For human beings, looking back on our past work or actions, cringing, and striving to do things better or differently in the future is a universal experience — like when an artist looks back on his or her earlier work with mild disgust. But when it comes to God, it sounds unlike him to think this way and maybe pokes a bit at our perceptions of his character, like his immutability or sovereignty. And yet, it’s this negative commentary that helps drive the story forward to its rightful climax in a way that a static, all-positive, “no problems here!” story can’t.

Though there are many places we can go to see this in the Bible, I like to pick up right in the middle, after centuries of covenant living are in the rearview mirror for Israel, and God begins to speak through the psalmists and the prophets. It’s during that time that David says, “Lord, you don’t desire sacrifice, but a broken heart.” Isaiah dials up the rhetoric further by saying (for God), “I don’t want your sacrifices, or your festivals, or your Sabbaths! I detest them!” and elsewhere “I live in heaven, not in temples built by human hands.” The attuned reader at this point might scratch their head and ask, “But, wait, didn’t God command these things to be kept and observed?”

When we get to the New Testament, we see this disconnect even more obviously with Jesus, whose freedom from the law reveals more than mere quibbles over interpretation. When it comes to the practice of Sabbath rest, Jesus proclaims himself its Lord (Mk 2:28), and even breaks it in favor of healing a paralytic (Jn 5:18). He refuses to throw a stone at the adulteress even though the law commanded it. He differentiates himself from Moses’s “Eye for an eye” and instead teaches his disciples to “Turn the other cheek.” He commends the faith of the unrighteous tax collector and scorns the righteousness of the Pharisee (Lk 18:9-14). He not only positions himself against the old ways but against things God himself spoke into existence. In this, David’s words become Jesus’s: “Father, you don’t desire these things anymore, you never really did, but I am here to do your will” (Ps 40:6-8, Heb 10:5-7).

Where I think we see this at the highest level, though, and where Jesus matches God’s Old Testament zeal over this matter, is when he flips over the money changers’ tables in the temple. Something often missed in this story is how Jesus sat down and “made a whip out of cords” before he drove people and animals from the temple, meaning that this wasn’t a spontaneous freak-out, but a calculated act that (at least temporarily) disrupted the entire sacrificial system of the day. An overreaction, you could say, if all he intended to do was to turn the dial 5 degrees or to “clean up” what was otherwise a good thing that was intended to last forever. Where was gentle Rabbi Jesus when you needed him? Wouldn’t a simple teachable moment have sufficed?

So, why is he doing this? Why is he flipping rather than teaching? The answer is that Jesus isn’t just overturning tables, he’s overturning eras. All due respect to the “temple cleansing” language we often use to summarize this Bible story, but I don’t think it does it justice. 

Jesus isn’t a small update to the operating system of the old covenant, but a new system altogether that renders the old obsolete (Heb 8:13). Between the two systems, the language is similar, some of the code persists, and the coder is the same, but they are as different as MS-DOS is from Windows 11 or the latest MacOS. 

It’s no coincidence that a few verses after Jesus flips the tables, he starts talking about his own body as the new temple and how he’ll raise it from the dead after it’s been destroyed. He’s signifying that he is the new way sinners will meet with and be mediated to God — not on the basis of our obedience, or moralistic “trade” (Jn 2:16), but by a broken heart, and moreover, Jesus’s broken and torn body. His own whipping.

Using Jesus’s suffering and death to shed light on the psalms and the prophets, as well as his position against the old Law in his early ministry, it becomes clearer why God has such zeal for all of this. It’s because fidelity to the rules lower our field of vision away from Jesus. Those who believe themselves to be healthy, after all, have no need of a doctor (Mk 2:17). The rules elicit pride and self-reliance more than faith and intimacy. Jesus’ prophetic demonstration in the temple sounds like anger, and in one sense it is because it’s linked with peoples’ sinful actions (the law incites disobedience), but digging deeper, it’s actually a veiled love story. It’s God in the flesh tearing up the thing that keeps his people from him, doing damage to the old way of “bring your sacrifices to God” and replacing it with a new and better way of “God brings his own sacrifice to us.”

