How do we evaluate 2020? As I mentioned in the previous post, it could be very easy to just say it was so bad that there is nothing to learn. Instead, we should have the posture of learners, no matter the situation, and the next passage in Ecclesiastes is a wonderful guide to help us evaluate 2020. So let’s take a look at Ecclesiastes 11, starting in verse 1. Remember that this is an ancient book of wisdom, written by someone who calls himself The Teacher. It might have been the wise King Solomon of Israel. We don’t know for sure. What we do know is that Ecclesiastes is loaded with wisdom.
Here is my seminary Old Testament professor, David Dorsey’s translation of Ecclesiastes.
“11:1 Release your grain when the rainy season begins, because after many days you will get a good return from it. 2 Set aside seed-money for seven, even eight years, for you do not know what sort of disaster might befall the land. 3 When the clouds are full of water they will empty their rain upon the land; when the trees bend to the south or to the north, you know the wind is blowing them in that direction. 4 But whoever watches the wind too closely will never plant; and whoever watches the rain clouds too closely will never reap. 5 Just as you do not know how the life-breath enters the fetus in a mother’s womb, so you do not know what God will allow to happen; and he is responsible for everything that happens. 6 Therefore sow your seed in the morning, and in the evening do not let your hands be idle, for you do not know which will succeed, the one or the other, or whether both will do equally well.”
Dorsey suggests that this section could be summarized like this: “Life is unpredictable; live wisely and do what is most likely to succeed.” Yeah. 2020 was unpredictable alright. Wow, that is the understatement to beat all understatements. Covid, and in particular the recommended or required response to Covid, was very unpredictable. My church leaders, for example, had to figure out, often with very little time to think or pray, how we were going to respond. I commend our leaders because we had numerous discussions in person, on Zoom, by email, and we didn’t always see eye-to-eye, and yet we came together. I’m thankful for how our church family responded to all the changes and surprises.
The Teacher reminds us that life always brings surprises that will require us to change. So we face life with an active approach, trusting that God is there behind it all, even when it seems that he is gone. I appreciate the Teacher’s reminder in verse 5 that God is there. There are many ways to view God’s activity in the world. The Teacher wants us to remember that God is active. As the creator, he is ultimately responsible, but that doesn’t let us off the hook. God created a world, a universe in which we have free will, and I am glad for that. It means we have free agency; we get to choose a great many things in our lives. But that means there will be times when we humans choose very, very poorly. How much of 2020’s trauma was due to poor human choice? A lot of it.
The point the Teacher is trying to make is that life will have some surprises from nature, and it will have some surprises from human nature, because there is freedom in the world. So remember that God is there, he has not left us alone, despite the hardships, even in 2020, and he will not leave us alone in the years to come. Therefore, knowing God is with us, we should seek to make wise choices, measured choices, responsible choices, diligent choices. We should avoid laziness or addiction or self-indulgence. While it might be tempting to fret or to collapse in self-pity, especially as we face the many surprises life confronts us with, we can remain stable in the face of the seeming instability, because God is always with us.
A new year is upon us! Are you excited? On one hand, the switch from December 31, 2020 to January 1, 2021 this coming Thursday night is the same as any old Thursday night. It is one day, then the next day. Sure, we get a long holiday weekend, which is nice, but New Year’s Day is just a day.
On the other hand, it seems to me that the first day of a new year is not just any old day. Every year, I find it incredibly helpful, if viewed with the right attitude of heart and mind, to have a marker, a pause to evaluate the past and prepare for the future. This kind of pause can also occur on your birthday or your anniversary. These kinds of markers can be very healthy, and New Year’s Day is another good opportunity for that kind of evaluation every year.
Except that this year has been anything but a typical year. Last week, when I was trying to explain the idea of idioms, I used an idiom that has been around a long time, but seems particularly appropriate for 2020. I said, “2020 is a dumpster fire,” and my guess is you know what I mean. The big four of 2020: political strife, the racial tension, the natural disasters, and of course Covid. The result is that for months now, people have been saying, “I can’t wait for this year to be over!” Maybe you’ve said that as well. If so, you’re in good company, because it has been a year like no other, and very, very difficult. But 2020 is almost over! New Year’s Day 2021, for many people, is going to be a day of rejoicing!
Anything has to be better than 2020, right? Sure, of course 2021 could turn out to be difficult too. Who knows? The pandemic is far from over, and the political and ideological division in our country is still sharp. Racial injustice has not been solved, and there will be natural disasters because there are always natural disasters.
