It’s Advent, and so we start with Luke. Why? Because it’s what we do. Luke wrote the infancy narratives that everyone knows. Luke wrote the monologue that Linus so eloquently delivers in the Peanuts Christmas special. Luke’s story is the backbone of almost every Christmas pageant ever presented in countless churches. But unlike Linus’ monologue, a direct quote from Luke, most pageants are mix of Luke, Matthew (the wise men), and sometimes extraneous elements like Christmas trees, Santa Claus, the Grinch, and maybe a snowman or two. So let’s do this. Let’s take Luke seriously this Advent and see where it leads us.
But if we’re going to take Luke seriously, then let’s start by considering Luke’s program: his purpose and motivations for writing his two great works that we know as Luke-Acts. Let’s be clear: seriously does mean boring, studious, or complex. It’s closer to taking the safeties off and letting the majesty of this literature range free. It means addressing this literature as people experiencing real problems that are complex, and we need that literature to measure up to the task of speaking into these difficult places. Good News! I bring you tidings of great joy, because not only is this literature up to the task, but the unleashing of the Spirit as part of approaching the literature this way will exceed your expectations of what is possible. There is no end to the depth of this literature, nor to the Spirit that empowers it. If you think you have figured it out, you will return to find it surprisingly new, a multifaceted Christmas jewel that reflects your current life situations. So expect, and pray for, this Advent of joy!
A serious, joyful, extravagant Advent is a path to radical spiritual upheaval and growth, a path toward a new year and new possibilities, and a path toward seeing God more clearly. There is a reason the church does Advent every year: we all need it every year as a discipline, like having your annual “spiritual” physical. Luke was likely a physician, after all! Luke was incredibly serious, incredibly joyful, and incredibly smart about his evangelical program. We should be no less.
So, who was Luke? He was the author of a two-volume set: Luke-Acts. We’ll never know for sure exactly who he was, but we can get a useful picture of him from the available clues. From the way he writes, he was clearly a highly educated Gentile, and was almost certainly a young man accompanying Paul on his famous missionary journeys. Notably, Luke is the only gospel writer to mention Paul, and he does much more than that: he devotes half of Acts to a full history of Paul’s journeys, the most complete history we have. (What a gift to the church!) Paul also mentions Luke in Philemon, and there are mentions of Luke in Colossians and II Timothy.
Now, let’s consider the timing. Paul was already a Pharisee at the time of Stephen’s martyrdom in 36 CE (Acts 7), so he was at least in his 20s or 30s then. So Paul was likely in his 50s when he started his missionary journeys in the early 50s CE. If we imagine Luke as a young man in his 20s during the height of Paul’s ministry in 50-60 CE, then Paul was likely a generation older than Luke. If true, then when Luke wrote Luke-Acts in 80-90 CE, he would have been in his 50s-60s, a mature writer in his prime looking back at the momentous events that gave birth to Christianity and, in his writing, passing this history on to the church. So in summary, all of this makes it easy to picture Luke as a Gentile born around the time of the Resurrection and who as a young man became Paul’s disciple, or at the very least, a devoted companion whom Paul trusted. So it is no surprise that we find extensive overlap between the gospels of Luke and Paul.
Who was Luke’s audience? The evidence and Luke’s own statements strongly suggest that Luke was not writing to a single community, but rather to whole strata of society. His most obvious audience is the intelligentsia and elite of the Roman Empire as evidenced by the overall artistry of his language and his stylized opening addressing the work to “Theophilus” (Lover of God), but he also addresses the wider church, seekers, and outsiders. Luke wrote with the intelligence, sophistication, and complex use of ancient Greek that would be read and studied by serious scholars and leaders at the time. Luke was making the case that Christianity can and should be taken as seriously as any other philosophical school. But what is crystal clear is that his primary audience was Gentile and not Jewish. Here we have strong alignment with Paul, who always considered himself, perhaps more than anything else, an apostle to the Gentiles. We remember that Paul was from Tarsus, far north of Jerusalem in Gentile country. Paul grew up a Jew in a Gentile world. For Paul, the question of how to be a good Jew in a Gentile world was his constant companion. By the way, if you substitute in that question “Christian” for “Jew” and “secular” for “Gentile”, you get one of the central problems for the modern church. This is why the gospels of Paul and Luke can resonate so strongly with us, if we let them.
