“The Lord sets the prisoners free…” (Ps. 146:7c)

It is “In the days of Herod, King of Judea” that the Luke’s narrative begins (Lk. 1:5). It’s a historical footnote for the modern day reader, but for Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph, the I-don’t-know-maybe-three wise men, the shepherds and the sheep and the innkeeper, Herod’s kingship meant that Israel’s king had not yet come.

Herod was a king in the way Moses might have been king had he ignored that burning Voice that spoke his name the day his conscience caught fire. Moses was adopted by the daughter of Pharaoh, the wealthiest man on earth, and possibly would have one day been put in charge of some region of grandpa’s empire, perhaps the region where all the Hebrew slaves were living. He looked like them, after all. In that case, he would have been a Hebrew “king” over Hebrew slaves under the king of Egypt.

Herod was something like that, except Pharaoh was Caesar and Egypt was Rome. Herod was a puppet king for Rome—with a Jewish tan. But let’s just say he was one chopstick short of being a fully functional human. So he had a favorite wife, Mariamne I. Then he murdered her. When he was made king over Judea, he made the brother he most respected high priest in Jerusalem. Makes sense. Then he had him drowned at a dinner party. When the two sons he had with Mariamne I grew up he promoted them to a track of royal succession. A nice gesture. Then he had them executed. He made his son Antipater the first heir in his will. Then, while lying in his deathbed, he decided, “Ah, what the heck…” and had him executed too. Then he died.

Oh, there was also that time the [not-so-]wise men inquired to him, the “king” of Judea, about the King of Israel being born in Bethlehem, so he had every male child under the age of two executed (Mt. 2:16-17)—a fallen apple not far from Pharaoh’s tree, it turns out (Exod. 1:22).

So it’s hard to say: did Israel need liberation from Caesar’s captivity or from Herod’s? Was it the ruler without or the ruler within that posed the more immanent threat of freedom? Is it Islamic radicalism or is it American consumerism? Is is American consumerism or is it my compulsory shopping habit? Is it corporate greed or is it my white knuckles? Is it civil strife of the kind that lives in my home, or the kind that lives in my heart? Is it sex trafficking in Thailand or is it the porn industry, or is it the iPhone industry, or is it the iPhone in my pocket? Or perhaps it is something about the fact that human heart is bent inward toward itself like an iron arrow.

Perhaps (re: without a doubt) the most severe form of human captivity on the planet is the human will. We all, deep down, have a Herod in our heart. We all want freedom from sin, except that part of us that wants the freedom to keep on sinning. We want to be healthy, but we don’t want to not feed our habits. We all want people to just love each other and stop firing missiles, except of course I’m going to keep a ‘record of wrongs’ on my wife (cf. 1 Cor. 13:5) and make sure to fire a comment back, right at the heart of her deepest insecurity. How else can I maintain control? Shame is the heaviest chain.

Come give us freedom, Lord Jesus: from death and hell, from hopelessness and fear, liberate us from our enemies and our obstacles. Amen, hallelujah! But don’t save us from our pride and from our selfishness. Don’t offer us liberation from our throne of independence.

We all want to do God’s will, except we never want to do “Not my will…” (Lk. 22:42).

But liberation by means of a cross means the world needs liberated from me, and that I need liberated from me. I need to be raised from the dead, but I first need to be “crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20-22). Most of us aren’t like Pharaoh, but all of us are a little like Herod. We all love ourselves a little more than our fellow man, our family; we love our way more than even our own well-being. And therein lies the root of all our relational brokenness.

We also tend to have this habit of holding people captive to our expectations of them; everyone is constantly evaluated according to how they treat me, notice me, benefit me, affirm me, congratulate me, like my facebook posts, heart my instagram pics, tell me that I’m right, amen my gossip, etc. We struggle to just let people be. We don’t like freedom. We like control. We don’t want God to give us an open field and say “Love me, love others.” We want a checklist. We feel ashamed in front of others–God, people–so we like to pile on exterior accolades, whether it’s performance, piety, the bandwagon of some noble cause, whatever, it can all be used as a hiding place for an imprisoned soul.

But sometimes we aren’t so disciplined, and the ol’ “lusts of the flesh” get the best of us, and we “liberate” our flesh from the captivity of self-discipline. But human freedom is not simply the power of the will to act; it is the power of the will to love, because love is the ultimate and essential human desire. With the will not oriented toward its proper end the power of the will to act is nothing more than the will to power, the drive of life toward infinite desire rather than infinite satisfaction. It attends to an indefinite future without ever reaching the present moment; it is the urgent now, not the eternal now. It is about survival, not life, the will’s appetite for more, not the will’s concern for life. The unfettered will will eventually find itself chained to desire’s shortest leash. Every addict knows this. Most people with instragram do too.

So perhaps today, just for one day, we could be uncomfortably honest with ourselves, like really question our own motives, and ask: who is living under the burden of my control? Have I enslaved myself to desire, to simply ‘my self’? Or have I enslaved others? Does it feel like “the days of Herod” around me?

If so, maybe it’s time to go ahead and announce the arrival of another King, even if it is a little early… A simple “Will you forgive me?” is a good start.

—

[To read an expanded discussion the freedom of the will, power, pride, love, and the Trinity (not in that order), click here]. 

Triune Form—The Eternal Act of Being

 “Eternity is the total, simultaneous and perfect possession of interminable life.”

Boethius, De consolation philosophiae 5.6

The Triune God is the eternal act of being. God’s being and action are coinherent. “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8).

---

The following discussion assumes Karl Rahner’s trinitarian axiom (“Rahner’s Rule”) to be a faithful guiding principle for reflection on the perplexing idea of God, eternal and absolute Being, acting among beings in the temporality and contingency of history (a “rule” not without controversy): “the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity.” That is to say, God’s ‘showing forth’ of himself in the economy of salvation is (if held in the right Light) analogically transparent to the immanent life of the Triune God from eternity. In other words, God did not become the Trinity in order to restore the fallen world. It is not God who becomes himself according to the absolute principle of creation (re: becoming); it is creation that becomes itself according to the absolute principle of the Creator (re: Being). History is salvation history precisely because the God who from eternity loved creation into being is the same who from eternity loved creation into new creation. The Lamb was indeed slain from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8), and thus the historic Gospel is indeed the “eternal Gospel” heralded by the angel of the eschaton (Rev. 14:6).

