Undiscovered Violet [A Reflection for New Year's Eve, 2017]

Undiscovered Violet—A Reflection for New Year’s Eve, 2017

Waning December

reminds me

that we have nearly taken

one more circuit around

the sun.

But the precise moment--      

the exact coordinates

in space and time--

that mark the orbit’s completion,

matters no more

than any other instant,

dots on a Seurat canvas,

all of them.

Lives are made of such points,

each one blurring into the next,

each finding its meaning

because of the next,

each revealing its own hue

because of the colors around it.

A year is hardly

one figure in the frame—

the woman with the umbrella, perhaps,

or the sail on a boat—

it is the composition of countless, tiny

strokes of color, each one

necessary and forgettable all at once.

And so one figure bleeds into

the next for the eye, while

the mind dissects

and diagrams

discrete faces

and forms and foreground.

The turning of the year

is no different. We

need breaks in

the painting,

and so the mind

draws imaginary circles around

this clump of days,

and that patch,

making lines and borders

to distinguish the days

we are living.

But we cannot truthfully

call it all good

or all terrible.

There is orange beside purple, yes.

There is unexpected blue
in a woman’s face,

and there are shades of green

that appear to clash

the red of the man’s hat.

The ugly is there,

and so is the beautiful,

the wondrous and the hideous,

and they must be named

as they are and

taken all together,

these momentary dots

comprising our days.

So take in each point

as you will,

each silhouette and shape,

every last spoken word and movement

of the year’s orbit behind.

But watch for what comes next:

the masterpiece continues,

wider and taller

than the gray blotch

through which we have been living,

and more brilliant than

a single fleck of gold

at midnight.

There is yet more

undiscovered violet,

waiting for your eyes.

Following After Jesus

Following After Jesus—December 28, 2017

“Now after [the Magi] had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.’ Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by might, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I have called my son’.” [Matthew 2:13-15]

If we are going to be followers of Jesus, we will have to follow him wherever he goes, whether they are places that we would have chosen, or wished for, or liked… or not.

If we are going to call ourselves the people of God, it will mean we will have to learn to accept the labels that the living God chooses to wear, too.

That will mean that we followers of Jesus, we people of God, will have to get used to the idea of a God who is a refugee.  And it will mean confessing no other gods than the one who fled, in his infancy, his home country because his family was trying to give him a better chance of life away from the violence of their native government.  This, we should be clear, is one of the consequences of confessing “Jesus is Lord,” and of the precisely-worded, hard-fought theological debates in the life of the early church that led to official creeds like Nicea’s famous pronouncement, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God; begotten, not made; of one Being with the Father.”  To name Jesus as God (as Christians do) is to name God as a child refugee.

And that will forever change both how we see God, and how we see refugees.

And as Matthew describes the story we often call the Flight into Egypt, there is no other word for what the Son of God becomes.  He and his family are in hiding, hoping to escape what Matthew describes as a government-sponsored campaign to kill the children of Bethlehem, so afraid of usurpers is Herod.  Jesus, only into his toddlerhood at the oldest, is taken by Joseph along with his mother, fleeing their home country and hoping—because they have no credential other than hope—that they will be allowed to stay in Egypt until the threat has passed.  They have no legal right or status granting them permission to live in Egypt—only the necessity that they cannot stay back in Herod’s jurisdiction.  They have no guarantees that Egypt will take them in, much less allow them to stay, especially with no guesses as to how long they will be dependent upon the kindness of strangers in Egypt to take them in. (After all, what do you say to the customs agent about your intended length of stay?  “We’re visiting for as long as it takes a tyrant to die”?)  All they have is their need.

What is significant to me, reading this story some two thousand years after Matthew put it on paper for us, is that in Matthew’s mind, their sheer need is sufficient reason for their welcome into Egypt.  Matthew doesn’t invent some legal reason (a reminder to me that the gospel writers were not making up stories out of whole cloth, but were convinced that they were witnessing to the real presence of God within lived history) or some convenient detail for why Jesus had an ironclad right to seek residency in Egypt.  There is no whipping out of a long-lost Roman citizenship document, like Paul would use later in Acts to make an appeal to Caesar.  There are no visa papers for safe passage, like in the movie Casablanca, that would grant Jesus and his family a legal pretext for immigrating to Egypt.  Matthew only names their need: they had to flee, because the ruler of their land was hell-bent on wiping out whomever he saw as a threat.  And from Matthew’s perspective, the need is enough—he assumes that the sheer fact of their need for refuge was sufficient reason the Egyptians to take Jesus and his family in, and to stay there for however long it was until the dangerously unhinged ruler of their home country died, along with his vendettas against the baby boys of Bethlehem.