A helpful quip to remember in Christian theology: God doesn’t change, but the covenants do. He isn’t aloof, or indecisive, nor does he make mistakes. He knew exactly what he was doing by sending the law first — to show us that our calloused hands aren’t the answer. But Jesus was always his plan A. His grace is the axis around which the entire story rotates. Everything else (even other parts of Scripture) falls subservient to it, and morphs and bends and aches at the whim of it. God has a heart, even a zeal, for this kind of scriptural drama. He puts us, the money-changing self-justifiers, out of a job. He beckons us to find rest in his son alone, the one who was struck on the cheek for our sins. And he invites us to stop the charade of striving to measure up and to be better versions of ourselves. These aren’t quaint lessons. They’re things God went to war over, and who took the bullet, that we might lay down our religious checklists and be spared. 

The post God Doesn’t Change, But The Covenants Do appeared first on Red Tree.

Good storytelling usually leaves us in a state of surprise — not just with a well-placed plot twist, but with which part of the plot gives us the most “feels” and which part we walk away ruminating about. Dune is an excellent example of this. 

The lore and world of Dune would take too long to summarize here, not to mention the intricacies of the story itself — maybe you’ve seen or read it? — from the traditions of Bene Gesserit witchcraft to the geopolitics of the spice trade to the biology of the sandworms. But I will say, visually, Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation of Herbert’s sci-fi classic hit on all cylinders. At least for this fan.

One of the more endearing parts to me amid the relative darkness of the story is how undeservedly and almost stubbornly the main character, 15-year-old Paul Atreides, is loved by the big three father figures in his life. I say father figures because they even seem to surpass the love of his actual father, Leto, who often seems more concerned about pruning his heir than spending quality time with him. 

Their names are Thufir Hawat, Gurney Halleck, and Duncan Idaho, all of whom play significant roles in helping to protect and secure the Atreides’ house. They’re elite warriors, master assassins in their own right, yet they share such a surprisingly soft spot for the boy Paul. Thufir (who is a much more developed character in the book) calls himself “an old man who’s fond of [him],” and is constantly watching his back. The younger Halleck wants to play-wrestle with him and oscillates between that and the actual sparring meant to prepare him for battle. Duncan, portrayed by Jason Momoa, isn’t afraid to embrace him or playfully tease him, calls him “my boy,” and ultimately lays down his life for him. The moment when he touches Paul’s thin arm and says, “You’ve put on some weight!” to which Paul says “Really?” to which Duncan replies “No” was the only point that I audibly laughed while watching the movie.

They’re light, humorous, and admittedly passing moments in the story. You might be thinking, “What about the sandworms!” Yes, the sandworms are epic. But as is the case in a grand but otherwise loveless story (sandworms don’t love), these things stick out. They’re meant to. And what accentuates the love even more is the solemnity of their situation and the significant threats that await the family on Arrakis. Paul’s personal struggles and sins stand out as well: his inner messiah complexes and nightmares that plague him through life, which he sadly gives in to at the end of the book. This disillusionment with the savior figure leads us all the more to ask who we’re rooting for and who or what is going to bring resolution. But this is a welcome twist, not unlike the “heroes” of the Old Testament who have more flaws than strengths, and who give us glimpses of hope, but ultimately not from themselves.

Maybe in Dune’s case, the answer is staring at us right in the face, through the B-level characters who love from the shadows. In the midst of one of the crueler depictions of humanity that you’ll see anywhere in literature or film (the Harkonnens), and the drama of war and betrayal, I find that my hope is less for a universe that Paul can conquer, or even for Arrakis to transform into a tropical paradise, but instead for a world filled with a love like Hawat’s, Halleck’s, and Idaho’s.

There are a thousand other things going on in Dune. I’m not trying to “solve” this story by any stretch. Its complexity and how it breaks the mold is what makes it so intriguing. That said, it’s this love from outside of us, and from outside our bloodline, that I can’t shake. 

It reminds me of the Book of Ruth when Ruth decides to return with her mother-in-law Naomi to her homeland after both of their husbands die. Her promise of “Your people will be my people, and my God, your God” is one of the more well-known in this section of Scripture. It’s a bright spot in an otherwise dark time of biblical history “when the judges ruled” (Ruth 1:1) and all Harkonnen-hell was breaking loose pretty much all the time. But Ruth is a glimpse of love that was all too rare those days. 

At the end of the book, Naomi is told by her friends, “Your daughter-in-law, who loves you, is better to you than seven sons.” Now, there’s a plot twist. No offense to my or anyone else’s in-laws, but aren’t our kids even more valuable? Yet here the Bible operates on its own terms. The surprise left hook of a love coming from outside our bloodline, apart from us altogether, pushes the story forward to the one we could call the ultimate in-law, the friend who sticks closer than a brother (Prov 18:24), Jesus Christ, who would come to love us apart from what we have to give him, by dying for us. God’s grace is given, not sourced or earned. It’s a complete surprise, so we can’t take any credit or consider it a “family trait.”

