I spent last Thursday and Friday in and around Montvale, New Jersey, a bucolic burg just minutes from the New York state line. Why? Because not only is Julie a preacher's wife, but I am a Vice-President's husband.  She is VP of sales for Pentax Medical USA with headquarters up there in Northern New Jersey.  And this past Friday was the company's annual Christmas party.  Since it is Julie's first holiday season with Pentax, it made sense for me to make the trip, join the party, and meet her new colleagues. Here are five thoughts from two days in NNJ:

1. Northern New Jersey is nice.  If you fly into Newark and survey the surrounding landscape, all the New Jersey jokes seem to make sense.  It is old, congested, and distressed.  Yet thirty minutes north and it's another world: wooded, verdant, and dotted with lovely homes and neighborhoods.  It's so nice that former President Richard Nixon spent his final years in nearby Saddle River, NJ.
2. Northern New Jersey is cold.  Some of you know I lived in New Jersey (the central part) for seven years -- four in college and three thereafter.  It wasn't long before I realized why I left.  Not just the bitter cold but the howling wind.  It made me realize again why so few people save up their money so they can retire in the North.
3. Getting out of the office is a great way to get work done.  What to do on a day when Julie was in the office and I was left alone before the party?  It's not like I was going to sit by the pool.  I had brought some of my best study materials and used the time to get started on a series that will be called The Path Of Most Resistance.  Relatively few distractions; relatively more concentration with a bible, pen, and paper.  It's one of my favorite ways to spend a day.
4. The world is involved in medical sales.  Pentax is even more full color than Good Shepherd.  I met Pakistanis, Puerto Ricans, Taiwanese, and Tennesseans among others.  I even met a few natives of Northern New Jersey.
5. They ain't got no Chic-Fil-A.  At least none that I saw.

