A Sunday Hymn

Nobody gets away with anything. Not even the ones who look like they did.

Merry Christmas From the Rebellion

What an invasion looks like

And so the child has been born, the King has arrived, and the invasion has begun. From that day in Bethlehem to our own, this revolution has continued. Following the example of our Master's own subversive activities, we deploy the full power of self-sacrificial love against war, hunger, poverty, suffering, pride, hate, cruelty, oppression, greed and the spiritual forces of evil behind them. 

And, like our earliest ancestors in the Christian movement, we spread that simple, innately powerful message, the joyful Great Announcement that "the Lord has come, let Earth receive her King!"

We have not always fared terribly well as we carried out our mission. Many, many of our brothers and sisters in the struggle all throughout the world are not doing well right now. But we've been warned of this from the beginning, and we are not afraid.

"I have told you these things," Jesus of Nazareth told us long ago, "so that in me you may have peace. In the world you have trouble and suffering, but take courage—I have conquered the world!" (Gospel of John chapter 16 verse 33).

But we press on. Because Christmas is not only a day of gifts, conviviality, and good cheer.  Christmas is a rebellion. 

A very happy Christmas (all 12 days) to everyone out there reading this!

Advent - The King on Your Doorstep

The True King arrives

The special child will be born.
    God will give us a son
who will be responsible for leading the people.
His name will be “Wonderful Counselor,
     Powerful God,
     Father Who Lives Forever,
     Prince of Peace.”
His power will continue to grow,
     and there will be peace without end.
This will establish him as the king
     sitting on David’s throne
     ruling his kingdom.
He will rule with goodness and justice
     forever and ever.
The strong love that the Lord All-Powerful has for his people
will make this happen!

Book of the Prophet Isaiah, chapter 9 verses 6-7, (ERV)

Advent, as we observed when we began these reflections four weeks ago, originally meant the arrival of a king. And just as the subjects of Rome long ago would have gone to great lengths to get everything ready for Caesar Augustus, Advent is a season of preparation for the coming of our King, Jesus of Nazareth.

Early tomorrow, while the sky is still dark (if tradition is any guide), the King will finally arrive. Not with a vast entourage of hangers on, not with all the opulent glory of an imperial ruler, but in obscurity and poverty and dirt. It still seems odd to us today, doesn't it? 2000 years have come and gone since Jesus' birth and we are quite familiar with this story. But we still instinctively associate luxury and showiness with importance and true power. When a world leader makes a gesture toward humility we do find it charming, but it would seem strange to us if they lived in a small apartment and ate cup-a-soup (although since I posted an earlier version of this essay one doing just that has turned up).

But the High King of the universe did live humbly from beginning to end, and he did it by choice.

I've come back to this dichotomy repeatedly throughout these little essays because it confronts me with a question: If God is like that when he comes to Earth, then what should I be like? If out of all the possible options he could have chosen he chose this one -- melding with and living among the poor and downtrodden -- then, out of all possible options available today, how should I live?

Tonight, for somewhere around the 2000th time, the High King comes again as a baby in that insect-infested manger, while his poverty-stricken parents and shell-shocked shepherds look on.

What does he want of us this time? Will we respond this year? Will we join his revolution?

*          *          *

Prayer: Our King, let us bow down at your makeshift crib with your poor, intrepid parents and worship you. And then help us to rise up and follow you wheresoever you may lead us. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, we pray. Amen.

Book of Isaiah, chapter 9 verses 6 - 7, Common English Bible

Advent, as we observed when we began these reflections four weeks ago, originally meant the arrival of a king. And just as the subjects of Rome long ago would have gone to great lengths to get everything ready for Caesar Augustus, Advent is a season of preparation for the coming of our King, Jesus of Nazareth.

Early tomorrow, while the sky is still dark (if tradition is any guide), the King will finally arrive. Not with a vast entourage of hangers on, not with all the opulent glory of an imperial ruler, but in obscurity and poverty and dirt. It still seems odd to us today, doesn't it? 2000 years have come and gone since Jesus' birth and we are quite familiar with this story. But we still instinctively associate luxury and showiness with importance and true power. When a world leader makes a gesture toward humility we do find it charming, but it would seem strange to us if they lived in a small apartment and ate cup-a-soup (although since I posted an earlier version of this essay one doing just that has turned up).

But the High King of the universe did live humbly from beginning to end, and he did it by choice.

I've come back to this dichotomy repeatedly throughout these little essays because it confronts me with a question: If God is like that when he comes to Earth, then what should I be like? If out of all the possible options he could have chosen he chose this one -- melding with and living among the poor and downtrodden -- then, out of all possible options available today, how should I live?

Tonight, for somewhere around the 2000th time, the High King comes again as a baby in that insect-infested manger, while his poverty-stricken parents and shell-shocked shepherds look on.