The fullness of life is revealed in the unity of God’s being and action, whose potency is freedom (and hence true tri-personhood) and whose actuality is love (and hence true oneness). Unlike human potency and actuality, there is no division in God between being and action. And as the ‘eternal act of being’ (Aquinas), God is love.

God’s love from eternity is actualized in history, but his life as such cannot be distinguished in terms of the potentialities of freedom (i.e., God could be other than love if he otherwise acted) or the determinations of love (i.e., God cannot otherwise act because he is not truly free). But this is precisely the way the qualities that constitute human life must be distinguished. Human freedom is the potency that makes love a human possibility. This is what makes an analogy of being between God and humankind simultaneously possible and impossible. God’s being and act are essentially one. Humans’ being and act are potentially one. But no man has ever realized his potential as such, with the exception of the Man who is God, Jesus Christ, who is as such both God’s being for man and Man’s being for God, and therefore he is himself the only analogy of being as such between God and man.

Triune Image—Freedom in Potency

This is, I believe, the basis for understanding human life in relation to God, which is the only way of understanding human life in any of its subsequent relations. The potency of human freedom can be actualized in love, but it can also be actualized in the negation of love. Genesis 1 describes from a God’s-eye-view the creation of the human community of persons blessed with the freedom without which genuine love cannot exist. The grammar of God’s image is revealed in the oneness of a plurality.^[1] God is the community that creates a community that is blessed to procreate a progenitive community that will fill the earth. This is God’s “very good” idea (Gen. 1:31). Genesis 2 describes from a worm’s-eye-view the creation of the human community, which actually begins as a not-good lone man, quite a remarkable contrast to the evaluation of very good image-bearing community of Genesis 1. But this is simply because the man was not yet complete. The man is not yet fully human, at least not in the way that God is fully God. So God killed him, pulled out the bone that guarded his heart, then raised him from the dead—and with him the life he truly longed for: “Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). It was the first hypostatic union: the body of Adam broken for Eve; the blood of Adam shed for Eve.

I suppose this is an overstatement, but it serves to illustrate the point: the creation of a kind of image-bearing community that is reflective of God’s inter-Trinitarian love requires such a self-outpouring that the lover’s self-donation extends with such completeness as to appear as the form of death: kenosis. And yet, what appears as the form of death turns out to be very form love, which actualizes human life. From this kenotic self-donation of the individual’s life comes the life of his beloved. Indeed, kenosis makes perichoresis possible. And so was made the very good image-bearing community.

True love is predicated on true freedom and true freedom to love is predicated on persons having suitable objects to love, namely human subjects. But the potency of such a freedom is deeply powerful. It can know and feel personally. It can intend things to happen for others, or to others. It can organize and recruit. There is an impressive power in a beast with claws and fangs, but there is no prospect quite so treacherous as the beast with freedom and speech. No animal is safe in a pride of lions, but the world itself is unsafe in the pride of man.

The potency of human freedom given to our progenitors was a power to rule over God’s very good creation in the order of love. Indeed, they were blessed to multiply and fill the earth through the act of sex, which is designed to be perfectly analogous to love’s essential form of self-donation and trusting reception. But that freedom for humans to love as God loves is precisely free not to. There is indeed a thin line between love and cosmic destruction.

Judgment and Grace—The Limits of Power

Death, the judgment for this abuse of freedom, is thus required to limit the destructive potential of human life and the will to power. However, it also serves to preserve the structure of human life, namely, the desire for oneness and our capacity to love, because the awareness of death has the power to awaken in us love’s eternal longing. It takes the mysterious experience of empathy, the basis of love, and amplifies is, indeed immortalizes it, in the experience of grief.^[2] The nagging impulse to embrace others, however few, only swells in its gravity as the inevitable eclipse darkens the final days over clinching hands. Nothing reveals the terrible power of love like the reckless desire to forsake all this world affords and dive into the infinite abyss just to remain with one’s beloved in death. But death affords no withness. So what does it profit a man to forsake the whole world and forfeit his soul?

Thus death preserves the possibility of love in a world bent toward power by revealing the futility of all pursuits of power. It is the governor on infinite acceleration that drives even the most powerful men to create a place of respite where they can stop pretending, a place to be weak, to love and to grieve. A man may ascend to the “judgment seat” beyond the reach of even the gods, but Pilate is still under the judgement of his wife (Mt. 27:19). The deepest human longings are disproportionate to human limitation. And thus it is the awareness of death that turns all human longing for love into the longing for God. It is the gift of sobriety that reveals to us that the true nature of our confused longing to become God is, in fact, the more intoxicated longing to become a small inclusion within God’s universal embrace. We long for a God who will dive into death and bring all life up from the abyss. We long for God who will not merely save us from death but save love from death. We long for a God who can unite all things back together in himself, a God who will restore for us an eternal respite from power, a God who will be powerful for us, so that we can be free to love. Indeed, grief is God’s prevenient grace.

Sin—Enslaved to Death

And thus, the principle structure of human beings is construed quite simply as free persons created for love. That is to say, the human will is structured to give love the freedom to rule. But that is not as simple as making a list of obligatory rules and checking them off dispassionately. Love cannot rule by putting freedom in handcuffs. But neither can love rule as an accident of freedom’s passions. Love has to be a movement of freedom, but freedom has to be disciplined toward love. For this reason, sin must be brought into the light in a triangulation of definitions with freedom and love.

Every particular sin, no matter the color, has the same genealogy. Sin is always the product of (a) a desire (b) based on a deception (c) organized against love. All desires based on deceptions organized against love can be called temptations. Temptations are experienced as an appeal to freedom, but they are precisely the opposite because they ultimately function to enslave freedom to desire, not to satisfy desire through freedom. Such temptations are not an appeal to freedom but an appeal to pride. Pride always feels like the freedom because pride always gets to say, “My will be done.” But human freedom is not simply the power of the will to act; it is the power of the will to love, because love is the ultimate and essential human desire. With the will not oriented toward its proper end the power of the will to act is nothing more than the will to power, the drive of life toward infinite desire rather than infinite satisfaction. It attends to an indefinite future without ever reaching the present moment; it is the urgent now, not the eternal now. It is about survival, not life, the will’s appetite for more, not the will’s enjoyment of enough to share. Pride may draw a crowd, but it struggles to make eye-contact. 

