Abba Above!

For the shepherd, it started out like any other day on the west side of the wilderness. He'd drifted that far with an eye to finding new shrubbery his father-in-law's sheep hadn't eaten yet. He had no idea the shrub he was soon to see. The light caught his eye. Evidently there'd been a lightning strike – or else some other twist of nature had lit the bush ablaze. But it had been quite a while since any storms had come through – why was the fire still going? The shepherd decided to investigate. But he was stopped in his tracks when he heard a voice – a voice saying his name. Now that was unexpected! Who knew him out here? And the voice told him to stop, said that it wasn't safer to get any nearer to the bush, that he'd already encroached on holy ground. Then the words came that changed everything. “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob!” With that, the shepherd's heart began to pound. It was as if he'd stumbled into a minefield. He quickly pulled his cloak over his face, over his eyes, terrified to see what he oughtn't see. Moses “hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:1-6).

That was a common reaction enough to the idol-grubbing spirits who pawned themselves off with stolen valor: distant figures of fearful splendor and unpredictable judgment. But how much more was there reason to fear “God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth” (Genesis 14:19), the only active God either in earth or in the realms above it (Deuteronomy 4:39). And though he spared the delicate shrub, he was “a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24). He was no tame God – Moses knew of cities he “overthrew in his anger and wrath” (Deuteronomy 29:23). Nor was it expected to find this righteous Judge down here where he could be reached. “Are you not God in heaven?” (2 Chronicles 20:6). He would, indeed, one day be known by the title “God of heaven” (Ezra 5:11-12; 6:9-10). “God looks down from heaven on the sons of men” (Psalm 55:2), surveying us. “It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in” (Isaiah 40:22). He sees all and knows all – he has a heavenly perspective. It's his prerogative to conceal or reveal: “It is the glory of God to conceal things” (Proverbs 25:2), but “there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries” (Daniel 2:28). This “God is in the heavens: he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). His heavenly glory is sovereign freedom, an unhindered ability to act, a transcendent independence that allows him unilateral power over which we have no veto. For that reason, it was recommended to “not let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth, so let your words be few” (Ecclesiastes 5:2). God being 'in heaven' was a check on our presumption. So “let us lift up our hearts and hands to God in heaven” (Lamentations 3:41).

With all those truths on display, it's no wonder the Old Testament scriptures are sparing in their depictions of the God of heaven as a Father. But it is there. First, God is a Father in the sense of being Creator. “But now, O LORD, you are our Father: we are the clay, and you are our potter: we are all the work of your hand” (Isaiah 64:8). “Is he not your father, who created you?” (Deuteronomy 32:6). “For we indeed are his offspring” (Acts 17:28). So he is “the Father and Creator of the whole world” (1 Clement 19.2), “one God and Father of all, who is over all” (Ephesians 4:6), “from whom are all things and for whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6). In the most distant sense, then, he is the Father of every creature he has made. And as the Father of every creature, he's owed blessing and worship from all. “Exalt him before every living being, for he is... our Father and God forever and ever!” (Tobit 13:4).

But in particular, the Old Testament reveals God as the Father of Israel – he adopts the entire nation as being collectively his child, and he commits himself to them as a Father. “Thus says the LORD: Israel is my firstborn son” (Exodus 4:22). “When Israel was a child, I loved him; and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1). So they say: “You, O LORD, are our Father” (Isaiah 63:16). In their culture, a father was known for two things: his authority over his household, and his role as protector and provider. So, as they reflected when the old covenant was drawing to a close, surely “God in heaven protects the Jews, in alliance with them continually like a father with his children” (3 Maccabees 7:6). And as God himself asks: “A son honors his father … If, then, I am a Father, where is my honor?” (Malachi 1:6). God, as Father of Israel, was owed reverence and obedience.

Beyond his national adoption of Israel, God was also known as “my Father” to select individuals. Israel's kings had the right to call on God personally like that, because God told David that to any son who succeeded David, “I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son: when he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men..., but my steadfast love will not depart from him” (2 Samuel 7:14-15). And so David and all his sons were given the right to cry to God, “You are my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation!” (Psalm 89:26). But, because God was also committed to being “Father of the fatherless” (Psalm 68:5), other righteous people in need took courage in addressing God as “Father” or even “my Father” (Wisdom 2:16). Sometimes, what they were looking for from God was discipline to nurture their growth (Sirach 23:1-4; cf. Hebrews 12:7-10). Other times, what they were looking for was a rescue “in the midst of storms and dangers” (Sirach 51:10).

That's when Jesus steps onto the scene. He's the true Son of David and the true Righteous One; he's a one-man Israel, and the Firstborn above creation. And all that would entitle him to call God his Father. But he's got even more to it than that. So when he appears as this mysterious celebrant of God's Fatherhood, it seems to be all he can talk about. And when he calls God his Father, he's not talking about some abstract God heretofore unknown – he's speaking of the same God who created the world and made a covenant with Israel and with David and did all that the Old Testament scriptures speak of. Jesus is talking of a God who is no less glorious than that, no less honorable than that, no less disciplinary than that, no less sovereign and free than the God of the Law and the Prophets. Jesus did not come to cancel anything the Scriptures said about God. Everything Jesus shows us is built atop what Moses and the kings and prophets and priests learned over those long centuries. But Jesus tells people that God's heavenly freedom – the freedom to do all that he pleases, the freedom to look down on the sons of men, the freedom to conceal things and reveal mysteries – is exactly what proves that God's fatherhood, in whatever sense it's experienced, must be perfectly generous and lavish: “Your heavenly Father is perfect,” he says (Matthew 5:48). “Your heavenly Father feeds... the birds of the air” (Matthew 6:26). “How much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11).

And, little by little, Jesus unfolded how he was able to say things like this. What God was called 'Father' for being Creator, or for being Israel's caretaker, or for committing himself to David or other righteous ones, they spoke sparingly and in metaphor. But when Jesus calls God his Father, he speaks unabashedly, intensely, often, and more literally than anyone ever dreamed. Jesus constantly cast himself, not just as one child of God among many, but as God's unique Son in a way no one else was – more than Israel, more than David, more than any of the righteous. When Jesus spoke of God as his Father, there was neither awkwardness nor analogy going on. For since before the creation of time and space, Jesus had eternally been the Father's Son, and God had eternally been the Son's Father, and the Spirit of their relationship had flowed infinitely from and to eternity. There is just no closeness to God like the Father-Son bond that is God. And so God was already Father before there was a David to raise up, before there was an Israel to look after, before there was even a world to create. All those were derivative of who God eternally was to Jesus. He is the only Son of God by nature, in literal truth.

But “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son..., born under the Law” (Galatians 4:4), into a particular human culture and language. And when the Word had become flesh, and after he'd come out of the manger, and when he was being raised in Nazareth by his mother Mary and foster father Joseph, I have a strong guess as to what the Word's first word was. In all likelihood, it was 'abba.' That's the common Aramaic word for 'Dad.' It's what little Jesus, and then one day teenage Jesus, would've called Joseph around the house. But Jesus always had a consciousness that it was the Temple in Jerusalem, not the hut in Nazareth, that was really his “Father's house” (Luke 2:49). And so to Jesus, it wasn't just Joseph who was 'abba.' God was 'Abba.' That is fundamentally how Jesus, in his humanity, learned to experience the God of heaven – as 'Abba,' as 'Dad.' And to no one but Jesus has that ever been as literally and naturally true. Others may have called God 'Father,' 'our Father,' 'my Father,' but none meant by those words everything that was on Jesus' lips or in Jesus' heart.

So when Jesus gathered his crew of disciples, his destined founders of a New Israel in and around him, they listened to him pray, and they were astonished at the absolute ease and intimacy with which Jesus addressed his Abba above. They didn't dare! But they wondered if he could give them a taste. So one of them said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray!” (Luke 11:2). And so he does. And where many other Jews switched into fine formal Hebrew to pray their set liturgical prayers, Jesus gives them a prayer in Aramaic – and it starts by calling God 'Abba' (cf. Galatians 4:6). What he's saying to them, as he gives them what we call the Lord's Prayer, is that he can open up to others his privileged relationship to his dear infinite Abba above. And that's exactly what he'll do. When Jesus went to the cross, he died not for one nation alone, “but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (John 11:52). He died to make it possible for people to become God's children, to be brought into God's family, to inherit the right to treat God as Father. And then Jesus was “raised from the dead by the glory of the Father” (Romans 6:4), making him “the Firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:29). Dying and rising, Jesus ensures that the Father's family can grow.