But hold on…before we get too far down the road of negativity, there is cause for rejoicing, for believing that 2021 just might be better than 2020. Not to mention that there were reasons to rejoice this past year as well! Let’s be sure that we don’t forget to pause and remember the good things we learned, we experienced and were a part of this year. So how might 2021 be better than 2020? First of all, I think it will hard for any year to be worse than this past year. I think it will be hard to even come close. So odds are favorable that next year will be better!. Second, it seems that 2021 already has a lot going for it just as it is about to begin. How so? Well, we start the new year with vaccines to a pandemic, already making their way across the world. Also the political strife of an election year is over. Furthermore, Congress just showed us a bit of unity, passing a bi-partisan Covid relief bill. Also, there are no new natural disasters to deal with (yet), and though the circumstances have been painful and we do have a way to go, there is a renewed movement for racial justice and healing in our land. In other words, the trajectory of 2021 has promise.
The result is that we might simply want to wash our hands of 2020 and move on. Let that dumpster fire burn on in the view of history, because we’re not turning back! Let’s get the new year started as quickly as possible!
If you feel something like that, I do too. We’ve gone through something so difficult, so long, so painful, and we’re desperately craving peace, and joy, and stability. That’s human nature. But let’s remember the important difference between wanting circumstantial or worldly peace, joy and stability and wanting Kingdom minded peace, joy and stability. Peace, Joy and Stability in Christ and who he is often has very little to do with the circumstances around you here on earth.
So I am going to ask you to look back and stare at that dumpster fire as it burns. No, I don’t want to make things worse for you. I’m excited, too, about the promise and hope of 2021. I’m ready for school to be normal, I’m ready for businesses to be open. I’m ready to not have to drive to all the way to the store, only to have to turn around and drive back home because I forgot my mask. I will say that I just might miss masks sometimes because I might be one of the weird ones who thinks it’s kinda cool to wear masks because it’s a unique time in history that we’re a part of. But seriously, I’m ready for restrictions to be done, and most of all, I’m ready for the Olympics!
While I’m excited for 2021, I also want us to see the opportunities 2020 has given us to learn from. I don’t mean that in a callous way. 2020 was no joke. 320,000 dead in the USA, and counting. 1.71 million globally, as of this past Tuesday. Anxiety and stress levels like never before. If I could go back and do something to make it never happen, I would. We should be grieving for the many who lost loved ones. We should be grieving for economic impact and pain so many felt during this time. So I don’t bring up the idea of learning from 2020 as if 2020 was good. It was horrible. I bring it up because we should always have the posture of learners. And thankfully, the next passage in Ecclesiastes is a wonderful guide to help us evaluate 2020. So check back in to the next post as we take a look at Ecclesiastes 11 and how its ancient wisdom might help us evaluate the past year and have a healthy start to the new one.
For Christmas Eve, Faith Church included as part of our worship service, the excellent depiction of the Christmas Story as told by the TV show The Chosen. Before continuing with this post, I urge you to watch the episode below:
As I watched the first part of the video, the introduction felt very familiar. Remember the intro? The people were suffering. In first century Palestine, the brutal Roman Empire occupied their land and taxed them heavily. Poverty was rampant. They knew darkness and pain and suffering. Sounds like 2020 doesn’t it?
We know darkness and pain and suffering, too, don’t we? It has been a dark year. If any other year included only one of the major crises we’ve faced for the last 12 months, that year would have gone down in history. We (as a nation) have not had one, but four. On top of that are personal struggles, tragedies and hard things you have all probably faced this past year. Thinking of those four national struggles, what made them more painful is that they all occurred at the same time, all lasting for months, and all four continue to this day. What four difficulties am I referring to?
First, as 2019 became 2020, bitter politics were already well underway. But in the early weeks of 2020 it exploded with acrimony during the impeachment hearings. That tone would only get worse through the primaries and election, and it has not stopped during the post-election transition lawsuits and mayhem. Second, there was a string of awful acts of atrocity against persons of color, kicking off a renewed movement to right the wrongs of racial injustice, which is our nation’s original sin. Yes, we’ve made progress, but we have a long way to go. Third, many across the country have suffered natural disasters. Fourth, it was around the time of the impeachment that we started hearing about Covid. The “19” in Covid 19 means that it actually started in 2019, but it didn’t reach our shores till 2020. The spring shutdown were some dark days. We got a brief respite in the summer, but now Covid is worse than ever. We praise God vaccines are finally being administered, but the darkness will be with us for a while, won’t it?
For you and I this is a Christmas Eve like no other. Just 12 short months ago, we hadn’t heard of Coronavirus. Tonight we mourn the loss of 320,000 dead and counting. I wonder if we’ve become callous to the numbers of Covid deaths because we’ve seen it on the news and watched them steadily climb day after day for months?
320,000 dead! Countless more survived, but many of them lost time at work and now have hospital bills due to being sick with Covid. Many others have never caught the virus but have had their businesses and lives impacted, not to mention the anxiety and stress we’ve felt.
