The Far Green Country

There is a real trouble with celebrating Christmas, but it is not the sort of thing you might expect. The trouble with Christmas is not that society says you have to keep religion to yourself (a statement usually made with a religious conviction all its own). Nor is the trouble with Christmas the fact that it has become so rabidly commercialized by secular culture. (Really, what did we expect?) Nor again is the trouble with Christmas the fact that we have to put up with so many hours of insipid music on the radio or movies on the television (though some of them may make you want to shoot your eye out). Nor, lastly, is the trouble with celebrating Christmas the fact that the Bible does not tell us to celebrate it.

The trouble with celebrating Christmas is that this world is a mess. Christ was born into a mess, and two thousand years later things seem to have only become worse – or at least, they haven’t seemed to improve much. Behind all the light-bedecked doors and beneath all the snow-covered roofs, people are still hurting. Some fathers in this world – maybe even in this city – cannot afford to feed their children properly, let alone buy them presents. Some mothers and children have lost husbands and fathers this year. Other families remain wholly alive physically, while living emotionally or spiritually apart – members doing their best to act dismembered. Still others walk alone, without family or friends with whom to celebrate – and to these, even God (if they know him) can seem awfully distant on a cold December night. In short, man’s inhumanity to man is still “dashing through the snow,” making you wonder – what exactly are we celebrating? For whom do the “jingle bells” toll, exactly?

Is celebrating Christmas all just a charade – a collective game being played to cover tears with tinsel? Is it simply an attempt to distract ourselves from death and sin with “brown paper packages tied up with string?” Or is there yet a reason – something real, something true to celebrate – even amidst the ruins?

The trouble with celebrating Christmas is that this world is still as messy as the night Christ was born. Yet the reason to celebrate Christmas is that this is not the end of the story. After thirty years of wading through this mess, Christ died a messy death. And here is where things get exciting: by his messy death, Christ owned this mess. All of this belongs to him now, and he is no derelict landlord. “Behold, I am making all things new.” From the moment he walked out of his tomb, Jesus has been taking ownership. He is working through his Word and Spirit even tonight – cleansing souls and reclaiming communities – and someday he will return in force to finish the job. This is what makes Christmas worth celebrating. This is why we sing, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” The world is still a mess, yes – but the world is now Christ’s mess.

“In a certain sense, the first three sacrifices [in Leviticus] are God-directed; they are propitiatory. The last two - the sin and the guilt offering - are sinner-directed. They’re expiatory; they cleanse away the accumulated guilt from the sinner, and it points us to the fact - as John says - the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. It not only placates the anger of God, but it cleanses us. And so anybody who is in Christ who has committed a sin and has confessed that sin has no reason to feel guilty about that sin. He has been cleansed. And that’s the good news. Part of the good news of the gospel is that if the sin’s been confessed, it’s been taken care of, and we no longer have the right (if you will) to beat ourselves up with it. And Satan no longer has the right to beat us up with it, because it has been washed away. God’s anger has been placated, and we have been cleansed.”

(Dr. Benjamin Shaw, “Sacrifices and Festivals in the Old Testament,” Christ the Center podcast, November 6, 2009. Available at http://reformedforum.org/ctc95/.)

Well, today is it. After nearly eight years of writing software, I am officially hanging up the compiler. It’s been a good run, and in many ways it is remarkable to me how much I have learned and was privileged to experience during this time. From an onerous beginning writing technical reports, to a height of creating a standalone 3D rendering API from scratch; from a callow intern in western Pennsylvania, to a plucky engineer giving coding lessons to international visitors; from a certified backwoods bumpkin to a member of a distributed, diverse software team; from a kid riding on backroads in the open back of pickup trucks, to an adult reasonably comfortable navigating the Byzantine honeycomb of the Los Angeles highway system - what an interesting few years it has been!

As most of you know, about a year ago I left full-time engineering to pursue a calling in gospel ministry. During this last year, I have continued writing software in a part-part-time role. Most of you also know that writing and publishing have been amateur hobbies of mine for several years. Well, I have recently been offered a contract from a commercial publisher to write a fiction trilogy for young adults. This has been a personal goal of mine for nearly two decades, and so I have accepted it.

In taking the writing contract, however, I have to face the brute facts of temporality. With my position as a ministerial student and seminarian already occupying a more-than-full-time slot in my life, there is simply no time to continue concurrently in two part-time roles. I can either write novels, or I can write software - but I cannot do both. So I have decided to write novels. (You fellow geeks won’t believe it, but with novels you don’t actually have to end every line with a semicolon. Weird, eh?)

Like my last vocational change, this one doesn’t come with a pay raise. But it does represent an open door that I’ve been knocking at for years, and so I take it as a providential opportunity that I must follow. To all my erstwhile coworkers, I wish you all the very very best. If you are in my neck of the woods, give me a ring and we’ll have a beer. In the meantime, I leave you with the following verse:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
(J.R.R. Tolkien)

“They do not attack us by open violence; but, in proportion as the name of God is more dear to me than my own life, the diabolical conspiracy which I see in operation to extinguish all fear and worship of God, to root out the remembrance of Christ, or to abandon it to the jeers of the ungodly, cannot but rack my mind with greater anxiety, than if a whole country were burning in one conflagration.”