And it grows by baptism. When we're broken down and die with Christ in the water, we're reborn to the life of faith – “born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5) – but born no longer as individuals but as parts. We become on earth the Son's Body – the Body of the same Son of God who has since ascended into heaven. Each of us, being born again, is born into his Body, and thus into his relationships. If my hand is part of my body, then my hand shares in my relationship with my dad. So if our life becomes part of Christ's Body, then our life shares in his relationship with his Abba! And so we “have received the Spirit of adoption-as-sons” (Romans 8:15). The Spirit, acting by promise to usher us to new birth, is what animates us as a single Body. God's goal in all this is “bringing many sons to glory” (Hebrews 2:10), and so Jesus is “not ashamed to call [us] brothers” (Hebrews 2:11). When you were born again, you became Jesus' little brother, you became Jesus' little sister. You were brought into the family, you came to share in Jesus' own relationship with his Abba, so you were given “access in one Spirit to the Father” (Ephesians 2:18).

And that's a matter of grace, not presumption! None of this is natural to us. On our own, we have no right to act this way, no right to talk to God this way. Jesus does – he's the one and only Son of God by nature. But for us, it's all grace, it's all adoption. You and I were feral children, found abandoned in the desert, and taken home in a curious way we don't understand. So of course these things don't come naturally. It takes a lifetime – if not longer! – to learn sonship from the Spirit of the Son. But because God took us in, he has “sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts” to accomplish exactly that (Galatians 4:6). It will only be finished in the future. The completion of the adoption proceedings only take place when you and I are raised from the dead, our bodies and souls alike being fully redeemed (Romans 8:23). Until then, we're called to unlearn our natural ways and learn to take on a greater family resemblance (cf. Matthew 5:44-45). And when we say this prayer, when we call God our Father, we commit ourselves to being responsive to the Spirit who's teaching us family resemblance.

So while we oughtn't go strutting about the house in presumption and pride, we instead ought to be delighting in awe at the privileges of grace. Because Jesus brought us home to his Father and opened to us everything that's his, including a share in his very own relationship with God. You have become, and are even more becoming, a child of the Consuming Fire! And so you, with great thankfulness, can approach God in prayer the same way Jesus does: as Abba. And that's exactly what we do when we pray the Lord's Prayer while the Spirit of the Son lives in us and points us toward God as Father. By this Holy Spirit, “we cry: 'Abba! Father!'” (Romans 8:15) – and when Paul writes that, he's talking about the Lord's Prayer! Every time we say it, the Holy Spirit is working in us to help our own spirits realize the privileges of our adoption.

What that means for our prayer lives is incalculable. The same God from whom Moses hid his face in fear? Now you can pray to him as 'Dad,' like you're a child running home from school, with every reason to expect bursting through the door will get you swept up and twirled around in an embrace of love. That's prayer, as you laugh and feel his embrace and listen to his warm welcome and tell him how glad you are to be his child: that's “Our Father, who art in heaven.” You tell him how glad you are to be home and how much you love him: that's “Hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” You ask him what's for supper: that's “Give us this day our daily bread.” You apologize for anything mean you said before school and any misbehavior at school: that's “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” You ask him to help you out when it comes to the neighborhood bully, or to check under the bed for monsters as he tucks you in: that's “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” And you murmur how glad you are, as you nod off, to be his kid: that's “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.” The Lord's Prayer is the prayer of a child's absolute joy and devotion.

And even as we grow, even as we mature and “grow up in every way” toward adulthood in Christ (Ephesians 4:15), the same God is still our Abba. We're no less glad to be home, no less glad for his hug, no less wanting to see his business succeed, no less hungry for a home-cooked meal, no less eager for an unhindered relationship, no less glad for the protection and security he provides. At any stage of growth in the faith, the Lord's Prayer is incontestably and ineradicably domestic. Christian prayer, which is always rooted in the Lord's Prayer, is first and foremost about running in to spend time with our Father, and learning to trust him as no more a stranger. In Christ our Elder Brother, “we have boldness and access with confidence” (Ephesians 3:12), an ability to “with confidence draw near” to our Father's presence to “receive mercy and find grace” (Hebrews 4:16). Our prayers need not be shy. The Lord's Prayer is the Church's declaration of confident access, never forgetting that it's a privilege of grace beyond our nature, but finding greater grace as all the reason for greater love.

When we embrace grace without presumption, this closeness won't sacrifice our Father's honor and authority – for to do away with either would be to demote him from Abba to Buddy. He isn't just some relative, he's our Abba, our Father; and he isn't even just any abba, he's our Abba Above. He's the Father who deserves all your love, all your devotion, all your reverence, all your obedience, all your trust, all your awe, all your wonder, all your worship. Paul is right to call him “the Father of Glory” (Ephesians 1:17). He remains, throughout the New Testament, “our Lord and Father” (James 3:9), “our God and Father” (Philippians 4:20). Even Jesus prays to his “Father, Lord of heaven and earth” (Matthew 11:25). God's Fatherhood isn't an alternative to Lordship or Godhood – it's an expression of it. The closeness is combined with awe. Our affection is in tandem with his authority. If God is our Father insofar as we're the Body of Christ, then we're obligated to treat our Father as Christ treats him, because we've become physical extensions of Jesus' own loving sonship to God.

Which means what Jesus is teaching us – and which we enact, knowingly or unknowingly, whenever we pray the prayer he gave us – is that prayer begins in adoration, in the attitude and act of worship that's suitable only for God alone. We adore our Abba above, our Father in heaven, in awe and wonder, and we center ourselves on his glory with reverent and obedient hearts. That's the beginning of all prayer that is prayer. Prayer doesn't kick off with a litany of demands, or even requests. Before we ask anything of God, we're called to simply bask in his presence, adore him in childlike awe, and keep our eyes fixed on him. We confess him as Father in gratitude and joy, astounded all over again that we get to share by grace in the sonship Jesus has, and that on that basis we get to relate to God in a deeper way, building on all that came before. So we adore our Father who is in heaven.

Over the next few months, as we explore this tremendous life of prayer to which Jesus invites us, we'll be seeing how the Lord's Prayer creates, expresses, and fulfills Christians' rightful hopes – how Jesus both teaches us how to pray in general and also prescribes a prayer that each Christian rightly adopts as his or her own, just as he or she is adopted by God through Christ. When you pray like this, God's Spirit is at work in you. See, when we're praying on our own, it's so easy for things to become awkward. We can be assailed by doubts and dreads. We can default to other models of relating to God – more distant and diffident, more shy and shameful. What Jesus does is remind us it doesn't have to be that way. Prayer needn't be a long-distance call, nor need it be a business meeting. Prayer is an exalted homecoming that throws wide the gates, and our Father is always ready to run to us from the horizon. All he asks is that, for our own benefit as well as his glory, we begin by learning to call him Father, treat him as Father, trust him as Father, and simply open by running to him and resting in him. As was said long ago about the opening of the Lord's Prayer: “May our hearts perceive God as Father! Our voice should proclaim this, our tongue should utter it, our spirit should shout it aloud, and everything that is in us should be in tune with grace, not fear.”¹ For this is the great grace of God in Christ – through whom and in whose Spirit may our Father be glorified forever! Amen.