What would you have said if someone told you that 12 months ago? Imagine on the blog, for Christmas Eve 2019, I wrote, “This time next year, at Christmas Eve worship, one of two worship services of the year when the room is usually packed, you will be sitting in a half-empty sanctuary, and you’ll all be wearing face-masks. There will be a bunch of people worshiping online, connecting from their homes via Zoom, because we’re quarantining from a disease that has taken 320,000 people in our country.” You’d be thinking, “No way. That’s ridiculous. … and what is Zoom???”
It’s been a dark year.
What do we do about the darkness?
Go back to the original Christmas story, and we do what the shepherds did!
Did you hear that phrase repeated in the story, right at the end as the shepherd leaves Joseph, Mary and Jesus? “People must know.” The shepherd has some good news, and people must know! In the middle of darkness, people must know. That was true then, and it is still true now!
What must people know?
People must know that God is with us. People must know that God came in the flesh to become one of us. That’s what the baby in the Christmas story was, in true historical fact. Yes, Jesus would grow up to be a great teacher, even a miracle worker. But those were signposts pointing to another reality, pointing to the truth. His teaching and his miracles are astounding in their own right, and we would do well to learn from them, as Jesus himself, through his teaching in particular, was showing us what kind of Kingdom is best, his kingdom.
But ultimately his life and ministry pointed to another reality, the truth that Jesus is both human and God. That he is God with us.
As the video closes, the shepherds are running around Bethlehem spreading the good news, when suddenly the mean, religious leader calls out. The leader asks a very important question to the shepherd, “Have you found a spotless lamb for sacrifice?” As the shepherd quietly looks back at the religious leader, a smile slowly forms on the shepherd’s lips. It’s a mysterious ending. Maybe it leaves you wondering.
Of course we know that the shepherd did not find a spotless lamb the religious leader had in mind. So why does the shepherd smile? Because he found a different spotless lamb. A very different one indeed.
It was a sacrificial lamb that people must know about.
I don’t know how much the shepherds understood about the significance of the birth of this baby. But they had just witnessed an astounding event, starting with the visit from the angels. This was the moment in the video when the light broke through the darkness of the shepherds’ camp. Here’s the story, as told in the Bible, the book of Luke, chapter 2, verses 8-20:
“And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”
“13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, 14 “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”
“15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”
“16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. 17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. 19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.”
We learn from this story that Christmas is a participatory event. Just like the shepherds, we tell the good news about what we have seen. People must know that God is alive and well. People must know that he was born, lived, gave his life to die as that sacrificial lamb, and then rose again from the dead to give us all the hope of new life.
I love how we see new life depicted in the shepherd, Simon, in the story. He has it rough. Shepherds, in general in that society, were outcasts, considered very dirty and crude. Of course Simon is a fictional character who not only has his leg healed, but also has new hope in the birth of the savior, we read in the story that the actual shepherds, the real historical shepherds, the ones who visited Joseph, Mary and Jesus in Bethlehem, were filled with rejoicing, with new hope, because the of birth of the savior. Maybe you feel dirty, outcast, marginalized or just plain old depressed and frustrated by 2020. There is hope! Please comment below, as I’d be glad to talk with you about this.
People must know!
People living in our dark world must know that there is a bright shining light of hope. As the ancient prophets foretold, “The people living in darkness have seen a great light.” That’s not only the people living in Jesus’ day, that’s also you and me. We have seen the light. We have the hope the world is longing for. We don’t have a solution that will eliminate all hard things for the rest of our lives. Even Jesus went on to have numerous difficulties in his life, as did those who chose to be his disciples. But he promised hope, he promised an abundant life, he promised to be faithful to us through it all, to never leave us or forsake us. There is a great light, a great hope, and great joy, that is found in Jesus. People must know! Who can you tell this good news to? How are you a living, breathing message of hope, joy and love?
One of my favorite parts of 2020, and yes there have been some good parts, is a phenomenon called Some Good News, a YouTube show created by actor John Krasinski, most famous for being on the TV show The Office. During quarantine he collected stories of wonderful ways people were treating each other with kindness, and he made about eight episodes, because he wanted to share good news.
We have good news, and arguably the ultimate good news, Christians. We have the good news of Jesus. Let the good news sink into your heart, let it affect your thoughts and your actions. May we end this year knowing the truth that God adores us. He sacrificially gave us his son in the most vulnerable and humble of ways. He desires to be known by each one of us. He is the hope of the world.
What should we do to use our bodies to express our faith? In the previous post, I mentioned church attendance. But an embodied faith must go well beyond church worship service attendance. So look to Jesus. Jesus had a human body, and he showed us how to live. Jesus invites to do what he did.
Turn to Luke 4:1. In Luke 4, we’re right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He has just been baptized by John the Baptist, and in so doing John has essentially launched Jesus’ ministry. John has been the forerunner, paving the way for Jesus. Now Jesus will take over.
