How do we make the teaching about God attractive to people who have never given it any thought – don’t even know there is anything to think about? How do we help them trust the unseen God, when there are so many things they can see that everyone else trusts?
We make the teaching about God attractive and motivate people to join his side both by who we are (or by who we are becoming, since who we are now is still so very incomplete) and by what we do. What we do is the outworking of who we are (or who we are becoming).
First, who we are (or who we are becoming). This only works if we are different from the people around us. God’s plan depends on it. It is the difference that attracts people to God.
A magnetic field depends on having a north and south pole. It is the opposite poles that attract. Likewise, our power of attraction depends on us being polar opposites to those around us. That doesn’t mean being weird or hostile but it does mean being different.
In Leviticus 19:2, God says to his people, “Be holy for I, the LORD your God, am holy.” More than one famous Bible scholar has pointed out this could be translated, “Be different for I, the LORD your God, am different.”
Because the LORD is different from other gods (both those in the ancient and the contemporary world), we who serve him will be different from people who bow to other gods, including money, political power, science, and education. (By the way, Christians should be involved in all those things. They are good things as long as they remain humanity’s servants. They are devilishly evil things when they become humanity’s gods, which is something we have seen played out before our eyes in recent months.)
But what makes us different? The fundamental difference is that we are God-oriented. If somehow God could be removed from our lives or we could be removed from our God (thankfully impossible), we would no longer be us. God is not just a part of our life, not even a big part; he is our life (Colossians 3:4). I’ve known people who have left the faith, moved from professing belief in God to professing disbelief in him, and the curious thing is that nothing really changed. I don’t see how that is possible – if they were really God’s people. Our lives, put bluntly, are about God.
Our values are also different. Most people’s chief values are: current comforts and pleasures (what St. John calls “the lust of the flesh”); future acquisitions of comfort and pleasure (“the lust of the eyes – gotta have that!”); and a position of status or prestige (“the pride of life”). I don’t say they enjoy those things – they don’t time; they’re too busy trying to acquire them – but they value them.
Our values are different. When we are granted pleasures and possessions and positions, we enjoy them; but we don’t need them and we won’t let them derail us from our pursuit of God, of love and of truth. That makes us different.
We don’t fear – or at least the person we are becoming is starting to overcome – the fears that control most people’s lives. They fear loss, humiliation, weakness, age, and death. It is ironic: in Western society, people lead the safest lives in the history of the world, yet they experience more anxiety than ever before. People have been taught to fear the next snowstorm, the next president, next market reversal, virus, disease, and internet outage. Unbelievable amounts of money are spent to protect people from their fears. But we fear God and, because we do, we are getting over our fear of everything else.
Another difference is our hope. In our day, distraction has usurped the place of hope, but that is not so in our lives. Even when we are nearing the end of life here, we continue to look forward. Our hopes transcend the next election, the end of COVID, our next vacation. The vacation may get cancelled; COVID may not get cancelled – it may continue; the election may usher the wrong party into power; but our hopes remain undiminished. Even immanent death cannot take hope from us.
Ideas are always context dependent. They make sense within a context. Outside of that context they may have a different meaning – or no meaning at all. The words I just used to describe our role (salespeople, promoters, advance team, marketing team) are found in a marketplace context. Salespeople coax shoppers to spend money on their product. Marketing teams try to capture market share. But the marketplace is not the best context for understanding our role.
Let’s try a different context that might help us gain a more biblical understanding of our mission. Instead of the Madison Avenue executive who attracts dollars, or the social media influencer who attracts followers, let’s substitute the revolutionary who attracts recruits.
I realize how controversial that image is in our day, when extremists are radicalizing young people and recruiting them to perform atrocious acts of violence. But I prefer it nonetheless because it has biblical resonances the other images lack. The good news we have been investigating is the gospel (the announcement) of the kingdom and of the king. It is the good news, as was said in ancient Thessalonica, “that there is another king, one called Jesus” (Acts 17:7).
