Windsor) it eliminated all funding to psychiatric programs for gambling addicts.

What do you think Samuel would have done? King Saul had cozied up to a foreign king who was tormenting God’s people in Israel of old. King Saul had kept the best of this foreign king’s livestock in order to enrich himself even though he had been told he must not profit from the foreign ruler who had brutalized God’s people. Samuel had come upon Saul at that time and had said, “For personal gain you have cozied up to the fellow who tormented your people? You aren’t fit to be king, Saul, and as of today you are deposed.” And then Samuel had slain the foreign king, Agag.

So what would Samuel do in Rama today? We can only guess. But we needn’t guess in one respect. We know for sure that Samuel, distraught at the spiritual declension in his people, would have pleaded with God until the sweat poured off him as it was to pour off Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. Samuel would have pleaded with God concerning a government so conscienceless and a people so stupid and a greed so shameless. A heartbroken Samuel would have pleaded until he was hoarse. To be sure, Samuel had deposed Saul and slain Agag; but this wasn’t the sort of thing Samuel did every day. Then what did Samuel do every day? He had a reputation for being a tireless intercessor. He would have interceded with God for his people every day. When he looked out over the broken-down, soft-headed, hard-hearted people of Israel, meandering like sheep without a shepherd and following whoever was making the biggest noise, Samuel cried to the people, “Far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you.” (1 Sam. 12:23) A fierce prophet in public, in private Samuel was the intercessor whose tear-runnelled cheeks told everyone what he was doing when no one was around to see him doing it.

III: — Elizabeth and Zechariah had been childless for years. Then they learned they were to have a child: “Yo-chan”, “gift of God”. Their child would be a prophet; not any prophet, but a prophet “in the spirit and power of Elijah”, Luke records.

Elijah wasn’t merely Israel’s greatest prophet; Elijah was the end-time prophet. Elijah was to come back when the Messiah was at the door. Elijah was to prepare the people to meet the Messiah.

Jesus himself insisted that John the Baptist was Elijah all over again. John had been sent to prepare the people for Jesus.

What was the preparation? What is it, since John still prepares people to receive the gift of Christmas?

(i) “You’ve got to make a U-turn in your life”, thundered John, and so we must. And we had better be sincere. If our “repentance”, so-called, is nothing more than a calculation designed to get us “fire insurance”; in other words, if our “repentance” is just one more expression of our endless self-interest; if it is anything other than horror at our sin and anything less than a repudiation of it, John will say to us what he said to the fire-insurance phonies of his day: “You nest of snakes, you slithering creeps; you are revolting. Get serious while there’s time to get serious.”

(ii) The second item in John’s agenda of preparation: “Put your life in order. If you are truly repentant inwardly, your life must display integrity outwardly”. Those whose occupations give them social clout (like police officers and military personnel) must stop brutalizing people; those whose occupations give them access to large sums of money (like accountants and bankers) must stop lining their pockets; those who hoard money and ignore the human suffering around them had better open heart and hand and home. Inward repentance must issue in outward integrity.

(iii) The last aspect of the preparation John urges: “Don’t linger over me; look away from me to my cousin. Don’t stop at listening to me; hear instead my younger relative. He is the one appointed to be your Saviour and Lord in life and in death!”

When John announced he was preparing the way of the Lord many responded. Many more did not. Among the latter was Herodias, Herod’s wife. John looked her in the eye and said, “First you married Phillip, your uncle Phillip, no less. Then you ‘fooled around’ with the man who is currently your husband. Then you had your daughter dance like a stripper in order to inflame a crowd of half-drunk military officers. You, Herodias, are incestuous, adulterous, and a pimp all at once. It’s an abomination to God; you yourself are a disgrace; and the stench of it all looms larger than a mushroom cloud.”

What happened next? Everybody knows what befell John next. Elizabeth had to make that sacrifice required of all the mothers we are probing this morning; she too gave up her son for the sake of the kingdom.

IV: — And then there is Mary. While Sarah, Hannah and Elizabeth had become pregnant through an extraordinary intervention of God, there was no suggestion of anything other than ordinary intercourse and ordinary conception. But it was different with Mary, and different with her just because her Son was to be different; Mary’s conception was unique just because her Son was unique. Isaac was a patriarch; Samuel and John were prophets; but Jesus was — and is — the Son of God incarnate. Isaac and Samuel and John pointed away from themselves to God; Jesus pointed to himself as God-with-us.

Throughout his earthly ministry Jesus indicated over and over that to worship him was not idolatry. He persisted in using the formula, “I am” (“I am the door, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, etc.) when he knew all the while that “I am” is the self-designation of God. He agreed with his enemies that only God could forgive sin — and then proceeded to forgive sin himself. He admitted that the law of Moses was divinely authoritative — and then went ahead and announced its definitive meaning. Everyone knew that God alone is judge; whereupon Jesus announced himself to be the judge and insisted that the final criterion for all of us would be our attitude to him.

Mary was unique just because her Son is unique. He — he alone — is the world’s redeemer. He has to be the world’s redeemer just because the world cannot generate its own cure. Every time the world has attempted to generate its own cure (there have been two notable instances of this in the 20th century alone, one in Russia and the other in Germany), it has left the world worse. The cure for a world gone wrong has to be given to the world. History cannot produce the saviour of history; history’s saviour has to be given to it. And if the current talks about “world government” give rise to some kind of international mega-sovereignty, then we shall have to learn all over that humankind’s attempt at self-sovereignty issues in self-annihilation. For precisely this reason Jesus Christ has been given to us — not produced by us — as the world’s sole sovereign and saviour. And if we are ever so foolish as to try to program any form of the superhuman we shall have to see — again — that all such attempts issue in the subhuman. Humankind cannot generate humankind’s redemption. Our redeemer has to be given to us. This is what Mary’s virginal conception is all about.

Mary learned what it was all about the day she was told she would bear Jesus, “Yehoshua”, “God saves”. On the same day she learned that a sword would pierce her heart; a sword would pierce her heart as surely as a spear and nails would pierce her son.

Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth. Each offered up her son. Mary offered up hers too. Mary gathers up in herself all that her sisters knew before her.

Isaac, Samuel, John. The Lord Jesus whose birth we celebrate in this season gathers up in himself all that his brothers knew before him. Yet even as he gathers up them all in himself he is so much more than they. He himself is God’s incursion into human history, and for this reason he himself is the action of God saving us.

Because our Lord Jesus is himself the action of God saving us, he is unique. His mother’s uniqueness testifies to his uniqueness. Rightly, then, did Mary cry, “Henceforth all generations will call me blessed.”

We too are eager to call her blessed, for we too have been blessed in her Son. We have been blessed pre-eminently in the Son’s resurrection from the dead. In that kingdom which his resurrection established the wounded hearts of Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth and Mary have already been healed. In that selfsame kingdom your heart and mine — wounded and broken, savage and self-contradictory, devious and disconsolate — whatever our heart-condition it is to find its cure in him who has been given to us to do for us and in us and with us all that will redound to the praise of his glory and the splendour of his kingdom.

Victor Shepherd
December 2002

392 Hark, a Herald Voice stanzas 3&4

390 O Come, O Come stanzas 3&4

391 On Jordan’s bank stanza 2

415 O Come, Let Us Adore Him stanzas 2&5

Isaiah 9:2-6
Luke 2:21-32

Everyone (everyone, that is, except the manifestly unbalanced) craves peace. We long for peace among nations, peace within our own nation, peace within our family, and, of course, peace within ourselves. In our psychology-driven age it’s the lattermost, peace within ourselves, that’s the pre-eminent felt need. The pharmaceutical companies have profited immensely from our preoccupation with inner peace. Prominent preachers like Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller have made a career and attracted a following through preaching the same sermon over and over for forty years; namely, how to acquire inner peace.

And yet a moment’s reflection reminds us there’s a peace we ought not to have. There’s a peace born not of inner contentment but rather of inertia. Several years ago an Anglican bishop penned a greeting to all the parish clergy in the diocese wishing them peace. One clergyman wrote back, “My parish doesn’t need peace; it needs an earthquake.”

There’s another kind of “peace” (so-called) that God doesn’t want for us and which he’s determined to take from us: that peace which is the bliss of ignorance, the bliss of indifference, the bliss of the deafened ear and the hardened heart in the face of suffering and deprivation, abuse and injustice. Our Lord himself cried to detractors, “You think I came to bring peace? I have news for you. I came to bring a sword.” We mustn’t forget that the metaphor of soldiering, of military conflict, is one of the commonest apostolic metaphors for discipleship: to follow Jesus is to follow him in his strife.

Nonetheless, he whose coming we celebrate at this season is called Prince of Peace. He himself says, “My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, give I unto you.” Then what is the nature of the peace he longs for us to have?

I: — The first aspect of such peace is “peace with God.” The apostle Paul writes to his fellow-Christians in Rome , “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” To be justified by faith is to be rightly related to God in a relationship of trust, love and obedience. To be rightly related to God is to have and enjoy peace with God. Plainly, not to be rightly related to God is have enmity with God. Is it also to be aware of enmity with God? Not necessarily. Most people who lack peace with God and therefore live in enmity towards God remain unaware of it. When they are told of it they smile patronisingly and remark, “Enmity towards God? I have nothing against him. I’ve never had anything against him.” Such people need to be corrected; they need to be told that even if they think they have nothing against God, he has much against them. He reacts to their indifference; he resists their disdain; he opposes their disobedience; he is angered by their recalcitrance.

Yet even as God rightly resists the indifference of ungodly people (indifference that is actually contempt of him), and even as God reacts as he must, it distresses him to do so. He longs only to have the stand-off give way to intimacy, the frigidity to warmth, the defiance to obedience, the disdain to trust. For this reason his broken heart was incarnated in the broken body of his Son at Calvary ; for this reason his Spirit has never ceased pleading. Sometimes in the earthquake, wind and fire like that of his incursion at Sinai, at other times in the “still small voice” that Elijah heard, God has pleaded and prodded, whispered and shouted, shocked and soothed: anything to effect the surrender of those who think they have nothing against him but whose indifference in fact is enmity.

What God seeks in all of this, of course, is faith. Not faith in the popular sense of “belief”; faith, rather, in the Hebrew sense of “faith-fulness”, faith’s fulness: faith’s full reliance upon his mercy, faith’s full welcome accorded his truth, faith’s full appropriation of his pardon, faith’s full love now quickened by his ceaseless love for us. It all adds up to being rightly related to him. With our hostility dispelled, ignorance gives way to intimacy and cavalierness to commitment. We simply abandon ourselves to him. “Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” He who is the Prince of Peace effects our peace with God.

II: — Knowing and enjoying peace with God, Christ’s people are now blessed with the peace of God. The peace of God is that peace which every last individual desires. The peace of God is that “eye” of rest at the centre of the hurricane, the oasis in the midst of the desert storm, the calm in the midst of convulsion, the tranquillity that no turbulence can overturn ultimately. The peace of God is that peace which God grants to his people as they face life’s assaults. No one is surprised to hear that peace with God issues in the peace of God; a peace with God that didn’t issue in a peace deep inside us would be an exceedingly hollow peace.

The peace of God needs to be renewed moment-by-moment throughout life. The peace of God isn’t static, isn’t a state; the peace of God is dynamic, a constantly renewed gift blessing those constantly waiting upon God. Why the emphasis on “moment-by-moment” and “dynamic”, on “constantly renewed” and “constantly waiting upon”? Because disruption without us and disturbance within us; these unfold moment-by-moment too. The doctrine of creation reminds us that creation occurs as God suppresses chaos so as to allow life to arise. In a fallen world, however, chaos always threatens to reassert itself; in a fallen world, chaos always laps at creation, always nudges it, sometimes jars it. A fallen world unfailingly reminds us that the political chaos of disorder, the biological chaos of disease, the mental chaos of unforeseen breakdown: these are ever-present door-knocks of a chaos that ceaselessly knocks at the door of everyone’s life.

Many of the assaults that leave us craving the peace of God are not merely unforeseen but even unforeseeable. They resemble the “blind side hit” that leaves the football player momentarily stunned. The football player is running full-tilt down the field, looking back over his shoulder for the quarterback’s pass. Just as the ball touches his outstretched fingertips an opponent, running full-tilt up the field towards him, levels him. The collision is devastating physically because of the full-speed, head-on impact; it’s devastating psychologically because it wasn’t expected. The worst feature of the blind side hit isn’t the pain of the impact, or even the helplessness of temporary prostration; worse is the disorientation that accompanies it; worst of all is the fear that may arise from it, for if the player becomes fearful of the blind side hit he’ll never want to look back for the quarterback’s pass. In other words, the fear of subsequent blind side hits has taken the player off the field; he no longer plays the game.

As life unfolds for you and me we are blind-sided again and again. We are clobbered by circumstances we couldn’t foresee and therefore didn’t expect. Because we didn’t expect them we weren’t particularly armed and equipped to deal with them. Pain of some sort is inevitable; momentary disorientation is likely. And fear? It would be unrealistic never to fear life’s blind side hits. The ultimate issue here isn’t whether or not we fear; it’s whether or not our fear is allowed to take us off the field, induce us to quit. Plainly, the peace of God has everything to do with our ardour for life and our commitment to kingdom-work in the face of the clobbering we can’t avoid.

To his fellow-Christians in the city of Philippi Paul writes, “The peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” The Greek word for “keep” (phulassein) is an expression drawn from the realm of military engagements. “Keep”, in ancient military parlance, has two major thrusts. In the first place it refers to the action of an army whereby the army repels attackers, holding attackers at bay so that while attackers may assault, even assault repeatedly, they never gain entry, never overrun, never triumph and therefore never annihilate. In the second place phulassein, “keep”, refers to the protection an army renders inhabitants of a besieged city so as to prevent the city’s inhabitants from fleeing in panic. The apostle draws on both aspects of the military metaphor: the peace of God prevents life’s outer assaults from undoing us ultimately and thereby prevents us from fleeing life in inner panic.

The apostle says one thing more about this peace of God: it “passes understanding”. In fact, it passes “all understanding.” It passes understanding inasmuch as it isn’t natural; it isn’t generated by anything the sociologist or psychologist or neurologist can account for; it isn’t circumstantial. In a word, there’s no earthly explanation for it. Peace of mind that arose in the midst of peaceful circumstances would be entirely understandable and therefore entirely explicable. On the other hand, innermost peace in the midst of turbulence and treachery and topsy-turvyness; this is peace that occurs for no apparent reason.

There are parallels, of course, everywhere in the Christian life. Jesus says to his disciples, “In the world you are going to have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” Our good cheer arises in the midst of tribulation just because Jesus Christ has triumphed over everything that doesn’t make for good cheer, even as he gathers his people into his triumph. In exactly the same way peace arises in the midst of turbulence and treachery just because Jesus Christ has triumphed over everything that doesn’t make for peace, even as he includes his people in his triumph.

It is the prince of peace who gives us that peace of God which passes all understanding.

III: — The one dimension of peace that remains for us to discuss this morning is peace among men and women. Once more there is a logical connexion with the dimensions of peace that we have probed so far: those who know and enjoy peace with God and who are beneficiaries of the peace of God are commissioned to work indefatigably for peace on earth. Jesus maintains that his people are ever to be peacemakers; peacemakers, we should note, not peacewishers or peacehopers or pseudo-peace manipulators.

There are several pretenders to peace among men and women that are just that: pretenders. Pretend-peace, make-believe peace, is simply a matter of pretending that injustice and exploitation, savagery and enforced wretchedness don’t exist. Pretend-peace, make-believe peace; Jesus says he has come to expose this; expose it and eradicate it.

And of course there’s another form of pretend-peace; it arises not from pretending that injustice and abuse don’t exist; it arises from the deliberate lie, the cleverly-couched deception, intentional duplicity, even out-and-out propaganda.

I am told that those used car dealers who are unscrupulous are adept at a technique known as “paperhanging.” A used car has a rust-hole in the fender. The hole isn’t fixed properly. Instead, paper is glued over the hole and the paper is painted the same colour as the rest of the car. Anyone could poke her finger through the paper, of course, but it’s hoped that the paper deception will hold up long enough to get the car off the lot.

Paper-hanging abounds everywhere in life. Much peacemaking, so called, is little more than a smooth tongue smoothing over a jagged wound. Paperhanging peacemaking never works in the long run, of course, but it’s used all the time in the short run to get us quickly past conflicts that will otherwise be publicly visible (and therefore embarrassing) in a family or a group or a meeting. In six weeks paperhanging peacemaking gives way to worse conflict than ever, conflict now marinated in bitterness and frustration; it then gives way to worse conflict still six weeks after that.

When Paul writes, “Let us pursue what makes for peace”; when the author of Hebrews counsels, “Strive for peace with everyone”; when Jesus urges his people to make peace; in all of this we can’t fail to hear the note of urgent doing even as in all of this there’s no suggestion at all of paperhanging.

Then how are we to make peace among our fellows? In the first place we must always be concerned to see that justice is done. The Hebrew prophets denounce anything else not only as ineffective but as an attempt at magic. God himself castigates the religious leaders of Israel as he accuses them, according to Jeremiah, “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” It’s often assumed that naming something thus and so makes it thus and so. It’s assumed that pronouncing “peace” over glaring injustice will yield peace. But it never does. Peace cannot be made unless injustice is dealt with first.

