It’s not as though we were worth it—at least not by our standard or measure of worth.  Just look at us.  We are such fickle lovers, yet wed to and loved by the most faithful source.  But what happens when the object or source of your security, sustainability and direction disappears?  We look around and the landscape has changed.  He’s no longer there.  When you start to wonder if God has forgotten you, it will be tempting to look for a more tangible deity.

The temptation is to create our own gods of devotion; those that don’t make any demands.  We might fashion a god that doesn’t call us to justice or even to have compassion.  It doesn’t expect you to have faith in it when it fails to do what you want.  Nor does it expect exclusive loyalty.  You can worship as many gods as you want, because the gods of our hands make only promises and no demands.

Yet the God of Good Friday is completely different.  Preciously because of us (not because of our wants or desires, but because of our unmanageable mess) this God takes the nauseous sin of the world directly upon himself.  He becomes sin.  The torment inflicted and the betrayal – beyond imagination.  He leads the procession of liberation.  Only no one can see.  Not yet.

The God of Good Friday is completely different.  This God is jealous, completely unmanageable and very demanding.  You can’t fashion him with your own hands.  You certainly can’t get a leash around him to make him come just because you call.  But that’s only because the Lord is making room for you to have faith.  Come and see.  Before the tomb was found empty, the cross was embraced by One who fashioned it, and every other thing in heaven and earth.

Behold the cross,

on which hung the Savior of the world.

Come let us worship.

 Doug Varnado, Community Church of Hendersonville, www.cchville.org

Preciously. That’s the reason why He came among us; and the very reason that He continues to come among us.  This week begins with a holy procession of shouts and acclaim and ends with the earth shattering news that Jesus had risen from the dead, a belief that, like an earthquake, shook the foundation of every mythology.  He came to make holy all and everything that stood between Him and the Father.

So this week we celebrate the Triumphal Entry and a final meal. But we also commemorate the sufferings of Christ; the mockery, the crown of thorns, the scourging, the nails, the thirst, the vinegar and gall, the cry of desolation and all the Savior endured on the Cross.  Then we move to the miracle of the resurrected life, trusting that the One who embraces the universe is also the One who knows us intimately and calls us by name.

I invite you to open your heart to this God and to the life that he offers.  Life—that’s what Holy Week and Easter promises.  Life that you cannot control and, thus, life that you cannot lose.

Dr. Doug Varnado, Community Church of Hendersonville (www.cchville.org)

Readings:

John 11:25-26; Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 16:1-8

            You enter the desert season of life when you have to leave behind something that was well-known and move toward something new – something that will require a change in you to receive it.  The desert journey is hard because it is so threatening.  Resources and assurances are few; questions and anxiety are plentiful.  In the desert you discover you have no choice but to trust God, which is why it is a place where souls are shaped.

            In the news on this 9^th day of Lent, we’re told that two soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan.  An Oklahoma man sought in killing his wife and child turns up dead in a Las Vegas hotel room.  Congress condemns Iran for sentencing a Christian pastor to death.  A downed Coast Guard helicopter is raised from Mobile Bay but there are no signs of the crew.  $5M was paid to buy the freedom of 16 American rights workers held in Egypt.  A bizarre incident here in Hendersonville was reported in The Tennessean, involving a referee and the coach of a 2nd grade basketball team.  Technical fouls during the game led to an ejection.  Afterwards punches were thrown, charges were filed, the Police are involved, parents are afraid to comment, both men are banned from entering the gym and a lasting witness is imprinted in hearts of a group of seven year olds.

            On the other hand, hungry families were fed by a local outreach agency.  A scholarship was awarded to teenage girl whose single parent mom wept during the presentation.  At a bank in Crossville, a fund was established for the families of the three who were killed last night in the storms that swept through Tennessee.  The decision to carry her baby full turn was made this morning by a young girl who over the Christmas holidays discovered that she was pregnant.  An anonymous donor gave the remaining money needed to provide a clean water well in Zimbabwe.  An Eagle Scout project began at the home of an elderly WWII veteran.  A driver let another car turn in front of them. Someone said thank you—and meant it. 

