For those of you keeping score at home, I wanted to let you know that at 10:59pm tonight I sent the final three chapters of my latest book to my publisher.

I am relieved. I am exhausted. I am happy. I don’t know what to do with myself.

My plan is to take a couple of weeks off, watch as many movies as I can and clear my head before I try to figure out what’s next for me.

One of the things I want to do is read some. Because of the nature of this recent project, I’ve been reading commentaries mostly. In fact, I think I read more commentaries in the past four months than I did in all of graduate school!

So, here’s where I could use your help. What are the books I need to get and read now? I’d like a mix of fiction and non-fiction. To start, Jill bought me Ferrol Sam’s newest novel, Down Town. I cracked it open yesterday and read about 100 pages before I knew what had happened. Oddly enough, that’s the only book I received for Christmas this year.

What do you recommend?

Question: If you were a shepherd 2,000 years ago and while you were outside watching the sheep one night an angel showed up with a message from God…well…what would you do?

Answer: Panic!

Shepherds were not highly regarded in those times. It wasn’t considered a very noble profession. You practically lived outside with animals — stupid animals at that. You were constantly coming into contact with…well…animal stuff.

Unclean wasn’t just a description — it was a condition for them. They were unclean hygienically and ceremonially. They weren’t allowed to testify in court. They weren’t allowed in the synagogues or the Temple. Ironically, the lambs they helped come into the world, the very animals that would be sacrificed for Passover, rendered them unfit to make sacrifices in the temple.

So, what must they have thought when they saw the angel? They probably thought, “Oh, no! What did we do now?”

They heard what they’d been told: God didn’t like unclean people. They probably assumed that the angel was there to tell them that God was mad at them — or worse. Maybe God had finally reached his limit with all the uncleanness and was ready to do something about it — starting with them!

But the angel begins with these words (a familiar refrain if you’ve read much about angels in the Bible): “Fear not.” Angels were always having to preface their conversations with people this way.

“God’s not angry,” the angel continued. “In fact, I’ve got good news for everybody — even dirty shepherds like you. You know all the stuff thats’ wrong with the world — all that stuff you wish could get fixed but looks hopeless? Well, God’s going to do something about it. He’s sending someone to save the day. This Savior is also going to be the King. You can go see him now if you want. Here’s how you’ll know him when you see him….”

Okay…wait. Don’t hurry on here.

If you’re that shepherd, how do you think that sentence should end? Think about it: this is the one sent from Almighty God to turn everything that’s upside-down rightside-up. This guy is supposed to deliver. He’s going to be the greatest King you’ve ever seen. How will you know him when you find him?

He’ll be wrapped in satin and lying in a hand-carved ivory creche. In his hand will be a golden rattle, and in his mouth will be a silver spoon, right?

Wrong!

“He’ll be wrapped in rags, lying in a feed trough, surrounded by stinky animals — kind of like one of your shepherd kids would be.”

In other words, here’s how you’ll know the Messiah when you see him: you’ll find him in the middle of a big mess.

The whole reason this is good news — to the shepherds that night and to us right now — is because we’re all messy people. Every night people appear on your television, and (under the heading “News”) simply tell us how the world got a little messier today.

We manage to mess up every single area of life: relationships, finances, work, family, the environment, the church, our consciences, our habits. There’s not a single place we haven’t managed to mess up. And we can’t seem to fix any of it. Try as we may, we cannot put Humpty together again.

So, the angel comes and says, “Here’s the good news: God is not afraid of your mess.”

Our God doesn’t care how messy your life is. It couldn’t be any messier than his was. He was born in a mess — wrapped in rags, laid in a manger — and he ended his life in a mess — stripped of his rags, hung on a cross.

And in between his first day and his last day, he mostly hung out with messy people.

We make Christmas really pretty, with red velvet bows and evergreen branches and all that. But the real message of Christmas proves that you don’t have to clean up for him. Cleanliness, it turns out, is far from godliness. If anything, it’s in the middle of our messiness that he shows up.

God does a lot of things — many of them seem strange to our admittedly limited perspective. Without a doubt, the single most unsettling, irrational, illogical thing he ever did was come to earth…as a baby!

If God came to earth as a fully-grown man, we could understand that a little better. If he came to earth as an angel, a ghost, an apparition or a disembodied voice, it might make more sense or fit our expectations a little better.

But a baby? He was totally helpless. He couldn’t feed himself or talk or walk or control his own bladder.

