Those who follow the lectionary might have preached about John the Baptizer during Advent, but I chose to tackle him on the last Sunday of the year, 
with perhaps a different take on the life of Jesus’ forerunner. Based on Luke 3.1-20 and Mark 6.14-29, you can listen to this message here:
Month: December 2013
Merry Christmas!
It occurs to me that I have some faithful readers with whom I have little other contact, so I take this opportunity to wish you and yours a very merry
Christmas, and a new year filled with many blessings. Celebrate by worshipping Christ, our new-born King! God’s best!
Passionately His,
Jeff+
There’s Something About Mary
Mary doesn’t get a lot of press among Protestant Christians, but she should! In this message, based on Luke 1.26-56, I demonstrate some ways we would do well to emulate Mary in our walk with God. Listen here:
The poem I read at the end of the message can be found here.
Take time to ponder
We often complain about how busy we get around Christmas time, but if you read the biblical account in Luke 2, you’ll notice that it wasn’t a whole lot less busy that first Christmas: there were crowds making their way to their various towns for the census; the nearby shepherds came along at the angel’s announcement; there was “a great company of the heavenly host” (v. 13 – probably a large army of angels) shouting God’s praise; and there were all the people who were amazed at what the shepherds said (v. 18), many of whom probably went to the cave to see what all the fuss was about.
And we think it’s busy when we go shopping!
In the midst of all that was going on, though, what did Mary do? Jesus’ mother took in everything that was going on around her, and she “treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart” (v. 19).
Yes, there’s a lot going on at this time of year. And we can learn from one of those who was at the centre of it all to step back and ponder.
It’s not easy, but we can do it if we make a conscious choice to do so.
Even if you’re not done your shopping yet, take a few minutes away from the crowd. Grab a coffee, sit down, take in everything going on around you, and pray. Tell God what’s on your mind, on your heart. Share with him your deepest yearnings and desires. Commit to God that you will make this crazy-busy season about him, first and foremost.
After all, Mary did.
Why not take some time right now? Go ahead! Instead of writing more for you to read, I’ll give you time to rest amid this busy time. You won’t regret it.
Merry Christmas.
Simeon: He lived to tell
The character of Simeon doesn’t play a very big role in the narrative of salvation, but it is an important role nevertheless. Today, we looked at his story, reading Luke 2.21-35. Listen here:
The next generation
“It’s the most wonderful time of the year.” So says the song about Christmas. A big-box stationery chain uses it for back-to-school. And I use it for competitive curling season! The Scotties Tournament of Hearts, the Brier, and the Worlds are annual standbys, but every four years, we are blessed with the Olympics, and the trials that choose the men’s and women’s teams that will compete on Canada’s behalf in the Olympics. It’s a wonderful time to see some outstanding curling.
I know, I know – some of you think that watching curling is akin to watching paint dry. But some of us find it pretty exciting both to watch and to play! My point is not to try to convert you to being a curling fan; the Lord will do that in good time!
Here’s something I noticed, though, watching the curling trials from Winnipeg last weekend: there are a lot of familiar names with slightly different 
faces.
So what? you might ask.
When I see the same surname on a different face, I’m usually looking at the next generation. Take John Morris, skipping a BC team, whose father was a competitive curler, and who now coaches a women’s team; or Scott Howard, playing for his father, Glenn, in Ontario. The passion for curling is strong enough that the next generation wants to take it on.
I think the church can learn something from competitive curling.
In Deuteronomy 6.4-9, we read: “Listen, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (NLT).
Way back in the time of Moses, God’s people were enjoined to make their faith-sharing organic: they were called to make their walk with God a family affair. It’s no different today. What is different, though, is the circumstances around which we seek to follow this command. There are so many influences on our kids’ lives nowadays that the task of being a Christian parent is about the hardest job known to humanity; I salute every man and woman who seeks to follow Jesus and encourage their children to do so. And I pray for parents who seek to raise their children to be followers of Jesus. One of the things I pray for parents is that they will have such joy and enthusiasm for their faith that their kids will want a taste of that joy and enthusiasm for themselves.
If you’re trying to help your kids love Jesus, show them how much you love him! I’m in your corner; you’ve got a tough job. But more importantly, God is with you.
Zechariah: Stunned Silence
Today, we began our Advent/Christmas series on characters around Jesus’ birth with the story of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist. Based on 
Luke 1.5-25, 53-80, you can listen to the message here:
The feast of St. Nicholas
Today is the Feast of St. Nicholas among our high-church friends, a day when the church marks the remembrance of a church leader whose heart for giving has become legendary…so legendary that, like many stories, it has been warped and changed into something it was never intended to be.
