call me pasturescott

embrace the x

“X-mas” was close to a cuss word in the church circles in which I grew up. Borderline sacrilege. People who wished you a “Merry Xmas” weren’t truly Christian; that’s just the way it was.

We saw the ‘X’ as a scheme to rid Christ from the very holiday that celebrated His birth! While there’s still a part of me that thinks it’s true for some, I have recently come to an understanding that there’s something more honorable in play.

The early Church loved the ‘X’ (chi) in ιχθυς (ichthus) or Christ (Χριστός) as it was their shorthand for the Savior.

What in the world is ‘ichthus’?

You’re not going to find it in your Greek New Testament. Ichthus was a ‘code’ word invented by the first-century church to silently confess who they were to one another – at the risk of their lives.

The Greek letters in ichthus make an acrostic:

I (Iesous)

Chi, or X (Christos)

Theta (Theou)

Upsilon (Uios)

Sigma (Sotor)

The letters together spell ‘ichthus’ (ιχθύς) and the five Greek words they represent make this striking declaration:

“Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”

Sometimes, when the situation demanded, they shortened it with an ‘X’ or a two-stroke fish outline.

I’m not a ‘fish symbol on the car’ kind of guy but I can certainly truck with the idea behind them. Those emblems, whether on a business sign or the bumper of an automobile, are designed to tell passersby We worship Jesus Christ, (who is) the Son of God, (our) Savior.

So what about the ‘X’?

The chi (or ‘X’) is just what you might expect. It has connotations of the cross and was surreptitiously drawn as a sign passed between believers.

Back in those days Christianity was seen as a rogue religion, outlawed by the Roman imperial government. If you were a follower of Christ, there was always the danger of being outed, so Christians (Xians), people of ιχθυς, would use a quick sign (a two-stroke outline of a fish or an ‘X’) to assure another they were safe in their company.

Embrace the ‘Χ’ this Xmas. You can be assured you’re tracing a long history of committed, devoted worshippers of the Christ!

Still uncomfortable?

I understand. I still wince a little when I see it spelled that way. Think of it in another way:

X marks a treasure, and Jesus is certainly the inexhaustible supply of God, our Portion and Prize for eternity
X marks where you are on a map – that’s what Emmanuel is all about. Imagine yourself ‘here’ and then place an ‘X’ over that spot. He is with you!

Hopefully this Christmas post helps you see what the enemy wants to scandalize, God sanctifies. When I see ‘Xmas’ from here on, I’ll breathe a little easier knowing it really is about Christ…whether the world knows it or not.

Merry Xmas, beloved!

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just another miraculous birth?

“How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

— Mary, Luke 1:34

If you know me at all, you know how much I love the writings of the late Eugene Peterson. The man has pastored my soul for decades. In one of his perhaps lesser known works, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, he reminds us the birth of Messiah wasn’t the only miraculous birth in scripture, but it was the only one of its kind.

The eminent pastor turns our attention to pre-Advent scripture to briefly recount five miraculous births God was “critically and intimately involved in…”:

Abraham and Sarah (Isaac)
Manoah and unnamed wife (Samson)
Boaz and Ruth (Obed)
Elkanah and Hannah (Samuel)
Zechariah and Elizabeth (John)

And here is how he worshipfully distinguishes the heart-staggering birth of King Jesus from those earlier birth events:

The work of God in the conception and birth of Jesus through Mary is continuous with these five previous “impossible” births, but it is also different…

How so? we wonder.

In the mothers ranging from Sarah to Elizabeth, a barren womb was the impossible condition to overcome; these women very much wanted a child. But in Mary the “impossible” condition is virginity: here there is no yearning for or expectation of a child.
Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places, 55-6

Peterson quotes Raymond Brown (The Birth of the Messiah, p314), who opens to us the compelling thought of this being the first and only birth through agency of a human womb in which God took the initiative.

It was all God’s idea!

In Mary’s case, she was a virgin who had no thought of bearing a child at that time. It was unthinkable to her. Maybe someday but not at this stage of her life, and certainly not as an unmarried woman!

Her pregnancy was ALL God’s idea! He wasn’t answering the cry of a barren couple, he was answering

Himself,

His own heart,

His own yearning.

This is the heart of Advent. This is the miracle and mystery of Christmas hope. Here is the gospel: God from the start has sought you, not the other way around. You weren’t even aware of your longing but that God was already at work filling your womb, your inner cry, with his life.

When Mary visited her cousin to tell her the news of her divine pregnancy, Elizabeth called her “Blessed!”

Allow me to put an ❗️on this post by pulling from another author I greatly admire. Picking up on Elizabeth’s same exuberant emotion, Brennan Manning applies it to all of us who are caught in the thrall of Christmas grace:

You are blessed! God’s desire is for you. And Jesus is the incarnation of God’s furious longing. He is your supreme Lover. It’s true. You are blessed. Your soul’s winter is over. The snows are over and gone. Flowers are blooming inside of you. The season of joyful songs has come. To you. You are blessed! The love of God is folly. No one is excluded. All (really!) are called to the banquet table. Come, and be filled. You are blessed! You can pray like a child, and enjoy God. You are blessed! Heal, and be healed…Amen. Amen. Amen.
Brennan Manning, The Furious Longing of God

Selah, blessed and beloved!

