Waiting on the Lord

December 23, 2012

Advent IV

Fr. Philip Eberhart

Waiting on the Lord

Audio File

  

Well, welcome to the second day past the end of the world!!  Apparently the Mayans were wrong,  or…  the calendar just ended.  I saw a cartoon of one Mayan asking the other why the calendar stopped there, and he said, “I ran out of rock!”

It may be just that simple, when it comes to the Mayans, and we get wrapped up in and mesmerized with fantasies, while the world around us laughs.

I also saw two other cartoons this weekend:  One had an absent-minded Jesus saying,

“That end of the world thing!   That was today?”  and another had Jesus saying, “End the world, 4 days before my birthday!  No Way!”

So once again we can get on with the living of life and the loving of others, as we have been commanded to do all along.

I think there is a reason why, over and over the Lord tells us in Scripture that “the day and the hour” are above our pay grade!  Once he even said they are above His, but are in the hands of the Father.

But this past week, has brought something to the fore for me, as I’ve talked with people about the end of the world (given that there was no real sense of fear here) – I’ve wondered what life would be like for us, if we lived our lives in expectation of His appearing?

This Sunday we center on the experience of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in our readings and songs.  There was one line that really struck me as I read through the readings this week:  the last line of the Gospel reading:

“And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord." 

This was spoken of Mary by her cousin Elizabeth, the mother of the prophet, John, the Baptizer, Jesus’ cousin.  And it was spoken of Mary, in the first few days or weeks of her pregnancy; in fact Luke has her going to stay with Elizabeth right after the Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel.  There is no outward and visible sign of the Lord’s fulfillment of the Angelic word.  

“And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord."

Waiting for the end of the world – let me say it a bit better – waiting for the coming of Jesus Christ in Glory for us in these days, is not unlike what Mary went through as she waited for His first advent. 

In effect we are “pregnant” with faith for the Kingdom of God to come.

Mary was incredulous at the things that were said to her.  Even the greeting, “favored one!” she pondered as she heard it!  

This morning I want to place us and today in the place of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

She has been given a promise, but there are no outward signs, other than this visitation and the words spoken to her at the Annunciation.  

When we think of Christ’s second coming, we have no outward signs to go by, other than His words, describing the times and the overarching attitudes of men and women.  No dates or even world events that can be collated with dates, for certain.  We are stuck with faith! 

Just like Mary, at the point of our gospel, all she had was faith. 

Have you ever felt that way?  Kind of believing against all the evidence?  I know I have.

And the angel’s words ring – “For nothing will be impossible with God.”

And Mary’s response to the angel is fantastic!  Would that our response to God and His promises would be like this:

Behold the bondslave of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your Word.”

In the life of our parish, we have heard over and over again the Big Three for working in the Kingdom of God:

Willingness – Availability and Obedience;   all three here are in view with Mary.

 

As she goes down the road to visit with her cousin, Mary must have been awash in the moments with the Angel and awash in the promise of His words.  I think every mother is aware of these moments – of new life forming inside – even at its earliest stages.  There are physical changes that begin to happen very quickly.

But for Mary, the most significant change was the spiritual place she found herself in.

“Hail, favored one. The Lord is with you.”

Take a moment and do a personal inventory of your own spiritual position in relation to the Father, especially in relation to His favor on your life and His presence in it. 

You see, Mary was given a foretaste in this experience, of what we have been ushered into as a result of the birth and of the death of her child.

 

Favor

Was it that Mary was especially holy, that she had a special upbringing or special circumstances of birth herself – we don’t really know those things apart from legend.

What we do know is that Mary was a young lady, perhaps we would even call her a girl still, today.  We know that she was in the lineage of David, as was Joseph, her intended.

 

We know that this set of circumstances, pregnant before the wedding, was not considered by many to be a place of “favor” in that society.  Yet, here she was.

The most amazing feature of Mary’s walk for me, is her willingness:  “Be it unto me according to your Word.”

Val once asked me, “Could Mary have said, No!”  I have to say she could have.  We all have the capacity as humans to say No to God.  “No Lord” is one of my favorite oxymorons!  And Mary chose availability to God call, to His word concerning her, and she obeyed that word.