Now, as I say, a story like this cannot help but affect the way we view both refugees and the person of God alike.  We have a way, living in a land of unending McDonald’s restaurants and Wal-Marts, of forgetting that others’ lives are far harsher and far more threatened than our comfortable routines often are.  I was noticing just today with my son, as he washed his hands in a rest stop bathroom, how he stood with his hands under the soap dispenser, confused about why it wasn’t automatically squeezing out foam onto his six-year-old hands.  He looked at me, and he says, “It’s broken, Daddy!” And that was because he is used to an elementary school that has automatic faucets and soap dispensers in every bathroom.  It was a surprise to him that there were public places that didn’t have electronic sensors that turned on and off with a literal wave of his hands.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with a school that has such cool fixtures (it probably saves the school a fair amount of money in un-wasted water and prevents the spread of germs). But it was, for me, a poignant reminder of how many assumptions we make about the comforts and conveniences around us, and how we just figure everybody else in the world has them, too. 

We forget how many people do not merely live without automatic sensors on their school bathroom faucets, but have no running water in their schools, or no schools to attend. 

We forget, living in a society in which the stock markets close at bigger and bigger highs on a regular basis, how many people have no guarantees that there will be a place to buy food at all tomorrow, or next week. 

We forget, living day to day without having to cross through military checkpoints, how many people live in fear that soldiers may come in the night and round them up, or that rockets overhead may destroy the roof over their heads.

We forget what Matthew the gospel-writer took for granted: that the need is enough reason for granting refuge.  Matthew would remind us that at least we Christians can never hear a news story, a press conference, or a politician’s speech about “those refugees” without also seeing Jesus’ face among them.  Because he was one.

And conversely, we people of God cannot picture the heavenly throne room without seeing that the Ruler of the Universe and the Maker of all things wears the face of an asylum-seeker who sought refuge in a rich, stable neighboring country, despite the fact that his family didn’t speak the language or have job prospects when they came.  For whatever else that means, it says that God is not so protective of divine dignity or so insulated from human suffering as to avoid being labeled an asylum-seeker.  We may not be comfortable with it, but the Almighty One entered into the world in the life of a child whose only appeal to others was his need—not any leverage, or legal documentation, or livelihood he could provide for himself.  God’s entry into the world—and indeed the whole salvation of that world—depended on the welcome of the people in a new land, making a place for the child Jesus when all he brought to the table was desperation.  Kinda remakes our working definition of the word “God,” doesn’t it?

We sometimes think, deep down in ways that nobody wants to say out loud, that our lives are more important than the lives of “other people”—you know, people who are not “like us,” people who are from other places, people who didn’t have the sheer luck to be born in the places where we live.  We have a way of thinking it is perfectly normal to say, “It has to be Me and My Group First, because everyone’s supposed to look out for their own kind in this world.” We have a way of thinking it is fine to provide charity to people far away, as long as they stay far away and don’t bring their problems to our doors.  We tend to call this “just being reasonable.” 

But the son of Mary forces us to go on the record, if we are going to take such a position, and to declare that we think our lives (or rather, our comfort and complacency) are more important than God… because from the Flight to Egypt and now forever after, the living God chooses to wear the label “refugee.” 

About thirty-odd years after he himself had to seek refuge in a strange country because his parents chose to bring him to Egypt hoping to save his life, Jesus himself would famously say, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.”  Sometimes we forget that he was not being figurative or melodramatic.  He was simply telling the truth. 

“I was a stranger, and you welcomed me,” says Jesus.  I guess the question to ask, if we can bear it, is this: Is he talking to us… or to someone else?

Lord Jesus, grant us the eyes to see you in all your humanity, down to the way you embraced need and depended on the welcome of others.  And grant us to see your presence, your reflected image, in the faces of those whose path cross with ours.