Please don’t think I am suggesting something impossible for most people, such as ensuring justice in the Middle East or in Latin America or in war-torn countries of Africa . I’m speaking of situations much closer to home. And in this regard I’m convinced that we fail to name injustice for what it is out of fear: we’re afraid that to identify injustice or abuse or exploitation is to worsen conflict. Likely it will worsen conflict, in the short run. But often conflict has to worsen if any genuine peace is to be made eventually. To expect anything else is to want magic. There’s no shortcut here. The psalmist cries, “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of God’s throne.” There’s more to God’s throne than righteousness and justice, to be sure, but without them, the foundation, there would be no throne at all.

In our efforts at peacemaking it’s important for us to examine carefully the earthly ministry of our Lord. Whenever he himself is made to suffer, he simply absorbs it. On the other hand, wherever he sees other people made to suffer unjustly, he acts without hesitation. He will go to any lengths to redress the suffering of those who are victimised. He will stop at nothing to defend the defenceless and protect the vulnerable and vindicate the vilified. Yet whenever he is made to suffer himself he simply absorbs it.

You and I will be the peacemakers he ordains us to be if we can forget ourselves and our minor miseries long enough to be moved at someone else’s victimisation. But if we are going to remain preoccupied with every petty jab and petty insult and petty putdown, most of which are half-imagined in any case, then so far from promoting peace we are going to be forever rationalising our own vindictiveness.

Remember: when our Lord sees other people abused he’s mobilised, acting instantly on their behalf; when he’s abused himself, however, he pleads for his benighted tormentors. We are always a better judge of that injustice which afflicts others than we are of that injustice which we think we are suffering ourselves. We retain an objectivity in the former that we abysmally lack in the latter. Peacemaking requires more than a little wisdom.

We are told that he whose coming we celebrate at this season has a unique name: “Prince of Peace.” As we are bound to him in faith we are rightly related to God and therein know peace with God. Secure in our peace with God, we are the beneficiaries of the peace of God. Possessed of the peace of God, we are freed from our self-preoccupations to work for peace among men and women.

The prophet Isaiah anticipated Jesus of Nazareth as the “Prince of peace.” Centuries after Isaiah our Lord’s birth constrained angels to cry, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased.”

The Reverend Dr Victor Shepherd
Advent II 14th December 2008
Church of St. Bride, Anglican, Mississauga

Luke 1: 39-56

It’s easy to sympathize with revolutionary movements, since revolutions are spawned by shocking injustices and unendurable oppression. It’s easy to see a new day dawning in revolutionary movements, a new day for those who have endured the long night of exploitation and frustration.

Because it’s so easy to sympathize with revolutionary movements we are all the more jarred — if not left feeling hopeless — when at last we admit that the movement which promised human liberation has delivered no such thing. No one knew this better than Robespierre, an architect of the French Revolution with its threefold promise of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. Robespierre was executed at the hands of the social transmutation he had engineered. Little wonder he commented, minutes before his death, “Revolutions consume their daughters”.

As we watch Latin American countries lurch from fascism to communism, from the political far-right to the political far-left, we see it happening all over again. The African nations that threw off colonialism because it was cruel have installed a political monster whose human rights violations make colonialism appear almost benign. In pre-Revolutionary Russia Czarist rule was deemed insupportable; yet in the early period of Leninist rule the state executed one thousand people per month. A revolution that had promised to feed people still couldn’t supply each citizen with a loaf of bread 70 years later. Promising people freedom it demoralized them with a secret police; promising human fulfilment it couldn’t even grant mere recognition of human beings.

Revolutions founder over one thing: human nature. And in a fallen world, “human nature” means “human depravity”. The problem with revolutionary movements is this: they are incapable of being genuinely revolutionary! They merely “revolve”; that is, turn up, recycle, the same fallen human nature. Revolutionary movements cannot get to the heart of the matter simply because they are powerless to deal with the human heart. Political leaders may speak of a “New World Order”; Christians, however, know that the only new world order is the kingdom of God. “New” orders (so-called) are merely a case of deja vu. The only real revolution is the kingdom of God, fashioned and ruled by the king himself. It alone supplies the new heart, new mind, new spirit of which the prophets spoke, for which everyone longs, and which Jesus Christ alone bestows.

I: — According to Mary, mother of our Lord and spokesperson of his revolution, real revolution begins with the scattering of the proud in the imagination of their hearts. “Heart” is biblical shorthand for the innermost core of a person, the “nerve centre”, the “control panel”. “Heart” has to do with thinking, willing, feeling and discerning. In addition, “heart” means identity, who we really are underneath all cloaks, disguises and social conventions. The “imagination of our heart” is our fashioning a deity of our own making, a god after our own image and likeness, which deity we follow zealously. Through the prophet Isaiah God says, “I have held out my hands to an obstinate people, who walk in ways not good, pursuing their own imaginations.” Isaiah knows that first we disdain the Holy One of Israel and his claim upon us; then we fabricate whatever deity will legitimate and satisfy our craving, whether we crave wealth or recognition or ascendancy or anything else.

While Mary is customarily depicted as demure and dainty, naive to the nth degree, the picture she paints of human nature is anything but naive: it is stark. She tells us of proud people who are victimized by the imagination of their heart — all of us; we are at this moment stumbling down paths “which are not good”, certainly not godly. All of us are like the fool of whom the psalmist speaks, the fool who “said in his heart, ‘There is no God'”. He’s a fool not because he doesn’t believe God exists; he’s a fool just because he believes God exists and yet maintains that there are no consequences to dismissing the Holy One of Israel while preferring and pursuing the imagination of the heart, no consequences to exchanging the deity we fancy for the God who claims our faithfulness. Blinded by and in love with the gods of our own making we are all alike fools whose folly is going to prove fatal.

Yet Mary remains spokesperson for a revolution which is to be announced as good news, the uniquely good news of Christmas: God has scattered the proud! Our first response to learning that God scatters us vigorously may not be that we have just heard good news! To be told that we have been scattered, at God’s hand, suggests that God has hammered us so hard as to fragment us, and then dismissively swept away the fragmented remains. To be sure, we have been judged; we have been found wanting. Yet this is not to say that God sweeps us away in his judgement. The Greek verb “to scatter” (DIASKORPIZO) also means “to winnow”. To winnow grain is to toss a shovelful so that the wind carries away chaff but leaves behind the kernel, prized and soon to be put to use. In other words, God scatters us, the proud, inasmuch as he longs to save us and intends to use us. In getting rid of chaff he lays bare that heart which he can then renew in accord with his nature and kingdom, and then use ever after.

“Scattering the proud in the imagination of their hearts” is essential if a revolution is to be real and not merely a recycling of human depravity. Mary insists that in the invasion of his Son God has scattered us all and will continue to do so, yet not out of petulance or irritability or frustration or disgust. God scatters us — winnows us — inasmuch as he plans to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves and use us in ways we cannot anticipate.

II: — Mary maintains that God has done something more; God has “put down the mighty from their thrones”. But has he? Has God levelled those who strut? Has he crumbled those who tyrannize? In one sense it appears that God has done no such thing. Caesar Augustus was not deposed the day Jesus was born. No mighty ruler has been unseated just because the gospel was upheld. We need think only of Stalin’s cynical comment when told that the pope opposed Stalin’s mass murders. “The pope?”, snickered Stalin, “How many troops does the pope have?” Stalin strutted just because he knew that he, and no one else, ruled the former USSR.

And yet at a much deeper level the advent of Jesus Christ does mean that God has put down the mighty from their thrones. Herod wasn’t paranoid when he raged that the Bethlehem child was a threat to his throne. After all, in the coming of Jesus Christ into our midst the world’s only rightful ruler has appeared. Herod intuited correctly that the Christmas Gift would win to himself the loyalty of men and women who would never transfer that loyalty back to Herod. All political manipulators and ideologues and social engineers and “educational” programmers; in short, all who want to reshape society, even remake humankind, must know sooner or later that just because the world’s rightful ruler has appeared and is now enthroned their authority has been exposed as mere posturing and their promises as mere wind. Discerning Christians testify that those who think they can coerce or control have in fact been dethroned. They have been dethroned in that no ruler or tyrant can tell Christians who they are (Christ alone does this); no ruler or tyrant can make Christians who they are (Christ alone does this) — which is to say, no ruler or tyrant can ever make Christians what they don’t want to be. Corrie Ten Boom was as simple a Christian as one could find. (She was a fifty-year old unmarried daughter of a Dutch watchmaker who kept house for her father and sister). Yet Corrie Ten Boom defied Hitler by harbouring Jewish refugees in German-occupied Holland. She knew the terrible risk involved; she knew what the penalty would be. Whereupon she persisted all the more resolutely in her defiance. The moment she refused to admit any legitimacy to Hitler’s rule; the moment she refused to conform to it — in that moment Hitler was dethroned. Plainly the most coercive man in Europe was powerless in the face of a fifty-year old, unarmed woman. Yes, he could imprison her (and he did); but he could never tell her who she was; he could never make her who she was; and he could never make her what she didn’t want to be. Any Christian who refuses to conform anywhere to the blustering and bullying of “the mighty” just because that Christian acknowledges the rulership of Christ alone; any such Christian testifies that God continues to dethrone.

The revolution of which Mary speaks is unquestionably real. Still, the question can always be asked, “Real as it is, how far does it go? Whom does it finally affect?” It’s easy to say that it manifestly affects all the bullies we don’t like in any case and whom we are glad enough to see dethroned. But Mary’s revolution is unique, qualitatively different from all social dislodgings and historical upheavals, only if that innermost tyrant, that self-important egotist who manipulates me, is dethroned as well. I know how easy it is to look disdainfully at the person who is so obviously ruled by chemical substance or psychological habituation or shameless self-promotion when all the while I secretly scramble to hide the things that control me and brazenly try to excuse them when I can no longer hide them. I know how easy it is to speak of a new heart and mind when my reactions, in unguarded moments, suggest a heart still ruled by passions and instincts which serve my lingering sin, my self-indulgence, self-advantage, and self-promotion.

Then I can only cry out to God that I do want the revolution of which Mary speaks to reach me and revolutionize me. And so far from gloating over the fact that God has put down the swaggerers whom I am glad to see put down, I must plead with him to dethrone in me whatever has usurped the rule of Jesus Christ. For only then will the genuine “new world order” be under way.

III: — It is a singular mark of God’s kindness that the work of God’s left hand assists the work of his right; to say the same thing differently, a mark of God’s kindness that his right hand is stronger than his left, that mercy triumphs over judgement, that whatever wound he inflicts is only surgical repair for the sake of restoration to health. Having “put down”, God now “exalts”; he exalts “those of low degree”, the humble.

The humble, it must be noted, are not those who belittle themselves miserably and otherwise display abysmally weak self-image. (Crippling self-image isn’t humility; it’s illness.) Neither is “humility”, so-called, a religious technique whereby we can get ourselves “exalted”. And of course humility could never be the end-result of struggling to make ourselves humble, since the effort of making ourselves humble merely reinforces pride. Humility is self-forgetfulness, the self-forgetfulness that steals over us when we lose ourselves in something or someone who is bigger, richer, deeper.

In the revolution of which Mary speaks it is these humble people, self-forgetful people, whom God exalts. To be exalted, ultimately, is to be lifted up a child of God. When John speaks of the incarnation, its purpose and its result, he writes, “To all who received him [Jesus Christ], who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” In other words, to “forget” ourselves into Christ is to become sons and daughters of God. To the believers in Thessalonica Paul writes, “You are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We don’t belong to the night or to the darkness.” What it is to be exalted — lifted up, held up — as a child of God who no longer belongs to the night or to the darkness Paul makes clear in his letter to the congregation in Philippi; those people are “children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life.”

There is nothing more revolutionary than the person who shines in the midst of a perverse world. No one, believer or unbeliever, has ever doubted that the world can repopulate itself (that is, no one has ever doubted that a crooked and perverse generation can produce crooked and perverse offspring). Humanists insist that the world doesn’t have to repopulate itself (that is, left to itself the world can produce better and better citizens — this belief is clung to even though the wars of last century alone have slew one hundred million.) Christians, however, know that the world has to repopulate itself, can do nothing except repopulate itself, for the only person who is profoundly different, before God, is the person whom God’s grace has rendered self-forgetful and then rendered God’s own child. This person shines like a Westinghouse light bulb in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. This person is a beacon of hope, because this person is living testimony that at God’s hand there is something genuinely different.

IV: — Mary gathers up everything about her revolutionary manifesto in her pithy summation: “God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.”

Who are the rich whom God has sent away empty? Bashing the rich is fashionable nowadays. And of course those who like to bash the rich are quick to tell us who the rich are. The rich are those who have fifty dollars more than the bashers have; the rich are those who have a slightly better pension or a slightly larger home than the bashers have. Such an attitude bespeaks only envy and resentment. The truth is, those whose “riches” are a spiritual threat aren’t those who have money but rather those who are preoccupied with money — whether they have it or not.

The mediaeval Christians who spoke of the “Seven Deadly Sins” were correct in naming gluttony one of them. They were also correct in insisting that gluttony is not a matter of eating too much; gluttony is being preoccupied with food, even if one’s preoccupation with food is a preoccupation with avoiding food! (In other words the person obsessed with slenderness is as much food-preoccupied — and therefore gluttonous — as the person who can think only of what he is going to eat next.) It is no different with respect to money. Those who don’t have it can be as absorbed by it as those who are awash in it.

In those revolutions which remain forever ineffective those who have money disdain and dismiss those who lack it, while those who lack it hate and envy those who have it. While appearing to be poles apart, those who have it and those who lack it in fact are identical, since both alike are engrossed with it. Only the real revolution gets us beyond this, for only the real revolution makes our preoccupations shrivel as the holy God looms before us in his awesome, all-consuming immensity. As this One looms before us the chaff we have been gorging is simply forgotten, and we become aware of a hunger we never knew.

Our Lord Jesus has promised that all who hunger for God and his righteousness are going to be filled. All who crave the ultimate satisfaction of a relationship with God which can’t be snatched away by a paperback putdown or evaporated by the fires of harassment; all who finally hunger for this as they hunger for nothing else will be given that bread of life which profoundly satisfies yet never satiates. For this bread leaves us seeking none other yet always seeking more of him who is himself way and truth and life.

The rich who are sent empty away; they need not remain away. For as soon as they recognize their preoccupations as unworthy of someone who is created to be a child of God they too will hunger, will look to him who alone satisfies, and will be yet another fulfilment of Mary’s Christmas cry.

Victor Shepherd
December 2001

Luke 2:1-14
Col. 1:15-20

Many people who are musically sophisticated regard Itzakh Perlman as the world’s finest violinist. Yet his violin-playing isn’t the most noticeable feature about him. Anyone who has seen him winces when he walks, if it can be called “walking.” Perlman had polio as a child and ever since has barely been able to shuffle along, ever so slowly, each step laboured and clumsy, swinging his caliper crutches in a monumental struggle just to get onto the concert-hall platform, while an assistant carries his precious violin for him. Perlman is the only violin virtuoso who has to sit to play.

Not so long ago in Lincoln Centre, New York City, Perlman was only a few bars into a violin concerto with the N.Y. Philharmonic Orchestra when a string broke on his violin. He waved his bow to the conductor to stop. Perlman removed the broken string from his instrument and signalled the conductor to begin again. Then Perlman played the entire concerto on the three remaining strings of his violin. Thunderous applause greeted him at concerto’s end. When it had finally died away Perlman said to the hushed audience, “Sometimes in life we have to do our best with what’s left.” Then he handed his defective violin to his assistant, retrieved his caliper crutches, and shuffled haltingly off the platform, once more doing his best with what was left.

Many people who appear — and are — extraordinarily gifted nevertheless have had to do their best with what was left. One such person was Isaac Watts, known throughout Christendom as “the father of the English hymn.” He wrote hundreds of hymns, many of which will never be forgotten. What few people know is that Watts was deranged frequently, and deranged for extended periods of his life. There were protracted periods when he wrote nothing, did nothing (apart from survive in the care of a kind family that protected him) as he waited until sanity returned. There were periods in his life when it would have been just as accurate to speak of episodic sanity as of episodic derangement. What did Watts write when sanity caught up to him and his suffering abated? “Come, let us join our cheerful songs with angels ’round the throne; ten thousand thousand are their tongues but all their joys are one.” Or again, “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun doth his successive journeys run.” As ill as he was for so much of his troubled life, Watts could still write from his heart, “My God, how endless is thy love!” Perhaps he is best known for “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come.” Certainly we’ve all sung his splendid Christmas carol, “Joy to the World!” It’s plain that Watts’s literary output was a matter of doing his best with what was left, what was left of his sanity. He always did his best.

God does his best, too, with what’s left. Yet there’s a difference here. When God does his best with what’s left of a fallen world, does his best with a disfigured creation, does his best with an evil-riddled cosmos; when God does his best with this he doesn’t merely extract bravely whatever good remains in it. Rather, he restores it. When God does his best with what’s left of a warped world, he recreates that world.

