Life of Christ

Despite the presence of several acclaimed breweries, restaurants, and the last remaining Blockbuster video rental store in America, the town of Bend, Oregon features another illustrious tourist attraction garnering local attention – a giant rock.

The large rock, which locals refer to as the Big, Obvious Boulder (or BOB for short), is roughly three feet tall and three feet wide. It sits near the entrance to a parking lot, and gets attention when oblivious drivers collide with it and their vehicles require rescuing. Bob’s claim to fame is that it is a magnet for cars, which end up high-centered on the boulder and need to be rescued.

Not only is Bob itself often affixed with stickers and signs warning drivers, but it’s become something of a local phenomenon, with its own Facebook group. Former Bend resident Terry Heiser, claims to have had the first run-in with Bob back in 2002. He said:

It was about 9 p.m. on a weekday and I was heading downtown to meet some friends. I decided to stop in at 7-11 and I took the turn into the parking lot as I had done dozens of times. I wasn’t driving crazy or fast. It was just an innocuous turn and next thing you know chaos happens and my truck ended up on its side.

I had to climb out of the passenger window to get out. I immediately called my buddies and they came down with an even bigger truck to help get me off of Bob. It was such a stupid but hilarious accident that I haven’t lived down to this day.

You can view the famous boulder here.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Christ, life of; Stumbling; Stumbling blocks - In his lowly life and death, the person of Jesus Christ was also a stumbling stone. People overlooked his significance and stumbled to their harm. 2) Attention; Carelessness - As we go through the routine activities of life, it is important to stay focused on what lies directly before us. When we become distracted by more trivial affairs, we are more likely to experience trouble, misfortune, and/or heartbreak.

With hundreds of things to see in Berlin, few tourists pay attention to what lies under their feet. The four inch by four inch blocks of brass embedded in the pavement are easy to miss. But once you know they exist, you begin to come across them with surprising frequency.

Each stone is engraved with the name and fate of an individual who has suffered under the Nazi regime. They are known as Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones.” There are over eight thousand of them in the German capital, and tens of thousands of them are spread across European countries, making it the largest decentralized monument in the world.

The idea was first conceived by German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992 to commemorate individual victims of the Holocaust. Each block, which begins with “Here lived,” is placed at exactly the last place where the person lived freely before he or she fell victim to Nazi terror and was deported to an extermination camp. Unlike other holocaust memorials that focus only on Jews, the Stolpersteine honor all victims of the Nazi regime, including Jews, the disabled, the dissident, and the gays.

Although not everyone supports the drive, Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer, the craftsman who makes each Stolperstein, spoke in support of the project. “I can’t think of a better form of remembrance,” he says. “If you want to read the stone, you must bow before the victim.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In his lowly life and death, the person of Jesus Christ can also be a stumbling stone, or the stone that was rejected by men that is precious to God.

In describing the incarnation Jill Carattini wrote:

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut once said of one of his most recurrent characters, “Kilgore was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He said, ‘The way things are going, all I can think of is that I’m a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.’”

In one scene Kilgore’s haunting suspicion is unveiled before him. Sitting content at a bar, he is suddenly overwhelmed by someone that has entered the room. Beginning to sweat, he becomes uncomfortably aware of a presence disturbingly greater than himself. The author himself, Kurt Vonnegut, has stepped beyond the role of narrator and into the book itself, and the effect is as bizarre for Kilgore as it is for the readers.

Vonnegut came to explain to Kilgore face-to-face that his life is all due to the pen and whims of an author who made it all up for his own sake. In this twisted ending, Kilgore is forced to conclude that apart from the imagination of the author he does not actually exist.

The gospels tell a story that is perhaps as fantastic as Vonnegut’s tale, though with consequences in stark contrast. The Gospel of John begins with a story that is interrupted by the presence of the author: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. … All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. … And the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a Father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1-15). The Word became one of us and moved into the neighborhood. But in this story, the presence of the author is not our demise but our inherent good.

Something tugged at Ronald Reagan on that August weekend in 1982. The President noted in his diary: “More of Saturdays work plus a long letter I have to write to Loyal. I’m afraid for him. His health is failing badly.” Loyal Davis, Reagan’s father-in-law and a neurosurgeon, was just days away from death.