And yet it’s what we need to quell the tide of the messiah complexes in our hearts, our tireless attempts at self-deifying and self-aggrandizing. We need a love that precedes it and stays faithful to us when we slip back into it. A love that doesn’t keep score and that simply loves us for who we are, even when we’re up to our eyeballs in the sands of sin, drunk on the spice of power, and seduced by the allure of thinking that we’re enough on our own.

The post Fatherly Love and Messiah Complexes appeared first on Red Tree.

Consider the book of Acts, which is often reduced to a church planting manual or, more broadly, a “how to” on the evangelistic side of the Christian life. This is common for readers of the Bible to do — categorizing books topically so we have a broad-brush starting point for understanding their meaning. “Nehemiah is the book on leadership, Jonah is the book on global missions,” and so on. But such categorizations are too simple. They treat the Bible more like an encyclopedia than good news.

The story of Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27 is a helpful place to go to see this, and to see how the Bible prefers to tell history in a way that’s “translucent,” that is, clear enough to see Christ on the other side of it.

On his way to Rome to appeal to Caesar, and under the supervision of Roman centurions, Paul and company run into a veritable hurricane on the Mediterranean. After days of tumultuous winds, little food, and constant fear of death, the ship is finally broken apart and the crew and prisoners need to swim for shore on a nearby island called Malta. Miraculously, everyone survives. I like to compare it to the movie Sully about the US Airways flight in 2009 that water-landed on the Hudson River after running into a flock of birds, another true story where catastrophe and almost certain death are met instead with a 100% survival rate. In both stories, the main characters exude an other-worldly calmness, one that reminds us of Jonah on the boat in his own storm on the same sea hundreds of years before, and even more, Jesus, who slept soundly amidst the storm on the Sea of Galilee while his disciples cried out for their lives.

And that’s our first clue that there’s more to this story than history alone. Paul points beyond himself here. His insistence that “not a hair from any of your heads will perish” in verse 34 is an echo of when Jesus consoles his disciples with the exact same words in Luke 21. So, far from simply a lesson on how Christians should replicate the same kind of faith when we find ourselves in similar disastrous situations, Paul is actually Jesus’s word of grace to us about how comprehensive his blood is when it comes to our redemption. His blood saves every single molecule and atom in our bodies — the smallest particles, the smallest of hairs, the most ingrained sins, even things we don’t realize are there, things we can barely see, but are still keeping us from God. He covers it all. There really is nothing to fear.

Paul continues to mimic Jesus when he calls the crew away from “continuing in suspense” (v. 33) and invites them to sit down to rest and break bread together. It’s an almost verbatim copy of what Jesus says at the Last Supper, which is intentional. It’s a reminder of how the gospel calls us away from our fears, worries, and especially our active efforts to save ourselves from the storm of our sin, and instead to trust in the broken, bread-like body of God’s Son alone. Verse 38 adds, “When they had eaten as much as they wanted, they lightened the ship by throwing the grain into the sea.” Jesus is the grain in this story as well, the bread that will suffer. In a surprise (and unfair?) twist, it’s the innocent grain that gets thrown into the sea first, even before the guilty prisoners. In the same way, it’s not just Jesus’s body, but his crucified body that saves us. It’s the scandal of the ages, when God would bear the greatest of injustices on our behalf, so we can unfairly, yet graciously, have our loads lightened.

There’s one more thing, however, that suffers in the story: the ship itself. It says, “The stern was being broken up by the surf … and the centurion ordered the rest who couldn’t swim to make for land on pieces of the ship. In this way, everyone reached land safely.” The ship, like the grain, isn’t about the ship. It’s a picture of something more. Jesus, in his ministry, fell asleep “on the stern”, linking him linguistically with the broken stern of Acts 27. But what’s most helpful is to see that it’s the broken ship that provided flotation devices to get everyone safely to land, especially those who couldn’t swim. It had to be broken, you could say — like Jesus’s body — or the way to land wouldn’t have been possible.

This is the good news. The centurion’s message wasn’t “Train hard to become an Olympic swimmer!” but “Hold on to the ship’s planks!” And so it is for us. The whole of the Christian life is characterized by holding onto something rather than trying to become better versions of ourselves. Looking back and looking ahead, we find even our successes and victories in life were purchased by the suffering of another rather than byproducts of our spiritual fitness. We’re all castaways. But that’s a good thing because God is at work saving those who know their need, and who know they can’t swim. Like the grain, he jumps in first, and like the broken ship, he jumps in with us, breaking up with the waves, so in the face of our own shipwrecks we remember he is not only with us in the storm, but he takes the worst the storm can offer for us. The ripple effects of Calvary move forward into this part of the Bible, whispering to us how much we’re nourished and buoyed by his grace alone, not by our works.