Isaac Watts knew this so very well. He articulated it for us in his Christmas carol, “Joy to the World.”

I: — “No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground”, cries Watts. Plainly it’s a reference to Genesis 3, the old, old story of the world’s fall. What has happened? God has never been indifferent to humankind’s root defiance of him and root disobedience to him and root ingratitude; he’s never been indifferent to the primordial posture we assume before him, a posture wherein our “know-it-all” smirk casts aspersions on his goodness, on the goodness of his promise to us and his claim upon us. His claim upon us is rooted in his promise to us; his promise to us is rooted in his own heart. Heart and promise and claim are one in wanting only to bless us. We, however, assume he’s an arbitrary spoilsport out to make us miserable. We doubt him, defy him, disdain him, disobey him.

Contrary to what the person-in-the-street thinks, God always gives us what we want. No longer pressing himself upon us, he takes a step back from us. (This is what we want: a little more distance between him and us.) As he takes a step back from us, the crown of creation, he thereby takes a step back from every aspect of the creation beneath its crown. A vacuum opens up between him and the creation. Into the vacuum there pours all manner of evil. Now the creation is marred and disfigured and warped. “Thorns and thistles” infest the ground, as the old, old story in Genesis tells us. In a primitive agricultural society, thorns and thistles infesting the ground bespeak frustration; so much frustration, in fact, that only ceaseless labour and ingenuity stave off utter futility. (Everyone with even a backyard vegetable garden knows that only ceaseless labour and ingenuity stave off the frustration of having the vegetable-enterprise end in utter futility.)

As for “sins and sorrows”, they are as endemic in a fallen world as thorns and thistles. Jesus says, without argument or proof, “Whoever sins is a slave to sin.” Foregoing argument or proof, he assumes that anyone who disagrees with him is incorrigibly stupid. “Whoever sins is a slave to sin.” Since we all sin, we are all in bondage. Sorrows? “Those who choose another god multiply their sorrows”, says the psalmist. The Hebrew verb can as readily mean “run after” as “choose.” “Those who run after another deity multiply their sorrows.” The fall of humankind means that we do run after other gods; and just as surely do we multiply our sorrows.

Yet Watts can write his carol, “Joy to the World!”, because he knows that the coming of Jesus Christ means that the curse upon the world is overturned; it’s reversed. The coming of Jesus Christ means that the blessings of Christ are as far-reaching (and known to be as far-reaching) as the curse has been. While our Lord’s pronouncement is unarguable, “Whoever sins is a slave to sin”, equally unarguable is his declaration, “If the Son makes you free, you are free indeed.” While those who run after other gods unquestionably multiply their sorrows, those who join our Lord on that Way which he is, join him in running the race of life, always looking unto him who has pioneered the way for us — these people unquestionably multiply their joys. As for frustration, frustration so intense as to border on futility; in so far as we do the work that he has given us to do, kingdom-work, our work will never prove futile and we ourselves shall never go unrewarded.

“No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.”

II: — Watts has even more to say about the joy that has come to the world in the coming of Jesus Christ. “He rules the earth with truth and grace.” The same Lord who restores the world now rules it, and rules it with truth and grace.

Christ’s rulership is remarkable. After all, the rulers we are acquainted with do rule, to be sure, but they don’t rule with truth. They rule with something other than truth. They rule with disinformation. (Think of the Gulf of Tonkin incident with the American warship. The U.S. government arranged this bit of disinformation in order to bring the U.S.A. into the Viet Nam war.) Or they rule with duplicity. (Think of Toronto Councillor Howard Moscoe. When asked, two weeks ago, why charity casinos would be installed in North York after the citizens of North York had voted in a referendum against charity casinos, Moscoe unashamedly replied, “The referendum meant nothing.”) Or they rule with propaganda. (Think of the federal government’s promise a few years ago never to implement wage and price controls. Within ninety days of being re-elected it introduced the controls!) Or they rule with sheer, simple, self-interest and self-enrichment. (Illustrations here are superfluous.) Rulers rule, to be sure, but they don’t rule with truth.

Neither do they rule with grace. Our Lord, however, does. He rules with grace. Grace, throughout scripture, is God’s faithfulness to his own promise ever to be our God. Grace is his undeflectible resolve never to quit on us in anger or abandon us in disgust or dismiss us in impatience. Grace is God’s unalterable determination to remain true to himself in his promise to us regardless of our unfaithfulness in our promise to him. Since grace collides with our sin, then when grace meets our sin grace takes the form of mercy. And since mercy, so far from being mere benign sentiment, is effectual in the face of our sin, mercy issues in salvation, shalom, peace. For this reason the threefold “grace, mercy and peace” is found over and over in scripture. (Once again, in its collision with sin grace takes the form of mercy, and mercy triumphs so as to effect our peace with God, our salvation.)

Unlike the rulers we read about every day, our Lord “rules with truth and grace.”

III: — Several minutes ago I spoke of our need to “do our best with what’s left.” Perlman and Watts have done so. But in doing their best with what was left, were they merely doing what they could to prevent a disaster from sinking all the way down to total disaster, unrelieved disaster? At the end of the day are you and I realistically doing no more than this? In doing our best with what’s left, are we merely doing what we can to prevent a calamity from sinking all the way down to complete calamity?

No! In view of the fact that when God does his best with what’s left (a wounded, warped creation) he restores that creation wholly; in view of this our doing our best with what’s left is much more than merely salvaging a catastrophe: it’s an anticipation of the day when God’s perfect restoration is going to revealed; it’s a preview of the day when God’s restoration is going to be rendered as undeniable as it is unmistakable. Watts did what he did not because there was nothing else to do besides fall into total despair; Watts did what he did, rather, because he foresaw the day when he, like the deranged man in the gospel-stories, will be found seated, clothed and in his right mind. Perlman did what he did in anticipation of the day when he, like so many whom Jesus touched, will be found no longer lame but now leaping and cavorting, unhindered and uninhibited in every aspect of life. When you and I “do our best with what’s left” we aren’t merely trying to put a happy face on a monumental misfortune; we are anticipating the day, says Watts himself, when our Lord “makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love.”

IV: — All of this being the case, what are we to do at this moment? Watts knew what we are to do: “Let every heart prepare him room.” We are to receive, or receive afresh, him whose blessings flow far as the curse is found. We are to receive, or receive afresh, the one who rules with truth and grace now and who is going to make the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love.

We are to receive our Lord. We are going to do so as in faith we receive bread and wine, the vehicle of his self-giving to us now, as surely as body and blood were the vehicle of his self-giving for us then.

“Let every heart prepare him room.”

Victor Shepherd
December 1997

John 1:1-18

Most people feel that words are easy to use; words can never be used up (there are so many of them); therefore words are largely useless. No wonder words are flung about frivolously. The microphone is stuck in front of the celebrity and she is asked to say something. She uses many words to say nothing, and no one expected her to do anything else. The politician is questioned in the legislature. He starts talking. Fifteen minutes later he hasn’t answered the question; in fact, his words are a smokescreen behind which the question is lost in “bafflegab.” And preachers? No doubt you have listened to preachers, many of them, who were no different. Words are easy to use; words can never be used up; words are largely useless — so why not fling them about?

But it was different for our Hebrew foreparents. For those people a word was an event. In fact the Hebrew word for “word” (DABAR) means both word and event. For our Israelite ancestors a word was a concentrated, compressed unit of energy. As the word was spoken, this concentrated, compressed unit of energy was released. Thereafter it could never be brought back, never re-compressed just as an event can never be undone. Once the word had been uttered this unit of energy surged throughout the world, changing this, altering that, creating here and destroying there.

The closest we modern types come to the understanding of our Hebrew foreparents is in our grasp of how language functions psychologically. We recognize that inflammatory speech can excite people emotionally; we recognize that sad stories can depress people. We’ll admit that words may alter how people feel, but we still maintain that words don’t alter anything in reality.

The Hebrew conviction is different. The psalmist writes, “By the Word of God the heavens were made.” God speaks and the galaxies occur. So weighty were Hebrew words that they were always to be used sparingly, carefully, thoughtfully. It won’t surprise you, then, to learn that at the time of the first Christmas the Hebrew language contained only 10,000 words (very few, in fact) while the Greek language contained 200,000. A word is an event, said our Hebrew foreparents. A word has vastly more than mere psychological force. Once spoken, a word is an event which sets off another event which in turn sets off another, the reality of it all extending farther than the mind can imagine.

When the apostle John sat down to write his gospel he was living in the city of Ephesus. John was Jewish; his readers, however, were chiefly Gentile, like you and me. In speaking about Jesus Christ, the Incarnation of the Word of God, John looked for a word which Gentiles would understand, yet a word to which he could also marry the full force of the Hebrew understanding of “word”. The word John chose was LOGOS. LOGOS is the Greek word which means “word”. But it also means reason or rationality or intelligibility. It means the inner principle of a thing, how a thing works. The logos of an automobile engine is how a cupful of liquid gasoline can be exploded to propel a two-ton car, how the engine works. The logos of a refrigerator is how electricity (hot enough to burn you) can keep food cold; how it works, its inner principle, the rationality of it all.

John brought the Hebrew and Greek concepts together when he stated that Jesus Christ, the babe of Bethlehem, is the word or logos of God. When the Hebrew mind hears that Jesus Christ is the word of God it knows that Jesus is the power of God, the event of God, the effectiveness of God; an effectiveness, moreover, which can never be overturned or undone, a reality permeating the world forever. When the Greek mind, on the other hand, the Gentile mind, hears that Jesus Christ is the word of God it knows that Jesus is the outer expression of the inner principle of God himself; Jesus embodies the rationality of God; Jesus discloses how God “works.” John brings together both Hebrew and Greek senses of “word”. John’s Christmas message is as patently simple as it is fathomlessly profound: the word of God has become flesh, our flesh, and now dwells among us. This is the great good news of Christmas.

Great as the good news is, however, we must still ask how far-reaching it might be. Is it good news, but only for a few people? Is it good news, but only for the religious dimension of human existence? Or is it good news of cosmic scope so vast as finally to be imponderable? In short, how big is the baby?

I: — Think first of science. Two or three generations ago it was feared that new scientific discoveries were taking people farther and farther from God. The advances of science added up to atheism for intelligent people. Some people reacted by speaking ill of science: “It doesn’t have all the answers, you know.” (No scientist ever said it did.) “There’s lots more to be discovered”. (Of course there is; this is what keeps science humble.) Nonetheless, the bottom line was clearly stated: “If your sons and daughters are going to study science, don’t expect them to be Christians.”

The apostle John disagrees entirely. John insists that the realm of nature which science investigates has been made through the word, made through the logos. This means that the inner principle of God’s own mind and being, the rationality in God himself, has been imprinted on the creation, imprinted on nature, and imprinted indelibly. There is imprinted indelibly upon the creation a rationality, an intelligibility, which reflects the rationality of the Creator’s own mind. What’s more, the inner principle of God himself which has been imprinted on that creation which science investigates; this inner principle is the word which has been made flesh in Jesus Christ. All of which means that however much we may come to know of science our scientific knowledge will never contradict the truth and reality of Jesus Christ; our scientific knowledge can never take us farther from God.

Science is possible at all only because there is a correlation between patterns intrinsic to the scientist’s mind and intelligible patterns embodied in the physical world. If this correlation didn’t exist then there would be no match-up between the scientist’s mind and the realm of nature that the scientist investigates. To say the same thing differently: science is possible only because there is a correlation between the structure of human thought and the structure of the physical world. If this correlation didn’t exist then no one could think truthfully about the physical world. Then what is the origin of this correlation, this match-up? The origin is the word, the logos, through which the realm of nature and scientists themselves have alike been created. John Polkinghorne, a mathematical physicist and a Christian writes, “The Word is God’s agent in creation, impressing his rationality upon the world. That same Word is also the light of men, giving us thereby access to the rationality that is in the world.”

Speaking of mathematics and physics; mathematicians don’t make scientific investigations. Mathematicians arrange symbols, the symbols representing relations within human thinking. Physicists, on the other hand, physicists do investigate the world of nature. Recently it was found that when mathematicians and physicists have compared notes they have seen that the relations purely within human thinking reflect the patterns and structures in nature which scientists uncover. In short, there is a correlation between the rationality of human thinking and the rationality imprinted indelibly in nature. How? Why? Because all things have been made through the word of God: all things in the creation, including the mind of the scientist herself.

Everyone knows that science is based on observation. But to observe nature scientifically is not to stare at it. If I were merely to stare at the stars for the next twenty years I still shouldn’t learn anything about stars. The kind of observing that science does is an observing that is guided by theoretical insights. These insights uncover the deep regularities undergirding what can be observed. Where do these theoretical insights come from, ultimately? They are produced by the word, the logos, the rationality of God, the word that became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth; for through this word both nature itself and the human mind were fashioned.

How big is the baby? Very big. He who was born in Bethlehem is the Word of God incarnate. All things were made through him. He is the outer expression of God’s “innerness”. And by him God’s “innerness” has been imprinted on the “outerness” of nature. Scientific discovery never distances us from God, never contradicts the truth of God, never points people toward atheism. On the contrary, to uncover scientifically the rationality imprinted indelibly on the creation is ultimately to ask for the ground of nature’s intelligibility. The one, sufficient ground of nature’s intelligibility can only be the intelligibility or word or logos of God himself.

II: — How big is the baby? Big enough to embrace not just someone here and someone over there; big enough, rather, to embrace all men and women everywhere. All humankind, without exception, is summoned and invited to become sons and daughters of God. To receive the Word made flesh; to receive Jesus Christ in faith, says John, to embrace the one who has already embraced us is to find ourselves rendered children of God.

A minute ago we spoke of the rationality or order in creation. Without such rationality scientific investigation would be impossible; more to the point, without such rationality or order life would be impossible. No one could survive in a world where bread nourished us one day but poisoned us the next; where water doused fire one day but fuelled fire the next. Without elemental order to the universe human existence would be impossible. And yet while this elemental order perdures in a fallen world, the fact that the world is fallen means that the dimension of disorder is always with us. Disease, for instance, is a manifestation of disorder.

Yet the disorder in the natural realm is slight compared to the disorder in the human mind and heart. We men and women are fallen creatures. We are alienated from God in mind and heart. Because we are alienated from God in mind and heart we are disordered in ourselves; in addition, we are an infectious source of disorder in nature. The environmentalists never weary of reminding us of this fact: we human beings are an infectious source of a huge disorder in nature. The environmentalists don’t understand, however, that we are such inasmuch as we are disordered in ourselves and unable to restore order in ourselves.

It is as we embrace the word incarnate who has already made us and embraced us; it is as we become children of God through faith in the Son of God that alienation from God gives way to reconciliation. Mind and heart, disordered to this point, begin to be re-ordered. We are on the road to recovery, and we are guaranteed utmost restoration.

How big is the baby? The word made flesh is big enough to embrace every last man and woman. The word made flesh, our Hebrew foreparents would remind us, is also strong enough, effective enough, to render us all children of God and keep us such until that day when nothing will even threaten to separate us from him.

III: — Lastly, John tells us that out of the fullness of the Word-become-flesh you and I have received, and will always receive, grace upon grace. To say that the Word has become flesh is to say that Jesus Christ has taken on our humanity in its totality; he has taken on our humanity in its exhilaration, its weakness, its frustration, its sin and its mortality. And this humanity, yours and mine, is so surrounded by the goodness and kindness and mercy and wisdom and undeflectable purpose of God, so steeped in the grace of God, says John, that we are always receiving “grace upon grace”. To say that we are set behind and before by the grace of God isn’t to say that God is indulgent or tolerant or blind in one eye. But it is to say that there is a gracious persistence in God as he pardons us, assists us, and takes up whatever is done to us and whatever we do to ourselves and uses it all as only he can as he moves us toward a restoration so complete as to bring glory to him and adoration out of us.

How big is the baby? So very big that out of the fullness of Jesus Christ we shall always receive grace upon grace and nothing but grace. The Lord who knows my profoundest needs better than I know them myself will always supply what I need most. It would be a very small Lord who gave me what I wanted, or gave me what I thought I needed. If I were given what I wanted or thought I needed I should only be confirmed in my superficiality and cemented into my immaturity. Yet so big is the incarnate one that he gives me not what confirms me in my disorder, but precisely what moves me a step closer to my recovery and restoration in him.

When I was ordained and appointed to a seacoast village I spent hours at the beach watching the Atlantic. Hundreds of metres out to sea a wave emerged from the ocean’s immensity. It broke on the beach, flooding the sand. Before the wave wholly receded, however, another wave broke on the beach and flooded the sand. Now the sand was flooded both by the incoming wave and the outgoing wave; that is, the sand was always flooded. And then a third waved surged onto the beach before the second one (even the first) had had time to recede. Wave upon wave. One day as I stood on the beach before the Atlantic and watched wave upon wave I understood what John meant when he wrote, “Out of God’s fullness we have all received grace upon grace.”