Something else worried Reagan: The dying man was an atheist. Davis once wrote, “I have never been able to subscribe to the divinity of Jesus Christ nor his virgin birth. I don’t believe in his resurrection, or a heaven or hell as places.”

Reagan, on the other hand, believed everyone would face a day of judgment, and that Davis’ was near. So the most powerful man in the world put everything else aside, took pen in hand and set out on an urgent mission—to rescue one soul.

This letter was found in the Reagan Library as part of Nancy Reagan’s personal effects:

Dear Loyal, I hope you’ll forgive me for this, but I’ve been wanting to write you ever since we talked on the phone. I’m aware of the strain you are under and believe with all my heart there is help for that. . . .

It was a miracle that a young man of 30 yrs. without credentials as a scholar or priest had more impact on the world than all the teachers, scientists, emperors, generals, and admirals who ever lived, all put together. Either he was who he said he was or he was the greatest faker & charlatan who ever lived. But would a liar & faker suffer the death he did?

Reagan wrote out John 3:16 for his father-in-law and then added:

We have been promised that all we have to do is ask God in Jesus name to help when we have done all we can—when we’ve come to the end of our strength and abilities and we’ll have that help. We only have to trust and have faith in his infinite goodness and mercy.

Did the letter have any impact? Nancy Reagan, who was with Loyal Davis when he died, and who saved the letter he received from his son-in-law, would later claim that her father did turn to God at the end of his life.

Possible Preaching Angle: Regardless of our political views, we can appreciate Mr. Reagan’s heartfelt concern and his clear presentation of the gospel.

In his everyday life, Charles Foster is a respected veterinarian, a practicing lawyer, and a teacher at Oxford University in England. But as noted in his book Being a Beast, Foster also has an unusual practice. Every so often Foster tries to live like a badger. Yes, like one of those dark-dwelling, tunnel-making, rodent and worm-eating mammals. Usually he does this alone, though for a few days he went with his eight-year-old son, Tom. On a friend's farm, they made a human-sized badger home, a 15-feet long hole that they would sleep in. Charles says he's probably spent six weeks living underground like this over the years, sleeping during the day, awake at night like real badgers.

For Foster the main part of living like a badger involves getting low to the ground, crawling around on his hands and knees. He also blindfolds his eyes (because badgers' eyesight is terrible) and eats earthworms (since 85 percent of a badger's diet consists of worms).

Now as strange and even repugnant as this sounds, think of something even stranger and potentially more repugnant—the God of all creation who exists in perfect beauty and splendor becoming a human being and living on our fallen planet—and there was no escape for a full human lifetime. Jesus Christ came to us not just as an interesting nature experiment. Nor was he repulsed by us. He came out of love to rescue us from our sin.

When the Bible scholar N.T. (Tom) Wright was asked what he would tell his children on his deathbed he said, "Look at Jesus." Tom Wright explained why:

The [Person] who walks out of [the pages of the Gospels] to meet us is just central and irreplaceable. He is always a surprise. We never have Jesus in our pockets. He is always coming at us from different angles … If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what it means to be human, look at Jesus. If you want to know what love is, look at Jesus. And go on looking until you're not just a spectator, but part of the drama that has him as the central character.

According to an article in The New York Times, "The Walt Disney Company's Star Wars: The Force Awakens earned roughly $517 million in worldwide ticket sales [in the first weekend], smashing multiple box office records. … It was the largest opening weekend in North America."

Why the huge success? Jeanine Basinger, a film studies professor at Wesleyan University, has one good theory. Basinger said, "The studios finally seem to be remembering, after years of over-reliance on visual effects, that moviegoers like a story. It can be a story we are familiar with. It can be a serialized story. But give us, please, we're begging you, a story of some kind."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Gospel; Bible; Preaching; Witnessing—Professor Basinger has a good point, and as Christians we have the best story in the universe to share with others. (2) Jesus Christ—Or you could apply this quote to anything related to Jesus' birth, life, death, or resurrection.

In some ways, our biggest challenge in gauging Jesus' influence is that we take for granted the ways in which our world has been shaped by him. For example, children would be thought of differently because of Jesus. Historian O. M. Bakke wrote a study called When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity, in which he noted that in the ancient world, children usually didn't get named until the eighth day or so. Up until then there was a chance that the infant would be killed or left to die of exposure — particularly if it was deformed or of the unpreferred gender. This custom changed because of a group of people who remembered that they were followers of a man who said, "Let the little children come to me."

