Make New

The scriptures referred to are Luke 1:39-55.

When we returned from Irma, we realized that we had a lot of work to do. We had to check everything out to see what to do with it. Almost everything in our garage had been under 4 feet of water and had to be thrown out, including our Christmas decorations. My bike could be cleaned. Our roof had to be repaired. But when it came to our water heater and air conditioning system, those had to be replaced with new ones.

We have been looking this Advent at how we should prepare for the coming of our King, Jesus. We've looked at being alert to the damage in this world and in ourselves. We've looked at what things we need to throw out. We've looked at what can be repaired. Today we are looking at what can be made new.

Everything was new at one time. Everyone here was a baby once. We all start out new. And some parts of us are continually made new. 100 hairs fall out of your head everyday and are replaced by new hair. (Well, for some people!) Your fingernails are completely new every 6 months, the lining of your stomach is replaced every few days and your skin every 2 to 4 weeks. Most of the dust in your house is old skin cells! Every 10 years every bone in your skeleton has been replaced. The only original parts you retain your whole life are about half of your heart, the neurons in your brain and the lenses of your eyes.

This teaches us a few things about newness. New does not necessarily mean novel or completely unprecedented. Most new things are built on what is old. Remember when computers needed punch cards? The idea of programming a machine that way was created by a textile worker in 1725 to control looms. Semyon Korsakov first proposed using punch cards to store information in 1832; Charles Babbage proposed using them to program the first mechanical computer at roughly the same time; and Herman Hollereth used punch cards in tabulating the 1890 US census. An old idea in one field gave birth to a new way of processing data. Indeed, creativity is mostly making connections between things that were previously unrelated. Everyone of us is here because of the connection between a sperm and a previously unrelated egg.

When I wrote radio ads I resisted using the term “new and improved.” Nobody ever sold a product as being “new and unimproved,” even if the only thing new about it was the package design. Sometimes we do want the new thing to be just like the old. I had digital books on my old computer that won't run on my current laptop. And I have features on my computer that I don't need or which make things I used to do more difficult. Like when your printer stops you from printing in black because you are out of yellow. But in general newer stuff tends to be improved. Remember when downloading something would take hours and in the meantime you couldn't do anything else on your computer, or even use your landline, or you'd have to start all over?

When the Bible talks about something being new, it usually means it is novel and always that it is improved. In the very first chapter of the very first book, Genesis 1, after creating light, sky, land, seas, sun, moon, and stars, then populating earth with birds, fish and land animals, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image.” No other living creature is created in God's image. This is both novel and an improvement over creatures with more limited capacities for cognition, invention, and both cooperation and altruism across kinship boundaries.

Of course, we have used our capabilities not only to unite with other humans but to war against them, not only to help and heal but to hinder and harm, not only to imitate God but to devolve into a diabolical parody of him, such that the term “to play God” has only negative connotations. Just a few chapters later in Genesis it says, “When the Lord saw how widespread was man's wickedness on the earth, and how every intention of the thoughts of his mind was nothing but evil all the time, the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain....Now the earth was ruined in God's sight and the world was filled with violence.” (Genesis 6:5-6, 11) This contrasts with the phrase repeated over and over in the creation account where God sees everything he has made as good. We have taken God's good gifts and used them for evil.

God's response to widespread evil is predictable. He shuts it down. But God is not a lover of destruction and death; he is a God of life so we get the story of Noah and the ark, where God saves a remnant of humankind and the other creatures. Here we see God in a couple of new roles: savior and restorer. God will not undo all of his creative work but he will reboot it, so to speak. After the flood, the earth gets a fresh start, albeit now the rules are not just to be fruitful and multiply but also to respect life. God's covenant with Noah is that he will never again flood the entire earth but humanity must not murder each other because, the Lord says, “...for in the image of God did he make humans.” (Genesis 9:6) We are to reflect God's image in us both by creating human life and by preserving it.

But the corruption has set in. Human beings still nurture evil and violent thoughts, which manifest themselves in evil and violent actions. And human beings recognize that sad fact, and we try to eliminate or at least limit the evil done by our species in various ways.

We seek charismatic leaders to inspire us to do good. And at a time when God's people were enslaved in a foreign land, God gives them Moses and leads them to the promised land. God adopts the new role of liberator. But the minute Moses is off on the mountain with God, the people create a god in their own image and worship that.

We try to fight the evil in our species by making laws. And God gives Moses laws that emphasize justice and fairness and mercy. But we only obey the laws when it suits us. We come up with workarounds and ways to obey the letter of the law while violating its spirit. For the most part we know what the rules are; we just don't want them to hinder us as we do whatever we like.

We make strong institutionalized leaders to make the people obey the laws. And when the Israelites demanded a human king like all the other nations have, their real king, God, said, “Go ahead.” But all the kings, including David, failed to stay free from the corruption that goes along with great power and wealth. Seriously. Parts of the books of 1^st and 2^nd Samuel and 1^st and 2^nd Kings read like Game of Thrones.