It all adds up to this. God’s immensity is always flooding us with grace. However much we blunder, our blunder cannot ungrace us. When our faith flickers and we feel like a half-believer at best, our flickering faith won’t expel us from the sphere and realm of grace. When we are proud and need humbling; when we are dispirited and need encouraging; when we are bruised and need comforting; when our resilience is shaken and we need reassurance; whatever our profoundest need the immensity of grace will always prove sufficient. The Word made flesh is this big.

At the beginning of the sermon I said that for our Hebrew foreparents a word is charged with power. It is an event that, unleashed, alters reality in a way that can never be undone. For our Gentile foreparents a word is the inner principle of a thing, its rationality, how it works. John brought these two senses together when he spoke of Jesus Christ as the Word of God made flesh.

The rationality of the incarnate word is mirrored in the structure of creation and in the structure of human thinking, thus facilitating scientific investigation. The recreative power of the incarnate word is able to render us children of God, thus remedying our disorder. The grace of the incarnate word is fathomless, thus proving daily that Jesus Christ is deeper than our deepest need.
Then John’s cry must elicit an identical exclamation from us; namely, that to behold the Word made flesh is to behold glory, glory without rival and without end.

Victor Shepherd
Advent 2009

John 1:14

TRUTH For years I have been intrigued by the psychology of perception. What do people see? What do they think they see? Or hear? Or not hear? Everyone knows that people tend to see what they want to see and tend not to hear what they don’t want to hear. In situations of stress or fatigue or social pressure people can “see” or “hear” what isn’t there to be seen or heard at all.

Recently I found myself listening to a psychologist who has worked much in the area of perception. He told his audience the following.

An adult is placed in a pitch-black room. A pinpoint light is turned on, 10 or 15 feet away. (The light is only a pinpoint; it illumines nothing else.) Once the light is turned on it remains fixed in the same place for the duration of the exercise. Without exception, the psychologist reported, the person in the pitch-black room will say that the light moves. How much it is said to move varies from person to person: from 1 inch to 8 feet, the average being 4 inches.

There is another aspect to this experiment, an aspect that makes my blood run cold. When all the people who participated in the experiment are brought together to chat among themselves, they eventually agree (no one has overtly pressured them into agreeing) that the light moved 4 inches. Even those who, when asked alone, reported that it moved anywhere from 1 inch to 8 feet; even these people now swear that the light moved exactly 4 inches.

Note, in the first place, that people “see” what isn’t there to be seen at all: they are inventing something (a light that moves), and then are genuinely unable to distinguish what is from what they imagine. Note, in the second place, that they come to agree unconsciously lest they appear odd person out, lest they appear to be a social misfit. Note, in the third place, that all of this occurs with something (the pinpoint of light) that hasn’t been rendered deceptive or seductive in any way.

By extension, what does this experiment say about our society’s perception of political issues, educational issues, moral issues, spiritual issues, issues that concern us all?

Now suppose that the pinpoint of light, instead of being left in place, were manipulated so as to deceive people. Then think about the political issues, educational issues, moral issues, spiritual issues where there are attempts and schemes aimed at misleading us. In an election campaign Brian Mulroney swore that Canada’s social benefits were untouchable (“a sacred trust”). Upon being elected, the first thing he did was try to tamper with old age security. What did Canadians do about it? They re-elected him. Lest you think me politically biased I must remind you that Pierre Trudeau defeated Robert Stanfield by means of a promise never to implement wage and price controls. Trudeau implemented them within 90 days of being elected. Whereupon Canadians elected him again.

The two instances of turpitude I have just mentioned aren’t very subtle. (For all their obviousness, however, most Canadians still didn’t recognize them). Every day there are instances of deception far more subtle, far more devious, far more convoluted. Every day we are lied to, and lied to again, as falsehood is piled upon falsehood, fabrication upon fabrication.

How much worse it would all be if we (and our society) were victimized not only by the cunning of men and women, not only by the propaganda of the politicians, not only by the ideologues in the offices of social planning and the military and the church, but also by malignant spiritual forces that underlie and compound and disguise the distortions that we know to be deliberately engineered! Scripture insists that this very thing is happening all the time. St.Paul reminds us in II Corinthians 4 that “the god of this world” obstructs and obscures and perverts the spiritual perception of us all.

Then where is there truth? More profoundly, what is truth? Unless we know what truth is, we shan’t know where to look for it. If we don’t know what truth is and therefore don’t know where to look for it, how shall we ever find it? As a matter of fact, we aren’t going to find it. We are never going to find it. Truth must find us!

Our foreparents in faith were ecstatic over Christmas just because they knew that truth had appeared; truth had found them. Truth had overtaken them and stamped itself upon them when they hadn’t known where to look or what to look for. Truth had come upon them when their perception was distorted (and they were unaware of it), when they had been deceived by human cunning (and were unaware of it), when “the god of this world” had deceived them (and they were unaware of it).

Truth, in John’s gospel, always has the force of reality. Truth is reality as opposed to illusion (illusion being, as Freud taught us, deception that mentally healthy people cling to). Truth is reality as opposed to delusion (delusion being, as Freud taught us, deception that mentally ill people cling to). Truth is reality as opposed to falsehood, as opposed to mythology, as opposed to fantasy. Truth is reality, John insists.

John, we all know, was a Jew by birth and upbringing. He knew Hebrew. Truth, in Hebrew, has the force of firmness, stability, solidity. When truth (firmness, stability, solidity) describes a person, that person is said to be steadfast; and because steadfast, trustworthy.

“The word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” Christmas upholds the incursion of truth into our world. The incursion of truth means the incursion of reality, firmness, solidity, steadfastness, trustworthiness. Jesus Christ comes to us with a unique power to penetrate our world of misperception, deliberate falsification, and spiritual deception. Jesus Christ is truth.

GRACE All of us make promises. When we make promises we intend to keep them. Despite our utmost resolve to keep promises, however, we break them. We are promise-breakers.

God, on the other hand, is the promise-keeper. He invariably keeps the promises he makes. There is no treachery in him that could lead him to “welch” on his promises to us; on the other hand there is much treachery in us that could excuse him for abandoning his promises to us. Still, nothing deflects him. However exasperated he is with us, he never gives up on us. However frozen our hearts may be to him, his heart throbs for us. However fitful we may be in our devotion to him, he is constant in his to us. Fitfulness in us is met with only more resolute faithfulness from him.

Now to say that God is faithful is not to say that he is inflexible, rigid. Because he is flexible his faithfulness to us takes a special form when his faithfulness meets our fickleness and folly: when his faithfulness meets our sin his faithfulness takes the form of mercy. (If God were inflexible, then as his faithfulness met our sin his faithfulness — his promise ever to be our God — could only condemn us, without provision for our rescue and without opportunity for our repentance.)

You must have noticed that St. Paul begins his letters to assorted congregations with the greeting, “Grace, mercy and peace to you”. Grace is God’s faithfulness to us, promised from of old, kept unto eternity. Mercy is God’s faithfulness “flexing” so as to deal with our sin. Peace (the Hebrew word is shalom); peace, in Hebrew, is a synonym for salvation. Whenever Paul speaks first of grace he speaks finally of peace; the peace, shalom, salvation that grace finally forges. In other words, grace is faithful love so resilient, so resolute, so undeflectable that not even our icy ingratitude, not even our defiant disobedience, can discourage such love. Grace is faithful love so flexible that it “bends” itself around our sin. Grace is faithful love so constant and consistent that not even our resistance can impede it or interrupt it. For this reason whenever Paul begins by speaking of grace he ends by speaking of peace, shalom: he has imprinted on his heart the logic of grace.

Let’s gather it up in a nutshell: GRACE is God-in-his-faithfulness keeping the promises he has made to us, all for the sake of a mercy-wrought salvation that renders us his children, members of his household and family forever.

To speak of grace and truth is to say that God’s promise-keeping faithfulness (grace) is the reality, the solidity, firmness, stability, that we can trust in a world of distortion and deception and depravity

WORD Perhaps there is a sceptic (even a cynic!) among us who has a most important question to ask. “If God keeps the promises he makes to us, does he do this merely because he wills to do it (the implication being that he could break his promises if he willed to break them), or does he keep his promises because it’s his nature to keep them?” When God keeps his promises, are we merely looking at something God does (for reasons known only to him), or are we looking into the innermost, unalterable heart of God?

We have already determined that grace means God is consistent in his attitude and act. But is God consistent in the sense of being a consistent actor? When the movie Awakenings was about to be filmed Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who wrote the book (Awakenings), spent much time with two superb actors, Robin Williams and Robert de Niero. Sacks was startled and more than a little frightened at the ability of these two actors, since he noticed that they could take on any role, any identity, and act it with perfect consistency for as long as they wanted. But of course none of the roles, identities, they took on were they themselves; none of their roles reflected their innermost heart.

What about God? The “face” that he “puts on” for us in Jesus Christ; is this “face” only skin-deep, or does it reflect depths in God that are so deep they couldn’t be deeper? Does it reflect the innermost heart of God?

As we answer this question you will have to bear with me as we make a short detour into the Greek dictionary. There are two Greek words for word. One word for word is hrema, while the other is logos. Hrema means “that which we utter”. Logos, on the other hand, means “outermost expression of innermost essence”. When John speaks of the Incarnation as the Word becoming flesh, he uses logos. John is plainly telling us that what looms before us in Jesus Christ isn’t merely an act or action of God (as though God could act differently if he felt like it); what looms before us in Jesus Christ is the outermost expression of the innermost essence of God himself.

God doesn’t keep his promises to us just because he feels like keeping them, his promise-keeping telling us nothing about his heart or nature. God doesn’t keep his promises today, the implication being that he might not tomorrow. The consistency God displays isn’t the consistency of actors like Robin Williams and Robert de Niero. Rather, in Jesus Christ we are beholding the heart of God himself. God will never do anything other than what he has done in Christ and is doing now simply because he cannot do anything other.

To say the same thing differently, grace and truth are not roles that God acts superbly; grace and truth are the Word, the outermost expression of the innermost essence. God will always be — can only be — what he is for us in Christ Jesus our Lord. Put the other way around, what God is for us in Christ he is in himself eternally. It is the innermost heart of God that has invaded our world of distortion and deception and depravity.

FLESH “The Word became flesh.” Typically, in scripture, “flesh” refers to our creaturely weakness. “Flesh” is the bible’s one-word abbreviation for our frailty, our fragility, our vulnerability to betrayal, to disappointment, to disease and to death. “Flesh” refers to our ultimate defencelessness in the face of everything we struggle to protect ourselves against but finally can’t.

To say that the Word became flesh is to say that God has stepped forth from his eternal stronghold and has stepped into our frailty, fragility, vulnerability and mortality. But he hasn’t done this just to prove that it can be done; and he hasn’t done this just to keep us company. He has done it in order that his grace and truth might become operative in you and me this instant. He has done it in order that grace and truth might seize us and soak us and shake us as often as we think that our vulnerability or our fragility or our mortality is the last word about us. He has done it in order that on any day of confusion or collapse truth will find us yet again; on any day of disgrace grace will bend the love of God around us and wrap us in his love as God’s faithfulness to us flexes yet again in the face of our sin. He has done it in order that on every day we shall know that we aren’t orphans lost in the vastness of the universe; rather we are children of him who has promised never to abandon us, always to cherish us, thoroughly to save us.

Christmas: an event in four words.

TRUTH: a firm, stable reality we can trust.

GRACE: God’s promise-keeping faithfulness as his love becomes mercy whenever it meets us in our sin, bringing us peace, shalom, salvation.

WORD: All of the this reflecting not merely something God does occasionally but reflecting who God is eternally.

FLESH: God himself going so far to keep his promises to us as to step forth from his stronghold and give himself up for us in the midst of our suffering and death.

“The Word became flesh…full of grace and truth.”

Victor A. Shepherd
Christmas 1995

John 1:14

I: — It means a rescue operation, a salvage operation. Salvation (the unique work of the saviour) is a salvage operation.

One week after the birth of Jesus, Mary and Joseph took their infant son to the temple to have him circumcised. There they met Simeon, an aged man who had waited years to see God’s Messiah. With a cry that relieved decades of aching longing Simeon took the baby in his arms and exclaimed, “Now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” Peace? Did Simeon mean that at last he had peace in his heart, peace of mind? No doubt he meant that too, but that wasn’t what he meant primarily when he cried, “Peace! At last!”

You see, Simeon was an Israelite. In the Hebrew language “peace” is a synonym for “salvation”. “Peace” means God’s definitive reversal of the distortion, disfigurement and distress which curse the world on account of sin and evil.

Years later, in the course of his earthly ministry, Jesus healed a menorrhagic woman. When he had identified her in the crowd he said, “Daughter, your faith has saved you; go in peace.” He meant, “Through your faith in me God’s salvation has become effective in you; now you step ahead in the reality of your salvation; you walk in it; you live out of it for the rest of your life.”

When Simeon lifted up the week-old Jesus and cried, “Lettest now thy servant depart in peace” he added, “for mine eyes have seen thy salvation…light for revelation to Gentiles.”

Why does he speak of the Gentiles? Plainly Simeon thought that prior to the advent of Jesus Christ Gentiles were “in the dark” with respect to God. The light that Jesus Christ is, said Simeon, alone could save us Gentiles who know nothing of the Holy One of Israel. Was Simeon correct? Years later Paul would describe Gentiles as “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” Apart from him who is the Christmas gift are we Gentiles Godless and our predicament hopeless? Paul assumed this to be unarguably obvious!

Two weeks ago the University of Toronto conferred an honourary doctorate on Isaiah Berlin, professor at Oxford University. Isaiah Berlin is regarded as one of the finest scholars of humanist conviction anywhere in the world. Multilingual, philosophically erudite, possessed of a remarkable grasp of history, he is intellectually awesome. In his address to the university he detailed the undeniable dark side of human history. While humankind had always been prone to warfare (with the huge loss of life unavoidable in war), it was Napoleon who first developed large-scale slaughter, large-scale in that the slaughter spread vastly farther than battlefield combatants. Then Isaiah Berlin pointed out that the 20th century was unparalleled for slaughter on an even greater scale: the Stalinist purges (not to mention the people Marxism has slain wherever Marxism has been ascendant), the Holocaust, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, and so on. It is the 20th century that has provided conclusive proof of what the previous centuries suggested to be the state of the human heart. As Berlin spoke, making his case stronger by the moment, the weight of his cumulative argument seemed on the point of convincing everyone that humankind of itself could never reverse its history of rapacity and cruelty. At precisely this moment (according to the Globe and Mail write-up) Berlin turned 180 degrees and announced, without any justification at all, that a glorious new day was just around the corner. History, to this point bleak beyond imagining, would suddenly reverse its course in the 21st century. Humankind was on the cusp of generating a genuinely new future for itself, said Berlin, and his only regret was that he, an old man now, would not live long enough to see us do finally what we had never been able to do to this point!

I was stunned. Berlin’s intellect is far greater than mine. Nevertheless, he exemplifies the point scripture makes over and over: a major consequence of our sinnership is blindness — blindness to truth, blindness to reality, blindness to the nature of sin and the necessity of the saviour. The worst aspect of blindness, of course, is blindness to our blindness; ignorance of our ignorance; insensitivity to our spiritual insensitivity. In a word, the worst consequence of our condition is utter unawareness of our condition and its consequences.

Then Paul was correct, wasn’t he! Humankind is Godless and its predicament is hopeless!

Except that the saviour of humankind that human history cannot generate; this saviour has been given to us. It is the fact of the gift that made Simeon’s heart sing. The fact of the gift means that humankind doesn’t have to remain Godless; its predicament doesn’t have to remain hopeless! What we must crave to do is receive the gift, never spurning it, never trifling with it, never pretending, along with Professor Berlin, that no such gift is needed even though the cumulative evidence is that such a gift — God’s own rescue — is our only hope.

I rejoice that this gift does not come to us with the impersonal label “humankind” written on it, as though it were for everyone in general but no one in particular. Rather I rejoice that it comes with my name on it. As often as I rejoice in this I recall the verse from the Hebrew bible — “I have engraved you on the palms of my hands, says the Lord”. And then I think of the four-line ditty I learned as a child:

My name from the palms of his hands
Eternity cannot erase.
Impressed on his heart it remains
In marks of indelible grace.

I rejoice that the gift with my name on it has come to me in such a manner as to impel me to own the gift, cherish the gift, glory in the gift. For I too can say with Simeon, “Peace! From the prince of Peace himself! Immanuel: ‘God-with-us'”. And because of “God-with-us”, I with God eternally.

II: — Christmas means something more to me. It means that the saved life I have been given in Christ I must henceforth live and can live. A minute ago I referred to Christ’s saying to the healed menorrhagic woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” He meant, “Your faith has immersed you in the salvation of God; now you live out of that salvation, live from it, for the rest of your life.” What she had been given in Christ she was obliged to live and — most importantly — could live.

When the woman caught in the very act of adultery was brought to Jesus he said to her, “I don’t condemn you; now you see to it that you never do this again.” What she had been given in Christ she was obliged to live and could live.