What does he want of us this time? Will we respond this year? Will we join his revolution?

*          *          *

Prayer: Our King, let us bow down at your makeshift crib with your poor, intrepid parents and worship you. And then help us to rise up and follow you wheresoever you may lead us. In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, we pray. Amen.

Come

A man named Simeon lived in Jerusalem... waiting for the time 
when God would come to help Israel, (Luke 2.25).

O come, O come, Emmanuel, 

And ransom captive Israel, 

That mourns in lonely exile here 

Until the Son of God appear. 

Rejoice! Rejoice! 

Emmanuel Shall come to you, O Israel! 

O come, now Wisdom from on high,

Who orders all things mightily; 

To us the path of knowledge show, 

And teach us in her ways to go. 

Rejoice! Rejoice! 

Emmanuel Shall come to you, O Israel! 

O come, O come, now Lord of might, 

Who to your tribes on Sinai’s height 

In ancient times you gave the law, 

In cloud, and majesty, and awe. 

Rejoice! Rejoice! 

Emmanuel Shall come to you, O Israel!

O come, thou Rod of Jesse,
Free thine own from Satan's tyranny;
From depths of hell thy people save,
And give them victory over the grave.

Rejoice! Rejoice! 

Emmanuel Shall come to you, O Israel!

Advent - First Move

Jesus chose to live here

Photo credit: Jonathan McIntosh

How delightful it is to see approaching over the mountains    the feet of a messenger who announces       peace, a messenger who brings good news,      who announces deliverance,      who says to Zion, “Your God reigns!” Listen, your watchmen shout;   in unison they shout for joy, for they see with their very own eyes    the Lord’s return to Zion. In unison give a joyful shout,     ruins of Jerusalem! 
For the Lord consoles his people;    he protects Jerusalem. The Lord reveals his royal power     in the sight of all the nations; the entire earth sees    our God deliver.

Isaiah 52.7 - 10

Advent, as we noted in the introduction to this series, originally referred to a state visit by the Roman Emperor. For him, messengers would have been sent out far and wide, preparations would have been going on for months, and everyone would know that Caesar Augustus was coming.

For the official state visit of the High King of the Universe there had indeed been an announcement -- but it was made to unknown peasant women.  And preparations were certainly being made, but they were being made in the womb of an unmarried teenage girl.

Make no mistake: The Lord was certainly "returning to Zion" and he would "reveal his royal power" in ways that still reverberate today.  The announcement found in today's scripture would come true; everyone who cared to look would know that God reigns. But the way the Messiah went about mounting his revolution was totally unexpected in almost every respect.

We're all familiar with how this plays out: Mary and Joseph, because of Caesar's orders, must travel 90 miles to an unfamiliar town, live with the work animals, and as a result the transcendent God who normally lives in unapproachable glory is born in a mule's feed box. Then they return to the minuscule, hardscrabble village of Nazareth where Jesus grows up among a few hundred people, most of them barely able to scrape together enough of a living to survive day by day.

But wait a minute. This is the Son of the all-powerful God we're talking about. This was not by chance. His birth could have occurred under any circumstances he desired -- in a palace, in a room at the temple, in the home of a prosperous merchant. Even an ordinary, fairly comfortable home would have been a step up. Perhaps Joseph could have worked a choice carpentry job for a wealthy client before leaving for Bethlehem so he and Mary could have a few hundred denarii in their pockets. With the wave of his hand God could easily have made this story much different.

But that is not how the Messiah wanted to come into this world. Instead he thought it was of supreme importance to be incarnated among the poor and the powerless.

Think about that. What does this say about the kind of God we Christians worship?

All throughout the Hebrew scriptures God had shown intense concern with the weakest members of society. "Don’t oppress the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor..." his prophets had cried.  Now, in his inaugural act as Messiah (an unborn act, no less), he freely chooses to become one of them.

Yes, this is God's strategy for invading the world and fomenting revolution, for founding the Kingdom of God. This King has chosen to stand up from among the weak and helpless of the world whose ranks he purposefully joined and, "announce peace... announce deliverance... and say to Zion, 'Your God reigns!'"

*          *          *

Father of the Fatherless, Advocate of the poor, thank you for becoming one of us at our most abject. In all we do enable us to proclaim peace, deliverance, and Jesus' reign.  It is in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.

Advent - The Revolutionary

Jesus and his comrade in arms

Photo credit: Susan WD

And Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord,
     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
     For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
     and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
     from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
     he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts;
     he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
     and exalted those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
     and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
     in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
     to Abraham and to his offspring forever.”

Gospel of Luke 1.46-55, ERV

________________________

As the birth of the Messiah draws nearer, let's pause for a moment and notice the young peasant girl chosen to be his mother.

