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David: The Lord’s Anointed

David: The Lord’s Anointed

by | May 10, 2023 | Featured, Headlines | 0 comments

What do Michalangelo, William Faulker, and Gregory Peck have in common? All of them have devoted significant time and effort to portray the biblical figure of David. If you think about it, some of our most famous sculptures, movies, and songs (Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” anyone?) have been inspired by David. His triumphs over Goliath and his failures with Bathsheeba are common knowledge, even if one isn’t familiar with the rest of his life. Considering how few people have actually read the Old Testament these days, that is saying something. 

This is no less true within the biblical narrative itself. Outside of Jesus, no human figure is talked about, referenced, or alluded to more than David. The Psalms are riddled with his name—as an author, or example, or symbol. The gospels include him in every genealogy. One of Jesus’ most popular titles was Son of David. Pretty much any time kings or kingdoms are mentioned, you can be sure David’s shadow looms large. 

And it all started in 1 and 2 Samuel. The author of that single scroll (the 1 and 2 were added later) was adamant that, like Abraham and Moses, David’s life represented a significant moment in the history of God’s people; and even though it would take 55 chapters to tell it, his story was critical to a life of faith. 

David was a shepherd, the youngest son of Jesse, whom no one believed would one day be king. He experienced the entire range of human emotion, from resounding triumph over Goliath, to rejection as he fled from Saul, from ascending to the throne in Jerusalem, to fleeing his own son who tried to kill him. He is, on the one hand, a man after God’s own heart, and on the other, a frail and fickle leader who fails his people time and again. 

Every detail of his life, and every chapter of 1 and 2 Samuel which records it, contain lessons, examples, and principles we can learn from. In our series on David, we want to explore as many of them as we can. But the most important thing David does is leave us wanting more, wanting better, wanting someone else. He is as good a king as we can hope for; and yet he isn’t nearly enough. He is like a first pass, a rough draft, that is so close, and yet so far away, from what it could be. 

He is the Lord’s anointed, the messiah, the king, but don’t let the pageantry fool you. David is human, weak, stubborn, and broken. He is a fellow pilgrim on the way to a higher country, an exile searching for a permanent homeland, flesh and blood longing for an other-wordly king. Join us in this series on David’s life as we explore the most indispensable lesson he taught us: we still need a King. 

A Love That Surpasses Valentine’s Day

A Love That Surpasses Valentine’s Day

by | Feb 8, 2023 | Featured, Headlines | 1 comment

In the third grade, Tiffany didn’t give me a Valentine’s Day card, and that’s when I decided I didn’t like Valentine’s Day. Even now, as a happily married man, Valentine’s Day simply fills me with a sense of dread that I’m going to forget it, not do it right, or not have time to plan something out. It isn’t that I don’t love my wife or don’t want to honor her; it’s that the whole holiday feels like Cupid’s tax on couples to prop up a “romance” cabal of card makers, florists, restaurant owners, and chocolatiers. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, and yes, I hear that “amen” from my single brothers and sisters in the back. 

 

Where Did Valentine’s Day Come From?

To justify my rejection of this holiday, I spent some time researching it. Where did Valentine’s Day even come from, and why do we do it? The answers, shockingly enough, made me fall in love again. 

Apparently, it started with the Romans, who celebrated a fertility festival called Lupercalia. I won’t regurgitate the details of what happened there, but I’m sure you can only imagine. This “festival” made a drunken sport of women for several days in early February without consequence. Like most Roman holidays, Lupercalia was hedonistic, oppressive, and dehumanizing. 

This went on for a long time. Then, in the third century, Emperor Claudius II executed a Christian man named Valentine, likely a priest, around the time of Lupercalia. Why he was executed is a subject of mystery. Some traditions say he was simply martyred for his faith. Others declare that he defied the emperor’s orders and performed weddings to help men avoid service in the Roman army. Some even say that Valentine wrote a note to his own jailer’s daughter, signed, “from your Valentine,” after befriending and healing her of blindness before his execution. 

 

A Christian Alternative

We don’t really know for sure what happened, but soon afterward Christians began celebrating “St. Valentine’s Day” as an alternative to Lupercalia. By the fifth century, Pope Gelasius I combined the two holidays in an attempt to stop the evil practices that had long characterized Lupercalia. Valentine’s Day was romanticized over the years, especially by Shakespeare and Chaucer in the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Eventually, writing cards to loved ones became a common practice. 

Valentine’s Day was nominally observed in the western world until 1913, when a small company in Kansas City called Hallmark began printing valentine cards, and the rest, they say, is history. 

 

Divine Love

All of this reminded me of something important, and something worth celebrating this Valentine’s Day, married, single, or somewhere in between. Despite what it has become today (and it’s fine if you like it), this holiday is actually a powerful statement. It’s a marker, not of the power of romantic love to bring happiness, but of divine love to bring transformation. It’s a reminder that the laying down of our lives as Christians, like St. Valentine, can change the most heinous human activities into celebrations of sacrificial love. We can trade beauty for ashes and a garland of praise for despair, as Isaiah taught us. St. Valentine’s love through death points to a love that surpasses all human loves, that no human power can ever stop. 