The awareness of death gives occasion for freedom to be confused by pride. Despite the intuitive reflex of our awareness of death to open us up toward others in longing, and ultimately to open us up to that longing into which God can breath hope against hope in order to make a space into which he can breath faith, it also closes us up in fear. Life exists in oscillations—expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting, trusting and giving, closing up and self-preserving. It is always in process, but in the final analysis life in the face of death is bent toward pride, mistrust, self-preservation. Fear of death has more gravity than fear of God. Indeed, it is “through fear of death” that we are “subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:15).

And thus, pride is the counterfeit of freedom and the antithesis of love. Its essential structure is pure inwardness. It operates on a disordered appetite for power without aim according to a primal mistrust and withdraw. Its goal is isolation—by way of either retreat or triumph. It can be felt as hollowing shame or gasoline powers, but both are pride. Pride can wear crowns at the top of towers, but shame is merely pride in sheep’s clothing.

The eyes of the couple were opened and they are now naked and very ashamed. So they hide from one another. Bone of Adam’s bone is now just plain ol’ flesh of Eve’s flesh. No longer are they one flesh–it was nuclear fission in the nuclear family. They hear God-sized footsteps. They hide. God confronts Adam. He points away, to the woman, as if God would be judge at divorce court?! But Adam tries, as we all try, to distance himself from the greater guilt—as though human guilt can be separated; as though the two weren’t a hypostatic union; as though Eve were not bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; as though we are not all the seed of Adam’s loin; as though it weren’t through one man’s disobedience that sin enters the world and death through sin; as though it weren’t through one man’s obedience that the many will be made righteous.

But God does not simply put the blame on Eve, nor does he simply put the blame on the serpent. Nor does he simply put the blame on all three, although he does condemn all three, because all three are guilty. But he finds a place to put the blame, a willing party. Looking down at the pitiful couple, hiding behind tattered fig leaves barely able to withstand the Garden breeze, he calls forth a lamb—the whitest lamb in the garden, a lamb without spot or blemish. It obeys. It comes in silence. They want to look away, but he does not let them look away. They need to see the cost of grace. “A Lamb of Sorrows: your transgressions, his wounds; his chastisement, your peace; his stripes, your healing. You have strayed, but he has come to be slaughtered for your iniquities; innocent, but numbered among sinners.”

The whitest wool now forever stained in a dark crimson that would forever remain: the color of guilt and the color of grace, the color of the intersection—the intersection where God unites with sinners. Love wears thorns at the top of the intersection: it is grace in sheep’s clothing.

Triune Image—The Act of Salvation

The Word of God, Jesus Christ, is the vantage point from which the Church views itself, the world, and God. Christ is the revelation of God that is transparent to the truth of God’s being in eternity and to the truth of human beings in history (John 1:1-14; Col. 1:15-20). If we have seen the Son, we have seen the Father (Jn. 14:9), and if we believe the Son is indeed God’s Son, then we are “given the right to be called children of God” (Jn. 1:12; Rom. 8:29; Col. 1:18; Heb. 1:6; 2:11). Thus, the Gospel claims that human beings participate in the divine life in Jesus Christ; that is, we participate in the divine life through Christ’s “interior” (immanent) relations within the Godhead and his “exterior” (economic) relations within creation (cf. Jn. 17). And this is so precisely because the “Word made flesh” does not signify a change in the (indeed impassible) divine life, but which rather signifies an essential change in human life. Indeed, the absolute made contingent relativizes the contingent according to the absolute. (Hence above: It is not God who becomes himself according to the absolute principle of creation (re: becoming); it is creation that becomes itself according to the absolute principle of the Creator (re: Being).)

This becomes transparent to us only by means of the Holy Spirit, who makes divine perception a human possibility, for he is the divine Subject, the Spirit of Truth, who reveals Christ interior to human subjects (1 Cor. 2:6-16) in the light of his exterior revelation as human Object. It was indeed better for us that Jesus should go and send the Helper (Jn. 16:7), for creation is not in its essential form apart from our sharing, however limited, in the intersubjective life of God: “…I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth…You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you” (Jn. 14:15-6).

Thus, the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is “I AM who I AM” from all eternity (Exod. 3:14), stands at the center of every “I think, therefore I am” in history as the “Word made flesh” (Jn. 1:14). Indeed, “I AM, therefore i think” is the more appropriate formula for Christian thought and speech. Absolute Being relativizes all contingent beings, and to the degree we can speak of the revealed form of Being as such, which is precisely what Christian proclamation presupposes, we must speak of Jesus Christ as the particular historical truth whose self-objectification delineates absolute and eternal truth for humankind, eternal truth become historical truth.

Christ is the Light that is come to me without ceasing to remain above, the union of the eternal Subject and created subjects without either losing their proper names; he is God’s gift to me and my gift to God (2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 8:1-4). Christ is in us, but Christ is not us; we are in Christ, but we are not Christ. Human life in Christ by the Spirit is nothing less than the subjective participation in the divine life as coheirs of salvation with Christ, the firstborn of creation (Col. 1:15) and thus the firstborn from the dead (Col. 1:18). And thus from a well that is deeper to us than we are to ourselves and extending up into infinite heights, “We cry Abba! Father!” (Rom. 8:15). And he hears us—his children.

The Church thus abides in history according to its message heralded as the “eternal Gospel” (Rev. 14:6): (a) from the vantage point of the divine Subject: “the mystery of [God’s] will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:9-10); (b) from the vantage point of the human subject: to “make known among the nations…the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27); (c) and thus the principle relation that can be described as the actuality of human participation in the divine life:

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation of our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (1 Jn. 4:7-12).

The Gospel thus opens us up both to receive God’s life of love and to extend our lives in love. This is indeed the Alpha- and Omega point of creation, of salvation, of new creation–and thus necessarily too of our proclamation.

“And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

On that day, indeed, God will again raise his Image from the dead.

Footnotes 

^[1] Hence: “”Let us (pl.) make man (sg.) in our (pl.) image (sg.), after our (pl.) likeness (sg.)…So God (sg.) created man in his own image (sg.), in the image of God he created him (sg.); male and female he created them (pl.). And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over [it]” (Gen. 1:26-28).

^[2] Indeed, the first experience of empathy that I remember distinctly was the moment it dawned on me, around the age of five, that my father, whose hand I was holding at the time, would one day die. Upon reflection, it was an experience that suggested, in an uninterpreted immediate sense, that my subjective life could not be entirely separated from the objective life of others. Empathy, like grief, is the intersubjective space wherein love is possible. This was also the first time I remember crying.