Instead of a Madison Avenue context, try picturing a Majority World context where upheaval and discord have been the norm for a generation. The leader in power has been there for over 30 years, ever since a popular uprising and military coup landed him in office. But his government is corrupt. Tax monies, which are bleeding the nation dry, end up in the pockets of a dozen powerful men, along with vast sums of misappropriated foreign aid. Those men live in luxury while the rest of the nation is hungry and hurting. Whenever common people go to the streets to protest, the military is ordered to mow them down like grass.
But now a great national leader who has been abroad for decades is planning to return to put an end to the corruption and injustice. His advance team is in your town, and they tell you about him. He is a great man who is humble and kind, honest and just, wise and powerful. They tell you about his plans to install a government that will protect its people, not feed on them. You have questions. They have answers. At some point, they challenge you to join them, to come over their leader’s side in anticipation of his return – and you do.
Now it is your turn to recruit others. This is not about market share or follower stats. It is about freedom, justice, truth, mercy, grace. What hangs on this is the future. You are advertising for a ruler, not a dollar.
That is roughly the position in which we find ourselves. We are not trying to corner the ecclesial market. We are not fighting for our share of religious dollars. Our only competition is with those principalities and powers that have usurped God’s place. We have news of a king and his coming kingdom. He will change things and make them right – and is already making things right in our own lives. Our lives provide the proof – the cosmetological proof – that he knows how to make things right. And we can tell people with confidence that he accepts everyone who comes to him, no matter who they are, what they have done, or what side they have taken in the past.
This acceptance is known as the reconciliation. Listen to how St. Paul speaks of it (2 Corinthians 5:18-20). “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of the reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of the reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God.”
This is an important passage that deserves careful study, which is not within the scope of this article (but we will come back to it). At this point, we just want you to grasp the context: God has begun the reconciliation and has given Christ’s people the role of his advance team, promoting God, appealing to people to join the coming kingdom, to come over to God’s side.
In philosophy, there are five principal arguments or proofs for the existence of God. One of those is known as The Cosmological Proof and argues there must be a sufficient and non-contingent cause for the contingent beings and processes that exist; and God is that cause.
We could talk more about the Cosmological Proof, but some of you are already nodding off; so, instead of the cosmological proof, let’s talk about what I call the cosmetological proof. This might be the first time those words have ever been used together, so they may require some ll explanation. Cosmetology is the study and practice of applying beauty treatments. Christians are called to be cosmetologists. We are to make the teaching about God attractive.
This is Titus 2:9-10: “Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not to talk back to them,and not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive.” Later, we will think about the instruction in these verses but, at this point, note their purpose: to “make the teaching about God our Savior attractive.”
That is what we do. Make the teaching about God attractive. The Greek word Paul uses here is “cosmeo,” from which we derive not only the word “cosmos” but also the word “cosmetics.” Cosmeo has the idea of ordering or arranging something, whether the universe or a person’s face and hair. When used of people, the thought is to make them attractive.
Some Christians are poor cosmetologists. Instead of arranging the teaching about God our savior to bring out its beauty, they derange it and make it look clownish and ugly. Take the hypocrite (someone who suffers from reality detachment). Going to him for teaching about God is like going to a stylist who suffers from a retinal detachment for a haircut. The end result in both cases will not be pretty.
For the last few months, we have been thinking hard about the gospel: what it is, what it means, and what we should do about it. Here is one thing we should do: make it attractive. Bring out its beauty. In Paul’s words, “make the teaching about God our Savior attractive.”
That idea is present in many places in the Bible. We are to be “wise in the way we act toward outsiders, making the most of every opportunity” (Colossians 4:5). Paul tells the Thessalonians to order their daily lives in a way that is becoming (that is what the word he chose means) to outsiders (1 Thessalonians 4:12). St. Peter suggests a way for wives to make themselves – not just their bodies – beautiful (same word we have here) so that their husbands can be won over to God’s side.
In the same letter, Peter calls on all Jesus’s people to live in a way that will attract others to God, that will cause them (in his words) to “glorify God.” Peter was simply echoing teaching he heard from Jesus about being the light of the world and the salt of the earth. Salt brings out the flavor in food. Light reveals the beauty of a place. Jesus wanted his people to reveal the beauty of God and the remarkable flavor of the life spent with him.
