Sponge Bob Sabra Pants

Today is my granddaughter’s birthday.

Her name is Sabra. Sabra Rain. She is turning four.

I nearly always write something about a historical event connected to the date or some comment on the daily reading in the One Year Bible. However, nothing much of lasting significance has happened on this date and today’s readings are difficult.

The passage from Numbers is more instructions to priests who have been dead now a long, long time and whose order of worship has been radically altered. I try to stay interested, but hey – I’m just a person. The New Testament reading is the third chapter of Luke, and is the genealogy of Joseph.

I think I will write about my granddaughter. Of course, that means I will have to write about each granddaughter as their birthdays come around. But that’s OK. It’s one advantage of having six readers!

Sabra is the daughter of Tiffany. Tiffany is the daughter of Daniel the Wise and Lady Patricia, his wife. Daniel the Wise is the son of Daniel the Elder and his wife, Joretta. Daniel the Elder is the son of John the Hunter and his wife Naomi the Just. John was the son of James the Shoeless and his wife Minerva. James the shoeless was the son of Richard of the Mountain and his wife Rebecca when they sojourned in the mountains, yeah for many generations.

Well, I could go on with this. I won’t because I can’t afford to lose any readers.

Sabra is a family name. The first Sabra is a family legend about a Native American woman who evidently begat with one of our ancestors and had sons and daughters. However, the family either lied to the census takers or something because she is edited out of any official document. The older members of the family all believe she existed and that they knew Indian members of the family who came down from the mountains to visit. There are even pictures – I saw them once, at my grandmother’s house. However, when I commented on them, I never saw them again.

So who was this Sabra? I have no idea, yet.

Something is askew however; because evidently strands of sickle cell anemia run through my family, and that is not generally a Caucasian, European disease!

We are left with official genealogies and unofficial genealogies.

Our Sabra is four years old. She doesn’t care. She wants me to change the television channel so she can watch Sponge Bob Square Pants.

Why do we need genealogies anyway?

Why do St. Matthew and St. Luke take our valuable time going on and on about obscure people who begat, sojourn, purchase a field and are then ‘gathered with their fathers?’

I think it is because covenant is about transmitting invisible things from one generation to the next. If one generation fails to pass something down. It gets lost. If one generation gets the information wrong, then what gets passed down is erroneous.

That’s why we can’t find the elder Sabra. She got lost. I don’t know why. Maybe she wasn’t the legal wife and therefore her children had to be registered as belonging to someone else. Maybe she wanted her children to pass as White and escape the stigma of belonging to a minority group in the America of the eighteen hundreds.

On the other hand, she is not completely lost. We have been talking about her for a long time in our family. There are no photographs or documents. There is only a crude gravestone with a large “S” on it.

And, there is now a four year old girl watching Sponge Bob Square Pants who has her name.

Her sister’s name is Moira Naomi.

That’s another story for another time because there was another Naomi before her. Two of them, in fact; one great-great aunt and one great-great grandmother.

The first Naomi was a force of nature who begat fourteen sons and daughters and who sojourned upon the earth for ninety years. Her ways were righteous before the Lord. Her children rose up and called her blessed.

Naomi probably knew the real story about the first Sabra. If so, for whatever reason, she took the story to her grave.

Sabra Rain is four and she already carries the history of her people. She has a name that gives witness to the sojourn of a people through generations, across mountains, through centuries, into a time when no one is forced to hide their name from their children because they belong to the wrong race.

Sabra Rain is a child of covenant.

As we tell old stories, she watches Sponge Bob Square Pants.

There will be plenty of time for serious stuff later.

For now, it time for birthday cake with a delightful gift from God.

The gift of our second Sabra, known and loved, and who will never have to hide.

St. Patrick Saves Western Civilization

Surely you realized what I would write about today!

It’s St. Patrick’s Day.

Patrick is one of history’s most beloved and influential figures.

Thomas Cahill claims that he saved Western Civilization by evangelizing the Irish.

Maybe so, but Patrick’s contemporaries would have laughed out loud.