And have you ever been to a live birth? There’s blood and sweat and mucous and screaming…and that’s just the dads! The whole process is uncomfortable to say the least. It’s unseemly. It’s unsanitary. As much as we may not want to think about this, birth — for all of its wonder and amazement — is a yucky process, and there are parts of it that we don’t even like to think about, let alone imagine.

This is how God chose to enter the world.

He could have chosen any way he wanted — something miraculous and exceptional, regal and majestic. But he chose the ordinary way.

Worse than that, he chose the peasant’s way. He could have chosen a major city with doctors, nurses or midwives and their sterilized equipment. Instead he chose a barn in a backwater town with no one but a carpenter’s rough and calloused hands to usher him into the world. There were probably more animals than people present at his birth.

No, this doesn’t make much sense to many people. The God of the universe humbling himself in such a way, emptying himself of so much to gain so little in return.

We would understand if royal officials were there eagerly awaiting his arrival. No one important showed up save a few dirty shepherds — oh and some strange men from the east that got there several months later.

But the Bible leads us to believe that this is exactly the way God wanted it.

A young couple, miles away from home, are unable to find a decent place to sleep. They’re forced to spend the night in a stable when she goes into labor and delivers this baby that has caused so much pain and would cause even more in his attempt to bring true peace, true healing, true joy. She wraps him in strips of cloth to keep him warm as her husband makes room in the feed trough. They’re both unaware that magi are headed their way or that shepherds are receiving the shock of their lives in the form of a heavenly chorus.

This is our God, this tiny baby with fists for hands and squinting eyes, depending upon and trusting in two scared newlyweds for his survival. He risks everything in order to maintain his own integrity and rescue the people who have never been able to keep their promises to him.

The storyline doesn’t make much sense to us, because it is we who are so out of synch with the way things ought to be.

God always takes the initiative. He is the Prime Mover, the Uncaused Cause. He banged the big bang, he lit the fuse that eventually exploded everything into existence. He set the dominoes up and knocked the first one down.

We are given the honor or responding to him — without coercion, without manipulation, without any strings attached.

God initiates; then he waits for us to respond.

YHWH comes to a childless old man, calling him to leave his homeland. Then he waits to see if Abram will say, “Yes.”

YHWH comes to a fugitive in the desert, calling him to go back to his homeland. Then he waits to see if Moses will say, “Yes.”

YHWH comes to a young boy tending sheep for his family, calling him to become the next king of Israel. Then he waits to see if David will say, “Yes.”

Think of it — the astonishing humility of a God who waits for a response rather than forcing one, who places his plan into the hands of inconsistent and inadequate people, promising his assistance if they will seek it.

YHWH comes to a young woman in a backwater village, calling her to bear a child who will be the Savior of the world. Will Mary say, “Yes”?

YHWH comes to a frightened and embarrassed carpenter, calling him to raise a son who will never truly be his. Will Joseph say, “Yes”?

They could have said, “No”. Abram could have stayed where he was. Moses could have ignored that burning bush. David could have stayed out there with the sheep. Mary could have run away from the angel. Joseph could have divorced her quietly. God did not force his plan upon them.

But think of what they would have missed out on.

God has a plan, and he will see to it that it comes all the way to fruition. He does not need your help, but he invites you into the story as a way of honoring you. You don’t have to do it. He can find someone else.

But think of what you will miss.

If you listen closely, you may just hear the voice of YHWH calling you — unlikely, little ole you — to something extraordinary, placing a portion of his plan into your inconsistent and inadequate hands, promising his assistance if you’ll seek it.

Will you say, “Yes”?

Salvation is free. It costs you absolutely nothing at all. In fact, if you try to pay for your salvation, you’ll find yourself on the outside looking in.

In the Bible, there is only one category of people who are eligible for grace: the humble. That’s kind of the point. You have to humble yourself in order to receive the grace of God that brings about your salvation.

But there’s so much more involved in the gospel than just that. God has saved you for a purpose. He has a plan for you. He wants you to partner with him in the redemption of the whole world. He wants to change the course of human history through you, through the money you give, the time you invest, the conversations you have, the talents you use.

God’s got something for you, something far greater than anything you could ever have imagined on your own.

Still, what God has in mind for you will cost you something. It may cost you everything.

Of course, it will be worth the price tag. You’ll find yourself repaid in spades. You’ll look back on life and wish you’d invested even more.