When the paralyzed man was brought to Jesus he said to him, “Your sins are forgiven; take up your bed and walk.” Our Lord didn’t mean, “Walk around, go for a stroll, meander, try a little sightseeing.” “Walk”, rather, is the commonest metaphor in the Hebrew bible for the obedience God requires of his people. In light of what God’s salvation, God’s people can walk as he requires them to walk.

When Jesus says to three different people on three different occasions, “Go in peace”, “See to it that you never do this again”, “Start walking and never stop”; when our Lord says these he is saying exactly the same thing to all three. What the salvaged are supposed to do the salvaged can do.

Christmas celebrates the Incarnation. The Incarnation is God himself living among us under the conditions of our existence. The Incarnation is therefore God himself living our difficulties, our disappointments, our distresses. The book of Hebrews speaks of Jesus as “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith”; he has forged a way through life’s thickets ahead of us. We don’t have to forge a way through the thicket; we need only follow him on the path he has forged for us. But this we must do, and by his grace this we can do.

Many years after Christmas, when our Lord was full-grown and had embarked on his public ministry, he told his followers that they were light and salt. Obviously we are not light in exactly the same sense that Jesus Christ is. He is the light of the world; our vocation is to shine with his light so as to reflect it into nooks and crannies where life unfolds for us.

Jesus also insisted that his followers are salt. Salt, in the Hebrew bible, is the symbol of God’s covenant with his creation. His covenant is his promise that he will never fail us or forsake us, never quit on us, never give up in disgust or despair, however angry with us he might be for a season. Christians are to be the living sign that God has not abandoned his creation and will not abandon it.

We are to be such a sign. Impossible? Except that our Lord has pioneered this for us already. We need only follow him on the proof-path. Because the salvager has been there ahead of us, we the salvaged must follow him and we can.

III: — Christmas means one thing more to me. It means that the ordinary is fraught with eternal significance. The apostle John speaks of the Incarnation as the Word becoming flesh. He means more than the fact that the self-utterance of God clothed itself in a human body: bones, blood, skin, hair, teeth. He means that the Word immersed itself in every aspect of our existence, from employment problems to temptation to fun-time partying to betrayal to exhilaration to grief to laughter to pain. None of it is foreign to God.

We must never forget that our Lord was born to ordinary parents, grew up in an ordinary town (Nazareth being a generic town like North Bay or Moose Jaw); he worked at an ordinary trade and ate ordinary food. He was so ordinary as not to be noteworthy; there is virtually no mention of him in the literature outside the New Testament. He was one more itinerant preacher of one more Messianic sect handled one more time in the manner Roman security guards were so good at. Yet he was also the sole, sovereign Son of God whose coming among us is the occasion of God’s most intimate presence, God’s most effective mercy, God’s unique opportunity.

Since life is 98% ordinary, it is in the ordinary moments of life that we are going to have serve God. Instead of looking for the extraordinary, the dramatic, we should understand that we are salt and light not particularly when we try to be or are challenged to be; if we are salt and light at all then we are salt and light all the time.

Jesus went to a wedding, and there was given opportunity to attest the mission of his Father. After the wedding he went to a funeral, and opportunity was given him for a different ministry. On his way to the next village a distraught parent told him of a daughter’s sickness; while he was sorting out this development someone who didn’t like him accosted him. It was all so very ordinary — and therefore it was all the opportunity of a particular word and deed and blessing and comfort.

The child in front of us in the variety store is crying because her mother has sent her to the store for a loaf of bread the child has lost her money. Two teenagers in front of us are maliciously teasing an elderly man in Erin Mills Town Centre. The stranger in the bed beside the person we have gone to see in the hospital calls out to us. Our spouse arrives home with horrendous headache and hair-trigger nerves on account of a sneak attack at work when she never expected it and therefore could not protect herself against it.

This is where we live. Christmas, the celebration of the Incarnation, reminds us that this is where God lives too. Then there is opportunity for discernment and service and intercession and courage right here. Depending on the situation there is opportunity (and need) for ironfast inflexibility or for the gentlest accommodation.

I am moved every time I recall a story of St. Francis of Assisi. An eager, enthusiastic novice among the friars told Francis that day-to-day existence with brothers in the order was suffocatingly ordinary. The two of them should move out into the wider world and bear witness to Jesus Christ. Francis agreed that this was a good idea. “But first let’s first walk through the city of Assisi from end to end”, insisted the older man. The two fellows did nothing more than walk through the city. When they had traversed it the impatient novice, puzzled now, turned to Francis and remarked quizzically, “But I thought we were going to testify to our Lord!” “We just did”, replied Francis quietly, “we just did.”

Life consists of the ordinary punctuated by the extraordinary. Punctuation marks are found relatively infrequently, aren’t they? I have yet to see a sentence that had more punctuation marks than words! Punctuation marks may help us read a sentence but they don’t make up the sentence. And strictly speaking, punctuation marks are not even necessary. (Something as important as a telegram, after all, has no punctuation marks.)

It is a sign of spiritual maturity when we understand that the ordinary is the vehicle of the eternal; it is a sign of spiritual alertness when, from time-to-time, we see how this has occurred. It is a sign of faithfulness when we live day-by-day in the certainty that there is no ordinary moment that God doesn’t grace, and therefore there is no ordinary moment that is finally insignificant.

Christmas is the celebration of the Incarnation. Incarnation — the living word and will and way of God becoming flesh of our flesh in our midst; Incarnation is the foundation of everything pertaining to the Christian faith.

Incarnation means a salvage operation that is nothing less than the salvation of God.

Incarnation means that the salvaged life God grants us through our faith in Jesus Christ is a life we must live and can live, since our Lord has pioneered it for us.

Incarnation means that the ordinary is the vehicle of God’s summons to us, as well as the occasion of our obedience to him through service to others.

This is what Christmas means to me.

Victor A. Shepherd
December 1994

I: — My appetite does not improve when I see a crow pecking at a dead animal on the side of the highway. And if perchance a crow were to drop a bit of ragged roadkill in my lap I should be repulsed. Elijah the prophet was told (who told him?) to hunker down by the brook Cherith which flows into the Jordan and crows would feed him there. Feed him what? Everyone knows what crows eat.

Elijah looms out at us from the Hebrew bible as a man who is utterly God-saturated. Over and over we are told, “The word of the Lord came to Elijah…”, and off Elijah goes to do and say what has been laid on him. Today we should find many different ways of speaking of him. He was God-soaked — for the text explains him entirely in terms of the God who has inundated him. He was humble — for it takes more than a little humility to allow oneself to be fed carrion. He was courageous — for it takes enormous courage to speak truth to power, particularly when the political power (King Ahab and his cruel wife Jezebel) is murderous. He was unpolished — for subtlety and soft speech were foreign to him. Most notably he was impassioned. Wherever we find Elijah his passion is aflame: his preaching, his praying, his scorn, his rage, his dejection; it’s all a firestorm. Moderation? Elijah never heard of the word. Balance? The “golden mean”? He wouldn’t understand. We wonder why Elijah is always and everywhere afire; he wonders why we appear not to be lit.

The greatest of the Hebrew prophets, according to Jewish opinion both ancient and modern, Elijah was God’s spokesperson in the face of the Baalism which surrounded Israel and threatened to infiltrate it. Baalism had several aspects to it. It was nature-worship, and nature worship (both ancient and modern) conveniently lacks any grasp of evil or sin. Nature-worship will always attract the hordes who want religious sentimentality without ethics. Not surprisingly Baalism tolerated, even encouraged, lasciviousness of all sorts.

King Ahab, an Israelite who knew exactly what God meant when God insisted that he is a “jealous” God (God abides no rivals; worship of him cannot be mixed with worship of anything else); Ahab nevertheless thought he could have his cake and eat it too. Why not mix Baal, the pagan deity, and Yahweh, the true and living God, together? Why not have the self-indulgence which Baal permits his people and the security which Yahweh promises his people? Why not the fornication which Baal laughs about and the forgiveness which Yahweh weeps to bestow? Why not? Don’t the television preachers tell us repeatedly that God wants us to “have it all”? Don’t the television preachers tell us repeatedly that we can have all the “goodies” of the world together with the gospel of God?

Elijah rightly says, “No, a thousand times no!” And so we find Elijah, the prophet of God, standing amidst the 450 prophets of Baal. “The Holy One of Israel”, Elijah says to them, “will shortly expose your Baal for the inconsequential puff of smoke that it is. And as for you, Ahab, so far from being a real king you are a double-crosser; you have betrayed the very people whose spiritual protector you were commissioned to be.” Whereupon Ahab stabs his finger at Elijah, “You troubler of Israel ; why do you have to be such a disturber?”

Jewish people always knew that Elijah, the greatest of the Hebrew prophets, would come back. He would come back at the end-time when the kingdom of God was breaking in on the world; he would come back when what all Israel called the “Age to Come” was dawning as it superimposed itself on what Israel called the “Present Evil Age”. Elijah would surely come back. And when he came back, ancient Jewish people insisted, he would do four things. He would restore the people inwardly through repentance; he would gather together the scattered people of God; he would proclaim salvation; and he would introduce the Messiah.

Centuries later John the Baptist appeared. John didn’t eat carrion brought to him by crows; he ate honey made for him by wild bees, with grasshoppers added for protein. John too spoke truth to power, even lethal political power — just as Elijah of old had. This time it wasn’t king Ahab; it was king Herod, a Jew in name only who had sold his soul to pagan Romans and now betrayed the very people whose spiritual protector he had been commissioned to be. And just as Elijah had ringingly denounced Ahab’s theft of Naboth’s vineyard, so John denounced Herod’s theft of his brother’s wife.

John had an elemental message which he declared tirelessly. “Repent. Right now. Don’t say, ‘Tomorrow’. You don’t have tomorrow. The axe is laid to the root of the tree now; it is the height of spiritual stupidity to think that the tree itself is going to last until tomorrow. Get right with God now. How will anyone know if your repentance is genuine? By the subsequent shape of your life. Will baptism in the Jordan (or anywhere else) save you? No it won’t. For unless your life is reordered before God, getting yourself baptized in desperation is no different from a snake slithering away in panic from a grass fire.”

And then John began gathering together the scattered people of God. After all, he urged repentance even upon soldiers, and they, despised gentiles as they were, were yet added to the “household and family of faith”. In the same breath John proclaimed the salvation brought by his cousin, Jesus, whose shoelaces John felt himself unworthy to untie. Did he introduce the Messiah? Repeatedly John urged the people, “Don’t look at me; look at him. He is the one to baptize you with the fiery Spirit of God!”

Months later the detractors of Jesus taunted him, “You can’t be the Messiah. Everyone knows that Elijah must come back before the Messiah can appear. And Elijah hasn’t returned for 800 years!” “Wrong again”, said Jesus to his detractors, “you are dead wrong. Elijah did come back. He came back recently. And you made fun of him. You called him names: ‘the dunker, the dipper’. Elijah did come back. And you dismissed him. Didn’t John urge repentance, gather the scattered people of God, declare the salvation of God, and introduce the Messiah?”

Today is Advent Sunday. We are preparing ourselves to receive (or receive afresh) him who is the Messiah of Israel and the saviour of the world, him who is nothing less than Emmanuel, God-with-us. Yet we can properly receive him only as we first admit that the Messiah can’t be known without the reappearance of Elijah, only as we admit with our Lord himself that John the Baptist is Elijah given to us once more. Which is to say, we can receive the Christmas gift himself only as we first hear the forerunner’s word and take it to heart and do it. The single forerunner of the Christmas gift is Elijah and John compressed into one. Let us hear our Lord Jesus once more: we can receive him who is the Christmas gift (our Saviour) only as we first hear and honour the word of the forerunner, Elijah and John compressed into one.

II: — Elijah was Israel ’s greatest prophet; David its greatest king. Many generations later David’s descendants gave birth to the Son of David, Jesus our Lord. David and Jesus were even farther apart temporally than Elijah and John: one thousand years separated David and his Son. Yet they had much in common.

They both came from simple country-folk; David and Jesus, that is.

They both gained notoriety when they were still adolescents: David as a shepherd boy who accidentally “showed up” older men when they would not respond to Goliath’s challenge, Jesus as a 12 year old who stymied learned clergy in the temple.

They both possessed enormous backbone, neither one a pushover, neither one cowering before brute power. When David saw the terror which had paralyzed his countrymen in the face of the Philistine threat David scornfully said of the Philistine leader, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?” When Jesus knew that Herod wanted to terminate him Jesus scornfully said to whoever would listen, “Go and tell that fox”, when “fox”, in first century Middle Eastern street-talk was shorthand for the most loathsome “creep” imaginable.

They both showed mercy to their enemies: David, when he knew Saul wanted to kill him and he had Saul helpless yet let him go, Jesus when he prayed at the last, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”

They both were men of passion. When David exulted without restraint “before the Lord” his wife, Michal, despised him for it. When the passion of Jesus fired his public ministry and rendered him heedless of danger his mother thought him deranged and wanted to take him home and sedate him.

They both were fighters, and both declined the weapons which everyone else assumed they ought to use. David was offered Saul’s armour, but put it aside, trusting a simple slingshot and the use God would make of it as God honoured the one who had first placed his trust in his Father. Jesus, summoned before Pilate, told Pilate that he, Jesus had at his command legions of angels whose unearthly power could have vapourized Pilate on the spot, together with everything Pilate represented. Instead Jesus trusted a simple cross and the use his Father would make of it as his Father honoured the one who had first placed his trust in his Father.

Both David and Jesus were born to be king. David was born in Bethlehem , a village outside Jerusalem . ” Bethlehem ” means “house of bread”. One thousand years later Jesus was born in Bethlehem too. Both were born to be king.

What was an Israelite king supposed to do? I say “supposed to do” since most Israelite kings didn’t do what a king was supposed to do. Instead they lined their pockets and slew their opponents. David was different. David knew that an Israelite king had three responsibilities. The king was to protect the people, uphold justice, and serve as a priest.

David did protect the people. In fact David was a military genius, like the Duke of Wellington or Ulysses S. Grant.

David did uphold justice. Justice today means little more than seeing that criminals are convicted and sentenced. Not so with that justice which God decrees. As a matter of fact there is no Hebrew word for justice; the Hebrew word is “judgement.” The king was to uphold God’s judgements just because the king was the agent of God’s judgements. And God’s judgement is not primarily a matter of convicting criminals and sentencing them. God’s judgements, scripture attests over and over, are God himself setting right what is wrong; freeing those who are enslaved; relieving those who are oppressed; assisting those who are helpless; clearing the name of those who are slandered; vindicating those who are despised. David did this. Those who had been set upon were set upon no longer. Anyone who “fleeced” the defenceless or exploited the powerless learned quickly that king David had zero tolerance for this sort of thing. When David himself was fleeing Saul’s murderous hatred 400 men and their families gathered around David, “Everyone who was in straits and everyone who was in debt and everyone who was desperate.” To be desperate is literally to be without hope; to be in straits is to have no way out, no escape. All such people found in this king one who would never disdain or ignore or abandon them.

And priest? The role of the priest was to intercede with God on behalf of the people. Frequently David went into the tabernacle “and sat before the Lord”; that is, he had his people on his heart, and pleaded with God for them all.

One thousand years after David a blind beggar minutes away from receiving his sight called out to Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy on me.” “Son of David”. It meant “messiah.” The messiah was to be a great king, greater even than David. A blind man who could see what supposedly sighted people couldn’t see knew Jesus to be the long-awaited king greater even than David.

The protection which Christ the king gave his people — continues to give them — is more glorious than any protection David furnished, for Christ our king has promised that nothing will ever snatch you and me out of his hand; nothing will ever separate us from that love of God made concrete in the king himself.

That Son of David who is Christ the king upholds justice as he implements God’s judgements. Jesus himself has said that all judgement has been delivered over to him. And since the primary purpose of judgement is to restore the right, to say he is judge is to say that he is saviour. If the primary purpose of the judge is to set right anything that is wrong, anywhere, from the sin of a child to the disfigurement of the cosmos, then the judge has to be the saviour as well.

And priest? In his atoning sacrifice Christ the king uniquely pleads with the Father on behalf of the people. For this reason the book of Hebrews speaks of Christ the king as “our great high priest”.

All of which brings us to the last point concerning David and David’s greater son: the matter of sin. Here their paths diverge. The New Testament tells us that Jesus was “tempted at all points as we are, yet without sin”. David, it can safely be said, was also tempted at all points; but he sinned grievously. He lusted after Bathsheba, Uriah’s wife. His lust warped his thinking. Adultery-on-the-way rendered murder perfectly reasonable. David didn’t merely stumble; he sprawled, sprawled shamefully. Everyone knew it.

A few days later, as David slunk out of Jerusalem (or tried to slink out), a man named Shimei walked on the other side of the street, cursing David and throwing stones at him. (No doubt the stones were a not-so-subtle reminder that the law of Moses prescribed stoning for adultery.) Abishai, David’s loyal friend, was outraged that the king should be insulted like this. “Why should this dead dog curse the king?”, cried Abishai, “Let me take his head off!” “No”, replied David sadly, “No. Shimei curses me only because God has told him to. The treatment Shimei accords me is no worse than I deserve.” David was publicly humiliated, yet refused to flee his humiliation inasmuch as his public humiliation was the God-ordained consequence of his sin.