But here is the great problem: this mission to the Gentiles was incredibly controversial in the 1st century, and for good reason. Jews were an oppressed minority in a Gentile empire. At the beginning of Christianity, Christians were overwhelmingly Jewish. Why invite the enemy in? Throughout their history Jews have struggled to keep their people from worshipping other gods. Remember the Baals and the sacred poles and fertility cults that the Old Testament prophets railed against? And the 1st century Gentile world of Rome was full of gods! (If you need reminding, consider the Odyssey or any Percy Jackson book or movie). Why let Gentiles in to corrupt and dilute our loyalty to God? Remember the Ezra narratives, the entire Deuteronomistic history of Joshua through II Kings and basically all of the prophets: the Exile to Babylon happened because of Israel’s idolatry, social injustice, and disobedience. Why, as Jews, would we make the same mistakes again? Think of how much worse this would have been when Luke was writing, 10-20 years after the fateful year of 70 CE when a new Babylon, Rome, had destroyed the Temple! The Gentiles are our enemy! They are not a theoretical threat! The Temple, once again, lay in rubble. Paul’s evangelism to the Gentiles was already radically open before Rome destroyed the Temple. Imagine how much more so it was afterwards.
Imagine also how this must have affected a young Luke hearing Paul preach for the first time. Here was an impassioned Jew, preaching about a Jesus from some nowhere district of the Empire, a Jesus his own people had rejected and executed. For the young Luke, Paul showed him Christ and offered that to him freely, while the Jews at the time would have excluded Luke as unclean. For Luke, the gospel of radical openness was not theoretical; it was his personal journey of faith.
From this perspective we can now approach Acts 10, a famous and thunderous chapter where Luke constructs a story starring Peter, the Rock of the church, confronting this very controversy, both within himself, within his community of Jewish Christians, and within the entire context of the Empire. (There are so many multi-layered metaphors in this story that unpacking it is an essay in itself.) The other major character Luke places in this story is Cornelius, a Gentile, but not just any Gentile: he is a Roman centurion, the very kind of Roman warrior that led troops into Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple! It is really impossible to overstate how devastatingly shocking the juxtaposition of these two characters would have been to Luke’s readers. Think of an SS officer or one of Darth Vader’s storm troopers being invited into your church.
After Luke sets up this crazy juxtaposition, it gets worse. Peter has a vision. It’s a vision of a picnic blanket full of all kinds of unclean animals that the Law forbids Peter, a good Jew, to eat. But God tells him to eat anyway. Suffice it to say that in this vision God proclaims to Peter that nothing is unclean that God made. This is an astounding and radical statement that eradicates human tribalism while upholding the central message of Genesis 1: after each act of creation, God saw that the creation was good. By the way, we should not miss the fact that Peter, who denied Christ three times, sees this vision three times. Right after seeing this vision, it gets even worse, again. Cornelius’ servants appear and invite Peter to Cornelius’ house where the Holy Spirit Itself commits the high heresy of falling on Cornelius’ family, repeating Pentecost but on an unclean and ungodly representative of the Roman Imperial State. This blows Peter’s mind in a very good way. It should blow ours if we let it. Who is your Cornelius? Who is mine? We all have not just one, but many. Luke’s message was and is a clarion call to the church: there is no one unclean who God made. In case you missed it, this multifaceted jewel of a vision within a story is how a smart and artistic 1st century writer makes a sledgehammer of a point.
In a testament to how challenging this teaching was and is, Luke next describes in Acts 11 how the leaders of the church in Jerusalem hauled Peter before them when they heard about this little incident and demanded an explanation. Into that space Peter preaches, a sermon that is simply a witness to what happened, and his words silence them. This leads directly to the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 where the overwhelmingly Jewish church hotly debated the question of evangelizing to Gentiles. James, the brother of Jesus, brokered a compromise that let it happen, and It should not be lost on us that the reason any of us Gentiles are Christian today is largely because of the decision at that council. In this way, Luke’s personal journey of faith becomes our journey of faith. We become Luke’s audience and Luke’s people. Luke’s story becomes timeless.
As an aside, let’s take a moment to address a common question that often arises at this point: why would God change God’s mind? Why would God give laws to the ancient Hebrews in the time of Moses and then cast them aside in the 1st century? That’s a question a bit beyond the scope of this essay, but I’ll offer a few thoughts. First, God didn’t change. God has always welcomed the alien and immigrant, because even the chosen people fleeing from Egypt were only ragtag aliens in the beginning. Remember Moses’ warning in Deuteronomy 6 that comes immediately after the great Shema, in case you doubt its importance:
When the Lord your God has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you—a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant—and when you have eaten your fill, take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. —Deuteronomy 6:10-12
The point is that we are all immigrants. We are all aliens. None of us are worthy to stand before God blameless. We err profoundly if we dare to think so.
