O Come All Ye Faithful

THOUGH IT COULD HAVE BEEN HIDDEN in monasteries since the 1300s, the hymn “Adestes Fideles”—famously translated into English from the Latin with the opening line, “O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant”—was first published in musical score in 1782 and attributed to English composer John Francis Wade (1711-1786). The history of this marvelous hymn is something for another flurry of investigation, but the sentiment takes me along another tangent this Christmas season. The sentiment is the invitation to “come” to Bethlehem. Several other Christmas carols echo this invitation, such as: “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” but is it even possible to, “Venite, venite in Bethlehem - Come, come to Bethlehem,” two millennia after the fact?

Certainly, people respond to invitations. Walmart® opened at 5am a few days ago (November 28) on the infamous “Black Friday” for anyone game enough to line up for the pre-dawn sales. Throngs responded. Tragically, however, so many gathered to “Save money. Live better.”® that one employee at a Long Island Walmart® store was literally trampled to death by the stampede of crazed shoppers as he unlocked the door. The police report indicated that the mob was at a full run at the time of the 5am homicide. At least one reporter said that the retailer “invited” tragedy at some level with such good sales. That conclusion is arguable, but it is beyond question that people respond to invitations. Sometimes in throngs, but more often people respond in less ostentatious and less violent ways.

During this very … interesting … year we, as a family, have happily responded to a gracious invitation to join the faith community at Fellowship Bible Church in Siloam Springs, Arkansas (by the way, the abbreviation for Arkansas is AR not AK, which is of course Alaska!). We are settling into this new situation nicely, though I still don’t know where the spoons are in the early morning when I attempt to make coffee before my eyes begin to focus. We have responded to the realtor’s “invitation” to buy a house. We have likewise responded to the banker’s “invitation” to send in a mortgage check. The children have responded to the “invitation” to enroll in the local schools. On this first day of December the snow clouds responded to the snow dances, a.k.a. “invitations,” of all the children in Siloam for snow. Though there was about an inch on the ground, it was not enough to cancel school. The girls and Shellie just accepted an invitation to go to a birthday party with new friends from church. In a few weeks Shellie and I will join the festivities of a wedding because of an invitation (we are going to call it a “date-night” for our quarterly evening without the kids!) We have even responded to the invitation from the local animal shelter to adopt a pet. I don’t know how much the young golden retriever, “Misty,” had to say about the invitation, but all the kids said, “Hooray, a dog!” We are deciding to which invitations we should respond in the New Year—baseball teams, community theater, book clubs—realizing that we cannot say, “Yes!” to everything … but it is nice to have options once again. Of course, if the invitation for Jocelyn (almost 3 years old!) to become a “pop star” comes, like she was pretending yesterday, I think such an invitation would trump a whole year of invitations. Suffice it to say, people respond to invitations.

The invitation to “come” to Bethlehem is legitimate no matter the year, no matter the background, no matter the circumstances. People do respond to invitations. Consider the original responders to that original invitation to “come” to Bethlehem. A priest, Zacharias, who basically asked the angel for proof before he assented to the truth, came to Bethlehem all the same and found a song where there was once an accusation. A band of shepherds, who were functionally only one notch higher in the socio-economic stratum than lepers and Gentiles, came to Bethlehem and made a stir in the procession becoming the first evangelists of the good news of Christ’s grace. A cluster of stargazers, who realistically had nothing to gain humanly from an arduous trip across culture and desert, came to Bethlehem but left out the “side door” yet not without first adoring the Christ with gifts fit for a king. These gifts possibly financed the emergency flight the holy (and dare I say “blended”) family had to take to Egypt with the government hot on their trail. A devout and unshakably honorable Joseph, who had staked everything on the word of God through the angel, came to Bethlehem. But even more impressively, Joseph remained in Bethlehem instead of skipping town soon thereafter like so many other males who think they are men, but when the relational pressure is on they behave like boys. A young and contemplative Mary, who had known the temporary though intense isolation that can come directly as a result of the blessing of God, came to Bethlehem without all the answers but with the astounding confidence that “nothing will be impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). People respond to invitations.