The post Paul’s Shipwreck From Hell appeared first on Red Tree.

But it’s this element of finding love particularly in small towns that’s got me thinking this year. I suppose, if you’d prefer, instead of Hallmark it could be Austenian images of Mr. Darcy traversing the countryside to court Elizabeth. My wife’s a big fan and we’ve watched our share of Austen films together. (Our daughter Jane’s name was inspired by one of the sisters in Pride and Prejudice.) But it’s hard to miss the pronounced theme in Austen’s novels of finding and experiencing love in the outskirts.

Well, you might be surprised to know that the Bible has a compatible view of love, and where to find it. But its story is anything but predictable. It goes against every bit of human intuition and appears (at least at first) in the unlikeliest of places. 

Nestled deep away in the middle of the Old Testament, in Song of Songs chapter 3, we meet a young woman who is in despair because she can’t find her fiancé. At wits’ end, she says, “I will rise and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I sought him [there] but found him not.” But then after she passes outside the city gate, past the watchmen on the wall, she finds him — in particular Darcy-fashion — coming up out of the wilderness toward her, his heart brimming with joy. A happy ending, to be sure, but a notable contrast between her distress and her relief, divided by a simple city wall.

Now, for us, as modern readers, often conditioned to reading the Bible more scientifically than artistically, this can all seem so arbitrary. Why does it matter where he was found, but that he was found? Well, fortunately for us, God isn’t like us. He’s a much more creative storyteller and always has his eyes on the smaller details, catching us off guard with things that confound human reasoning. 

The truth is, it matters greatly where the woman found her husband-to-be because when it comes to the Bible’s hometurf, different locations symbolize different theological realities. The Apostle Paul isn’t shy about this in Galatians 4 when he likens the physical city of Jerusalem (and the temple therein) with Mt. Sinai, and with the old, lawful covenant of “Do these things and then you will live” (Lev 18:5). The woman is a poetic picture of something beyond herself, as is the rural landscape she finds love in. She’s a picture of the bride of Christ finding Jesus outside of or apart from the trappings of the Law. 

This is also why Jesus was born in small-town Bethlehem, grew up in the Podunk town of Nazareth, ministered to the tiny villages of Galilee, and even more, why he died for us “outside the city gate,” as the author of Hebrews so helpfully reminds us.

The apostles are adamant about this. The prophets insisted on it — both where he would be born and where he would die — for the sake of a pure, undiluted gospel. Because, law and love don’t mix. The law demands something from us; it remembers past offenses. But love gives, and keeps no record of wrongs.

The New Testament is more “Quaint Christmas village” than we tend to think. It’s a village far outside the city limits of our work, hectic lives, responsibilities, moral accolades, and the high expectations that so many people place upon us and that we place upon ourselves. The gospel tells us — and the stories show us — that the law is behind us, not in front of us. So, with a sigh of relief, we can rest in the countryside of God’s grace, knowing that he was restless to come and love us to the uttermost — to find us, in fact — by coming all the way down to our hometown and dying on a cross in our place.

The post Finding Love Outside the City appeared first on Red Tree.

When we parent our kids, especially for those 18 years we have them in our homes, we take them through the whole story arc of redemptive history. In the beginning, when they are young, our care for them is very one-way. They are born into our families by grace, not by any choice of their own, and we love them unconditionally, even when they can’t sleep well, or when they’re sick, or when they fuss. When they get a little older, this kind of love continues, but we also start to teach them the difference between right and wrong and that there are consequences for their disobedience and sins. You could say that in some ways we become the voice of the law to them, with various forms of discipline, teaching, and instruction becoming more prominent. We don’t make this the main mantra of our home, though. Grace always wins the day when our kids are unable to obey or listen to us. Their sins grieve us, yet we remain their parents nonetheless, on their good days and bad days in equal measure. In this, we image the New Testament to them — how even in this “Old Testament” era of their lives, mercy is greater than sacrifice (Hos 6:6) and love is greater than law (Heb 10:5-10).