King David’s greater son didn’t flee his public humiliation either. Jesus was “numbered among the transgressors”. He was assigned that death — crucifixion — which the Romans reserved for insurrectionists, deserters and rapists; that is, reserved for those whose disgrace could not be greater. Jesus refused to flee his public humiliation inasmuch as his humiliation was the God-ordained consequence not of his sin but of his sin-bearing righteousness. The apostle Paul, as so often, says it most compactly: “He who knew no sin was made sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

The Christmas announcement to the shepherds in the field was plain: “Don’t be afraid. Good news! Great joy! For to you is born in the city of David a saviour who is Christ the Lord.”

The city of David is Bethlehem , “house of bread”. And in the house of bread is born David’s greater son who is himself the bread of life. Then this one, given to us anew at this season, we must receive anew, for he is saviour inasmuch as his humiliation is his invitation to us to become that righteousness of God which we need as we need nothing else.

Elijah, David, John, Jesus. The Christmas story begins in a lowly cattle shed, once upon a time, in royal David’s city.

Victor Shepherd
Advent 2003

Isaiah 60:1-3
Matthew 2:1-12

Who ought to worship? Everyone ought to worship. (We all know this much. Everyone ought to worship.) Still, the Christmas carol, Angels, from the Realms of Glory, speaks of different sorts of people who ought to worship. It speaks of angels and shepherds, sages and saints.

I: — Today we are going to start with the shepherds. Shepherds were despised in 1st century Palestine. The social sophisticates in Jerusalem and other city centres of urbanity looked upon shepherds as uncouth, since shepherds worked with animals. Shepherds were also regarded as dirty. Sheep, after all, have very oily fleece and the shepherd has to handle them; besides, sheep poop everywhere. Shepherds were also looked upon as less than devout. It was awkward for them to get to all the church services as expected, since their animals were forever getting lost or falling sick or breaking a leg or having obstetrical difficulties.

Like all people who are despised for any reason, however, the shepherds were also useful to the very people who despised them. At both morning and evening services in the temple, the cathedral of Jerusalem, an unblemished lamb had to be offered up to God. High quality lambs, therefore, were always in demand. Temple authorities had their own private flocks just outside Jerusalem, in the Bethlehem hills. The Bethlehem shepherds looked after both their own flocks and the flocks of the temple authorities, always looking out for the perfect lamb to be sacrificed in the temple. These shepherds, despised as they were, were ordained by God to be the first people to behold the Lamb of God, the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world. They were the first to hear the good news, gospel, of Christmas: “For to you is born this day a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.”

I understand why the shepherds were the first to hear and see, apprehend and know, believe and trust. The shepherds were first in that like other people in general who come from the south side of town they aren’t taken in by the smokescreens and false fronts that middle and upper class people love to hide behind. People from the south side of town see it the way it is and tell it the way it is.

My first day on the job in Streetsville (I came to the congregation in 1978 and remained for 21 years) I arrived early at my office and waited for the church secretary. Promptly at 8:30 a.m. the secretary, a large, imposing woman, loomed in the doorway to my office, looked me in the eye and said, “I’m married to a truck driver; you get it from me straight.” That was her first utterance. Her second was like unto it: “There’s a toilet between your office and mine, but it’s noisy, if you get what I mean.” Is there anyone who wouldn’t get what she meant? Right away I knew I was going to get along with this woman. Because she, married to a truck driver, was utterly transparent and non-duplicitous, frontal, she spared me untold grief over and over in congregational life.

She and I had much in common, not the least of which is the simple fact that we both live in the shadow of a dog food factory. And there’s nothing wrong with this. After all, Moses was minding sheep when the Lord God accosted him and the world was different ever after. Gideon was threshing wheat when he was summoned from heaven. Elisha was ploughing a field when he was named successor to Elijah. No congregation can afford to be without shepherds and all those like them.

This being the case, why do we see so few of these people at worship in virtually all the churches of historic Protestantism? Roman Catholicism has always been able to attract people from the whole of the socio-economic spectrum, from the most affluent to the most materially disadvantaged. To be sure, the Protestant churches do see some of the latter; Protestant congregations aren’t completely homogeneous. Still, we see far too few. Their absence dismays me, since I have found that these people have no difficulty with me, at least. Several years ago a man with a grade ten education chuckled, “Victor, we can always be sure of one thing on Sunday morning: you’ll never be over our heads!” Such people live in Toronto in large numbers. But they are proportionately underrepresented in virtually all Protestant congregations. Why? Can any of you enlighten me? Their absence haunts me. For shepherds have been summoned to worship Christ the new-born king. And if they do worship, they’ll be the first to see and seize the Lamb of God who takes away their sin too.

II: — Sages ought to worship as well. To be sure, the hymnwriter insists that where sages are concerned “brighter visions beam afar”; brighter, that is, than the sages’ contemplations. I agree. But to see Jesus Christ as brighter, even the brightest, is not to say that lesser contemplations aren’t bright at all and aren’t to be valued. They are bright, and they are to be valued. To say that God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ supplies what no sage will ever arrive at is correct; but to say that because God’s self-disclosure is this what the sages are about is worthless – this is wrong. To say that the event of Christmas gives us what no philosophical exploration will ever impart is not to say that philosophy (or another scholarly discipline) is therefore foolish and useless. The uniqueness of the Christmas event never means that intellectual rigour isn’t a creaturely good, a creaturely good that gives God pleasure.

Philosophy is an academic discipline that I cherish. Please don’t tell me that philosophy’s significance is measured by the old question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Philosophy, after all, taught me to think, and 90% of good preaching is just clear thinking. Moreover, insofar as philosophical enquiry is the exploration of what is there is an intellectual excellence to it that we ought not to slight, for God takes pleasure in any human excellence. (Let’s be sure of something else: God takes no pleasure in mediocrity of any sort.)

Jesus Christ is truth. I am glad to affirm this. He is that “brighter” luminosity that sages are summoned to worship. But to say this isn’t to say that the contemplations of the sages are inherently vacuous and invariably useless, let alone evil. Because the church has undervalued the sages’ contemplations the church has largely abandoned the arena of intellectual endeavour. At one time the thinkers inside the church could out-think the thinkers outside the church; at one time. In my second year philosophy course the professor, a man who made no religious profession, had the class read both Bertrand Russell and Thomas Aquinas. Russell is an atheist; Aquinas, a Christian and the greatest philosopher of the middle ages. It’s easy to see why an agnostic or atheist professor would have us read Russell. But why Aquinas? Just because that professor wanted us to appreciate the intellectual power of the “Angelic Doctor”, as Aquinas was known in the 1200s.

Years ago I overheard Emil Fackenheim, himself a marvellous philosopher, remark that Kierkegaard was the greatest thinker to arise in Christendom. I thought the statement was perhaps exaggerated Then I found others saying the same thing. Then I noticed that Ludwig Wittgenstsein, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century (together with Martin Heidegger); I noticed that Wittgenstein had said that Kierkegaard was by far the profoundest thinker of the 19th century. Will the profoundest thinker of the 20th century turn out to have been a Christian? And of the 21st? Not a chance. Why not? Because the church has abandoned the intellectual field. Fuzzy-headed feel-goodism is as profound as we get today.

At the time of the Reformation (16th century), those who had first been schooled as “sages” (i.e., humanists) before they applied themselves to theology also wrote theology that we shall never be without and provided leadership for the church. Those, on the other hand, who studied theology only without first drinking from the wells of humanism wrote no worthwhile theology and provided no leadership for the church.

Yes, sages should worship Christ the new-born king, since he is king and brings with him what the sages can’t supply of themselves. But this is not to say that the sages’ sage-ism is worthless. There is creaturely wisdom that is genuinely wise, even as the pursuit of that wisdom gives pleasure to God.

III: — Saints too are summoned to the cradle. “Saints before the altar bending, watching long in hope and fear.” The saints are those, like Simeon and Anna of old, who wait on God. The saints are always found “before the altar bending”; i.e., the saints worship, profoundly worship. They are always found “watching long in hope and fear”; i.e., the saints are both expectant and reverent. “Suddenly the Lord descending in his temple shall appear.” Shall appear; shall continue to appear. In other words, the Lord who came once in Bethlehem of old comes again and yet again, continues to come. Insofar as any of us are found at worship, waiting on God expectantly and reverently, the selfsame Lord will unfailingly appear to us.

It was while Isaiah was at worship that the sanctuary filled up with the grandeur of God and the holiness of God and the glory of God. The glory of God is the earthly manifestation of God’s unearthly Godness. It all overwhelmed Isaiah so as to leave him prostrated under the crushing weight of God, only then to be set on his feet so that he might henceforth go and do what he had been appointed to.

It was while Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, was at worship that he was rendered speechless for as long as he needed to stop talking in order to hear and heed what God was saying to him.

It was while the apostle John was at worship, exiled for the rest of his life on the island of Patmos, that he was “visited” and wrote, when he had recovered, “His voice was like the sound of many waters, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength…and when I saw him I fell at his feet as though dead. But he laid his right hand on me saying, ‘Fear not….’”

What do we expect when we come to worship? Three hymns and a harangue? What if “Suddenly the Lord descending in his temple did appear”?

He who came once doesn’t come once only. He comes again and again. As often as he comes the saints before the altar bending – the saints at worship – are overtaken yet again, and like John of old can barely croak, “His voice was like the sound of many waters, and his face like the sun shining in full strength….” The saints in any congregation today know as surely as the saints of old knew. And the saints at worship today declare, “Come with us and worship Christ the new-born king.”

IV: — What about the angels? Make no mistake: the angels are real. It is the height of arrogance to think that we are the only rational creatures in the universe. Who says that a creature has to possess flesh and bone in order to possess reason and spirit? The Christmas carol invites the angels to “proclaim Messiah’s birth.” Such proclamation, such witness, is precisely what scripture says angels are always and everywhere to be about. Such proclamation or witness is crucial. You see, because the angels are mandated to bear witness, specifically to bear witness to Jesus Christ, God will never lack witnesses who attest the truth and power of his Son and of that kingdom which the Son brings with him. To be sure, you and I are mandated to bear witness to all of this too. Flesh and blood witnesses like you and me, however, are sadly lacking in quality and quantity. Still, where we are deficient, the angels are not. Therefore I find much comfort in the angels. However much I may fail in serving and attesting and exalting Messiah Jesus and his truth, there are other creatures whose service and witness and exaltation never fail.

Listen to Karl Barth, the pre-eminent theologian of our century. A few years after World War II Barth wrote, “Because of the angelic witness to God’s kingdom we can never find intolerable or hopeless the apparently or genuinely troubled state of things on earth.” Just before the outbreak of the war Barth had been apprehended at his Saturday morning lecture in the University of Bonn, Germany. He had been deported immediately from Germany to his native Switzerland. As soon as hostilities with Germany had ceased the cold war with the Soviet Union had begun. While there was no war, hot or cold, in Switzerland, Barth never pretended the Swiss were uncommonly virtuous. He readily admitted his own country financed itself by harbouring the ill-gotten gains (the infamous unnamed accounts in the Swiss banks) of the most despicable criminals throughout the world. Nevertheless, “Because of the angelic witness to God’s kingdom we can never find intolerable or hopeless the apparently or genuinely troubled state of things on earth.”

V: — Lastly, the Christmas carol invites us all, everyone, to worship Christ the new-born king. It tells us that this infant has been appointed to fill his Father’s throne. Since Christ’s sovereignty over the whole of creation is unalterable, acknowledging his sovereignty is not only an invitation to be received and a command to be obeyed; it’s the soul of common sense.

Our Lord is the new-born king. To be sure, the only crown he will ever wear is a crown of thorns. Finding no room in the inn and having no home in which to lay his head throughout his earthly ministry, the one house he’ll eventually occupy is a tree house, ghastly though it is. And of course the only throne he will ever adorn is a cross. Still, he is king. We mustn’t allow the bizarreness of his royal trappings to deflect us from the fact that he is king. He rules, he will judge, and he can bless.

Then acknowledge him we must. The writer of our carol cries, “Every knee shall then bow down.” Since everyone is going to have to acknowledge him ultimately, like it or not; since every knee is going to have to bow before him either in willing adoration or in unwilling resignation, it only makes sense to adore him and love him and delight in him now, together with sages, saints, angels, and by no means least, shepherds.

Victor Shepherd
December 2000

Colossians 1:19

Canada is religiously diverse. Muslims outnumber Presbyterians in Toronto and outnumber us again in Canada as a whole. We used to read about Hindu people in India and elsewhere. But when a trustee from the Toronto Board of Education spoke of Mahatma Gandhi in a manner that offended the Hindu community, we learned quickly that our Hindu fellow-Canadians are more numerous and less visible than we had thought.

Unquestionably we live amidst religious pluralism. In the sea of religious pluralism the Christian conviction concerning the Incarnation sticks out like a sore thumb. If we remain silent about the Incarnation we can always pass ourselves off as vague theists; i.e., people who believe in a deity of some sort, people who believe enough about God to appear religious yet who don’t believe so much as to appear offensive.

Then should Christians downplay the Incarnation, as one professor suggested to me? We can never do this, for the truth; the undeniable, uncompromisable truth of the Incarnation has seized us. At any time, but especially at Christmas, we exult in the truth that the Word was made flesh, that God has come among us by identifying himself with all humanity in the humanness of one man in particular, Jesus of Nazareth. We who have cherished the gospel of the Incarnation for years are like those men and women of old whose elation concerning Jesus caused them to shout in exultation. Detractors didn’t like this. They told Jesus to silence his followers. “Silence them?” said Jesus; “If my followers fell silent the very stones would cry out [in acclaiming the truth.]”

We who cling to our Lord today must cry out too in gratitude for all that God has given us in him and done for us in him. We are never going to be found denying our Lord by denying the Incarnation. We are never going to surrender the particularity of the Incarnation in order to blend into the blandest religion-in-general. Without hesitation we are going to thank God for his coming to us as Incarnate Son in Jesus of Nazareth. Without embarrassment we are going to announce this truth in season and out of season.

Why are we going to do this? What does the Incarnation mean? Why is it crucial to all men and women everywhere even if they disdain it?

I: — In the first place the Incarnation means that God loves us in our misery so very much that he is willing to share our misery with us. He loves us enough in our alienation from him as to stop at nothing to fetch us home to him.

But do we need to be fetched home? In his best-loved parable, “the parable of the prodigal son,” as we call it, Jesus uses two pithy, single-syllable words to describe our condition before God. The first word is “lost;” the second, “dead.” Please note that Jesus doesn’t attempt to explain what he’s said in order to defend himself for saying it. Neither does he argue for it in order to persuade us to believe it. He merely states it: “Lost, dead.” He expects us to agree with him.

On another occasion people are gathered around Jesus, listening. They hear him using the strongest language concerning the spiritual condition of humankind. They assume he’s referring to “others,” “others” being inferior sorts whom they don’t like in any case and whom they could readily agree to be spiritually defective. “But what about us?” these hearers ask Jesus, expecting to be exempted. “What about us?” Whereupon our Lord utters two more words: “blind, deaf.” Suddenly enraged, these people fly at him: “Don’t talk to us like that. We are better than that. We have Abraham for our father.” “Abraham?” says Jesus; “You wouldn’t know Abraham if you fell over him. Your father is the devil.”

You and I ought never to deceive ourselves about our sinnership. We ought never to forget it. We should recall it daily, and daily feel better immediately, since to recall our sinnership is to recall the Christmas truth that God loves us enough to condescend to us sinners and number himself among us.

We speak of God’s love presumptuously and therefore shallowly. “Of course God loves. What else can he do? Of course God loves me. Who wouldn’t love me? Of course….” It’s all so very shallow.

We need to ask a profounder question. “How much does God love? How far will he go in loving me? What price will he pay to love me? How much will he suffer to love me?” The truth is, God loves us sinners so much that his love will stop at nothing to reclaim us and rescue us. His love doesn’t go “only so far” and stop there; his love goes as far as it has to go in order to have us home with him again. Plainly it wasn’t sufficient that he love us “from a distance;” plainly he could love us savingly (anything less is useless) only if he condescended and came among us as one of us humans, and humiliated himself by identifying with us sinners.

In my first congregation I came to know an old man, Jim MacCullum, who had served in World War I. One day he and his best friend were moving forward in “No Man’s Land,” the open space between allied and enemy trenches. Enemy fire became so intense that the Canadian troops had to fall back. When Jim got back to his trench he couldn’t find his friend. Whereupon Jim went back out to “No Man’s Land,” into the teeth of murderous fire, searching and calling out until he found his friend. His friend was badly wounded and unless rescued would shortly perish. The wounded man looked at him and said, “Jim, I knew you’d come.”

There’s a moving similarity between the situation of Jim’s friend and our situation before God. In Romans 5 Paul speaks of us as helpless. That’s the similarity. There’s also the profoundest dissimilarity between Jim’s friend and our situation before God. In Romans 5 Paul also speaks of us as enemies of God. Jim’s friend wanted to see Jim as he wanted nothing else. We sinners – blind, deaf, spiritually inert – don’t expect a saviour and don’t want one.