What is Jesus’ first act of ministry among the huge crowds of people that came to be baptized by John? Read Luke 4:1-2.
Kinda crazy, right? Jesus leaves the crowd behind and goes off into the desert. He has a wonderful crowd to minister to, and he ditches them. He goes to be alone. There he fasted, eating no food. Remember that Jesus had a body! What he is doing, or rather what he is not doing, is very much affecting his body. The silence, the solitude, the lack of nourishment. For 40 days!?!? That’s definitely in the realm of the miraculous. The human body can’t live without food and water that long, so we read in Matthew and Mark’s accounts of this time in the desert, that angels ministered to Jesus. Think about what was going on in Jesus’ body during those 40 days. The hunger pangs. The weakness. The emotion. The loneliness.
But it gets worse! We then read that the devil tempted him. To what degree or how the devil tempted him during the entirety of those 40 days, we don’t know. Matthew’s version of the story sounds like the devil’s temptation was the whole purpose of the 40 days in the desert! Imagine what Jesus was going through, in his body and in his spirit, during those 40 days.
I’ve had some hard physical experiences, and maybe you have too. What has been your most difficult one? I’ve endured a week of three-a-day soccer practices, and I’ve trained for and run marathons. Each of my marathons were about four hours, and they were excruciating experiences, especially the last hour, which was about 5-6 miles of nothing but pain every step. As grueling as that was, I have no idea what the fasting, the isolation, and the temptation must have felt like for Jesus.
Wouldn’t it seem that he was just barely hanging on by a thread? I get it…he was God, he was filled with the Holy Spirit, and angels ministered to him, so there is obviously something supernatural going on here. But still, as we read, he was hungry. My guess is that means very hungry.
One of my favorite writers on the topic of how humans have a spiritual side and a physical side, and how that matters to Christians, is Dallas Willard. Willard says, surprisingly, that Jesus, at his temptation, was almost certainly not at a place of spiritual weakness. He was at a place of spiritual strength. Think about it. Jesus had just spent 40 days using his body to connect with God. Imagine how you might feel if you spent 40 days with God! Just you and God.
When we go on a retreat or a mission trip, we often feel so close to God, and that is because we are using our bodies to be close to God, or to serve God, and the result is no surprise. We feel close to him! Now extrapolate that to 40 straight days of doing nothing but being alone with God, depending on God, striving for God. So what we see in this story is that Jesus was showing us how to use our bodies to grow our spirit.
Then look at what he does next. Read Luke 4:3-13.
What do you notice? Jesus’ meditates on Scripture. When the devil tempts him, Jesus just responds in Scripture. He literally speaks only the words of Scripture. Think about that. It means that Jesus has used his body and mind to know Scripture, and not just to memorize it, but to dwell on it. This is part of what the Biblical writers call meditation. It is not eastern meditation which is often about emptying the mind. Biblical meditation is about filling the mind, with Scripture.
This kind of meditation on Scripture, as Jesus demonstrates for us, is an important practice. It is using our body to dwell on the truth of Scripture. Sometimes all you need is one word of Scripture to center your mind on God. I have done this many times when the stress of life is intense. I will pray, “Peace” thinking about God’s peace that he wants to bring. It’s a simple prayer. One word! But it is based in Scripture, which means that it is focused on God’s heart. God wants our bodies and spirits to experience peace.
So to experience God in the depths of body and soul, let’s do what Jesus did, practicing silence, solitude, and meditation on Scripture. Because we are embodied souls. How will you practice these in 2021?
Just like Jesus, we might have to open up space in our busy lives to make time for an embodied faith. He didn’t have time. He was training 12 men to take over for him. He was trying to keep up with friends and other followers. He was leading an itinerant preaching ministry to thousands. Jesus’ ministry, if he wanted it to, had the possibility of being 24/7. There was always more people to heal, more people to talk with. But he made sure to include regular pauses in his life, for rest, for time alone his Father. Jesus practiced an embodied faith.
We, too, can make time for God in our lives, even if we are busy. It might mean stopping a less important thing in order to make space for what is vital. So what gift does Jesus want? This week we have learned a principle just as we did in each of the previous weeks on Honest Advent: Jesus wants us to give him gifts that he first gave us. He came to earth and embodied humanity for us. He humbly became the creation that he created. Now he leaves the Holy Spirit to make a home within us. To embody us. He wants us to acknowledge that, to know the truth of that, to care for our physical bodies like the temple of the Spirit they are, to care for and pay attention to the fact that we are spiritual beings, that we are the embodiment of the living God as we walk around here on this earth. That we are pro-life in all senses of the word. Loving people. Learning to love God more and more, not just with more head knowledge, but to know and love our good and gracious and good God.
