Yoked

Back in the Old Testament, when God first designed the Tabernacle and built it in the wilderness with Israel to dwell among them, there came to be in the heart of the Tabernacle a place called "the most holy place," which contained things like the Ark of the Covenant, covered by the Throne of Mercy. There was also the "holy place," which contained the communal altar, for example. And then, the courtyard, in which the people gathered.

It took three units of Israelites to move the Tabernacle every time the people moved, three sons of Levi who were divided by their ministry unto the Lord and His place. Numbers 7 tells us a little bit about how all this worked, and what happens here is extremely interesting, particularly as we continue to work it through. But let's start where it starts. 

The princes of the other eleven tribes in Israel, which were actually twelve once the sons of Joseph were separated into two tribes (in order to maintain twelve after Levi was dedicated to the service of the Lord and would receive no inheritance), each brought to Moses and Aaron an offering - a total of six covered wagons (one per two tribes) and twelve oxen (to pull the wagons). So Moses and Aaron then had the task of dividing the wagons and the oxen among the sons of Levi to be used in their work in service of the Tabernacle. 

Gershon received two wagons and four oxen for the carrying of the tent itself and its fabric coverings, all the outer courtyard that made up the gathering place of Israel. Merari received four wagons and eight oxen for the carrying of the bars and boards and posts that held up the tents and dividers that Gershon carried. 

And Kohath received nothing. 

Kohath had, by far, the heaviest burden of the Tabernacle, carrying all of the holy and most holy things - the things made out of solid bronze and silver and gold. But because these things were the holy and the most holy things, they were not allowed to load them up on oxen like cargo. They were not allowed to pack them up like any other belongings. They were not permitted to let anyone, or anything, else do the heavy lifting. Kohath was required to carry these things on their shoulders.

This was a difficult task, indeed. For it was not just that they should carry these things on their shoulders, but that they must carry these things on their shoulders without also touching them. We have a couple of other stories in the Old Testament about persons who reached out even to steady the holy and the most holy things so that they would not fall and, touching them, were smitten by the Lord and died right there. So hoist these things onto your shoulders by their carrying poles, but do not touch them, for they are holy. 

Ready? Go. 

Now, what we're creating here is an understanding of what it means to carry the holy things and the most holy things from one place to another. What we're looking at is the heavy responsibility of being the ones who move the house of the Lord from one place to another. What we need to see is how, while Gershon and Merari were able to yoke their oxen to a cart for their carrying, Kohath become oxen themselves and are yoked with the holy and the most holy things. This is the image that we need to have of this people walking through the wilderness. 

And then...stay tuned. 

What Faith Feels Like

As the Christian faith wrestles with a post-Christian world and a widespread illiteracy about who Jesus even is, it depends upon the witnesses of Judeo-Christian history and the early church. And this witness serves an even greater purpose for the Gospel today, as it stands in tension with another widespread characteristic of a post-Christian (and specifically, post-modern) world:

It makes faith more than a feeling.

You may have noticed that we're living in a time unlike any other in which all things are based upon nothing more than how someone "feels" about them. We have even changed our language to accommodate this new "truth." How often do you hear someone say something like, "That feels like it is probably a good idea" or "I feel like people today have more opinions than they used to"? Neither of these is something anyone could actually "feel." They would have to either "think" or "believe" it, but we're living in a world that values neither thinking nor believing and so places its entire emphasis on feeling, even on feeling those things that are not conducive to really being felt. 

So when a Christian today says something like, "Jesus is the narrow road" or "Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life," the world either gets offended that we didn't add an "I feel" statement on the front of that...or they mentally add it on for us, making Jesus nothing more than a preference or another subjective idea that we have. 