There is an Old Testament text that can help us understand the cosmetological proof. God tells the prophet Jeremiah to buy and wear a linen belt. This was not like men’s leather belts today but a kind of sash that was worn around the waist and was meant to be stylish and attractive.
Then God told the prophet to take off the sash and hide it in a crevice in the rock. Jeremiah buried it in the crevice. When God later told him to dig it up, Jeremiah found it ruined – stained, mildewed, nasty. God used the ugly belt as a metaphor. He said, “…as a belt is bound around a man’s waist, so I bound the whole house of Israel and the whole house of Judah to me,’ declares the LORD, ‘to be my people for my renown and praise and honor” (Jeremiah 13:11).
As Christopher Wright put it, “God wants to wear his people.”[1] They make God look good, enhance his renown, praise, and honor. His people – that is, we – are intended to live in a way that brings out the goodness, glory, and beauty of God for others to see.
TheCosmetological Argument does more than prove the existence of God. It proves him to be desirable. It is not advanced by philosophers’ dialectic but by our delight in God. We attract people’s attention to God by the attention we give God.
[1] Christopher J.H. Wright, The Mission of God’s People, p. 137.
We could have done better. COVID-19 might have been a uniter, bringing Americans together to deal with a common threat and to preserve a shared interest. We could have done what America has done before in the face of such threats: put aside what divides us and work together for the common good.
But COVID-19 has not be a uniter. Or rather, we have not been uniters. We have retreated from each other into our political, racial, and religious corners, like prize fighters, impatient for the next round so that we can deliver our jabs or maybe even a knockout punch.
Writers and social commentators are calling 2020 “The Year of COVID” and “The Year of the Coronavirus,” but this is a misnomer. 2020 was “The Year of Division.” The coronavirus merely alerted us to how deep our divisions are.
Before the coronavirus, the division between the races, always painfully present, was front and center. The division between the sexes was also highlighted by the Me-Too movement and the trial of Harvey Weinstein and other powerful men. The division between the wealthy and the poor became glaring in the light of growing income inequality.
The divisions have further divided us. Somehow Black Lives Matter turned into an argument about the value of Blue Lives. The pain and humiliation suffered by the sexually harassed led to the defamation of victims. Instead of raising concern, the income inequality numbers became a sword in the hands of political swashbucklers. COVID didn’t divide us. We were already divided.
We can blame COVID-19 for the current state of affairs, but the real blame falls back on us. We have not been people of peace but people of strife. We have not tried to see the good in others but have looked for the bad. We have not mended divisions; we have intentionally deepened them.
These divisions did not happen because of COVID. They happened because of us. COVID, like a societal microscope, merely magnified it. A coronavirus cannot kill the American way of life, but these other diseases, which are diseases of the soul, can.
These diseases of the soul go by long-established names and the wise have always been aware of them. They are known as greed, lust, anger, sloth, envy, gluttony, and pride, the so-called seven deadly sins. Division is one of their chief symptoms.
COVID-19 will eventually go away but what about these diseases of the soul? Is there any cure for them? For this disease has not only infected individuals; it has spread through human society all across the globe.
There is an island in the South Pacific where everyone is profoundly colorblind. Natives to the island all see in grayscale. They neither see nor understand color. How could this colorblindness ever be undone? By introducing a color-sighted person into the genetic line.
Christians believe that God has followed a similar route in curing the diseases of the soul. He introduced a human who was free of sin into soul-ravaged humanity, the one person who had not been infected. Someone “like us in every way, yet without sin.” But if every human had been infected, as the Bible teaches and Christians believe, where on earth would this person be found?
Not on earth. In heaven. This person was, as St. Paul put it, “the man from heaven.” Christians know him as Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Ironically, it took God to be truly and healthily human. Jesus did not merely bring the cure; he is the cure.
That cure is already available. Unlike the COVID vaccine, no one must wait in line. This cure, however, must continue to be taken over a lifetime, which is another way of saying one must persevere in faith.
This cure relieves the painful side effects like division, fear, violence, and hatred that are associated with the soul-diseases of greed, pride, anger, and lust. However, symptom relief generally takes time and requires the continuing application of the cure, as directed. While immediate benefits are frequently experienced, the eradication of soul diseases is progressive and occurs over a lifetime (and even beyond).