I once had a class in seminary where we were talking about how we are embodied souls, which is our topic on the blog this week, and the professor asked the class what we would consider to be the most important spiritual habit we should practice. Of course there are the common answers of prayer and Bible study or biblical meditation, and while the professor said those were all important, none were most important. You know what he said was the most important spiritual habit? Exercise. Getting physical exercise.
What? How can physical exercise be a spiritual habit? Isn’t that contradictory? Nope. I agree with the professor. If we have a correct understanding of ourselves as embodied souls, then physical exercise can be seen, and I would say, is properly seen, as a spiritual habit. I will admit to you that I don’t always view my exercise from a spiritual perspective, but it always helps me both physically and spiritually. I’m not saying you need to run like I do. But I do ask you what it will look like to care for your body. Because when you care for your body, you are caring for your soul.
Caring for your body releases stress, which helps you think more clearly, which is good for the body and the soul. It is part of why one of the things we ask candidates at our denomination’s pastoral assessment center is how they care for their physical body. The emotional parts of ministry are hard, and without a healthy outlet they will be harder. The same goes for everyone, especially in a year like this one, 2020, which has been extremely stressed out.
Another time I had a mentor tell me that sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is….what? What do you think he might have said? It is very similar to the idea of exercise. That mentor said that sometimes, the most spiritual thing you can do is sleep. Our society tends to be sleep deprived, and that is bad for our bodies. That means being sleep-deprived is also bad for our spiritual side. Remember body and soul are linked, totally enmeshed, intertwined, inseparable. Think about it. Jesus slept. I love that the Bible tells us that Jesus slept. We could assume it. He was human, so he did everything we humans do. All the bodily functions and emotions. Including sleep. Obviously, we’re all different and that means we each need varying amounts of sleep. But it is something that we would do well to take seriously, as a spiritual practice, along with exercise, eating right, and mental health. All that we do in our body affects our soul.
What this means is that we need to consider how can we experience God in our bodies…not just our head. The primary way that people think of experiencing God in their body is by attending worship services. But I have to ask, is that all? Just by going to church worship services? Furthermore, if attending worship services is the primary way people experience God, we need to ask why American Christians have a steadily declining practice of church attendance. Only 44% of American Christians say they go to church weekly. Another 18% say they go once or twice per month.[1] If we are thinking that we can experience God by going to church, only 4 out of 10 of us are doing so weekly. Apparently we have found other ways to experience God in our bodies. Or have we?
Do we need a new view of how to embody our faith? Certainly attending worship services is one way that we use our body to engage the spiritual, and perhaps in 2021 you need to examine your practice of worship attendance. What else should we do? There is more. Check back in to the next post!
Does the body have a soul? Let’s talk about that. As we continue learning about embodiment during this fourth week of Advent, while we’re focusing on our physical or material side, what about the spiritual or immaterial side of humanity? Religion tends to emphasize the spiritual side. What we’ve been learning, though, is that Christians see our bodies as vitally important. Because God came to us in human form, which is what we celebrate at Christmas through the birth of Christ as a human baby, we are gravely mistaken if we think it is the spiritual side of our bodies that is most important. Both the human body and the human soul are equally important. So we must treat our body and our soul as equally important.
This is exactly why Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, “19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”
This is why we practice healthy eating, exercise, and why we avoid those habits and addictions that would do damage to our body. Moderation is a virtue for the body. These are also pro-life, which we talked about in the previous post.
At this point some might be wondering that it seems I’ve talked quite a lot about bodies. You might be wondering, “Aren’t you over-emphasizing the body? Shouldn’t you also talk about the soul? How do we care for our soul?” Good point. How do we care for our soul?
First of all, what is the soul? Pixar is set to release their next animated movie, Soul, this week, and I’m looking forward to how they describe the soul. There are Christian theologians who have misgivings about the immaterial or spiritual part of life. Is the soul just our thoughts? Is the soul just the inner part of what it means to be human, but not necessarily a separate spiritual being?
There are many ways theologians have attempted to answer these questions. We probably won’t know the real answer until we pass on to heaven. But what seems to be true, not matter how you describe it, is that we humans are both material and immaterial, we are both physical and spiritual, and every part of us is important. I don’t know if our immaterial part is body and thoughts, or body and soul, or body and soul and spirit. None of us know for sure. You are entitled to your opinion.
What I do know for sure, though, is that God the Son, who was spirit, took on human flesh and was born as a human baby with a body. We call that incarnation, which is a fancy word that means “to take on a body” or “to take on flesh.” God, when Jesus was growing as a baby inside his mother Mary’s womb, now had skin and bones just like us. It is a dramatic miraculous moment.
Think about how God identifies with us at that moment. What had only been a creator-and-created relationship was now totally different. The creator became like the created so that he could know our human experience.