(Calvin, Epistle to the Galatians, 4.29)

“The law is something like chemotherapy. When chemotherapy is used to treat cancer, it does not give life. Actually, it is an instrument of death. The chemicals that are poured into the body destroy healthy tissue as well as cancer cells. During the course of treatment, chemotherapy actually makes the patient feel much worse. But it is all necessary for the patient’s long-term health. In much the same way, the law makes us worse so that Christ can make us better.”

(Philip Graham Ryken, Galatians, 136)

“This brings us back to the point Paul has been trying to make all through this letter, the point recovering Pharisees keep needing to hear: God deals with us according to his promise, and not according to our performance… remember how promises work. It is impossible to earn a promise.  The only way to receive a promise is to trust in it… there is nothing I can do to fulfill the promise. The only thing I can do is to trust him to keep his promise… But I cannot fulfill his promise to me on his behalf. So it is with the promises of God’s covenant.  Only God can fulfill them.  Therefore, when he promises us salvation, it follows that we cannot earn it for ourselves… This brings us to a very practical conclusion: God deals with us according to his promises, not according to our works. And so, writes John Stott, ‘every sinner who trusts in Christ crucified for salvation, quite apart from any merit or good works, receives the blessing of eternal life and thus inherits the promise of God made to Abraham.’… Salvation in Christ does not rest on a law that we inevitably break; it rests on a promise that God cannot break… The Christian life is not a quid pro quo, so that if I do what God wants, then God will do what I want. God simply does not operate this way. Instead, my relationship with God is based entirely on believing his gracious promise… We simply believe that God will make good on his promise to save us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And then, of course, we act on our faith, living like the true heirs of God that we have become through his covenant in Christ… This is the grace of God, that he does not deal with us on the basis of our performance, but on the basis of his promise.”

(Philip Graham Ryken, Galatians, 127-129)

“Traditionally, this process of ‘gospel-realizing,’ especially when done corporately, is called ‘revival.’  Religion operates on the principle: I obey; therefore I am accepted (by God).  The gospel operates on the principle: I am accepted through the costly grace of God; therefore I obey.  Two people operating on these two principles can sit beside each other in church on Sunday trying to do many of the same things – read the Bible, obey the Ten Commandments, be active in church, and pray – but out of two entirely different motivations.  Religion moves you to do what you do out of fear, insecurity, and self-righteousness, but the gospel moves you to do what you do more and more out of grateful joy in who God is in himself. Times of revival are seasons in which many nominal and spiritually sleepy Christians, operating out of the semi-Pharisaism of religion, wake up to the wonder and ramifications of the gospel. Revivals are mass eruptions of new spiritual power in the church through the recovery of the gospel… This is not a new program or something you can implement through a series of steps. It is a matter of wonder. Peter says that the angels always long to look into the gospel; they never tire of it (1 Pet. 1:12). The gospel is amazing love.  Amazing grace.”

(Tim Keller, “The Gospel and the Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World,” in The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, ed. John Piper and Justin Taylor, pp. 112-113)

“The core problem is that we are inviting men and women to come under the power of the gospel without having first come under it ourselves. Frankly, I know of very few confessing Christians who have ever shed tears over their sins. Or if once they wept over their sins, they are careful never to do it again; they see no one else doing it, and they quickly become convinced that people who shed tears are not normal Christians.”

(C. John Miller, Repentance, pp. 86-87)

“So in your confession to God you fight to name your sin - and to give your sin its right name. Then you hand it over to Christ by faith and taste the happiness of guilt forgiven (Ps. 32:1) and find the deliverance from hypocrisy which comes through honest confession (Ps. 32:2-5).

What you now know is almost beyond words, but has the feel of clear shining rain, sunshine after tears. Grace is for sinners, and you have felt grace make a clean sweep of your repentant heart. God loves you where you are, not where you have been pretending to be. There is a natural transition now to start loving other sinners where they are, not where they pretend to be - or where you think they should be.”

(C. John Miller, Repentance, pp. 85-86)

“Since saving power comes from Christ alone, it has seemed increasingly important to me of late to emphasize to those under conviction of sin that they retire and pray privately in coming to Christ. My reasons for this are twofold: First, prayer in private makes it more difficult for people to use the counselor as a priest and hopefully brings them to rely on Christ alone for salvation; and second, prayer alone brings the glory of Christ into sharp focus by moving the counselor out of the sinner’s line of vision.

Later, when repentant sinners recall their turning to Christ, they will have things on a solid basis. They will find their confidence in Christ and the gospel, not in the presence or absence of another person, and spontaneously they will give the Lord of glory credit for what He has done through the gospel message.”

(C. John Miller, Repentance, p. 82)