Farewells

Farewell. It’s a word we don’t use terribly often in modern English. But it’s an activity in which we must all engage … farewelling those who pass from the scenes of our lives, or at least from the everyday scenes. And we’ve become quiet experienced at it here at PRBC. For, in the decade-and-a-half that this has been my church home, the Lord has seen fit, both to gather a handful of our number into His heavenly presence, and also to send a great many handfuls of PRBCers to live, work, and worship in other earthly locales. And so we’ve had to wish a great many people God’s blessings as they have gone on from our fellowship. And we do so again this coming Sunday.

Now, in this day of phones, email, automobiles, and airplanes, farewelling a moving friend is not nearly so stark a goodbye as it once would have been. I am able to stay in quite easy touch with former PRBCers in Washington, and in Florida, and in many places in between. And so maybe we don’t feel these sorts of farewells as keenly as we might have if we’d lived in the days of the covered wagon. But it’s still hard to see people go. And it’s hard to be the one who goes (probably harder, in many cases).

And yet I am reminded today, as our brother and sister and their children depart from us, that even if they were heading out on the Oregon Trail, never to see our faces again in this life; or even if they were departing this life altogether … the farewelling would only be for this life. Because, for the believer in Jesus Christ – in addition to being “always … with the Lord”, and being finally rid of our sin forever – the eternal world that lies before us will also be a grand reunion of the saints, will it not? As my friend Eileen once told me, on her way into surgery, ‘I will see you soon … either here, or there!’ And she was right! If we are in Christ, we will see our Christian friends again! Perhaps face-to-face, thanks to automobiles or airplanes. Maybe on FaceTime or Skype. But assuredly in glory!

Now, I doubt there will be a Pleasant Ridge seating area in eternity. But we will all be in the same congregation together once again! And I feel confident we will track one another down, and fellowship together, once again, just as we did here at the crest of this hill in Cincinnati (only, in that day, we will do it without time constraints or sin!). And so, in this day of farewells, we look to that day of reunions. And thus we can be “sorrowful yet always rejoicing.”

"Who can stand before His cold?"

It’s been chilly, has it not? Six below zero when I checked the weather app on Tuesday morning! And, though it’s been warmer since, it’s still been pretty frigid for the most part! And it got me thinking of the psalmist’s question, quoted above. Here’s a little more of the context, from Psalm 147:

12Praise the LORD, O Jerusalem!

Praise your God, O Zion!

…

16 He gives snow like wool;

He scatters the frost like ashes.

17 He casts forth His ice as fragments;

Who can stand before His cold?

In short, snow, frost, ice, and cold are listed, here, as reasons to “praise the LORD.” In them we should see cause for magnifying our God, rather than for murmuring in our grumpiness; inducements to song, rather than to sourness! And so praise the LORD for these phenomena of winter! Praise Him, for instance, for what the snow has to teach us about His forgiveness (Isaiah 1:18) and His word (Isaiah 55:10-11). Praise Him for His creativity, seen in the beauty of the frost, and in the glory of a tree branch glazed with ice. And praise Him for the mighty power by which He brings these weather events to pass!

Indeed, I think it’s that mighty power that is in view when the psalmist asks, at the end of verse 17, “who can stand before His cold?” How mighty is our God? Well, one example of His power is that He can so drop the temperature (v.17) that the human body cannot long stand before it without substantial help! Yes, with coats, and gloves, and hats, and thick socks we can stand (for a while) before the coldest days of winter. But not on our own. And not even in our normal attire. And all sorts of bad things can happen to us if we try!

And so “who can stand before His cold?” No one!

And when we realize this fact; when we realize that it’s so cold outside that we cannot long stand before it without significant protection, our response should be to recognize the amazing power of the God who sends the cold … and to praise Him for it (v.12)!

When God hems us in with the cold, He is demonstrating that He is God, and that we are not! And we should be thankful that we have a God like that – a God who is actually God; a God who is powerful enough to hem us in; a God before whose power we actually cannot stand! Because the God whose might is potent enough to produce unbearable cold is the same God who also wields that invincible power to protect, provide for, and redeem His people! And we need a God like that, don’t we? Indeed, we wouldn’t have Him any other way!

So praise the LORD that He is so much mightier than we! And remember (and praise Him for!) that glorious reality the next time you find yourself unable to stand before His cold!

Christmas Poem, 2017: In the Morning, Joy and Light

Here is this year's Christmas poem.  Keep in mind, as always, that these poems have a good deal of reading between the lines in them ... as I try and place myself into the history and wonder about the sorts of things that may have gone through the minds of the various players in the incarnation accounts. I'm wondering these things aloud, not to try and re-write the story (much less to assert that my imaginings are factual), but simply as a way of getting at the narratives afresh, and trying to draw some lessons from them.

You can listen to the poem here, or read it below the page break.

"You shall call His name ..."

A lovely theme in Matthew’s telling of the Christmas account is his emphasis on what the Child of Bethlehem is called. Have you ever noticed it? Three times Matthew points out what this special Child is, or was to be, called. And each name or title is instructive.