What do you get when you combine . . . A classic Union County saying, John's epic version of the Christmas story (don't blink or you'll miss it), A "stand up" invitation, and A John Piper (yes, UMCers!) inspired insight that he who had no beginning began everything? You get God Drops In, a sermon that landed at this bottom line: Spirit took on skin so he could take on sin. _____________________________________________ Back in Union County where I served in the 90s, people would often conclude a conversation with “Come see us.” It was sort of the aftermath of “bye” and sort of the equivalent of “see you later.”  “Come see us,” as they or I stepped into the car or elevator or office.  And, motivated by both guilt & performance like I am, I immediately assumed the worst: “Am I not visiting enough?”  “Do I need to be in the community more?”  “What am I doing WRONG?!?!”  And then, and then, I learned through the community grapevine that if you grew up in those parts, “Come see us” meant something else entirely.  It actually means, “this conversation is over & please don’t come over to my house!”  So in the nuanced manners of the rural south “come see us” is actually a subtle way of saying, “no, don’t.  Don’t come see us, don’t come over, DON’T. DROP. IN.”  And now . . . every one of you in line will shake my hand & say “Come see us!”               And I can’t help but think that, when it comes to the prospect of God coming to earth, we in so many words & thoughts are like “come see us!”  which means, of course, DON’T.  Why would we want God to visit and therefore hamper our efforts to be our own gods?  Yet as we open up John, a gospel who begins the Xmas story not in a manger but in outer space, not in Bethlehem but with the Big Bang, we see that God waits for neither our permission nor our invitation.  And as we open these words – really just digging into four verses – I do so with fear & trembling.  Because how in the world can what I say measure up to what is beyond measure?  How can I shed light on what is already gleaming with brilliance?  How can I do justice to that which is more than just? Talk about inspired, eternal, & true, talk about worthy of elevation, nowhere are those words and that action more applicable than in John 1.                  Because look at John 1:1:    In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.     In the beginning was the Word.  And let me let the cat out of the bag here and now:  the “Word” is Jesus in his pre-embodied state.  See, John knows that the Greeks in his audience are looking for great wisdom and the Jews in his group are searching for great power and the word “Word” sums both of them up perfectly.  It actually sounded like logos (Ew!  Do a greek-ish reading of it that day?)  which is where we get “logical.”  But now that you know “Word” is Jesus, look at what it says about him:  In the beginning was the Word . . . It does NOT say, “The Word began.”  “The Word launched when . . .”  Pointedly says neither of those things; instead, it’s in the beginning the Word – Christ, Jesus, the babe in the manger, the Savior on the cross – was ALREADY THERE.  You know what that means?  Jesus never had a beginning.  He. Always.  Was.                Think about that!  What else do you know that had no beginning.  I mean, I began on Nov. 14, 1961 (actually, nine months before that, right?, so . . . Happy Valentine’s!).  You began.  The church began.  The world began.  Charlotte began.  LakeWylie began.  Everything started and launched.  Except the startER and launchER.  Everything began except ONE THING.  Or one ONE.  He never not was.  Inconceivable, incomprehensible.  And … take-it-to-the-bank TRUE.  Then, after John has started his masterpiece by blowing our minds, sort of like when the Millennial Falcon goes to Light Speed, John repeats and deepens his praise in 1:2-3:   ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.   So Jesus predates the beginning, he predates the predate, and in Spirit form he has by the power of his word called everything into being.  (BTW, both Hebrews & Colossians echo this – Jesus saves the creation he spoke into existence).  He who has not beginning BEGAN EVERYTHING.  Whew.               And then, and then, John tells his Xmas story.  You ready to hear all about mangers & donkeys & starts & Bethelehem & no room in the inn?  Well, it ain’t here!  You’ve got to go to Luke & Mt for that (see? It’s a LIBRARY!).  John’s Xmas story is 1:14a:   The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.   That’s it?  YES!  That’s it!  When you’ve started Jesus’ story at the Big Bang, that’s enough.  Big Bang becomes bouncing baby!  It’s brilliant.  Jesus’ birth in a nutshell:  the Word, Spirit, eternal, invisible, somehow enters a teenage girl’s womb and becomes flesh, skin, temporal, and oh-so-visible.  The UnBegun assumes an embryonic beginning!  Word became flesh and what I want you to k now is what comes next:  “he made his dwelling among us.”  Not above us, not around us, not in spite of us, but among us.  He dropped in & set up camp!  The world was like “come see us (not)” and he was like, “you got no choice.”  The spirit took on skin.               But why?  Why drop in?  To teach, to be example, to motivate, to chastise?  Nope.  Look at 1:14b: We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.   We beheld his glory, his “like Father, like Son”-ness . . . and you know what John tells us again & again & again is the Son’s glory?  His backwards, paradoxical journey to glory?  THE CROSS!  John says throughout his masterpiece that if you want to see the glory of the one who lit the Big Bang . . . you don’t need a telescope.  You need the cross.  God’s power is up there and it’s on there.               Why?  Because you didn’t invite him and you didn’t welcome him but you have a sin problem the needs dealing with and in God’s wisdom & grace & love the cross is where that happened.  