Jesus in disguise

                                                  

Christmas 1914 on the Western Front witnessed a remarkable event.

The Great War, now known as World War I, had begun. Years of unimaginable death and destruction lay ahead. Yet during the week leading up to Christmas a century ago, many German and British soldiers put down their weapons, crossed battle lines and shook hands. The informal “Christmas Truce” brought enemies together to talk of home, exchange food and cigarettes and engage in impromptu soccer games. Some even sang hymns and carols together.

In the darkest places, Christmas brings light. Enemies make peace. Old hatreds die, and mercy is born. Christ is glorified.

On the first Christmas, God willingly entered enemy territory, disguised as a helpless child, to make peace with those who had rejected Him over and over through the ages. Only a few recognized Him when He walked among us. Even fewer followed Him. He was reviled, betrayed and denied before being put to death on a Roman cross. Yet He changed everything through His life, death and resurrection.

Have you encountered the Lord in disguise?

Jesus told his disciples: “For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me: I was in prison, and you came to Me. … Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me” (Matt. 25:35,36,40b NASB).

This Scripture passage formed the essential mission strategy of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who took Jesus’ words literally. For her, every hungry person, orphan and refugee was “Jesus in His distressing disguise.” The more distressing the disguise, the greater the need for our love.

In 1946 she sensed a “second call” from God to leave her original vocation as a teacher in a Calcutta convent and go to the streets, which were filled with the refugees of communal violence, poverty and indifference. One day she stumbled over a starving woman, eaten with worms, lying in the gutter. She picked up the woman and took her to a hospital, refusing to leave until someone cared for her. City authorities eventually gave Mother Teresa an abandoned Hindu hostel, where she could take the nearly dead to die in the arms of love. Thus was born her mission to “the poorest of the poor.” In 1950 she founded the Missionaries of Charity, gradually expanding her ministry to lepers, disaster and war victims, the unborn — even affluent Westerners afflicted with loneliness and isolation, which she regarded as the worst diseases of the developed world.

Mother Teresa carefully schooled her missionaries in simple acts, like touching.

 

“We train ourselves to be extremely kind and gentle in touch of hand, tone of voice and in our smile so as to make the mercy of God very real and to induce [others] to turn to God with real confidence,” she said before her death in 1997.

Which brings me back to my earlier question: Have you ever encountered Jesus in a “distressing disguise”? How did you treat Him?

Maybe He showed up in your town recently, speaking a strange language and carrying all His possessions in a plastic U.N. refugee bag. Maybe He’s sitting in the county jail, with no visitors except an overworked public defender. Maybe He’s working at the convenience store near your house and has nowhere to go for Christmas.

Maybe He’s living in an Ebola-stricken area of West Africa, in a refugee camp on the Syrian border or among a spiritually lost people group never touched by His modern-day followers, wondering if anyone will come bringing light and hope.

Were Jesus’ words about visiting Him by visiting others symbolic? Perhaps. But Mother Teresa’s lovingly practical approach to the “least of them” makes a lot of sense to me. One thing is for sure: God Himself personally visited us on the first Christmas in the form of a child, walked with us as a man, died and rose for us as a Savior.

One day in eternity, He we will ask us who we visited in His name.

 

The ‘Crews missile’ and Christmas

(Listen to an audio version at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/165/16575/16575-91862.mp3)

Have you heard about the “Crews missile”?

It was launched by Nick Crews, 67, a retired British Royal Navy submarine commander. But it wasn’t a torpedo aimed at the empire’s enemies; it was an email aimed at his three adult children. It blew up family relations — and created a furor in England and beyond after his eldest daughter, 40-year-old Emily, released the message to the media.

Fed up with his children’s career failures, divorces and other assorted dysfunctions, angry at the toll their constant crises had taken on his wife and anxious about the future for his grandchildren, Crews let ’em have it. Here’s an excerpt from his “Dear all three” email:

“Mum and I have been used to taking our own misfortunes on the chin, and making our own effort to bash our little paths through life without being a burden to others. Having done our best — probably misguidedly — to provide for our children, we naturally hoped to see them in turn take up their own banners and provide happy and stable homes for their own children. … [Y]et each of you has contrived to avoid even moderate achievement. Far from your children being able to rely on your provision, they are faced with needing to survive their introduction to life with you as parents. … none of [whom has] the maturity and sound judgment to make [wise] decisions.”

