DAY 134

FAMILY

2 Kings 19, 20 & 21 and John 4:1-30

In the Old Testament we read of a wonderful king, who is in a very tough spot. Hezekiah, a good king of Judah, is having to face the powerhouse of Assyria. Assyria has already dealt a final blow to Israel. They are brutal in their methods. The family that Moses led across the desert, splintered for decades now, is a facing extinction.

These battles are actually verified with some amazing archaeological finds. Here is one website that provides some information:

http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2010/07/top-ten-biblical-discoveries-in-archaeology-10-assyrian-lachish-reliefs/

Hezekiah seeks counsel from God’s prophet Isaiah. The story unfolds with God protecting the city of Jerusalem. In one instance God distracts the Assyrians, and in another he destroys them. Hezekiah gets a bit ahead of God and allows some Babylonian envoys to have a full view of the treasures of God. After Hezekiah’s death we read about his two sons: it is not good and you no doubt know where this is going.

In the New Testament we have the story of what is often referred to as the “woman at the well.” Now before we dig into the story let’s just connect some dots. The woman is from Samaria and she says that her ancestors use to worship on the mountain and Jesus’ in the Temple. Have you connected the dots? Samaria is where the ten tribes that formed Israel were. Worshiping on the mountain – is the High Places that were never torn down. We know that the Jews really disliked the Samarians – and yet they share a common ancestry. Sure that ancestry has twists and turns. People get moved, intermarrying takes place, but this woman is able to say “our ancestors worshiped on this mountain.”

I find this story amazing. Put yourself in Jesus’ shoes and then imagine you saying to the face of a woman, “You are right, you’ve had five husbands and the man you are living with now isn’t one of them!” I cannot imagine that I would get the positive reaction that Jesus received. Yet an encounter with Jesus is different than any other encounter. An encounter with Jesus is…is an encounter with…the opportunity to drink in Living Water.

That opportunity exists today for everyone. His point of being at the well was to begin the process of reconciling the world to God, what better place than to start with a people that were once part of the chosen family – and that is the point – for we are meant to be part of the family. 

DAY 133

LIGHT IN DARKNESS

2 Kings 17 & 18 and John 3:19-36

“And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.” (Jn. 3:19)

Today in the Old Testament we read about two important stories.

The first is the fall of Israel; those ten tribes that split off after Solomon’s death. There kings for the most part did evil – very, very few did good. They had the Light, it was the Law. They had people who would point them to the Light – these are the prophets who we have yet to read. Yet they loved darkness. And so the nation of Assyria conquers them, drags them out of the land and puts “replacements” on their soil (that is how it was done back then).

The second story is in Judah. Remarkably in Judah, Hezekiah (the evil Ahaz’s son) did what was right…he even removed the high places. I find that amazing. A person with a father this evil is able to “do what is right.”  Yet when he came under attack, he took the gold and silver from the Temple to essentially “pay-off” Sennacherib of Assyria. We read how Assyria is not satisfied. Hezekiah makes a treaty with Egypt. The plot is developing. Will this nation fall as well, or will God intervene?

As you read the Old Testament stories there is a phrase that you come across. It usually goes something like, “God sent Assyria to…” It reads as if God is maliciously destroying the nation He created. That can lead to a picture of a God of vengeance. Many people think this is who the God of the Old Testament is. I have a different point of view. My point of view hinges on two connected thoughts. The first is that I think if God were to remove His hand from our world, that even our air would disappear. His presence holds it all together; the fancy word is sovereign. I connect that thought with the Old Testament writers tone. They thought very highly of God’s sovereignty. Therefore anything that happened, especially to his people, could only happen by His explicit involvment.

When we come to these two nations, you and I have read about how unfaithful they have been. They are not following God. They in fact are caught up in a world of sin. They are weak. Did God cause them to be defeated? Possibly, but it is also possibly that they, because they did not live as God has commanded have created a society and a nation that is vulnerable.

As I turn into the New Testament there are those words, they loved darkness. When you love darkness we know where it leads. It leads to death. By the time of John the Baptist’s words for today are written, Israel has been scattered (the scattering you read about today) for five centuries – all because they loved darkness more than light.

