12/10/23 – Good News—God’s Downward Mobility by Rev. Tim Mitchell

GOOD NEWS—GOD’S DOWNWARD MOBILITY

December 10, 2023
First Week of Advent
Rev. Tim Mitchell

I grew up in the northern part of Appalachia, in a small Ohio town 30 miles north of the West Virginia border. The home I grew up in remains on a dirt road in the boonies. You can look up Appalachian stereotypes on Wikipedia and read them. “The people of Appalachia are often portrayed as lazy, tobacco-smoking, overall-wearing farmers.[1] “Of the acceptable prejudices, meaning those that are either widely accepted, overlooked or embraced as truth, that remain, the negative mainstream American attitude toward Appalachia has gone largely unchallenged for decades.”

Wikipedia talks about the film Deliverance, which “features negative stereotypes of Appalachian people, portraying the people as inbred, backward, and dangerous. It does, however, showcase rather accurately the poverty that the region and its people endure and explores the negative attitudes that city folk have towards Hillbillies.”

I have spent a good portion of my life seeking upward mobility. That is to move beyond the stereotypes of Appalachia. Most Americans aspire to advance—to move up in life. Not many of us are seeking to move down. Yet here is God on the move.

John Stroman writes: The good news is that Jesus was born in an obscure village in an out-of-the-way place that was shadowy, barren, and unknown. Today, Christ comes to the shaded and bare areas of our lives. This is what Advent is all about. This is the good news!

Jesus was born amid the poverty and obscurity of those Judean hills, but the fact remains that he transformed human life in the first century. It all began with such lowliness and unpretentiousness. Today, Christ comes to those shadowy and barren places of our lives and brings the light of God’s love and grace. It was good news for the first century, and it is good news for our century.

This is the hope and joy of the Advent message. This is the good news! In Bethlehem, heaven came down and touched the earth as never before. Today, the gospel’s good news touches our hearts and lives with the announcement that God is with us. Jesus walked along the shores of Galilee, but the good news is that he walks our city streets today. He is with us amid life’s strains and stresses.

We are to take our cue from God and seek to provide space for others who are not like us and create a space alongside us for others who are seen below us. We take our cue from a coach named Pop Warner.

In 1950, sportswriters selected him as the most outstanding athlete of the first half of the twentieth century. He was a star in the National Football League, perfecting the dropkick as an effective scoring weapon, and played professional baseball for seven years. He starred in basketball, track and field, swimming, and lacrosse. Jim Thorpe, a true All-American athlete, was the best there was. However, his recognition for a lifetime achievement in sports came with help.

Thorpe was born in 1886 in the Indian territory, now Oklahoma. He lived with his family in relative obscurity. No one cared about him, his family, or his people. He was a Native American, an Indian; by this fact alone, he was labeled as one who would not produce anything good. Through some good fortune, however, Jim was chosen to attend Carlisle Industrial School in Pennsylvania, a unique college for American Indians. At Carlisle, Jim Thorpe would receive the recognition that his talent deserved.

In the early years of this century, Carlisle was a recognized school in major college athletics. Glenn “Pop” Warner, Carlisle’s famous football coach, noticed Jim Thorpe’s athletic ability. Jim had never seen a football, let alone played the game. Yet, he was a natural. Carlisle played the eastern football powerhouses of the day: Army, Penn, and Princeton; Carlisle beat them all. Led by Jim Thorpe, Carlisle amassed one of the best records in the country. Thorpe was recognized as an All-American in 1911 and 1912. Jim was a natural athlete; he excelled in everything.

In the summer of 1912, before his final year at Carlisle, Jim represented the United States in the Summer Olympic Games held in Stockholm, Sweden. He entered and won the heptathlon (seven events) and decathlon (ten events) in track and field. He is the only person in Olympic history to accomplish such a feat. The king of Sweden told Jim, “Sir, you are truly the world’s greatest athlete.”

Jim Thorpe was a great athlete, an All-American, maybe the best that has ever lived. As they say, he could do it all. Yet, he lived in obscurity until fortune allowed him to be discovered through his presence at Carlisle and his association with the legendary coach, Pop Warner.

Jim Thorpe’s recognition as a star athlete illustrates the theme of Advent that we celebrate today. Jesus was born in an obscure town in a stable and placed initially after his birth in a manger, a feeding trough for animals. He, like Jim Thorpe, was unknown. And the reputation of someone born in Nazareth could be discerned by this statement in Scripture, “Can anything good come from Nazareth”?