Indeed, St. Nicholas, the ancient Christian bishop known for great benevolence, has, for so many, become Santa Claus, the Coca-Cola drinking poster-
boy for consumerism at its worst.
Think about it: the figure of Santa Claus is not a Christian symbol of giving, but an icon of hope for commercial endeavour. Had there been no St. Nicholas to morph, there would be no “Black Friday”, the day retail businesses begin to make a profit for the year. It is no small irony that Black Friday occurs the day after American Thanksgiving, when over 300 million people set aside time to be grateful for all that they have, only to be enticed by sales to trample over people to get – what? – more.
St. Nicholas was not about more. And St. Nicholas did not give only to “deserving girls and boys”. No, Nicholas’ benevolence stretched beyond adding to the storehouses of the deserving to meeting the basic necessities of the truly needy.
For many in North American society, Jesus’ birthday celebration has become an opportunity to accumulate more rather than to extend grace and kindness to others, as Nicholas did.
I encourage you, today, to celebrate the feast of St. Nicholas by treating Advent and Christmas as seasons not of spending money immoderately, but of extending grace lavishly.
Jesus said, “Take care! Protect yourself against the least bit of greed. Life is not defined by what you have, even when you have a lot” (Luke 12.15, The Message).
By the way, thanks to everybody who prayed for my wife and me while we were in Israel. We arrived home safely last night, and are still processing the trip!
The Old City
Today, we spent most of the day in the old city of Jerusalem, and in some important Christian sites. We began at the Western Wall, where faithful Jews come to pray; it is the only area of the Jerusalem Temple still standing, and faithful Jews pray there, nearest where the Holy of Holies once stood in the temple. Then we went through some tunnels once used for the conveyance of water, seeing some remarkably old architecture.
We visited the pools of Bethesda, where people went to receive ritual cleansing and healing. A very old church building stands near there, the Church of St. Anne, which has gorgeous acoustics. We sang a few hymns there, and listened to the echo! (You can watch a video of our singing here, courtesy of one of my colleagues on this journey.)
We crossed the Kidron Valley to visit Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed to be released from the cup of suffering, and where he was ultimately betrayed by Judas. We visited the church which stands where Jesus would have been tried and beaten by Caiaphas, including a dungeon in which Jesus may have been housed for his flogging.
We then walked the Via Dolorosa, tracing the steps where Jesus carried his cross toward Golgotha, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The rock where Jesus was crucified remains exposed within this church, and the tomb in which he was buried can be seen from within the same church complex. Many go to visit the rock of Calvary and the tomb, though, of course, Jesus is not there.
Where he did appear, the Upper Room, was another place we visited. The Upper Room was turned into a Christian synagogue not long after the resurrection (probably after the destruction of the temple in AD 70). We know it was a Christian synagogue because it was shaped like a synagogue, and instead of being oriented toward the temple, it was oriented toward the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site where the crucifixion took place! After the conquering of Jerusalem by the Muslims, it became a mosque, and now is largely guarded by the Israeli ministry of religion as a tourist site. It was quite moving to sing God’s praise in the very room where Jesus and his friends had their final Passover meal together, and where the Holy Spirit descended on the first believers; the birthplace of Jesus was Bethlehem, and the birthplace of the church is the Upper Room!
It was a busy day, and we were glad to get on the bus to travel back to the hotel after what I’d call the longest 7 km walk of my life. But it was a very special walk indeed.
Jerusalem and Bethlehem
Yesterday, we began our day with a visit to the Bible Lands Museum, including the Shrine of the Book. This place boasts a 1:50 scale model of the old city in the time of the second temple, and is very impressive (though, alas, a bit too big to add to my HO [1:87] scale railway empire).
The Shrine of the Book holds several of the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls on permanent display, as well as the scroll of Isaiah, which was preserved in its entirety. Many of the scrolls which were fragmented were cut up by the Romans when they overtook the Essene communities at Qumran; the Isaiah scroll was not found by them, so it survived intact.
Later, we went to the Old City and explored some ancient aqueducts, watercourses prepared in Canaanite and Davidic times as well as in the time of Hezekiah. Their versions of sewer and water mains built the foundation for what allows us fresh water intake and adequate drainage of waste today. At the Bible Lands Museum, we saw two sections of a water “pipe”, cut out of stone. These were shaped square stone sections that fit together, with a groove on one end and a flange on the other. Remarkable engineering for thousands of years ago!
We stood by the site of the pool of Siloam, where the blind man washed the mud Jesus put over his eyes, so he could see. We came up from there to the base of the Western Wall of the temple. The size of the stones cut to build that place were as remarkable as Josephus said they were! To stand on the remnants of the temple steps, where Jesus himself stood to teach, was a moving moment. Those steps were cut in such a way that you could never run up them; each step had to be purposeful. I think this was done by design, to make the ascent to the temple a prayerful act.