That brings us back to the question of how we care for our soul. I would suggest that we cannot care for the soul, as if it is disembodied. We can’t separate the spiritual part from the physical part. They are intimately linked.
What you do in your body affects your soul and spirit. And vice-versa. If you do not care for your body, to the point where your body is affected negatively, you will automatically be affecting your spiritual side negatively too. You cannot affect one without affecting the other. Likewise, if you do not tend to your soul, to the point where your soul is affected negatively, you will automatically be affecting your physical body as well. We are embodied souls!
So how can we care for body and soul? Check back in to tomorrow’s post, as we’ll look at some practical suggestions.
Yesterday I mentioned that Christmas has a significant connection to the abortion debate. How so? Consider what we read in Psalm 139:13-16a, where the Old Testament King and Poet, David, writes: “13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, 16 your eyes saw my unformed body.”
We should always be cautious about creating theological views based on poetry, because poetry is notoriously difficult to interpret, mostly because it uses an economy of words and lots of figurative language. In other words, David is not writing a medical science treatise on human anatomy here. There is a major difference between a science textbook and a collection of poems. David is writing a work of poetic worship, and thus he doesn’t intend to tell us everything we might want to know about the human body.
But what about the soul? That is a theological concept. We can learn theology from the psalms, can’t we? Yes, but we also have to remember that because the psalms are worship songs, they were not originally written to give us detailed or intricate theological explanations. For instance, in verse 13, when David writes, “You created my inmost being,” is he talking about the body or the soul or both? We don’t know for sure, as this is poetry after all. Interestingly, the Hebrew word David uses for “inmost being” is literally, “kidneys,” which is really bizarre to our modern mind. Why would David care about the organ in the body that collects urine? Actually
David doesn’t care about that. Instead, he is using an ancient Hebrew idiom. An idiom is when we would say “2020 has been a dumpster fire of a year.” What do we mean? 2020 has been a really bad year. In the same way, David is not intending to talk about kidneys, but instead he is talking about our inner being, as the NIV translates it. Frequently, this word is actually translated “heart” in the Old Testament and often used along with “mind,” in verses that say, “God searches the heart and mind.” So while David is using a physical body part word, he is almost certainly talking about humanity’s immaterial part. Therefore David is teaching that God creates the immaterial part of us.
But what about the second part of verse 13, “You knit me together in my mother’s womb”? This doesn’t mean that God is at work specifically building the human body inside a mother’s womb. Instead, we know that God created the means whereby a human father and mother would create human babies. And we know that happens as cells grow and divide following the the information encoded in our DNA. Obviously, that scientific description is not what David meant. So what did David mean?
That God is a creative God. He is the creator. Furthermore, as David says, God is the creator in another way, he is the creator of the soul. Perhaps all David is trying to suggest is that at some point, the precise moment of which we may never know, God joins that soul with the body growing in the womb. In that sense, God is at work, creating the human. And therefore, a human is not just a body, but a body and a soul.
This is why Christians stand strongly against abortion. We don’t know for sure, but we believe that God is at work creating the human at the earlier stages of human growth, and we believe the earliest stage is the moment of conception. Therefore, we believe that abortion is a sin.
Also, because we are embodied souls, we don’t stop there in our beliefs about God’s concern for life and the sanctity of life. We are pro-life in a much wider sense! We are for life precisely because of our views about God’s creative work in both body and soul. Christians have strong theological reasoning, then, to be against killing of all kinds. Think about all the ways we should be pro-life. Pro-life means we don’t want people to be killed by gun violence. Pro-life means we don’t people to be killed by Covid. Pro-life means we don’t want people to be killed by war. Pro-life means we don’t want people to be killed by the death penalty. We see pro-life as tangentially related to issues beyond killing. For example, pro-life means we openly welcome the refugee and the orphan across our borders, but we do so in a way that preserves the family. Pro-life means we don’t want children to be separated from their parents. Because we believe God created humans as embodied souls, we choose to have a robust understanding of what it means to be pro-life.
It could be said that these are all political issues. I would counter that they are theological issues first. They are theological issues that have been politicized. We Christians must allow our theology to have priority over politics. When you think about these issues theologically, especially given the theology of the body, such that God is creator of the body, and that at Christmas we celebrate that God himself embodied flesh in the person of Jesus, these issues must be seen theologically first. To be pro-life is so much more than whether or not a law should be on the books banning abortion. To be pro-life is to understand how the God of life views all of life.