He was a poorly educated victim of the Irish slave trade, under the constant suspicion of Church authorities in Britain, and was known for little more than wondering around the villages of Ireland praying for sick people and starting churches.

The greatness of Patrick consists in the bold step he took to preach the gospel outside the network of educated, Latin -speaking middle and upper classes of Europe. Not since Jesus had anyone purposefully visited the “fly-over” zones of the world to share the gospel. There were churches in Rome, Constantinople, Ephesus, Alexander, and so forth. Wherever people could read and discuss great ideas, the gospel seem to do well. Christians were an educated, literary people – people of the Book. The lower classes of people were “pagano,” or “bumpkins.”

The Irish were the worse bumpkins of all. Violent, immoral, unlettered, desperately poor, and steeped in a mystical form of nature worship called Druidism; they were not a people that church leaders thought about evangelizing.

It makes me think about our modern church planting movement. Have you noticed that most of our “church planters” are burdened for the upwardly mobile, cool, well educated and well dressed people of the great cities? Well that’s the way it was in Patrick’s’ day too.

However, Patrick insisted that he had a call. God had given him a vision to return to the place where he had once been a slave.

It was a dangerous mission. It was a mission that the rest of the church did not esteem.

He went anyway.

We love Patrick because he was like Jesus. He voluntarily went into a world no one else wanted to visit. He loved people that no one else loved.

There is a phrase in the Apostle’s Creed that talks about that. It’s when we say, “He descended into Hell.”

Evangelical Christians often have difficulty with that phrase. It doesn’t sound right. It sounds like Jesus went somewhere to be punished.

Our problem with the phrase is language. There is more than one word for “Hell” in Greek.

“Sheol” is indeed the place of punishment.

However, “Hades” means the abode of the dead.

The Apostles Creed only insists that we believe that Jesus descended into the place of the dead. I believe it means more than that, but the creed doesn’t insist that a Christian believe what I do about Christ’s descent into Hell.

A long time ago, God looked down from Heaven and decided to become a man. He decided to come into our mess. He didn't descend into Caesar's palace. He didn't descend into the Sanhedrin. He didn't descend into the academy in Athens. He descended into Hell.

First, Christ descended into an animal stall, a cave filled with nasty straw and horse manure. Down, down, he kept going into humiliation. He kept going all the way to the bottom of human civilization, becoming socially marginalized, and finally even criminalized.

Christ ended his life covered in spit. He was naked, humiliated, abandoned, and rejected: like a lamb led to slaughter.

Then he descended even further, into the mockery of demons and fallen angels, down where the slimy, underground creatures of death, disease and those alienated from God live; down into an unfathomable and unmentionable horror beyond all human imagination.

I do not know exactly what happened then. All I know is that on the third day, He rose again with the shout: "I have in my hands the keys to death, Hell and the grave."

It was then that Christ was able to say, these signs shall follow them that believe, "in my name you will cast out devils".

What had happened?

St. Paul said that He who ascended was the same one as He who had descended. And because he descended and then ascended, He led our captors into captivity and then gave gifts unto men: apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers and evangelists.

Jesus gave birth to a people who can survive, thrive and minister the saving gospel of Jesus in the midst of Hell.

David had once said, If I make my bed in Hell thou art there!

Hell can't keep God out. He descended into Hell. Are you in Hell? God is there too.

Anytime we feel as though we are sinking into Hell, we must remember that God knows what Hell looks like and where it is.

We may indeed go through Hell. However, we are attached to the One who knows how to get out of Hell. He once entered Hell of his own volition. Then, of his own volition, He rose up, and as he arose, He carried upon His shoulders all who believe in Him. Since he has ascended to Heavenly places, so have we.

That’s what Patrick knew as he sailed toward the Irish coast. He was already free of Hell and therefore, wherever he went, Hell would not survive.

Like his Lord, Patrick went to Ireland to set people free from the power of Hell.

When he arrived, there were no Christians. When he died, he left a vibrant Christian church that would soon pour out missionaries and teachers into all of Europe, and in time, into North America and around the world.

