by Christie Purifoy | Dec 21, 2011 | Advent, God's promises, Jesus, Scripture
Do not be afraid (Luke 2:10).
Those words still echo from the day of his birth. How is it that we forget? Why do we close our ears?
We busy ourselves with words, with rules, with judgements and controversies. We worry. And, yes, we continue to live lives rooted in fear.
Afraid we’re doing it wrong. Afraid we’ll lose it all. Afraid someone will find out. Afraid there’s nothing to look forward to.
Afraid, afraid, afraid.
We set up our fences. We wonder who’s in, who’s out. We criticize. We condemn.
Why?
When he had risen from the dead the command was the same: Do not be afraid (Matthew 10).
How would you live if you believed there was no need to ever be afraid?
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 14, 2011 | Advent, Jesus, Scripture, Waiting
I can’t say with certainty what kind of Messiah the Jewish people were waiting for two thousand years ago. However, I’m fairly sure that Jesus was not it.
I imagine that many were waiting for a powerful king. A revolutionary. A fiery-tongued savior with a sword in his hand.
What they got was a carpenter from Nazareth who spent his time with the wrong sort of people.
I’m sure that if any of the disciples had been told before meeting Jesus that their Messiah would turn out to be a local carpenter who turned the other cheek, they would have been disappointed. What about the glorious daydream they’d worked up during the long years of their wait? Why couldn’t God do it that way? What kind of promised-kept was this?
And yet, I doubt that any of those men felt disappointed as they began to preach after Pentecost. I think they would have said that the Jesus-who-is far outshines the small revolutionary of their earlier imaginings. By then, they could see reality with God’s own eyes, like Stephen, who “looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55).
God’s plans often surprise us. It seems they rarely play out exactly as we’ve pictured. And yet, I do not think it is a matter of trading our beautiful hopes for God’s slightly-less-exciting version. Ultimately, this life is not about the sacrifices we make for God. It’s about God’s unbelievably good love for us.
Accepting God’s version may sometimes look like settling for less, but it is always, always more. It is always better.
Jesus was and is the ideal Messiah. A king and a servant. A lion and a lamb.
God has long been writing the perfect story. In the world. In our lives. At Advent we remember how good the story is. We also remember that we haven’t even made it to the ending yet. The villain has not yet been vanquished.
“And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming” (2 Thessalonians 2:8).
The world’s happily-ever-after is not yet here, but it is breaking in. Can you see it?
by Christie Purifoy | Dec 6, 2011 | Advent, Jesus, Scripture, Waiting
Living in a one-hundred-year-old apartment in the city, we took our baths in a narrow, enameled tub. Back then, I found the idea of a jetted, whirlpool bathtub very appealing. I live in suburbia now, and I have just such a tub. Alas, the reality is less exciting than the fantasy.
I think I tried using the jets once. As it turns out, I don’t much like soaking in bubbles with the sound of a motor in my ears. Now the jets only get turned on when the big kids want to terrify the two-year-old during bathtime.
Even worse, without an apartment-building-sized boiler, we don’t actually have enough hot water to fill this fancy whirlpool bath to the top. I’ve learned the hard way to open only the hot water tap and not to let it run past halfway, lest I find myself with a tub full of lukewarm water.
Still, I do occasionally indulge (minus the jets and with the tub less than full). Recently, my soak was disturbed by the shrieks of my arguing children. I sank down beneath the water hoping to block out the noise and was surprised by the enveloping silence.
Immediately, I was a kid again. At what other stage of life do you spend so much time going pruney beneath the bathwater or shutting out the sounds of Marco-Polo cries at the swimming pool?
I’d forgotten how loud this kind of watery silence actually is. There is a whole other world in this silence: the rush of blood, the wheeze of each breath. It is a noisy world within a world, though it is generally unnoticed, unheard.
I typically imagine silence to be a kind of emptiness. A kind of nothingness.
The gap between Old and New Testaments suggests that God was silent for many, many years before the birth of his son.
I wonder what this silence signified. Emptiness? Distance? Or, could it have been, a world within a world?
When the infant Jesus was presented at the Temple, there were two waiting for him. Two, prepared to recognize and honor him: Simeon and Anna.
In these two we glimpse the truth. God’s silence weighed so heavy on them that they knew he was neither distant nor inactive. They knew their Christ was coming.
One day, he arrives. The silence erupts. The angels sing.
On this day, many can see what had always been there unnoticed and unheard. Songs of joy and prayers of thanksgiving are lifted to the heavens over one tiny head.
But Simeon and Anna are not surprised. They have long been listening to the sound of blood pumping and breath rising. They know that God’s silence is anything but empty.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 30, 2011 | Advent, Faith, God's promises, Jesus, Scripture, Waiting
The Bible is an often cacophonous, centuries-long conversation with God about the things of God, but some of its most powerful voices have spoken to us out of darkness.
There is Job, who understood that God himself had “blocked” his way and “shrouded” his paths “in darkness” (Job 19:8).
There is Jeremiah, lifelong witness to unimaginable chaos, suffering, and loss.
Both stared into the darkness of their lives, darkness willed by the God they faithfully served, and saw … something good. But also something so mysterious they could not name it.
God spoke to Job from the darkness of a storm, and Job received wisdom, like a spark of light. “I know that you can do all things; no plan of yours can be thwarted,” Job responded. “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42: 2,3).
With the sound of weeping in his ears, Jeremiah received a glorious yet inexplicable vision: “The Lord will create a new thing on earth – a woman will surround a man” (Jeremiah 31: 22).