Our is an embodied faith. The opposite of this is the view that says ours is a purely spiritual faith. But Christianity is not a purely spiritual faith. Does that sound odd or wrong? Let me say it again. Christianity is not a purely spiritual faith. Upon hearing that some might think, “What are you talking about, Joel? Our faith is our spirituality.” Yes, our faith is our spirituality, but our faith is not purely spiritual. It is also an embodied faith. If you said, for example, “Our faith is purely spiritual, or completely spiritual, or only spiritual,” then I would say, “No, our faith is so much more than spiritual. It is spiritual, but it is also embodied. Our faith has a body because humans have bodies.”
Throughout Advent we are following the themes of Honest Advent, looking for gifts that we can give Jesus. Gift he actually wants. We have seen how we can give Jesus our vulnerability, love, identity, and today…our bodies. Bodies? Doesn’t he want our hearts? Yes. But there’s more…
Let me make a comparison to illustrate. We are different from angels. Angels are purely spiritual beings. They do not have bodies. That means, importantly, that we are also different from God. God is Spirit. God has no body. That goes for God the Father, and God the Holy Spirit, and God the Son in his pre-incarnate form. I just used a theological vocab word there. “Pre-incarnate.” Notice that I did not say, “Re-incarnate.” We hear “re-incarnate” probably more than we hear “pre-incarnate.” What’s the difference? Reincarnation is when you die and then your soul comes back as a different person or animal, and it is a belief found in some eastern religions. That’s not what Christians believe about the after-life. Furthermore, reincarnation is very different from “Pre-incarnate.” Pre-incarnate is just a fancy way of saying, “that state of being that Jesus was in before he took on a human body.” What I’m getting at is that Jesus was 100% spirit before taking on a body. But Jesus became an embodied spirit, just like us.
Christmas is the celebration of God the Son taking on a human body. His parents, Mary and Joseph, gave that little ball of flesh the name Yeshua, which in English is Joshua, and more commonly, Jesus. God had become human in the form of a tiny newborn, vulnerable baby. That’s one of the most important beliefs we Christians hold to. That one of the persons of the one true God, one of persons of the Trinity, became like us. Jesus is God who is Spirit, and who also became God in the flesh. Very much like Jesus, then, we humans have a bodily part and a spiritual part, which is sometimes called a soul. We are embodied souls.
I will not pretend to understand how the combination of body and soul works. How are we both? There is no clear consensus.
We’re pretty familiar with how the physical side works, right? Suffice it to say that a human woman and man work together to create a new human baby. Their work is physical only. They create only the physical part of the human. We believe that it is God who creates the spiritual part of humans. In his mysterious wisdom, God adds a soul to a body. God creates the embodied soul. God makes it a reality that our faith, therefore is an embodied faith.
When I think about that, the first question that comes to mind is: When do we receive our soul? At the moment of conception when a sperm pierces an egg? Does the miracle happen in a mother’s womb? We don’t know. Maybe it happens when the baby’s heart first starts beating in the womb? Maybe it happens at the moment the baby leaves the birth canal and takes its first breath? Theologians debate this, have many differences of opinion, and they don’t know for sure. The Bible doesn’t tell us the precise moment that we become embodied souls. Of course this debate about body and soul has many implications, the most famous of which in recent decades is regarding how we think about abortion.
Check back in to the next post as we continue learning about our embodied faith, and how it might relate to the abortion debate.
My wife, Michelle, and I recently watched season 4 of The Crown on Netflix, a show about the current monarchy in England. The more I watch that show, the more I think it should be called “The Marriage.” Most of the central story lines are deeply affected by the various marriages of the characters. Not just the Queen’s marriage, but Charles and Diana’s marriage and other marriages too. What we learn is that even for royalty, marriage requires what we learned in the previous post, that true love is costly. How, though, do we practice love, whether in marriage or in other relationships, like those in a church family, so that love endures?
Have you ever heard of the 5 love languages? I urge you to pause reading this post and check out the 5 Love Languages website. Some people receive love through the giving of gifts. But other people receive love through quality time, or quantity of time, or other ways. People are complicated…relationships are complicated. How can you be Jesus to someone? Loving God means we want to love people.
We can really easily fall into the fallacy of believing that other people are too difficult to love, while we ourselves are quite easy to love. “Why can’t everyone just think like me? Why can’t everyone just act like me?” we think, “Life would be great.” We can especially get caught in the trap of thinking like that with our spouses.
Or maybe it wouldn’t be so great. One of the enduring lessons of The Crown is the need to learn to love and respect one another’s differences, with the clear self-knowledge that we ourselves are not perfect. We sacrifice ourselves, in love, for our spouse, for this person who can upset us, disappoint us, frustrate us, because through it all, we learn that a husband and a wife are two people who, in their brokenness, are loved by God and can love one another.
As we love our spouses sacrificially, also think about what God did for us. He sacrificially gave Jesus for us, and we were far from perfect, right? So we, too, can give our lives in sacrificial love for the people around us. We can serve them, love them, and treat them with respect and kindness.