We haven’t seen what the apostles saw, but we have seen other things. We’ve seen God change our lives for the better, give us hope, bring us peace, transform our relationships, free us from addictions, replace unforgiveness with love, anger with goodwill, save our marriages and much more. We have seen for ourselves that serving the Lord Jesus is the best thing we’ve ever done.
Trusting Jesus (and not just believing things about him) and living for Jesus (so that our life choices are centered around him) will change us and impact those around us. We willsee things we haven’t seen before, our confidence will grow, and our hope deepen. That doesn’t mean life will get easier. It didn’t get easier for those first gospelers—it got harder … and better. Jesus promised trouble and joy – and his people get both.
Before Karen and I started dating, we each had dedicated ourselves to the Lord Jesus. When we got married, our plan was to go abroad and work among the poorest of the poor, sharing the good news of Jesus in word and, especially, deed (since neither of us had any public speaking skills).
We applied to our denomination for licensing and began the process of becoming overseas workers. That included fulfilling a two-year term of service in our own country. I was given the job of pastoring a church that was on the brink of closing. I didn’t want to be a pastor, had no idea how to be a pastor, and was afraid to speak in front of people. But Karen and I were trusting King Jesus, to whom we were committed.
Three months after my pastoral duties began, the biggest giver in the church died. It was her money that kept the bills paid – including my salary. Then began an odyssey of trust in God and learning what he is like. Within a year-and-a-half, we had used up all our personal savings. Not long after that our first child was born and we had no insurance and no money. We had to apply for Hill-Burton Act funds to help with the hospital bills.
Things got harder as time went on. One winter, the suede leather coat my dad had given me was at the dry cleaner and I had no money to redeem it. Because the garage door was always coming off its track, I got a big glob of grease on my other winter coat, so it was at the dry cleaners too. The bill for both coats was just short of $50, which we didn’t have. So we prayed.
It was January, Sunday was coming, and I needed a coat. Right after praying for the money with our young son Joel, I went down to the mailbox, hoping that God would supply as he had at other times, through the post.
But there were no checks in the mail. There may have been some bills, I don’t remember. However, when I went outside a few hours later, I found an envelope stuck in the door with a $50 bill in it.
During those years, people we didn’t know and had never met stopped, got out of their cars, and gave us money, saying that God told them to do it. Not once, but multiple times – and never the same people.
When our car was giving me fits, I prayed what in spiritual formation circles is called whining prayer: GOD, I NEED A NEW CAR! And that evening we were given a new car. Well, it wasn’t new, but it was new to us and that is what I meant when I prayed.
I was invited to speak at a prayer retreat 40 miles away. The night before I left, I was up, pacing the floor, and questioning whether I should continue as the pastor of this church. We had no money, no groceries, and two kids to feed. I was having a crisis of faith. I was a dad who couldn’t take care of his family. But that night God helped me and I renewed my commitment to him. I told him he was still my portion and my very great reward and that I would trust him.
At the retreat, a woman I didn’t know asked if she could speak with me. She handed me a check, already filled out, and said, “God wants me to give this to you.” When I got home that night, I learned that people from church had dropped off groceries, which was the first time I remember that happening.
Those in-the-moment-of-need provisions became a common occurrence and, the thing is, we never told anyone (except God) of our need, not even our parents – especially our parents. We have seen how God acts in this world for the people of Jesus.
But money is just a little thing (as Jesus himself pointed out), a first-year introductory course. More important is what God is doing in our lives and our family. He has been changing us, even while – even by – allowing us a small part in what he is doing to change the world. Karen and I are satisfied. We are satisfied with life. We are satisfied with God. And with the things we are not satisfied – usually ourselves – we trust God to keep working until he is satisfied!
The first disciples told people what they had seen and, because they had experienced these things for themselves, their words had power. When we can tell people what we have seen for ourselves; when we can tell them about the Lord we have experienced and about whom we are excited, our words will also have power.
That is God’s plan. He is ready to show himself to us as real, as Lord. The Jesus who died for our sins, was buried, raised, and seen, can be experienced in our own lives. But it is not the religionists who experience him. It is the revolutionaries. It is not the spiritual dabblers. It is the committed. It is not those who play at religion but those who trust the God they’ve found – the God who’s found them – in Jesus.
