ADVENT & ANTICIPATION

Scripture: Genesis 3:15; Galatians 4:4-5.

“I will cause hostility between you and the woman—between your offspring and her offspring; he shall crush your head, and you shall crush his heel.”

“When the intended time had fully passed, God sent his Son—born of a woman, subject to the law—in order to redeem those who are under the law and so that we might receive the benefits of being adopted as his children.”

Today marks the first Sunday of the Advent season, the time of the year where we reflect on the meaning of the incarnation and the birth of Jesus Christ. It is much more than simply the birthday of a religious figure, however—Advent sums up the entire Biblical narrative in the birth of the long-awaited Messiah and looks forward to the day when the Messiah returns to bring history to its intended goal and end. Advent then spans from creation (even, perhaps, we can say before creation. See Ephesians 1)to the culmination of history, and is centered around the the idea of anticipation of the coming Messiah.

And no one knows that anticipation better than Adam and Eve. Of all the people who have ever lived, they alone knew the full cost of the Fall, having experienced life in YHWH’s shalom. They alone knew what it meant to have an unfractured relationship with YHWH himself and all of creation. And while we continue to feel the effects of the Fall in our everyday lives, all we have known is the fractured reality of sin. Adam and Eve, on the other hand, knew what it was like prior to the fall, and had to live the rest of their lives with an experiential knowledge of what they lost in their sin. So imagine the anticipation they felt when they overheard YHWH tell the serpent that he would be destroyed by one of Eve’s sons, bringing back the world they once knew and rescuing all from the curse they had brought.

Imagine the hope, the joy, as Eve gave birth to Cain. Would he be the one? Or maybe it would be Abel? Time would ultimately show, of course, that it would be neither who fulfilled God’s promise. Can you imagine the sorrow, not only over the death of one son and the exile of another, but at the realization that God’s promise would go unfulfilled? Image the crushed hope, the wandering faith, and the doubt. Then imagine it all over again with the birth of Seth. Would they ever get back to Eden?

The Fall led to the Great Exile—not captivity in Egypt, or even Babylon, but to sin and death and Exile from the Garden. The birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is our great Exodus, bringin us back, not just to Eden but to a Greater Eden—the New Creation.

Imagine, Adam and Eve’s anticipation for the skull-crushing seed to come.

We now live in the tension of incarnation and consummation. By that I mean that the skull-crusher has come, and yet we are not back in Eden. In the powerlessness of the cross, Jesus overcome the power of Satan, sin, and death, crushing the skull of the serpent, and brought the New Creation into the present. However, it is just a taste of the New Creation, the fullness of which we will experience when the Messiah returns to put all things right. We see Satan prowling around now, but one day we will see the reality of his destruction. Like Adam and Eve, we anticipate the coming of the Messiah. We long to return to Eden, to a restoration of all things that is far more glorious than we can imagine.

Nativity image found here.

As I said in my last post, some new things are coming down the drain for my blog. You’ve probably noticed in the last year or so that I have moved from my more academic posts to a more general approach to blogging (including academic posts as well). This is on purpose, as I’m hoping to move this blog away from a purely academic blog to a more personal blog (essentially done already). I’ve updated the look of this blog to reflect this more personal shift. The next step is more in the future, but I’ll be discussing that when the time comes.

Those of you who receive updates through email for a feed reader can check out the new look by clicking here: http://www.katagraphais.com.

[Note: This site has been down for the last week or so due to some problems with my server, but all has been fixed and everything should be working again. However, this blog will be going through some changes in the next few months. More on this later.]

I’ve been reading James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, volume 1 in his cultural liturgy series. This book hass been a very interesting read so far. James has questioned and critiqued the basic idea of ‘world-view’ as valid way of learning. His basic argument, which I think has lots of validity, is that the current education paradigm focuses on the person-as-thinker or (particularly in reformed circles), the person-as-believer. Though this last category (reminiscient of Romans 1) has much truth to it, according to Smith, it suffers the same problem as the person-as-thinker model: they are both dualistic platonic approaches to education, not taking into account the holistic person. In other words, it assumes that we are basically minds encased in bodies, and that all education functions primarily at this thought level.