Would it be fair to say that every Christian should know both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are kind of the devil, and that it doesn’t take faith, hope, love, or courage to say so? It just takes partisanship or anarchy, the willingness to tell people bad news.

If so, wouldn’t the bold thing to do in this heyday of very recycled and highly predictable anti-[__________]-rhetoric be to use nounish sentences like “Jesus is Lord.” or tell people real news like “Jesus saves.” and “Jesus makes things new.”? We’ll all get a chance to make our statement in the voting booth. In the meantime, can we just be resolute not to get carried away in the mainstream current of a ‘gospel of Ecclesiastes’ without even including the last line of Ecclesiastes.

God is sovereign. Kingdoms rise and fall. Cast a vote, and make disciples of all nations. Jesus is coming back. Good News.

“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.”

~ Eccles. 12:13-14

‪#‎adventisforreal‬

“Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever; who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry” (Ps. 146:5-6).

The troubling thing about God in a nation that is so overstuffed with stuff is that God seems to prefer to come when and where nothing else is coming. Advent is the season that the Church points to the One who came out to the open air. There was no room in the inn when he arrived (Lk. 2:7), so Life was born out of doors, in a manger. There was already a king in Israel (Lk. 1:5), so Christ was enthroned outside of Jerusalem, on a cross. He was born and he died in no man’s land, because the God who comes cannot be contained in one one man’s land, or one nation’s land. He came to every man, to every mother, to every child, but first to a Virgin.

So there must be vacancy for God to come, not like an empty room in an otherwise room-filled inn, but a place where the living God cannot be confused with any of the ordinary gods. Ordinary gods aren’t laid in mangers and in tombs. Only the living God can come where there is no life. God acts where there is no other activity, lives where there is no life. God’s presence is learned by way of God’s absence, but it’s hard to know God’s absence when everything else is stuffing the presence of the present.

I’m learning to be thankful for seasons of absence. I’m learning that absence is the place where God’s hand can be most clearly seen. I’m also learning that God’s absence is evidence itself of the reality of God (see excerpt below).

Convict me, Lord. I want my absence to remain empty until you fill it, rather than keeping a steady an influx of alternatives to get me by. Lord, help me into–into–the desert, even if help only feels like heartache, even if your presence feels only like a vacuum filled with infinite longing, even if seeking you leads to an endless search, let me search for you forever rather than find all the treasures of Egypt. I know full well the cost of returning to Egypt.

Only keep me from settling for anything less than all of you.

Today’s reflection concludes in deference to a man who speaks on absence with authority–from the other end of life:

From Anthony Bloom’s Beginning to Pray

Luke 1:6-7 “[Zachariah and Elizabeth] were both righteous in the sight of God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and requirements of the Lord. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and they were both advanced in years.”

Barrenness is of course a fertility problem. Biologically it refers to a womb that cannot support embryonic life. Agriculturally it refers to a land that cannot support crop life. Metaphorically it proves to be a most portable word. It was evidently a favorite of the Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, who spoke of barren efforts and barren shores and barren crags and barren lives and ultimately of a barren Death:

Wiser there than you, that crowning barren Death as lord of all,    

Deem this over-tragic drama’s closing curtain is the pall!

Lord Tennyson is right. Barrenness finds its way into every nook and cranny of this world and our experience of it. And that is because theologically barrenness is the state of creation this side of Eden.

The world is duplicitous in its grandeur and its terror, its beauty and violence, in its capacity to provide for the unseen sparrow and its capacity to turn to ice. Creation is groaning in labor and in suffocation, the sign that is more than a sign that Mother Nature is ever losing her battle with Father Time. We live in a world and in bodies and in communities that simply cannot support life. Every home so rich with memory will slowly start to lose touch and eventually will be left alone. No more children giggling their way into the master bedroom on Saturday morning. No frenzy of life in the kitchen on Thanksgiving Day frantically filling every dish and basket and platter with an attempt to keep the past alive. No one to say “Mom” or “Dad” or “You’re grounded!” or “Pass the jam”–just the occasional “Mr.” or “Mrs.” when the phone rings. Then calls come only for “Mrs.”, with condolences. Then the phone just stops ringing.

Life inside the walls gives way to a damningly exact proportion of grief. But soon no one is even left to cry. What was home will now house only an empty memory, maybe a few moths. Every birth certificate already shares its name with a death certificate. The world is our womb, and it is barren, every life a miscarriage.

But God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing. And he does not just hurl the world into a space sufficient to sustain it. He creates formless void (Gen. 1:2), a barren womb, a world that he would himself have to fill in order to sustain life, a world that would have to be filled with him and so could be filled with joy. Apart from him this world will always return back to the joyless void, but with him always back to a feast of life. So God creates from the very beginning a world in which he can be born, and thus a world in which we can be born again.

So as we wait upon the Lord, we should not look for him to come to places full of strategy and competence and men in dark suits. He comes where the efforts are barren and the ground is chapped. Slaves in Egypt became a nation in the desert. God had come. Out of barren wombs the child of promise is born to Sarah, the child of prophecy to Elizabeth, the “Voice in the Wilderness” born to a father who could not speak. God had come.

Out of nowhere the substitute came to Abraham for his son on Mount Moriah. Out of the Virgin the Substitute came to Israel for all sons on Mount Calvary. God has come.

And God is coming again. Isaiah says we’ll know it is God because the cracked desert floor will begin blooming like a daisy field in springtime; the groaning ground of the curse will suddenly burst into song (Isa. 35). Scorched war fields will become spring-fed gardens (Isa. 58); swords and spears will be beaten into the shape of life and kept in the barn (Isa. 2). He said that lions and tigers and bears would go vegan and siesta with lambs and yearlings (Isa. 11). There will be life where there can be no life, peace where there can be only blood, a symphony filling canyon winds. Paul says we’ll know it is God because when he comes he will lay death down to sleep, pray the Lord its hell to keep. We’ll wake up one day without aching joints and pressing deadlines. We’ll see mirrors we’re not ashamed of (1 Cor. 15).

John says we’ll know it is God because of what happens to the brokenhearted. The little boy whose dad was sent home in the form of a flag; the young mother of that boy looking helpless at his searching eyes; the little girl who never wore white. We’ll know it is God not because the brokenhearted will suddenly stop crying but because their tears will be wiped away (Rev. 21:4). They will be touched by a real Hand and there will be a resurrection of real hands. Those searching eyes will find what they never stopped looking for. It will be like a world ruled by the real religion that James talked about (Ja. 1:27).