He closed with this:

“I can now tell you that I for one … have had enough of being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children’s underachievement and domestic ineptitudes. I want to hear no more from any of you until, if you feel inclined, you have a success or an achievement or a realistic plan for the support and happiness of your children to tell me about. I don’t want to see your mother burdened anymore with your miserable woes. … I am bitterly, bitterly disappointed. Dad.”

Tough love? Crews has become both a hero and a villain in England since his blunt message became public, setting off a media storm and provoking thousands of responses. Many Britons admire his hard-hitting candor in an age of endless excuse making for personal irresponsibility. Others condemn him as unfeeling and cruel.

“My parents just don’t do tea and sympathy and never have,” reported daughter Emily, who said she was devastated by her father’s words but admitted they contain a lot of truth. Her two younger siblings insist on an apology; 35-year-old brother Fred refuses to speak to Dad until he gets one.

In a subsequent interview with the London Daily Mail, Crews said he “hated having to send [the email] and I have examined my conscience. … I still mean every word.”

Navy commanders aren’t known for giving gentle feedback. My maternal grandfather was a ship captain, and I’ve heard lots of stories about the rough justice he delivered when his kids went astray. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it backfired. As an occasionally exasperated father, I can sympathize with Crews. As a son who inspired similar fury and despair in the hearts of my own parents more than once, I also sympathize with his children.

But angry tirades about the failings of others don’t work, contends New York Times writer David Brooks in a column about Crews. “People don’t behave badly because they lack information about their shortcomings. They behave badly because they’ve fallen into patterns of destructive behavior from which they’re unable to escape,” Brooks writes. True enough, but he proceeds to serve up warmed-over recommendations about rewarding good behaviors and ignoring bad ones. That doesn’t work in the long run, either, if the darkness inside our hearts doesn’t change.

Why do I bring up this painful family episode so close to Christmas? When I first read about Nick Crews and his anguish over his children, I thought about God, our Father. In many Bible passages, the Lord speaks of His despair and wrath caused by the sins of His people. The Old Testament prophets record a long litany of His bitter disappointments (as Crews might describe them) in His wayward children.

“I have spread out My hands all day long to a rebellious people,” the Lord cried, “who walk in the way which is not good, following their own thoughts, a people who continually provoke Me to My face …” (Isaiah 65:2-3, NASB). But God also promised a sign in that same great book of prophecy: “Behold, a virgin will be with child and bear a son, and she will call His name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14b, NASB).

Some 600 years before the birth of Christ, a Father whose heart had already been broken countless times was planning an act of love that would go far beyond the imagination of any earthly mind. What if He had washed His hands of us altogether? What if He had told us never to seek Him again until we could redeem our own hopelessly evil selves?

Instead, He came to live among us as a servant and went to the cross to make a way for us to return to Him.

Yes, there will be consequences — eternal ones — for every soul that rejects the amazing grace of God offered through His Son. But for now, the offer stands.

Here’s the message of Christmas: A loving Father is still waiting for us to come home.

Home for Christmas

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/144/14478/14478-80565.mp3

Mom died 10 years ago.

Can it be that long? I still hear her voice, smell her perfume, smile at her throaty laugh. Surely we talked just the other day.

I would give almost anything to talk to her again.

“Don’t forget to call your momma; I wish I could call mine,” counseled the late, great Southern writer and humorist Lewis Grizzard when his mother was long gone. I never understood the ache behind those words until I couldn’t call Mom anymore.

Home is what I’m talking about. Rick Bragg, another Southern writer, put it this way: “You wake up in your momma’s house and you smell the best bacon you’ve ever had. But more than anything you hear her footsteps. You hear her moving around. And you know that everything’s all right … as long as you can hear that sound.”

At Christmas, thoughts turn homeward, even if the home you once knew no longer exists. It lives on in a place beyond time.

“Christmas Eve will find me where the love light beams,” goes the song. “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.”

Home. Even folks who never had a happy one long for it. No matter how far we may have wandered, we search for home like the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).

How amazing, then, that Jesus left His home at Christmas, quietly entering this dark world. While we search for home, He searches for us.

Missionaries — or anyone who leaves the comforts of home and crosses cultures to seek wandering souls — follow in His footsteps. They give up the light and warmth of the familiar to share something eternal with those in search of God. They leave home to remind people where they came from.

