People don’t mean it badly, but if you’re a missionary for any length of time, you get used to folks’ basic response to seeing you in the USA being something like, “Oh, it’s you! What are you doing here? How long are you around?”

I gather that it’s typical for missions agencies each to have their own jargon for what used to be generally known as “furlough.” That term has the advantage of being a single two-syllable word that means something to most people, something like: these missionaries are back in America, but not because they quit. Also, they may be asking for money.

The language of “furlough” has fallen out of favor, though, because it also gives the false impression that whatever time missionaries spend in their sending country is theirs to spend as they like, that they’re on sabbatical or vacation. Our agency has its own more-or-less proprietary acronym for what we’re doing here: “HMA,” short for “Home Ministry Assignment.” Plenty of ink, virtual or physical, has been spilled to dispel that notion, and articles on missionary blogs or agency sites are probably easy enough to find; my intent here isn’t so much to gain sympathy for missionaries spending time Stateside as to answer some of the FAQs we run into in our particular situation and help give a sense of what the HMA experience is like for us – the good, the bad, and the surreal.

Let me pause to emphasize the phrase our particular situation here: home assignment is a hugely diverse phenomenon, even within our own agency. Different countries have different visa requirements, different ministries lend themselves to different schedules, and missionaries have different needs and life situations. Our particular rhythm is 4-5 years on the field, one full year off. That’s not at all a matter of personal preference – it’s the result of a delightful phenomenon called tax totalization. The long and short of it is that our agency requires us to stay in the US Social Security system, and to do this, the totalization agreement between the USA and Germany says we must leave Germany for a full year before we hit the five-year mark on the field.

That means that our home assignments are very different from a lot of missionaries’. Some spend just a couple of months in the USA, maybe over the summer, every few years. On the plus side, their work on the field suffers reasonably little interruption; on the other hand, the actual time Stateside can be grueling, with visits to different churches every Sunday and as many presentations and meetings as they can squeeze into the time. Their time here is a trip; then they go home to the field.

We’re over on the other end of the spectrum: our field ministry is massively disrupted no less often than every five years. So is our life; our kids miss a year of school, our relationships are long-distance at best, and we have to figure out what to do with our living situation and our stuff for a big chunk of time. It might be subletting or putting everything in storage; either way, we’re saying goodbye to most of our books, kids’ toys, furnishings, and all the little things that make everyday home life what it is.

Then again, once we’ve made it to America, we’re not in quite such a rush. We have some leisure to space out church visits and reports and actually be part of the life of our home church. It’s hard to express just how good that last part is: our churches in Germany are ones we are delighted to support, but while we’re working there, they’re generally church plants, small congregations trying to grow and develop and, a lot of the time, just keep going. The availability of Sunday school classes, Bible studies, moms’ and dads’ groups, prayer groups, reading and study materials, fellowship events, a nursery (!), children’s Christian education, retreats – to say nothing of worship in our heart language and our own theological and liturgical tradition – feels unbelievably luxurious and enriching, especially as it’s not our job to make it all happen.

What is our job while we’re here? Most basically, we’re here to testify to what the Lord has been doing on our field over the past term: it’s edifying to the Church to hear these things, and these kinds of testimonies can be God’s instruments to help call more people into cross-cultural ministry. At the same time, we’re giving an accounting: how have we made use of our supporters’ donations? What kind of a return on their investment can we report? That sort of question may seem crass or unspiritual, but it’s quite the opposite. We’re stewards of gifts offered to God for the sake of His kingdom, and we are answerable for how we manage them.

Part of the job, almost inevitably, is also raising more support. As I’ve written elsewhere, ongoing support almost always trends downward during a term on the field. That’s not necessarily caused by some disaster; it’s just part of life happening while we’re gone. So while we’re here, we need to connect to new people and new churches to put us on firmer financial footing as we head back to the field.

The rest of our time is a mix. On this particular HMA, we’re between church plants, having left our church in eastern Munich self-governing and growing; another plant is in the pipeline at this point, which would involve a move within Munich. That’s quite different from last time around, when we were between cities, preparing to start a whole new range of ministries in a new place. My involvement with our partner seminary isn’t changing, and communication with both faculty and students, grading papers, and so forth is still a regular part of my work week here. With a new team-leader role, oversight of missionary teammates as well as active recruiting are in the mix now as well. As much as possible, we’re trying to prepare ourselves for our return to Germany by seeking continuing-education-type opportunities, preparing teaching material, and attending conferences.