John also says we’ll know it is God because it will be like a Bridegroom and a Father and a Son and like a world full of siblings (Rev. 21-22), like wedding reception and a family reunion all at once (Rev. 19:6). It will just be a mess of an overflow. Loneliness won’t even fit in a crack on the floor. There will be no storm shelters or panic rooms, no sirens or seatbelts, no temples or mosques, no shut doors or closed countries, no walls, no gun control, no guns, no abortions, no greed, no partisanship, no voting booths, no border patrol, no arrogance, no bumper stickers, no child soldiers, no fatherlessness, no websites, no shrapnel, no midnight calls, no divorce, no mistrust, no shame, no shadows, no small caskets, no more God-damned goodbyes: only God, only Light, only peace, only joy, infinite joy drowning the void beneath the weight of the “glory of the Lord that fills the earth as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:9; Hab. 2:14), and us—with a Table there at the center to keep the past alive for good (Rev. 21:21-23).

When Christ comes, he comes to dethrone the one called “barren Death” crowned “lord of all” by burying the crimson of His crown in a deeper crimson bloom of roses. Yes, every knee, Death–so Death, be not proud (Donne)! For He is the “firstborn of creation” (Col. 1:15) and therefore the “firstborn of the dead” (Col. 1:18), so he will again descend into this barren womb, but this time to give birth. When “the Lord descends from heaven…the dead in Christ shall rise” (1 Thess. 4:16). And on that day, the world will be an ultrasound devoid of any dark, born again into the womb of eternal life together with the eternally Begotten Son of God. No more miscarriages.

When he comes…

Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise, 

Weaved in my low devout melancholy,

Thou which of good, hast, yea art treasury,

All changing unchanged Ancient of days,

But do not, with a vile crown of frail bays,

Reward thy muse’s white sincerity,

But what thy thorny crown gained, that give me,

A crown of glory, which doth flower always;

The ends crown our works, but thou crown’st our ends,

For, at our end begins our endless rest,

This first last end, now zealously possessed,

With a strong sober thirst, my soul attends.

‘Tis time that heart and voice be lifted high,

Salvation to all that will is nigh. 

     ~ John Donne, La Corona 

 

 

“But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Mt. 6:33).

The first half of life we long after a vision of the Kingdom. The second half of life we long after a dream of Home. Those who stop short of the kingdom of God and his eternal homecoming will discover only restlessness instead of joy and only nostalgia instead of peace.

—-

Why is the high school student aimlessly charged with a need to just “get out of the house”? Why does same high school student twenty years later find himself trying to recreate the home he grew up in? Why do boys resent their moms more than anyone when they are young and love their moms more than anyone when they are old? Why is it that in childhood we long for adulthood and in adulthood we long for childhood? Why do young girls and old women both want to be twenty year-old models, even though twenty year-old models don’t want to be themselves? Why does life teeter between restlessness and nostalgia?

Why does Christmas make us feel the way it does?

The number one problem concerning the Kingdom that was about to enter Zechariah’s world–in a manger–was not that it was too small but that it was too large. The grand vision of the kingdom of God had been reduced to the grandest vision of the kingdom of Israel. And that just wasn’t grand enough to accommodate God’s vision for the world. But this is always the rub.

Visions of national sovereignty satisfy enough the kingdom-shaped longings of our youth and protect enough the home-shaped longings of later life. So we settle, indeed, for the small. We want peace in our nation, absolutely, but world peace is reserved for the wishful thinking of hippies on earth and religious thinking about heaven in the hereafter.

Maybe that’s why the angel gave Zechariah’s son a name that came out of nowhere (wasn’t a family name; the neighbors thought it was odd, Lk. 1:60-61) and why John never went by his given name. He simply called himself “A Voice.” He was “the Voice crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’.” Indeed, that voice came out of a nowhere called the wilderness.

God brings life forth through Elizabeth’s barrenness and “A Voice” forth through Zechariah’s silence, because this life and its voice were preparing the world for a kingdom-shaped world as big as the earth and a home-shaped life as eternal as heaven. The world had given up on such a grandiose hope. A truly new Voice was required to proclaim the infinite horizons of a kingdom that should be too good to be true. This required a reorientation.

Advent is our reorientation to the Voice of the one who tells us to listen to our deepest longings and announces the Gospel of God’s infinite kingdom as our eternal home. But this Voice always has to come from the silence, because even the Church tends to lose its Voice on occasion. Advent silences that old cynicism and says listen up! There is One coming! Prepare the way! Don’t sell yourself short! The world always wants to give up on that grand of a kingdom but God always raises up a Voice that refuses to let hope be silenced.

There is a Voice that calls out in the wilderness of your heart, the same wilderness that leads you looking for a vision of the kingdom but too often leaves you aching with a dream of home. That Voice comes to the wilderness to announce the One who is greater than us because he is before us, whose shoes we are unworthy to untie. It is the Voice that comes in opposition to our righteousness, that tells us to bear fruit worthy of repentance. It is the Voice of Advent that says: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight his paths in the desert?’ (Isa. 40:3; Mt. 3:3; Mk. 1:3; Lk. 3:4; Jn. 1:23). And it is the only Voice that will lead to the Kingdom that won’t leave you in the desert without a home.

—

I think the words of Frederick Buechner’s echo that Voice well. I’ll end in their wake…

The world floods in on all of us. The world can be kind, and it can be cruel. It can be beautiful, and it can be appalling. It can give us good reason to hope and good reason to give up all hope. It can strengthen our faith in a loving God, and it can decimate our faith. In our lives in the world, the temptation is always to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running strongest. When good things happen, we rise to heaven; when bad things happen, we descend to hell. When the world strikes out at us, we strike back, and when one way or another the world blesses us, our spirits soar. I know this to be true of no one as well as I know it to be true of myself. I know how just the weather can affect my whole state of mind for good or ill, how just getting stuck in a traffic jam can ruin an afternoon that in every other way is so beautiful that it dazzles the heart. We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors. The fragmentary nature of our experience shatters us into fragments. Instead of being whole, most of the time we are in pieces, and we see the world in pieces, full of darkness at one moment and full of light the next.