Once the disciples had grasped the big picture – that the kingdom of God had broken into our world with Jesus’s resurrection – they began telling others. They started functioning, just as Jesus said they would, as witnesses to him and the resurrection.
We will go wrong if we think those early followers of Jesus thought they were spreading a new religion. Nothing could have been further from their minds or more repugnant to their hearts. They were Jewish people who worshiped the God of Abraham, who had acted through Jesus to bring the world under his rule and would take further action still.
The apostles didn’t think of themselves as starting a religion but as carrying on a revolution. They announced that Jesus, not Caesar nor anyone else, was the rightful ruler of the world. They were expecting the kingdoms of the world to become the kingdom of God and his Messiah, just as the prophets had promised. The world had changed because of Jesus and would change even more, and they were spreading the news.
Whether you see yourself as a revolutionary or as a religionist makes a great deal of difference. The revolutionary goes into the world. The religionist goes to services. The revolutionary is committed to bringing heaven to earth. The religionist is satisfied with going to heaven. The mindset is entirely different. One has had an insight; the other has received a call.
So, how do you see yourself? It will depend, I think, on how you see Jesus. If you see him as his disciples did – the exalted Lord and kingdom-bringer – you will see yourself more as a revolutionary. If you see him as he is often represented today – an economy-class ticket to heaven – you’ll see yourself more as a religionist.
Our text says that the risen Christ appeared to Peter, then to the 12, then to more than 500 disciples at one time, then to James, then to other apostles, and finally to Paul himself. These witnesses found themselves caught up in the revolution. They were in the vanguard of the coming kingdom. They knew their announcement of what God had done was preparing people for what God was doing—and would do.
When people see some unusual event – whether a possible kidnapping or the return of someone from the dead – what do they do? They tell people. That is what we did when we heard the woman’s scream and saw her pushed into the car. We called the authorities and later told our friends.
That is what the apostles did. They told their friends, told the authorities, told everyone who would listen – and others who would not. You might think they would tire of telling the same story, but they had come (with Jesus’s help) to understand its relevance. The future of the world was wrapped up in what they had seen. People needed to hear about it in order to adjust to the coming reality.
At first, the disciples told only their friends. They knew what they had seen: Jesus, alive after having been crucified; but they didn’t yet understand what it entailed, the vastness of its scope.
But they did understand that the people who killed Jesus might kill them too. The authorities had grilled Jesus about his followers before they executed him. That was ominous.
Jesus had been executed as a revolutionary, and the disciples knew how their Roman overlords treated revolutionaries. During the slave revolt, Rome brutally executed thousands of – not combatants but – POWs. The same general who conquered Jerusalem had once lined the Appian way from Rome to Capua with crucified POWS. Every 2/10ths of a mile for about a hundred miles, travelers on that road saw a different dead slave nailed to a cross – 6,000 in all.
The Empire thought of crucifixion as an attention-grabbing billboard that would leave everyone talking about what happens to people who challenge Rome. The apostles had seen smaller copies of that same billboard many times.
Rome had killed Jesus … and yet here he was alive again, which meant God has veto power over Rome! Over the next forty days, the risen Jesus explained to the disciples the significance of what had happened: God was fulfilling his promises, bringing his kingdom. He told them that the next step in the Kingdom of God revolution was for them to announce the good news far and wide.
So they told everyone, even the authorities – and they pulled no punches. Listen to the Apostle Peter: “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus. You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.” (Acts 3:13-15).
Before the very people who ordered Jesus’s death, the apostles said, “The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior that he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel. We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.” (Acts 5:30-33).
When people see something that interests or impresses them – whether a football game, a scenic vista, or people arguing at the supermarket – they talk about it. After Karen and I were married, we lived in a large apartment complex on our city’s southwest side. One morning around 2 or 3 o’clock, we heard a woman screaming for help out on the street. I jumped up, threw on some clothes, and went running out, telling Karen to call the police. (This was before we had 911.)
As I exited the building, I saw a car stopped in the middle of the street, with a woman on the far side of it – the woman who had screamed, I assumed. She was being pushed into the car by a man. As I ran, the car peeled off, and I never saw them again.