A year is a strange amount of time to be gone. We need to make some kind of a home here in the States, but it needs to be no more difficult to pull up stakes and leave behind than absolutely necessary. We’re torn between the sweetness of time spent with people who know us and share more in common with us than anyone we know in Munich on the one hand, and the longing to be back in a place where we can really invest our time and energy in relationships and ministries we hope to see develop over the long term. The field really is home for our children, and it’s where we’re convinced we’re called to be, where we’ve gained experience, grown spiritually, and found a place where we can serve God’s kingdom.

A veteran missionary once remarked to Anna, “HMA is what kept us going back to the field for all those years.” It maybe sounds harsh, perhaps was even meant harshly, as much as to say: being back in the States always reminded us why we don’t want to live there. There’s something to that. Missionaries can’t ever go home again, not in this life, and we don’t fit here any better than we do on the field, at least after a while. At the same time, HMA is quite literally what keeps us going: it’s our opportunity to keep our family, friends, and churches connected to the people and places we serve the rest of the time. It’s where the giving comes from that allows us to live and share the gospel without burdening the people to whom we’re sent. It’s our chance to remember where we’ve come from and share much of who we are with our children, and it’s a time for God to work on us in ways we trust will bear fruit in Germany for years to come.

-Ben

The two of us have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, first as college-aged and post-college singles seeking support for one-week trips, summer internships, and then one- and two-year terms in Berlin, where we met. I was probably especially bad at it, a combination of my innate laziness, shortcomings in time-management skills, an introvert’s native fear and loathing toward phone calls (especially cold calls), shyness exacerbated by feeling foolish asking people to fund some dumb kid’s post-collegiate foray into longer-term mission work, and battles with loneliness and depression.

Our next time around, we had some advantages: we were married, I was working toward ordination, our first child was born—we were, by at least a few generally accepted measures, Real Grown-Ups. Moreover, we were returning to a city where we’d served before, so the things we’d learned and experienced were relevant to our new call; for that matter, we were both veteran fundraisers, with a better idea of how to budget our time and focus our energy, two pools of previous supporters and contacts to combine, and, very importantly, two complementary sets of gifts and skills to apply to the task.

As of this writing [Ed.: summer 2018], we’re trying to finish up a third round of fundraising, not starting from zero as we had in the past, but still needing to pick up several thousand dollars in monthly support in order to be cleared for departure. In these many years of doing this work, we’ve often been struck by how difficult it is to communicate some of the basics of what it means (and doesn’t mean) for us to live on support and we need and are asking for when we make our appeals.

In what follows, I’d like to offer a little overview of how it all works—not a FAQ, exactly, but an intro to what living on the support we raise means for missionaries in our organization (I can’t speak to other agencies’ policies, though a lot of what’s true for us may well be applicable to other missionaries you might know). We usually don’t have time to lay all this out, so I hope this can help folks make sense of what some of the jargon means and what we’re trying to get across in our communications.

The first basic thing to understand is that we are salaried employees of our agency, MTW. That might seem obvious, but I suspect it’s not always really clear to everybody. Being employed by the agency means that they’re the “company” that pays our salary, benefits, and work expenses, and it also means that when you support us, you are more fundamentally supporting MTW. The money you send in belongs to them, and under all normal circumstances, they allocate it in accordance with your wishes—specifically, it’s earmarked for the account out of which we get paid.

This also means that the amount of our compensation is set by the agency: our pay doesn’t vary depending on how much support comes in any given month, since the donations aren’t going directly into our pocket. If a big supporter drops us, forgets to send a check, or whatever, that doesn’t (necessarily) mean we can’t pay rent and buy groceries that month, so we enjoy a measure of real stability. On the other hand, this is the reason we spend so much time talking about the percentage of our support need we’ve raised—because our employer commits to compensating us at a certain level, we need to be able to show that the support that will come in over the course of a four-year term will be enough to maintain that level of compensation while keeping our account in the black.