It is in Jesus, of course, and in the people whose lives have been deeply touched by Jesus, and in ourselves at those moments when we also are deeply touched by him, that we see another way of being human in this world, which is the way of wholeness. When we glimpse that wholeness in others, we recognize it immediately for what it is, and the reason we recognize it, I believe, is that no matter how much the world shatters us to pieces, we carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home and that beckons to us. It is part of what the book of Genesis means by saying that we are made in the image of God. It is part of what Saint Paul means by saying that the deepest undercurrent of all creation is the current that seeks to draw us toward what he calls mature humanhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ….Joy is home, and I believe that the tears that [come] to our eyes [are] more than anything else homesick tears. 

Buechner, The Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections

So there’s this one small detail we’ve been leaving out. The good news of Jesus Christ comes as the free gift of grace, and that sounds exactly like this: “Repent, and believe in the Gospel” (Mk. 1:15). We’re quite happy to talk about the swinging door of the Gospel, but how is it that we so often avoid mentioning the threshold of the Gospel?

Since grace is free, it is assumed, we mustn’t associate our faith with any costs, any requirements, anything on our end that might be expected of us and so nullify grace as grace. But the fact is: grace is free only because we cannot afford it. Its value is, in fact, infinite, because it is based on the immeasurable worth of Jesus Christ, and him crucified. It’s true, God isn’t looking for us to give him any-thing. He’s looking for us to give ourselves.

Grace is spilt blood, not melted ice cream. We should acknowledge, then, that while there is nothing of worth we can offer in exchange for the grace of God it is only so because God is not looking for us to barter with him with little pieces of our lives and pocketbooks. That’s no different than the old bartering system of sacrifices and burnt offerings, the one Zechariah was employed by. But the stakes were being raised from sacrificial lambs on the altar to the sacrificial Lamb on the cross. Herein lies the heart of the Gospel. The Gospel reveals that God doesn’t want our “goods and services”—as though God were in need of anything at all, as though everything weren’t already his (Ps. 24!)—but rather he wants all of us, and so he gives us all of himself.

God has removed the barter system altogether. He wants to remove the distance that that economy creates. He wants us for us because he loves us—like a father but more than father—and only when we are awakened to that basic truth will we be bold enough to unfetter our desires to want him back. We want nothing less than all of God. That is why desire is always stronger than satisfaction (Rolheiser), why the end of every pursuit reveals only a new beginning. All symphonies remain unfinished (Nouwen). Life is more like jazz than Brethoven’s 9th. This is why the sober heart prays along with A.W. Tozer, when he said, “I want the whole presence of God Himself, or I don’t want anything at all to do with religion… I want all that God is or I don’t want anything at all.” 

That’s just a soul daring to tell the truth. But when it comes to loving God, we are our own worst enemies, because we continue to try to barter with God. We do “this and that” for God hoping to appease him. We tithe little pieces of our lives as though God were in need of our support. And in so doing, we find ourselves constantly negotiating with our conscience over what is “enough” for God, being tossed about between our own unrighteousness and self-righteousness, wondering why we never feel wholly at peace with God, with one another, and with the mirror. The reason is simply this: nothing is enough.

But Christ is enough!

 So what does this have to do with repentance? With Zechariah? 

Repentance does not mean “do something differently,” or even the popular definition, “turn around.” It means, quite simply, “change your mind.” Zechariah was going to have to repent, because his whole priestly bartering system was about to be rendered obsolete. Christ was giving us all of himself. All altars would be closed for business. This Lamb would need no assistance, nor assistants.

So think about what we’re doing when we cheapen the idea of repentance, minimizing the cost of discipleship, making it out as if people can nickel and dime their way to God because, well, grace is “free.” What we are doing is inviting people back into the barter system and denying them the truly free grace of God, the only grace that brings true freedom: spilt blood, not melted ice cream. As Bonhoeffer, “When Christ calls a man he bids him come and die.” Therein lies resurrection freedom.

But it’s not even Christmas yet, so we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. For now, we need to think about changing our minds. How can the Church rediscover the language of repentance, calling people to “Repent, and believe the Gospel”? Because as long as the Gospel doesn’t require repentance, as long as it is something we can fit into our budget, the good news just isn’t good enough. And in that case, we need to stop selling ourselves short, and selling others short, and reclaim the cost of discipleship: it will cost you not a penny less than the life of God. 

“A voice cries out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” (Isa. 40:3).

“Elizabeth was barren and both [she and Zechariah] were advanced in years” (Lk. 1:7). The days were tired. Evening never came soon enough.  It’d been a long life under Roman rule. It’s not that they were ready to die. It’s just that they were not ready to start a new life. It was time to slow down. They were at peace with God, they’d lived faithfully (cf. Lk. 1:6), and the burdens of the priesthood would soon be carried out by the next generation. Zechariah had spent these latter years training up young men, seeing in their faces the son he never had. He’d already grieved that unanswered prayer, for now Elizabeth was both very barren and very old. And then God answered it (Lk. 1:13).

By this time, Zechariah’s mind was no doubt made up about a few things. He knew that the world’s treasures were peddled in smoke and mirrors and that human innovation, with all its willful gullibility, is never more than a new arrangement for the same old empty promises. When he was young, life was charged with possibility. His favorite book of the Bible was Joshua. People had called their generation the “Joshua generation.” But he eventually realized that every generation gets called that. It’s has something to do with hope, maybe also regret. 

Truth is, Zechariah had long given up on that naïve faith in the future, or at least that a new future could begin today. His favorite book now was Ecclesiastes. It resonated. It’s not that he had lost faith in God. Indeed, he had faith the strength of an old growth forest, unmovable by the winds of change. It’s just that sometimes God is in the Wind (cf. Jn 3).

Are you sure you’ve got the right address? Zechariah says, in effect, to the angel Gabriel: “How shall I know this? For I am an old man…” (Lk. 1:18). Gabriel is annoyed. “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God…” (Lk. 1:19). How will you know? You will know when an angel who stands in the presence of God comes and tells you. That’s how you’ll know! So Gabriel silences him.

It is impossible to know why Zechariah doubted or exactly what the nature of the doubt actually was. Age was certainly a factor. But he seems to have more than just a question about fertility odds. Gabriel said that his son would “be filled with the Holy Spirit…and come to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children…” (Lk. 1:15-17). Zechariah was a priest. He knew where that line came from. It’s the very last line of the Old Testament (Mal. 4:5-6), which, for Zechariah, was not yet “Old.” It was just kind of….“on hold.” For it to become “Old” would require it being fulfilled. And given the nature of the prophecy, if that were being fulfilled, everything was about to be fulfilled.