Smith counters that we are not merely minds with a body to drag them down, but a holistic being. We are not primarily people-as-thinkers, but people-as-lovers. This isn’t, as Smith points out, love as in pizza, or even love as in spouse, but love as religion. We are worshippers at our core, striving toward ultimate love. We are desiring a Kingdom which is a picture of human flourishing. We are created to desire the Kingdom of God, and human flourishing in the light of God’s shalom, but because of sin we often seek after many other kingdoms. This leads us to seek our kingdoms in other places, finding our worship in culture.

Smith’s view of ‘world-view’ says that it is reductionistic. I agree with this, to some degree. We are much more than intellect, and we interact with the world through more than our thoughts. However, it seems (so far) that even with the valid critiques that Smith brings, he ends up doing the same in the other direction. It seems that Smith’s view of person-as-lover is similarly reductionistic. The reality is that person-as-lover necessarily also contains person-as-thinker, and person-as-believer, but Smith’s rhetoric sometimes leads us away from that understanding.

All in all, however, the book has been absolutely fantastic. I really recommend it. The book is focused primarily on university education, but the contents are applicable to a general theory of knowledge, as well as understanding how we are affected and effected by our culture.

Sojourn Community Church, where I am a member, is partnered with both the Acts 29 network and the Southern Baptist Convention. The fact that Sojourn is dual-aligned leads to some interesting conversations considering the well-documented fall-out between the two.

This past week, Sojourn hosted one of Acts 29’s boot camps—a two day long conference dedicated to training present and future church planters. Over 400 were in attendance, including myself. What makes this particular boot camp unique was the participation of several SBC pastors and employees: Daniel Montgomery (Sojourn’s pastor of teaching and vision), Ed Stetzer, Dr. Russell Moore (Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration at SBTS), and Dr. Greg Allison (Professor of Christian Theology, SBTS). Following the boot-camp, Matt Chandler, pastor of the Village Church (dually-aligned SBC and Acts 29 church in the Dallas-FW area), preached a sermon on Hebrews 11 at the SBTS chapel service on Sunday.

I say all of this for a few reasons:

It expresses healing between the two groups, which is a direct result of the Gospel. Dr. Albert Mohler, president of SBTS, had several of the Acts 29 pastors over at his house for a number of hours (Inluding my pastor, Daniel Montgomery), and wrote this article in response: Younger Pastors and the Hope of a Future. In response, Scott Thomas (Director of Acts 29), wrote a response to Mohler’s response: Honored and Awed: This is what Graciousness Looks Like.

I wish everyone, but particularly present and soon-to-be pastors and church planters, would listen to Chandler’s sermon. It was excellent. One of the best sermons I have heard in a long time.

I wanted to point Ryan Couch’s blog, which says everything I wanted to say about the conference and more. Why reinvent the wheel? Go here and read all about it. You can also read Steve McCoy’s take on the conference. I have followed Steve’s blog and twitter for awhile now, and was very grateful to finally get to meet him and his awesome family at the conference.

It was an incredibly beautiful week that has given me lots to meditate on.

The last few weeks have been pretty crazy/busy—I wrote a paper on Isaiah 52:13-53:12, then worked on a sermon from Job which I gave this past Sunday, and now I’m working on another paper.

This paper will be looking at the role of creation in worship, primarily creation’s temple role in the Garden of Eden, and how each temple/tabernacle afterward picks up on the original goal of creation. Yesterday I finished Greg Beales book on The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, and today I started reading Dempster’s Old Testament theology, “Dominion and Dynasty” and came across this brilliant quote:

“While it is true that the Bible ‘was never received as sacred scripture because of its literary merit’ (Carroll 1993: 89), ignorance of its literary features impedes understanding. This is part of the problem with fundamentalism, whether on the theological right or the theological left; the text is simply used and not studied.” Dempster, pg 24.

Right on the money.