I was hardly a star witness. I couldn’t identify the woman. Was she tall? Short? I didn’t know. What was the man’s race? I wasn’t sure. What did the car look like? It was too dark to distinguish the color. I didn’t see the license plate. If I had been summoned to court, some defense attorney would have tied me in knots. They would have asked if I hadn’t dreamed the entire episode.
If I did, Karen dreamed it with me. I certainly didn’t see everything – the woman’s features or the car’s license plate – but I did see some things: a car in the middle of the street, a woman being pushed into it, the car peeling away as I approached. Karen and I both heard the scream for help.
Could I have misinterpreted what I saw? It’s possible. The girl could have been drunk and the person pushing her into it could have been her dad, taking her home to sleep it off. Or she could have been injured – that might account for the scream – and the car I saw could have been rushing her off to the hospital.
We are thinking about the role of witnesses in the gospel, beginning to pivot from what had happened to what the disciples did – and we might do – about it. Consider the role of witnesses in Paul’s bullet-point summary of the gospel:
1 Corinthians 15:3-8: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.”
Could these witnesses have misinterpreted what they had seen? It’s possible but it seems unlikely. More than a dozen people in five different places at five different times saw Jesus on Day One. At one of those places, at least ten of them saw him simultaneously. Many (and possibly all) of those people saw him on subsequent occasions, some when they were alone and some when they were in groups. Some of the people who didn’t see him on Day One – Thomas, for example, did see him on Day 8 and then again later. Paul says that on one occasion more than 500 people saw him simultaneously and most of those people were still alive and could verify what he wrote.
Could these witnesses have been dreaming? Only if more than 500 of them had the same dream at the same time. Could they have hallucinated? I suppose anything is possible, but history reports no other hallucination on this scale – nothing even remotely like it.
Disruption (n) – “the action of preventing something, especially a system, process, or event, from continuing as usual or as expected.”
This has been the year of disruption. Things have been disrupted at church: Services, classes, gatherings, funerals, even offerings. In our private lives, our routines have been disrupted. Karen and I have had to go into quarantine twice, in each case at a very inconvenient time.
It has been hard to get any momentum going this year. Just when things start to click, the virus surges again, a new set of Health and Human Services guidelines is issued, and a new round of business closures begins.
I can only imagine what it is like to be in school or to have a son or daughter who is in school at this time. Talk about disruption! The old routine is gone and what has replaced it can hardly be called routine at all. Classes have been held remotely, then in-person, then remotely again. Parents need to take personal time. Students need faster internet speeds.
The only thing more confusing than being a student or a parent during the pandemic is being a teacher or administrator – especially one with their own kids at home, trying to learn how to learn all over again.
We’re liable to think of our situation as unique, but the Bible is full of stories of men and women who found their routines turned upside down. Abraham’s life, for instance, was interrupted by God’s call to leave his home and family and travel to an unknown land. During the process, his brother died and he and his wife took in their nephew. Then his dad died. After that, he went through a major economic crisis and a war. Thinking about Abraham’s life sets my minor COVID-19 disruptions in an entirely different light.
Or what about Moses – forced to leave his wealthy home and support himself as an ag worker – a job he probably knew nothing about. Or David, whose once-grateful boss turned against him, forced the daughter to whom David was married to leave him, and did everything he could to ruin his life. Or Ezekiel, the refugee prophet whose wife died during a force deportation and he wasn’t even permitted to grieve.
Or consider Christmas. We are used to recalling the beautiful parts of the story of Jesus’s birth. But consider how disruptive it must have been to the lives of Mary and Joseph.
(Luke 2:1-7) In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.
God, the theologians tell us, is omnipotent, immutable, and incomprehensible. They should have told us that he is also inconvenient. The eternal and omnipresent God doesn’t step into our little lives without disrupting our plans.
Mary was probably a teenager when the angel appeared to tell her that she would conceive and have a son, the Son of God. No doubt Mary had other plans – getting married, for one (she was already engaged). Her fiancé was a great guy – she didn’t yet know how great a guy – but what man doesn’t leave when he discovers his fiancé is pregnant with someone else’s baby? Disruption.