And it is for all such perverse people that God’s love swells and swells until his love has to find embodiment in the Nazarene. At this point God has loved us so very much that his love has humbled him in a manger, humiliated him with a reputation he doesn’t deserve (“sinner”) and tortured him in Gethsemane and cross.

Tell me: people who speak so very glibly about God’s love – how do they know that God loves them at all? We know that God loves us at all only as we see him loving us to the uttermost, only as we see him loving us until his love stops short of nothing in order to reconcile us to himself.

Let’s be sure we understand something crucial: while the Incarnation is essential to our salvation we aren’t saved by it. We are saved by the Incarnate One’s sin-bearing death. Then beyond God’s condescension and humility there’s humiliation as he, the holy one, identifies himself with unholy rebels. And his humiliation takes him even into a torment wherein he absorbs in himself his just judgement upon us in order that we might be spared it. This is how much God loves us. And only as we see him loving us this much do we have any reason to believe that he loves us at all.

For years now I have pondered the fact that the best Christmas carols sing about the Incarnation for the sake of singing about the atonement, the cross. Think of one of my favourites, “Hark! The Herald Angels sing!” But first let’s listen again to our text: “For in Jesus Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Incarnation) and through him to reconcile all things…making peace by the blood of his cross (atonement.)” Now listen to the carol: “Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled.”

Think of the carol, “As With Gladness.” It says, “So may we with willing feet, ever seek thy mercy-seat.” In ancient Israel the mercy-seat was the gold lid on the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant was the place where God met with his people; and the mercy-seat, the gold lid, was the place where costliest sacrifice was offered. Jesus Christ is where God meets with his people; his cross is the mercy-seat. Costliest sacrifice is offered here, which sacrifice bathes us in effectual mercy. And we learn it all from a Christmas carol.

I glory in the Incarnation. I know that God loves me at all just because I first know that his love stops short of nothing in his searching for me and his rescuing me.

II: — In the second place I glory in the Incarnation in that Jesus of Nazareth, human with my humanness, has fulfilled on my behalf the covenant obedience that God’s love wants from us humans. God covenants himself to us in that he promises ever to be our God. We in turn covenant ourselves to him in that we promise ever to be his people.

God unfailingly keeps us covenant with us. What he promises he performs. What he pledges he delivers. And we? We promise unfailing obedience to God. We promise exclusive loyalty to God. We promise uninterrupted love to God. We promise truthfulness before him. Whereupon we break all the promises we make. Even the promises we make with the best intentions we break nonetheless. We are covenant violators.

God looks out over his entire human creation, hoping to find promise-keepers. Among six billion people he can’t find one human being who gladly, gratefully, consistently, fulfils humankind’s covenant with God. At this point God is faced with an alternative: write off his human creation on account of its disobedience and rebellion, or fulfil humankind’s covenant himself. He has already fulfilled his covenant in loving us undeflectably. Now he also has to fulfil our covenant with him if our covenant is ever going to be kept. In the Incarnate One of Nazareth God not only fulfils his covenant with us; he also fulfils our covenant with him. In other words, in view of humankind’s disobedience God has to come among us as human and in this way fulfil our covenant himself.

I glory in the Incarnation in that the Incarnate One is the human covenant-keeper to whom I must cling, covenant-breaker that I am. To be sure, I have heard the gospel invitation and responded to it. I am a new creation in Christ and grateful for it. Yet the old man, the old being, still clings to me. When we became new creatures in Christ the old man, old woman, was put to death. But as Luther liked to remind us, the old man or woman won’t die quietly; the corpse keeps twitching. This being the case, it’s plain that in Christ I am a new creature; in myself I remain the old covenant-breaker. Then I must cling to Jesus Christ so that his covenant-keeping comprehends my covenant-breaking.

To be sure, I do love God. But I never love him as much as I’m supposed to. Then I must cling to that Son whose human love for his Father is defective in nothing. To be sure I do trust God. But somehow my trust in God is always being punctured by episodes of distrust when I dispute that he can or will do for me all that he’s promised. To be sure, I do obey God. At least I aspire to obey him; I want to obey him. But actually obey him? In all matters? Without exception? Then I can only cling to that Son whose human obedience to his Father is faultless. To be sure, I am possessed of faith. Yet how faithful is my faith? Faith of the head comes easy to me: I believe all major Christian doctrines and have never doubted any of them. So much for my faith of the head. But what what about the faith, faithfulness, of my heart? My heart is treacherous. Then I must cling to that Son whose human faith in his Father was never compromised.

Let me say it again. God unfailingly keeps his covenant, his promises, to us. Just as surely we violate ours to him. Then we must cling to the Inarnate One in whom God as man has come to keep that human covenant with him which we can’t keep.

In other words, Jesus Christ, the Incarnate One, mediates God to us and at the same time mediates us to God. He is the one and only Mediator – both manward and Godward – whom God has provided us in our great need.

III: — Lastly, I glory in the Incarnation since it is the greatest affirmation of life. After all, if human life is so precious to God that he chooses to live our human existence as human himself, then human existence must be rich, wonderful, a treasure. If God so prizes human existence then we must prize it no less. If in living every dimension of our humanness God endorses every dimension, then we must endorse every dimension too.

Life is good. I didn’t say easy. I didn’t say life is trouble-free or confusion-free or pain-free. I said life is good. The Incarnation is the story of God’s coming among us to rescue us inasmuch as he deems our existence worth rescuing. Then human existence, however problem-riddled, remains good.

I feel sorry for the people who have slipped or skidded or otherwise fallen into the rut of not being life-affirming. Frequently they tell me they don’t feel very good because they have had the ’flu six times this year. But no one gets the ’flu six times per year. ’Flu-like symptoms – dragginess, weariness (“psychomotor retardation” is the fancy medical term) – these are the symptoms of low-grade depression. Low-grade depression is usually so very low-grade that it’s not recognized as depression. It’s what people slide into unawares when they don’t have reason enough to be life-affirming.

The Incarnation is reason enough. I love that verse from the book of Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in all his toil.” (2:28) We are to enjoy eating and drinking and working not simply because they keep life going; we are to enjoy these because they are pleasurable, good in themselves.

I’m always impressed with the child’s exuberance. A child is on the tear every waking moment. He doesn’t want to go to bed – even when’s so tired he’s staggering – in case he misses something. Yes, I know; we adults don’t have the child’s physical stamina, and we are aware of the world’s grief in a way the child isn’t. Nonetheless, the child’s exuberance should inflame ours.

One day after church the Shepherds’ lunch-hour table-talk roamed hither and yon from that morning’s sermon to Canada ’s newest submarines to Alice Munro’s most recent collection of short stories to the Argos ’ Grey Cup victory. Maureen looked at me said, “You have a thousand enthusiasms.” Indeed I have. Isn’t this better than a thousand wet blankets? In the Incarnation God affirms everything he pronounces good.

The Word became flesh. The Word was embodied. Then to say “life-affirming” is also to say “body-affirming.” The taste of green apples and blue cheese. The crunch of buried ice fragments in the middle of our ice cream cone. Flannelette sheets on a winter night. Renee Fleming’s soprano voice. Yitzhak Perlman’s violin. Riding a bicycle for hours longer than we thought we could. One day I was walking through the ward of a nursing home where the residents were in the worst condition imaginable. One malodorous, old man was hunched over in his wheel chair, head on his folded arms, seemingly more dead than alive or virtually comatose. I assumed he was asleep or depressed or deranged or all three at once. As I tiptoed past him he sat up, grinned at me and shouted, “Did you bring the sweets?” I could have kissed him.

It’s Christmastide. Together we are pondering the foundation of our faith, the Incarnation, God’s coming among us as human in Jesus of Nazareth.

– Because God has visited us in this manner we know how much he loves us: he will do anything, suffer anything, absorb anything, to have us home with him again, reconciled to him forever.

– Because God has visited us in this manner we know that he as human has fulfilled our covenant with him when we couldn’t fulfil it ourselves.

-Because God has visited us in this manner he has affirmed the goodness of our existence, and insists that we affirm it too.

Yes, we do live amidst religious pluralism. So did Jesus himself. Yet he remained who he was amidst it and never apologized for being who he was and is. We are unapologetic. For that truth which has seized us we could never deny – and in any case would never want to.

Victor Shepherd
Christmas 2004

Matthew 3:1-12

We expect to find a family resemblance among relatives. John and Jesus were cousins. Not surprisingly, then, they were “look-alikes” in many respects.

Both were at home in the wilderness, the venue of extraordinary temptation and trial and testing, but also the venue of extraordinary intimacy with the Father.

Both preached out-of doors when they began their public ministry.

Both gave their disciples a characteristic prayer. John gave his followers a prayer that outwardly identified them as his disciples and inwardly welded them to each other. In no time the disciples of Jesus asked him for the same kind of characteristic prayer, with the result that we shall never be without the “Lord’s Prayer.”

Both John and Jesus lashed hearers whenever they spoke of God’s severity and the inescapability of God’s judgement.

Both summoned people to repent.

Both discounted the popular notion that God favoured Israel with political or national pre-eminence.

Both were born through an uncommon act of God.

And both died through having provoked uncommon rage among men and women.

John insisted that the sole purpose of his mission was to point away from himself to his younger cousin, Jesus. Jesus, for his part, never uttered one negative word about John. Jesus even endorsed John’s ministry by submitting to baptism at John’s hand. Indeed Jesus said, “Among those born of women (that is, of all the people in the world), there is none greater than John.”

I: Elizabeth and Zechariah named their long-awaited son “Yochan.” “Yochan” means “gift of God.” This gift, however, didn’t come with the pretty ribbons and bows and curlicues of fancy gift-wrapping. This gift came in a plain brown wrapper.

Think of John’s appearance. He wore a camel-hide wrap-around, and it stank as only camels can stink. (Jesus, by contrast, wore a robe fine enough that soldiers gambled for it.)

Then there was John’s diet: wild honey. How many bee stings did he have to endure to procure the honey? No doubt he had been stung so many times he was impervious, bees being now no more bothersome than fruit flies. And the locusts? There’s lots of protein in grasshoppers, since small creatures like grasshoppers are the most efficient in converting grain protein into animal protein. Grasshoppers are good to eat, as long as you don’t mind crunching their long legs and occasionally getting them stuck in your teeth. John was anything but effete, anything but dainty, anything but a reed shaken by the wind.

John’s habitat was noteworthy. The wilderness, everywhere in scripture, is the symbol for a radical break with the posturing and the pretence, the falsehoods and phoniness of the big city and its inherent corruption. Jerusalem , hier shalem, describes itself as the city of salvation. But is it? Jerusalem kills the prophets and crucifies the Messiah. By living in the wilderness John contradicted everything the city represented.

And of course there was John’s manner. He had relatively few tools in his toolbox. When he saw that the truth of God had to be upheld and the sin of the powerful rebuked, he reached into his toolbox and came up with its one and only tool: confrontation. It wasn’t long before he confronted Herodias, wife of Herod the ruler. John looked her in the eye and said, “First you married Phillip, your uncle Phillip, no less. Then you ‘fooled around’ with the man who is currently your husband. Then you allowed your daughter, Salome, to dance like a stripper in order to inflame a crowd of half-drunk military officers. You, Mrs. Herod, are incestuous, adulterous, and a pimp all at once. It’s an abomination to God; you yourself are a disgrace; and the stench of it all looms larger than a mushroom cloud.” Whereupon Mrs. Herod had said, “I’ll have your head for that. Watch me.”

We mustn’t forget John’s singlemindedness. Because his camel-hide loincloth lacked pockets, John’s one-and-only sermon he kept in his head and his heart. It was a simple sermon. The judgement of God is so close at hand that even now you can feel God’s fiery breath scorching you and withering everything about you that can’t stand the conflagration. And in the face of this judgement, thundered John, there are three things that cosy, comfortable people think they can take refuge in when there is no refuge; namely, parentage, piety and prestige.

Parentage. “Abraham is our parent. We are safe because we are descendants from the grand progenitor of our people, Abraham our father.” We are Abraham’s son or daughter only if we have Abraham’s faith, John knew. In light of the crisis that God’s judgement brings on everyone, we’re silly for putting stock in the fact that our grandmother was once a missionary in China and our father once shook hands with Billy Graham.

Piety. “We are Israelites. Only last week we had our son circumcised.” “We’ve been members of St.Matthew’s-by-the-Gas Station for forty years. We had all our children ‘done’ there; we also contributed to the repairs to the steeple.” Piety, said John, is a religious inoculation. Like any inoculation it keeps people from getting the real thing. For this reason piety is worse than useless: it guarantees that what can save us we shall never want.

Prestige. “We are the Jerusalem aristocrats.” In 18th Century England an aristocrat was asked what she thought of John Wesley’s movement. “A perfectly horrid thing”, the Duchess of Buckingham had replied, turning up her nose as if someone had just taken the lid off an 18th Century chamber pot; “Imagine being told you are as vile as the wretches that crawl about on the earth.”

It was little wonder that those who found John too much to take eased their discomfort by ridiculing him. Baptizein is the everyday Greek verb meaning to dip or to dunk. John the dipper. “Well, Yochan, what’ll it be today? Dunk your doughnuts or dip your paintbrush? Here comes the dippy dunker.”

Might John have been deranged? His enemies said he was crazy. But the same people who said John was crazy said Jesus was an alcoholic. Certainly John was crude. Jesus admitted as much when he told those whom John had shocked, “What did you expect to see? A reed shaken by the wind? A feeble fellow smelling of perfume?” John lacked the polish of the cocktail crowd. But he was sane.

II: — Regardless of the family resemblance between John and Jesus they’re not identical.

John came to bear witness to the light. Jesus was (and is) that light.

John pointed to Jesus as the coming one. Jesus pointed to himself as the Incarnate one.

John reminded the people of God’s centuries-old promises. Jesus was, and is, the fulfilment of all God’s promises.

John administered a baptism of water as an outward sign of repentance. Jesus administered a baptism of fire as the Spirit inwardly torched his people.

With this lattermost point we have highlighted the crucial difference between John and Jesus. John could only point to the kingdom of God , the all-determining reality that was to heal a creation disfigured by the Fall. Jesus, on the other hand, didn’t point to it: he brought it inasmuch as he was the new creation, fraught with cosmic significance, the one in whom all things are restored. John’s ministry prepared people for a coming kingdom that the king would bring with him. Jesus’ ministry gathered people into that kingdom which was operative wherever the king himself presided — which is to say, everywhere.

It’s not that Jesus contradicted John. Rather, Jesus effected within people what John could only hold out for them. Because the ministry of Jesus gathered up the ministry of John, nothing about John was lost. At the same time, the ministry of Jesus contained so much more than John’s — as John himself gladly admitted. In other words, the ministry of Jesus was the ministry of John plus all that was unique to our Lord.

Ponder, for instance, the note of repentance sounded by both men. John thundered. He threatened. There was a bad time coming, and John, entirely appropriately, had his hearers scared. Jesus agreed. There is a bad time coming. Throughout the written gospels we find on the lips of Jesus pronouncements every bit as severe as anything John said. Nonetheless, Jesus promised a good time coming too. To be sure, Jesus could flay the hide off phoneys as surely as John, yet flaying didn’t characterize him; mercy did. While Jesus could speak, like John, of a coming judgement that couldn’t be avoided, Jesus also spoke of an amnesty, a provision, a refuge that reflected the heart of his Father. Everything John said, the whole world needs to hear. Yet we need to hear even more urgently what Jesus alone said: “There’s a party underway, and at this party all who are weary and worn down, frenzied and fed up, overwhelmed and overrun — at this party all such people are going to find rest and restoration, help, healing and hope.”

Jesus, like John, spoke to the defiant self-righteous who not only disdained entering the kingdom themselves but also, whether deliberately or left-handedly, impeded others from entering it; Jesus spoke to these people in a vocabulary that would take the varnish off a door. Jesus, however, also had his heart broken over people who were like sheep without a shepherd, about to follow cluelessly the next religious hireling — the religious “huckster” of any era who exploits the most needy and the most defenceless.

Because John’s message was the penultimate word of judgement, the mood surrounding John was as stark, spare, ascetic as John’s word: he drank no wine and he ate survival rations. Because Jesus’ message was the ultimate word of the kingdom, the mood surrounding Jesus was the mood of a celebration, a party. He turned 150 gallons of water into wine – a huge amount for a huge party. He is the wine of life; he profoundly gladdens the hearts of men and women. His joy floods his people.

With his laser vision Jesus stared into the hearts of those who faulted him and said, “You spoil- sports with shrivelled hearts and acidulated tongues, you wouldn’t heed John because his asceticism left you thinking he wasn’t sane; now you won’t heed me because my partying leaves you thinking I’m not moral. Still, those people you’ve despised and duped and defrauded: your victims are victors now; they’re going to be vindicated. And their exuberance in the celebrations they have with me not even your sullenness can diminish.” Whereupon our Lord turned from the scornful snobs that religion forever breeds and welcomed yet another wounded, worn down person who wouldn’t know a hymnbook from a homily yet knew as much as she needed to know: life in the company of Jesus is indescribably better than life in the company of his detractors.