That doesn’t mean we allow them to use or abuse us. It also doesn’t mean that we need to be close friends with everyone, such as everyone in a church family. That’s simply not possible in most churches, even those of smallish size (note that the average size church in the USA is 75), so we need to have graciousness and be okay with the fact that some people are closer with others.
I’ve heard it said that there are cliques churches, but the reality is that it is natural for people to group off into smaller bands of friends, whether a small group or a Sunday school class. This is normal, as long as we love one another in the process, and as long as we keep an eye out for those who are on the outskirts and welcome them in love.
What will it look like for you to demonstrate sacrificial love this Christmas? Do you need to have a heart check to see if you need to be more loving? One of the greatest gifts you can give Jesus this Christmas is to receive his love, become his child, and then once you are his child, whether you just became his child today or you have been in his family for years, is to love him and love one another, and then to love those in need. Our love for other people should be impossible to miss because it is so active.
I had a difficult time finding the picture above, the one with a man holding an umbrella for another guy. My difficulty didn’t have to do with the photo, but with the fact that I couldn’t figure out how to get the search algorithm to give me what I wanted.
I use Unsplash for free quality photos for my most of my blog posts. It is an astounding resource. As I was writing this post, I knew I needed a photo that illustrated love. So I typed “love” in the Unsplash.com search bar. I don’t know how Unsplash’s algorithm works, but I suspect it has something to do with the tags photographers attach to their photos. The photos my search returned were all about hearts, weddings, and people hugging and looking dreamily into each others’ eyes. Pretty standard depictions of love, wouldn’t you say?
But that’s not the aspect of love I was looking for.
Eventually I discovered that I couldn’t use Unsplash to find a photo for this post. No matter what word or phrase I typed in the search bar, I couldn’t find words that gave me pictures of the kind of love we’re talking about in the post. We’re talking about a complete love. Those depictions of love I saw on Unsplash are incomplete. How are they incomplete? What we learn as we continue our study of Honest Advent, which in week 2 is about giving Jesus the gift of love, is that love isn’t love unless it costs you.
What we have already seen in our previous posts here and here is that love is participatory in helping those in love, and today we will learn that love is selfless and sacrificial within a church family. John repeats this over and over again in the letter we’ve been studying this week, the New Testament book of 1st John. For example, he describes this kind of love in 1st John 2:7-8 as a command that we heard from the beginning. He curiously calls it an old command that is also new. What command is John talking about?
John is referring to something he mentioned in another New Testament book he wrote, the Gospel of John. Keep your finger in 1st John, and turn to John 13:34-35. The scene in John 13 is the Upper Room, the place where Jesus had a final meal with his disciples on the night before he was arrested. Scan through chapters 13-17 and see all the teaching from Jesus, loads of it, all on that same final evening. In 13:34-35, Jesus says this to his disciples: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, that you love one another.”
That command applied not only to Jesus’ disciples, but also to all his followers since. In our church families, therefore, we should be known for loving one another. Even when we think differently about things, we still love one another. If we disagree about how to handle political or cultural situations, we love one another. If someone in the church family rubs us the wrong way, we love one another.
John repeats this over and over throughout 1st John. For example, read 1st John 4:19-20. “You cannot love God while you hate your brother. Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” These are such important statements. If you have a broken relationship with someone in your church family, then John is saying this is a serious concern. This is why the famous love chapter of the Bible, 1st Corinthians 13, is so helpful because it is a great place to learn what love is like. “Love is patient, love is kind, love bears all things.” We also need the words in Ephesians 4, “Speak the truth in love.” What we learn about love through these various teachers is that love is not a feeling. Love is active, participatory. Love sacrifices. Jesus is our example in that. If your love is not sacrificial, it is likely not love. True love will cost you.
For example: A key part of loving well is listening to the one you love, getting to know them. Paul writes in Philippians 1, “I pray that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight.” Love is willing to sacrifice what one feels one needs, and it asks, “What does the other need?” What the other person needs might not be what we want to give them. What the other person needs might not be easy for us to give them. Instead love asks, “What is going on in someone else’s world? What things might be going on beneath the surface?” Love is really getting to know them. Love listens.
God is love. He knows what we need. He sacrificed for that need. You and I, though, don’t always know what the other person needs. Loving them means learning about their needs. In fact, loving people will look different depending on the person. It might mean meeting a financial need, it might mean giving them extra time to themselves. It might mean just sitting quietly with them. One thing we know for certain is that real love, love that looks like Jesus loves will require sacrifice. Loving someone will require giving up something of yourself in some way for another. Loving someone will almost certainly go beyond giving them gifts that are material possessions wrapped in a package with a bow that are opened on Christmas.
True love will cost you. And it will be 100% worth it!
Engaging Scripture 