Joseph was a stand-up kind of guy. He was the real deal. Righteous. Kind. A self-starter, who had what it takes to launch his own business. He too had plans, starting with getting married and having kids. Then he found out that his fiancé was already pregnant. Disruption.
One thing to know about disruptions is that they usually lead to more disruptions. After Joseph and Mary found out about the pregnancy, they didn’t just go on with their plans and their nice, quiet life. For reasons having to do with taxes and (quite possibly) scandalmongers, they decided to leave their hometown and move to Bethlehem, where Joseph’s family came from.
Moving is a disruption at any time. When we moved a few years ago, I considered it a major interruption – even though we only move two hundred yards to the east! Joseph and Mary didn’t move two hundred yards. They moved to a new town in a different province, almost on the spur of the moment. No job, no guarantees, and no moving van. They carried everything they had, either on themselves or on a donkey. We always picture pregnant Mary riding on a donkey, but most people didn’t have donkeys and the Bible doesn’t mentions one. Joseph may have had to carry their earthly belongings on his back to their new home.
But … what hew home? When they arrived in Bethlehem, they were homeless. It’s likely they ended up sleeping in one of the caves that dot the ridge that runs through the area. That is where the local shepherds “stabled” their sheep in inclement weather, and the earliest accounts of Jesus’s birth (after the Gospels themselves) assume that Jesus was born in a cave. When my wife was pregnant, she couldn’t get comfortable in our queen-sized bed. How did Mary manage a cave floor? Disruption.
After the baby was born, things slowly normalized. The couple found a house. Joseph must have found work, probably as a carpenter/builder. They were finally getting back into a routine. Then came the magi, who unwittingly brought danger to the young boy’s life, and their routine went out the window. For the second time in a couple of years, Joseph and Mary packed up their things on the spur of the moment and left, this time for a foreign country, where they again had to find housing and a job, among people who spoke another language. Disruption.
We may assume that such major disruptions happen to people like Joseph and Mary, but not to people like us. Yet, think about it: we are in the middle of a major global disruption – the pandemic. Much of the world is experiencing disruption. We are not exempt.
Everyone experiences disruption, even people who work hard to preclude disruption from their lives. In fact, those are the people who think of even minor inconveniences as major disruptions: the car won’t start – major disruption! Can’t go to the office because of quarantine – major disruption!
The truth is that no one escapes disruptions. Lockwood has lost people during the pandemic, though only two of them (so far) from COVID-19. There are always disruptions, including cancer, stroke, heart disease, accidents. If you were rich enough to hide from the pandemic on your own private Caribbean Island, even that would be a disruption. But no one is rich enough to hide from death. We are all going to die someday and dying is the biggest disruption of all – terribly inconvenient!
The fact is most of us need a good disruption from time to time. We may not like it – probably won’t – but that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. Without occasional disruptions, the priority of our convenience, our plans, our schedule remain unchallenged, which can leave us assuming a false independence from God. God uses disruptions for our good, to teach us to trust him, to break us out of our self-centeredness and enable us to know him better.
He also uses disruptions to move us in new and better directions. The business world has a term for systemic changes brought about by the introduction of a new agent. They call it disruptive innovation. God has been managing disruptive innovation since he banished our first parents from the Garden. No one understands it better.
When God interrupts our lives: through something difficult, like sickness, joblessness, or the loss of a loved one; or through something positive, like a job offer, a move, a new relationship, we must be careful to keep our feelings in line with our faith. If the disruption is a bad thing, we are liable to catastrophize, to feel this thing is so terrible that we will never recover. If it is a good thing, we are liable to romanticize, to think that this will make life perfect. In either case, such feelings can cause us to lose sight of the Lord who is at work in both good times and bad.
When major disruptions come, there are things we can do that will help. We can remind ourselves and those with us that we are part of a larger story. There is a big picture we don’t see; but the author does. He is constantly connecting the arc of our storyline back to the main story, which is the greatest story ever. We won’t always see it; in fact, we only get glimpses of it. But we can always believe it if we know the God who gave his only begotten Son.