So however you celebrate this February 14 (and good luck getting a reservation), remember our dear friend Valentine, who changed an empire by pointing to a divine romance.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you who are deeply loved by God.

The Heavens Declare

The Heavens Declare

by | Nov 9, 2022 | Featured, Headlines | 1 comment

My son ripped open the present with all the glee that a child can muster early on Christmas morning. His Apaw (Grandpa) sent him something special: a telescope from National Geographic.

My son is a big science kid, and is especially interested in the stars and planets. That night, we set the telescope up on the back deck. The waning moon beamed down on the yard, so bright we saw shadows. Wrapped in jackets over pajamas, and boots over wool socks, he peered into a lens that peered into a lens that peered into a lens that magnified what no human eye could see. His breath caught as he stood stock-still. “Dad, I can see craters!” When he finally let me have a turn, I saw them, too. The sun’s light on the moon’s surface illuminated countless craters, scoops from rock and dirt thousands of miles away. Each one was thousands of years old and exactly as it appeared when it was young, a living photograph. There was a tug on my sleeve. “Dad?” As I pulled away from the telescope, my eyes came back to earth. “Can we do a star next?”

When the ancients considered the heavens, they were often afraid. It’s hard to blame them. The size and scope of it all, the blackness of the night sky, and the endless blue of the day, were no doubt hard to fathom without our modern instrumentation. It must have felt like standing at the edge of an endless cliff, right in front of you, without explanation, seemingly without beginning or end.

Humanity now stands on another such edge. We have launched the Webb telescope, factors of thousands more powerful than its predecessors, and by its mirrored eyes we see things hidden from the foundations of the world with razor sharp clarity. Beautiful, yes, but vast, seemingly infinite, and on its surface, empty and void of life.

The Scriptures admonish us that when we consider the heavens and the works of God’s hands, our response should not be fear. The heavens declare his glory, says Psalm 19, and we should worship God for his wonderful design. But I saw something in my son that day that made me wonder if we are missing something; something hidden between the whirring galaxies overhead.

It’s something G.K. Chesteron once quipped about Jesus., who pointed not only to the heavens, but to the lilies, the sparrows, and the details of our lives, reminding us that they said something profound about his Father. And yet, there was something Jesus could not tell us, something we were not ready for. Chesterton put it this way:

“There was something that [Jesus] hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was one thing that was too great for God to show us when he walked upon the earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was his [joy].”

The heavens declare his glory, no doubt, but I have also begun to wonder if they shout his joy, too. The universe, as it always has, will continue to befuddle us. Every new mystery unlocked leads to hundreds more. The more we see of it, the less we understand. The Scriptures, for their part, never tell us precisely what the heavens are, but they do tell us something of what they mean.

And I think they mean, in part, to give us a hint at God’s capacity for joy. Through this lens, we might begin to understand that the mind-bending size and scope of a galaxy so large it would take hundreds of millions of years for any human to traverse, simply means the galaxy was made for Someone else’s delight.

It may mean that the trillions of stars, nebulae, quasars, and black holes together represent a power, a design, and a joy that we simply are not yet ready for. It may even mean that when the apostle reminds us that there is a weight of glory to be revealed in each one of God’s children, that if we were to see it now, we would not believe he meant it. How could we believe it, when we can barely understand the stars themselves?

There are times, unlike my son, when I look in that telescope and recoil at what I see. The universe, we know, does not go on forever, but it might as well. The earth, this small rock in a small galaxy in a tiny corner of it all, seems pretty insignificant in comparison. It can make you feel lonely, isolated, and meaningless.

Life can do this, too. We may feel small compared to the news, our problems, our fears, and anxieties. Perhaps you find yourself discouraged today. Afraid. Out of control. Unseen or unknown. Remember with me that the heavens declare the glory of God, the joy and delight of God, which he promises one day to fully share. This life is preparing you for it. So keep waiting. Keep watching. Keep looking up.

 
Horror and Sinai

Horror and Sinai

by | Sep 21, 2022 | Featured, Headlines | 2 comments

I jumped off the boat and into the lake, my skin grateful for the cool of the water. I floated, face up, and closed my eyes. The sun burned red through the lids. There was no gravity, no up or down, or east or west, and my thoughts sailed off in the light breeze. All my cares melted away like the clouds in the afternoon heat. 

Then it touched me. My body coiled and wrenched my mind back to earth. I kicked my legs,  swiveled my neck, eyes darting down into the darkness around me. Something icy, slick, and fast had slithered up my back. 

Try as I might, I could not see more than a few inches below the surface. I couldn’t see my own feet, straining up against gravity’s slow snare. A sick feeling bloomed in my stomach and oozed to my fingers and toes. A feeling of smallness. A sense of incomprehensibility. A dread for the shapeless and nameless things that might lay below. I swam hard for the boat. 

Later, I gave the feeling a name: horror. 