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christmas is for shepherds and moabites

Looking back on this blog, I can spot times where I’ve written angsty at the church or when I’ve made the gospel seem as though it was only for the elite. I’ve written from places of hurt and sadness. There are some lighthearted posts here and there and a whole lot of essays of encouragement. On balance, I’d much rather write about a gospel that is true and gracious. And accessible.

If you drew a line from previous posts that sounded more preachy to where I’ve been ruminating in recent years you’d discover that line marks precisely when Graham passed too soon from this world. He’s my reason for this “new season” of softening.

His story has taken the edge off. How God handled Graham has taught my fingers to dance across the keyboard. I’m not spending as much time these days wringing my hands over the condition of the church, and overly obsessed with matters of who’s in who’s out. I’m still savoring the awe that my boy is with Jesus…and waking up to a gospel of attraction rather than subtraction.

As Christmas approaches I find myself thinking about the key players in the nativity story once again. I suppose it’s because our son was taken eight Decembers ago I’ve been more drawn to the people who shouldn’t be in the cast of Advent but are. People like those shepherds abiding. Imagine these guys making up the first worship team!

These were not a romanticized version of herdsman but a rough-and-tumble group of guys. Today, they would be more suited for a biker’s bar than a synagogue. Gamey and course, their arms would sport a collision of tattoos and hard lines from hard lives would crease their faces.

And yet, and yet.

Heaven sang like a choir to this audience of irregulars. Religious folk labeled them unclean. They were unwelcome in their churches because their line of work with sacrificial lambs connected them to manure and flies and death. They had one job: tend the temple sheep until they were needed to spill blood for the people’s sin. This bunch were tough.

And yet…the Light of Christmas Glory built a tabernacle around them.

A friend and I shared breakfast last week and conversation turned to, as it always does, the gospel. I mentioned I was in Isaiah in my daily reading and referenced the prophet’s hard words about an ancient people, the Moabites. But then I discovered something.

A very cool gospel something.

Virtually nowhere in scripture are the Moabites mentioned with any degree of favor. They are the sworn enemies of God’s people from the beginning. So repugnant are they, God makes them pariah in his own sanctuary.

No Ammonite or Moabite may enter the assembly of the LORD. Even to the tenth generation, none of them may enter the assembly of the LORD forever,
Deuteronomy 23:3

You’d be hard-pressed to find anything anywhere in the Bible remotely nice about Moabites. Even Isaiah, the “Christmas” prophet (Isa 7:14, 9:2, 9:6, 11:1) piled on with a plethora of judgments regarding Moab, not mincing words.

And yet. And yet.
[Here’s the very cool gospel part]

I found a lone verse where Moab is given a good ending, just like my boy. Plugging the word “Moab” into my Bible app’s search engine, this text bubbled up:

“Yet I will restore the fortunes of Moab
in days to come,”
declares the Lord.
Here ends the judgment on Moab.
Jeremiah 48:47

Don’t miss that last sentence. “Here ends…judgment.” Precisely because Jesus died for Moabites too is why that promise holds. What was announced to baseborn shepherds on the night of Advent — “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.” — applied to a congregation of misfits.

Oh, don’t you remember? Ruth….the Moabite? Right there in Jesus’s genealogy? Jesus Messiah came into this cold earth with some Moabite blood!

Jesus is heir of a line in which flows the blood of the harlot Rahab, and of the rustic Ruth; he is akin to the fallen and to the lowly, and he will show his love even to the poorest and most obscure. I, too, may have a part and lot in him.
Charles Spurgeon, The Gospel of the Kingdom

Shepherds and Moabites, prodigals and lost causes. Christmas is good news for people without a country. The only ones left in the dark are those who ignore the Main Character. He, who was born in a feeding trough, lived homeless, and was buried in a donated grave, came not for the tidied-up but for the beat-down.

I’m weak
fragile
gone in a strong gust
or wave
my bones and soul
break
like dry twigs.

It is possible to lose all

except

the love of God.

The gospel is for the unheard, the counted-out, the ones from whom friends hide their face, the shamed, the losers.

It’s “good news to the poor…liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind”

the disadvantaged
the incarcerated
the disabled

Jesus draws near.

–Quina Aragon, Spoken Word Artist

This post is for anyone out there who has a “Moabite” in their life. Some unlikely candidate for gospel change. You hope, you actually hurt, for their salvation. This could be their last shot and that pains you.

Don’t give up, beloved. Pray that some heavenly visitor, or a choir of singing angels, finds them in some forgotten field on a night they least suspect and draws them in to “join the triumph of the skies.”

God can meet them in their isolated bulwarks of hardened flesh. He came all the way from Glory to raid the devil’s domain after all.

Selah, and Merry Christmas to you and yours!

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