First, we are told in Matthew 1:16 that this Jesus, born of Mary, “is called the Messiah.”* And who was the Messiah? He was the Anointed One, the Redeemer, the coming King that the Old Testament and the Jewish people had long been anticipating. The Messiah was the seed of the woman (Genesis 3), who would come and crush the devil’s head. He was the seed of Abraham, in whom “all the nations of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 22). He was the Son of David, who would someday reign on His ancestor’s throne. He was the longed-for child of Isaiah 9, who would bring light into darkness and peace into war. He was the suffering servant, who would be “pierced through for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53). He was the one toward whom all “the fullness of the times” was gestating! The culmination of God’s great redemptive purposes! “Jesus … who is called the Messiah.”

And then, not only does Matthew point out His Messianic title, but also His personal name: “You shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins”* (Matthew 1:21). The name “Jesus” is our English version of the Hebrew name Joshua, or Y’shua. And this Hebrew name, Y’shua, means the LORD (Yahweh) saves. And that is precisely what this Child of Bethlehem came to do – to “save His people from their sins.” Jesus “became flesh”; and He was “tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin”; and He “bore our sins in His body on the cross”; and He rose on the third day; and He is coming again, someday soon … all in fulfillment of that marvelous name, and of the heavenly mission of salvation that lay beneath it! “You shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins”

And then notice, thirdly, that Matthew points out, from the prophecy of Isaiah, another name by which this Child would be called (Matthew 1:23): “‘They shall call His name Immanuel,’ which translated means, ‘God with us.’”* What a name! This babe in the manger is indeed truly human – very man of very man! But He is also very God of very God! “God with us”*. This, in fact, is why He is able to “save His people from their sins”! For “who can forgive sins but God alone?” No one! And so praise God that this baby is, indeed, Immanuel! That He is, indeed, “God with us.”* And praise God that He came to be “with us” – to walk among us, and to take upon Himself our nature, “sympathiz[ing] with our weaknesses,” entering our temptations, and dying our death. What a name, Immanuel!

Consider what the baby of Bethlehem is called, this Christmas. And in addition to all, I hope that, by faith, you can call Him yours!

________________________
*Bold or italicized emphases within biblical quotations have been added by this article’s author, and are not part of the original biblical text.

Uncomfortable Christmas

We’d all like our Christmases to fit quaintly, picturesquely, onto a holiday postcard. A fresh layer of snow blanketing the ground, and spread perfectly, like icing, on every ledge of the house. Warm light glowing from the windows. The scent of apples, cinnamon, and warm meat lingering, enticingly, in the air. All the family gathered happily ‘round the fire or the tree. And, of course, cards mailed and presents bought and wrapped, well in advance! This is Christmas, as many of us envision it. It’s certainly how I like my late Decembers to look and feel. I long for my family to have our own little “silent night, holy night” on which “all is calm, all is bright.”

But maybe I import a little of my own Christmas longings, expectations, and traditions into the scene in Bethlehem. For, while there surely were parts of that holy night that fit right in with Joseph Mohr’s famous description of it (“silent”, “calm”, and “bright”) … let us also remember that, for Mary and Joseph, the night was probably less-than-quaint in a good many ways, too! They were living out of a suitcase on that holy night in Bethlehem. And few of us like to do that. Let’s not forget, either, that Mary was nine months pregnant, which comes with its own set of discomforts (which are usually not the portrait of Christmas cheer and charm, for the mother!). And that’s before we think about the process of actually giving birth! Remember, too, that things hadn’t quite worked out as well as the young couple might have hoped with the whole lodging situation. And so they weren’t staying at the Holiday Inn, or at a warm little cottage in the snowy woods, or even at grandma’s house! Surely it was, in many ways, an awkward and uncomfortable first Christmas, there in Bethlehem! Had we lived through it ourselves, methinks it would have seemed anything but picturesque!

And yet it was into a scene like this – not the one on the postcard, but the one in which a young couple is seriously roughing it – that Christ came to be Immanuel, “God with us”! It was on an uncomfortable first Christmas that God chose to send the world His joy, and peace, and hope, and mercy, and salvation in Christ! Why? I think as a reminder that God, in Christ, offers hope in the midst of our own less-than-picturesque lives! Sin has left us roughing it! And Christ has come as a Savior, not into a scene from Currier and Ives, but into the dirty snow cast up by the ever churning wheels of our brokenness.

Does that mean I am intentionally going to try and make my Christmas more like uncomfortable Bethlehem, and less like a Thomas Kinkade painting? No! But it does mean that, if this holiday season is awkward, lonely, difficult, nerve-wracking, painful, marked by failure, or in any other way lacking in traditional charm, I need not think that I have missed Christmas. For Christmas is about the coming of Christ! And this Christ chose to show up, that first Christmas, not in the postcard, but in a scene lot more like our own scrambled Christmases than we are sometimes prone to remember! And this Christmas (as in all the other seasons of our muddled lives); this Christmas, whether “all is calm and bright” or not – and precisely because, in reality, it is not – Christ will come to His broken people still.