The Good News, and we will read and study this much more, is that God did not abandon them. He disciplined them, but did not abandon them. His Plan? Jesus! Jesus is the plan, the Messiah, the Lamb of God. John the Baptist knows this, John the Baptist is the prophet, the one to announce that the Redeemer has arrived.

John the Baptist knows that Jesus must increase and he must decrease (3:30) and he, JB, proclaims, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” I know those are strong words, but you and I have been reading a history of what happens to a people when they in fact live for themselves and not God.

Think back to a few of my blogs. What was the Nation of Israel's (all 12 tribes) purpose? To be great – no! To be light – yes. To be a beacon of living in a fully human way connected to Almighty God. To live in a way that would draw all nations to God. But they loved darkness. We need not judge them, we need to learn from them: may we love light.

DAY 132

LOVE
2 Kings 15 & 16 and John 3:1-18

For God so loved…Love, there it is, that word…again. In our Old Testament lesson we come across eight kings: three from Judah and five from Israel. Only two did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. Six did evil, and one, King Ahaz, even offered his son in fire (2 Kings 16:3).

What does love look like? For these kings it should look like who they are allied with, or following, or obeying. Do we know it when we see it? Most of us are able to see kindness, but I am not always sure about love. I think about it a lot. We are going to be talking more about this is John’s Gospel because Jesus brings us this word a lot – Jesus will even say later “if you love me you will keep my commands.”

I have to be careful to not judge too quickly whether or not love is taking place. That parent, or spouse, or friend, who is often appearing unkind, might be practicing love. Sometimes discipline is love. Sometimes silence is love. Sometimes suffering is love. For God so loved the world we read today. It has become our “sound bite,” but it needs to be more.

Do you think Jesus is “loving” Nicodemus, this man who comes at night, in secret? Jesus seems to be pretty tough on him. “Don’t you know, you are a teacher” says Jesus, it seems like taunting.

We know that Love Lasts; that it has “legs.” We know that Love suffers long. We know that Love conquers. We in fact know that Jesus loved and loves Nicodemus…and Nicodemus knew it…for it is Nicodemus who will with Joseph of Arimathea lay our Lord’s lifeless body in the tomb.

I could write 1,000 words on this passage and not be done. There is the image of night. There is the idea of Spirit and Wind and how it connects to Genesis 1. There is Jesus “high and lifted up.” There is the idea of “born again.” All of this is John drawing on the Scriptures to tell us the amazing story of God come to earth. You have even read enough of the Scriptures to see each of these connections.

Today though I am pondering love, and I invite you to for moment, ask yourself what your love looks like, ask yourself if you have allowed God’s to enter your heart.

DAY 131

WATER TO WINE
2 Kings 13 & 14 and John 2

In our Old Testament reading we continue to see the rulers of the nations struggle, and at times completely fail, to follow God. We continue to see over and over again the effects of syncretism (the mixing of faith traditions). We continue to see that “as the king goes, so goes the people.” Jesus is Prophet, Priest and King. He will assume all three Old Testament roles. It is crucial that He does. For in Christ we see a true King, one whom we should follow.

In the Gospels we hear Jesus speaking of the Kingdom of God and we hear Pilate ask Jesus, “So you are a king?”

Seeing Jesus clearly falls heavily on the Gospels. John in his Gospel uses a different approach then Matthew, Mark and Luke. Those three, while not writing biographies, do chronicle many of Jesus’ miracles. John on the other picks seven (a nice perfect Jewish number) signs, progressively demonstrating Jesus’ divinity – today we read of the first sign.

He is how one author reflects on this miracle:

“God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn that water into a juice which will ferment and take on the certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see. Either like the Pagans they refer the process to some finite spirit. Bacchus or Dionysus: or else, like the moderns, they attribute real and ultimate causality to the chemical and other material phenomena which are all that our senses can discover in it. But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off. The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at the wedding party in Cana.” – from “Miracles,” God in the Dock by C.S.Lewis. 