Another thing we do to deal with human evil is make sacrifices. Animal sacrifice is found in almost every human culture and many ancient cultures practiced human sacrifice. It was done to gain or regain divine favor. You give up something, like your best livestock, to atone for what you have done to offend the deity. Of course, after a while, making sacrifices is just factored in as part of the cost of doing what we like. As it says in Isaiah, “'The multitude of your sacrifices—what are they to me?' says the Lord. 'I have more than enough of burnt offerings, of rams and the fat of fattened animals; I have no pleasure in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.” (Isaiah 1:11) God goes on to say that what he wants is for people to treat each other with fairness and compassion. (Isaiah 1:16-17) The sacrifices are for our benefit, not his. They reveal the cost of the evil and violence we commit and commend.

The problem with all these solutions—looking to laws and leaders and rituals to make us better—is that they are all external. The problem is internal. The problem is not so much with human institutions as with humans themselves. We need to renew humans. We need a spiritual regeneration like the cellular regeneration our bodies undergo. We need spiritual rebirth. Which is what God is doing through his son, Jesus Christ.

In Jesus we see God's roles as savior and restorer and liberator and lawmaker and king in a new and more personal way. For instance, the story of Noah's ark is a terrific one but not one all of us can relate to. (Though if you stayed rather than evacuated during Irma, I bet you can imagine that story more vividly these days.) In Jesus we see a God who not only saves people physically, by healing them and restoring them to life, but a God who wants to restore our spiritual health and life.

Again after you read the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 you dive headlong into all the minutia of how Bronze age theocratic Israel is to organize itself and run. There's a lot of good stuff in there but you can drown in all the details. As the new Moses Jesus highlights two commandments, to love God and to love other humans, and shows that everything else is subordinate to those two. And rather than us doing no more than the law requires, Jesus challenges us to go beyond it, not merely refraining from murder but from rage and hatred as well, not simply refusing to indulge in adultery but also to reject regarding others as sex objects, not only inhibiting your inclination to retaliate but actually loving your enemy. It's not merely the external responses Jesus wants us to change but the impulses that incite us to act those ways.

But how do we do that? People can change but it is difficult and we are subject to backsliding. If the problem is internal, the fix must be too. More importantly, if man-made solutions don't work, the solution must come from God. But how do we get God in us, where the source of our problems are?

Again Jesus is the answer and again God is doing something new. In Jesus God moves from being outside us to being one of us. That is not only new but it is unique. And Jesus not only shows us what God is like, but being human he can also show us what we can be. But he doesn't do what he accomplishes in the flesh by simply being God's son; he does so by being filled with the Spirit of God. At his baptism we are told the Holy Spirit alights on him like a dove, recalling the image of the Spirit of God hovering over the waters of creation. (Luke 3:21-22; cf. Genesis 1:2) Next Luke tells us “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.” In Mark the Spirit is less gentle. He says the Spirit “drives” Jesus into the wilderness. It is the same Greek word used when Jesus “expels” demons from the sick. (Mark 1:12) Then, after his temptations, Luke tells us “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit.” (Luke 4:14) Jesus begins his ministry in the synagogue in Nazareth reading the passage from Isaiah 61 where it says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me...” (Luke 4:18) It is by God's Spirit that Jesus is able to do what he does. If we are to follow Jesus, we need his Spirit.

Under the old covenant, only certain people were anointed with the Holy Spirit: prophets, priests, some kings. But that changes with the new covenant under Jesus Christ, where the Spirit is poured out on all believers at their baptism. As God enters humanity in Jesus, God enters us when we open ourselves to his Spirit. To fix what's wrong with us, God has got to get into us. Renewal must come from the inside out.

But just as you need good air around you to draw it into your lungs, we need to saturate ourselves in an atmosphere of Christlike thoughts, words and actions if we are to have sources of renewal. That means we need to immerse ourselves in the word of God, in Christian worship, and in Christian community. It is magical thinking to take for granted that a person seldom exposed to such things is going to somehow find the spiritual resources available in Christianity. When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton said, “Because that's where the money is.” If you want to experience spiritual renewal in Christ, you go where Christ is. As he said, “For where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them.” (Matthew 18:20) And just as the parts of our bodies have to be continually renewed, so we as Christians need regular renewal and the best place within the Body of Christ. To be the Body of Christ on earth, we need to be connected with and get our direction from the head of the church, Jesus himself.

As members of that body, we may look different and have different functions but through the love of Christ flowing through the body, we have a unity that does not depend on uniformity. We each express our faith in Jesus differently rather like the way the cells and organs in your body are amazingly diverse in form and function but each contributes to the wellbeing of the whole.

God is about life and life is about renewal. Death comes when something stops renewing itself. It declines and decays. And that death can be the end or it can be the beginning of renewal. Old cells die to make way for the new. White blood cells attack harmful bacteria and then, having absorbed them, die to save the body from infection. In a spiritual transaction we don't fully understand, Jesus died to save us from the evil with which we have infected the world, each other and ourselves. But the source of life cannot stay dead. Jesus rose and out of his death comes new life, eternal life for all who go to the risen Christ for healing. As Paul says, “If anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation: the old has passed away; Behold, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

Ultimately this world will die. But the last book of the Bible says that this is not the end but the beginning. In his vision John sees the new creation rising from the ashes of the old. He writes, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying: 'Now the dwelling of God is with humans, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. For the old order of things have passed away.' He who was seated on the throne said, 'I am making all things new!'” (Revelation 21:1-5) The God of life and resurrection is making a new creation for people made new in Christ. And we are invited to plant the seeds of that new creation now.