The Infectious Lyric

“The Infectious Lyric”—December 27, 2017

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

        who, though he was in the form of God,

                did not regard equality with God

as something to be exploited,

        but emptied himself,

                taking the form of a slave,

                being born in human likeness…. [Philippians 2:5-7a]

Be careful what songs you let get stuck in your head: they will change the way you think… and speak… and act… and love.

In all seriousness, today’s verses are a call to get a song stuck in our head—a particular song.

It is widely believed that these verses that we know as Philippians 2:5-11 are actually part of a song, a hymn, which Paul is quoting here.  (That’s why the words are set off with those strange line breaks and indentations in your Bible and up above, too: these are lines of poetry.)  Whether this hymn was something of Paul’s own creation (pastors have been known to write a song or two over the years) or was a familiar song Paul is referring to, we just don’t know for certain.  But if you are willing to trust the scholars who know about such things on this one, let it be enough to say that these verses have the feel of a hymn about Christ in the original Greek.

And Paul leads into that hymn by calling us to listen to the lyrics of that song, and to let them shape our thinking.  He is daring us to let this song about Christ get stuck in our heads and hearts, to infect us like a divine computer virus.

And this is how the song goes:  Christ Jesus, who is fully God, didn’t use his divine position for a cushy seat or position of safety, but rather entered in our humanity as one of us, poured himself out, and placed himself in the role of a fully human servant.  That’s a lot to put in as single verse of a song! 

Really, the claims that this hymn makes about Jesus are breath-taking.  We Christians believe that in Jesus, no less than God the Son entered into a human life and gave himself up completely into the role of a servant.  Even down to washing feet.  That’s really an amazing thing to say about God.  It really is.  What makes the Christian Good News so unbelievably, wonderfully odd is our belief that none other than God “emptied” himself to enter into our human experience, to go to death on a cross for us, picking the thankless, mundane, difficult work of serving, and then laying down his own life, his very last breath, for our sake.  Plenty of other religious or off-shoots from the Christian faith believe in God, sure; and plenty of them even say pleasant things about Jesus.  But the Gospel goes even further—not just that there is a God, and not even just that Jesus had some nice teachings, too.  The Gospel starts with the radical claim that in Jesus, God was willing to take on a life like ours.

Now, that by itself is amazingly good news.  And given the likely reality that Paul is quoting a source that his readers already knew by the time he wrote this letter we call Philippians, well that means that Christians believed in Jesus’ divinity from the very earliest years of our existence!  (Sometimes, religion scholars make the claim that Christians “invented” the idea of Jesus’ divinity several centuries later, but this verse gives very early evidence that Christians believed Jesus is fully divine, and it is so ancient that even Paul, a writer of the New Testament, already was singing this song in his hymnal and got the words stuck in his head by the time he wrote this letter.)

Now, all of that may be well and good, but there’s more to this.  Notice that Paul doesn’t just stop with intellectual information about Jesus, but he insists we make the connection to how we live, we followers of Jesus.  Christmas isn't just a story you hear, or a lesson you learn in your head--but Jesus' humanity becomes the pattern for the ways we live, as well.

Paul doesn’t just want to get a song stuck in our heads—he is trying to get that song to affect our relationships, our actions, and our words.  This isn’t just a head trip or a list of Jesus-related facts that Christians are supposed to believe to get into the heaven club.  Paul takes the picture of Jesus and says, “Let this shape your brains.”  He says, essentially, “Learn to let your minds follow the pattern of Jesus—and Jesus, by the way, poured himself out for all of us.”  The point is that if Jesus could be humble enough to leave the throne of heaven to live a human lifetime of washing scuzzy feet, touching contagious sick people, and dying a criminal’s death, well, then you and I can be humble enough to let someone else get the credit or attention for some accomplishment, or to do the grubby, thankless job without needing to have a parade thrown in your honor, or keeping on with life without having to toot our own horns.  You and I can be considerate enough to look out for the needs of others before our own.  You and I can find what Wendell Berry calls “the infinite longing of the self to be given away.”  That’s what happens when you let a song like Philippians 2:5-7 get stuck in your head.