The Hyssop Purge

“You are the man!” The words still echoed in David's ears. He lay on the cold winter ground, crying out in the night, organizing his shattered thoughts. He'd thought he'd gained everything. Nine months ago, he'd had the most delightful evening after he'd peered down from the edge of his palace rooftop and seen her bathing in her courtyard down below. After their time together, he'd sent her away, expecting that to be it. But when word came she was pregnant, the king was terrified of scandal (2 Samuel 11:1-5). He tried summoning her husband back from the battlefield, tried getting them together so as to pawn the baby off as Uriah's. But Uriah's commitment to the mission – commitment like David used to have – got in the way (2 Samuel 11:6-13). There was only one way, David reckoned, to cut off scandal at its source, and that was to make sure Uriah – David's long-time friend and brother-in-arms – became one more casualty of war. David hated to do it, but it followed an inexorable, desperate, lethal logic (2 Samuel 11:14-25). And so David graduated from adultery to manipulation to murder. And it paid off! Bathsheba was sad, but scarcely the wiser. Once socially appropriate, David added her to his harem as one more wife, and the pregnancy bore fruit in a little prince who, if no one crunched the numbers too attentively, could've just barely been conceived on their wedding night. All those months looking over his shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and now the dust cleared and David had profited from it all. He got the girl, kept his reputation, and cradled a beautiful baby boy (2 Samuel 11:26-27).

Scarcely had David breathed his sigh of relief when God's prophet darkened his door. Speaking in rich parables, Nathan placed David before a spiritual mirror, and David found his finger of condemnation abruptly pointed at his own reflection. It all came crashing apart. David heard verdict and sentence, glimpsed the dread cost, and felt as though his heart were being split open like a pomegranate in his chest (2 Samuel 12:1-12). That was yesterday. David hadn't eaten since Nathan about-faced and marched away. He knew starvation was less a threat now than the judgment of God ready to shake palace and nation, with David at its epicenter, unless he urgently sought for salvation. And so, tears running down to his ruddy beard, David began line by line to sing.

“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions!” (Psalm 51:1). David couldn't appeal to God's justice – that'd be death. Not to his own reserve of extra credit – that'd been shown a sham. He appealed to the promise of a God of love, a God committed to his creation, committed to Israel, committed even personally to David as his anointed king, his christ. That's what David was supposed to be: Israel's christ with a lowercase 'c.' Yet he'd transgressed. He'd violated God's trust, betrayed God's covenants. He'd written himself into a corner, into a nightmare, and only the mercy of God could upend his inkwell and leave a splotch of grace big enough to coat and cloak the handwritten shame scrawled all over David's page.

“Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!” (Psalm 51:2). David felt dirty, defiled, haunted by the gunk and grime he could feel clinging to him: Bathsheba's perfume, Uriah's blood. He needed a bath. But scrub and scrub he might, the spot wouldn't come out. He could still smell it, still feel it. He needed a bath. “For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me” (Psalm 51:3). In times past, David could tell himself he was righteous, the man after God's own heart. It was easy to point the finger at bigger sinners – at Goliath, at Saul, at the Ammonites with whom David's armies went to war while David grew bored in safety. But now all his deflections were no defense. Now all his excuses rotted on his tongue, and his guilt was as if tattooed inside his eyelids. Waking, sleeping, his conscience had been awakened with a relentless fury.

“Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment” (Psalm 51:4). David knew he'd hurt Uriah, assaulting his marriage and arranging his murder. He'd hurt Bathsheba, intruding into her world and seducing her with royal splendor to please his own pleasures. He'd hurt himself, too, and he'd laid the seeds for depravity and death toward his other wives, his other children, and for this newborn son, getting sicker by the day. All them had he offended and hurt. Yet that was nothing next to his offense against God. To stare at his sin was to be horrified at a high-handed rebellion, at a sacrilege, at David's callous disregard of the LORD. In each sinful step, David had been polluting his holy station; and this perversion carried the risk of outraging God's promises, corrupting the elect nation, maybe even damning the world. No judgment of God, no intervention to rescue the hope of salvation from David's tarnished grasp, could be blamed or questioned.

“Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). David realized that his rot, his shame, went to the root and origin. What he'd done was no mere surface scum on the lake of his life, easy to skim off. It pulsed out from the wellspring. His whole history was suffused with sin, from the time David was nought but a single cell on a journey to the uterine wall. For even then, when he was being fearfully and wonderfully made, he'd nonetheless been the inheritor of a building weight handed down from exiled Adam – and by the time of David's first steps, he'd already been carrying a landfill on his shoulders.

“Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart” (Psalm 51:6). Everything God wanted to see in David was exactly everything David didn't have. How could an adulterer, a schemer, a murderer ever reclaim his role as Israel's christ? How could he be a vision of the promise again? How could he even justify living? How could he take God's lessons to heart, and live them? The questions beat relentlessly inside his skull. He paused to reflect on the Law, driven to resolve the irresoluble tension.

David remembered how, a couple centuries ago, his forebears had been slaves in Egypt. How could David ever forget, when they revisited the saga every year at the Passover? And when they were slaves, Moses had told them – had told David's great-great-great-grandfather – to slaughter a lamb, and to pool its blood in a bowl, and into that bowl, they'd dip a whole bunch of hyssop branches. Only with hyssop for a paintbrush could they paint the lamb's lifeblood onto the doorframes of their homes. Only with the hyssop could they apply a layer of protection, the laid-down life of the lamb, to keep the plague-angel at bay. And it had worked like a charm! The wrath of the final plague had steered clear of every marked house. Every man of Israel who'd taken hyssop in hand that day had saved himself and his family by the blood of the lamb (Exodus 12:21-23).

And David had to think, doesn't he find himself being drawn back into slavery to his passions – his lust for a beautiful woman, his fear of being snared in scandal, his frustration at being unable to manipulate a righteous man, his self-loathing at being reminded how much kingship had changed him? Is David any less scared than his forefathers in the foreign land, though he be a king and they poor workers? Isn't David just as desperate for protection from a wrathful judgment now? And isn't the angel of death stalking Bathsheba's firstborn?

David thought, too, how in the Law, God had spoken through Moses a list of rules for quarantining the wretched leper, and yet had handed down also a ruling of immense hope for lepers everywhere – those lowest of the low, outcast from the outcast. Contaminated, feared, reviled – and yet even lepers had hope, as slaves had hope. For once an anointed priest ruled that a leper was no longer infectious, the priest had gathered two birds and scarlet yarn and cedarwood and hyssop. And among the other motions of the ritual, the priest would give an order for others to break one bird over a vessel of spring water, that it be mingled with blood; and into the bloody water the priest would dip the hyssop with the wood and yarn and living bird. With the hyssop dipped into water and blood, the priest would shake that famed medicinal herb over the leper (Leviticus 14:1-6). “And he shall sprinkle it seven times on him who is to be cleansed of the leprous disease; then he shall pronounce him clean” (Leviticus 14:7), and the leper, in transition back to normality, would shave, bathe, and repeat a week later, and so be fully pure (Leviticus 14:8). None of it was possible without hyssop. Hyssop wasn't just good for painting – it was a natural aspergillum, great for sprinkling. Not to mention, it lend its fragrant smell to counter the bitter odor of the blood. No hyssop, and a leper's a leper for good. But thanks to that hyssop in the priest's holy hand, every leper in Israel had a pathway back to wholeness, to purity, to life.

And isn't David's heart as leprous as any skin had ever been, infected with sin and its rot? Isn't David cast as far away from the Holy Presence as any leper was from the camp (cf. Psalm 51:11). And then doesn't David need cleansing, doesn't David need healing, every bit as much as the farthest and feeblest cast out in medicinal exile?

As David pondered it, he had a third thought. David remembered how, later in the Law, God had spoken not to Moses alone but Aaron also, and told them that others needed cleansing: those defiled by the presence of death. They'd walked through a graveyard, or come across a corpse, or even handled human bones. They'd plunged into the realm of the dead, and now death was on them, staining them with its ghastly uncleanness (Numbers 19:16). But God had seen in advance, and so had made provision. Every so often, the priests were to find a red heifer – a rare creature – and not only sacrifice it, but burn its body entirely to ash, along with cedarwood and scarlet yarn and, of course, hyssop (Numbers 19:2-6). And the ashes of the heifer, mingled with the ash of these other things, were gathered up and kept in storage for the occasions God had foreseen (Numbers 19:9). So if someone caught a case of death-impurity, the priests would sprinkle a bit of the ash into spring water and make it holy. And then just anybody clean could dip hyssop in that holy water and sprinkle it onto the defiled person and defiled things. After a couple treatments of holy water, the person defiled was fully restored to the realm of life and communion (Numbers 19:17-19). So simple! But only with hyssop's purging sprinkle, followed by a nice bath, could everything be brought to completion. No hyssop, no help.