As they grow into their teenage years, discipline changes. Disobedience often becomes more frequent, and they might start to look like a prodigal, wanting to forge their own path. At the same time, we realize that our lawful words have less and less effect on them, and they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do, regardless. We still give advice and warn them of the consequences of their actions, many times with tears. But, our parenting morphs into less badgering and more quiet encouragement, promising that we’ll always be there for them, come what may, even if their lives tailspin out of control.

When they turn 18 and leave our homes, that’s when things really change. No longer are we their guardian. No longer are they under any house rules. Even “obedience” language goes away. There are no “do’s and don’ts” or any law-like preclusions. No sticker charts or chore lists. Just love and freedom, like it was in the very beginning when they were infants. 

Galatians 3:23-26 says, “Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith. Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian. So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.”

Paul is saying that the law was like a guardian in the home until Christ came — like Vin Diesel in The Pacifier — but when Christ came the guardian was out of a job, similar to how adults are no longer under an in-home nanny or tutor, or under those kinds of parental roles anymore. We are children of God through faith alone, clothed with Christ, not the law.

So, as parents, our final word is the word of the father to the prodigal. In the face of his son’s waywardness, he is no longer judge or discipliner. He doesn’t hold his sin over his head like a mirror. He simply runs to him, embraces him, and says, “Let’s have a feast and celebrate!” And so the story goes, that, in Christ, God has the same kind of unconditional, new-testament posture toward us rebellious sinners. This is good news for parents and non-parents alike. To those who grew up in a loving home and those who didn’t. To moms and dads who hit home runs and those who are weighed down by their parenting failures. For God is the true Parent, and we are forever saved and defined by his matchless love, not by our works.

The post Parenting with Grace appeared first on Red Tree.

I’m always struck by how these types of things are received in large, public venues. Of course, we clap and appreciate what these people have done. As we should. Especially the bone marrow donor! But there’s often a sense to which they poke back at us too. If we haven’t done what others are being recognized for, we might start to feel the tiniest bit of shame or guilt creep up within our hearts. Comparison games run amuck. And if we have done them, then we might wonder why we’re not out on centerfield ourselves, getting the same recognition.

Of course, there are more personalized, self-initiated, and therefore more devious forms of this, what we sometimes call virtue signaling, or simply wearing our acts of charity on our sleeves. Social media has exacerbated the problem to the moon and back. But whatever the source, it’s quite the predicament. If we’re honest, no matter who we are or what we’ve done, chances are we prefer our accomplishments to lean more public than private. And yet it doesn’t do a lot of good for us. The more we brandish our acts of righteousness, the worse versions of ourselves we tend to become.

This is why Jesus’s spin on all of this in Matthew 6 is so refreshing. And shocking. In it, he instructs his disciples and the listening crowds to not be like the hypocrites who give in order to be seen by others. He calls them “those who live out of the synagogue,” or the law-center of religious and social life. Instead — and this is the kicker — we shouldn’t let our left hands know what our right hands are doing so that our giving is done in secret (Matt 6:1-3).

At first glance, the teaching appears simple enough: check your arrogance at the door and let your acts of charity be done privately. And that is certainly the point. At least part of it. But, I’m just as interested in what Jesus says before the privacy clause, about our hands. Because, if you think about it, there’s more going on here than privacy toward others. There’s also a privacy toward self that Jesus desires. “I want your hands themselves to be oblivious to what’s going on,” he says. This type of ethical living is on another level, better yet, another planet. It supersedes the moral because the moral application to Matthew 6 would be to simply try harder at being private with our acts of generosity. But, that doesn’t cover the private-to-self dimension of what Jesus is actually going after. Again, he wants a type of self-forgetfulness that can only come when we’re not focusing on the good work itself. Because the instant we do, our left hand starts bragging to our right hand, and we start feeling a little better about ourselves on the basis of morality alone.

There’s a lot of grace in this for us. These big ethical markers (or seemingly so) of Jesus’s kingdom aren’t simply standalone ethics, they’re impossibilities — who can actually be that forgetful and blind-to-self apart from cutting off one of our hands entirely? See, these things lead us to focus on something other than our works, that is Christ crucified, the one whose left and right hands were stretched far apart and pinned to a bloody cross, and who gave to us the riches of his grace by dying in our place. 

Tim Keller calls this a “grace over goodness” way of living. When our attention is on how much we’ve been loved, we realize we don’t always have to know what we’re doing as Christians. We don’t even need to know what ‘good’ is (though we might). We certainly don’t need the recognition, because, again…what for? Instead, forgetting ourselves and remembering him, like a branch to a vine we trust Jesus will be the one to bear fruit in due time. And because it’s God we’re talking about, he will surely do it. Even better: if we’re in Christ, he already has.