God has come down to meet us right where we are and to encourage us to meet others “right where they are”!

And when Jesus comes, he comes to bring good news. Jesus desires to meet our needs.

Jesus met the needs of the first-century world, and the good news is he meets the needs of those in today’s world. As Walter Wink reminds us in his influential book, Engaging the Powers, “Jesus identifies today with every victim of torture, incest, or rape; with every peasant caught in the crossfire of an enemy patrol; with every single one of the forty thousand children who die each day of hunger . . .with the Alzheimer’s patient who is slowly losing the capacity of recognition and the AIDS patient who is barely holding on to life” (p. 142). The good news is that in Jesus, God became flesh and experiences life precisely as we experience it. Jesus shares our every joy, pain, and tear. Emmanuel, God is with us. That is the good news. God has come down and met us where we are!

The good news is that this God who has come down is a God of compassion and concern! Once again, John Stroman writes: “The message of the good news of Jesus was earthshaking for the first-century world. They had never heard such a teaching about God. For the first-century Greek mind, the idea of God was one of absolute serenity, which nothing in heaven or earth could affect. They saw life in terms of a God who was serene, isolated, untouchable, and free from all feeling and emotion. For the Stoics, God was, by nature, incapable of feeling. In the first-century world, the idea of God was one of detachment and indifference to human needs.

The difference that good news in Jesus Christ made to the people of the first century was to reveal a God who cares desperately and is involved in human situations. Against the backdrop of this first-century world that considered all the deities as being insulated from human need and emotionless to human concern comes the good news of Jesus Christ. Barbara Taylor Brown reminds us, “When you look at him (Jesus), you see God. When you listen to him, you hear God. Not because he has taken God’s place, but because he is the clear window God has glazed into flesh and blood — the porthole between this world and the next, the passageway between heaven and earth” (The Preaching Life). That was good news for the first-century world, and that is good news for our modern world.

Never before had God been defined in such loving, kind, gracious, and caring terms. This was unthinkable for the first-century world to whom Mark wrote his gospel. It seemed incomprehensible to those of Mark’s day that the Son of God would be born of a woman in the tiny village of Bethlehem in a stable cave on a cold winter’s night. But the apostle stated this event in terms that are true for all ages when he declared “that . . . in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

God has made a way “down to you and me,” the good news is that God will persevere. Mark opens his gospel with the declaration: “The good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Here, we discover God’s love in action in the life of Jesus. The whole Bible is a commentary on the grace of God, which seeks to mend and lift up the fallen.

Why wasn’t Israel given up as hopeless because of her constant bickering, criticism, and failure? Why wasn’t Jacob cast out on the scrap heap for his warped and twisted ways? Why didn’t God disown David for the dark and degrading deed that made his name a byword in the land? Why wasn’t Peter left to sink after his base denial? Why wasn’t Saul of Tarsus, persecutor, blasphemer, hater of Christ, blotted out of the Book of Life forever?

Why is it that God has not given up on us? We have disregarded God’s love, polluted God’s creation, and mocked God’s purpose with cruel acts of inhumanity. Why doesn’t God go ahead and allow us to self-destruct? Because there is nothing in heaven or on earth so dogged, determined, stubborn, and persistent as the grace of God that wills to save.

Tom Long asks the question in his book Shepherds and Bathrobes: “Have you ever noticed where God placed his treasure that he was seeking to deposit on the earth?” The treasure is not gold but gospel. It’s not silver, but good news. Not hard, cold cash, but grace, love, and peace.

He points out that God could have left it with the politicians, those who are responsible for collecting taxes, building schools, and passing laws, but God didn’t. God could have left this treasure with Zechariah, the high priest, but his unbelief took him out of the picture. God could have left it with the rich and famous or those of high society!

Long states that God left the treasure in the least likely places: in the love, care, and nurture of a first-century peasant woman chosen as the “handmaiden of the Lord.” God’s treasure was left with the most powerless figure in the ancient world. Doesn’t that tell you something about God’s grace in today’s world?

We are constantly surprised by grace. Grace may be surprising, but grace is always amazing. God comes to us in the most unlikely and lowly place — Bethlehem. God comes through the most unlikely and humble of people — Mary. God comes to us under the most unlikely and ordinary circumstances- the Judean hills’ poverty. Today, through Christ, God comes again to the most unlikely and lowly people- you and me.

God comes to us at the level of our needs. Knowing that we cannot go where God is, God comes to us down here where we are. Mark calls this “the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

 

 

© Rev. Tim Mitchell, 2023, All Rights Reserved
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