which Jesus are we talking about?

Recently, I've been reading Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch's book, REJESUS: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church and some of what they write I've heard before in their talks but I love the following quote on 111: "we need to go back to the daring, radical, strange, wonderful, inexplicable, unstoppable, marvelous, unsettling, disturbing, caring, God-Man."

This morning I was speaking on a story that Jesus tells (Matthew 21.28-32) and Jesus tells it in the midst of a crazy series of events...Jesus enters Jerusalem and the people hail him as King, they are excited and the people are asking, 'Who is this?'

Jesus answers their question in an intriguing way…by entering the temple and driving out the money changers and sellers of high priced animals for sacrifice. Next, he heals the blind and lame in the temple courts. He leaves the city and the next morning, he curses a fig tree and it withers. It is plain to the reader or hearer through these experiences that Jesus is demonstrating who his power comes from…his Father in heaven. Later in the day, he enters the temple courts again and teaches the people. The chief priests and elders challenge his authority. They doubt who he serves and how he serves.

In response to their questions about his authority, he says this, “I will also ask you one question. If you answer me, I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things. John’s baptism—where did it come from? Was it from heaven (God), or of human origins?”

They don’t know how to answer his question honestly and answer “We don’t know.”

So it is after Jesus stumps the leaders about the origin of John the Baptist’s authority that he tells this story about two sons.

This is one baffling Jesus. I wonder if this is the Jesus we have become familiar with.

already pondering Christmas

For whatever reason, I don't like Christmas.

I think it has something to do with the over commercialism of Christmas and the reality that I feel like I have to buy things from shopping malls. In the past, I would have pushed back my emotions, stuck my head in the sand and kept going on with the season at full pace but this year is different...I am already preparing myself for something different. I want to fully engage Advent Conspiracy as our community of faith engages it. I have desires to worship God more fully, spend less on things that will eventually be garbage, give more money away to people who need it and love all by contributing to God's work. I want to be creative with the gifts that I give. I want to spend more time with family. I want to make memories. This is my wish list for Christmas.

As I was reading today about Jesus' birth, I encountered some great quotes by Frederick Buechner in The Faces of Jesus that give me hope around the season of Advent and Christmas:

“At Christmas time it is hard even for the unbeliever not to believe in something, if not in everything. Peace on earth, good will to men; a dream of innocence that is good to hold onto even if it is only a dream; the mystery of being a child; the possibility of hope—not even the canned carols piped out over the shopping center parking plaza from Thanksgiving on can drown it out entirely.” (14-15)

“…when the child was born the whole course of human history was changed. That is a truth as unassailable as any truth. Art, music, literature, Western culture itself with all its institutions and Western man’s whole understanding of himself and his world—it is impossible to conceive how differently things would have turned out if that birth had not happened whenever, wherever, however it did. And there is a truth beyond that: For millions of people who have lived since, the birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it." (17)

“For better or worse, it is a truth that, for twenty centuries, there have been untold numbers of men and women who, in untold numbers of ways, have been so grasped by the child who was born, so caught up in the message he taught and the life he lived, that they have found themselves profoundly changed by their relationship with him. And they have gone on proclaiming as the writers of the Gospels proclaimed before them, that through the birth of Jesus a life-giving power was released into the world which to their minds could have been no less than the power of God himself.” (17)

“Like any baby, Jesus as a baby does not judge or exhort or puzzle the world with his teaching. He makes no demands, threatens no punishment, offers no rewards. The world is free to take him or leave him. He does not rule the world from his mother’s lap but, like any child, is himself at the mercy of the world.” (20)

“In trying to say too much, piety always runs the risk of saying too little or saying it wrong, and the great pitfall of Christian art, especially when it tries to portray the birth of Christ, is sentimentalism. The stable becomes a painted backdrop, the floor a carpeted stage, the manger a prop lined with artificial straw. Neither the holiness nor the humanness of the moment is rendered so much as the schmaltz, and the Incarnation becomes merely a Christmas card with all the scandal taken out of it instead of what St. Paul called “a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles,” instead of the proclamation that the Creator of the end of the earth came among us in diapers.” (20-21)

“As long as he stays the babe in the manger, he asks us nothing harder than to love him and accept his love, and the temptation is thus to keep him a babe forever, for our sakes and for his sake too." (23)

If you are like me and don't like Christmas, I hope these reflections by Buechner might lead you to rethink and reenact Christmas differently this year.

Considering Our Sin

This last weekend, I came down from an incredible retreat in the mountains that focused on community and the overlapping of heaven and earth. I consider it a monumental time for our church as we move towards being missional in the world and how this requires us to deal with our sense of health in the interior of our community. God is at work in us.

When I returned, I was confronted with the terrible sin of not the world but the church. I started to hear about the often spoken of Evangelical Ted Haggard and all sorts of allegations on Sunday night of sexual immorality. I then read further on Monday about what had happened over the weekend. The entire episode makes me have compassion on Ted's family, the community of New Life Church, and even Ted himself as I think about the words of Jesus in Matthew 7. I am driven to seek humility.

Through Jesus' words, I see that I need to seek compassion and humility in my own life. I must not forget that followers of Jesus Christ are all saints struggling with sin. Humility brings me to my knees and allows me to see myself for who I am and remember that God is still working in and on my own character. I am a work in progress just like Ted. We both need the grace and mercy of God.

Josh

Jesus Camp

I was amazed tonight as I saw a news piece on a new documentary called Jesus Camp (check out the website and see what you think). I don’t know exactly how to respond to a documentary like this; I am repulsed by it and interested to see it at the same time. How do I respond as I try to journey with Christ?

How do I respond as a father of a young son who will navigate this world when he gets older and attempt to follow Christ in the midst of North America?

Josh