The same way that the classic hymns of your childhood stay with you and come back to you when you are going through a crisis—the way that you might just have sung "Silent Night” by heart on Christmas Eve, the way the words of "Amazing Grace" can just roll off your tongue without effort, or the way you can find courage in “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” or comfort in “How Great Thou Art”—Paul wants this song to become so engrained in our hearts and lives that it changes the way we act. 

It’s not just about head knowledge and memorized creedal talking points—it’s about getting the Gospel song stuck in your head, letting it take root in your heart, and letting it stir your hands and feet to action, like you are nodding your head to the rhythm and tapping your toes to the beat.

Today, let the song of Jesus get stuck in you… and see what happens.

Lord Jesus, let your own mindset become our mindset, that our actions and words may witness to you, and that our love would come to look like yours.

Because Ideas Cannot Bleed

Because Ideas Cannot Bleed--December 26, 2017

"By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God..." [1 John 4:2]

"Vulnerable" is a charged word.  Nobody likes to be called "vulnerable," and nobody wants to admit their own vulnerability, or any kind of susceptibility to weakness.  

After all, these are days in which so much talk around us is about "greatness," "strength," and "winning," and being vulnerable sounds so much like being least, being weak, being a loser.  

Nobody likes to be called vulnerable themselves, and we generally don't like the idea of our God being "vulnerable," because that sounds like God being defeated, or broken, or beaten... and if our God (or "god"?) is vulnerable, then my goodness, that doesn't look very good on us, does it? Oh deary my, the conventional wisdom says, you don't want to give the impression that your God--your religion--is weak, or vulnerable, or not in control and "winning", do you?  No, no, no, they say--you need to project power and look tough, and you need to make your god/God look invulnerable, too.

Yeah, "vulnerable" is a charged word these days--and yet, to hear the Bible tell it, it is at the heart of our faith.  To believe in a God who "has come in the flesh" in a human life is, by definition, to believe in a God who chooses vulnerability, as scandalous as that may sound.

Or to put it more directly, from the perspective of the New Testament, there is no true God but a vulnerable one.

And in particular here, John insists that we understand that Jesus, the very Word and Son of God, really came and lived among us in the flesh.  God really did crash into our lives in a new way by being present in Jesus, and that means we really do get to know what God is like by learning the stories of Jesus.  Against all the other mystery religions and cults and philosophies of the first century, the early Christians insisted that God wasn't too distant to relate to us in the physical, flesh-and-blood life of a human being, and a rather ordinary-looking human being at that, from a backwater province of conquered people on the eastern fringe of the Roman Empire.  The philosophers and other mystics were convinced that any deity worth his salt wouldn't--indeed, couldn't--associate with the likes of finite, fragile, physical beings, but had to stay more or less in the ethereal realm of spirits and souls and other invisible things.  They could conceive of a savior coming to teach us new ideas, new modes of contemplation or mystical truth, but no divine savior from God could actually be one of us.  That just seemed preposterous.

And like I say, against all of that, John here insists that Jesus, the Savior and the Son of God, really did come among us as one of us, not just a vision or an idea or an apparition.  That means God chooses vulnerability, because being human means a certain amount of vulnerability.

Frederick Buechner notes it powerfully in a reflection on the birth of Jesus.  In a piece from his book, The Hungering Dark, Buechner writes:  "The child born in the night among the beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of the beasts. And nothing is ever the same again. Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. . . . For those who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby’s skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that."

Buechner's point is just the same as John's here today--the God we meet in Jesus chooses vulnerability, which means God has chosen the weakness of infancy all the way to the desperation of death.  There is no true God but the vulnerable One.

Ideas cannot bleed, some people are fond of saying.  And usually that is meant as a compliment to ideas, a testament to how an idea can endure even when generations of actual people rise and fall.  Christians would agree that ideas cannot bleed, but we do not necessarily see that as a sign of the superiority of ideas to people.  Because an idea cannot be hurt, cannot suffer, cannot give its life for anyone, it also means that an idea cannot love.  And as far as Christians are concerned, the world's only hope for being rescued from its own brokenness is for God to love the world and redeem it, not for God to bombard us with a new idea to try and get us to think our way into heaven.  Jesus is the sign for us that God is not just interested in giving us new ideas to contemplate, but indeed is willing to be hurt for us and for our sake--even at our own hands. 