Now, here's where the Christian faith does something entirely unexpected. The Christian faith is based on love, which most of us would say is a feeling. And most of us would say that the more we become convinced of the Christian faith, the more we are drawn into this love and the more this love is drawn into us, which ought to make the Christian faith progressively more of a feeling over time. Which means that if someone who has been a Christian for a long time tries to tell you about his or her faith, you ought to expect to hear a passionate, emotional, feeling-based plea about why Jesus is, you know, super-cool. 

But in the Christian faith, exactly the opposite is true. In the Christian faith, love becomes less of a feeling over time and more of a truth. It becomes less emotional and more rational, particularly the more irrational it becomes. It is the younger Christians in the faith who utilize the most passionate, emotional, feeling-based pleas because they are the ones who are in that honeymoon, head-over-heels, warm fuzzies kind of love that marks the beginning of any relationship. The longer someone has become a Christian, the more that emotional love has settled into an intimate wonder, a tender knowing, a real and vital truth. 

Which means that exactly contrary to what the world believes, someone who tries to convince you of the truth of Christianity is not unexamined in their belief; they are most deeply examined in it and have found it, through love, to be true. 

Regardless of how we might "feel" about it. 

The world no longer knows what to do with this. Our world doesn't know how to handle something that can't be reduced to an "I feel" statement. They don't know what to do when we refuse to say, "I feel" but instead declare "He is." So they tell us that clearly, we just feel it, even though we didn't say it in so many words. They tell us it's only our opinion, only our experience. They tell us that's nice for us, but it doesn't really work for them, that the laws of their universe are somehow so different that what we are so ready to claim as truth cannot possibly also be true for them. And they pat us on the back and tell us that's nice and then shove us along so that we can't bother them any more with it. 

And then, sometime later - maybe hours, maybe days, maybe weeks, maybe years - some of them come back to us. They circle back and ask us what it was that makes what we "feel" so much more vibrant, so much more fulfilling, so much more wonderful than the formless and void that has filled them with emptiness for far too long. They circle back and ask us how they can feel like we feel. What, they ask, does faith even feel like?

It feels like truth. 

Which is why mere feeling will never come close to capturing real faith. 

Christ in a Post-Christian World

What was an essential for Jesus's ministry in Galilee and Jerusalem is one of the greatest challenges for Christ in our own time. Where His ministry was enhanced because of the spiritual literacy and Scriptural knowledge of the faithful Jews of the region, ours is challenged by the illiteracy of a post-Christian world. 

For much of the past two thousand years, Christ was the center of all literacy. Life revolved around faith, and you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone who did not know thoroughly the testimony of Jesus. There then came a time when other emphases, namely "reason" and "science" started to push on the edges of faith, and it was no longer the case that faith permeated all areas of life. It was still true, however, that most persons had a good familiarity with the basics of the Christian story. 

No longer. Today, we are living in a world where even those in the most developed nations may have never come in contact with Christ in any form. We have secular preschools, which means that young kids are no longer dependent upon the church for their early education. We have 24/7 worlds, which means that carving out Sunday morning for something like church seems more and more foolish. We have a thing called "tolerance" (which is actually anything but) that says we're not really allowed to teach Christ any more, lest we be accused of "pushing" our faith on someone who doesn't want it. 

Did you know that in today's world, for the first time, we are baptizing adult Christians who, just a year or two before, had never heard of Jesus before? At all.

This is a huge shift for the Christian faith, and it presents a number of challenges for those of us who carry His Cross into this world. 

Now, more than ever, we need a holistic theology. We need a theology that starts not at the manger, but at the formless and void. Because if we start at the manger, we set up a great man, but we do not establish the Son of God. We create the impression that anyone can be born into such greatness, that it's just the kind of thing that sometimes happens (or, at least, happened once), and this doesn't tell our world much about our Jesus. We have to be able to start at the promise, not at the fulfillment, or this Jesus of ours makes no sense.

Now, more than ever, we need a truly Judeo-Christian framework to use as a point of reference. There's nothing in the New Testament that wholly explains what the sacrifice of the Lamb means for the people of God, except where it calls back unto the Old Testament. We have to know that Old Testament. We have to be able to talk about atonement from a historical faith perspective or we'll never be able to make enough sense of His sacrifice for our world to believe it.