And David had to wonder, isn't he equally defiled as they, if not more? For David hadn't merely touched death. He'd caused it. He'd cheered for it. He'd unleashed it. He'd surely been through the ritual spoken to Moses and Aaron – surely he'd handled corpses on the field of battle – but now he needed something stronger. For the very crimes of which David was guilty were capital offenses under the same Law by which David reigned as king. “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death” (Leviticus 20:10). “You shall accept no ransom for the murderer who is guilty of death, but he shall be put to death” (Numbers 35:31). By all rights, David should order the execution of David. How can he be a legitimate king under God's Law if he doesn't? But how can he reign if he lives no more? The sentence hangs over David's head. He needs a solution, and fast.

So many others had a solution for their plights. The Law outlined a remedy for slaves languishing in Egypt: to paint a protective coating of blood with a bunch of hyssop. The Law outlined a remedy for lepers yearning for wholeness: a priestly sprinkling of blood and water from a branch of hyssop. The Law outlined a remedy even for those swept up in fellowship with death: a sprinkling by anybody clean with holy water from a branch of hyssop. Sacrifice applied with hyssop would make a way for them. But no clean man in Israel, no robed son of Aaron, no grand patriarch could take up the hyssop branch and run to David's rescue. Not one had the strength. Not one had the right. The Law of Moses outlined no remedy, made no provision, for the horror he'd become.'

And so David prays directly to the LORD, the Giver of that Law: “You purge me with hyssop, and so I shall be clean! You wash me, and so I shall be whiter than snow!” (Psalm 51:7). Let David's case be filed with the rest. Let David be regarded as a slave stuck behind in Egyptian ignorance, as the king of all lepers, even as someone trapped in a tomb, overwhelmed by a wave of ash and bone, with no way out but the grace of God. All he prays and all he hopes is that God will construct him a tailor-made solution on the analogy of the other three – that the LORD look so kindly on his stain as the LORD did on slavery and leprosy and death. That mercy, David awaits.

What David needs – what this disgraced lowercase christ craves – is the capital-C Christ who's Lord even of David. He needs someone beyond a clean man, beyond a Hebrew, beyond a priest, beyond a patriarch. He needs God to grasp the hyssop branch and wield it for his salvation. Nothing will ultimately redeem David except for the coming of a greater Christ than he, a Supreme Priest-King whose New Law will enact remedies that never came by Moses and never came by Aaron. And that Anointed Priest King with a New Law and new remedies is just who Jesus, Son of David, was born to be. He was born to be God with a hyssop branch.

You see, it's not for nothing that, when Jesus hung from the cross, laying down his life for his people, John fills in the details by having a hyssop branch lifted up to Jesus' lips (John 19:29). John was using a pun and a figure to underscore a theological point about what the crucifixion really was. It was the source from which hyssop would be pulled away with everything needed to paint and sprinkle salvation on the world. And as the gospel spread, Hebrews shows the realization that Jesus was the Priest-King who had given himself as that sacrifice. “Under the Law,” it says, “almost everything is purified by blood, and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22). But Jesus' “ministry is... more excellent than the old one” (Hebrews 8:6), “for if the blood of bulls and goats and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (Hebrews 9:13). And so we have come to receive Jesus' “sprinkled blood” (Hebrews 12:24).

After Hebrews and John, the next few generations of believers kept meditating on the theme, and realized that just as Jesus fulfilled the Passover lamb, so he also fulfilled the red heifer that was burned with the cedarwood much as Christ blazed with love on his wooden cross,¹ while the hyssop showed that “the warmth of life melted the frigidity of death.”² They came to see that the blood and water mingled to cleanse the leper pointed forward to the blood and water flowing together from Christ's pierced side, and that the hyssop only underscores that Jesus will “wash and purify” all things.³ And when the Church welcomed new Christians in baptism, that's just what happened. They came in touch with the cleansing David begged. They were purged by the blood that's better than any lamb or bird, and dove into a holy water no heifer's ash could make. They were washed and purified completely by Jesus, losing all their guilty stains of a million generations' weight. And so, in those days, after being baptized, the custom was that a new Christian was given a clean white robe to wear, to show visually how “he who is baptized is seen to have been cleansed both according to the Law and according to the Gospel.... He whose sin is forgiven is made whiter than snow.”⁴

You or I may not have symbolized it with such a change of literal clothes, but when we were born again, when Jesus plunged us beneath his flood, we each got the cleansing David begged. The blood of Jesus availed for you and for me. The landfill dissolved off your shoulders. The ledger of all your wrongs was erased as blank as a pristine snowfall. Everything unheavenly about you was blotted out that very hour. Under the Law, a leper or a person defiled by death was warned to get nowhere near the sanctuary while still impure, or else they would be killed (Leviticus 13:46; Numbers 19:20). But now “we” – you and I – “have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus” (Hebrews 10:19), “with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” in baptism (Hebrews 10:22).

That leaves just one spot of trouble – and it's that we still sin. “Can a man be pure before his Maker?” (Job 4:17). “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (1 John 1:8). Ananias and Sapphira were born again, yet they died under God's judgment over their sin. So do we dive back into uncleanness and sin and death. We turn our backs on our baptism, we grow deaf to the Spirit, we stray into the mud, and we hear the warning that even God's children can “make a shipwreck of their faith” (1 Timothy 1:19) and “fall away from the living God” (Hebrews 3:12). We still sin. And even if our sins never look outwardly like David's sin, they may be no less grave, no less serious, no less deadly to the tender life of grace born in us. But still our need can never outrun or outflank the provision of God. We can still find Jesus with hyssop in hand, for by his sacrifice, he still has ways of sprinkling our hearts clean again, still paints over the slaveries and leprosies and deaths we caress, when we but return to him our broken, contrite hearts.

“Every purification of sin like this, which is sought through repentance, is in need of assistance from the One from whose side water and blood came forth.”⁵ And Jesus never withholds that assistance, never turns the hyssop away, from one who comes as he ordained and begs to be purged clean. “You will be sprinkled with hyssop, because the humility of Christ will cleanse you.”⁶ And once he sprinkles us anew, we can again hear joy and gladness (Psalm 51:8). Christ ministers to us, and suddenly we discover a clean heart and an upright spirit (Psalm 51:10). We can be restored to the abundant joy of God's saving love (Psalm 51:12). And we can go out and tell others, calling them to come to Jesus for the hyssop purge (Psalm 51:13). Because no stain, no stench, no weakness, no slavery or leprosy or death, needs to be forever. Just bring it all “to Jesus / to wash your crimson stains / white in his blood most precious, / 'til not a spot remains.” Thanks be to God! Amen.

In the Snowy Pit

The wind whistled past him. Snow was still falling. It wasn't so simple to see. Benaiah was a young man, standing on the precipice, listening to the roar below. This was the moment of decision. Clutching his spear in his hand, he astonished those around him by taking the next step. Pushing off the edge, he leapt into the pit.

Benaiah was a small-town boy from Kabzeel, a town at the southernmost boundary of Judah's tribal allotment, not far from the Edomite border (2 Samuel 23:20; cf. Joshua 15:21). Born under the kingship of Saul son of Kish in the late eleventh century BC, leadership was then in the hands of one of the northernmost tribes, distrusted Benjamin – so Benaiah knew what it was like to live on the edge. His father Jehoiada was a priest, descended through a long chain of ancestors from Aaron the brother of Moses (1 Chronicles 27:5). But the priestly life wasn't for Benaiah. Perhaps he had a disqualification. Perhaps he was ordained but simply gave his life to other pursuits. It was likely before the question even came up, when Benaiah was a teenager, that he would have run off to join the persecuted hero David in the wilderness.