I’m always moved at our Lord’s simple assertion, “I am the good shepherd.” What did he mean by “good”? Merely that he is a competent shepherd, as any competent shepherd can protect the flock against marauders, thieves and disease? There are two Greek words for “good”: agathos and kalos. Agathos means “good” in the sense of upright, proper, correct. Kalos, on the other hand (the word Jesus used of himself), includes everything that agathos connotes plus “winsome, attractive, endearing, appealing, compelling, comely, inviting.” I am the fine shepherd.

Malcolm Muggeridge accompanied a film crew to India in order to narrate a documentary on the late Mother Teresa. He already knew she was a good woman or he wouldn’t have bothered going. When he met her, however, he found a good woman who was also so very compelling, wooing, endearing that he titled his documentary, Something Beautiful for God.

John was good, agathos. Many people feared him and many admired him. Jesus was good, kalos. Many people feared him, many admired him, and many loved him. Paul speaks in Ephesians 6:24 of those who “love our Lord with love undying.” Did anyone love John with love undying? If we’ve grasped the difference between agathos and kalos, between what is good, correct, upright and what is so very inviting and attractive as to be beautiful, then we’ve grasped the relation of John to Jesus.

There’s another dimension to Jesus that carries him beyond John. It’s reflected in the word he used uniquely at prayer, abba, “Father.” Now the Newer Testament is written in Greek, even though Jesus customarily spoke Aramaic. In other words what our Lord said day-by-day has been translated into another language. Then why wasn’t the Aramaic word, abba, translated into Greek? The word was left untranslated in that Jesus had first used it in a special way, and to translate it would seem to sully its distinctiveness.

Abba was the word used by a Palestinian youth to speak of his or her father respectfully, obediently, confidently, securely, and of course intimately. It wasn’t so “palsy walsy” as to be disrespectful. Neither was it so gushing as to be sentimental. It was intimate without being impertinent, confident without being smug. Abba was trusting one’s father without trading on the father’s trustworthiness, familiar without being forward, secure without being saccharine.

We must be sure to understand that when early-day Christians came to use the word abba in their prayers they weren’t repeating the word just because they knew Jesus had used it and they thought it cute to imitate him. Neither were they mumbling it mindlessly like a mantra thinking that if they kept on saying it, mantra-like, whatever it was within him that had given rise to it would eventually appear within them. On the contrary, they were impelled to use the word for one reason: as companions of Jesus they had been admitted to such an intimacy with the Father that the word Jesus had used uniquely of his Father they were now constrained to use too, so closely did their intimacy resemble his. When Paul writes in Romans 8:15 that Christians can’t help uttering the cry, “Abba, Father”, any more than a person in pain can help groaning or a person bereaved can help weeping or a person tickled by a good joke can help laughing; when Paul reminds the Christians in Rome that this is normal Christian experience, “normal” means being introduced by the Son to the Father in such a way and at such a depth that the Son’s intimacy with the Father induces the believer’s intimacy. Abba.

We should note that the written gospels show us that Jesus used this word in Gethsemane; Gethsemane , of all places, when he was utterly alone at the most tormented hour of his life. I understand this. William Stringfellow, Harvard-taught lawyer and self-taught theologian who went to Harlem in a store-front law practice on behalf of the impoverished people he loved; Stringfellow, ridiculed by his denomination, suspected by the Kennedys and arrested finally by the FBI for harbouring Daniel Berrigan (a Jesuit anti-Viet Nam War protester); Stringfellow wrote in a little confirmation class book he prepared for teenagers, “Prayer is being so alone that God is the only witness to your existence.”

The day comes for all of us when we are so thoroughly alone we couldn’t be more alone. And in the isolation and torment of such a day we are going tofind that God is the only witness to our existence. But he will be witness enough. And because it’s the Father who is the only witness to our existence, we shall find ourself crying spontaneously, “Abba.” Surely Jesus had this in mind when he said, “There has never appeared anyone greater than John the Baptist. Yet the least in the kingdom is greater than John.”

We all need to be shaken up by the wild man from the wilderness, the grasshopper-eating, hide-wearing prophet whom no one should have mistaken for a reed shaken by the wind. Yet as often as we need to look at John, we find fearsome John pointing away from himself to Jesus, the Word Incarnate, the lamb of God and the Saviour of the world; someone no less rigorous than John to be sure, but also so much more than John – someone so very winsome, compelling, inviting as to be beautiful.

Victor Shepherd
St.Bride’s Anglican Church, Mississauga
Advent 2007

Isaiah 25:6-10
Psalm 40:1-3
Hebrews 10:11-18
Luke 2:22-38

Loitering is illegal. Loiterers can be jailed. Why? What harm can there be in standing around? Police departments are quick to tell us how much harm there is in standing around. Police departments know that the person who stands around for no reason, with nothing in mind, is someone who won’t be merely “standing around” for long. Someone merely standing around is someone who is readily drawn into whatever disturbance might boil up around him. Idleness is readily co-opted by evil. The empty-handed, empty-headed loiterer who claims he’s only standing around readily becomes an accomplice of whatever evil is lurking.

Advent is a time of waiting, but not a time of waiting around, not a time of loitering. To wait, in scripture, is always to wait for, to anticipate, to expect. To wait, in scripture, is always to be on the edge of your seat in anticipation of something that God has promised.

The Hebrew verb “to wait (for)” is derived from two Hebrew words meaning tension and endurance. If we are waiting for something momentous, waiting eagerly, longingly, expectantly, then we live in a tension as great as our endurance is long.

I am always moved at the people in the Christmas story who wait in such tension with endurance.

Elizabeth , for instance; she had been childless for two decades. In Israel childlessness was the worst misfortune that could befall husband and wife. Each year’s barrenness found Elizabeth waiting, her endurance tested.

Zechariah, Elizabeth ’s husband; he was unable to speak from the time he learned of his wife’s pregnancy until their son, Yochan, “gift of God”, was born. Nine months may not strike us as a long time to wait for speech to return, but it’s unimaginably long when you don’t know if your speech is ever going to return.

Simeon had spent years looking for, longing for, the Messiah of Israel.

Anna had been married only seven years when she was widowed. Now, at 84 years of age, she lived on the temple precincts, “worshiping with prayer and fasting, night and day,” Luke tells us. When she finally beheld the infant Jesus she knew that what she had waited for for 60 years had appeared at last.

These were godly men and women. And like all godly folk they knew how difficult it is to wait; how difficult it is to wait for God. It is difficult. No wonder the psalmist exhorts us, “Wait for the Lord. Be strong, and let your heart take courage. Yes, wait for the Lord.”

At the same time we must remember that to wait, in scripture, is never to “wait around.” To wait is never to loiter, doing nothing, available for whatever evil looms up. To wait, in scripture, is to wait knowing that we don’t wait alone; God waits too. God waits for us, his people. The prophet Isaiah tells us that God waits for Israel to bear fruit. When God waits, and waits specifically for his people, it’s never the case that God is “waiting around,” doing nothing. God always waits for Israel by working in Israel . God waits by doing.

Think of the diverse pictures scripture paints of God’s involvement with Israel , God’s working among his people.

• a mother nursing her infant. The mother nursing her infant is waiting in one sense; she isn’t doing anything else, can’t be washing the kitchen floor. Yet in nursing her infant she isn’t “doing nothing.” What could be more important than the wellbeing of her babe?
• a father helping a young child to walk. The father is waiting for the child to grow up even as he does something about it.
• a heartbroken husband (we’re still talking about how the bible portrays the waiting God) resolving not to leave the wife who has disgraced herself and humiliated him. Such waiting, replete with resolution, is a long way from doing nothing.

In none of this could God be said to be waiting around, loitering, up to no good at all. As a matter of fact, the one word that characterizes God’s involvement with Israel is passion. And since God waits for Israel to bear fruit by doing whatever he can with Israel , it’s plain that God’s waiting for us is his impassioned involvement with us. God waits by hastening.

Then our Advent-waiting must never be waiting around, loitering. Our Advent-waiting must be marked by impassioned involvement.

But impassioned involvement with what? What exactly are we waiting for?

I: — The apostle Paul says that the entire creation is “waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” In other words, the entire creation is waiting for, longing for God’s deliverance from anything and everything that stands in the way of its fulfilment. Right now the entire creation is frustrated; it doesn’t unambiguously serve the purpose for which God fashioned it.

[a] For instance, the earth was created to sustain all of humankind. To be sure, bodily good isn’t the only good. There are also an intellectual good and a cultural good and an emotional good and a spiritual good. At the same time, unless the bodily good is maintained; that is, unless physical need is met, the remaining goods never arise. No intellectual good or cultural good or spiritual good is going to appear in the person who is starving to death or merely malnourished. For centuries the earth yielded enough food to feed the world’s population many times over, even as malnutrition and starvation consumed millions of people. So far as feeding people is concerned, the earth has been frustrated in serving the purpose for which God created it.

And then in the twinkling of an eye a corner was turned. In the twinkling of an eye a new situation has arisen: as of today, for the first time in human history, more people will die prematurely from overeating than will die prematurely from undereating. Once again so far as sustaining people is concerned, the earth is frustrated in serving the purpose for which God created it.

[b] Physicians tell me that the most sophisticated aspect of all the growing edges in medicine (and medical science has many growing edges) pertains to fertility. For decades infertility was deemed a female problem. The new growing edge pertains to male fertility. Huge advances are underway here. Good. Millions of couples will conceive otherwise never could have. And right next door to the fertility clinic, in any hospital, we can find the abortuary. The contradiction here leaves me speechless.

[c] Billions of tax-payer dollars are spent each year on public education. The end result is that the level of adult illiteracy in Canada has slowly risen from 35% to 47%. Yes, as much as is spent on public education, it can always be argued that not enough is spent, since other jurisdictions spend more than we do. At the same time, social problems are never remedied simply by throwing more money at them. Trillions of dollars have been poured into slum areas of American cities, and the slums are no closer to disappearing.

[d] And then there are the people who continue to approach me; the chronically mentally ill. Twenty-five years ago the development of neuroleptic drugs was heralded as a breakthrough inasmuch as the new drugs would permit ill people to live outside of institutions. Undoubtedly some ill people have benefited. A great many, however, have not. Many defenceless people were put on the street with a bottle of pills. In two days they had lost their pills, or traded them for something else, or had forgotten how frequently to take them. They couldn’t return to the institutions from which they had been discharged, because these institutions had been replaced by carriage-trade condominiums. Many of these people are in worse condition than ever they were when they were institutionalized. When Maureen and I were in Washington four weeks ago we were startled at the number of psychotic people found in downtown Washington . It’s the same in every major North American city.

The entire creation is frustrated, says the apostle. It waits – and we who are part of it wait too – for its restoration.

But waiting never means waiting around. Waiting for God’s deliverance of the creation entails our impassioned involvement with it, entails our zealous doing on behalf of it, wherever it is frustrated and for whatever reason. Unless we are doing something about the world’s frustration we aren’t waiting for God at all; we’re merely waiting around, loitering, soon to be part of the problem instead of its alleviation.

Remember: God waits for Israel to bear fruit by spending himself unreservedly for Israel .

II: In the second place, says the apostle, we ourselves wait for adoption as daughters and sons of God, “the redemption of our bodies”, as he puts it. But aren’t we sons and daughters of God by faith now? To be sure, scripture insists on the distinction between creature of God and child of God. Every human being is a creature of God, made in God’s image, loved and cherished by him. Children of God, however, are those who have heard and heeded the gospel invitation, and who now cling in faith to the Incarnate One, Jesus Christ, their elder brother. Believing people are God’s children now. We are born of God and have been granted a new nature from God.

Then why is it said that we are waiting for adoption as God’s sons and daughters? The apostle’s point is this: while we have been made new at God’s hand, we don’t appear very new. To be sure, sin no longer rules us; Jesus Christ does. But while sin no longer rules us, sin continues to reside in us. Martin Luther used to say, “Yes, we are new people in Christ; but the old man, the old woman, won’t die quietly. The corpse twitches.”

The apostle is puzzled about the gap, the undeniable gap, between his new life in Christ and his contradiction of it every day. On the one hand he knows that all whom Jesus Christ draws to himself are made new in him; on the other hand he’s surprised at how much of the “old” man seems to hang on in him. Listen to Paul as he speaks of himself in Romans 7. “I don’t understand my own actions. For I don’t do what I want, but rather I do the very thing I hate. Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” Still, he knows that his ultimate deliverance is guaranteed: “Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

When Paul speaks of himself as ‘wretched’ he doesn’t mean primarily that he feels wretched. He’s not telling us how he feels; he’s telling us what he is. No doubt he didn’t feel good about it; still, he’s telling us primarily of his condition, not of his feeling. His condition is this: there’s a dreadful contradiction within him. He recognizes that his practice falls abysmally short of his profession. Until he was apprehended by Christ he wasn’t aware of any contradiction within him; now he knows that Christ has rendered him new even as everyone around him finds him entirely too ‘old’. It’s his condition that’s wretched. “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”

The ancient Romans devised a terrible punishment for criminals; namely, strapping a corpse onto a criminal’s back. Imagine the sheer weight of it. Imagine the odour, the leaks, the overall hideousness. It must have been ghastly beyond description.

Did I say “ghastly beyond description”? But such ghastliness is my spiritual condition; such ghastliness is my outward life compared to my inward truth and my Christian profession. Who will deliver me from this hideous contradiction, this body of death?

In our sober discussion of this topic we must be sure to notice something profound. The apostle dares to admit his own innermost contradiction, dares to raise the question, only because he already has the answer. “Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” He’s going to be delivered from the walking contradiction he is. The burden of the ‘old’ man that seems strapped to him is going to be lifted. He knows it. He’s waiting for it. We wait for it too.

But we don’t wait around. We don’t loiter. We genuinely wait for our deliverance only if we are doing something about our self-contradicted discipleship, only if we are doing something about the inconsistencies in us that are so glaring that many people wonder if there aren’t two of us.

We must remember, in this season of Advent-waiting, that God waits for Israel to bear fruit by sparing nothing of himself to have Israel bear fruit. We wait for the final, full manifestation of our adoption as God’s sons and daughters by sparing nothing of ourselves to shed that corpse, repudiate it, which renders us grotesque at this moment. And “thanks to God through our Lord Jesus Christ”, we shall one day be rid of the burden on our back and perfectly reflect that image of God in which we were created, which image our Lord is now, and which image we cannot fail to display.

III: — Lastly, we wait with our Lord as he waits himself. We stand by him in his waiting. The book of Hebrews tells us that after Jesus Christ had offered up himself for us, “he sat down at the right hand of God, and since then has been waiting until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet.”

The reference to footstool in Hebrews 10 is borrowed from Psalm 110. Psalm 110 – about footstool and enemies – is the most frequently quoted psalm in the New Testament. This fact alone tells us that the apostles, and all Christians after them, know that enemies abound. Enemies are enemies; that is, enemies can do enormous harm.

When I was a youngster I couldn’t grasp why the psalmist spoke so very often of enemies. Was he unusually nervous, even paranoid? Now I understand. Enemies are anything that hammers us, anything that threatens to undo us, anything that assails us from without or wells up from within.

Enemies from without are easy to identify. Jesus had enemies in the religious hierarchy of Jerusalem ; he had enemies in the civil government of Rome ; enemies in the dark depths of the spirit-world; enemies among his followers (Judas, traitor), even enemies among his closest friends (Peter, whom Jesus described as satanic, on at least one occasion.) As I have read church history, I have learned that every forthright Christian spokesperson has been flayed at some point by all the enemies just mentioned.

In addition there is one enemy which you and I must contend with that our Lord never had to contend with; namely, himself. Of all the enemies who might assault us, there seems to be one who always assaults us: our very own self. More often than not we are our own worst enemy. For this reason a principal enemy, always lurking, is the enemy within.

Whether our enemy exists inside us or outside us, however, enemies are enemies. We need to identify them and resist them.

But we never have to resist them alone. Even now our Lord is at work, resisting those enemies who molest his people. To be sure, even our Lord is waiting for that day when all the enemies of his people are made his footstool. But until that day, he isn’t waiting around, loitering. On our behalf he resists those enemies he has already defeated, waiting for that day when defeated enemies are dispersed forever. We genuinely wait for our Lord only as we wait with him as he continues to resist everything that molests his people, and all of this in anticipation of that day when his enemies (ours too) have been dispersed.

Elizabeth waited during that first Advent, as well as Zechariah, Simeon and Anna. They all waited for the one who was to be the Messiah of Israel and the ruler of the cosmos. But they didn’t wait around, loiter. They were as impassionedly engaged as the God of Israel whom they knew. Therefore the only form our waiting can take is an impassioned doing of the truth.

In Advent we wait for him who came once for the world’s redemption. We wait for him who continues to come to us unfailingly day after day. We wait for him who will come again to vindicate all who are about his business now.

Victor Shepherd Advent 2006