If you can’t be in Ireland today, at least take a moment to wish you were. It will be craze there and many things will be done that St. Patrick would not have liked! Nonetheless, congratulations to all Irishmen everywhere –and to their scattered children across the world who have -- or who claim to have roots there.

Happy St. Patrick’s’ Day!

Unbend This: A Truck and an Ass

Leonard Griffin is a pastor of a wonderful church in Phoenix, Arizona. The blog is not really about him but I want to at least say that he and his wife Sharon may be two Christians I admire as much as I have ever met.

Anyway, like I said, the blog is not about him.

It’s about a story he once told me to illustrate the meaning of “depravity.”

He once bought a truck which he really liked. However, it kept pulling to the right.

He complained to the people who had sold him the truck. They promised to take care of it.

They aligned the truck. They balanced the wheels. After all of that, the truck still pulled to the right.

Finally, the mechanics discovered the bent axle. As it turns out, aligning the front-end and balancing the tires of a truck cannot fix that truck if the core issue is a bent axle!

When problem is that serious, a superficial solution doesn’t help.

Christians believe that human beings, like Leonard’s truck, are profoundly bent. That is what we mean by the doctrine of depravity. It doesn’t mean that we are not good looking, nice, or well mannered. It means that our axle is bent. It means that our attempts to correct our most basic flaw will not work. Our problem lies at a deeper level than any human effort can reach. A bent man cannot unbend himself. All the people who try to “unbend’ us, however noble, intelligent or gifted, are themselves “bent.” To unbend a human being requires the help of an Unbent Being.

Christians believe that there are deep laws governing the universe. The ancient Chinese described these “laws” as the “Tao.”

(My last blog was a reflection on what that means.)

Christians agree with Taoists that there is such a system of “laws” that undergird the universe. We disagree with Taoists that human beings can learn how to live in accordance with the Tao. We can discern what is right but we cannot actually do what we know is right – at least not all the time. The road – the Way (for that is what the word “Tao” means) – is straight enough, and we can certainly learn to see it, but when we try to drive on that road, we discover that we are driving crooked. Just like my friend Leonard.

Christians believe that an Unbent Man once came into the world to unbend us.

Jesus Christ was God “enfleshed.” He knows how we are made, for what we are made, and what keeps us from living in accordance with how we were made.

Through the the death of this innocent Unbent Man, Jesus Christ, justice was satisfied, evil was defeated, and redemption was made possible

By His death on the cross, Christ destroyed our sins and offered repair for our bent souls.

One of the Easter hymns of ancient Orthodox churches puts it this way: “He trampled down death by death.”

Some of the Church Fathers described the death of Christ as a victim on a hook. The enemy of our souls, the Evil Bender of souls, took the bait. He ingested the goodness and death-destroying power of the Son of God. Evil attempted to absorb goodness and revived a blow from which it will never recover.

As a result, the entire universe will someday be unbent.

Christians believe that after his death and decent into death, Christ resurrected. He then ascended into heaven to take His place at the right hand of God, the Father. He will be there until the work of universe unbending is completed.

The death, burial, and resurrection of Christ were not only personal victories for Jesus then; they were “vicarious victories,” that is to say, “done in the place of.”

All who believe in Jesus, will receive every benefits that He won in His struggles with death, hell, and the grave. (See Romans 3:35; 2 Corinthians 5:21; 1 Corinthians 15:3)

In Christ, God became human. Because of that we are now clothed with the nature of God. (See 2 Peter 1: 3,4)

Not only that, but one day every speck of dirt in the cosmos will be unbent, redeemed, sanctified, and glorified.

This is what we mean when we speak of the “vicarious work of Christ.”

Oh, today in the One Year Bible, we read about Balaam and his famous talking ass (Numbers 22).

It’s a funny story and I must comment on it.

It is a satirical account of a man of God with a reputation for displaying supernatural gifts. However this great prophet – God’s man of glory and power –is dumber than the beast he rides on.

The ass gets it right.

The prophet gets it wrong.

I was just thinking about how wonderful it is that in Leonard’s case, the situation was reversed!