I’m here to remind you today that you didn’t imagine those dreams. You didn’t imagine that vision. And God has not forgotten you. Perhaps you’ve been taken where you never wished to go. Maybe life has seemed all detour, no destination. Maybe you think that you’ve gone beyond the reach of God’s purposes, serving no useful role in any way that amounts to much. The truth is that sometimes people are called, and sometimes people are taken…
All the world’s programming about effective Christian witness can’t compete with believers who have warm, thawed hearts, and all the world’s programming about effective Christian witness can’t thaw frozen hearts that sit like a cold stone on an unbending pew, rock-hard, Sunday after Sunday.
The moment you slip from branding as an evangelistic tool to branding God, your logos and graphics have slipped from tool in service to God to weapon of iconoclasm – destroying an image. Hashtag simony. We do not create Team Trinity.
We are called to receive the brand of Jesus Christ (not his motivational verse t-shirt). Christ imprints himself on our thoughts, our emotions, our decisions. By his stripes we are healed, and there is no web analytics metric to measure the bleeding back of Word Made Flesh. We are called to be made into the image of God, to be bearers of God’s image, and anything that eats away at the image of God in us is violently iconoclastic.
It’s a mistake to criticize questioning by and in itself. An unexamined life is not worth living, and an unexamined faith will last about as long as Farrah Fawcett hair, Hammer pants, beanie babies, MySpace, “Gangnam Style” and every other grass that withers and flower that doth fade away.
Jesus’ Incarnation was not initiated by humans: that is one of the most important implications of the Virgin Birth. Jesus came, unexpected, uninvited, uncreated. Receive Christ, then, this season, as you do in Holy Communion. You can put up a tree: you cannot create Christmas. You can get a great deal on The Toy for your kid: you cannot create Christmas. We receive Christmas…
In the middle of life – car repairs and cancelled trips, cancer test results and job changes, crises and half-finished projects – what is truly urgent, and what is only a red herring? Holy focus slowly grows out of maneuvering from one situation to a next, feeling out the tempo of the Holy Spirit and recognizing the holy even when a child is vomiting on the floor, someone is screeching their brakes before rear-ending you, and your daughter is beginning a conversation with, “um, Mom?…can I talk to you about something?”
“Who is God? Emmanuel, Word-Made-Flesh, Jesus Christ the fully divine, fully mortal. And the Book of Revelation is understood through Emmanuel, God with us, who makes all things new – new, say, as a newborn, fists tight, eyes blinking, with that delicious newborn smell and tiny tufts of hair. Our world needs to be new again: reborn, pressed against the chest of its Creator.”
“This Thanksgiving and Christmas, we need food pantries and nonprofit organizations, churches and kind social workers, homeless shelters and business donations, we need Good Samaritan funds and people who order a coffee in the drive-thru for the guy with the sign at the intersection. The Church is really good at putting programming in place.
Only when you’re at the end of your rope, it’s not always programming that you need. In fact, programming can be a tool to distance ourselves from uncomfortable need.”
“Despite my excellent undergraduate education preparing me for Christian ministry, despite my thoroughly-enjoyed seminary training, I don’t remember any discussions on how to provide pastoral care during a plague. Of all people, though, Christians must be conversant in the language of mortality, fluent in the evils of death and the beauty of resurrection, articulate in tragedy and triumph. What else is the rhythm of the church year for, but to practice us in the art of living the pattern of Kingdom life, of Christ-life, of birth, death, and resurrection? We must talk of these things if we have any hope of acting on them, putting hands to ideas. We must all find our inner Mother Teresa and touch the dying – even if you choose to wear three layers of gloves.”
“Jesus Christ wants you to glow – not just to see his light, not just to talk about the light of God, not just to reflect his light, but to be transformed into light.”