Think about the problem of the Exodus: if you were to take a ragtag assortment of barely civilized, impoverished, uneducated, desperate people whose only common experience is that they’ve lived through centuries of Egyptian imperial trauma and then bring them into a desert (no choice about that, the Nile delta is surrounded by desert), they would need bright fluorescent name tags just to remember who they are and keep from killing each other. God called Moses to form a nation out of raw human chaos (does this remind you of Genesis 1?). The Law kept the people holy, or separate, from all of the surrounding cultures that constantly threatened to overwhelm them (and very nearly did on many occasions). The Law was what they needed at the time, and was likely about all they could handle. Some examples may be helpful. if you’re a beginning piano student, would your teacher put a Rachmaninoff concerto in front of you at your first lesson? No, you would get “Hot Cross Buns” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. If you’re learning to cook, would your instructor assign you to handle a New York celebrity wedding with 500 guests and six courses sampling the regions of Southeast Asia? No, she would show you how to chop an onion and heat oil in a pan without burning the kitchen down. If you’ve never worked out before and sat for way too many hours at desk jobs, would your trainer give you a 53 lb kettlebell, a Bosu, a loaded trap bar and set you a 60-minute circuit of 15 exercises followed by running around the outside of the building five times? No, you would die. He would do an evaluation of your fitness level before letting you near any equipment.
God does not change. God teaches. And the lessons change as we progress.
The second thing I would offer is that radical openness is hard. Very hard. People resisted it in Moses’ time (if they could even hear it), they resisted during the reign of David and the following kings, they resisted during the 1st century, and we continue to resist it today. Humans are by nature tribal and we easily succomb to fear when threatened, leading to the building of walls and excluding outsiders. Consider the many ways that modern churches reject people, whether based on race, creed, nationality, sexuality, wealth, status, profession, or musical preference. Too often our churches are tainted by our broader culture’s eternal penchant for being a Baskin Robbin’s store full of many flavors of rejection and multicolored toppings of bias.
God’s radical openness is hard for us. Very hard. It is easy to say that God created all people, loves all people, and accepts all people. It is easy to say, but much harder to accept. Too often, we don’t want it to be true. We like to think that people we like will also like people like us, and will despise people we despise. Nonsense. Even more ridiculous is when we pretend this applies to God. God loves lots of people we despise. Even worse: God calls us to love them also. Who are those people for you, the people hopelessly beyond God’s grace? That cannot be accepted? That have no place “in the tent”? What is today’s Jerusalem Council?
At this point some of you may be feeling vindicated and very happy about what I’m saying, and that you sorely wish everyone else thought this way, and that this call to openness is what you’ve been trying to say all along. But friends, and I say this with all love, we must be careful. If we ever say, regardless of what side we’re on, “We are righteous and they are not”, we fall into the trap. In my view, no one says this better than Luke’s mentor. You really need to read Romans 2-3 in their entirety, but I’ll start with the opening of chapter 2. Here we go. Buckled seatbelts are strongly advised, and take small children by the hand:
Therefore you are without excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others, for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. —Romans 2:1
Especially in this time and climate, you need to put that statement on your refrigerator and read it every day. It is so easy to slide into this. Why else do you think Paul opens Romans this way? It plagued his ministry continually. And it’s just the beginning of his discussion of the nature of human Sin.
Here’s one more exercise to try. This may be a hard ask, but it is useful. If you’re a Christian, then in this passage substitute “Christian” for “Jew”, because here Paul is talking to “insiders” who think that the fact that they are insiders makes them righteous. Then substitute “the unchurched” for “gentiles”, because in our context, it is the unchurched who are our outsiders. Or, substitute for “gentiles” any group with which you vehemently disagree and question the validity of their views. Then reread.