Favor is something that God bestows on us as a gift of grace.  His grace working in and through our hum drum, plain Jane life.  “God chooses us,” Jesus told his disciples, “and He calls us His friends!”  Amazing words.

And those words are words that have promise for us, the same promise that the words of the angel held for Mary 

“The Lord is with you.”

 

Presence

Jesus modeled this, as well as his mother.  Perhaps it is one of the things that Mary passed on from her parentage of Jesus – a dependence on the real presence of God in her life, for the fulfillment of His Word to her.  There was no other source possible!

Mary could not “help out” with this project!  

And we can not “help out” with the work that God is doing inside us – and we should not help out with the work that God wants to accomplish through us!

In fact, the more we “help out” the more we mess things up, in my experience.

So we need to keep in mind the theme of being “pregnant with faith and with the Kingdom of God” and know that this is not something that can be managed.

God’s presence inside us is accomplished by our out-and-out surrender, as I mentioned last week – Hands UP!!   It is surrender to God that opens our hands and our hearts to the movement of His Spirit in and then through us.

This is our inheritance and our bequest.  The Holy Spirit is the deposit – the down payment on our life eternal – in the here and now!  

So we must watch Mary, and model our life and our ministry after her and after her Son, Jesus, the Christ.

“… blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord."

 

Let us pray.

Lord, we believe. 

We pray that like Mary, the Mother of our Lord, Jesus Christ, we may be enabled to hear your voice speaking and to trust in Your Word to us.  Give us patience to rest in your providence and provision.  Give us faith to believe. Give us grace to persevere in the face of obstacles and adversity.

Let your will be done for us, Lord, according to Your Word.  We declare to you our willingness ( I declare to you my willingness).  Lord, show me where my willingness to be yours and to serve you fades.

And move me, Lord.  Move me from willingness to availability, Lord.  Clear my head and heart of busyness and make room in my schedule for you and for your work!

And finally, Lord Jesus, help us, help me to be obedient – to do your work in your way and in your time, each day.  Let me not run ahead of you or lag behind you in my obedience.  Help me to keep in step with Your Spirit.

For the sake of your Kingdom, Jesus, and for the fame of Your Name, we pray.

Amen.

The Building Blocks of Faith

December 26, 2010
“To As Many as Believed”

The Building Blocks of Faith


So how important are some of the building blocks … some of the specifics of what we believe about Jesus Christ?

For instance, just how important is this Virgin Birth thing? And if it is important, why is it important?

The problem with our age, according to a recent Barna poll of Christian believers across the US is that we have stopped thinking theologically … probably an outgrowth of the fact that some decades ago we stopped reading … biblically !! Our understanding of the import of individual pieces of doctrine and how it fits together systematically to make the whole of what we call “belief” is, for much of the country, at an all time low.

Now I wouldn’t say that this is true of us at REZ generally, but I am certain that we cannot swim in the water of our culture without being effected by its pollutants !! And I know that we approach our faith in America kind of like a HOBBY! I’ve heard it said that in America “we Worship our work, we Work at our play and we Play at our worship!” And if we do indeed play at our worship then we probably approach belief much like this game of JENGA. Certainly our culture does.

The point of the game is to sit with an opponent and try to remove as much of the foundational structure of the tower until it topples over. Whoever removes the last piece before it topples, loses!! Its fun!

The question before us is 1: What pieces of our faith are foundational? And 2: What happens to us if we do not hold to them or really understand that they are foundational?

The writer to the Hebrews urges his readers to “hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering.” (10:23) But we have a tendency to easily set aside tenets within the structure of our hope, without thinking about them too much. And pretty soon we are experiencing a crisis of faith – the toppling effect of removing pieces of the foundation.

So how about this Virgin Birth thing? How important is it and why?

Our gospel reading begins with the classic words of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Most of us accept that Jesus is somehow divine and human together – that is the doctrine of the incarnation and it is central to our understanding of Jesus and is foundational to our understanding of who He was, and is and what He did among us.

