Remember, It's Christmas

Matthew 28:18-20 - “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

It’s Christmas afternoon. The presents have been opened. Food has been eaten or is being prepared. Someone you know is realizing that their kid is more interested in the box than the expensive toy that came inside it. Extended family is commenting on how much someone has grown, and the weird uncle turns it into a self-deprecating fat joke. And today is the day to really settle in for a long winters nap.

Or maybe your day has been different. Maybe you’ve been so caught up in preparing for Christmas you forgot to celebrate it. Today is the day we celebrate the birth of our savior. An unimportant family had a baby in a cave and set Him in a feeding trough (if you had the same nativity set I had as a kid then you know that this made the donkey look very concerned). This birth that should be trivial, another kid to throw on the pile that is humanity, instead sent a shockwave through time. This is the point where everything changed.

An angel told some shepherds who were working in the nearby fields to come check out the big event that just happened. Shepherds who were pretty low on the social hierarchy ladder got to be the first witness to a turning point in history. Then a few months/years later some smart dudes came from far away to meet Him because they understood how important He was and would be.

Now 2019 is almost done. The next time you get another one of these emails we will be 1/5th into the 21stcentury. Time is flying and we are busier and more distracted than ever before. So, if you have spent too much time preparing this year take a minute for yourself (60 literal seconds), and just reflect on all the great things that God has done this year. Sure, you’ve faced challenges but for now what has gone right? Even if it is just for you, just for now, take a moment to celebrate.

“…behold, I am with you always…”

Merry Christmas

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Rejoice!

Isaiah 25:9 It will be said on that day “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”

This is part of a prophesy found in Isaiah 25. The whole chapter is focused on how the Lord will protect His people and destroy those that would seek to harm them. He will gather his people on a mountain to feast on rich food and well-aged wine. He will swallow up death forever and will wipe the tears from our faces.

With imagery like this it’s easy to see how Jesus’s appearance on the scene would confuse people. They all thought that the prophesies all pointed to this Superman™ type character that would be holding a sword and lead an army to destroy all their oppressors. They thought the coming kingdom would be royalty with vast land and fortresses. An Earthly kingdom of might and power crushing all who would oppose them with an iron fist!

However, what arrived was a baby. Not even a royal baby, or a kid born to a connected family. From the outside Jesus was just a normal kid born to a normal family. Maybe people close to them knew the “scandal” of how Mary was with child before the marriage, but many people could chalk that up to “kids these days” shenanigans.

An unremarkable kid born to an unimportant family would change the world. The people who heard the prophesy of Isaiah were thinking about a revolution of might and power. But Jesus came to start a revolution of the mind, a revolution of the heart, and a revolution of the spirit. The world doesn’t change, people change.

Jesus commandeers expectations. Anytime we want to put Him in a box and say, “this is how I’ve always done, and this is how I always will do it,” Jesus comes along and tells us that we’ve been called to more. Jesus came as the savior of the world, but he didn’t come in the way anyone expected it. He came with love instead of the sword.

How can we be glad and rejoice in his salvation?

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Matthew 1:6 - And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah…

A hilarious suggestion popped up on my news feed the other day: extending the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The rationale was that there needed to be more than one month between family get togethers.

We can probably all relate to that sentiment, at least for a couple of weeks following one of these events. Of course, the hope is that over time the bad memories will fade and only the good ones will remain. Most of the time we forget about the fights and the political discussions (disagreements) and who did what to whom and we end up remembering that, when it comes right down to it, we really do love these crazy people we call family.

Over a long period of time, we tend to scrub our history of negativity even further. I recently went down a family-tree rabbit hole on ancestry.com. The old boat manifests and birth certificates that the software could find didn’t really give me much info other than that a former-relative existed; I had to fill in the rest of the details myself. With each new connection the program found, I imagined that the person lived a life filled with adventure and intrigue, faithfulness and righteousness. It probably wasn’t true, but I certainly didn’t want to consider that I might have a few bad seeds in my family tree.

Matthew does just the opposite when he is recording Jesus’ family tree. He makes a special effort to include the bad seeds. This remark about David is case-in-point: in case anyone had forgotten, David’s son Solomon was born to Uriah’s wife. How did that happen? Well, long story short (Matthew is reminding us) David abused his power and impregnated another man’s wife before killing that man to cover it up. Yeah, that’s what Jesus’ ancestors were like.

Matthew is so intentional to include details like this because he wants us to know that these are the types of people that Jesus comes from and comes to, but I think there is another reason as well: he wants us to think about how even the people who screw up the most are still used by God for his redemptive purposes. David, despite all his flaws, was the King “after God’s own heart.” Solomon, the offspring of that otherwise hugely embarrassing error, becomes the son of the promise.

Yes, our families are probably messed up, and so are we. Matthew reminds us that Jesus’ family was not much different, and if they can be used for God’s redemptive purposes, then so can ours. Maybe that’s the reminder we need before we do it all over again and get together with them in just a couple of weeks. And that is really good news.

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Finding Shiloh

Genesis 49:10 (KJV) The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the unexpected, largely because that’s the title of this coming weeks sermon (teaser). I’ve also been thinking a lot about the word Shiloh, largely because that’s the name of the dog our family recently acquired. (I promised myself I wasn’t going to be one of those people who was always talking about their dog, but I digress.)

When the Israelites moved into the land of Canaan, God told them to put the tabernacle in the city of Shiloh. Excavations of the site in Israel have revealed that it was heavily fortified prior to the time of the Israelites, but by the time they got there the walls had crumbled and it was a relatively nondescript location. Shiloh has been translated in a lot of different ways, but basically it means a place of peace or tranquility (Think “Pleasantville”).  It may have seemed like a strange location for the very dwelling of God, but it wasn’t the city that gave the dwelling significance, it was the other way around: Shiloh meant something because it was the place of the Lord’s presence.

The other time Shiloh is mentioned is as a proper name. Jacob is giving his final blessings to his sons and the word Shiloh is used in his blessing to his son, Judah. Don’t get me started on the irony here: the dog we got for Judah was named Shiloh before we got her (providence?). A sceptre is the mark of royalty; what Jacob is saying is that the royal line will not pass from the line of Judah until Shiloh appears. In most of our English bibles it is translated as something like “to the one to whom it belongs”. The point is that long before the monarchy in Israel, when David (from the tribe of Judah) would be crowned king, Jacob prophesied to his sons that there would be a Shiloh.

That Shiloh, the Messiah, was also quite nondescript. He wasn’t much to look at. Isaiah’s prophecies essentially tell us that he won’t be much to write home about. It was the fact that Jesus was the place where God dwelt among his people that gave him significance. And so, it is the thing that gives us significance.

We can either choose to think of ourselves as relatively nondescript, maybe not that special, or not that important. Maybe more of us should take that humble attitude. Yet when we remember that we are now the temple of God, that we are now the place where God dwells, we are given a significance far beyond what our humanity might suggest.

I might even say that it is indeed unexpected.

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