According to some historians she may have been as young as 12. Nazareth, where she lived, had only a few hundred inhabitants at the most. Everybody there would know in short order that Mary was unmarried and pregnant -- an enormous stigma in 1st century Galilee, worthy of stoning under Jewish law. In movies and art she is almost always portrayed as calm, serene, perhaps a bit shy and submissive. If we are not careful our cultural assumptions may cause us to take it for granted that she just assented meekly to the Angel Gabriel's request, a mere passive, resigned "bondservant" of the Lord.

But this song of Mary's shows her to be nothing of the sort...

Far from being the plaintive melody of a serene, submissive maiden, this is the battle hymn of a rebel! Quite aware of her "low status" as an unwed, teenage pregnant nobody in grungy little Nazareth she shakes her fist in the faces of the powers that be. "Watch out," she cries, "the true King is coming and he is going to turn things upside down!" The days of the "proud", the "rulers", the "rich" are numbered; the revolution has begun.

Mary meets her cousin Elizabeth

Painting by Claire Joy

Mary knew her Bible. Her song echos the one sung by Hannah, the mother of the Prophet Samuel, also miraculously born a thousand years before. They both sang of a revolution: Samuel's would be one that overturned the oppressive Philistines, who ground his people's faces into the dust. The revolution of Mary's coming child would be one that overturned the cosmic powers of sin and evil -- the powers that oppress and crush all humanity. 

Mary locked arms with Hannah, and with Sarah, and Rachel, and Samson's unnamed mother, and with her own cousin Elizabeth, with all the mothers of miracle babies that made up the the backbone of Israel's history, and sang of the great revolution that they had all been promised and eagerly looked for. Now her own child would finally fulfill that promise.

The early Christian movement never got over this young girl. They groped about for words sufficient to describe it. She was "sordid humanity's solitary boast," as Augustine said. The essence of a Saint is willingness to do what God asks; she was the greatest of all Saints, the church fathers said. Before her messianic son was even conceived and began to do his holy work, this girl firmly planted the flag of The Resistance against the forces of evil and declared in effect, "This is where it stops. This is where God finally finds someone who will do his will whatever it takes, and act as his instrument to turn this whole thing around."

"“Yes, I am a servant of the Lord," Mary proclaimed. "Let this happen to me according to your word." And to Jesus' early followers this one act -- Mary's bold, "Yes!" -- began the process of reversing Eve's "No." She brought the King into the world, gave him his first lessons (somewhat radical ones, no doubt!) and set him on the road to his final victory at Golgotha Hill.

Admittedly, she did not always understand him.  He was not the King anyone expected, after all, nor did he fight his battles as the Messiah was supposed to. But even though she knew that by doing so a sword would pierce her very soul, she followed him right down to the cross and beyond.

No, Mary was far from a passive womb or a meek bystander to the drama of her son's mission. She was a comrade in arms, a fellow revolutionary. She was a worthy mother of the Messiah.

*          *          *

Prayer: Lord of The Revolution, thank you for this young woman whose dauntless courage helped make our faith possible. As the day on which we celebrate the coming of the King draws near, help us to have the courage always to say, "Yes, I am a servant of the Lord; let it happen to me just as you have said." In Jesus Christ's name we pray. Amen.

The Purpose of Authentic Light

Justin Martyr in his
Philosopher's robe

This is the fourth and final post of my beginning-of-the-year "housekeeping" series. The other three can be found here, here, and here. This one will be about what Authentic Light's purpose is, what I'm hoping to accomplish here.

In the first half of the 2nd century, there was a man named Justin whom I admire quite a lot. He was a philosopher who had been a follower of Plato until he met an old man as he was walking by the sea one day. He continued to wear his philosopher's robe but from that day on he taught what he considered the ultimate philosophy: Christianity. He once described what he did this way:

“I live over a man named Martinus at the Timiotinian Bath... If anyone wanted to visit me, I communicated the teachings of truth to them.”

That's pretty much what the Authentic Light blog is for: communicating simple, radical Christianity to interested parties. It's simple because in a way there's not much to it. The basics can be recited in under a minute. And it's radical because that simple teaching can (and does) change everything.

Brand Names

But there is a dizzying number of  brands of Christianity, aren't there, all clamoring for us to do it their way and subtly -- or not so subtly -- denigrating the competing brands. When people unfamiliar with the Movement Christ founded, or who have only heard bad things about it, or who had a bad experience with one brand, decide to look into Christianity for themselves, they are faced with a spinning, bewildering sea of claims and counterclaims. As St. Paul said about another type of confusion, "If some people come in who are without understanding or don’t believe, they will say you are crazy," (First Letter to the Corinthians chapter 14 verse 22, ERV).