Larry King, of CNN fame, was once asked if he could interview anyone from the history of the world, who would he interview. His answer was Jesus Christ. When asked what his interview would consist of he said he would ask one question: “Were you really virgin born?” Because if the answer is Yes, it “explains history for me.”

How important is this little piece of our foundation?

Is the Virgin Birth of Jesus something we can negotiate with? And what real evidence do we have to support our belief in it?

IS IT NEGOTIABLE?

Well, NO, not if you want to have the “faith once delivered to the saints.” (Jude)

If we remove the Virgin Birth of Jesus, we subsequently and necessarily must remove Miracles and Divinity from the equation, as the Virgin Birth speaks to his origins… to the mechanics of his arrival among us … as simply a man or … as a God/Man.

The choices are two: Either Jesus was the illegitimate son of a carpenter and his teen bride (as many in his village likely believed) OR he was the supernatural gift of God through a chosen virgin, as prophecy predicts and as the story recounts in Scripture.

The choice then made sets one on a path of belief or unbelief, based on the assumptions that form this one building block of faith and hope.

The Virgin Birth points at least to a world that is unbound by sheer naturalism. Ravi Zacharias makes this point in his book, “Jesus Among Other Gods”. (p. 38) He points out that such a claim, especially in the time and culture in which it was advanced, would have been subject to scorn and ridicule at the very least – stoning and death at the worst. For a young, betrothed bride to turn up pregnant at the wedding was a scandal of the first order – and for her to be accepted in that condition by the new husband was evidence, in and of itself, that something else – something extraordinary was happening.

But what proofs can be offered except the recounting of dreams or visions by Mary herself or by Joseph her husband, both of whom have the most to lose if this was a fabrication – a lie.
Interestingly the other characters in the story also play an important role as does an understanding of the culture. Zacharias goes on,

“Mary, Joseph, Zacharias, Elizabeth, John the Baptist, and then the disciples risked everything for this truth.”

He explains that the culture was one of “power and position,” and for them to set their son up for his humiliation toward a cousin younger than himself and to maintain that position of “second fiddle” even up to their son’s death at the hands of Herod’s daughter and the guards who brought her his head, was cultural suicide. It was a path toward ostracism and living as outcasts in their own home towns!

And for Mary and Joseph, the claim of a supernatural pregnancy, while they were engaged, would have been laughed at and they would have been ostracized in the harshest ways by those in closest relationships with them. Instead the opposite appears to be the case, as Joseph took Mary in, though pregnant without disgracing her publically, as did Elizabeth, her cousin, during the final trimester of her pregnancy, when the outward evidence of her pregnancy was irrefutable. All these point to the veracity of what they believed about the pregnancy – that they believed what Mary had said about God’s hand in all this.

Do you believe it?

Do you believe what we say each Sunday:
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.

If you believe it what does this mean?

As Larry King said, “it explains all of history!” It means that Jesus is who he said he was, the very Son of God – God With Us, Emmanuel. The Virgin Birth is set as a diamond in the setting of hundreds of prophecies regarding this coming of Messiah. Matthew spends inordinate amounts of ink on making those connections, and that is why you have Joseph’s genealogy and the Joseph dream story up front in Matthew. Those two stories are the ring setting for the story Luke tells us of the details of the birth, the testimony of Mary (which has little real credibility apart from Joseph’s acceptance of her), and the theological ramifications of such a birth.

Valerie is working today, but she related to me her astonishment this past week at a discovery she made at her work. She works with two muslim women, who celebrate Christmas. Seems like a contradiction, right? But no! It seems that one other religion in the world holds to Jesus’ Virgin Birth: Islam!!

In the Koran (Surah 19:19ff) Jesus, it asserts, was “born of a virgin.” Yet Islam denies the divinity of Jesus, maintaining that he was the last great prophet, before Mohammed. The Koran was written 600 years after Jesus birth, yet affirms this birth story as true, but does not make the connection to Jesus origin then, in God. Just as for many in our modern culture, the connection between the virgin birth and divinity of Jesus is lost. But it is one of the features of this story that is unique among world religions: Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, all born of natural means and died natural deaths.