But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast of your relation to God and know his will and determine what really matters because you are instructed in the law, and if you are sure that you are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth, you, then, who teach others, will you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who forbid adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by your transgression of the law? For, as it is written, “The name of God is blasphemed among the gentiles because of you.” —Romans 2:17-24
Yes, this is Paul grabbing us by the lapels and shaking. Hard. But Paul does it is because this is so important and so dangerous. But here’s the good news! Do you also see that Paul is simultaneously showing us the way beyond this divisive time? (Keep reading Romans if you want details.) Do you see that Paul is lighting the way forward? How? It’s simply the reverse of his rhetorical questions: build up your communities by creating and strengthening loving relationships. Very simply, get to know someone who disagrees with you. Take them to lunch. Don’t discuss the thorny issue. Just get to know them as another person, and discover how to love them. Who is your Cornelius? Talk to them. Discover what they need and provide it to them. Build the bridge. Repair the breach. Because watch out, the Holy Spirit might just commit a high heresy before your very eyes. This is radical openness in practice.
Yes, it is hard. It always has been. But the good news is that your measure of success is not whether you change another person’s mind. Your success is simply that you reached out in love, that you lowered your own weapons and turned them into plowshares to build a field where love and understanding can grow and flourish.
Look at Paul’s example. Paul is basically saying to the Jews, don’t feel righteous because you think you’re better than the liberal Gentiles that want to throw away your traditions. And he’s saying to the Gentiles, don’t feel righteous because you’re better than the conservative Jews that won’t accept you. None are righteous! Paul makes everyone mad at him, and he’s just fine with that. Every pastor knows this dynamic all too well. In many ways our prejudices, our causes, and our held positions often become part of our wealth, our mammon, and logs in our eyes that blind us to the gospel. Again Paul shows us the way forward, because if our actions are not infused with and informed by love, then they are at best worthless, and at worst, deadly.
Do you see why he had to write I Corinthians 13? Do you see how misleading and silly it is to limit this to wedding Scripture? This text is meant to stop wars and the dissolution of human communities, including the church! It is one of Paul’s largest sledgehammers, and while we all love to quote it, if we’re honest, we don’t want to hear it. The best among us have moved beyond wanting mere wealth and power, but we do want angelic speech and knowledge and faith and generosity and self-sacrifice and all the rest. But adding love to all that? It’s hard. Very hard, but very necessary, because without love, it’s so easy for us to become people who see those who do not agree with our cause as not being welcome in the church.
Even when we know we are right (be careful), we are called to love first. Even when we can see the way that others cannot, we are called to love first. The only “right” thing is love, and this Love, this Grace, is God’s radical openness. This Love is the refiner’s fire that will burn away any walls we try to put up.
Picture Luke, now fully mature, a respected and well-known figure in Christianity, 20-30 years after Paul’s death amid Nero’s persecutions, 10-20 years after the destruction of the Temple. Picture him as he looks back in astonishment at what has happened to the church. What was once a tiny, demoralized, fringe movement in Judea is now sweeping the Empire like wildfire. The Jewish leadership in Jerusalem tried to stamp it out, and it kept spreading. Nero and all of his Roman might tried to stamp it out, and it kept spreading. New Emperors are now increasing the pressure, executing more and more Christians, but it is still spreading through poor, rich, slave, and free, in spite of all kinds of internal divisions and strife, through every sector of society, further and deeper into Europe, and Luke can clearly see that it is transforming, that he is transforming, that he who was once a rejected outsider has become an insider, that the entire Christian movement is no longer a Jewish movement, no, it is far bigger than that now. There are no longer any outsiders for this God, this mighty, surprising, and overwhelmingly loving Holy Spirit.
It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth. —Isaiah 49:6
How can Luke (or any of us!) read the prophets and entire Hebrew literature about this God and not be silenced in awe and amazement at something no human hand could accomplish, this literal transformation of the known world?
See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like washers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.
—Malachi 3:1-3
This is the true Advent: the fire of the Spirit unleashed, uncontrolled, blowing where it will. This is the radical openness of God. Read Malachi carefully and take care. Beware delighting in this Jesus. More often than not, the Jesus that comes will not delight you, but will burn through you, cleansing you, freeing you, transforming you. But so often we will throw up our hands and resist. We don’t want to change. We don’t want to let go of the past and our comfortable prejudices and things we think we know. We’re scared of taking the leap into an unknown and unfamiliar landscape where we may not be right, or even know what right is. But we must if we are to grow and take the next faithful step. This is the laying down of our burdens at the foot of the Cross and watching the wrath of God burn them away. For the Spirit has no patience for crosses, or tombs, or anything else we try to put in its way. For this wrath of God is a wrath of Love and purifying fire, the mortal enemy of Sin and Death and every source of darkness. This is the Christ, the Light of the World, and indeed, the darkness cannot overcome it.