On that note, it’s important to realize that we are responsible to raise every dollar of our support. Some agencies, especially denominational ones like ours, partially or fully subsidize their missionaries’ support out of their general fund, but that’s not how our denomination does it. (There are various reasons for this, but I’m more concerned here to make sure the facts are clear than to discuss the whys and wherefores.) You could say we’re “listener supported,” and just like public and nonprofit broadcasters, we need to do “pledge drives” every so often to meet our budget.

There’s a key difference between us and public broadcasting, of course: the broadcasters are always here, always providing their service to their supporters, always doing some measure of advertising, and always picking up new listeners and viewers. Their regular pledge drives only need to run for short periods in order to bring in enough gifts and new memberships to cover the annual budget. We, on the other hand, spend most of our time out of the country, and while we do our best to communicate well with our supporters, we don’t have many chances to find new ones, except about every four or five years when we’re on home assignment.

For that reason, we tend to talk about our monthly far more than our annual budget (let alone the cost of an entire term on the field). Some of that is a matter of sticker shock; a nonprofit broadcaster trying to raise half a million dollars or more for its operating budget for the next six months to a year probably doesn’t raise eyebrows, but it’s pretty daunting to talk about that level of funding for one missionary family, even when it’s spread over four years. And the fact is that raising that amount of money in the form of one-time gifts would take an awfully long time for most missionaries—and then we’d have to do it all over again before every term.

This is why recurring gifts (what public broadcasters and similar organizations call “members”) are our fundraising lifeblood. Over the course of a 48-month term, someone who can give $50 or $100 each month without missing it has contributed $2,400 or $4,800 respectively, daunting sums for many of the same people if they were asked to give up front. The same logic applies to any recurring giving: if you’re giving $300 every quarter, $600 semiannually, or $1,200 once a year, then it’s the same (from our perspective) as if you were giving $100 every month—it adds up to $4,800 over the course of those four years. More than once, we’ve run up against the perception that anything other than a monthly pledge is “one-time,” but it’s really not. If you can pledge to give a lump sum every December, then you’ve knocked off 1/12 of that amount from our monthly need.

So where do genuine one-time gifts fit in? For us, they were most important when we were first starting out. There are several types of one-off expenses that roll around each term (things like plane fare to and from our field), so there needs to be “cash on hand” to cover those; we had to get a certain balance in our account along with having our full support need pledged before we could leave for Germany for the first time. One-time gifts (plus any surplus in monthly giving) add to the amount of “cash on hand,” which provides the buffer that makes up for any monthly shortfall. In our case, because we have a healthy balance in our account, once the one-off expenses for this term are accounted for, one-time gifts contribute to our monthly need at 1/48 of their total value.

Finally, I think it’s worth talking about what we mean (and don’t mean) by a “pledge.” It may be simplest to describe it this way: pledging support to us means writing us into your budget, planning to support us as part of the normal use to which you put your financial resources. It’s a plan, not a legal obligation or a sacred vow. I worry that we’ve over-spiritualized missionary (and other ministry) support, so that people feel like they can’t make commitments like this unless they have some extraordinary measure of faith, or unless they feel presumptuously certain about their future financial prospects. But the reality is that every item in your personal budget is a pledge to use what God has provided to you in a certain way.

We—and I do think we speak for most missionaries here—understand that none of us knows the future. Anyone who’s been on the field for any length of time has lost support, whether it’s because supporters lost jobs, had surprise quadruplets, were diagnosed with a serious illness, decided another ministry’s need was more urgent or important—or died. We know these things happen, and we don’t see anyone who stops giving because of them as having broken a promise (or as having been unwise to make the commitment in the first place). On the flip side, we have a number of supporters who genuinely don’t know how much money they’ll make any given month, such as those who work on commission. Some of these just give whenever they can; some even make a pledge for a minimum amount, then often go above that in their actual giving. The diversity of circumstances among our dozens of supporters is impressive, and it’s heartening.

I hope this is a helpful walk-through of how the whole support thing works for us. We’d be happy to hear any questions we haven’t addressed, and I may come back to edit, clarify, or add information as needed, so feel free to be in touch!