The post When We Don’t Know What We’re Doing appeared first on Red Tree.

It’s nostalgic. It’s funny. It’s visually striking. The acting is superb. The music’s catchy. The interplay between the Barbie world and the real world is creatively portrayed, without being too cliche. In all, the movie has a lot going for it. It’s, just, fun.

But there was something that left us feeling hollow afterward. On our walk home, after a few minutes of internal processing and silence, my wife broke the ice: “I think it needed a love story.” “Mmm,” I agreed, “Tell me more.” She elaborated: “I just wanted to see some kind of sacrifice or deference, but it kept hitting a glass wall every time I thought it might go that way.” 

If you haven’t seen it, there are several moments in the movie where Ken declares his love for Barbie, only to be rejected with a “That’s really not what we need right now”-type sentiment. Even the God-figure (Barbie’s creator), after teasing us with a tear-inducing speech of “You’re perfect, in spite of your flaws, Barbie,” (the most powerful moment in the movie, in my opinion) quickly pivots to the “You can do anything you want” messaging that rounds out the rest of the film. It ends with the narrator holding out hope that Kens would rise up in status with Barbies in Barbieworld just like women would rise up in status with men in the real world. And it all just kind of…happened…without a shade of self-giving or sacrifice from any of the characters. It was as if the messaging itself was the main character more than Barbie, who just kind of dragged everyone along to the not-so-surprising conclusion.

Now, I realize that a love story in the Barbie movie in the year 2023 was never going to happen. But it’s interesting to consider why it couldn’t happen. Love requires sacrifice, which implies neediness. It’s built on the foundation of putting others first, which implies distinction. It often catches us by surprise, because the one who we think has some kind of priority suddenly desires to become lesser for the sake of the other. But all of this has a hard time living in a story where equality, independence, and self-aggrandizement wear the cape. It’s like a squishy ball when you press down on the center and the internal contents get pushed to the outside. Some themes just can’t co-exist; instead, one thing gets decentralized at the expense of the other. In this case, love.

It’s a somewhat surprising turn for director Greta Gerwig who isn’t aloof to sacrificial love in other works of hers like Little Women and Ladybird. But maybe that’s the point. We’re all a bit like her, trying (even unintentionally) to move on from love – to find ultimate meaning in the self rather than in the objective deference and sacrifice of another.

When it comes to the divine romance between Jesus and the Church, it’s predicated on the fact that the bride and the groom are different. We are not God, and he is not us. He’s the stronger party who willingly lays down his life for us, the weaker party. He puts us first, even scandalously, by becoming “just a Ken” in our place. For love to truly take root, someone needs to give, defer, and suffer. But, as it is, the clamoring for equality and extreme independence poisons the roots of romance, just like the law drives a wedge between God and people because it’s built more on posturing and work than receiving and grace.

Christianity isn’t a story about rising up to be like others, nor of a God who tells us we can accomplish whatever we put our minds to, but of a lover stooping down low and sacrificing himself for those he loves. Directionality is important, both in spirituality and storytelling. All it takes is a little bit of love to set things in the right direction (down, that is, not up). Not just in a marriage, but in all kinds of relationships, big or small — a love that considers others more important than yourself (Philippians 2:3), and a love that makes us okay standing in the shadows while others shine.

I like to think that if the story continued, maybe Ken and Barbie would come to see this. Barbie 2, anyone? But then again, without love, it would keep getting lost in all of the strivings for sameness. Thankfully, love comes from above not from within, so our hope is set not on getting this all figured out, but by fixing our gaze on a bloody cross where heaven kisses earth in a way that is undeniably self-effacing yet breathtakingly beautiful.

The post No Room For Love appeared first on Red Tree.

A few stats to help you understand the giant that U.S. Women’s Soccer is on the international stage:

• Since 1991 (the first official Women’s World Cup) the United States has won 4 World Cups (1991, 1999, 2015, 2019). 
• In the years they didn’t win, they have one 2nd place finish and three 3rd place finishes. 
• The next closest country is Germany with 2 World Cup titles and 3 top-4 finishes. From there it tapers off relatively quickly. 
• The U.S. also boasts two of the top-4 goal scorers of all time and holds the record for most goals scored in World Cup matches at 138. 

There are other individual accolades, as well, but this gives you an idea of just how long the U.S. Women’s National Team has been the team to beat internationally. They are, without question or debate, the juggernaut of the women’s game.

