METANOIA

Some words just work, don’t they?  They roll off the tongue as if they were designed simply for that function.  Metanoia is one of these words.  It just rolls off the tongue – meta … noia.  It’s the kind of word that should be placed into a poem and spoken while sipping tea and munching on a Ginger Snaps.  It comes from a Greek word meaning to change one’s mind.  We give it a Biblical sounding status by translating it, “Repent,” but it really does simply mean to change one’s mind.

Simple, right?  No! Not at all.  Have you ever tried to get somebody to change their mind on something?  Really change their mind?  Actually turn around from what they once thought and embrace a new way of thinking and being?  Turn around from self and self-ways to God and God-ways. 

Somewhere Swiss theologian, Hans Küng, says, “We are to preach metanoia. We must entice people from the world to God.”  Oh, that’s all?  Just entice people from the world to God?  I’m in.  I feel powerless to do it, mind you, but I’m in.  Metanoia, world.  Repent.  Turn around.  Embrace the God life. 

We Christians say that God has entered into human history in the person of Jesus and that Jesus brings into our world the very life of God.  He, we say, is the best news ever to make its way onto the human stage.  Yet, many people refuse this good news and summarily dismiss Jesus from their thinking.  Why?  You will have to ask them.  I’m sure the reasons are as varied as are the people holding to them.

I Corinthians 2:14 says, “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.”  This is a challenging word and leaves me wondering how in the world a person without the Spirit of God could ever possibly come to know Jesus.  How does a person come from dismissing Jesus as irrelevant to the place of faith in Him?  How does one turn around from the position of thinking that things of God are “foolishness,” to that radical place of embracing God and God-ways?

To turn around this way may just be the bravest and most courageous act known to mankind.  It’s huge.  It is God-size huge.  I don’t have the capacity to convince people to come to Christ.  Lord knows, I’ve tried through the years.  And, I’ll keep on trying because I have experienced Jesus in my own life and I am convinced He is who He says He is.  How to get someone else to be convinced is another story.  All I know to do is live the Jesus-life as the everyday and ordinary expression of who I am and pray that some how, some way, the Spirit of God will connect with people at a deep level in their lives so that they will see Jesus, be intrigued by what they see, and choose to check Him out. 

C. S. Lewis’ story of the moment he came to faith has always struck me as a light shinning in a dark place.  I think too often we feel that people need to get their act together and come to Christ in the “getting it together.”  I don’t think it works this way, though.  I think Jesus works in our “don’t have it all together” lives.  Maybe a part of turning around and embracing Jesus is the fact that we don’t have to have all things “worked out.”  In Lewis’ case he wrote in, Surprised By Joy,

"You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England"

Can you come to Christ dejected and reluctant?  It is almost as if Lewis came kicking and screaming into the life of faith.  He desperately did not want Jesus to be who Jesus said He was.  Lewis’ intellectual integrity, however, wouldn’t let him escape the possibility that maybe there were things about God he didn’t know.  Maybe God was at work, perish the thought.  Maybe God’s love was real.  Maybe Jesus is who He says He is.  Maybe God was so big that “having it all together” wasn’t necessary.  At any rate, Lewis wrote,

"I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?... The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation".

So, my brothers and sisters in Christ, faint not.  Don’t let it rest on your shoulders.  Trust the Love that will not let people go without a fight, without a genuine reaching out in compassion and forgiveness.  Trust the Christ who desires that we be saved more than we desire it.  Trust the God “who emptied Himself of all but love and bled for Adam’s helpless race.”  Trust the God who loves His creation with a love that will not let it go.  He got to you, after all, and it has changed your life.  Maybe He can get to those you love, too.  Go ahead sing it loud and clear,

I stand amazed in the presence

of Jesus the Nazarene,

and wonder how he could love me,

a sinner, condemned, unclean.

How marvelous! How wonderful!

And my song shall ever be:

How marvelous! How wonderful

is my Savior's love for me!

Sing it and then live the turned-around life.  Metanoia!   What a great word!

THE GREAT I AM

I wonder what Christmas in America would look life if capitalism and materialism hadn’t hijacked it.  We’re told that if we removed the Christmas season from our economic system, our economic system would take a staggering hit.  Merchants throughout the land depend upon Christmas.  We may not want Jesus in our politics and schools but we sure do want Him on Main Street from Black Friday until all post-Christmas sales are behind us. 

What if people around the country didn’t focus on gifts but on the Gift?  Gifts come and go.  They don’t last, at least most of them don’t.  The material breaks down.  Products atrophy.  Next year’s model replaces last year’s “just had to have it” model.  And, each year the cycle gets repeated.

The Website http://www.statista.com tells us  “The United States' retail industry generated about three trillion U.S. dollars during the holidays in 2012. These holiday sales reflected about 19.3 percent of the retail industries total sales that year. As a result, just over 720 thousand employees were hired throughout the United States to compensate for the holiday rush.”*  To this I would suggest that if we take those numbers out of the economic mix, we come to a world of economic hurt, from the poorest to the richest of us.

