Love: Advent

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need[1]

Last week I began a short series of posts for advent thinking about how we can prepare ourselves to celebrate Christmas. Each week I’m looking at a different aspect of what the coming of Jesus was and is intended to signify for us and how we can prepare ourselves to receive it.

My last post considered how Christmas is about hope. Hope is a good beginning but it isn’t enough by itself.  Hope implies that we are confident that things will change, even that they will change for the better, but we still need to give it content.

This is what the final three weeks of advent begin to fill in. This week we are looking at ‘Love’.

Suggested readings: Isaiah 40:1-12; 1 John 4:7-21; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

The Need for Love

‘All you need is love,’ so say the Beatles. It is a popular sentiment and it is easy to dismiss; love is not, obviously, all that we need. Yet with that said, the Beatles were on to something. In his sermon on marriage St John Chrysostom (the greatest preacher of the first thousand years of Christianity) commented that ‘The love of husband and wife is the force that welds society together.’[2] Similarly, John Wesley, for whom the whole of Christian life was the pursuit of holy love argued that ‘Love is the end, the sole end, of every dispensation of God, from the beginning of the world to the consummation of all things.’[3]

It isn’t just singers and saints who have argued for the centrality of love to humanity. Psychologist, Dr Raj Raghunathan, describes the need to be loved as ‘one of our most basic and fundamental needs’ while the need to show love ‘is hard-wired and deep-seated.’ [4]

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Jesus said that truly ‘it is better to give than to receive.’[5]

To love and to be loved is part of what we are created for – to be loved first by God and then to show love to each other. The failures of humanity can largely be traced back to the rebellion and insecurity which prevents us from receiving the divine love for which we were created and our subsequent failure show that love to one another. When we pray for God to come to us, when we become people of hope, we are praying for God to show us love, to teach us what it means to love and to enable us in turn to love one another.

Christmas is both God’s act of love for us and his demonstration to us of how we should love.

Christmas is God’s Love for Us

The passage I suggested reading from Isaiah speaks of a day when God would come to his people and demonstrate his love for them. It is taken up in the New Testament and explicitly referred to being fulfilled in the coming of Jesus.

In the prediction the prophet paints a picture of what God’s love for us is like and how we can experience it when he comes.

It is love that forgives.[6]

The birth of Jesus is about God doing everything that is necessary to restore our relationship with him. The prophet doesn’t hide from the fact that his people are sinners. We cannot hide from our failings, shame, or even our guilt. It simply won’t do to pretend that we are fine – for how then will we ever get better?

Christmas is not about pretending that we’re fine and God can come anyway – like a family barely containing their feud around a Turkey dinner. When Jesus comes he comes not to hide our sin but to deal with it. God has taken the punishment, paid the debt, healed the disease – whatever picture you like to use – that separated us from him. This is love that forgives and renews.

It is love that reveals.[7]

At Christmas we find out what God is like – he makes himself accessible to us by revealing himself to us in a way we can understand. This is the absolute minimum requirement for a relationship of love – to know the other person. Christmas is where we begin to see the glory of God in a way we can understand.

To put it another way, if you want to know what God is like, come and look at Jesus. This is love that reveals

It is love that is faithful and reliable.[8]

We know that human beings fail and are unreliable. We let each other down – we can’t help it. Isaiah uses the picture of flowers falling or grass withering when it gets hot.

Yet God’s love is not like that.

As Isaiah says ‘the word of our God endures forever.’ God’s love will not fail, is totally reliable, and endures forever. When Jesus was born, humanity encountered the first and only wholly dependable love that has ever been. This is love that endures.

It is love that is strong and protects.[9]

This may seem a strange theme to bring out in a prophecy about Christmas. After all, we are in the season where we worship a baby born, ‘meek and mild’, totally vulnerable, in relative poverty. Yet Isaiah points out that this baby will crush the head of our enemies and redeem us from the curse of death.

Isaiah wants to stand at the manger in Bethlehem and cry out ‘See the Sovereign LORD comes with power and rules with a mighty arm.’ By his life and death and resurrection this Son of God will love us by protecting us from all that can harm us. Here is love that is strong and protects.

Finally, we have a picture of love that is gentle and kind.[10]

Here is a God who is able to gather us up in his arms, who is gentle with those who are hurt and sore, who looks to restore and to heal his children. This is the Father who will fight furiously to protect his children and then gently carry them home to tend to their wounds, love them and hold them close to his heart.

This is THE love. The love that defines all other loves, that gives them meaning and inspiration.

As we read from 1 John,

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.[11]

Christmas is Love that Costs and Inspires

It is a wonderful picture, beautiful, true and making sense of all that we desire and intuitively know about ourselves but it is not yet complete.

John tells us that this is love that costs.