At least, for now. Because, this year none of that mattered. They came into the tournament with a little less swagger than usual, failed to impress the critics in their first 3 matches (even though they played well enough to advance to the knock-out stage), and were eliminated on penalty kicks against Sweden in the wee hours of the morning, U.S.-time. (The southern-hemisphere location and time zone seemed to poetically speed up the result. No last-minute comeback.) Just their earliest exit ever from the tourney.

What surprised me the most, however, and quite honestly usually does when it comes to sports journalism, was how critical much of the media was over the loss. Men. Women. Americans. Internationals. Other coaches. Even some of the American players themselves. It didn’t matter. The common refrain was one of shock, almost disgust. Megan Rapinoe, who missed one of the penalty kicks, said afterward, “It felt like a sick joke.” Others looked to rationalize it by assigning blame or finding excuses where they could. “Heads will roll,” they said. I admit, it was easy for me to join in with the critics.

But these kinds of responses are also short-sighted. Yes, we just saw Goliath collapse to the ground, dead. But we’ve seen it before, and we’ll see it again. What exactly are our long-term expectations for this program? What’s good enough? 

I don’t claim to be an elite soccer mind here, but 4 World Cup titles is pretty good, right? I don’t think this U.S. women’s team has anything to really hang their heads about, at least as a program. What else is there to prove? 

Well, it turns out this stuff is more ingrained than we might like to think. It’s a big part of how we, as fallen human beings, try to make sense of the world. Success often has less to do with getting to the top and more to do with staying on top. And even though that’s an impossible standard for anyone, we scratch our heads looking for the reasons for such untimely and surprising falls from grace. “There must be a rational reason for the imperfection, right? What small tweaks can we make in order to right the ship?”

Christian theology says to all of this that high expectations are actually what cause us to fall. The Apostle Paul says in Galatians 5, if you let yourselves live under a part of the law, then you are obligated to obey the whole law. If you place yourself under the burden of doing in order to be (and stay) saved, then what’s required is nothing less than lawful perfection: “The one who does these things will live by them” (Lev 18:5). And now when we read the law today, it continues to shout at us from the top of the moralistic stat sheet, “Come up here!” Or worse: “Stay up here! Don’t lose your footing!” … when in fact we’re always in a state of slipping.

Solomon calls this a “chasing after the wind” in Ecclesiastes 1 — a type of treadmill existence that never really gets us anywhere. Josh Cohen, in his article The Perfectionist Trap, says, “Something about being human makes it difficult to feel that we have done, or are, enough. We are unwilling to extinguish the hope that, one day, we will be recognized as exceptional.” And so we keep running. What we need is something (or someone) who comes apart from the law and all of its trappings. Instead of chasing the wind, we need the Wind to chase us, save us, and tell us that we actually don’t have to get anywhere at all in order to be whole.

And that’s really where all of this is heading: the fact that it’s never enough (that we’re never enough) drives us to stop looking inward and to start looking outward. Grace alone speaks a word of acceptance to both winners and losers alike because it’s given to us completely apart from human merit, and only through the one who became a “sick joke” on a wooden cross for us, dying in our place, and loving us to the uttermost. If God could become that low for us, then maybe there’s hope for us chronic-looker-uppers, and hope that the voice from the top of the stat sheet might grow fainter and fainter with time.

The post When Four World Cups Aren’t Enough appeared first on Red Tree.

The story consists of Elizabeth and Mary both receiving an angelic pronouncement that they were pregnant. Elizabeth was barren and Mary was a virgin, so the news is met with bewilderment and joy. It’s yet another time in the Bible when God overcomes the obstacles of age, infertility, despair, and now virginity, which makes sense on the cusp of the New Testament since, at the core, the gospel is about life coming from nothing. Onward to Easter!

But what strikes me most about these birth narratives is how they differ — how they duel. In fact, in a lot of ways, the distinctions between the two are more important than the similarities. In John the Baptist’s case, it actually isn’t Elizabeth who first gets the news, but her husband Zechariah, a priest who served in the temple. After the angel Gabriel says, “Your super old wife is going to get pregnant,” he’s (justifiably) skeptical. And this is where the otherwise joyful moment takes a turn for the sour. Because of his disbelief, Zechariah is stricken mute and won’t be able to talk until John is born.