Another interesting fact from Statista.com reads, “The Christmas tree is considered to be the main symbol of this pagan tradition, and is an integral part of the holiday shopping season. About 24.5 million real Christmas trees were purchased in the United States and cost, on average, about $40.30 U.S. dollars in 2012.”  Isn’t that interesting?  This mega dent on our economy, on this web site at least, says that it is all based on “this pagan tradition.” 

So the birth of Christ into human history has been so hijacked that the season has come to be called, “pagan.”  Furthermore, it seems the culture doesn’t want Jesus but it sure does want the colossal number of bucks that are generated because of His birth, materialized and capitalized and paganized though it be. 

So, we don’t want Jesus but we don’t mind pagan.  We don’t want incarnation but we sure want money.  We won’t let it be what it is so we’ll hijack it, indoctrinate it into the culture, tell people to max out their credit cards to make it happen, and then eat, drink, and be merry.  How can that possibly be a good thing?

I have another question.  How might we demythologize Christmas, reveal it for what it really is, and actually embrace the Prince of Peace whose birth has been hijacked?  Actually this process has already been done for those who might care to think about it. 

Did you know the Church really doesn’t celebrate a Christmas season much?  We celebrate the season of Advent.  We take an entire month to celebrate, to reflect, to embrace, and to look forward to the birthday of Jesus.  Like all birthdays, however, it is only a twenty-four hour event, and then we move on.  Advent isn’t about the day of His birth so much as it is about the incarnation of God into human history.  Jesus didn’t come out of a vacuum.  He came out of a story, a story of creation and holiness and sin and failure and love and forgiveness and promises and covenants.  The day of His birth, huge though it be, is not the day that most captivates His followers.  What captivates His followers is what His birth into history means.   Now that’s worth celebrating. 

The real celebration of Jesus’ birth begins on Christmas day, contrary to the sales pitches that begin before Halloween and continue as long as one more red cent can be gotten from us.  We don’t have an exact recording of His date of birth.  The Church has

chosen to make December 25, however, the day we stop and have a birthday party. It’s a party that leads to Jesus’ life and death and resurrection, and the establishing of a church, the job of which is to keep the story moving forward from one generation to the next.

So, in the scheme of things, in this church year, we have the four Sundays of Advent, Christmas day, two Sundays after Christmas day, seven Sundays of what is called Epiphany, with the Advent and Christmas celebrations ending on February 23, 2014.  The main thing for followers of Jesus happens in Advent and after His birth (where we celebrate the manifestation and revelation of God), and not Halloween and before His birth.  Try telling this to a culture.

As soon as Epiphany has concluded we celebrate what is called a Transfiguration Sunday that leads into the season of Lent and Palm Sunday and Holy Week and Easter Sunday, followed by the six Sundays after Easter.  Then we move to Pentecost, and the rest of the church year where we are reminded time and time again of the ramifications and implications of the life of Jesus among us.

I hope you have a merry Christmas.  I really, really do.  I just hope that you and I won’t become so enamored with an event that has been orchestrated by people who really do want to make money that we forget the birth of Jesus in history wasn’t for the establishing of a money-making, happy-holiday season, or for the sale of countless trees who meet their demise in the merriment of it all.  How sad that would be.

Enjoy the season.  Just remember what it is about.  The birth of this baby boy in Bethlehem was huge beyond my ability to state it properly.  Because of the human condition, however, we need to remember that he didn’t come to be celebrated like some rock star.  No.  He came to die on a cross.  He came to bring the very life of God into your story and mine.  He didn’t come to establish a system of gift giving.  He came to be the greatest gift you and I could ever receive.

A few years ago Mark Lowry and Buddy Greene wrote a song in which a series of questions were presented to Jesus’ mother, Mary. Would you think about these questions as you look and hope for and apprehend for yourself all that Jesus’ coming means?

Mary, did you know 
that your Baby Boy 
would one day walk on water? 


Mary, did you know 
that your 
Baby Boy would save our sons and daughters? 


Did you know 
that your Baby Boy 
has come to make you new? 


This Child that you delivered will soon deliver you. 



Mary, did you know 
that your Baby Boy 
will give sight to a blind man? 


Mary, did you know 
that your Baby Boy 
will calm the storm with His hand? 


Did you know 
that your Baby Boy 
has walked where angels trod? 


When you kiss your little Baby 
you kissed the face of God? 



Mary did you know the blind will see,

the deaf will hear, the dead will live again, 


The lame will leap, the dumb will speak 
the praises of The Lamb? 



Mary, did you know 
that your Baby Boy 
is Lord of all creation? 


Mary, did you know 
that your Baby Boy 
would one day rule the nations? 


Did you know 
that your Baby Boy 
is heaven's perfect Lamb? 


The sleeping Child you're holding 
is the Great, I Am.