-Ben

Oh, Samson.

If ever there were a time to blame the victim—at least in part—this is probably it. The man’s predilection for a certain kind of woman has caught up with him hard. The Worst Nazirite Ever is reaping the harvest of lifelong carelessness about his calling. He made his bed; now he’ll lie in it.

And yet… and yet he has actually struck a series of blows against his people’s oppressors, sowing some much-needed disruption in the fallow field of an Israel far too content to be slaves in their own land. He has done the Lord’s work, and he has paid the price of being savior to a people unwilling to be saved. Delilah handed him over for a princely sum of silver; the men of Judah had been willing to do it for free.

Now Samson embodies his nation fully. Darkness has fallen on a man named Sun (in Hebrew, he’s Shimshon, from shemesh, “sun”), called to be a light. He’s been enslaved, the penalty for his own faithlessness. He’s become a spectacle to the nations. He is Godforsaken, desecrated, weak. His enemies’ attitude is summed up in one detail: they don’t bother with haircuts for their prisoner. Surely, they think, having broken the Nazirite code so definitively, he has forfeited all help from his god.

Yet they have failed, fatally, to reckon either with Yahweh’s power or with His mercy.

They have taken what is the Lord’s: the hair of the Nazirite’s sacred head, God’s due, to be laid upon the fire of the peace offering at the completion of his vow (Num 6:18). Samson is at fault too, but in the end it was Delilah’s crony, in the Philistine lords’ pay, who took what was holy to Yahweh, incurring His jealous wrath. Then, too, they have not reckoned with this God’s single-minded devotion to His purpose to make this people of His the instrument of His judgment and mercy.

And so Samson calls upon the name of the Lord, asking to be remembered and strengthened, to avenge himself upon his enemies. His prayer granted, he brings the judgment of God down upon himself and them together, in his death achieving a greater victory than any he had gained in life.

Behold the man: the greatest and worst of the Judges, his enemies reveling in victory and finding themselves deceived in the end.

Behold the man: the Judge of all the earth, his enemies reveling in victory and finding themselves deceived in the end.

Christ hangs there, having done the Lord’s work and nothing else, paying the price of coming to save a people who do not want his salvation. He has been betrayed for a slave’s price in silver, handed over to the Romans for nothing. He is a spectacle, a brutally effective one, the Gentiles reveling as they humiliate Judah’s king, the Jews satisfied that this pretender, this blasphemer, has forfeited all claim on God’s help.

Yet they, the cronies of the powers of sin and death, have taken what belongs to the Lord, a most sacred head—recall that Jesus swore off the “fruit of the vine” on the eve of his betrayal (Luke 22:18)—incurring God’s jealous wrath. The Christ calls upon the name of the Lord, and with the last of his strength pulls down the judgment of God upon himself and his enemies.

So he dies, and the Light of the world, the Sun of Righteousness, is darkened.

But in this moment, the foes of the living God and of His people find their temple crashing in upon their own heads, because not only have they committed this sacrilege, this theft of what is holy to the Lord, but they have called Good evil—they have slandered the Holy One of Israel, rejoicing in the destruction of one truly righteous and imagining this one to be rejected by God whom God must deliver from the grave.

This is no defeat.

Three verses in Exodus contain one of the more astonishing moments in the entire Bible.

Moses has come down off the mountain. He reports God’s requirements of His people, and they vow to meet them. He builds an altar, and the congregation worships, as God had promised. They ratify their vow, and Moses marks them with the blood of the covenant, the blood of their offerings that has given them such access as they have to the terrifying God who has come down in fire and cloud onto the mountain.

And then seventy-four men go up to where they can see God (Exod 24:9-10). They see where His feet rest on a celestial pavement (v. 10), and the Lord holds back His hand, allowing them shockingly near to Him, hosting a meal so they can eat and drink while experiencing a vision that by rights ought to be fatal.

Of these seventy-four, not one will eat and drink the yield of Canaan. Aaron’s sons will fall first, disregarding the Lord’s command in their service at the new tabernacle at Sinai. Aaron himself and the seventy elders will fall in the wilderness; Moses will see his people’s homeland only from a distance. In a matter of days, Aaron will go from seeing God to making a golden calf for his people to worship (no doubt with their elders’ at least tacit approval), so they can claim to have seen the Lord too.