Jesus stands alone here, and is the unique witness of God’s power and love for humankind the ssssssssssworld over. From the beginning, “communion and the power to give life existed in God himself. God, who is Father, Son and Spirit is in fact, Being-in-relationship. In Christ, the Word became flesh. God created flesh in the act of the creation of man and woman but God was not bound by our requirements of consummation in begetting His One and Only, Unique Son, through whom He was “reconciling the world to himelf.”

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.

You see, to be born of God, we must follow the way of Jesus, the Virgin Born One, who was born, "not of blood, or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God." It is thus, just as Jesus was, that we are given the power and right to become children of God.

So let us hold fast the hope that we profess and believe and receive Him, once again,
In the stable that is our heart, as he is born in us this day.

Amen.

R.I.P. Our Dear Mamie

Yesterday, I did 'last rites' for my friend, Mamie Todd. In their late years, she and her husband George, (R.I.P. April 2009) have been some of our faithful stalwarts at REZ. Through decades of health issues they have persevered to be one of the most faithful couples we've ever known.

It was with great surprise (and deep joy) that we greeted them on our first Sunday evening as RESURRECTION ANGLICAN FELLOWSHIP, as we met that evening at the chapel at Colorado Community Church's Englewood Campus, only a mile or two up the hill from our old home at St. George's. Old home! Boy was that true for George and Mamie, members of St. Georges for decades, thus our overjoyed surprise at their presence with us in this new church plant.

Both of them worked quietly, behind the scenes, doing little things like collecting food from farmer's markets and delivering it to food banks the same day. Gathering clothes, tools, anything useful actually, and seeing to it that it go to someone who needed it. This was George's passion and daily activity, and Mamie supported him until his passing last year. Now she has fought her final battle and joined him for a great square-dance on the golden streets. I'm wondering who the caller is!??? Bet that was quite a reunion.

Mamie (and George), we will miss you greatly in our lives at REZ. And that is the way it should be. People who are significant for us should leave a hole in our lives! We fill those holes, eventually, with the stuff of memory and thankfulness and praise to God for the gift He has given us. I got an email this morning asking how many of the last great trophy winners we can remember: Heiseman, Academy Awards, Pulitzer Prize, World Series MVP... you name it. Can you? But ask who has made an impact on your life? Who helped you with a difficult time in your life? Who reached out to you in a small but life-changing way? These are the people who COUNT!
Not the big names or the bright "stars."

Mamie and George, we love you. You have touched us and we have grown because of knowing you both. Go with God and be joyful together in the habitations of light.

Rest in Peace, indeed.
Padre Phil+

Hmmm, seems like this might become a Monday morning thing.

Great worship yesterday with Bishop Greene, our bishop in the Anglican Mission, now "theAM."
He shared a great word on the Revelation of Jesus and its foundational character for the work of God and our partnership in the adventure yesterday.

Schools are all back in session this week, and life seems to be returning to normal after the holidays, whatever that is. Hoping to get a handle on some exersize, or just some walking with the weather a little more tolerable. Holiday food seems to pile up and slow things down.

Reading list for this week:
DEEP CHURCH by Belcher: a middle way ( I like that as an Anglican) between the traditionalist and emerging church movements of evangelicalism. We are reading and discussing this as a part of our Anglican Mission pastors' group. Sure enjoy being a part of a group of men who are searching together for God's will and way, best practices and new ways to do things. It is very stimulating and a real refresher!

DO THE RIGHT THING by Mike Huckabee: Part of my 2010 is going to be a more active stance on the political and policy fronts. I like Gov. Huckabee as he doesn't seem quite as shrill as other TV commentators on FOX. I'm interested in his take and seeing if he can help me put all the political upheaval in a proper context. Hope so.

Glenn Beck's COMMON SENSE: Actually I'm reading the original version in the back first, by Thomas Paine. I think that might be the place to start here, rather than with Beck himself. Thankful for a new tack that Beck is taking currently, working for the recovery of our Christian heritage and the goverenment of We The People. REMEMBER? Faith, Family & Freedom!

Well, probably ought to get on with the reading and walking instead of just typing about it. HUH?

Padre Phil