From there, we said good-bye to our tour guide for the rest of the day, and carried on into Palestinian territory, into Bethlehem. We stopped at the Nissan family shop, a souvenir shop specializing in hand-carved olive wood objects, while we waited for our Palestinian tour guide to take us to the Church of the Nativity. This visit was quite interesting, as we were able to see some ancient art in the building, and visit the grotto where many believe Jesus was born (directly on the spot). It was under this building, in a cave, where Jerome translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin.
Another long, but immensely interesting day!
Judea
Yesterday, we left the serene shores of the Sea of Galilee and headed south. (Actually, those shores were not all that serene; there was a wicked wind storm going on, despite the clear skies, and had we had our boat ride on the lake that day, it would have been cancelled.) The night before had not been kind to me; multiple power outages left me awake at 3:00 a.m., unable to return to sleep.
Our journey south led us to Judea, via territory that is owned by Israel but largely occupied by Palestinian people. We passed through a ‘check point’, and while it looked like a border crossing in some respects, all we had to do was slow down; people coming out, on the other hand, were being interrogated. This is a very complicated land, politically.
We stopped first at the site where Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan. At this point in the river, flowing south from the Sea of Galilee, it is actually quite deep. I don’t think that’s always the case, but it really depends on the rainfall. There was a marker on the wall above the water where, in January of this year, the water crested – and it was probably fifteen feet higher than it was as we witnessed it.
The Orthodox, especially, consider this a holy site and have church buildings erected nearby – both in Israel and in Jordan, which is directly on the other side of the river. On both sides, structures have been erected to allow for pilgrims to be baptized (or, often, baptized again) in the very place where John baptized Jesus. Our leader pointed out a set of stone stairs on the Jordanian side which were put in place as early as the 300s, marking this spot as a pilgrimage site from the very early years of the church.
It was interesting that at this Christian religious site, both Israeli and Jordanian soldiers were present, with the Jordanian soldier being more obvious, right down near the water, automatic rifle in hand. These two nations seem to get along well right now, but this unique place along the border is perhaps the weakest spot in terms of the simple ability to gain entrance from one direction or the other. One could walk through the water from one side to the other without being carted off by the current without great difficulty – as long as one wasn’t afraid to face the barrel of a gun upon ascent.
From there we continued south through more Palestinian settlements – a lot of vegetable growing happens in this area, thanks to irrigation – and stopped at the caves of Qumran. When that Bedouin shepherd threw a rock into a cave back in 1947, he expected to hear a bleat, not a crack. What he discovered were clay jars filled with scrolls and fragments which contained almost the entire Old Testament, along with a number of other significant historical writings. These were stored there for safe-keeping by the Essene community, a sect of zealous Jews that died out in the early years of the last millennium. What those scrolls did for biblical scholarship was nothing short of amazing, proving that the faithfulness of scribes and God in the maintenance of the integrity of biblical documents was greater than any had imagined.
Following this historically and religiously significant stop, we visited that most unique of tourist sites, the Dead Sea. The mineral content of the Dead Sea is such that it can house no life, and the water’s ‘heaviness’ enables anyone – even me! – to float effortlessly. The shore has such a coating of salt on it that it looks like a thin, sugary icing. But just being near the water and licking your lips assures you that it is decidedly not sugary. The mineral content of this water is such that if you don’t shower off when you get out, you’ll regret it until you do! Folks with a variety of skin ailments find the waters of the Dead Sea quite soothing. While there’s nothing especially faith-filled about a trip to the Dead Sea, it is one of those unique opportunities that ought not to be missed if one is travelling in Israel.
Continuing south, through the Judean desert, we came upon a large rock overlooking the Dead Sea: Masada. It was here that Herod had a great palace. Jewish zealots overtook the community, and when the Romans went to retake it – building a ramp that was a feat of engineering for its day – the occupiers decided to kill their own rather than be taken back into slavery. A few women and children survived to tell the story, recorded in the writings of Josephus. Masada remains today as a symbol of Jewish nationhood and pride, despite its history. Our tour guide gave a very impassioned testimony of how he sees Masada as an Israeli.
Tired from a long day, we made our way up to Jerusalem, through a traffic jam – in the middle of the Judean desert! – and arrived at our hotel for the night. I remarked to myself that hearing the whine of the bus engine as we climbed our way into the Holy City gave me a fresh appreciation for the Psalms of Ascent. People really did have to climb a long way to get to Jerusalem!
Passionately His 