So it seems to go with these suppers. God invites traitors and cowards to His table and feeds them on the eve of their craven acts of treachery.

Yet all those centuries later, the Lord who hosts the supper will be one with the new Moses who will stand in the breach and intercede for his people when they corrupt themselves definitively. They have seen Jesus and so have seen the Father; they will none of them stand on the Lord’s side when the hour comes. And yet their Lord will tell them, do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me. This will not be the last Supper, but the first of many myriad.

The seventy-four saw the Lord, and ate and drank. The Twelve saw the Lord, and ate and drank. But none of them had yet seen the Lord glorified as he would be the next day at noon, thirsting and dying. We have seen this, we who have the eyes of faith. We know that we are in no position to say all that the Lord has spoken we will do; it is all that the Lord has spoken, His Christ has done. So we behold the Lord, and eat and drink.

I love to preach.

I’m not entirely sure how good at it I am – the general consensus seems to be that you need to preach about 100 times before you figure out your own approach, find your voice, and so forth. In my particular situation, though, the opportunities aren’t all that frequent; between seminary classes, my internship as an ordination candidate, occasional chances to fill the pulpit while raising support, and my actual work on the field, I’d estimate that I’m somewhere in the low to mid-20s by now (two-thirds of those sermons having been prepared and preached in German).

On a recent trip to participate in a multi-church missions conference, I was invited to preach at a partner church the Sunday before the conference started, then again the following Sunday as part of the conference itself. I’m fairly sure that was the first time I’ve preached on consecutive Sundays since I was ordained.

My first delivery of the sermon I used has been posted online here, so I thought I’d share. Again, I don’t put myself forward as a homiletic black belt or anything (and I suspect that the following week’s delivery of the same sermon was probably improved by the tweaks I was able to make during the week), but the subject matter really is near and dear to my heart.

Shaphan the scribe reads the newly discovered book of the Law to King Josiah

The disciples’ befuddlement at Jesus’ predicting his sufferings – not to mention, of course, his actual suffering and death – show that they had an entirely mistaken notion about what sort of king he was sent to be. That’s a fairly familiar reading of passages like Peter’s “Get behind me, Satan” moment, and it’s an accurate one. But it’s often accompanied by the implicit sense that when Jesus says, “You are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man,” what he means is: “You are not setting your mind on the things of the New Testament, but on the things of the Old.”

What I mean is that we tend to assume that first-century Jews like Peter were basically right to see the promises of the Old Testament as pointing toward a king who would come and seize power by the sword and drive the Romans back into the sea, and that their only mistake was in not seeing that God was doing something completely new and different this time. But this just doesn’t hold up: Jesus was and is the Christ, which means the anointed king of Israel, the one the law of Deuteronomy 17:14-20 (my sermon text) is meant to regulate. To say that Jesus came to fulfill the Law for his people means that he came to do what God required of anyone who would be king over His people.

And if that’s the case, then we need to be digging deep into the Old Testament to see what exactly Jesus thought he was up to, going about being Israel’s king the way he did. I hope this sermon gives a little snapshot into how I try to do that in Germany, whether it’s in my seminary classes or from the pulpit. It is endlessly profitable to me, and I hope it’ll be of some benefit to some of you as well.

-Ben

A passion of ours, and a great need for the German church, is to see lyrically rich, Christ-centered, and singable hymns form the basis of the musical diet of German congregations. That’s one of the many reasons we’re excited to serve in the church plant we’re headed to in Munich — its pastor, Robin Dammer, shares this passion and has been hard at work on new translations of just such songs. Here’s a lyric video of his latest, a translation of “My Hope is Built on Nothing Less (On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand)”:

But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah,
     who are too little to be among the clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me
     one who is to be ruler in Israel,
whose coming forth is from of old,
     from ancient days.
Therefore he shall give them up until the time
     when she who is in labor has given birth;
then the rest of his brothers shall return
     to the people of Israel.
And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord,
     in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God.
And they shall dwell secure, for now he shall be great
     to the ends of the earth.
And he shall be their peace. – Micah 5:2-5a

How will these things be? How will it all be different in the latter days?