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

The coming of the Son of God at Christmas was already a demonstration of God’s love but it was not enough to accomplish all that he had for us. To remove the curse of sin and death from us would cost the Son of God his life; to celebrate the child in a manger is to look forward to the man on a cross.

In other words, Christmas is the beginning of God’s demonstration of love for us, not the end.

God’s love cost him. True love will always cost us.  It calls us to be committed to the good of another, to prefer their interests ahead of ours, to seek their good even at the price of our pain. When the Son of God came to earth he loved us even to the cost of his life.

He loved you enough to die for you.

Even that is not enough, however. Most love-stories would end with death but not this one.

As surely as the stable led to the cross, the cross led to the resurrection. Jesus dying and coming back to life is the final demonstration that the vision and gift of love that we receive at Christmas can overcome everything. To coin a phrase, it is the proof that love, or if you prefer Christmas, wins. And now we are called to live it out.

John goes on:

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.[12]

John is talking about love between Christians but the principle extends further than that. We are called to embrace the love that characterises Christmas – that forgives, reveals God, keeps faith, protects, and nurtures – and to allow it to become completed in us.

Application

How can we live differently in light of this?

First, encounter Christ.

If you haven’t encountered the love of God given to us in his Son then this Christmas can be the best you have ever had. Isaiah speaks about ‘preparing the way of the Lord.’ You can prepare yourself to receive Christ by asking God and examining yourself to see where your life is out of line with what he wants. Then receive him by trusting him.

Second, embody Christ.

We can be a people who love others as God loves us. This begins with asking ourselves hard questions:

• Do we love our family or friends with forgiveness, with gentleness, with protection, with nurture?
• How are our relationships this Christmas?

If there is someone with whom you are not at peace then today is the day to fix that.

Third, present Christ to others.

We present Christ to others by demonstrating his love for them in our words and in our actions. Why not find someone to encourage or nurture? If you know of anyone with practical needs then go out and meet them. Don’t expect anything in return – do it for love.

 

This is part of a series of reflections focussed on preparing for Christmas. If you’re looking for a service to go to during this season, you’re welcome to join us at Hersham Baptist Church.

• Sunday 10th December, 10:30 am family worship.
• Sunday 17th December, 10:30 am, communion.
• Sunday 17th December, 5:30pm, family carol service.
• Sunday 24th December, 10:30am, communion.
• Sunday 24th December, 3:00pm, come and join in nativity.
• Monday 25th December, 10:00am, family Christmas celebration.

[1] ‘All You Need Is Love’, Lennon-McCartney, 1967.

[2] St John Chrysostom, Homily on Marriage, < http://www.roca.org/OA/121/121b.htm > [accessed 7 December 2017]

[3] John Wesley, ‘Sermon 36: The Law Established Through Faith’, Sermons on Several Occasions

[4] Raj Raghunathan, ‘The Need to Love’, Psychology Today (8 January 2014) < https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sapient-nature/201401/the-need-love > [accessed 7 December 2017]

[5] Acts 20:35.

[6] Isaiah 40:1-2

[7] Isaiah 40:3-5.

[8] Isaiah 40:6-8

[9] Isaiah 40:9-11.

[10] Isaiah 40:10-11.

[11] 1 John 4:9

[12] 1 John 4:11

Hope: Advent

Just what makes that little old ant
Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant
Anyone knows an ant, can’t
Move a rubber tree plant
But he’s got high hopes[1]

Over the next few weeks I’m posting some reflections on how we can prepare ourselves for Christmas. This week our topic is ‘Hope’.

Suggested readings: Isaiah 64:1-12; Mark 13:24-37; Romans 8:18-27

Introduction

Humanity needs hope.

To hope is to be confident that there is someone or something that can overcome the problems and futility of the world we live in and make it better. It is to believe that this is not all that there is but both that there is another world that could be – a world without cancer and crying, without heartache and lying, a world of peace and not war, where there is no famine and our hearts are content – and that there is someone who can bring that about. This is necessarily spiritual – it looks to something beyond us that can deliver us and heal us, that can save us from the darkness that lurks within each of us.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that the philosopher Friederich Nietzsche who rejected the idea of God warned us ‘do not believe those who speak to you of extra terrestrial hopes!’ only to then conclude that hope itself was ‘the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.’[2] In other words, we might as well despair, because there is no one coming to help – there is no answer to the problems we face.

As a Spurs fan I can sympathise with Nietzsche; it is the hope that kills you.

Christianity rejects Nietzsche’s counsel of despair completely as contrary both to our experience of the world and God’s revelation to us.

We are programmed to hope and when we do not, we suffer enormously. [3] We cannot help it. Yet if our hope is to be well-founded, if it is to escape wishful thinking and become a confident assurance of something to come, we need to understand what the problem is that we believe needs to be overcome and what we believe needs to be done to fix it.