Zechariah had spent his life learning how to believe that God’s promised future would happen—in the future. And in a moment, that future was beginning right now. Maybe the Joshuas of the world are ready for a revolution today, but today Zechariah would do well to have his knees replaced. He identifies more with Methuselah than with millennials. At this stage, it’s time to die quietly trusting that God will fulfill his promises sometime in the future. But God is no respecter of our daytimers. So Zechariah would have to reframe all he’d ever believed. The time was at hand.

For nine months this teacher of the Law will be unable to speak. He will be removed any ordinary social roles. He’ll have some alone time. Maybe he’ll may start reading Joshua again. More importantly, his priestly duties–teaching the Covenant, service at the altar, temple staff meetings–all those things will now be put on hold, because all those things were not growing “Old.” 

It’s no wonder that when he does open his mouth for the first time after nine months it is no longer as a priest but as a prophet: “Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied, saying…” And out came in concentrated form the announcement that all of God’s promised future was at hand (Lk. 1:67-79). The priesthood was being silenced, because the Lamb preparing for the slaughter would need no assistance at the altar. The old institutions were passing away, behold the world was becoming new (cf. 2 Cor. 5:17).

Sometimes the Lord shakes up our world (a change of frame) to prepare us for repentance (a change of mind). Often these times of reframing are necessary, because all too often we frame God right out of our world. It’s easy to believe in the God of yesterday, it’s easy to believe in the God of tomorrow, but it’s hard to believe in the God of today. It’s hard to believe that God can speak today, answer prayers today, change our hearts and our habits and our homes today. But God will always, and will only, work in our lives and our world today.

“Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, today is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2).

Even the day Christ comes back, the second Advent, will be a day like any other, a day we call today. The question for us, then, does our faith frame the living God in a yesterday that is always gone or a tomorrow that is never here? Have you talked to God—have you listened to God—today?

“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts…” (Heb. 3:7, 15). 

Lo, in the silent night
A child to God is born
And all is brought again
That ere was lost or lorn.
Could but thy soul, O man,
Become a silent night!
God would be born in thee
And set all things aright.

~ Author Unknown

 

“And an angel of the Lord appeared to Zechariah, standing to the right of the altar of incense.Zechariah was troubled when he saw the angel, and fear gripped him. But the angel said to him, ‘Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will give him the name John” (Luke 1:11-13).

They’ve been waiting. They’ve been remembering. They’ve been preparing. And now they are expecting.

But let’s be honest, this wasn’t expected (Lk. 1:18-20). Even though it was an answer to prayer (cf. Lk. 1:13), it wasn’t one of those prayers you really expect God to answer, like a ‘traveling mercies’ prayer, or that wildly daring one about food being miraculously transformed into “the nourishment of our bodies.” This was a specific prayer. That’s the kind of prayer that leads to trouble, because as soon as you start asking God for things to happen that don’t ordinarily happen you have to start looking God in the face—and that’s where you’ll have to return to ask why it hasn’t happened yet. Specific prayers are fighting prayers.

Keeping it generic helps us preserve a professional distance. Nobody’s personal space is violated. Nobody has to expect much from anyone. Praying for God’s will to be done in Elizabeth’s life is one thing, but praying that God would put a baby into Elizabeth’s barren womb is quite another. The answer—yes or no—will be empirically verifiable now. Everyone’s personal space is violated, God’s, Elizabeth’s, and the one standing in the gap between them trying to build a bridge between heaven and earth. Prayer like that has no social boundaries. That’s why most of us don’t pray like that. We’d rather just agree to live parallel lives and avoid the discomfort that often comes at the intersection.

God answers prayer. God does not answer prayer. Both statements are true. Word it however you want to try to soften it or stick up for God—“God answers every prayer, just in ways we don’t understand”—but that does no good. That’s just an excuse to never look God in the eye. Nor is it true that if a prayer hasn’t been answered the problem is the faith of the praying person—the problem is that God didn’t answer the prayer. The only thing worse than people who smear every prayer into an enigmatic “yes” are those who lie about the unambiguous “nos.” I’ve heard people talk about prayer as something that only needs to be “claimed,” as though God had no say in the matter, as though God were not a Person. I’ve heard people lie about God answering prayer. I’ve seen ministries based on that lie. Those ministries are not about God acting. They are about people acting like they are gods. They are about people reaching up into heaven’s treasury and grabbing whatever the hell they want—if only their faith is tall enough. But human faith gets little larger than a mustard tree. And sometimes God doesn’t answer prayer. People who say God answers every prayer are people who have never prayed.

But Zechariah prayed. And he prayed at the intersection. That’s where my mother prays too. Zechariah prayed for a son to be born who could not be born. Elizabeth was barren. My mother prayed for a son to be found who was irreversibly lost. No enigmatic yesses were possible. God would answer her prayer or God would not. And for at least twelve years, from the volatile ages of 10 to 22, he did not.

I once was preparing on a sermon on prayer and texted my mom (because that’s what sons do when they need something from their mom—they text them) and asked her what prayer life was like “when I was going to hell in a hand basket. Please email response” Below is an excerpt from she wrote:

Subject line (all caps): “NEVER CONSIDERED FOR ONE SECOND TO HELL IN A HAND BASKET” (reprimanding tone noted).

…I knew God wanted you more than I did. So, while I was extremely concerned, sad, and experienced many sleepless nights, I never really landed on the thought you would be lost. My prayer life deepened so much during that time to the point of wordless groanings and moanings that cannot be uttered (Rom. 8). But I knew God was faithful…

The curious thing about my mother’s unanswered prayers is that they did not have a distancing effect but a deepening effect. With each unanswered prayer she dug down deeper into God’s heart, so as to say, “Fine. Then I’m moving in—and I’m bringing all my burdens and my baggage with me. And I’ve got A LIST of names. Deal with it!” Her prayer moved from trusting to entrusting. Truly, my mother has no boundaries. There is no personal space in her life. She’s like a bridge with a winch on it. Some people have a prayer closet. She has a prayer lasso. Seriously, spend a day with her and you’ll know what I’m talking about. I tried my hardest to go to hell. My mom just wouldn’t let me (cf. Jude 1:23).