Benaiah, as he grew, became strong, daring, devoted. In time, Benaiah stood out among David's followers. Proving his merit in battle, he became one of David's thirty mighty men, essentially the Green Berets of David's fighters. So too had David laid the groundwork for one day recruiting a team of mercenaries, the Cherethites and the Pelethites; and once he did, he assigned Benaiah to supervise them (2 Samuel 8:18; 20:23). Coming to reign in Jerusalem at last, it was from these Cherethites and Pelethites that King David selected a security detail for himself, knowing that they'd be unswayed by Israel's internal tribal politics. And who did David trust as their commander? Benaiah. Benaiah became David's personal bodyguard, Chief of Secret Service (2 Samuel 23:23). Eventually, Benaiah would even take Abishai's place as commander of the Thirty (1 Chronicles 27:6). Benaiah's career didn't stop there. When David organized Israel's men into military divisions, one to serve on duty each month, Benaiah was installed as one of those twelve lieutenant generals, in command of 24,000 men (1 Chronicles 27:5). In practice, busy Benaiah, by that point a father with a grown son, delegated that son, Ammizadab, to command them in his stead (1 Chronicles 27:6). It was Benaiah's shift of soldiers who were on duty at the end of each spring, in the month when Pentecost was (1 Chronicles 27:5).

As the four decades of David's kingship wore on, time came when the embattled monarch grew old, and his son Adonijah sought to guarantee himself the inheritance of the throne by declaring himself king in David's days. It was Benaiah, cooperating with the prophet and the high priest, who played a leading role, at David's command, in transferring royal authority to Adonijah's younger half-brother Solomon instead (1 Kings 1:32-40). And thus – through Benaiah's work – the LORD secured the royal line of succession into which would be born a man named Joseph, a woman named Mary, and above all, a Messiah named Jesus, to save his people from their sins.

For his loyalty and bravery, the fully matured Benaiah – certainly now in his late fifties or sixties – was elevated to commander-in-chief of Israel's army under Solomon (1 Kings 2:35; 4:4), in addition to serving as the court assassin or executioner – take your pick – when it came to enemies of the state who now at Benaiah's hands could meet delayed justice for their terrible crimes, as the late David had advised (1 Kings 2:25, 34, 46).

An incredible career for an obscure but incredible man in ancient Israel. But how did he make his name? With three great exploits. In one, Benaiah faced a Goliath of his own. Maybe it was when David lived among the Philistines and raided the Amalekites as far as the land of Egypt (1 Samuel 27:8). But Benaiah found himself squaring off against an Egyptian over seven feet tall, massive and muscular. The Egyptian had a massive spear, while Benaiah as yet had nothing but a walking stick. Outmatched, outgunned, yet Benaiah's youthful dexterity let him disarm the giant and strike him down with his very own spear (2 Samuel 23:21; 1 Chronicles 11:23). A second exploit was on the field of battle, perhaps after David had begun to reign in Jerusalem and warred to press the Moabites into subjection (2 Samuel 8:2). In open warfare, Benaiah faced down two of the most elite soldiers in all Moab – men fierce as lions, men just like the men in David's Thirty or his Three – yet, though it was two against one, Benaiah still emerged victorious (2 Samuel 23:20).

But perhaps before either came the day of the great snows. In those days, Asiatic lions roamed the countryside of Israel. David, as a shepherd boy, had had occasion to kill one with a slingshot. And now Benaiah had his own chance to face a lion. The lion had slid in the snow, fallen into a hunting pit – and it was none too happy about it. Roaring, raging, it yelled from the wintery depths. Into that pit, Benaiah leapt. We can only speculate why. Maybe someone else had fallen into the pit with the lion and needed rescue. Maybe the lion injured itself in its fall and, rather than let it slowly starve in the pit, he went down to put it out of its misery. Maybe Benaiah was a thrill-seeker bent on proving his bravery and valor. Maybe Benaiah, unwilling to risk the lion's escape to terrorize the land anew, risked himself for the safety of the community. Whatever his reason, Benaiah leapt.

Landing, Benaiah found a slippery floor and visibility poor, as he confronted the raging lion. He knew, as any man must have, that the swat of a full-grown lion's paw suffices to shatter bone. And that's to say nothing of claws or jaws. One slip, one unguarded moment, and Benaiah is dead meat – literally. He's trapped with no refuge or retreat, not to mention that, as a deep southerner, Benaiah's literally out of his element, having perhaps scarcely seen snow until that day. But in he went. What his tactics were, we don't know. Likely he brought a spear with him and, finding the right chance, thrust it through the whirling snow and scored a lethal blow. Calling out that the lion was dead, someone surely lowered him a rope, and he climbed back to the broad land above. And so it was that Benaiah killed the lion in the pit on the snowy day (2 Samuel 23:20).

Now, you or I read that story, and we're children of the modern era. We're by instinct limited in how we read. We read the Bible, and we find only histories or moral lessons in faith and virtue. But there's so much more here than a obsolete narrations or exhortations to courage. Down through history, Christians have read a many-layered Bible that, when all its rightful senses are explored, points on every page to Christ and his Church. For didn't Jesus say that all of Scripture “bears witness about me” (John 5:39), that “everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (Luke 24:44)?

And so what is written of Benaiah is written, at its deepest level, to show us Christ. For this world is a snowy pit, obscure and unclear, and each of us is trapped in it, from birth to death, with the devil. Each of Benaiah's three exploits – against Moabites, massive Egyptian, and raging lion – is against an image used in either the New Testament itself or in early Christian writings to depict the devil. “Be sober-minded, be watchful! Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). He's strong, he's deadly, he's dangerous, and in the pit of the world, we're snowed in with him. There's no escape. But from the broad land of heaven jumps down the Word of God, leaping into our flesh and our position, joining us in the pit. God so loved a pit-trapped world that he sent his only-begotten Son, Benaiah-style, to come down and give the lion a mortal wound, that we might live; and the spear with which Christ struck the lion is his cross.

So too, Benaiah's later career foreshadows salvation history. It's not for nothing that in David's days Benaiah oversaw Israel's active-duty troops every Pentecost. His was a pentecostal courage from the “Spirit not of fear but of power” (2 Timothy 1:7), foreshadowing the descent of the Holy Spirit into our world-pit from Christ. In this era, when now the Spirit has been given, we are the active-duty troops on duty under the Spirit's ultimate command, as he speaks to us by Scripture and by Church and leads us marching onward.

And at last, when David's days were done, he left the throne of David to the son of David, who sent Benaiah forth into the land to exact a fierce judgment against sinners like Joab, Shimei, and Adonijah. And so it is that “the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done” (Matthew 16:27), being “revealed from heaven... in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel” (2 Thessalonians 1:7-8), but also “to save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:28).

In Benaiah, we see one of many shadows of the things that have come to pass and the things that are and the things that remain to come. But in Christ Jesus, we find the substance of them all. Glory be to Christ the Doer of Great Deeds, to Christ the Devil-slayer! And thanks be to God for the Christ who will one day return to pull us from the snowy pit to the perfect spring of a new creation. Amen.

Commander of Winter

So, a quick show of hands: who here has seen or heard the forecast for this evening? Yes, I thought so. Doesn't look too promising, does it? This evening, they say, we have a 90% chance of getting our inch of snow, turning to rain already tonight, possibly back to light snow tomorrow morning, to yield a fine slushy mess. Of course, by this point, we've had our sampler platter of winter weather already, what with the freezing rain last Sunday and the larger snowstorm before that. Even this weekend, our county is getting off easy. Further west, they're calling for mostly snow, with the far end of western New York warned of more than eighteen inches. Those of us who are greatly fond of winter weather are few and far between – although we have some notable exceptions among our number. But this morning, with the limited time we have, I'd like to begin looking at some of the Old Testament's mentions of winter weather. Meditate on these as the air chills and the snow falls tonight.

First, when we get our snow or ice, sleet or hail, whatever the case may be, it reminds us that God is sovereign. What does he say to Job? The LORD asks, “Have you entered the storehouse of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war?” (Job 38:22-23). And, of course, Job hasn't. He's an ancient man, living three thousand years ago, without much understanding of how God prepares snow or hail, and certainly he's never been on site. We today claim a scientific grasp of the mechanics, but even now they remain too complex for us to firmly predict what exactly any given storm will do. How much more, then, should God be trusted with the vastly more complex webs of possibility that permit dangers in the world for the sake of opening the windows to let greater good blow in?