The Absence of Hope

Christians understand that the problems we face flow from the distance between humanity and God.

The reading I suggested from Isaiah is an extended meditation on the corruption that follows naturally when we are distant from God and a plea that God come to his people to heal them. Isaiah’s prayer is stark in its honesty about the consequences of that distance and the position that Israel found herself in. It holds a mirror up to our own lives. They often faced cruelty from others and in turn showed cruelty to each other. To use the language of Jesus, they lived in a world in which people do not love one another as they love themselves; they did not seek the good of others in everything but instead uses and abused them.

I can only speak from my own experience but I think Isaiah’s description is basically true of all of us.

We are capable of good; yet we do not always do it.

There are times when we are selfless and sense a call to look beyond ourselves; yet there are times when we are cruel and selfish.

It can be tempting to think that the problem is with another group of other people (Tories or Socialists, bigots or liberals, Jane down the road or Tim at work), who are the bad ones while we are entirely without blame. I understand that temptation but Isaiah will not allow us to go there.

We are all, he says, stained by the actions, thoughts and attitudes we do and cannot help doing.

Even the good that we do is tinged with unrighteousness. You can think of this theologically – if we are not acting from trust in God and for his glory then we are by definition acting apart from him and for the glory of another. Or we can think about it economically – we live in a world in which every single one of us benefits from injustices and perpetuates those injustices and we cannot escape from them. Or we can think socially – how often do we do what is good in part because we want the respect and applause of others?

This sin flows from our being distant from God and has the effect of re-affirming and deepening that separation.

Isaiah uses the picture of a leaf that is broken off the branch by the wind. The leaf inevitably, naturally withers and dies when it is removed from the tree. When we cut ourselves off from God the consequence is that we too wilt – we don’t have what we need to carry on living and so we die both physically and spiritually.

Christmas is About Hope

There is only one thing that can provide legitimate hope in this situation. We cannot reach back to God.  So Isaiah prays that God would come down from heaven and be reunited with his people.

Our hope is that God will not hold himself back forever but come to us. This is message of hope at Christmas: we cut ourselves off from God and yet God has chosen to come to us.

When God comes to dwell with his people, the corruption and death, the injustice and iniquity, that Isaiah laments and that is at the heart of much that causes us despair is changed. Where we were formerly cut off from the thing that gave us life, now we have been put back on. It is as if the tree stooped down and picked up its leaf, brown, curling and dying and reattached it.

The coming of Jesus at Christmas marks the beginning of God’s reversal of all that Isaiah laments and offers us hope that it will not always be like this.

• If God has come to us then we can be confident in the promise of life in the midst of death.
• If God has come to us then we can be confident in the promise of righteousness in the face of sin.
• If God has come to us then we can be confident in the promise of love in the midst of hate.

The birth of Jesus is the absolute proof of God’s determination and desire not to abandon us to corruption but rather redeem us and grant us life.

To put it another way, Christmas is the best, truest and firmest ground for hope that we can imagine because God has come to us. When we call the child Immanuel – God with us – we are saying ‘you, in all your weakness and helplessness – are the proof that God has not finished with this world and its people but still loves it and cares for it.

Our Final Hope

Christmas, then, is the foundation of our hope. But it is not hope’s completion. Christmas is not the final word on the story of God’s redemption of the world. This is what St Paul was referring to in the passage I suggested from Romans.

We have hope because Jesus came to us. Yet there is a sense in which the story is not complete. We long for more. We, along with all creation, long for the hope to be completed: for God and creation to dwell together fully and permanently, for every tear-stained eye to be dried and broken heart to be healed, for wars to cease and disease to be destroyed.

Christmas prompts us not just to look back at hope begun but to look forward to the time when hope is completed. Jesus came once to bring us hope and he will come again to complete it. Christian philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, referred to this as eternal hope ‘which is never put to shame’ and means ‘at every moment always to hope all things’.[4] It is to believe that anything and anyone, any situation and any problem, can be redeemed at the return of Christ.

Living as People of Hope

If this is true, then how can we live as people of hope?

First, let me ask if you have encountered Jesus and received the hope that he brings? To meet with God as a man is fundamentally to receive hope for the future if we will trust him and follow him. If you haven’t yet done that and you feel like you would like to then ask God to show himself to you this Christmas, resolve to trust him, to turn away from selfishness and sin, and to be baptised. You will receive the presence of God with you and in you and find a hope that cannot be taken away.

Second, even those of us who have already come to know Jesus can live as if we have not. I’m talking primarily about a sense of hopelessness. This is not what we are called to – we are called to live lives of hope.