For John, this is the lynchpin of our faith--either we worship a God who is not afraid to come so close as to enter our human lives as one of us, who is unafraid to be entwined in the turns and tangles of human history, who is unafraid to hurt for us and to bleed for us, or we are stuck only with an idea of a distant God who may have helpful suggestions to offer us, but who can only appear to come close without ever being touchable.  And as John tells us here, if we give up on the idea that Jesus really came among us in the flesh, we've missed the whole point of the faith, and the good part of the Good News, which is all about a God who will not stay off where it is safe in a distant heaven or in the safety of the realm of theory and ideas.

The take-home point for us today then, is this:  ideas can't bleed.  We Christians are fooling ourselves if we think what we have to share with the world is just a new idea for ethics or morality, or a set of timeless principles.  Ideas can change the world, but they cannot redeem the world, because an idea cannot love or sacrifice itself.  Only a Person can do that.  Our message to the world, and to our neighbors and friends around us, then, is not "Hey, listen to this new idea we have about God!" but "Come meet the living God for yourself, the God who loves the world enough to suffer for it in the person of Jesus."  Our calling is to help people to know this Jesus.

O God of genuine love, let us know your love more and more fully today, so that we can share it with others beyond the sterility of ideas and theories.

Who Saves What?

Who Saves What?--December 25, 2017

I wonder—whose turn is it? 

Whose turn is it to save Christmas?

All my life I’ve been ingrained with this idea, from annual TV and movie specials, books and cartoons, all featuring someone whose job it is to heroically save Christmas.  There’s of course the classic 1988 slapstick comedy of “Ernest Saves Christmas,” the kids’ cartoon “Gekko Saves Christmas” that my PJ Masks-loving kids are sure to like, as well as a host of others, all filling up TV channels and streaming movie queues each December.  One favorite bedtime book at our house lately continues the trend in a variation with talking-farm-equipment, entitled “Tractor Mack Saves Christmas.”  And you can add to the list Garfield the Cat, Paw Patrol Pups, Elmo the Muppet, and Beethoven the giant St. Bernard dog, each of whom have had TV or movie specials in which they get to “save Christmas.”

Now, whether you have seen all of those movies, TV specials, and books, or not, you already know the basic plot just from the titles alone.  With a “So-and-So Saves Christmas,” you pretty much know what you’re getting, and if you’ve seen or read one, you’ve seen them all.  And chances are, you’ve lived some version of the plot, plus or minus a big shaggy dog or a talking tractor. The basics go like this: everybody is getting excited for the celebration of Christmas, and all the preparations are coming along swimmingly, when—dun, dun, dun!—disaster strikes, threatening to ruin the holiday festivities.  Sometimes it’s a magical conundrum, like Santa getting lost on a foggy night, or losing his sack of toys.  Sometimes a big snowfall is threatening to close down all the town festivities.  Sometimes it’s something as ordinary as a family argument when everyone is running a million different directions and wanting to make the Christmas celebration perfect, and Mom or Dad’s patience finally wears out until there are angry words and stomping feet.

Ah, but however it happens in all the Christmas TV specials, once the threat is unleashed, whether magical or mundane, the fear on everyone’s minds is that Christmas will be—<gasp!>—ruined! And the question on everyone’s lips is: who will save Christmas? 

Well, you know how these stories work.  Usually the one who “saves” Christmas is the character whose name is in the title of the TV special.  And usually, what the movies and TV shows mean by “saving Christmas” is that someone will swoop in at the last second and make sure that the celebration—the party, the presents, the festivities, and all the planned programming—still happens the way it’s supposed to.  No matter how many complicating details or plot twists get in the way: a side trip to the Island of Misfit Toys, or the Bumpuses’ dogs get into the kitchen and eat up all the Christmas turkey just before dinner, or Buddy the Elf needing to find the self-confidence and courage to fix Santa’s sleigh in Central Park—no matter what threatens the merriment, the hero has to “save Christmas” by making sure it all goes right in the end.  The toys have to get delivered.  The sleigh has to be fixed and get flying.  Kevin’s mom has to get back across the ocean from France to see her little boy on Christmas after he’s been left home alone. Ralphie’s family still has to eat something for Christmas dinner while he nurses his broken eyeglasses and clutches his BB gun. 