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” William Wordsworth wrote. “The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar: not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home. …”

In recent years, the impact of ongoing violence, political turmoil and family breakdown has driven many young people in India’s Kashmir region to drugs in any form they can find them: over-the-counter medicines, glue, pills — or for the wealthier, LSD or heroin. More than a third of Kashmiris ages 15 to 35 have become drug addicts, according to unofficial estimates. But a few Muslim-background followers of Christ are reminding them of what they really need.

“I used to drink bottles of codeine every night in order to go to sleep,” said a tall, clean-shaven student in the traditional woolen cloak worn to beat back Kashmiri winters. “I was causing so much pain to my family and living the life of an addict, until I found Christ and was taken in by a group of believers.”

In East Asia, a team of believers traveled five hours on a winding, rocky road before reaching a village overshadowed by a huge monastery. They met a shop owner and one of the team members began sharing Christ with her. She looked stunned as she said, “You are in a village of monks. We are all Buddhists.”

The Christian smiled and said, “We know. That is why we came.” He introduced another team member who had lived as a Buddhist monk in a monastery for 18 years. The former monk said, “I prayed, chanted and meditated for hours every single day, but I did not have peace.” Then he asked the shop owner, “Do you have peace?”

Elsewhere in Asia, a man filled with resentment and hatred over past hurts prepared to buy a gun on the black market to murder his father and stepmother. His sister — unaware of his plan — invited him for a visit. He was amazed to observe how his sister had changed since she had accepted Christ a few years earlier. He abandoned his plan for vengeance, embraced Christ and was baptized.

Soon after, he received a call from his father, who was seriously ill. The new believer forgave his father, told him about Jesus and prayed for him. He used the money he had saved for a gun to help pay for his father’s medical treatment. His father recovered and now attends a church, seeking to learn the ways of God.

Our true home is with God, and Christ is the way to get there. Let’s go home for Christmas.

What Christmas is all about

(Listen to an audio version of this post at
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As night follows day, the annual blitzkrieg of Christmas advertising is followed by lots of hand-wringing about how we’ve lost the “true meaning of Christmas.”

This year even the hand-wringers are probably praying (quietly) for huge holiday sales to jump-start the economy. Still, we hear Charlie Brown’s poignant cry cutting through the commercialization: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?”

Sure, Charlie Brown. They may be getting harder to find in America, but you can locate people all over the world who know what Christmas is all about. They’re in some surprising places, as these recent reports from missionaries illustrate:

-- A young woman in a communist country began tutoring the children of Christian workers. When the mother of the children presented her with a Bible, she expressed tearful thanks. As the tutor left their home and started down the road, the mother watched her from a window. She saw the tutor pull out the Bible, hold it to her heart and kiss it.

-- A woman in Taiwan joined 90 people participating in a Thanksgiving meal at a local church. But she wasn’t there primarily for the turkey and trimmings. Rather, she had a pressing question: “Why has no one ever told me about God before?” Stunned by the question, a missionary led her to salvation in Christ on the spot.

-- A Christian worker among Muslims in Eastern Europe sent this request: “Please be in prayer for our Christmas outreach. We will be assembling Christmas gift bags and distributing them to all the students of a local school. Thank God with us that the school administrator, once very skeptical of us and our work, has once again given us the ‘green light’ to present these gift bags any way we choose and to put on a program that includes Christmas hymns and other evangelism. Pray [that] the whole village will be radically transformed by the Lord.”

-- Many Tibetans live in high-altitude areas where snow has been falling since November. In December, people come down to the cities to stay with friends and extended family members until the snow clears in March — enabling Christ followers to talk to Tibetan Buddhists about Christmas and the Gospel. Pray they will have opportunities to share with Tibetans who have come from distant and hard-to-reach places.

-- Believers are partnering in a Christmas distribution project that has the potential to reach tens of thousands of people in a major Asian city. Pray that each person who receives a Gospel packet will read the literature and watch the corresponding video. Ask the Holy Spirit to open hearts, and pray that many will make decisions this year to follow Jesus.

And in South Asia, a Muslim-background follower of Jesus recently posed this question to a Christian worker who serves as his spiritual mentor: “If a brother or sister is having a problem with something in their lives, would this be a good time to fast and pray?”

“Definitely!” the mentor answered quickly, a little impatient with the simplicity of the question.

“Should fasting always be done individually or can it be done in a group?” the believer asked.

Either way, the mentor responded, as long as it is a time of humble submission and drawing close to God.