There will be a baby.

You, O Bethlehem, haven’t been Royal David’s City for three centuries, ever since your most famous son captured the stronghold of Zion and called it by his own name. And that means that this child, this Ruler who comes from you, will be David’s Son indeed – but he’ll be no Crown Prince of Judah. He will be born among the tattered remnants of his father’s kingdom, in a town that has lapsed once again into insignificance since the old days.

Nevertheless: he will be born with a kingly calling, born to be the Ruler David was on his better days, the morning-light-after-the-rain sort (2 Sam 23:3-4). He will bring the good old days back with him, and better: his coming forth is from of old, from ancient days (Mic 5:2), which is to say, before Abraham was, he is (John 8:58). His “coming forth” is the sallying forth of the Serpent-Crusher, the riding out of the Seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to possess the gate of his enemies. Every seemingly forgotten promise is now due to be remembered, a day of reckoning for the God who appears to have so recklessly overcommitted Himself.

This is the real why of all the death, destruction, and horror; not that Yahweh flew off the handle after one too many improprieties from His people, but that He knew all along that the woes of His people’s overthrow were not to be the pangs of death but the pangs of childbirth, so as to bring this child into the world (Mic 5:3). When he has arrived, then the time of scattering will be past, the time of gathering begun. But the scattering must take place, if he is to come at all. The royal Son cannot be born royal; his Father will use the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.

What we get in return for all of the misery is a Good Shepherd. The very presence of God, and His being pleased to name us as His own (5:4), are the pasture we are starving for, and this one will take us there. We will “dwell secure” – literally, just “dwell” or “stay” – never removed from this presence and grace, because this Ruler will be great to the ends of the earth. Who would dare to try to take us away? Where would they take us to be out of reach of his power to deliver and protect?

He will be, quite simply, peace – not only because his greatness will protect them from harm, but because he will take away the cause for God’s coming in wrath against His people, and will therefore have no more need for Assyria or Babylon to be the rod of His anger (Isa 10:5). As long as he lives, it will be in truth not merely David but the Lord of Hosts Himself who reigns in, over, and for His Israel (4:7).

The baby born in Bethlehem, nearly 700 years after this word was spoken, was the sign (Luke 2:12) that it was all true, that payment was due on all God had promised. He was all that the prophet spoke and more: a just ruler and descendant of David according to the flesh, whose coming forth was from days far more ancient than David or Moses or Abraham or even Adam; the Good Shepherd who would lay down his life for the sheep; himself our peace, the tearer-down of the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile, man and God.

When this baby was born, one could then safely say, there’s only one way this can turn out now. The kingdom must come; the Lord must reign and send His word out to every corner of the earth; there will be peace, because Peace is here.

That means real, heavyweight joy for us who believe that this is all true. It means defiant joy, sometimes angry joy, that refuses to abide anything that would darken the appearance of the light; the news is too good to be spoiled by foes without or fears within – these must be overthrown. It means thankful joy, joy that eats and drinks and is merry, joy that bathes in twinkly light reflected off red bulbs hung on spruce twigs. It means astonished joy, joy as of those who dream, for whom the Lord has done great things, because He has.

Take courage, friends, and merry Christmas.

It shall come to pass in the latter days
     that the mountain of the house of the Lord
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
     and it shall be lifted up above the hills;
     and peoples shall flow to it… – Micah 4:1

Well: the Lord comes to dismantle the corrupt edifice of His people’s kingdom, to purge pollution from His land. And then?

And then: when He is there, and when His outrage has been expended against His people’s offenses, He will bring about what ought to have been happening all along.

The blessing will evince an odd symmetry with the judgment. Where His coming will make the “high place of Judah” – Jerusalem, host to her people’s idolatrous cult (1:5) – melt and flow down the mountain’s slopes (1:4) into oblivion, now that mountain will be higher than ever she was, with God’s word flowing down out of it and Gentiles flowing uphill in response (4:1-2).