Basically—and pay close attention to this, in all of those “saving Christmas” type stories—the movies all say that no matter how many things look to be coming unglued in the second act, it only counts as “saving Christmas” if we get all the loose ends tied up, and basically as long as everything goes back to normal, with presents being delivered in the nick of time, the Grinch (spoiler alert) giving back all the stolen decorations, and Kevin’s mom making inside the doorway in time for a happy ending and the closing credits.  Any of those TV specials and Christmas-time movies basically boils down to the question, “Who will save Christmas?” And by “Save Christmas,” they mean, “Fix everything that didn’t seem to be going smoothly at the second commercial break.”

So, depending on which movie you are watching, sometimes it’s Ernest P. Worrell who saves Christmas, or Buddy the Elf, or Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, or any of a host of other animated talking animals….

And the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that the reason our culture grinds out this same essential plot-line into the casing of new characters like so much sausage, is that somehow we have gotten this fear that Christmas is in danger. 

That’s just it, isn’t it? Whether the fear created the movies, or the movies created the fear, or whether they both reinforce each other like a vicious circle, somehow I think we have fallen for the idea that Christmas—the day, I guess—is in danger, is in trouble, and needs saving. Somehow we have gotten the idea that Christmas is fragile like a glass ball on your tree, and that it must be protected and held very gingerly, or else it will break.  We have fallen for this idea that Christmas is in danger of disappearing or fading away, or, I don’t know—melting—and that it’s up to some brave and virtuous soul to come to the aid of Christmas and put it right. We have just taken our fears of “breaking” Christmas and projected them onto stop-motion reindeer and Saint Bernards.

Sometimes our fears are local and close to home—we are worried that Christmas will be ruined if the day’s proceedings aren’t exactly like they were last year, or if someone is missing that we remember from Christmases past.  Sometimes we are worried that our hospitality won’t measure up when the guests come for dinner, that the roast will get burned or the turkey will be eaten by the neighbor’s dogs.  Sometimes we are afraid that if enough people don’t say “Merry Christmas” instead of something more generic, we will lose some kind of battle, or surrender some kind of prominence we had gotten comfortable with, and we are afraid, I guess, that Christmas itself might vanish in a puff of candle smoke if enough people don’t say, “Merry Christmas” like they are bringing Tinker Bell back to life in Peter Pan by clapping and promising that they do believe in pixies after all.  Sometimes, maybe we are afraid that if we don’t get it right, that Christmas itself will be broken, and oh dear, then what will we do?  See, I think that underneath all the goofy, derivative TV movies there is a question we keep asking, because we assume it has to be asked:  Who will save Christmas this time? we wonder… because deep down, we have become convinced that Christmas is a thing that needs saving.

Which has got me thinking lately: Who saves Christmas the first time around? 

Seriously.  In the first Christmas.  In the story of Jesus’ birth—the one we just heard, the one that we know from memory so well you could practically recite it by heart.  Before it was Elmo or Paw Patrol or Garfield the Cat… who saved Christmas the first time, on that night in Bethlehem when Mary starts feeling contractions?

Who jumps in at the last minute to make sure that Mary won’t have to make that terrible trip, leaving behind her familiar home in Nazareth and her reserved room at Galilee Regional Medical Center’s maternity unit? 

Who silences the arrogant and self-absorbed Caesar Augustus when he is about to decree that everyone has to go back to their hometown in order to enforce compliance with his new census and tax initiative?

Who finally finds a nice quiet private guest room for Mary to have her baby in, when at first it looks like there will be no other available space but the place they keep the animals for the night?

Who swoops in at the last minute and brings a well-built, handcrafted crib for the new baby to be laid in, so that he doesn’t have to spend his first night on the planet plopped down on some moldy hay in a spare food trough?

Who defeats crooked and cruel King Herod from his terrible plan to wipe out any would-be kings?  Who makes sure that the baby Jesus is never in any kind of danger again?  Who stops the tyrant’s plan so that Jesus and his family don’t have to flee as refugees and live in a foreign country with their lives dependent on the welcome lasting in their new host country of Egypt?