Some version of this horror has probably found you, too. It creeps up from the darkness of the deep water. It steals in through the telescope pointed out into the emptiness of space. It falls down on the head looking up from the feet of mountains. It’s not the horror of Jason in slasher movies like Halloween. It’s not the cheap thrill of The Exorcist. It’s not even the suffocating fear of human depravity like Rear Window or Psycho. It’s the horror of the unknown – or more precisely – the unknowable. 

H.P. Lovecraft made a living on this form of horror. You may or may not know the name, but you’ve probably felt his influence. He is widely known as the father of cosmic horror, a sub-genre that does not so much play to our fears of death or pain, but to more existential dreads about our place in the universe, our smallness in comparison, and the sheer incomprehensibility of it all.

It is an effective form of horror because it is so deeply rooted in the human experience. It is, in fact, a form of horror we encounter in the biblical story. When Moses and the people come to Mount Sinai in Exodus 19, Israel meets the living God like this:

 [16] On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled. [17] Then Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they took their stand at the foot of the mountain. [18] Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke because the LORD had descended on it in fire. The smoke of it went up like the smoke of a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled greatly. [19] And as the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him in thunder. [20] The LORD came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain. And the LORD called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. [21] And the LORD said to Moses, “Go down and warn the people, lest they break through to the LORD to look and many of them perish.”

The sense of the story is terror inducing. To the ancient mind (and perhaps the modern one as well), a mountain was as permanent and as awesome as it gets. This is why so many places of worship were set atop a mountain. When God descends to Sinai in Exodus 19, and seems to consume it with fire, the people tremble at the power of God, who is bigger, and older, and higher even than the mountains themselves. It’s almost incomprehensible. It’s horror on a cosmic scale. 

The story is a reminder that God is, in the Lovecraftian sense, horrifying. To actually see God as he is, what he is capable of, his purposes and plans laid bare to our eyes, would obliterate us. When Isaiah is transported in a vision to God’s throne room (Isaiah 6:1-5), he is not fascinated or awe-inspired. He is undone. Lovecraft would approve. 

It is important, as I’ve reflected on this, to understand the horror of God. Not because he wants to hurt us or scare us, but because he is unknowable to us. He is higher, and deeper, and wider, and older than we are, and even older than the stars and the planets. The vastness of space still teaches the same lesson that Sinai did; who is this God even the quarks and the photons obey? 

If God were to turn our horror to awe, or even to worship, he would need to reveal himself, hide himself, in something much smaller, something weaker, something very much like a person. Something like Jesus of Nazareth. This is, after all, how the author of Hebrews understood the incarnation in chapter 12:

 [18] For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest [19] and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them…[22] But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, [23] and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, [24] and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

The Old and New Testaments, when read together, equally affirm how thin the line is between horror and worship. The whole thing ultimately pivots on the incarnation of Jesus. He is, in a sense, the line. He is the Word made flesh, the fire and lightning become skin, the unknowable made touchable. 

Lovecraft is only half-right: there is a dread just beyond our conscious thought that, when it slithers up our backs, can evoke a horror unlike almost any other, and that horror is a holy God in the presence of a sinful person. But in Jesus, our God reveals himself not to be the boogeyman, but the Son of Man; we do not fully know him, but he fully knows us. And when we finally see this “monster,” he does not confirm our worst fears, but defeats them. And our horror becomes awe. And our awe becomes love. And our love becomes worship.

Life Up in Smoke

Life Up in Smoke

by | Apr 20, 2022 | Featured, Headlines | 0 comments

“I think everyone should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” 


I have found myself returning often to this quote by actor Jim Carrey. It’s one of those sentiments that is really easy to nod along to, but hard for most of us “normal” people to believe. 

If you are like me, you would not say this aloud to anyone, even yourself. But there is something you want from life that you are sure, if you had it, would be the answer: more money, more time, good health, more confidence, better friends, less depression, prettier looks, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, that promotion, this car…on and on that list could go. But if the story of our lives were a simple fill in the blank, we probably all know how we would complete the sentence: “If I only had _______, then I would finally be happy.”

But paradoxically, many of those who have been lucky enough to achieve their dreams like Jim Carrey, look back to the rest of us and shake their heads. It didn’t work. They are just as broken, insecure, and unhappy as they have ever been, and in some cases, even more so.    

Carrey isn’t the first person to make this observation. In fact, thousands of years ago, the author of Ecclesiastes wrote the now famous words about the human pursuit of happiness: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” He knew it didn’t work, either. 

Whether we put our hope in wealth, pleasure, youth, workplace success, or even things like human justice and vindication, Ecclesiastes forces us to acknowledge, again and again, that we will ultimately be let down. At some point, we will find our lives up in smoke with no answers and nowhere to turn. And even if along the way we get the life we always wanted, we will find it wasn’t enough. 

But hidden in this bracing book, there is something, if we are open to it, that can lead to real satisfaction on the other side of our disappointments. We hope you will join us this spring as we start our sermon series on this amazing book of Ecclesiastes. It won’t always be easy, but there is wisdom on the other side. See you Sunday!