At one time though, Christianity was one thing, and every follower of Jesus knew what it was. It was taught "everywhere, always, and by all". Christianity, at the beginning, was the deposit, the revelation we discussed yesterday. It's basic outlines can be seen throughout the New Testament and then, before the last Apostle had died, traced in the letters of Clement, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna, and in the writings of Aristides, Athenagoras, and the noble Justin Martyr mentioned above. Plus a large crowd of others. It slowly expanded until the late 400's as more meat was put on the bones. But they were always the same bones given once and for all to the saints, expanding (changing the metaphor here) as they were unrolled and their implications realized.

Today, (giving up and mixing my metaphors with abandon) those same unrolled bones lie at the base of every Christian group -- Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, and Orthodox. In many churches creeds are read every Sunday, ostensibly to remind us of this. We hear them, but we often don't recognize what the words mean. And of course, that eventually gets boring, and ultimately meaningless.

But if you do learn the words, if you grasp the full meaning of that wildly, madly, powerfully, wondrous revelation (and no, it can never be fully grasped because it speaks of infinite things), you might just find yourself swept up in a revolution far bigger than yourself.

As one of my favorite theologians says, "I plan to present nothing new or original in these pages... I am dedicated to unoriginality." It is my contention that ordinary, garden variety Christianity is the most exciting thing in the world. Authentic Light is not here to argue or with a compulsion to convince anybody. All I hope to do, like Justin Martyr, is to "communicate the teachings of truth." This site is content to turn that message loose in all its rugged glory and let it work.

Aliens

The new civilization worshiping in the
Catacombs

Over the years I've gotten a few questions and comments something like this: "You say you're here to teach basic Christianity. Why don't you stick to that? Why do you keep posting about all these holidays? What do they have to do with the doctrines Christianity teaches?"

The answer is they have everything to do with it. Here is an important point: Christianity is not just a list of teachings by that nice Mr. Jesus. It is an entirely new civilization, commonly known as the Kingdom of God.

Of course there is no question that we should pay our taxes, participate in government, and support the PTA. And certainly we shouldn't be stern-faced sticks-in-the-mud who refuse to chat with the neighbors or go to the movies. Quite the opposite in fact. As St. Paul reminded his friends in Rome, "When God reigns, the order of the day is redeeming justice, true peace, and joy made possible by the Holy Spirit", (Letter to the Romans chapter 14 verse 17, The Voice Bible).

But did you catch it a couple of Sundays ago (if your church does Advent, that is)? The start of Advent is New Years Day for us. In fact Christians have an entire calendar of our own that doesn't begin in January or the Spring. It's designed to constantly remind us of the epicenter of our lives: The life, death, resurrection, and royal authority of the Messiah. That marks us out as different.

The idea isn't original. Ancient Israel was given a cycle of holidays to remind them of their own mighty "redemption" by God from Egypt and the blessings of their inheritance in the promised land. Jesus of Nazareth, being God and all, is superior to Moses, great though he was, and the spiritual agreement Jesus instituted supercedes the old, physical one. And we still have a year-round cycle of holidays helping us remember our own redemption by Jesus from something much more evil than the Egyptian Pharaoh and point us to a much greater "land" promised by Jesus.

Exiles

But that's just emblematic of a larger truth: That people who truly follow Jesus of Nazareth have not just a different calendar, but a different ruler and are citizens of another country. We live in our nations here on the Earth in much the same way ambassadors dwell in foreign lands. Or perhaps as underground resistance movements do, since we are busy building the Kingdom of God right under our neighbor's noses -- and inviting them in.

We are foreigners in this world and, like many

foreigners, not always welcome.

St. Peter was clear on this: "Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles to keep away from fleshly desires that do battle against the soul," (First Letter of Peter chapter 2, verse 11).

Why? Because, "our citizenship is in heaven," said the Apostle Paul. "We look forward to a savior that comes from there—the Lord Jesus Christ," (Letter to the Philippians chapter 3, verse 20, CEB)

The earliest members of the Christian movement insisted that, because of the Holy Spirit's action within them, they were a "new race", a new kind of human being. One ancient author, writing probably a mere 30 years after the Apostle John died, described us this way:

"They live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land... They busy themselves on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, but in their own lives they go far beyond what the laws require..."

( Letter to Diognetus chapter 5, verses 5 - 13)

A chapter title in C S Lewis' famous book Mere Christianity sums it up well: "Nice People or Changed Men?" As members of the Christian Movement we are not intended to change as little as possible so we can fit in here in this world. That "change" Lewis talks about transfers us "from the power of darkness... to the kingdom of the Son he loves" (Letter to the Colossians chapter 1, verse 13).

Once that supernatural change gets hold of us, it is only in that Kingdom that we can truly settle and finally belong.