            The hard journey of Lent is about making a choice.  It’s about entering the desert.  It’s a new direction or disorientation, about trusting God—or not. When your life has been disoriented, you just want to go back to the way things were.  We always critique the vague mystery and soul shaping experiences of the present by defaulting to the past. It’s just so much easier.

            But once you have entered God’s desert, there’s no going back to who you were.  The future is ahead, and only the God of mystery can get you there. Along the way He will shape your soul.

            O God, do what we are too afraid to do for ourselves.  Strip away the facades. Pull us into freedom.  Bring us to places where we have no choice but to walk with you, that we may along the way discover the joy of being fully alive.  Amen.

A sinner!  Who me?  Yes.  Sin is personal.  It’s not simply an action or a deed.  It’s not merely misbehavior.  It’s instead our human condition.  It’s that which permeates human nature and existence through and through, so much so that the psalmist was right when he prayed,

“Create in me a clean heart, O God and restore a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10).

The psalmist is right to pray to God, because only God who created the world can affect this kind of radical transformation.  No monarch or prophet, no ruler or nameless suffering servant can author the new creation that God intends us to be.  There is only one who identifies himself with our situation, who steps in between us and our past and makes us once again bearable to God and the world.  Not that we might progress to the point of taking this place ourselves, but rather that we might never fall again into this place.  As Paul was asserting,

“So, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

On this first day of Lent, let the ashes with which we mark ourselves remind us that from nothing we, each of us, were created and that the God who created us will not rest until we are at last transformed.  Amen

“as a word so beautiful and magnificent that it is almost untranslatable in English.” 

This week we read the story of Mary’s declaration that “nothing will be impossible with God.”  Upon hearing that she would miraculously conceive and bear the Messiah, she lets us know that this can only be God’s story, God’s initiative.  God is doing the impossible work of newness in the world and in us.  Newness and steadfast love are all God’s doing in the first place.  It’s not that there is nothing we must do to make this moment happen; it’s that there is nothing we can do.  Only God can make this impossible child.  Only God can author loving kindness and steadfast love.  Only God can create real newness.  Only God can do forever.  And in this story—this true story, God will.  There are very few things that are steadfast in our human experience.  The retaining wall at the lower end of my house is bowed like an old man’s back.  The stock market is as fragile as crystal.  Relationships dissolve like the sun as it dips below the evening horizon.  The image that we see in the mirror faintly resembles the vibrancy and youthfulness of earlier years.  Everything is tenuous—except this.  God’s steadfast love, which by definition is unconditional and eternal, brings us to Mary.  The power of God to do impossibly new things is backed by His unending faithfulness; unasked for, unimagined, unmerited.  The rule of this impossible child will have no end.  The promises of God for his steadfast love fulfilled in Jesus are forever.  And for this young mother, at that moment, as far as we can discern from the story, there is only joy.  May that same untranslatable steadfast love be yours in Jesus, this season and forever. 

Luke 1:26-38; 47-55; Romans 16:25-27

“Joy is at the heart of who God is and we will never understand the significance of joy in human life until we understand its importance to God!”  G.K Chesterton

        In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton describes how the joy experienced by a child is just a fraction of the joy that exists at the heart of God.  In one of the most beautiful pieces ever written, he says: 

“Because children have a bounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged.  They always say, “Do it again.”  And the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead, for grown up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”

        But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.  Is it possible that God says every morning, “Do it again!” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again!” to the moon?  It may not  be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike.  It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old and our Father is younger than we.

        We have sinned and grown old.  I’ve thought about that statement again and again.  We have sinned and grown old.  We become jaded and tired.  We live with a host of worries and irritations.  Like old men and women the monotony grinds us to a halt.  But our eternal God is like a child who says “Do it again!”  Nothing is taken for granted though God has seen everything there is to see.  He has knowledge of everything that has or will be known.  And every day when the sun breaks our horizon, God gets excited like a little kid.  Do it again!  And if we’re not filled with awe and wonder and delight, it’s not because we have everything we need.  It’s because we are broke.

        We will never understand God until we come to realize that he is the happiest being in the universe; that joy is his basic character and his eternal destiny.  Why does that matter?  Jesus says:

I have told you these things so that you can have the same joy I have and so that your joy will be the fullest possible joy.                 – John 15:11 NCV

        To miss out on joy is to miss out on the reason for your existence.  May you know the joy that comes only through knowing the Savior of the world who authors this season.