There is going to be a Judge in Jerusalem, one who will bring in the heathen not as instruments of destruction, not as invaders, but as disciples (4:3). The Good Life will be instituted (4:4), everybody having enough, everybody provided the means of rest and enjoyment. Judgment is horrendous news for those liable to it (viz.: you and me and everyone we know), but if judgment falls and there is a future on the other side of it, then the presence of a just judge, the true Judge, means peace.

The whole Bible is shot through with the insistence that there will be latter days: in the latter days, the woman’s seed will bruise the serpent’s head; in the latter days, all the nations will be blessed in Abraham’s seed; in the latter days, there will be a prophet like Moses; in the latter days, God will raise up a son to sit on David’s throne; in the latter days, the earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea. There will be a way through death, a way through destruction, and out to the other side.

For Israel and Judah in the immediate future, this is the way of defeat and survival as a shamed and broken remnant of a once-proud kingdom, enduring imprisonment, exile, and slavery in hope of a future homecoming.

That hope will never really be fulfilled, though, until this passage is not one of survival but of death itself endured. When there is no more fiery wrath to flow down the mountains, then the word of peace can do so, and the peoples of the earth can approach the One who sits atop His holy mountain.

It seems impossible and demands faith: all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever (4:5). We will do this, not because there is any hope that we will turn ourselves into a people fit for His kingdom, but because He has promised a future. We walk in His name because that is surely the only path to that holy mountain, the only passage into the latter days.

The second installment in a series of reflections on Micah for Advent. Here’s part one.

“Do not preach”—thus they preach—
     “one should not preach of such things;
disgrace will not overtake us.”
     Should this be said, O house of Jacob?
Has the Lord grown impatient?
     Are these his deeds?
Do not my words do good
     to him who walks uprightly? – Micah 2:6-7

Before we call the Lord’s coming good news, we had better take some time to audit ourselves. Micah’s harshest words are reserved for the presumptuous, for preachers of and believers in cheap grace (Bonhoeffer’s memorable term). “No, no,” drips the favored rejoinder from languid lips, “don’t be so dramatic.”

We are, after all (so our thinking tends to go), the people of God. Nobody’s perfect, and the God who was so lavish in His promises to our forebears would never be unreasonable in His expectations. Surely He’ll understand that the ongoing project of real estate reallocation in Judah has been a necessary condition for the present burst of prosperity, which we have it on expert authority will keep the economy growing (and finance the highly necessary Assyrian appeasement policy), despite whatever the malcontents want to claim (2:1-2; 8-9).

But no true prophet can be reasonable about these things. Take away what Yahweh has given to others, and He will disinherit you (2:5). Treat what God has promised and given as something common, a commodity meant to serve your appetites, and you pollute it to such a degree that He will call the faithful to leave it for their own salvation: Arise and go, for this is no place to rest, because of uncleanness that destroys with a grievous destruction (2:10). In the end, exile will be an exodus (2:12-13).

It is not enough for Our Guy to be in office, either. With godly and faithful Hezekiah on the throne, confidence in cheap grace still ran high: “Is not the Lord in the midst of us?
No disaster shall come upon us” (3:11). This at a time when those who sat on the right side of a rigged game were fattening themselves on the destruction of the flock entrusted to them (3:1-3). If your hope is in cheap grace, this is the inevitable progression: you will give yourself carte blanche to pursue your own ends; you will stifle the voice of conscience and truth that says that this carte isn’t blanche but bloodstained; you will seek out and subsidize the voices that affirm the rightness of your ways; and when the day of reckoning comes, you will call out to a silent God (3:7).

But it is not too late before then: meaning, it is now, today, if you hear His voice, not too late. The prophet still speaks in the words he wrote down; the Prophet of prophets still speaks by the Spirit he put in Micah 2,700 years ago (3:8). Do not my words do good to him who walks uprightly? saith the Lord (2:7): it is good for you to hear that you are a crook and a cannibal in His eyes, if only you will believe it. You may yet be part of the remnant from whom He takes everything they thought they had, so as to give them a city with foundations in a kingdom that cannot be shaken, a city founded on the blood of His firstborn, founded on costly grace, incalculably costly grace.

Because of you Zion shall be plowed as a field, the prophet promised (3:12); but for those with ears to hear, even and especially those at fault, they would yet be plowed into fertile soil to receive the seed of the Sower.