And this is how it should be. Anything worthwhile is costly. The higher the potential reward, the greater the upfront costs usually are. It’s this way in your personal finances. It’s this way in your relationships. It’s this way just about everywhere in life.

The question becomes: How badly do you want to see God’s plans come to fruition? Badly enough to pay the price? Badly enough to make sacrifices and do without in the short-term for the sake of long-term gain?

Think of Mary and Joseph. They’re part of God’s chosen people. They don’t have to do anything to achieve that status. God graciously endowed them with this blessing. That’s his default setting towards them.

But then he invites them to something deeper, something richer, something heavier. He invites them to participate in his story, playing a major role in furthering his purposes in a powerful way. That invitation will cost them everything — their reputations, their standing in the community. They’ll be ridiculed. Their families will be embarrassed. Their children will grow up with a stigma.

Salvation is absolutely free; that’s one of the things the incarnation is all about.

But furthering the plotline of God’s unfolding story, actually playing a part in that story…that can be a very costly endeavor. Are you willing to pay that price?

The church in which I grew up did not do much for Christmas. We did not decorate the building with Christmas trees and all that. We did not do special Christmas Eve services. We did not do Christmas Pageants, so I was never subjected to that kind of torture.

But I bet some of you were.

The problem with Christmas Pageants, as I see it, is that there are so few important parts. Obviously, there’s the baby Jesus (which may or may not be played by a real, live baby — depending on the availability of a newborn). Then there’s Mary. And Joseph. The angels — especially Gabriel. The three wise men. A multitude of shepherds (depending on how many boys your church had). And various barnyard animals.

Am I leaving anything out?

Again, the problem always seemed to be the lack of parts — especially female parts — especially in contrast to the fact that there were always more girls who wanted to be in the pageant than boys in the first place.

So, the organizers were often forced to make up parts to accommodate eager youngsters. How many shepherds could there be? How many angels? Maybe the Inn Keeper…and his wife…and his kids…and his extended family who were also there. Not everyone is going to get a speaking role. Some of the kids are just going to dress up and stand there. You can’t all be the star of the show.

All of this brings up something I think is worth discussing. The New Testament opens by emphasizing a recurring them that runs through the Old Testament: This is God’s story. He’s been writing it since before the beginning. He accomplishes it through bizarre events, miraculous activity and unlikely people. It always exceeds our wildest expectations and stretches the limits of believability.

But make no mistake about this: It’s his story — not yours.

Mary and Joseph had dreams of their own — dreams they’d been dreaming since before God started meddling in their business. They were modest dreams, to be sure, of raising nice kids and having a nice home.

And then God showed up and invited them into a larger story, a dangerous story, demanding more of their time and energy than they could have ever imagined. It promised a greater adventure than they could have found anywhere else, the kind of story worth living and dying for. Signing on to play a role in this story might be compelling, but it would be costly.

This means — among other things — that life is not all about you. Obviously, you’re in there. You’re significant. Your life has meaning and purpose and value and all that. But let’s be honest about this: there’s a much bigger story playing out around you.

In life, you have a couple of options. You can choose to be the star of your own story. It’s a relatively small story with a miniscule budget, and you have to write, direct, produce, act and do all your own stunts.

It’s exhausting just thinking about all that.

Or you can choose to play a supporting role in someone else’s masterpiece. To be precise: God’s story. His story has no beginning and no end; it has an unlimited budget, and the wrap party promises to be something we can’t even begin to imagine.

The only problem is you don’t get to be the star.

Of course, it’s a much better story, and — because there’s someone else writing, producing and directing this thing — you won’t end up running yourself ragged and driving everyone around you insane.

The greater the story, the larger the narrative, the more able it is to withstand the hardships, the more likely it is to answer the foundational questions that keep us up at night. Where did we come from? Where are we going? How are we to live in the meantime?

Turns out, nothing less than this big story will really satisfy your deepest longings. What we find when we allow our stories to be absorbed into God’s larger narrative is that we can imbed our time into eternity.

So, the choice is yours. Do you want to star in your own little show? Or are you willing to play a supporting role in the greatest story ever told?

We have no idea what he looked like. He probably didn’t have wings and a halo. But there was something about him. Mary knew he was an angel.

Mary was young and idealistic. Joseph was a good guy, the kind of man any father would be glad to welcome as a son-in-law. They had their whole lives ahead of them. They would get married, settle down and start having children — in that order.

Or so they thought.

But then there was this strange visitor who pronounced such troubling things. And he knew her name. He said she was going to have a baby, but that couldn’t be true. She and Joseph would wait until after they were married before they would…you know…do the thing that leads to having babies.

