Unexpected Encounters: Mystery

12/22/24 • 35 min

Advent, in other words, is a time for wondering and marveling at the Christ child and a time for wrestling with the mystery of life's hard questions like, how, and why, and when? And just to wrap this up, this is not some psychological cathartic purge so we can really enjoy Christmas dinner. This is our faith in action. This is the Christian faith; not sugary, not phony, not surface level, not dabbling here and there, not, oh yeah God's cool, it's not that. This is our faith in the action of real life, where there's real pain, no matter what time of year it happens to be. Confidence we might say, in the reality of God's presence with us. Confidence in the knowledge, and I use that word on purpose. Confidence in the knowledge, the reliable knowledge, that in Jesus, as Simeon said, “our eyes have seen our Salvation”, a light for revelation.

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Unexpected Encounters: Listening

God speaks to whomever he wants to speak, about whatever he wants to speak, whenever he wants to speak to them. The message isn't about how to make God speak to us more. What we're talking about here is how to put ourselves in a posture to listen. To hear when he speaks. And I don't know about you, but if I am predisposed to not want to do what God says, and yes sometimes I'm not. Did you hear that, he's a pastor? The pastor doesn't want to do what God asks him to do sometimes, shocking! But when I am predisposed to not want to do what he says, I'm more inclined to avoid him. Like take literal steps to avoid him. To make myself unavailable when his number pops up on my phone. I'm much more likely to let it go to voicemail, and then conveniently forget to check it. But I've also experienced the opposite. I've also experienced those times and seasons where I've practiced saying yes. Stepping out in faith when I think I hear God asking me to do something, even when it's scary. Even when it feels, at first, like I'm actually losing something. And every time I do, I relearn the lesson, that truly His yoke is easy, His burden is light, He does not lay anything too heavy or unfitting on me. And every step of obedience I've taken, always ends up leading me in the right direction. Sure, God comes and asks these people to do some pretty crazy things in these stories, but man, when they said yes to Him, what a ride! What an adventure! And I believe that those adventures, those experiences, those encounters with God, are available. Available to us, right now, right here, where we are, if only we would listen.

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Unexpected Encounters: Seeking

All the time, Jesus the Messiah, the one born King of the Jews and of the entire universe for that matter, lay helpless as a baby born to a poor unimportant family, lying in obscurity, literally just a few miles away from Jerusalem. And however tempting it might be to look at Herod, and the Magi, and Snicker, and comment, like the emperor that wasn't wearing any clothes. Probably better, is to see ourselves in this meeting. This meeting between these fake kings. You see, our whole society is like that. People trying to impress each other, with their money, with their degrees, with their accomplishments, their sports team affiliations, how well their portfolio is doing, how attractive their boyfriend or girlfriend is, how smart their children are. And us religious people, we're probably worse of all. Constantly trying to pretend that we are better than we actually are. That we know more than we know. That we are certain, more than we are actually certain. We are half breeds and frauds pretending to be kings. The good news of course is that we don't have to live that way.