Eric Youngblood: An Odd and Liberating Response To The Threat Of Losing Religious Freedoms

  • Tuesday, December 1, 2015
  • Rev. Eric Youngblood
What would you say if you were cowering before a boss who was trembling with rage, because you had defied his explicit orders?

 

Or if you were being reamed by a roommate for disregarding her wishes?

 

Or even worse, if you had been summoned before an egomaniacal King whose carotid arteries were bulging around his neck like muscadine vines choking a tree trunk, and whose halitosis and hate were joined in a vocal tirade at your inconceivable disloyalty—if you were enduring in that moment a shower of abuse and the terrifyingly certain threat of being melted in minutes in an easy-bake oven from Hell (aka, a blazing inferno furnace), what would you say?

 

 

If you could even muster a verbal response, you probably wouldn’t think to say:

 

“I don’t need to defend myself to you in this matter.”

 

Self-Defense Makes So Much Sense

Why?  Because self-defense makes more sense to us than baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.

And so does it’s ugly sister, self-promotion.

 

Yet, the non-defensive response above is precisely what three of our theological forebears (you know, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) said when they were in the throes of losing their religious freedoms–freedoms which they never apparently had in the first place– determining instead to let the chips fall where they may, because they knew Him who was holding the chips…and it wasn’t ultimately King Nebuchadnezzar though he glared in vehement rage at them.

 

These Hebrew twenty-somethings had been too well-schooled in true authority. Their mothers’ milk was a constant drinking in of the marvel of the actual Boss, the only Judge, the King of consequence who didn’t need a furnace for re-fining. Yahweh need merely lift his voice and “the earth melts.”

 

“An Oldie but Goodie…”

Hundreds of Sabbaths later in the history of God’s peculiar involvement with a tiny nation called Israel, we find a young, pregnant, out-of-wedlock, Hebrew girl singing the same tune. Different words, but the same musical genre. The oldie-but-goodie, “God-can-be-counted-on-even-in-the-most-precarious-situations-so-I-don’t-need-to-defend myself” genre. 

 

It’s dominant tone can’t help but be relieved exuberance. Because it’s just so liberating to abandon the exhausting vocation of defending and promoting ourselves.

 

We don’t, in fact, have to defend ourselves. Not when we’re content to be little, looking up to the God who is big.

 

You are Carrying the Cure!

You’ve met the singing Hebrew girl of whom I speak. You’ve surely bumped into her in the 1st block of the Lukan neighborhood of the Scriptures.

 

And you’ve no doubt heard tell of her even in our day. She’s famous now. But not because of following what would have been her natural tendency (one that is shared, by the way, with all sons of Adam and daughters of Eve) toward excessive auto-biography with all it’s promoting and defending and advancing of the self. No Mary was God-promoted.

 

“You, Mary,” insisted the over-worked angel, “have been noticed and selected by God to carry salvation in your womb. The fruit of which, in merely nine months, will be ripe for the healing of the world.”

 

“God is drawing near.

 

Reversals are imminent.

 

Sin-sickness, soon to be cured.

 

And you are carrying the Cure.” 

 

Marveling at Holy Luck

Mary’s girlish exuberance at her holy luck was pressed into hymnic form with the kind of maturity that only emerges in a life that has been a humble cup of plain hot water in which the tasty but potent tea-bag of the Scriptures has been steeping.

 

Soaked and steeped in Christmas wonders, Mary belts out the beauty of God’s:

“God thinks about little ones

and acts for the helpless.

He pays attention to all that’s sad,

to all that should never be.

He acts where we can’t, when we can’t, where we won’t!

I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,

look at all He does for me,

not just me, but for we!

 

Ne’er has he fudged on an oath

and no pledge has been given

with fingers crossed b’hind his back!

 

When you act like God,

too-big-for-your britches,

he fixes that;

When you let him be God,

you never stop being surprised.

 

I can’t get over it. God is coming,

just like he said.

 

And for some happy reason,

he can’t get over his people,

 

he just keeps helping, and healing,

defending, and gladdening!”

(my stylized rendition of Luke 1:46-55)

 

Learning to Sing-a-Long

An unimportant no-one from backwater town sings an instructive tune for hope for any who learn to sing-a-long.

 

Mary considered that the coming of God-in-skin meant the undoing of the normal order of things.

 

God’s donning of diapers means celebration for those who come to their senses enough to stop trying to be God, and instead opt-in to God’s earth and human renewal project.

 

Mary interpreted the unlikely esteem in which God held little ole’ her as proof that He truly does promote the humble, perform wonders for them, remember them, and fill their empty bellies with tasty victuals.

 

We’d be dullards not to appropriate the same message for ourselves.

 

A Christmas Mantra

What if the lessons of that first Christmas as sung by Mary might chase away our compulsive need to defend and promote ourselves?

 

Self-defense and self-promotion.

 

The blaring buds we have jammed in each ear. But if we take them out to listen to Christ’s tender melody, we begin to re-think....

 

“If the Mighty one is the One who does the promoting, then I don’t need to promote myself.

 

“If the Mighty one defends me, I don’t have to defend myself in these or any matters.”

 

Let a summary phrase from Mary marinate in you a bit:

God lifts up the humble

 

God lifts up the humble

 

God lifts up the humble.

 

Repeat it like at Advent mantra. Like a bad pop song that aggravatingly superglues itself to your frontal lobe, let these freedom words adhere to your personality and your thought.

 

Don’t Steal God’s Role

When I do this, I have an anti-dote anytime I find myself in an Eric-exaltation mood. A sanity attack.

 

Wait, a minute, “I’m trying to act like God. God is the one who promotes and demotes. God is the one who defends.”

 

When I’m instinctually driven to defend myself, shift blame, spin the facts… whenever I am misunderstood or am compelled to make sure people know how great I am, I ought to pause and listen to the mantra stuck in my head.

 

God lifts up the humble

 

“That’s right. Here I was taking God’s role again, seeking to advance myself. My salvation and my honor depend on him. God lifts up the humble. I need to humble myself, be content to be small.”

 

When I am taking the God role, I am trying to serve as the maestro of God’s symphony. He’s liable to push me aside, because the music of Christmas can’t play on the planet with too many maestros.

 

In my clearest moments, of course, I’m certain I don’t want to be God. It’s a task far too complex, and I don’t have the resources for it.

 

But being small?

 

Going to the ash heap?

 

Being broken down by the wheels of living?

 

Having all my hope come from looking out and looking up?

 

Being nothing, so that he can be everything?

 

It’s the only way.

 

Remember with Mary: “The Mighty one has done great things for me.”

 

And of course, it’s the way embodied in the stooping beauty and stunning allure of our Savior’s life, “when he became what we are so that we could become what he is.”

 

What He alone does, We Mustn’t Attempt

“God lifts up the humble.” So we don’t have to lift, promote, defend ourselves.

 

“God lifts up the humble.” We don’t have to, and we ought not.

 

It’s a Christmas mantra to repeat. And then repeat again. And see if you can trust it enough to ask God to get bigger than he ever has in your life this Christmas.

 

Let me warn you, it might make you sing.

-----

Eric Youngblood is the Senior Pastor at Rock Creek Fellowship (PCA) on Lookout Mountain. Please feel free to contact him at eric@rockcreekfellowship.org.

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