Still, this odd person — this angel — said she would have a child even though she was a virgin. It was going to be God’s son, and it would have nothing to do with the normal processes.

How in the world was she going to explain this to Joseph?

Joseph — the man with the upstanding reputation — did not take the news well. He didn’t get angry and yell at her; he was too much of a good guy for that. But he certainly wasn’t going to marry her now. She was damaged goods. Once people found out (and Nazareth was too small a place for them not to find out), it would cost him that upstanding reputation.

If he wanted to maintain his status, he would have to terminate their relationship.

There was no need to make a big fuss over it. He could handle this quietly. He didn’t want to embarrass her.

But, he may have wondered, “What if she was telling the truth? No, that’s crazy! There’s no way an angel showed up to a teenage girl in the middle of nowhere to tell her that she’s carrying a miracle baby. In Jerusalem? Maybe. In Nazareth? Never.

He decided to sleep on it.

Little did he know that YHWH would invade his dreams, sending him a messenger to let him know that  Mary was telling the truth. Joseph had no need to be afraid to marry her, the angel said. At least he didn’t need to worry that Mary had been unfaithful.

And so Joseph and Mary, neither of them knowing how it would all work out, embarked on their journey together. And you thought your engagement and wedding were stressful!

Together they would endure the onslaught of insult and ridicule. They would hear the whispers and see the smirks. They would answer the questions they could and ignore the rest. Sometimes they doubted themselves and wondered if they had imagined the whole thing.

But then there was this baby, who became a boy, who became a man who was really a person who had always existed. And it was all so strange and new and unheard of that it had to be true.

And it was.

“We are a New Testament church producing New Testament Christians.” 

Ever heard that? The sentiment may not always be expressed in these same words, but it’s a prevalent mindset in our time. We spend so little time studying the Bible at all, when we do go to God’s word, we tend to reach for the Gospels or one of Paul’s letters (usually the second half of one of Paul’s letters — you know — the really practical parts).

The Old Testament seems to be relegated to children’s Sunday School (where it serves as a good source for morality tales) or adult Bible studies related to biblical prophecy (where it serves as a kind of Oijua-board, giving us shadowy clues for the future of our nation and our world).

It hasn’t always been this way. Christians throughout the centuries understood the profound sense of unity and harmony between the two testaments. But when Nazi Germany officially forbade the study of the great “Jewish book”, it was only reinforcing what many people already thought: we don’t need the Jewish parts; we just need the Christian part.

Here’s the problem with that statement: You can’t really be “New Testament” anything without being “Old Testament”, too. Just try to understand Hebrews or Revelation without the Old Testament background. When the apostle Paul told Timothy, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16-17), what “Scripture” do you think he was talking about?

He was talking about what we now call the Old Testament.

To be clear: it is my belief that the Old Testament is incomplete without the New. It is also my belief that the New Testament is incomplete without the Old. Apart from the Old Testament we would have an incomplete understanding of what God is really like. We could never understand the origins of our truest problem, our alienation from God and others. And thus, we would have an incomplete understanding of what people are really like too.

The Old Testament constantly reminds us that God is the center and source of life. The world does not revolve around us. We are not the center of the universe. The earth is not ours to do with as we see fit. We are given the task of being stewards of God’s creation, and our lives are sacred — meaning we belong to God and are set apart by him for his purposes.

We learn from the Old Testament how life with God actually is, not necessarily how it should be. It is alarmingly real, refusing to gloss over life with all of its humanity and brokenness. Abraham, Jacob, Job, Moses, David, Jeremiah, Jonah — God refuses to wait until a golden boy hero comes along with his perfect teeth and broad shoulders and spotless character. He deals with people as they are, enduring arguments and complaints and wrestling matches and moral failures, and he is not unmoved by our problems.

The Old Testament gives us a history to join, a promise that God doesn’t kick us out at the first chance, choosing instead to enter into a relationship, with all that involves. We know from the Old Testament that we can actually interact with God, that he prefers an honest argument to dishonest compliance.

More than anything, Christians should value the Old Testament because Jesus did. These are the stories he learned and the prophets he quoted. These are the Psalms he prayed and the laws he lived.

Without a good understanding of the Old Testament, it will be impossible to become like Jesus. So, next time you open the Good Book, do some reading from the first half (more like 3/4). Read the Psalms. Read the Proverbs. Allow yourself to steep in the wisdom of the same Bible Jesus read.