Jesus never married. But his treatment of women led to the formation of a community that was so congenial to women that they would join it in record numbers … Jesus never wrote a book. Yet his call to love God with all one's mind would lead to a community with such a reverence for learning that when the classical world was destroyed in what are sometimes called the Dark Ages, that little community would preserve what was left of its learning. In time, the movement he started would give rise to libraries and then guilds of learning …

He never held an office or led an army … And yet the movement he started would eventually mean the end of emperor worship, be cited in documents like the Magna Carta, begin a tradition of common law and limited government, and undermine the power of the state rather than reinforce it as other religions in the empire had done. It is because of his movement that language such as "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" entered history.

The Roman Empire into which Jesus was born could be splendid but also cruel, especially for the malformed and diseased and enslaved. This one teacher had said, "Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me." An idea slowly emerged that the suffering of every single individual human being matters and that those who are able to help ought to do so. Hospitals and relief efforts of all kinds emerged from this movement; even today they often carry names that remind us of him and his teachings.

Humility, which was scorned in the ancient world, became enshrined in a cross and was eventually championed as a virtue. Enemies, who were thought to be worthy of vengeance ("help your friends and punish your enemies"), came to be seen as worthy of love. Forgiveness moved from weakness to an act of moral beauty. Even in death, Jesus' influence is hard to escape. The practice of burial in graveyards or cemeteries was taken from his followers … It expressed the hope of resurrection … Death did not end Jesus' influence. In many ways, it just started it.

In the midst of her "Mrs. Carter Show" world tour, the singer Beyonce has made it very explicit what she expects from her hosts. The Daily Star reportedly scooped up a copy of the list, which included the following demands:

• All crew members must wear 100 percent cotton clothing.
• Alkaline water must be chilled to 21 degrees and served with $900 titanium straws.
• Bathrooms must have new toilet seats and red toilet paper at every venue.
• Hand-carved ice balls should be made after each show to cool her throat.
• Newly refurbished, luxury dressing rooms with enough space that's typically used to accommodate entire sports teams.

Of course Beyonce isn't the only famous or wealthy person (or ordinary person like us) who makes outlandish requests. In sharp contrast, when Jesus came to earth, he demanded nothing—except for a cattle stall. A Christian from the 4th century (Theodotus of Ancyra) explained it like this: In the Incarnation, God "chose surroundings that were poor and simple, so ordinary as to be almost unnoticed, so that people would know it was the Godhead alone that had changed the world."

Here's one way to look at Jesus' earthly life of obedience to God the Father. Jesus lived approximately 33½ years, or 1,057,157,021 seconds. In every second the average human being's brain has 100 billion neurons all firing around 200 times per second, giving a capacity of 20 million billion firings per second. If we want to know how many conscious decisions Jesus made to obey his Father's will, multiply 20 million billion by the number of seconds he lived: 1,057,157,021. The equation would look like this:

20,000,000,000 x 1,057,157,021 = a very large number!

Jesus Christ never made one decision, consciously or unconsciously, in all those innumerable split seconds that wasn't completely consistent with loving his Father and his neighbor. And his obedience wasn't merely an outward performance. He always did the right thing, and he always did it for the right reason. During his lifetime of constant, unwavering obedience, from infancy all the way to death, he wove a robe righteousness sufficient to cover millions and millions of us. Yes, even you.

In September of 1940, Witold Pilecki, a Polish army captain, did the unthinkable—he snuck into Auschwitz. That's right, into Auschwitz. Pilecki knew that something was terribly wrong with the concentration camp and as a committed (Roman Catholic) Christian and a Polish patriot he couldn't sit by and watch. He wanted to get information on the horrors of Auschwitz, but he knew he could only do that from the inside.

So his superiors approved a daring plan. They provided a false identity card with a Jewish name, and then Pilecki allowed the Germans to arrest him during a routine Warsaw street roundup. Pilecki was sent to Auschwitz and assigned inmate number 4859. Pilecki, a husband and father of two, later said, "I bade farewell to everything I had known on this earth." He became just like any other prisoner—despised, beaten, and threatened with death. From inside the camp he wrote, "The game I was now playing at Auschwitz was dangerous …. In fact, I had gone far beyond what people in the real world would consider dangerous."