Our lives should demonstrate that, however bad it seems, God is committed to our good, to redeeming us. Whatever situations we face, whether you are someone who despairs at the future of our country, or suffer unemployment or bereavement or frustration or failure, we should never lose hope.

Christians are not people of despair but of hope because we know the one person who can change the world, who can redeem our situations, who can keep us in any hardship. Who will even raise us from the dead.

This doesn’t mean that Christians will never suffer depression. I, myself, have gone through periods of depression and so have many of the great saints of history. When we do, we should recognise it and get help. But it does mean that our default position should not be cynical or negative, should not be harsh or hopeless. We should believe and trust that God will redeem and restore. This attitude of hope is cultivated through prayer, above all, and through fellowship and familiarity with Scripture.

Finally, we can then be people of hope for others. As we prepare for Christmas, we can resolve to be a cause of hope for others rather than for their despair. In our words and actions we can show them that the world can and will one day be redeemed by a God who loves it and came to be born as a part of it.

 

This is part of a series of reflections focused on preparing for Christmas. If you’re looking for a service to go to during this season, you’re welcome to join us at Hersham Baptist Church.

• Sunday 10th December, 10:30 am family worship.
• Sunday 17th December, 10:30 am, communion.
• Sunday 17th December, 5:30pm, family carol service.
• Sunday 24th December, 10:30am, communion.
• Sunday 24th December, 3:00pm, come and join in nativity.
• Monday 25th December, 10:00am, family Christmas celebration.

[1] High Hopes, Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, 1959.

[2] Thus Spake Zarathrustra, [1883-85] 2006: 6; and Human, All Too Human, 1878: s.71 cited in Bloeser, Claudia and Stahl, Titus, “Hope”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/hope/&gt;

[3] Dr Stephen A. Diamond, ‘Clinical Despair: Science, Psychotherapy and Spirituality in the Treatment of Depression’ in Psychology Today, 4 March 2011 < https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evil-deeds/201103/clinical-despair-science-psychotherapy-and-spirituality-in-the-treatment > [accessed 30 November 2017]

[4] Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love [1847] 19995, p.260 and 249 cited in Bloeser,and Stahl.

Image Credit

Introducing Advent

I’ve noticed that we’re entering the season running up to Christmas. When I was a child I remember Christmas starting when CITV was interrupted by adverts for coke featuring enormous and brightly lit lorries streaming across the country proclaiming that ‘Holidays are coming.’ Now we look out for mince pies.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is that there doesn’t seem to be a build up. We’re either in late summer / early autumn with no Christmas. Or it is full-Christmas and every shop looks like a grotto with fake snow and trees and songs and candy canes until I’m seriously wondering whether I’ve drunk the wrong tea in the morning (I’m looking at you, Garsons Farm). There is nothing in between.

I think that this is a shame. It actually diminishes Christmas. When we strip the celebration of its context, when we feast without fasting, it leads to a shallower rather than a deeper appreciation of the season. To put it another way, every gift has a significance that comes in part from the context in which and into which it is given.

Let me give an illustration. One of the major Christmas traditions in our family is watching the Muppets’ Christmas Carol. Several times. I make no apologies for this; it’s the best adaptation of Dickens by a country mile and in any case, the muppets are awesome. At the end of a Christmas Carol [SPOILER ALERT] Scrooge has a lovely Christmas dinner with Bob Cratchit and his family while they sing a song with muppets as far as the eye can see. On its own it’s a nice scene. But its emotional power, the depth of its meaning, comes from how mean Scrooge is at the beginning and the journey he has been on through the film.

This is true for Christmas as well. Jesus’s birth didn’t come out of nowhere. It is given meaning by the journey that led to it and the yearning and needs of humanity that it was designed to meet. Like any gift, the gift of Christ derives significance in part from the context into which he was given.

To put it another way, if we’re going to appreciate Christmas deeply, to let it move and challenge us, we need to spend some time understanding the depths of what we’re celebrating.

This is what Advent is all about – it is the preparation for Christmas. The season also has a second dimension –not only helps us to prepare ourselves for celebrating the birth of Jesus, it should prompt us to look forward to the day when Jesus returns and brings everything to completion.

Over the next four weeks I’m going to post reflections on a different aspect of advent (hope, love, joy, and peace) to help us to get ready. Later this week I’ll be posting my first advent reflection, considering our desire for hope.

 

This is part of a series of reflections focussed on preparing for Christmas. If you’re looking for a service to go to during this season, you’re welcome to join us at Hersham Baptist Church.

• Sunday 10^th December, 10:30 am family worship.
• Sunday 17^th December, 10:30 am, communion.
• Sunday 17^th December, 5:30pm, family carol service.
• Sunday 24^th December, 10:30am, communion.
• Sunday 24^th December, 3:00pm, come and join in nativity.
• Monday 25^th December, 10:00am, family Christmas celebration.