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126:1-6; I Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

            Yet the failure or reluctance to look within is not without pain.  Do we really want ‘a voice of one calling; “In the desert prepare the way for the LORD.”  I think we’re good with the “glory of the LORD revealed and all mankind together will see it.”  But the call of repentance?  Who’s really on board for a redirection of life that prepares the way for the LORD?  Who among us will acknowledge a bulging deficit of personal and global virtue that can only be filled by ‘”making straight paths for Him?”  The prophetic voice of Isaiah and the prophetic fulfillment of John the Baptist bear witness to a peace that we might not be ready to acknowledge.

            Individually, we are where we are by choices that direct the trajectory of our lives.  As a nation, we are where we are by a million daily decisions in the name of liberty, Wall Street, wishful thinking or foreign policy.  A ten-year war, securitized mortgages, the pandemic of personal debt, growing entitlement, the option of God, the election of ideologues—those didn’t just emerge mysteriously.  Our fingerprints are all over them; decisions, demands and choices made at the crossroads of conscience, belief and haste.  And so we cry out, “God, this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.  Come and fix it.”  And he has.  And he will.

            He has promised.  He has come.  And he is coming.  We may not want the peace he offers or the answers that he provides.  They force us to face the facts; and face ourselves.  But the way of peace has been provided.  Before the fullness of the kingdom can be made known, the rough ground must become level and every mountain be made low and God be glorified.  Only then will the peace of God fill our hearts, our nation, and our earth.  Only then will the shepherd gather his flock and carry us close to his heart.  Only then will things be as they were intended to be.  Peace. 

Isaiah 40:1-11 (TNIV)

¹ Comfort, comfort my people,
   says your God.
² Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
   and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
   that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the LORD’s hand
   double for all her sins.

 ³ A voice of one calling:
“In the wilderness prepare
   the way for the LORD^[a];
make straight in the desert
   a highway for our God.^[b]
4 Every valley shall be raised up,
   every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
   the rugged places a plain.
⁵ And the glory of the LORD will be revealed,
   and all people will see it together.
   For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

 ⁶ A voice says, “Cry out.”
   And I said, “What shall I cry?”

   “All people are like grass,
   and all human faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.
⁷ The grass withers and the flowers fall,
   because the breath of the LORD blows on them.
   Surely the people are grass.
⁸ The grass withers and the flowers fall,
   but the word of our God endures forever.”

 ⁹ You who bring good news to Zion,
   go up on a high mountain.
You who bring good news to Jerusalem,^[c]
   lift up your voice with a shout,
lift it up, do not be afraid;
   say to the towns of Judah,
   “Here is your God!”
¹⁰ See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power,
   and his arm rules for him.
See, his reward is with him,
   and his recompense accompanies him.
¹¹ He tends his flock like a shepherd:
   He gathers the lambs in his arms
and carries them close to his heart;
   he gently leads those that have young.

 Mark 1:1-8 (TNIV)

 ¹ The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah,^{[a][b] 2}as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:

   “I will send my messenger ahead of you,
   who will prepare your way”^[c]—
³ “a voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
   make straight paths for him.’”^[d]

 ⁴ And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. ⁵ The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. ⁶ John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. ⁷ And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. ⁸ I baptize you with^[e] water, but he will baptize you with^[f] the Holy Spirit.”

            This Sunday is the start of Advent.  It’s the beginning of the Church Year for those that follow the liturgical calendar.  You might think it strange that as a more contemporary interdenominational church we choose to fully embrace this holy and ancient celebration.  However, the significance and relevant message of Advent is undeniably current and profound.

            The word Advent means “coming” or “arrival.”  The focus of the next four weeks is the celebration of the birth of Jesus the Christ in his First Advent, and the anticipation of the return of Christ the King in his Second Advent.  It’s a time of anticipation and waiting; words that really run counter intuitive to our culture.  It’s also for us who live “between those times” a bit troubling.

            The disconnect between church and secular calendars may never be greater than on the first Sunday in Advent when the theme is “HOPE”.  The irony is that both calendars obviously share the same goal: preparing the world for Christmas.