DAY 130

COME AND SEE!

2 Kings 10, 11 & 12 and John 1:29-51

“Come and See” is the Cathedral “tag line” on our website. It borrows from Philip’s answer to Nathaniel. Nathaniel is suspicious of what he is hearing about Jesus. Philip’s answer, “come and see, come and judge for yourself.”

I believe in this day and age that is a big key to letting people meet Jesus. Our task really is twofold. First to be trying, not to be perfect, but rather to be authentic – people don’t expect perfection – they expect authenticity. The second part is invitation. Invite people to “come and see.” It is not necessary to argue with people, it is necessary first step to invite them.

Here is our attempt at the Cathedral to invite:

http://www.thecathedralofallsaints.org/welcome/

The Old Testament continues with the “bad kings and good kings.” Jehu seems especially zealous for the Lord which might be a polite way of saying he killed a lot of people. And yet he did not completely follow God. He continued to struggle with the reality that Jerusalem was not in his territory and so he left the high places. Ever since the first king of the Northern Kingdom, the kings have been fearful of the people going to Jerusalem and becoming disloyal.  Yet even having the Temple did not keep the Kings of Judah from sin. Jehoash, a good king, who even repairs the Temple, maintains the high places.

DAY 129

SAVOR IT

2 Kings 7, 8 & 9 and John 1:1-28

A delicious meal should cause us to slow down and savor every morsel. In fact, if there are other items on the table that do not add to its taste, maybe it is just as well to let them alone.

I feel that way about our two readings today. I take it you have read the Old Testament, and by doing so you and I have kept up with history. But today we have before us one of the finest pieces of prose ever written in the world – John chapter one.

Today, before turning to my feeble attempts to describe the text, I think you should first read the words…slowly.

Below is a more detailed discussion of the text, but don’t rush…savor it.

I start with a question for you: What is your mental map of the universe and beyond? Do you have a general idea of how you think it all fits together?

The Greeks for centuries did and their idea dominated our world until about 400 years ago. Their view was that the earth was flat, that the earth was at the center, and that God (or something akin to God) was beyond the cosmos.

There were two imponderables for them:

w  The idea of some higher perfect power, or force, or god(s) causing all of what they could see to exist, and holding it all together.

w  Their desire to figure out how to get from the earth to where this “other” perfect power or being existed.

For centuries their philosophers would come up with different ideas and concepts that wrestled to make sense of these two imponderables. Over the centuries (as far back as the 6^th century b.c.) they began to describe something called logos.

Logos was described in various ways by different Greek philosophies including:

w  The principal of order and knowledge

w  The generative principle of the universe

w  Active reason that pervaded and animated the universe

Are you getting a sense that there was this idea, this concept, which was trying to capture that behind all that they could see, hear, and think about, that there was something or someone more? They wanted to understand it, know it and in fact be with it.

Today we read John’s Gospel, chapter one beginning at the first verse. If we read it in Greek we would have read, “In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God and the logos was God.

John was saying to them that their idea of something or someone more behind it all was a good idea. This idea of logos captures the amazing nature of where we live and that he, John, knows the logos and that “it” is not separate from God, but is God.

In fact John tells them that logos isn’t some impersonal concept, no, logos is a person as John writes “he”. He was in the beginning with God. The text shifts from using the word logos to the pronoun “he” driving home that their ideal is a person and that this person is responsible for all that ever was and ever will be. This person is the source of life and this source is light to all people. It is the true light.

Can you imagine the Greek listeners, but it gets better because not only is it a person, not only is this person the creative and sustaining force of the universe, not only is this person the source of life and the light of all people, but this person is “coming into the cosmos”. One of those imponderables: How do they get to the logos has been turned upside down; logos is coming, has come, to them!

Tragically, though the world was made through him, the world and his people did not receive him. The dilemma of the first century is the dilemma of today: Can we as humans accept and receive God, and His invitation to us? God does not give up for we read, “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God”.