But beginning in 1941, prisoner number 4859 started working on his dangerous mission. He organized the inmates into resistance units, boosting morale and documenting the war crimes. Pilecki used couriers to smuggle out detailed reports on the atrocities. By 1942, he had also helped organize a secret radio station using scrap parts. The information he supplied from inside the camp provided Western allies with key intelligence information about Auschwitz.

In the spring of 1943, Pilecki joined the camp bakery where he was able to overpower a guard and escape. Once free, he finished his report, estimating that around 2 million souls had been killed at Auschwitz. When the reports reached London, officials thought he was exaggerating. Of course today we know he was right.

Here's how a contemporary Jewish journal summarized Pilecki's life: "Once he set his mind to the good, he never wavered, never stopped. He crossed the great human divide that separates knowing the right thing from doing the right thing." In his report Pilecki said, "There is always a difference between saying you will do something and actually doing it. A long time before, many years before, I had worked on myself in order to be able to fuse the two." The current Polish Ambassador to the U.S. described Pilecki as a "diamond among Poland's heroes."

For too long, we've called unbelievers to "invite Jesus into your life." Jesus doesn't want to be in your life. Your life's a wreck. Jesus calls you into his life. And his life isn't boring or purposeless or static. It's wild and exhilarating and unpredictable.

All religions claim some sort of "revelation." Buddhism depends on the profound insights gained by Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) during his moment of enlightenment while meditating under a Bodhi tree. Hinduism looks to the Vedas passed on to the first man at the dawn of time. Islam says that the angel Gabriel dictated to the Prophet Muhammad the very words of God.

But Christianity claims something very different: a series of events [about Jesus' life, death, and resurrection] which are said to have taken place in public, in datable time, recorded by a variety of witnesses …. It is as if Christianity places its neck on the chopping block of [public] scrutiny and invites anyone who wishes to come and take a swing.

[For example], imagine I came to you claiming that my late great, great grandfather revealed himself … in Times Square, New York, last Monday during the morning rush hour. His appearance stopped the traffic and left witnesses dumbfounded as he explained to them the truth about the spiritual realm …. The claim itself is one you could test to some degree. You could watch the news services, read eyewitness accounts, check the New York traffic reports and so on. You might not be able to prove it beyond all doubt … but a fair-minded person would be able to arrive at a reasonable judgment about its truth or falsehood …. If you found no evidence at all, you would be well within your rights to dismiss it. If you found good evidence, or at least more evidence than you would expect if the story were a fiction, then you could quite rationally accept it as true. This is what I mean by a testable claim.

The central claims of Christianity are to a degree testable. You can apply the normal tests of history … and find that we do in fact possess exactly the sort of evidence you would expect if the core of the Jesus story is true and decidedly more evidence than you would expect if the story were fabricated.

Saul and Pilar Cruz, a married couple who founded Armonia Ministries in Mexico City, launched their ministry by planting a church on the edge of a vast garbage dump. Starting the church had its challenges. In particular, the people had a difficult time trusting Saul's leadership. Although Saul is a gifted strategist and thinker, he often appeared aloof. By his own admission, at this point Saul was unwilling to plunge into the pain and poverty of his people.

But all of that changed one Sunday morning when someone burst into their worship service with a frantic need: the local sewage system had started leaking and then flooding the street. As the sewage continued to gush, the street was on the verge of collapse. The crisis also threatened to sweep away dozens of nearby homes. To make matters worse, the city wouldn't respond for at least three days.

Saul and a local engineer organized the onlookers and church members to stop traffic and make sandbags. After working frantically for nearly fifteen hours, by three o'clock the next morning they had finally stopped the flow of sewage. It was cold and drizzling, and Saul was shivering. Exhausted, covered with mud and sewage, Saul and his church members emerged from the pit and walked back to the church. Some of the women had heated water so the volunteers could wash off the filth.