The believer — who leads a fast-growing, house-based movement of Muslim-background Christ followers — became excited.

“We have already been talking about fasting and praying on Dec. 24th, especially for the [evangelistic] outreach this year,” he announced. “Then we will break the fast on the 25th and have a celebration and meal together.”

No Christmas tree, no candlelight service, no presents or lights, the mentor thought to himself. Just brothers and sisters coming together to fast and pray for the lost — and then to rejoice together on Christmas Day, confident that their prayers will be heard by their Savior, Jesus Christ.

That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Knocking at the gate at Christmas

Listen to an audio version of this post at
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It’s human nature to focus inward, especially during lean times.

We do it as individuals, as families and as a nation. Let the world take care of itself for a while, we say. We’ve got to worry about home base until things improve. Enough already with endless global crises, foreign wars, etc. Let us have a quiet, peaceful Christmas for a change.

If only the world were so accommodating.

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky once said.

Trotsky’s grim observation was cited recently by The Economist magazine in an analysis of the many overseas challenges faced by President-elect Obama.

Case in point: the November terror attacks on Mumbai, India.

The Mumbai massacres weren’t just another blip on the global chaos meter. They illustrate once again the power of a small but well-organized band of murderers not only to kill innocents and paralyze a city, but to spark dangerous international confrontation. The threat of war between India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers, serves the interests of no one — except terrorist organizations seeking to destabilize the region.

The United States and other world powers simply cannot ignore that kind of crisis. So they respond to try to calm tensions and avert far greater violence.

SPIRITUAL CRISIS

In the personal and spiritual realms, however, it’s easier to look away when people are in crisis. I’m an expert at being (or pretending to be) clueless about the needs of folks all around me. You can’t help everybody, right?

“I think one human tendency resulting from the fall of man is to protect oneself from being consumed by the needs of others,” says a missionary serving in one of the poorest, most violent and least-evangelized countries of Central Asia. “I’ve found that fear within and fought it many times in pursuit of love.”

When things get tough, she asks, “Does God give me a ‘Holy Bible for Chaotic Times’ that directs me to give only to family and treat people the best they should reasonably expect me to under the circumstances?

“Or can He still be telling me, ‘Give to everyone who asks of you’?”

She avoided these uncomfortable questions more easily in the United States, where whole communities prohibit “soliciting,” where donations for the faceless needy can be dropped in offering plates and collection boxes. In the Muslim nation where she works, the poor are everywhere. Giving alms is expected, but the socially acceptable gift is a tiny amount. If you give more, you will be inundated with constant pleas for help.

All very reasonable — until someone comes to you needing more.

Such a one came to her last year: a desperately poor grandmother pleading for help to care for her orphaned grandchildren. The missionary did what she could and wondered guiltily during a visit home to the United States if the old woman and her grandchildren survived an especially hard winter.

“Maybe I did what I could instead of doing what Jesus could,” she admits. “I was unwilling to love extravagantly for Jesus and excused myself with ‘culture stress.’”

The missionary returned to Central Asia this year. The old woman found her again, with the same plea for help. The uncomfortable questions within returned.

“How would Jesus have me ‘Give to everyone who asks of you’?” she asks herself.

“If I had been used all of my life, yet blessed with children and grandchildren, and yet have their orphaned care fall upon my bent back and their little bodies draw close against my thin, bony frame and into my tattered [cloak], and if I saw their dark eyes in smudged faces looking wearily into my emptiness, and if I knew there was a person with great resources living on a certain street in a courtyard behind a certain gate, might I hope that person would charitably give me more than a [five-cent] coin?

“And if I, standing inside the courtyard gate, knew that the Father loved this beggar woman since eternity and accomplished salvation for her and her loved ones and longed to enfold her in His love this very moment, what might the love of Christ do through me?”

This same beggar woman is standing at your gate and knocking at your door. Not literally, perhaps, but she is there. Whole nations and peoples are there, pleading not just for food but for the Bread of life, the Word of God made flesh.

“What child is this?” they are asking. “Could He give us hope, too?”

Yes, it’s easier to ignore the insistent knocking, to pretend they aren’t there. But when the missionary in Central Asia feels overwhelmed, she turns to Jesus.

“I consider Him and think, ‘Jesus, You love me and I love You. That’s all I know for sure.’ Then He seems to put His arms around my shoulders, smile and keep walking.

“I want to be able to look back on these days with a smile that I got from Him.”