For some cosmic reason the sale flyers will always dredge up more response than the announcement of “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom His favor rests” (Luke 2:14). But that does not negate the invitation or the response. That does not tarnish the call to “Venite, adoremus, dominum! - Come and worship Christ the Lord!” So bring your situation, your baggage, your gifts, your confusion, your joy, your confidence, even your unbelief and “come” to Bethlehem all the same—for the Lord has visited us there, personally delivering the blessing of restored relationship through salvation in Jesus Christ. We’ll meet you there!

"In the days of Caesar Augustus..."

IN THE DAYS OF CAESAR AUGUSTUS--these words frame the Nativity story in Luke, chapter two. In the days of the powerful, famous, intimidating emperor-for-life Augustus sitting at the epicenter of political control in Rome the days of peasant Mary's pregnancy finished while she and Joseph were in the hamlet of Bethlehem for Augustus' mandatory census.

Augustus (birth name Octavian) ascribed to himself many things including titles, privileges and characteristics. After brutally defeating his rivals and then seizing power from his once ally now enemy Mark Antony, Octavian became the sole despot over the entire Roman Republic--east and west--formed the Roman Empire, assumed the name Augustus, the title Emperor, and received/demanded the laud from his subjects as "the son of god," which was derived from his familial connection to Julius, whom the Senate declared divine a handful of years earlier. Caesar Augustus, son of god--it was even minted on the coins. The often mentioned pax romana "Roman peace" of Augustus was really the mass murder of all of Rome's enemies under the boot of Augustus' superior army. But for all of his grandstanding, Augustus is nothing more than a backdrop for the Infant King, Jesus Christ. Christ--the true and only Son of God--born under the foot of Rome, in reality has all things under His control.

This Infant, poor and unwelcomed by the world, upstages the greatest of all political examples--yet without writing a single word, building a single bridge, commissioning a single aqueduct, or amassing a single army. Jesus is the One we worship this Christmas, and forevermore.

Ordination Contemplation

NOVEMBER 22 MARKED my 11th anniversary to the gospel ministry.

Eugene Peterson in his book, Working the Angles, writes a few sentences that take me back to the trajectory of my ordination. Describing what ordination ought to mean Peterson writes:

We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don't trust ourselves--our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know that we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and that there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to help us: be our pastor, a minister of word and sacrament to us in this world's life. Minister with word and sacrament to us in all the different parts and stages of our lives—in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle. This isn't the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is yours: word and sacrament.

One more thing: we are going to ordain you to this ministry and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community. We know that you are launched on a difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know that your emotions are as fickle as ours, and that your mind can play the same tricks on you as ours. This is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you. We know that there are going to be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like we are believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you. And we know that there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it. It doesn’t matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it. There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise right now that you won’t give in to what we demand of you. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you to the mast of word and sacrament so that you will be unable to respond to the siren voices. There are a lot of other things to be done in this wrecked world and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the basic terms with which we are working, the foundational realities with which we are dealing—God, kingdom, gospel—we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling us the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking biblical words of command and promise and invitation.

That, or something very much like it, is what I understand the church to say to the people whom it ordains to be its pastors.

Still, no matter how impressive the ritual, no matter how sincerely the vows are given, we keep trying to untie the cords that lash us to the mast. Some of us manage to get loose and respond to other demands. When the people around us forget the terms of our ordination, forget why they asked us to be pastors in the first place, and urgently try to involve is in their newest project, we begin to lose confidence in the authority of our own hard trade. We feel left out of the mainstream and then attempt to cure our sense of exclusion, obscurity, and frustration by plunging into an action that will “make a difference.”

Eugene Peterson, Working the Angles, pp. 23-25