And who comes up with some proper, dignified spokesmen to announce the birth to the world, instead of those scruffy-lookin’ night-shift sheep farmers?

Who makes all those scary, dangerous plot twists and snags go away on the night when Jesus was born?  That is to say, Who saves the first Christmas?

Ah… that’s right.  Nobody.

Nobody “saves” the first Christmas, at least not the way the movies and TV shows all teach us to expect it.

No Roman adviser reins in Caesar Augustus to tell him he has gone way out of line stroking his own imperial ego, or prevents the emperor’s tax registration plan from going through.

No ragtag band of rebels deposes King Herod to stop his horrible plans for the babies of Bethlehem.

No talking animals arrive on scene to build baby Jesus a nicer crib, nor does Buddy the Elf find a spare room for Mary to have a quiet, private delivery.

Nobody saves the first Christmas, in the sense of making sure it all comes off without a hitch.  And nobody pretends that is the point of the story, either. 

And that, dear Virginia, is quite simply because Christmas doesn’t need saving.  It never did.

Christmas doesn’t need saving. We do.

All the movies, books, cartoons and TV specials, along with all of our antsy fears that Christmas is too fragile to touch, or somehow under attack or in danger of breaking, all of those fears have it backwards.  Christmas doesn’t need saving, because Christmas is just a day to remember a story—and the story itself is about how we are in need of rescue, how humanity is in need of saving, and how God steps onto the stage of human history in a unique and unrepeatable way in the tiny hands of a baby boy born to peasant parents in the backwater of the Empire who will bear a cross one day.

The angels do not say to the shepherds, “Go into Bethlehem, because Christmas won’t happen unless you get there to fix it all!”  Notice that—the message from the angels is not that everything hangs on their showing up at the right time.  The angels don’t show up to tell them, “You have to get into town to save Christmas!”  No, just the opposite!  The message is, “God has given a Savior.  God is doing the saving.  You have been picked to be the first ones to see it, but fixin’ it ain’t up to you.  God does the saving, because it is humanity that needs rescue, not the date on the calendar when we remember that the rescue happened.”

And this is the news we most deeply need to hear on this day: even when all the other details and troubles of the story stay unresolved, God doesn’t give up on the birth.  God doesn’t say, “Oh dear, nobody arrived to make it all turn out neatly?  Well, Christmas is cancelled!”  God doesn’t say, “Somebody had better get their Christmas cheer going and make their spirits bright, or else I’m not coming!”  And there is not a hint at all that if the townspeople of Bethlehem don’t recognize the day and call it Christmas that the miracle will be withdrawn.  No—the incarnation of God in the human life of Jesus is not so fragile as all that.  Christmas—the actual birth of the actual savior—can’t be broken, or destroyed, or lost, or overruled or disappear—because the wonder of this night is that in a real moment in real history, which cannot be undone or erased, the Maker of the universe took on the fullness of what it means to be one of us, in order to put right all that is broken in this whole hurting world. 

And so our calling, not just on this day but every day, is to tell people what God has done, not to fret about how we are supposed to do this or that to “save Christmas.”  Christmas didn’t need saving.  We did.  Our job is to pass along the news.

Who saved the first Christmas? Nobody—because it was never about protecting or preserving the day, or the tradition, or even the turkey.  And even when all those things went wrong and remained unresolved on the night of Jesus’ birth, it didn’t break Christmas.  Nobody can undo what God has already done in Jesus.  Nobody needs to “save Christmas” because Christmas can’t be broken.  The Savior has already come, and the rescue is already accomplished.

The real question for this moment is simply, Now… who will you tell?

Whatever the Adventure Is

Whatever the Adventure Is--December 22, 2017

"The angel said to [Mary], '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 holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.' Then Mary said, 'Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.' Then the angel departed from her." [Luke 1:35-38]

If there is one thing that has stuck with me from my brief childhood adventures in Cub Scouting, years and years ago, it was the Boy Scout motto: Be prepared.  

As a kid, I think it first struck me that the motto was rather vague.  Pre-teen me would have asked incredulously, "What are we supposed to be prepared for?"  And sure, some specifics would give a little more direction as to what to pack, and what to have ready.  After all, you prepare for a quick trip to the store differently than you pack for a move across the ocean to a new country, and you prepare for a one-night dinner party differently than you would for the birth of a child into your family.  I think that the younger version of myself just shrugged off the wisdom of the Scout motto because I thought it was too broad to give any particular direction to my life.

