Word of Life Church Podcast

All Hallows Eve (Halloween) and All Saints Day are further examples of Christians re-appropriating pagan holidays for Christian purposes. Like was done with Christmas and Easter -- though Halloween has proved more difficult to unmoor for its pagan past. In its Christian origin All Hallows Eve was a time to remember the departed saints. (You can see how this could lend itself to less sacred and more ghoulish themes.) The idea was to remember the departed saints because they still belong to the communion of saints. Because we believe in resurrection (and being with the Lord in the interim), we understand the body of Christ, the communion of saints, to be comprised of both the quick and dead, the living and those who sleep in Christ.

As followers of Jesus who are also citizens of the nation with the world’s largest economy and most powerful military, we face the same kinds of challenges as the Jewish exiles and early Christians to whom the books of Daniel and Revelation were written. Their situation speaks to us. American Christians have to learn how to live like the Jewish exiles and early Christians who lived in the midst of empire. Like them we live in the tension of engaged citizenship and covenant faithfulness. We are exiles on main street.

Daniel held onto his Jewish identity in the midst of pagan empire through the practice of daily formative prayer. But prayer is no guarantee of success or safety. In fact, formative prayer, the kind of prayer that resists being conformed into the image of the empire, may lead us into the lion's den.

Perhaps the greatest need for the modern Western church is to turn away from the reactive and turn toward the contemplative. We are reactive when we respond out of fear to a perceived threat to our assumptions and self-interest. We are contemplative when we perceive the other through God's eyes of love and respond with compassion. But the only way to enter the contemplative is through the practice of formative prayer.

What if God does not use us despite our weaknesses and failures, but because of weaknesses and failures?

At the end of the Babylonian Empire, King Belshazzar had succeeded Nebuchadnezzar and he followed in the same arrogant ways of his predecessor. During a party where Belshazzar and his guest were toasting the gods of gold and silver, a mysterious hand appears and writes on the wall. The message has Belshazzar leaves stunned. Daniel is brought in to interpret this message and it is bad news: Babylon is coming to an end. The pending fall of Babylon is the way empires go. They grow in power and arrogance and then they fall. As modern-day exiles living in a modern-day Babylon we have hope that the kingdom we belong to is an everlasting kingdom. Jesus has defeated Babylon and we learn to live not isolated from this fallen world and not immersed in it. We live imitating Jesus, knowing he has defeated Babylon.

When things are hazy, one thing is clear: Jesus is the way. When things get crazy, one thing is certain: Jesus is the truth. When things begin to wither and die, one thing is consistent: Jesus is the life. As we reflect upon Jesus' declaration that he is the way and the truth and the life we find the life we were always looking for. To experience that life, the Jesus life, we have to be willing walk the Jesus way and consistently proclaim the Jesus truth.

In chapter 4 of Daniel we find the story of the king who went crazy -- the emperor who went insane. King Nebuchadnezzar is the personification of empire and this subversive story is a prophetic critique of the insanity of empire. But it's only the exiles who possess a counter-script and thereby can live outside the dominant script who perceive the insanity of empire.

"If I have not love, I am nothing." -The Apostle Paul"Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed." -Hans Urs von BalthasarEverything minus Love = Zero.With this in mind, Pastor Brian shares his four noble truths...Life is Hard.God is Love.Jesus is Lord.Love Never Fails.

The dreams of the prophets and the nightmares of empires are one in the same. What the people of God hope for the most, is what the empires of man fear the most—that the reign of God will at last be seen on the earth, bringing justice to all people.