As they gathered together, Saul started to cry. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I need to pray. I need to thank God, because he just saved us. He saved you. He saved me. Can we pray?" Then Saul put out his hands as they all held hands and knelt to pray. By the time they had finished praying, Saul had earned their trust, becoming their leader and their friend. Later on, Saul would comment, "People need to see you're for real—that you really care for them, that you're even ready to put your life on the edge for them."

Christmas celebrates the fact that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, moved into our world, walking into our suffering. Our God isn't aloof. Jesus put his life on the edge for us, descending into the mud and sewage of our world.

Tim Keller writes:

There is no way to have a real relationship without becoming vulnerable to hurt. Christmas tells us that God became breakable and fragile. God became someone we could hurt. Why? To get us back … . No other religion—whether secularism, Greco-Roman paganism, Eastern religion, Judaism, or Islam—believes God became breakable or suffered or had a body."

According to Martin Luther, even from his birth, Jesus was standing with sinners. Luther wrote:

Christ is the kind of person who is not ashamed of sinners—in fact, he even puts them in his family tree! Now if the Lord does that here, so ought we to despise no one … but put ourselves right in the middle of the fight for sinners and help them.

In his book Unspeakable, Os Guinness tells the story about a well-known Christian leader whose son had been killed in a cycling accident. Although the leader was devastated, somehow he managed to suppress his grief, even preaching eloquently at his son's funeral. His display of hope in the midst of tragedy earned him the admiration of many.

But a few weeks after the funeral, the man invited Guinness and a few friends to his home. According to Guinness, this man spoke and even screamed "not with the hope of a preacher but with the hurt of the father—pained and furious at God, dark and bilious in his blasphemy." In his agony, he blamed God for his son's death.

Rather than rebuke him, one of Guinness's friends gently reminded the enraged father of the story of Jesus at Lazarus' tomb. On three occasions in that story, Jesus expressed anger, and even furious indignation, in the presence of death. When Jesus came to earth, he became a human being just like us, feeling the abnormality of our suffering. In Jesus' humanity we see God's perspective of our pain: the beautiful world God created is now broken and in ruins. Jesus will heal this broken world and our broken lives, but first, he came to earth in order to identify with our anguish.

Guinness concludes that when we understand Jesus' humanity, it frees us to face the world's brokenness just as Jesus did. Like Jesus, we must never accuse God of wrongdoing or blaspheme God, but like Jesus, we are "free to feel what it is human to feel: sorrow at what is heartbreaking, shock at what is shattering, and outrage at what is flagrantly out of joint … . To pretend otherwise is to be too pious by half, and harder on ourselves than Jesus himself was."

Gregory Boyle retells the story of a 15-year-old gang member named Rigo. Rigo was getting ready for a special worship service for incarcerated youth when Boyle casually asked if Rigo's father would be coming. The following is a summary of their conversation:

"No," he said, "He's a heroin addict and never been in my life. Used to always beat me."

Then something snapped inside Rigo as he recalled an image from his childhood.

"I think I was in fourth grade," he began, "I came home. Sent home in the middle of the day … . [When I got home] my dad says, 'Why did they send you home?' And cuz my dad always beat me, I said, 'If I tell you, promise you won't hit me?' He just said, 'I'm your father. Course I'm not gonna hit you.' So I told him."

Rigo began to cry, and in a moment he started wailing and rocking back and forth. Boyle put his arm around him until he slowly calmed down. When Rigo could finally speak again, he spoke quietly, still in a state of shock: "He beat me with a pipe … with … a pipe."

After Rigo composed himself, Boyle asked about his mom. Rigo pointed to a small woman and said, "That's her over there … . There's no one like her." Then Rigo paused and said, "I've been locked up for a year and half. She comes to see me every Sunday. You know how many buses she takes every Sunday [to see me]?"

Rigo started sobbing with the same ferocity as before. After catching his breath, he gasped through the sobs, "Seven buses. She takes … seven … buses. Imagine."

Boyle concluded this story with an analogy. God, as revealed in the person of Jesus, loves us like Rigo's mother loved her son—with commitment, steadfastness, and sacrifice. According to Boyle, we have a God "who takes seven buses, just to arrive at us." All throughout Jesus' ministry—his birth on Christmas morning, his meals with sinners, his healing of the sick, his death on the cross for our sins—he showed us the heart of God, the God who will take a long journey of love to find us.