Even during disruptions, we can trust God’s purpose if we know his character. But trust is a choice. We don’t drift into it. We choose it. That is what as Mary did when, in the face of disruption and uncertainty, she said: “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said” (Luke 2:38). She chose to trust. We must do the same. We never outgrow the need to do this.
To trust God as Mary and Joseph did, we will need to submit our plans to him, knowing that he may take them off the table. As long as we insist on having things our own way, which is to say, as long as we make an idol of our plans, we won’t be able to trust God. It will simply be impossible.
Instead of trusting our plans, we can entrust our plans to God. If he takes them off the table, we’ll know it is to make room for something better. He took Joseph’s and Mary’s pleasant domestic plans off the table, but only to make room for them in the story of the salvation of the world. We can trust God – this God; the God who took our flesh and bore our sins – with the future, even when our plans have been disrupted, as they have this year.
Disruption does not have the last word. God does. Whatever the media may say, 2020 has not been the Year of COVID-19. It has been the Year of our Lord, as 2021 will be. COVID is not king. Jesus is.
I think we get Jesus confused with Peter Pan. We seem to think he is the boy who would not grow up.
A seven-year-old girl went with her grandparents to look at Christmas displays in the suburb where they lived. When they saw a large Nativity scene, Grandma called attention to it: “Look, Sarah, isn’t it beautiful?” And Sarah, who was a very smart girl, said: “Grandma, one thing bothers me. Jesus is the same size he was last year. Why doesn’t he ever grow up?”
Perhaps Jesus does not grow up because we won’t let him. We love the baby Jesus. He is so sweet, sitting on his mother’s lap, like he is in Leonardo’s painting, stretching out a tiny hand to his admirers. It is all so charming – and entirely innocuous. What could be less threatening than a little baby – particularly one that never grows up?
But leaving Jesus at Bethlehem on Christmas Day is like leaving WWII at Normandy on D-Day, or manned flight at Kitty-hawk on a December day in 1903. It is important to celebrate the act that set it all in motion, but there is so much more to the story. Interestingly, Christians did not think to celebrate Christ’s birth until about the fifth century, but for many contemporary westerners, Christmas is the only Christian holiday they celebrate.
At Christmas, we stand over the manger – we are comfortable there – and sing about the Child who is proof of God’s love for the world. But at some point we need to move away from the manger. We need to let this Baby become a man and hear what he says and see what he does. The story of Jesus moves on; it leaves Bethlehem behind. The place of his birth is referred to only one other time in the rest of the New Testament, in a conversation by people who didn’t know that Jesus was born there.
We can choose to frame the events of Christmas so that they comprise a stand-alone story – a fascinating one, to be sure – but there is more to the story than that. It is the story of the infiltration and invasion of earth. The Infiltrator comes from outside our world. The Invader comes to wrest the earth from the dark powers that control it
Christmas is an invasion. St. Paul wrote: “In the fullness of time, God sent forth his Son…” The word translated “sent forth” has the primary meaning “to send on a mission.” Jesus is not Peter Pan. If we think of him as a boy who did not grow up, we underestimate him. He is an invader, and he is on a mission.
History has its stories of famous spies and infiltrators: Nathan Hale, Mata Hari, Alger Hiss, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. They infiltrated armies and state departments and intelligence communities. But there has never been an infiltration on the scale of “Operation Bethlehem,” which required the infiltration of our race, even our biological make-up, through the Virgin’s womb.
Bethlehem was ground zero for an invasion, a strategic move in an age-old war. But the story does not end there any more than the story of WWII ends at Normandy. We must move away from the manger to see the King of Kings and not just the newborn king.
Even at Christmas – especially at Christmas – it is necessary to look beyond the manger to the stark and terrible cross. And beyond it to the shattered and empty grave. The rescue mission has extended far beyond Bethlehem.
And it is not over. Ordinary people are being taken up into the fray, joining the side of the new king. They announce pardon to people who have disregarded him as they once did. They extend peace.
The operation began with the daring invasion at Bethlehem but the tide was turned at Calvary. Today, the mission continues in Cleveland and New Orleans, Chicago and New York, Kolkata and Beijing – wherever God’s people find themselves. Christmas deserves to be celebrated not as a sweet story for children but as the first strike in the continuing mission to rescue the world.
The Way Home 