I once heard my father in-law say, “When you don’t see the hand of God, just know you can trust the heart of God.” The only people who say things like that are people who actually pray—because it makes no ordinary sense. As humans, there is no other way to determine how to trust someone, because hands are expressions of the heart. But this or that answer to prayer can never communicate the depths of God’s heart. And it may threaten to brings us only to God’s hand. That’s what happened to the Exodus generation. They starting out “groaning” into God’s heart (Exod. 2:23-25) and quickly ended up “grumbling” at God’s hands (Exod. 16). So God reserves only one place where his hands can be called the perfect expression of his heart (Jn. 1:18). It’s the one place he commands everyone to look to see his heart right through the center of his hands. It’s at the intersection, where Christ closed all the gaps. That’s where God prays.

Prayer is like a tuning fork. A tuning fork is tuned to one key, and only one key. It will vibrate if it gets close enough to something else vibrating in the same key. This is called resonance. St. Augustine once said, “You have made me for yourself, O Lord, and my heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.” He was talking about resonance. Whether it knows it or not, the heart is trembling in its longing for a gracious God. That trembling feels like fear–and it should, considering–so we don’t expect to find any resonance with God. But it turns out, a gracious God is the only God there is. God has one Word to so say to this world, and he wrapped It in swaddling flesh to say it. In so doing, that enfleshed Word became receptive on our behalf. In Christ, we are tuned to the key of God. But it has always been there, at the center. David heard it. David’s salvation didn’t come by asking God “into his heart.” It came by storming his way into God’s heart. David took up residence there. Where else could he go? The Law condemned him. But God didn’t. That’s why you can hear the Gospel resounding before it even sounded in Psalm 51. Resonance.

God uses prayer to bring us close enough to himself that our hearts get in tune with his, because that’s how he changes our hearts. He shakes the grace into us. In time, it’s the life of prayer itself that proves God is gracious and can therefore be trusted with everything, even and especially with our sin. He’s a God who found a place for sinners right at the center of his heart. We come to know God’s heart when we resolve to bury ourselves inside it, baggage and names in tow. Eventually, no set of circumstances can drown out that piercing sound of infinite grace and the island of peace it creates (Phil. 4:4-7!). Even when the answer is still no, even if I am being marched to the sepulcher, even when the sun forebears to shine—Even so…Amen.

But then, one day, God answers—because God does answer prayer—and the circumstances are changed. Zechariah’s world is changed. Elizabeth is expecting. And frankly, he’d stopped expecting it. Zechariah will have to reframe. But that’s tomorrow’s word.

For now, amen.

“One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much” (Lk. 16:10).

Waiting. Remembering. Preparing. Such was the life of Zechariah the priest, a man who was faithful in a very little who was about to be given very much. Waiting—because it was still “in the days of Herod, king of Israel” (Lk. 1:5), a king who ruled more in the manner of Israel’s Pharaoh than Israel’s Liberator (cf. Mt. 2:16; Exod. 1:22). As long as Herod was Israel’s king, Israel’s King had not come. Remembering—because that was his priestly duty. The priests were tour guides of Israel’s memory. But Israel’s memory was not a museum, because it was not filled only with what God had done but all that God had promised to do. So the priests were called to be the living memory of God’s promised future. They were called to remember, and so prepare. 

There are different ways of preparing. It depends on what you are preparing for, a certain future you are anticipating. A person who prepares for a race runs. A person who prepares for a dinner cooks. A person who prepares for a test studies. Martha Stewart once prepared for the future she was anticipating by selling her shares in a stock. 

I suppose by a certain stretch of the imagination Zechariah’s preparation was something like Martha Stewart’s. He’d been tipped off. He knew where to put his stock, and where not to. He knew not to put any stock in the kingdom Herod was trying to build and prepared instead for the one God had promised to bring. 

That way of preparing is about the “little things,” being faithful in the “very little” of today because God is taking care of the “very big” of tomorrow. Believing that allows us to enjoy the freedom of living a small life: we don’t have to build and collect and store up for an apocalyptic winter; we don’t have to fight our way to the top; we don’t even have to be angry about who is at the top, because the very top of this world is still only the tip of a footstool that belongs to another world’s throne (Isa. 66:1). And the One seated on that throne has promised to bring that another-world to this one (Rev. 21). 

If God is in charge of all that, we are free to just live little lives that seek to honor him. Zechariah lived like that. He wasn’t known around town for much of anything. Just another priest, not even the”high” one. But he was known by God. Luke said he was “righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the statutes and the commandments of the Lord” (Lk. 1:6). He prepared for the future by living for the One who promised to bring it. 

If faith were an arrow, it would not be pointing up. That is the popular way to think about faith, likely because up never leads back down to earth, where my boss and my habits live. Faith is far more comfortable in the clouds than it is on Monday morning. But faith is a forward arrow (Heb. 11). It doesn’t point to an ideal. It points to a path. Jesus didn’t say fly away with me. He said follow me. He said, “Lo, I will be with you on Monday” (Mt. 28:20, paraphrased). Faith is found in the “little” things, like my attitude at the office, or at home where only my family and God have to put up with me. That’s where my faith lives, or not. If we are going to prepare for the coming of Christ, it won’t be up there with my exceptions but down here with my rule. It’ll be on Monday. Jesus is coming back on Monday.  

Zechariah was caught “walking blamelessly” through everyday life as he headed to the office that Monday morning. You can tell it was a Monday because Luke says “his division was on duty” at the temple (Lk. 1:8). Duty is Monday talk. That day the lot fell on Zechariah to go into the temple to offer prayers and burn incense. And when he did he saw an angel. The angel told him his barren wife would give birth to a son. He was to name him John. It was an exceptional moment. But Zechariah didn’t arrive at that moment because he was having an exceptional day. He hadn’t specially prepared to receive a miracle from God that day. It wasn’t at a healing conference or a prayer retreat. He wasn’t on a pilgrimage away from ordinary life. He was on duty. He arrived at this exceptional moment because he was living by his everyday rule: to be prepared for God to come on any day of the week, especially the first day of the week.

—

Maybe that’s why Zechariah was chosen to be John’s father. Maybe all history was waiting for a father like Zechariah to raise a son like John, because John would have a special assignment. The angel told Zechariah his assignment would be to “make ready for the Lord a people prepared” (Lk. 1:17). Like father, like son. 

“A voice crying out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord!’” (Jn. 1:23).