And like the psalmist says, “He sends out his command to earth, his word runs swiftly: He gives snow like wool, he scatters frost like ashes” (Psalm 147:15-16). God is the power behind the snow, the ice, the sleet, the hail, the frost. God is the Creator of the world, and he's all-powerful – there's nothing he cannot do. And ultimately, although he works ordinarily through intermediate causes, God is the One empowering the giving of snow or the scattering of frost. It's a show of his power, a reminder that God is God and we are not. For all our pretense, for all our grasping at control, neither you nor I can stand in the path of a blizzard and deflect it. When the windows frost and the snow falls, we must marvel at a mighty God.

We also lack the authority to command the winter – to make it do our bidding. But God has just that authority. Like Elihu tells Job, “God thunders wondrously with his great voice, he does great things we can't comprehend: for to the snow he says, 'Fall on the earth!'... From its chamber comes the whirlwind, and cold from the scattering winds. By the breath of God, ice is given, and the broad waters are frozen fast” (Job 37:5-6, 9-10). God thunders, God speaks, and snow and cold and ice obey. He has authority, and when he speaks, these winter weather phenomena respond accordingly. They put us to shame! Because how often does God tell us to fall on the earth – to leave our chambers and go forth with mercy – and we stay clustered in our storehouses? How oft do we, unlike the ice, refuse to be given? And how oft do we, in the face of opposition or temptation, hear God calling us to freeze firm like the waters, and yet we're indifferent to the temperature of the situation? Wisdom: be attentive! For the Commander of Winter has every bit as much right to command you and me.

And when he at last flexes his might, he is irresistible. The psalmist asks, “Who can stand before his cold?” (Psalm 147:17b). I'll tell you, many windy winter days I'll step outside and sharply regret it, and then all I want to do is to take cover from the cold. I can't withstand it! It's at times like this that I'm glad I don't live in Oymyakon, the coldest village on earth, with a temperature usually around -40 and where on a colder day, your eyelashes might well freeze together. At its record low of -96, it was once below the average temperature of Mars there. Yet even in Oymyakon, who can dare boast before the LORD? Who anywhere needn't be humble?

So why does he send these things? Elihu tells us: “Whether for a rod or for his land or for mercy, he causes it to come” (Job 37:13). Sometimes, Elihu thinks, God provides harsh cold and winter weather as discipline. That, we can understand. Other times, Elihu suggests, God sends it “for his land,” because snow and ice had a beneficial role in enriching the land in preparing for another good growing season. And last, Elihu says, God might send his cold and his snow and his frost “for mercy.” And that may be hardest to imagine. But like the psalmist declares, God “gives snow like wool” (Psalm 147:16). He blankets the land in snow like a cozy fleece comforter, swaddling the earth in pristine beauty and serene comfort. Tomorrow's dawn may not look quite like that, but some snowfalls are truly beautiful (especially viewed from indoors). And that's God's mercy at work.

So winter weather can show us God's sovereignty and even God's love. But winter weather is also an action of the earth, and it's one way the earth praises God. “Praise the LORD from the earth, you... hail, snow, ice, tempest blast, those thing that do his word!” (Psalm 148:7-8 LXX). So the psalmist sings. When the earth gets cold and invites the snow, invites the ice, invites the wind, all these things are praising God! It's strange to think – but in their own unspoken way, each falling snowflake praises the Designer of its crystalline intricacy. Every chilling wind is singing its pointed hymn. It may not be a language pleasant to us, but God will be praised in every tongue – even these. Theirs can, at times, be a violent praise, like David dancing before the ark, coolly careless and thrashing before his Maker. So might winter weather thrash before the same Maker. Sometimes praise can be cold and austere, harsh and forceful. So in nature's praise, and so in our lives as well. God calls for our forceful, harsh, even chilly praise in the bleakness of our emotional midwinter, when darkness and frost are our only companions. And God accepts our harsh, chilly praise no less than our soothing, sunny praises in the springtimes of life. When the snow falls and the wind blows, watch the earth praising God – and join in.

What's more, winter weather reminds us that our family is large. Bear with me now. The LORD asked Job, “From whose womb did the ice come forth? And who has given birth to the frost of heaven?” (Job 38:29). Part of the great mystery of the Book of Job is an intense meditation on what it means to be a child of God, and when God at last speaks from the storm, he teaches Job that creation's marvels are the mysteries of his divine parenthood – that he looks on many creations as his offspring. It was God's womb that cradled the ice. It was God who gave birth to the frost of heaven. God isn't bashful to speak so. So in some mysterious way, when we realize ourselves as God's offspring even just by creation (to say nothing of becoming his heirs by adoption, as we have in Christ), we come to know ourselves as a big family – a family bigger than the human race. And the powers of snow and ice and frost are brother and sister to us. Winter weather is our family reunion! And, yes, family reunions can sometimes highlight tensions in a family – awkwardness, discomfort, unpleasantness – but that makes them no less worthwhile; and the same is true when Brother Frost and Sister Snow come to town to visit. They're perhaps a tad eccentric, with manners that can be grating, but offspring of our Father all the same.

Finally, winter weather is a pointer to our salvation. We'll think more on this the next two Sundays, but for now, hear the psalmist: “He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs” (Psalm 147:17a). And hear Moses: “When the dew had gone up, there was on the face of the desert a fine and flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground” (Exodus 16:14). And in the next verse, the Israelites name that frosty treat 'manna.' The bread of angels (Psalm 78:25)! For forty years in the desert, that was the diet of God's people, from God's storehouse of frost. And so each time since then when God sends down frost upon the earth, he's inviting us to imagine how the desert must have looked when God fed and cared for his people with heavenly bread those thousands of years ago.

And that leads us to think of when the Living Bread came down from heaven – Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of God. “He sends out his command to the earth: his Word runs swiftly” (Psalm 147:15) – that's Jesus! “He sends out his Word and melts them; he makes his Spirit blow, and waters flow” (Psalm 147:18). Now, if your lawn is anything like mine, you can see more of it this morning than you could a week ago, because the layer of snow is melting away. God has spoken onto his creation, sending forth a word that commands the snow to submit to the heat of the sun. God does not let ice hold sway forever – even in Oymyakon.

But so too, God has spoken his personal Word into creation as Jesus Christ. He descended from heaven like hail, taking on warm human flesh in the womb of Mary. And the Word brings the Spirit, and when the Spirit blows, the baptismal waters flow, and new birth is made possible. And to those who've received the new birth, the Word named Jesus gives his divinized flesh as manna, as bread from heaven, on the altar. The Word of God has become for us an edible frost that cools the passions of sin and chills the flames of hell. So let us gather in praise and thanksgiving before the sovereign Commander of Winter, who speaks in judgment and mercy, and let us feast on heaven's frost, Christ the Living Bread, the Word who freezes and melts at his pleasure in us. Amen.

Let All the Welkin Ring!

Merry Christmas! Today's the second of those famed twelve days of Christmas, so we still get to say that. Next Sunday we can too, if we want. I hope you all had a pleasant first day of Christmas. I know I did, by and large. Last night, as perhaps the start of a new yearly tradition, my wife, mom, and I watched one of the classics of Christmas cinema together: It's a Wonderful Life. Came out in 1946, and yet, though I knew plenty about it, I'd never actually seen it until last night. Now, I'm curious, show of hands: how many of you here this morning have seen It's a Wonderful Life? What a movie. I just wish, though, that they'd given a little bit more screen time to the character of Clarence Odbody, Angel Second Class. He, you see, was sent down from the heavens as George Bailey's guardian angel in the hour of need. And for all that you wouldn't want to get your theology from a Frank Capra movie, there's one point at which Clarence rings quite true to life.