Now, more than ever, we need the witness of the early church. Although they were living in a time when everyone had heard of Jesus, they were also living in an age in which there was a lot of hostility toward Him. They were persecuted, oppressed, and mocked, and yet, they carried on. They learned to worship. They broke bread together. And they never stopped proclaiming His truth. It's the kind of courageous faith that we need once again in a world hostile to Christ in an entirely different way. 

But let us not forget that this hostility is not our greatest challenge, not by a long shot. Even the world He inhabited was hostile to Christ; He spent much of His time speaking against those who just would not believe Him, who would not buy that His was the holy way. No, our greatest challenge is not that the world despises Him; it always has.

Our greatest challenge is that the world no longer knows Him. 

And that's why now, more than ever, we must labor to make Him known. 

Jesus in a Time of Faithful Jews

One of the hallmarks of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth is that He spent a great deal of time talking about the Jewish Scriptures. Overwhelmingly, everything He did was steeped in them. 

When He takes the scroll in the Temple and begins to read, He reads from the prophecy of Isaiah, and the people are amazed. When He speaks quietly with the disciples, He often quotes the same prophet, referring, of course, to how those prophecies come fulfilled again in Him. When He preaches the Sermon on the Mount, He takes the Scriptures of the law and expands upon them, bringing a fuller meaning into each of God's commands. And we know that He spent a lot of energy engaging with the Pharisees, who were the men who were sure they knew the Scriptures the best. Jesus, of course, continually told them they barely knew the Scriptures at all. (Though we cannot say that was true. The Pharisees knew what the Scriptures said, even when they did not seem to understand the heart of them.)

In fact, regardless of the number of difficulties that Jesus encountered in His ministry, we can say from the testimony of the witnesses that "Scriptural illiteracy" was not one of them. The men and women of the region of Galilee knew their Jewish faith.

It's actually this literacy, this knowledge, that enabled Jesus to do the ministry that He was set on this earth to do. The things that Jesus did, the proclamations that Jesus made, the promises that Jesus fulfilled would have meant nothing at all if the people had not known Him before He came, had not been looking for Him. 

Imagine if He'd had to start over every time He wanted to do something. 

Imagine if every time Jesus did something Jesus-like, He had to stop and start from the beginning and explain to the crowd why that was Jesus-like. Imagine if He had to keep telling them what it meant that He was doing these things. Imagine if every miraculous, wondrous, wonderful act of Jesus had to come with a statement about which prophecy it fulfilled and why and how. All of a sudden, the Jesus story loses something, doesn't it?

That's not to say that the people understood everything that He did. Not at all. They had plenty of questions, plenty of curiosities. We see it in the whispers that seemed to follow Him everywhere. We see it in the challenges of the Pharisees and those they trained. But because they had a foundation for knowing Jesus, their questions were not really, "What does this mean?" Rather, they were asking, "How is this possible?" 

It wasn't that they didn't know; it was that they couldn't believe their eyes.

And this sets up something beautiful for God. He's free to do the things that He's called to do and to just be Jesus, knowing that He doesn't have to tell them who He is; He can show them. And every time He shows them, He takes their breath away again. He draws them a little bit deeper. He becomes even more than they ever imagined He could be. Because He's everything they've hoped for, longed for, waited for, but He's more even than this.

It's how Jesus of Nazareth - can anything good come from Nazareth? - becomes the known presence of the living God - because the people knew their Scriptures so well that they knew what they were looking at, even when they couldn't understand or fathom it.

The whole story of Jesus, it changes if the people don't know what they're looking for. It changes if the people haven't heard the promises. The story of the Son is fundamentally different if the people do not know the Father. 

If you don't believe that, just look around.