We hate to wait.

We don’t like lines at the grocery store. We don’t like traffic. We don’t like conventional ovens. “Take a seat, and the doctor will be with you shortly,” is among our least favorite sentences — not only because it stretches the definition of the word “shortly” beyond credibility, but because it implies something we don’t want to think about:

There are things beyond our control.

Waiting is so…passive. It feels weak. It means we’re not in charge of the process.

We hate to wait.

We eat fast food, eschewing restaurants that require us to make a left-hand turn across traffic, constantly scanning drive-thru lanes to see who would be in line ahead of us, trying to predict the likelihood of them being one of those “high maintenance” customers who special orders everything and presents the high school student at the window with a coupon and a two-party, out-of-state check that will most certainly require a manager’s approval.

We hate to wait.

But we have to wait. The message of the Bible, the Old Testament in particular, is this: There is a God; you are not him. Living in-between times, which we do as much as those folks who endured the inter-testamental period of 400 years’ worth of silence, forces us to wait.

Are there things that are in your control? Of course. You can choose whether or not you’ll keep your wedding vows. You chose how you spend your money. You choose how much television you watch and which programs. You have a lot of say over a lot of things.

But you don’t get to say when Jesus comes back. For that, you will simply have to wait.

Should we make good use of our time? Of course. You should be diligent, refusing to live like foolish people (who tend to waste time, killing time). You should live like a wise person, redeeming the time. You should make the most of your time by investing in those things that will last into eternity.

But there are times when you must recognize that there are a few things out of your control. In those times, your best move is to do nothing for a while, to wait, to learn the wisdom of Psalm 46:10, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

If you will, you’ll find out what a blessing it is to have some things that are completely out of your control. More than that, you’ll probably find out how trustworthy is the One who holds the future in his hands.

By the time we reach the end of the Old Testament, God’s list of promises is so long, it’s understandable that people might begin to wonder when or if he’s ever going to get around to checking things off the list.

It had been nearly 2,000 years since God told Abraham, “I will bless you…and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:2-3). Abraham had been confused about how this would happen, since he had no children, but God miraculously intervened and caused Abraham and Sarah to have a baby boy named Isaac. But God’s blessing didn’t come to the world through him, so that promise will still unfulfilled. It hadn’t been broken, but it hadn’t been kept yet.

It had been nearly 1,000 years since God promised King David that one of his descendants would build a house for God and reign forever. David’s son Solomon built a spectacular temple, but that wasn’t what God was talking about. That temple had been destroyed, and the nation of Israel had been split in two after Solomon’s death. Another promise unfulfilled — not broken necessarily, but not kept either.

It had been nearly 600 years since God had told Jeremiah and Ezekiel that he would create a community of people who wouldn’t just live God’s law out of a sense of obligation but because of an internal desire. Again, this promise was so far from reality that people began to wonder if God would ever make good on his word.

Perhaps you wonder about things like this. Jesus promised to return and set everything right once and for all. But one look at CNN provides enough evidence to know that there’s another promise that’s been left unfulfilled.

Beyond that, God has promised rest and joy and security to his people. And many of us know what it’s like to ache for those promises to be fulfilled in our personal lives. We live with stress and anxiety. Our relationships are fractured. Our health is failing.

We may join others in wondering when or if God will ever see fit to keep his promises.

But here’s something to keep in mind: Your circumstances do not reveal God’s character. In fact, the challenge of living Christianly in our world is to view our circumstances in light of God’s unchanging character.

See, God is patient (and that’s a very good thing); and he does things in his own sweet time. He makes promises, and he keeps them.

But he doesn’t always keep them when or how we want him to.

If you think about it for more than a moment, he’s got a pretty good track record. He’s never broken one of his promises. And the promises he has fulfilled have always exceeded the wildest expectations of people.

Most of the people who have ever lived on this earth, have lived during one of the periods of silence or hidden activity. They’ve lived during the 400 years of Egyptian captivity or during the 70 years of exile or the 400 years of inter-testamental silence or, like us, in between the advents of Christ.

Knowing that we might struggle with his timing, God calls us to live with hope and trust in that which he has promised — in spite of the fact that we don’t see it yet.

He calls us to look back at his track record. He calls us to look forward to the coming fulfillment of his promises.

God has, in fact, decisively acted in our past. He has made startling promises regarding our future. Only by combining the backward glance with the forward gaze do we have sufficient perspective to live in the now.