And that's that, for all of Christian history, the Church has believed that there are guardian angels – not deceased men trying to earn wings, but immortal heavenly beings assigned by God to our help. And the Church believed it because she unpacked it from the Bible. The psalmist, after all, celebrates that God “will command his angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways” (Psalm 91:11). The author of Hebrews describes angels being “sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” (Hebrews 1:14). In Acts, a young woman mistakes Peter for “his angel,” the one assigned to him (Acts 12:15). And Jesus himself implied that the “little ones” all have guardian angels, for “in heaven, their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 18:10). And as the Christians of the first centuries studied these scriptures, they marveled that “the worth of souls is so great that, from birth, each one has an angel assigned to him for his protection,”¹ “an angel that accompanies him, acting like a kind of... shepherd,”² “to help in the life of each person,”³ so that “there is present to each one of us, even to the least who are in the church of God, a good angel, an angel of the Lord, who guides, warns, and governs – who, for the sake of correcting our actions and imploring mercy, daily sees the face of the Father who is in heaven.”⁴ And thus, as Jesus said, your guardian angel is among those who rejoice greatly over your repentance whenever you turn toward God (Luke 15:10).

What's more, the Church has also always believed that angels are in some way fellow-members of the church, and that when the church gathers to worship God, angels are worshipping God alongside us. After all, when the Apostle Paul demands that churches behave themselves appropriately in worship, he explains himself by simply saying, “because of the angels” (1 Corinthians 11:10).⁵ And more directly, the author of Hebrews announces, in our worship, we've joined “innumerable angels in festal gathering” (Hebrews 12:22). All of which suggests that the names on our membership roll, however we clean it, can never tell the true story of our membership. And why not? Because of the angels! Invisible to us, there's no way to count just how many angels are on hand to assist and share in the worship we're offering God today.⁶ But they may well be in the majority here.

So let's do something a little different this morning. We mortal members hear, what, fifty, fifty-one sermons a year directed at us, while the angels listen in? This morning, if you'll indulge it, I say we swap places for a bit. Feel free, by all means, to listen in – but the rest of this sermon, all but the end, goes out to the angels.

So, to the angels of this church, greetings in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ! You've certainly known about him a lot longer than we have, haven't you? For you knew him before ever he took on the name 'Jesus.' “In the beginning,” I've read, “was the Word – and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). From all eternity, the Word was all that God was, and was with God the Father in his heart. But then God spoke, and time began. And in that first instant of time, the Word from within the Father's heart was, “Let there be light!” (Genesis 1:3). And suddenly, there was light – and suddenly, there were you. It took the Word no time to give you being. He willed, and you obeyed and existed. You came forth fully formed, and in that instant, already you knew God, loved God, were inclined toward him as your natural good.

But then came a second instant – separated from the first by perhaps no more time than one of my heartbeats to the next. God spoke to you in his Eternal Word. This Word proposed to you a destiny beyond your nature, the outline of a plan for all things, a prospect for your role therein. The Word invited your free and open embrace of it. But some of your brothers refused. They rejected a destiny beyond nature that would take humility to receive it. So those angels, as it's written, “did not stay within their own domain, but left their proper dwelling” (Jude 1:6). But you remained. You were faithful. Humbling yourselves, you decided once and for all for God. And by that same Eternal Word, the Father's grace confirmed you in love, forever unable to fall, and forever destined you for glory as you were blessed in beholding his face.

After that, you surrounded God, rank on rank of the heavenly host – seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, and angels⁷ – and you all sang for joy as God spoke things into being in heaven and on earth (Job 38:7). Didn't you “offer praise before him on account of all his works” in creation?⁸ You even watched with wonder as he breathed the breath of life into mud and moved it to be man. Angels, I've no doubt you wandered through the Paradise of God, watching the primeval parents of all our kith and kin. But did it surprise you, did it dismay you, when your fallen brother used the serpent and lured us to make the same prideful choice as him – to spurn grace and chase ruin? For then were we expelled from paradise, and some of your loftiest brethren, of the order of cherubim, stationed as guards to ward us away from the tree of life.

Yet the sorrow of our fall, though pitting us so often against you, was no end to your mission for our ungrateful brood. For surely God revealed to you then, if not before, his plan to save the prodigal earthlings lost from the garden. And for that, he called on you. He declared you as “ministering spirits sent out to serve, for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” (Hebrews 1:14). And I wonder – though there must be billions of angels beyond our comprehension – just how each of you present with us today has been serving through the ages. Patriarchs like Abraham and Jacob met angels (Genesis 18; 32:1) – were any of you among them? We hear over and over that it was through angels that God delivered the Law to Moses (Acts 7:53; Galatians 3:19; Hebrews 2:2) – were you there on the mountain, were you the thick cloud, did you see? When Elisha prayed his fearful servant's eyes be opened, and he beheld the hills suddenly “full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (2 Kings 6:17), was that you? Or when Daniel testified God had “sent his angel and shut the lions' mouths” (Daniel 6:22), did one of you do that? Moses, David, the prophets – were you there, involved?

Whether you did or didn't, between those scenes and besides your missions here and there, first and foremost you've always remained fixed on God the Holy Trinity, the source and summit of all your love and life. What do you do more than worship? Nothing! Don't you say, again and again, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come” (Revelation 4:8)? Don't you chant, “Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created” (Revelation 4:11)? “The cherubim fall before him and bless him. As they arise, the quiet voice of God is heard, followed by a tumult of joyous praise” – your praise!⁹ “They tell of his royal splendor as they truly know it, and exalt his glory in all the heavens of his rule. They sing wonderful psalms according to their insight throughout the highest heaven, and declare the surpassing glory of the King of divinities in the stations of their habitation.”¹⁰ Isn't that what you've been doing since time immemorial: worshipping like priests in heaven to “present to the Lord a pleasing aroma” where “praises of God are offered eternally”?¹¹ And in all this, as the “bread of angels,” the Eternal Word was your constant sustenance (Psalm 78:25).

But then it happened. You'd been helping God to shepherd all the peoples in the world as they labored under sin and temptation. You'd been eager to know more of God's plan, the things not even angels can see apart from revelation. But did it take you by surprise? Were any of you here lurking unseen in the streets of Nazareth, eavesdropping as your brother Gabriel spoke to Mary? And when Mary gave her beautiful yes, her humble and queenly yes, were your fiery eyes able to see the infinite Word stretch down to meet her? Or, as some thought in early years, did the Word disguise himself as one like yourselves and so slip past you in stealth?¹² I suppose it wasn't so, and that you saw the moment the Word came. Did any of you here watch in perplexity as this Word – the Word that spoke you into being, the Word that spoke your grace, the Word that spoke your glory, the Word you've heeded in ardent love long before we were – suddenly seized on our human nature, joining it to his divine person? Did you watch the Word create a human soul, not for yet another of your wards, but for himself? And through the next nine months, did you marvel to notice the Word knitting himself in Mary's womb a body of heavy matter, of flesh, blood, and bone? What was it to you angels as the heart of God beat soft and small?

For we're told, and we can believe it, that human nature is ranked naturally lower, in the great chain of being, than seraph or cherub, archangel, or even the lowliest angel in your ranks, on account (among other things) of our susceptibility to death (Hebrews 2:7). And so, in some profound way, the Word by which you live and move and have your being suddenly lowered himself beneath you, even as his divinity remained above you. “Jesus himself, the transcendent Cause of [you] beings which live beyond the world, came to take on human form, without in any way changing his own essential nature.”¹³ Immortal as God, he was mortal as man. Infinite as God, he was finite as man – and not merely as man, but at first as a single cell, beyond the power of our eyes unaided to see. Then over days and weeks the cells multiplied – a blastocyst, an embryo, a fetus he became, taking form in accordance with this human soul heretofore unknown fused to the Word always known by you.

I know, angels, how it's written that the apostles and evangelists were privileged to announce “things into which angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:22). For “not all the mysteries are open to you.”¹⁴ But you itch to know and see, to love and sing. Yet you cannot taste for yourselves what it's like to have God literally become what you are, with the intent of infusing your natures with divinity itself. So how shocking was it to witness this done for us?