We see, even in John, that the crucifixion is built into the nativity.  The word became flesh because that torn, bloody flesh on the cross was God’s ultimate sign of glory.  Here’s really what it means in John 1:14 when God drops in:  Spirit took on skin so that he could take on sin.  That’s it!  He didn’t drop in to visit, to chat, even, ultimately, to teach.  He came to rescue.  Every Sunday is a reunion of the rescued as Jessica LaGrone says.  John 1:14’s Xmas story brilliantly & eternally captures not only the beginning of all things but the beginning of the JESUS thing.  Spirit took on skin so that he could take on sin.               See, if our great need had been learning, God would have sent a teacher.  If our great need had been peace, he would have sent a negotiator.  If our great need had been money, he would have sent an economist.  But our great need – whether you realize it or not – is forgiveness, so he sent a Savior.  Hallelujah, he sent a Savior!  Spirit took on skin so that he could take on sin.               Because listen:  we typically don’t take sin on.  We give in to it.  We try to get away with it.  We rationalize it.  But whether we know it or not, it shackles us and burdens us and separates us.  Right now, some of you are in the middle of broken, separated relationships – from spouses, ex-spouses, siblings, parents, friends – and the root cause of that separation is sin.  Maybe yours, maybe theirs, probably both. That’s what sin does.  It divides & separates.  And we’re not strong enough to take it on and TAKE IT DOWN on our own.  That’s why we need an advocate, a defender to take it on for us.  Which is what Jesus did on the cross, in his glory.               This headline just made laugh:    Americans: Heaven and Jesus, Sure. Hell and Sin, Not So Much (AV)   Turns out that 61% of ppl in the US believe Jesus is divine and a whopping 60% believe we’ll be reunited with loved ones in heaven.  Yea!  But 64% EVEN OF CHURCHGOERS think all religious paths get you to that heaven and, even more to the point, only 4 in 10 believe there is a hell.  And 65% believe that while everyone sins, most people are inherently good.  Most people are inherently good.               No. We’re. Not.  Poll responding Americans are believing in a half Gospel – and it’s actually the back half.  We’re about the full Gospel at Good Shepherd and it’s the kind of good news that can only be embraced when you accept the bad.  We’re made in God’s image, yes, but through sin both natural and chosen we’re alienated from that image and separated from that God.  The reason we said to him “come see us (not)” is that we were perfectly fine serving as our own God.  That is the pinnacle of sin.  So the whole gospel acknowledges that whole mess and then celebrates what John says about our Drop In God.  He drops in to live among us, it’s with a purpose and the purpose is this:  Spirit took on skin so that he could take on sin.               And that “dwelt among us.”  Do you know how incomparable that is?  To enter into the dirt & grime and blood & guts of the human experience?  Starting with, um, being born?!  He got down and dirty in order to deliver.  This is particularly unthinkable in Islam, where Jesus is a prophet.  But in Islam prophets are so revered and honored that they can never die such an undignified death as one on the cross.  So the Koran states that Jesus only “seemed” to die or that it was actually someone else up there dying.  They want to preserve Jesus’ dignity by protected him from a gruesome death on the cross.  What they don’t understand is that the gruesomeness is not only his dignity; it’s his glory!  There’s glory in the gore and beauty in the blood!  He understands everything that his people – you and me! – go through because he’s lived it.  Among us, AS ONE OF US, in the neighborhood.  Not above us in judgment.  Among us in redemption.  He dropped in not to chat, not to role model, but to take on our great enemy of sin:  Spirit took on skin so that he could take on sin.               It’s kind of interesting: in our day, we have a struggle convincing people Jesus was DIVINE.  Almost everyone believes he existed; fewer believe he was God in the flesh.  We often go to John 1 to, as they say, prove his divinity.  And yet do you know what John was correcting?  Not divinity deniers; humanity deniers!  People who were on board with the Big Bang Jesus; they just couldn’t quite hang with the flesh and blood one.  Hey – you deny either one, humanity or divinity, and you’re missing the mark.  He was human because he had to live it to redeem it; he was divine because he had to be greater than it to conquer it.  Spirit took on skin so that he could take on sin.               That’s really the Divine Drop In.  Xmas doesn’t happen because God wanted to make a good world better.  To make a nicer world nicer.  He wanted to make a dead world alive.  A sin sick world forgiven.  I pray that drop in brings perspective to this wacky season of life.  Which makes me think about that woman who was a worn out Xmas shopper waiting for an elevator in the department store.  Any of those here?  She was at the mall, two small children hanging on her legs asking for more stuff & more bling, battling other shoppers for the best deals & the shortest lines, dreading the walk to her car in the lot, when the “ding” rang and the elevator opened.  Full, of course, but there was room for her & children to squeeze in.               As she did and the doors closed, she said, “Whoever started this whole Xmas thing should be found, strung up, and shot.”                From the back of the elevator a small voice replied, “Don’t worry. We already crucified him.”               And so we did.  And it was his moment of glory to reserve your place in glory.  Spirit took on skin so that he could take on sin.               Stand up invitation with music bed in background