In darkness, they were given Light.
And we who live on the other side of the mystery, we who are citizens of a kingdom Job and Jeremiah could only dream of, who are we to despair? Who are we to lose hope?
We, too, are promise-bearers. For, we know: He will come again.
“And we have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”
2 Peter 1:19
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by Christie Purifoy | Nov 17, 2011 | Family, God's Love, Grace, Jesus, motherhood, Scripture, Stories, Uncategorized
A brief story about a Purity Ball in my Sunday newspaper catches my attention. There is an image (a church altar decked in lace like a bridal veil) and there are words spoken by a twelve-year-old girl (“I’m saving my purity for my husband”), and I feel troubled, as if there is a small pebble in my shoe.
I don’t know why I am troubled. These are my people, after all. We speak the same church-y language, we love the same Lord. And goodness knows we need more fathers like this one, fathers who dance with their daughters and whisper prayers over their heads.
It would be easy to keep turning the pages, forget the nagging pebble, but I do have an eight-year-old daughter, after all. I hold the paper still and say to the sky, “Lord, do you have wisdom for a firstborn girl raising a firstborn girl? I’m troubled, and I don’t know why.”
And I can’t say if it’s an answer to my prayer but what comes to me is a story: the woman at the well. The woman with five husbands and one who wasn’t even that. Considering her, I decide that she wasn’t created for a husband (or five). She was created for Jesus.
In fact, she was so highly esteemed by him that Jesus chose her to be the first to hear his earth-shattering news: the Messiah you have longed for is here. I am He.
I want to take this lovely twelve-year-old girl by the hand, look her in the eyes, and try to explain (but how to explain?) that purity isn’t some thing wrapped up in a box. It isn’t a commodity exchanged for a price. It’s a fire, it’s a light, it’s a fountain, and, yes, it turns the values of this world upside down because it’s holy and it’s a sacrifice.
What I would try to say is something like this: purity is a renewable gift, not a thing to grow dingy and worn (though I’m not quite sure who is the giver and who it is that receives, is it me? Is it Jesus?).
But the best news of all? Husband or no, you are invited to live the kind of love story in which even a prostitute can be the belle of the ball.
So, dear little girl, may your light shine, may my light shine, may the light given my daughter and my sons shine and shine. For He is ours, and we are His.
Good news.
by Christie Purifoy | Nov 4, 2011 | Jesus, Scripture, Uncategorized
How’s that for a title? Did it draw you in? Turn you off?
To be honest, I’m trying not to care whether or not His name is an effective lure for a blog post. I’m trying not to care because I’ve realized something important: it’s all about Him, but I make it about so many other things.
I’ve tended to think that this is a problem for “those other” Christians (and, I promise you, there will always be “others” in this gorgeously diverse body of Christ).
I point my finger at an earlier generation of believers and say, “Thanks to you, too many people in this country think Christianity is about right-wing politics, pseudo-science, celebrity preachers, and churches that look like clones of corporate America.” I may be the quiet, introverted type, but I’m quite good at pointing fingers, even if only in my own mind.
However, I’ve been convicted (a heavy, old-fashioned word, right? Yet, I think it’s the only one to use). I, too, have made this believing life to be about so many other things: social justice, creation care, orphan care, free-trade coffee … well, you get the idea.
Surely those are good things? Justice for the poor, caring for widows and orphans: aren’t these necessary components of a religion that pleases our maker?
Yes, I’m quite sure that they are. I’m not about to buy chocolate harvested by trafficked African children, and the grief I personally feel over abortion and capital punishment can’t be untangled from my Christian spirituality.
And yet … I’m beginning to see how a commitment to good things (to causes, to ideals) is not exactly the same thing as a commitment to Him. To Jesus. One certainly flows from the other, but they are not interchangeable.
If someone asks, “What is Christianity all about? What does it have to offer?” the right answer is “Jesus,” not “feeding the hungry” (though that doesn’t, for one minute, let me off the hook for feeding the hungry).
I pray that my life speaks on behalf of justice for the least of these. I must do (and keep on doing) some serious self-reflection about the size of my house, and the overflowing state of my children’s toyboxes (not to mention my own closet). In my view, following Jesus demands these responses. Yet, I can no longer live as if this is the heart of the Good News that Jesus came to preach.
The treasure we’ve been given, the treasure we should be proclaiming, the treasure we should always be giving away … is Jesus himself. Emmanuel. God with us.
I have hardly begun to see how this Jesus-centered faith will reveal itself in my life. Is it only semantics? What, really, needs to change?
I can point to small things. Reading the Bible with my kids, I try not to reduce the story of Noah and the ark to a moral lesson about obedience or trust. Jesus told us that Scripture was all about Him, and I want to take that seriously. I want my kids to see Noah and his ark, not in isolation, but as a part of one beautiful, world-changing Jesus story (thank you, The Jesus Storybook Bible!). I’m also grateful to attend a church where the Eucharist (Communion, Lord’s Supper) is not an afterthought but the highlight of our weekly gathering. The sharing of this Jesus-meal is the purest, most compelling sermon we can preach. It communicates perfectly to seeker and believer, child and adult.
I sense that there’s more … much more. What a relief to know that this is not merely one more theological knot to untangle. This is not one more item to check off of some spiritual to-do list.
This is far more personal because it’s all about a person; it was, is, and always will be about the One who sits enthroned. Jesus.