We become children, part of the family. How far God has moved their minds (and ours) from this human construct of “god” as some impersonal force or being, to a God who seeks the most intimate of relationships; family. We become family not by any human action: not by blood, or by flesh, or even by our wills. No, we become family not by our action, but by God!

Then, as if to put an exclamation point on all of this text, it moves back upward and we read: logos became flesh and dwelt among us. We have in this one sentence the Good News. That which we cannot see or comprehend, that which is beyond the cosmos, has not just come, but come and put on flesh. Not only did he put on flesh, but he “dwelt” among us. The Greek here could easily be translated as he “pitched his tent” or “tabernacled” among us. God didn’t live in a far off castle, no he lived with us. God became human in order that we might be able to not just ponder the imponderable, but to welcome, receive and live for and with and in Him.

How does John make such claims? “We beheld his glory!” He is an eyewitness; he has seen the logos full of grace and truth.

This is a stunning piece of Scripture. It reveals to us truth as it reveals to us God. Our human minds are no different than the Greeks of old. We try and try to comprehend, but are limited. We try and try to construct some system by which we might climb up to God, but we fail. It is God who descends and reveals, but not only reveals, but adopts and lives among and in us, if only we receive him.

My prayer is that for all of us God will be more than an abstract concept and that we will receive him. To receive him I think is two steps. The first step requires us to have the necessary courage to be honest with ourselves. The courage and the honesty to admit that as humans, as smart as we are in the twenty-first century, we don’t have all the answers, and even when we have the answers we fail, we aren’t perfect. That admission takes some courage and some humility. The second step requires intelligence and faith. The intelligence to see that there is something or someone behind all that we can see and understand, and the faith to believe that it is God and that God welcomes us, imperfect as we are, into his family through His Son.

Let us pray. Almighty God, we thank you that you have come to us, that you have shown us in your Son Jesus, that you are real and that your love for us is real. Lord we pray that you will enter our minds, our wills and our hearts so that we might live no longer for ourselves, but for Him has come among us. Amen.

DAY 128

THE PROMISE

2 Kings 4, 5& 6 and Luke 24:36 – 53

These three chapters of Second Kings, chapters 4, 5 and 6 have Elisha bursting onto the scene. I mentioned yesterday that we might have missed how great a prophet Elijah was and so I want to make sure that I mention this about Elisha. If you have read the stories:

·         Multiplying oil for a widow’s son

·         An elderly barren woman conceiving

·         A son who die, resuscitated back to life

·         A famine, and a deadly pot of stew purified

·         A man healed of Leprosy

·         The lie of a servant exposed

·         An axe head made to float

·         The revealing of the heavenly host ready to enter battle

·         An evil king seeks the prophets death

The power of God is certainly flowing through Elisha, not only has he done marvelous deeds, but he has apparently spoken against the King of Israel to the point that the king feels he is responsible for the famine. Prophets, more than predicting the future, speak God’s truth to the powers of the day. We will see this more and more as we study them.

Turning to the New Testament we come to Jesus’ Ascension. One of the things I worry about is that I will start repeating myself. I don’t think I have shared “The Promise of the Father.” Look at Jesus’ words. He tells the disciples, “I am sending the promise of my Father upon you.”

So what is it that God promised? The short answer is the Holy Spirit, but I want to try and share the depth of this moment. When Jesus says the phrase, “the promise of the Father” it would trigger in the minds of his disciples a classic Jewish teaching called “The Promise of the Father.”

Jesus is not sharing some “new fangled notion.” He is claiming that an ancient prophecy is about to come true. It is a prophecy found in Jeremiah 31:31-34 (http://www.esvbible.org/Jeremiah+31%3A31-34/ ) and picked up on in Ezekiel and in Joel. We will unpack those a bit more in the coming days, but for right now I want to plant the seed that the Third Person of the Trinity (who we may not have perceived to be in the middle of the action thus far) has been there since the beginning. Further, the Holy Spirit is a key part of God’s Plan after Jesus’ Ascension. It is why Jesus must Ascend. In the coming days we will talk more about it, but I wanted to make sure that in the middle of everything you picked up on this phrase and began to think about a how faithful God is, especially with His Promises.