There have been a handful of mornings in ministry when I have had a strong desire to call in sick. Not on days that I've actually been sick, mind you. But days when the bed felt awfully warm. And there were some things on my schedule that I simply didn’t want to face. And I knew the days ahead were long. So I thought, “wouldn’t it be OK, just this once, to pretend like I’m sick?” Just spend the day reading the novel I’m enjoying, checking the Tennis Channel, maybe even working out. But no. There is the rather obvious matter of honesty. Once you start lying, then the lies begin to cascade down through the rest of your life. Yet there is an even more important reality: those things I didn’t want to face and those meetings I didn’t want to have would still be there whenever I came back from being “sick.” Better to address difficult things first rather than delaying what is inevitable. So I showed up. That’s a prerequisite for success anyway, isn’t it?

Ann Patchett's novel State Of Wonder opens with this: The news of Ander Eckman’s death came by way of Aerogram, a piece of bright blue airmail paper that served as both the stationary and, when folded over and sealed along the edges, the envelope.  Who even knew they still made such things?  This single sheet had traveled from Brazil to Minnesota to mark the passing of a man, a breath of tissue so insignificant that only the stamp seemed to anchor it to this world.  Mr. Fox had the letter in his hand when he came to the lab to tell Marina the news.  When she saw him at the door she smiled at him and in the light of that smile he faltered. "What," she said finally. He opened his mouth and then closed it.  When he tried again, all he could say was, "It's snowing. "I heard on the radio it was going to."  The window in the lab where she worked faced out into the hall and so she never saw the weather until lunchtime.  She waited for a minute for Mr. Fox to say what he had come to say.  She didn't think he had come all this way from his office in the snow, a good ten buildings away, to give her a weather report, but he only stood there in the frame of the open door, unable either to enter the room or stay out of it.  "Are you alright?" "Eckman's dead," he managed to say before his voice broke, and then with no explanation he gave her the letter to show her just how little about this awful fact he knew.   "Well," you're thinking, "that sure is nice writing and I am more than a little intrigued to find out what happened to this Eckman fellow and what is the deal between Mr. Fox and Ms. Marina, but what in the world does this have to do with your post title about reading the bible all wrong?" Quite a lot, as it turns out. Can you imagine what we would be doing to Patchett's breathless prose if we chopped it up into verses?  If it read something like this? (1) The news of Ander Eckman’s death came by way of Aerogram, a piece of bright blue airmail paper that served as both the stationary and, when folded over and sealed along the edges, the envelope.  (2) Who even knew they still made such things?  This single sheet had traveled from Brazil to Minnesota to mark the passing of a man, a breath of tissue so insignificant that only the stamp seemed to anchor it to this world.  (3) Mr. Fox had the letter in his hand when he came to the lab to tell Marina the news.  When she saw him at the door she smiled at him and in the light of that smile he faltered.   What had been seamless is now mechanical; what had been lyrical is now linear.  It's not the way Patchett writes (thank God), nor is it the way we read.  Dividing her prose up like that does violence to the beauty of her art. And to a large extent, that's what we do to both the theological brilliance and the literary artistry of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  We take their prose and we interrupt it by artificially dividing it into chapters and then micro-dividing it into verses . . . all of which were added between 1227 and 1551 AD (and AD is, of course AM, AM, AL, and AJ!). So . . . what to do?  Am I recommending all of us ditch our suddenly suspect chapter-and-verse bibles? No. But I DO recommend you add something like the NIV Books Of The Bible to your repertoire, as it is the complete text of the biblical library without the later additions of chapter and verse.     And then I recommend you read one of the Gospels -- start with Mark as it is both the shortest AND it's my favorite -- and read it in a single sitting.  Not a chapter per night.  Instead, snuggle up with a good read that tells epic history with a novelist's flair.  That's how you read the bible all right.

We had a wonderful night serving around Charlotte Sunday night for SRV CLT.  Good Shepherd and Steele Creek Church of Charlotte came together for the effort as we sent out 120 students, 35 adult leaders to 8 ministry locations.  Here are just a few of the things we did together:  

• Packed 80 food packs that will be given to kids at Lake Wylie Elementary & Steele Creek Elementary who wouldn’t have food over the weekend otherwise.
• Packed backpacks with 2,800 books for under-resourced kids in CMS through Restore Global.

 

• Organized winter coats and accessories for our homeless neighbors at the Harvest Center.
• Prepared and served a meal for families at Charlotte Family Housing.
• Prayed for our city and organized items at the 24-7 Prayer Center.
• Created tissue-paper flowers and sang Christmas carols to the residents of The Crossings in Steele Creek.
• Threw a Christmas party for 75 residents of Hope Haven complete with music and Christmas cookies.Gave away pizza & water to homeless in Uptown Charlotte.

  Overall, it was a great night and students left knowing that God was able to use them to share his love with others through simple acts (and hopefully grasping that he is willing to do that consistently through them if they are willing). One final story…one of the girls who helped to pack the food packs for our local schools shared during the crew discussion that it was personally impactful to her to do that because she was one of the kids who would receive those food packs every weekend when she was in elementary school.  Blessed to be a blessing—full circle. The invited are becoming inviters.