            The commercial world is using every medium possible to hawk its urgent message.  Our mailboxes, newspapers, television and radio stations, in-boxes and web pages overflow with one unanimous appeal: buy gifts now. Christmas decorations are already up in our city.  Target displayed their seasonal merchandise in October.  We want to start the party now.  Yet God allows us to wait.  He invites us to partner with those who for centuries have cried out in hope “O come, O come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lovely exile here until the Son of God appears!”

            The hope for us, says the church in Advent, is that we are out of hope, and we know it.  We know in our better moments where our quest for self-fulfillment and affirmation has left us.  We know too, what it is like to wander after putting our trust in anything other than the One we hope for.  We so easily miss a thousand little gifts from Him in order to secure and receive the next big gift that we absolutely must have.  The Advent prophet shocks us though with the reality of our state:  “All of our righteous acts are like filthy rags . . . like the wind our sins sweep us away . . . you have hidden your face from us” (Isaiah 64:6-7).

            That’s why the church generally refrains from singing Christmas carols during Advent.  We dare not rush to greet the Redeemer prematurely until we pause here and wait and hope and admit that we do need redemption.  Nothing within can save us.  No thing can save us.  Our hope must be in someone out there who comes to us; and He does, in His time.  We find our way only because One does appear, takes our hand and leads us home.  That is our hope, our only hope. May that gift and the anticipation of it, far surpass anything this secular world could ever offer.

~ Doug

This Week’s Readings – Hope:    Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7; 17-19; I Corinthians 1:3-9

Among the huge contingent of support were also a small handful of protestors exercising their freedom of speech.  They displayed signs filled with hateful slogans and extreme expressions of bigotry.  I’m thankful that I live in such an amazing country that allows free speech for every person, and in the case of Westboro Baptist Church, no matter how vile, venomous and bigoted it may be.  Earlier that day, this same group picketed in front of the Nashville Islamic Center as well as the Gordon Jewish Community Center.  I hope and pray that those who abhorred the presence of this group of protestors would also feel equally strong against the bigotry displayed that day toward Muslims, Jews, homosexuals or anyone else who was not a Westboro follower.

I can’t even begin to fathom how those who profess faith in Jesus Christ could display such arrogant, hateful and blatant bigotry.  As a Christ follower, I don’t even have a grid to plug that into.  It defies logic and mutilates the heart of the gospel. 

I wonder though when the prophet Micah wrote, “And what does the LORD require of you?  To do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8), how and where do we draw that line?  Because unfortunately, more often than not, that line gets drawn.   

Doug Varnado

“Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”  Matthew 17:4-5

            Whatever happened on that mountaintop, the disciples of Jesus understood, for a moment at least, that God was with him; that when Jesus spoke they needed to listen, because it was God speaking.  They also needed to watch what he did, watch very carefully from then on, in him God was acting.

            What does transfiguration have to do with us?  First, the miracle of Jesus is that he comes not at our invitation, not because we have earned the right.  He comes to us because that is what love does.  In addition, it means that he has revealed himself to us for who he truly is. Every other altar or tabernacle; shelter or idol is to be removed in the presence of the One, and only One, to whom we listen and follow.  Yet, how do I know if there are competing altars in my life?  Am I certain that those altars, however good or benign they may be, have not become my idols?  Have I truly been honest with myself about my altars?  Have they become idols?  As honestly as you can, consider these questions:

• Am I content at this stage in my life with the money and possessions that I have or do I feel I need more?
• Am I seeking more power and control in my life or do I feel this is sufficient for me at this time?
• Do I have or am I pursuing a relationship in my life that I feel that I must have for my life to be truly fulfilled or meaningful?
• If no one would find out or I would not be caught, is there anything that I am willing to betray my values to obtain?
• What craving is so strong that it can distort my thinking and make me engage in denial, self-justification, and  secrecy?
• Am I able to identify the things that keep me from following Jesus fully?  Are they, in my life practice, sufficiently stronger to influence or control me than what I profess to believe?

            God gives us those rare moments in life when there is no fog, no haze, no trees, no obstructions where you clearly see the truth about Jesus, and the truth about yourself.  He gives those moments of clarity where you know something is the way it is supposed to be.  He has revealed himself to you for a reason.  Have you surrendered yourself to it and to Him?  That is our moment of truth.  Listen to Him.  Just listen to Him.