Thinketh Such Things

One of the truths about prayer that has taken me perhaps the longest to embrace, for it feels often foolish to the human being, is that prayer must be spoken out loud, even whispered if that is all the voice that one can muster for it.

There's a popular myth in Christianity that one need not pray out loud, but must only pray by thinking the words or perhaps by praying in the heart, but this sets up a very difficult question, as well as a very deep hypocrisy.

The question is how, if we are to pray only in thought, we then signal the Lord that these are the thoughts that are directed toward Him. How do we tell Him that we would like Him to start listening? Do we merely think it and then, He knows? If this is true, then the Lord must be listening to all of our thoughts. Most of us don't like that idea, primarily because we are not really thinking Lord-worthy thoughts all of the time. Most of our thoughts are extremely mundane...or worse. So we ask God, by asking Him to hear our thought prayer, to ignore the rest of our thoughts that we know that He heard and to pay attention only to those that we dedicate specifically to Him.

Or if we pray only in our hearts, how is it that we move our stream of thought from our heads to our hearts? The truth is that this doesn't look very different for most of us, except to say that we perhaps strain a little more. We perhaps put a little more stress into our thought and say that it is our heart straining it, but is it really? We may spend our entire lives wondering what a prayer of the heart looks like and how it is fundamentally different from a prayer of the thought.

But the greater concern with this idea that we need only to pray in our thoughts or in our hearts is not the questions that it raises, but the hypocrisy that it introduces. It turns our lives exactly upside-down from where they should be, if we're honest about it, and this is extremely dangerous.

It doesn't take much to see this. Each of us has millions of thoughts each day. If prayer is nothing more than our thoughts intentionally directed toward God, then what do we do with the countless thoughts that are not intentionally directed toward God? Here's the truth: we are not intentional about them at all. We have millions of mindless thoughts and direct only a handful of chosen ones toward God.

Truthfully, I don't know anyone who pauses to say, "Lord, please listen to this next set of thoughts," who is just as intentional about saying, "Lord, do not listen to these." We're non-discriminating in our thought process except in one direction, and this sets us up with two ways of living.

This makes us intentional about our relationship with God, but not intentional at all about how we live. All of a sudden, we must admit that our lives are not holy. They are not sacred. They are not faith-full. They are not even Christian lives, no matter that we say that we pray. Most of our lives are mindless, unintentional. We run on auto-pilot unless we need God for something, and then, we turn toward Him, but not until.

God has told us this is not what He desires from us. The fathers of our faith, the saints, have testified this is not the way to live as God's people. Everything about our lives is supposed to be intentional. Everything we do is supposed to be for His glory. Everything we do is supposed to reflect His love. But if we cannot, even in our own "prayer" (thought) life, show a care for this singleness of living - because we are unintentional so much of the time - how can we ever live it as a witness to the world?

The same is true of the heart. When we pray in our heart, we put our deepest hope there. But this means that all of the rest of the time, we are not living with our hope in our heart. It's on a shelf somewhere, I guess, waiting for us to take it down and funnel it toward God once more in a moment of need or whatever. This is not the way that God intended us to live.

But become intentional about your prayer life, become a person who prays out loud, and it no longer runs together with all of the unintentional things you're doing every day. Pray with your mouth, with your voice, and you come to see more clearly how your thoughts wander. It's easier to put them into perspective and to bring them into alignment with the integrated faith-full life you're trying to live. Because all of a sudden, your thoughts stand in contrast to your prayer. You see them for what they're worth.

Pray with your mouth, with your voice, and you learn to carry your hope in your heart more continually. It's easier to have hope in your heart when it's not busy doing your pleading for you, or worse, when it's not idle in the course of an "average" day. In true prayer, there is no average day, and you need that hope. It's easier to have it when you permit it simply to dwell inside of you, to live in your heart.

As much as we have said that prayer needs be nothing more than a thought that you think toward God, we have also confessed that speaking a prayer changes something about the experience.

Truth is, it changes everything.