It’s hard to not empathize with the guy, isn’t it? — at least for everyone who has struggled to trust God for things before. My wife and I, after our first pregnancy ended in miscarriage, had a hard time believing that there were brighter days ahead. But a curse of silence? Really Gabe? Not even a second chance? Nor a little understanding that maybe it’s going to be hard for a lifelong barren couple to believe they’re pregnant? Perhaps, though, this is the point. Readers of the Old Testament don’t need much convincing that the rote inability human beings have to obey or trust in God comes with consequences, many times immediate and unpleasant. 

But that’s what makes Mary’s story so surprising:

She said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God” (Luke 1:34-35). 

Notice anything — oh, I don’t know — blatantly unfair about that? The one million dollar question here is why isn’t Mary punished for her own form of disbelief? Her words “How will this be?” are almost a verbatim copy of Zechariah’s (Lk 1:18-20), and yet she isn’t struck mute. She’s just doled out more grace in the form of a promise. It’s as if these two announcements are operating by a completely different set of rules.

The answer to this apparent contradiction (and angelic flippancy) has to do with how these two couples and these two sons represent two different biblical covenants or ways of relating with God.

Zechariah, on the one hand, is a priest who is inside the temple when he is made mute. Not only does he represent the old covenant “professionally” (as a Levitical priest), but he is also experiencing the full weight of what the law did to Israel and the watching world, that is, cursed those who couldn’t keep it. Notice the conditionalism: keep the law, or else; believe God, or else; have perfect faith, or else. 

Mary, on the other hand, is different. She’s a Judahite and represents the new covenant of grace. She represents that the long-awaited time when God would forget our sins is now here. Her son Jesus would be associated with enemy love, not speedy condemnation. No more muteness or Tower of Babel-like punishment. Just reconciliation with God through his shed blood forever.

In the end, like so many things in life and theology, there’s a bad-news-good-news lesson for us here. Zechariah’s lack of faith mirrors ours. He’s an emblem of how all of us are crushed by heightened expectations, unkeepable standards, and various forms of failure every day.

But Mary is a picture of us hearing the gospel. She’s a picture of the curse of the law being replaced with Jesus’s loving restraint, even his willingness to be struck mute himself, like a sheep silent before its shearers, that we might live. To borrow a word from the angel, this gospel “overshadows” anything and everything we do — the good and the bad. That’s what’s so unique about it. Contrary to so many of the world’s mantras, life is better when it’s less about us and what we do and more about God and what he has done. It’s better when his love not only covers our sins but also takes the focus off of our goodness so that we can truly find freedom in the grace that is given unconditionally and despite our stubbornly persistent faithlessness.

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Usually, conversations around these matters orbit around why we cancel plans (cue talks about introversion and social media). But I’m more concerned about plans that are canceled for us, by extenuating circumstances, with a tinge of a surprise to them. Why do those kinds of things often feel so refreshing, whatever generation we’re a part of?

An internet meteorologist I follow on Twitter helped shed light on this for me. He posted a forecast for rain, followed with: “I love a rainy morning sometimes. No pressure to save the world today. Just a good day to be lazy after a busy week.” His take, and I’d agree, is that unforeseen weather events lower expectations on us. They take the pressure off.

I used to spend a lot of time on the golf course. And as much as I enjoyed playing, getting rained (or, lightning’d) out would come with a sigh of relief, especially at a tournament, as there wasn’t any pressure to perform at a high level anymore. The stress of competition could wait for another day. “Until then,” the rain said, “go home and rest.” 

The meteorologist’s tweet probably didn’t mean to dip its toe into the theological, but it reminded me of when Jesus, not long before his arrest, predicted his disciples’ flight and abandonment, saying, “The hour is coming when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone.” There’s something about the sufferings of Jesus that send people to their homes, literally and figuratively, like a sudden crack of loud thunder (Lk 12:54-56, Jn 19:27). 

And there’s a reason for this. Every step that Jesus took toward Calvary made it all the clearer that he was accomplishing the salvation of the world on his own. Single-handedly. This is why it was so dark and stormy and even earthquake-y when Jesus was dying — because the cross is the loudest demonstration ever of “You don’t have to save the world today; Jesus already has.” It’s the great plan-canceler of history, for all ages and generations. It interrupts our efforts at saving ourselves and sends us to our homes — not onto great pilgrimages or perilous adventures, but to rest.

When it comes to salvation, it’s 100% better not to work for it than to work for it. And through Jesus, the one who makes it rain on both the righteous and the unrighteous, this is precisely the message the gospel brings to bear: the surprise rainstorm of the gruesome death of the Son of God gives shelter to the good and the bad alike, for it’s by his grace we’re saved, not by our works.

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