Nine months went by, watching in wonder. But then came the night, the fateful night when the Word of God would reveal his tiny human face to the world. And more than any other mystery you might unfold, given leave, I want to know about that night – that night when the heavenly liturgy of worship was on earthly display, and the veil was torn away in a field outside that little town of Bethlehem, otherwise so still and silent. To be sure, I don't know, O angels of ours here, whether you were in Nazareth at the annunciation. Perhaps you were in heaven, attending nothing but God in his realm. Or perhaps you were elsewhere in our world, on assignment of one sort or another. But then came that night. I read in the Gospel that “a multitude of heavenly host” then appeared. What percentage of angels were there? Was it only a fraction, with you here having been left out? But I turn to another page and read, “When [God] brings his Firstborn into the world, he says, 'Let all God's angels worship him!'” (Hebrews 1:6). All? All! Every angel in existence, crowding densely to chant the gospel song, “that famous song of jubilation!”¹⁵

So you were there, weren't you, angels? Each of you – my guardian angel, his, hers – you were on the scene the silent and holy night when Christ was born! What did it look like for you, I want to know? With blazing vision, did you see the Word-made-Flesh brought into the open, pressed forth from virgin womb to violent world in the presence of ox and donkey? Did you stand at attention as the umbilical cord was cut, and could you already see the chains of death and hell severed with the stroke? Did you hear God's cry as air filled his infant human lungs – and did it sound to you like a shout of revelation? Did you appreciate the miracle to end all miracles, and how this was the salvation of a shattered creation? Because it was. It was. So what was the joy within your light, O holy winds, as you beheld the dawn in the midnight hour? How excited were you by the unfolding of all you'd yearned for, and to enter the next phase of a mission long as time had run?

Then you went to the shepherds, who not so far away were “out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” (Luke 2:8). But why did you go to the shepherds, angels? Were they in the same field where that boy David once grazed his father's sheep when he was a shepherd like them? Did you go because they were so like David? Did you go because they were the poor and downtrodden, the outcast and overworked? Or did you go because they were so still and quiet, purifying and refining their souls? When you went, what were they doing as you invisibly drew near? Were they idling away the hours in talk of family struggles and bills? Did they talk of their hopes and fears? Were they bored and in silence? Or were they watching and praying?

Then one of your brother angels made himself visible, wrapped up in the Lord's own glory carried with you. So I've read that these lonely shepherds were utterly terrified by the sight (Luke 2:9)! What was the look on their faces, angels? You saw them in that moment – you know! It's no second-hand story to you; it's a memory undimmed by the march of time. When the shepherds saw the light all around, how fast did their hearts beat? How near were they to passing out?

You were there, watching, listening, as your brother angel reassured them – told them not to fear, said it was “good news of great joy” he'd come to deliver, a message handed down by the Father through the ranks and now revealed to the unkempt and uncredited. But not for them alone. It was a reason for all humans, high or low or in between, to rejoice in a new-found dignity and deliverance (Luke 2:10). It was for such as these shepherds, your fellow said, and for all of the human race, that in David's city had just been born a Savior who was the long-awaited Messiah, and more than that, was heaven's Lord (Luke 2:11). They knew, these shepherds did, that Rome called it 'good news,' 'gospel,' when the emperor's birthday came around, for Caesar claimed to be the savior and lord who brought a new age of peace to the earth. But what Caesar apes, Christ brings. This day, not the birthday of Augustus, was the true good news. Yet the shepherds would find their true Emperor, not in an inaccessible palace or a far-off land, but back in town, in their neighborhood, on their street. They'd find their Hope wrapped up and dressed in the same way the shepherds' parents had once wrapped and dressed them, and how they'd since wrapped up their own sons and own daughters. They'd find him in a feed-trough for the livestock of peasants and paupers (Luke 2:12). When your brother angel told them that, what did it mean to them? Did their eyes grow wide as they heard tell of Messiah? Did their mouths gape in awe at their salvation?

Then, suddenly, you tore the veil away. You let them see you – not just one angel, but all of you. You filled the welkin – the clouds, the air, the heavens – on every side. Your voices rang out and shook the earth by your exuberance. Unseen by them, unheard by them, you'd already been at worship, already been offering your liturgy of praise to the Father of spirits. But now these shepherds were witnesses to it. Your song went forth, the song you'd been singing all along, the triumph of the skies (Luke 2:13).

“Glory to God in the highest!” you sang (Luke 2:14a). To God be all the credit, to God be all the praise, to God be all importance, to God be all the starry-eyed wonder of those with stars for eyes. You'd once sung songs inspired by creation, you sang as witnesses to judgment, you were awed into outpoured praise day and night by the holiness, holiness, holiness of your Lord. But now, caught up in the denouement of the drama of the divine dawn, you sang all the higher, all the clearer, all the greater. With all the gusto of a supernova, you belted out your Gloria that no gravity could pull down short of highest heaven. Handing the call one to the next up your column of light, your chant compounded its way from Bethlehem's fields to the Holy of Holies above.

“And on earth, peace among people with whom God is pleased!” (Luke 2:14b). Who finds peace in the Savior? All the earth can, if they live toward God's pleasure like a flower bending to unfold its petals to the sunlight. Is that what you were saying? That if we live toward God's pleasure as the Messiah lives to please his Father, then we'll find the peace Rome couldn't give, no power can give, not even you can give? For if we follow the Word toward the lowest of the low, if we humble ourselves to graze like ox and donkey from the grace in our manger, if we become his little hands and his little feet in the world, then even on earth, the peace that counts – the peace with you, the peace with God – is already for us, for we stand in God's favor and relay it outward in good will. And from that favor and good will and peace, we glorify God alongside you, returning to life “glorifying and praising God for all we've heard and seen” and tasted and found (Luke 2:20).

I wonder, angels, how long the veil was down. I wonder how long the shepherds were privy to your liturgy of worship, how long they heard your ceaseless hymn of joy, how long they lifted up their sheep-bitten hands toward their God and yours, with all their fear banished and all their dullness quenched by the unconquerable light defying the night. But eventually, you left them to take their next step, from sight to faith. You “went away from them into heaven” (Luke 2:15), restitching (as you went) the veil between earthly sense and spiritual substance. You declared joyfully before the Father's face in heaven what you'd said and done, and you glorified him. For you knew your song had become the shepherds' song, and would become the church's song. Down through the years, you've shepherded the shepherds, you've assisted and strengthened people just like them – just like us – not with an eye to earning anything, but simply to please the God you will to love.

And now, here we all are – angel and human together, invisible and visible side by side, with our attentions aimed toward the same Holy Flame on high. We humans gathered here now were not there that night – but you angels were. And it's as real to you now as it was then, for you do not forget. Could you help it, then, be real again to us? Would you remind us here why it's such glad tidings? Would you help us taste peace on earth? You evangelized the shepherds then – evangelize us too, because you can't spell 'evangelize' without 'angel.' Whisper good thoughts to our minds, angels. Stir up our slothful hearts, angels. Tell us of the King of Glory!

But now I turn again from you, angels, to you, fellow sons of Adam, daughters of Eve. You see, our friends the angels need no Savior. “It is not angels that he helps,” Scripture announces to us (Hebrews 2:16). But he came to help us. God helps us, God saves us, by his Word becoming one of us, in our own flesh, sharing our softness and weakness, our fragility and our helplessness.

So here we are again to hear again – to hear the gospel begin, to catch the strains of angel song ringing the welkin – and the song is meant for us to catch. We're here to join our earthly worship to the heavenly liturgy that's been going on and has no end. We begin there in the field, approaching the manger, where angels watch in wonder. But it will continue in solemn awe around the cross. For in Jesus our Savior, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and, through him, to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19-20). And we're here to face the awesome wonder that our risen Savior – fully God but also now fully human – has been exalted, as our brother, “with angels, principalities, and powers,” even seraphim and cherubim, “having been subjected to him” (1 Peter 3:22). Our nature is on the throne. In Christ, we have “tasted... the powers of the age to come” (Hebrews 6:5). And not even the mightiest angel has power enough “to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). That's assurance that, if we persevere in faith, then in the resurrection to come, we who believe will be, as Jesus himself promised us, “equal to angels, and sons of God” (Luke 20:36).

We could never be lifted so high, had God the Word, God the Son, not lowered himself so low, into our dirt and grime. This is “the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his holy ones” (Colossians 1:26), “so that, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the powers and principalities in heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10). Worthy is the Word-made-Flesh, worthy is our Emmanuel, worthy is our Savior who is Christ the Lord, “to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing” (Revelation 5:12)! With this mystery, let the welkin ring and ring and ring! For, from this very hour at Bethlehem, he's given a more than wonderful life to us all. Amen.