But the more I let those two words roll around in my brain, and perhaps just the more I live life, the more I think there is a certain wisdom in the broad advice to "Be prepared," precisely because it is so open-ended.  And that's because I now take it to mean, "If you are going to live this life well and rightly, you need to be ready for whatever direction it may take you.  Be ready for whatever the adventure is."

That, of course, fits well with what Scouting is supposed to be about, I would think.  Since you don't know what you'll need if you go out into the woods alone, for example, you'd be well-served to have skills for survival, cooking over a fire, navigating strange terrain, and making yourself a shelter.  You might not need all of those skills on any one given day, but you might just need any one of them.  So it's best to be prepared for whatever the adventure might throw at you, knowing that you'll never quite know what you have gotten yourself into until you are into it.  

I think much the same these days about Mary's response to the angel in this scene from Luke.  Mary's response is so broad and sweeping that at first, my immature soul wants to laugh at how much Mary is getting herself into.  "Here am I, the servant of the Lord," she says, "Let it be just as you say."  That sounds rather like saying, "Whatever you say, Angel--I'll be ready."  Part of me wants to warn the young girl: "Mary, Mary, Mary, you are writing a blank check here--if you tell God that you are willing to do whatever God says to you, you should expect that God is gonna require something big of you!"  It strikes my ears like "be prepared"--as something so broad, so open-ended, that you can't ever exactly picture what it would look like to really do it.  Either way, you don't know what tools to bring--will we need a screwdriver for today's mission... or a blow torch?  A Bible... or a copy of the Twelve Step Big Book?  A car for going to visit someone who is sick and in the hospital?  A pick-up truck for helping move a formerly homeless family into their new place?  A plane ticket to fly across the globe to join in mission or relief work?  Part of the adventure is knowing that it could be anything.

And that's just it--with the God who calls us, we really are on the adventure of a lifetime.  To follow Jesus, to prepare for this One we are convinced is worth waiting for, is to say "Yes" to a life that you won't fully see or predict until you are already knee-deep into it.  It is to say, "Yes," even when it comes with surprises... or sends you into the midst of situations outside your comfort zone... or sends you to people you did not think you would ever meet.  It is to say, like Mary, "I'll be ready for anything, so I'll travel light."

I can't possibly guess what the living God has in mind to do with your gifts, your time, your passion, your restlessness, your servant's heart, your love, and your resources.  But I am convinced, as someone daily challenged by Mary's response, too, that it will be worth it.  It may well be that the best way to actually prepare for Jesus is to be ready for anything, just like the Boy Scout motto.  

So, today, let's allow that to be our prayer, and let us dare to hope that will be enough.  However and wherever and for whatever you call us, God, we will dare to say, "Here I am, the servant of the Lord.  I'm prepared... whatever the adventure is."

Here we are, Lord God, your servants.  Lead us on this adventure following after Jesus.

A Prelude to Hope

A Prelude to Hope--December 21, 2017

"The word of the LORD came to me: Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel: prophesy, and say to them--to the shepherds: Thus says the Lord GOD: Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves!  Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.  So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals.... For thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.  As shepherds seek out their flocks when they are among their scattered sheep, so I will seek out my sheep." [Ezekiel 34:1-5, 11-12]

Christmas brings out the cynic in me.

No offense intended to you, if that comment feels too grinchy, but I will just own it.  Christmas--as a season, as a marketing-gimmick, as a genre of music and movies, and as a decorating style--just brings out my inner cynic.  And I have come to the point where I am glad, oddly enough, that it does, because that cynicism clears the horizon of anything that lacks... substance.  It silences the empty chatter and noise to create the necessary quiet that is the prelude to genuine hope.

At one level, it is just the fakeness that sweeps over storefronts for at least a month and a half each year--the overly saccharin sweetness of the music, the TV movies, and the candy, the relentless refrain on the radio insisting that this is "the most wonderful time of the year."  The Elves-upon-Shelves, the lackluster mall Santas, and the fussing over whether we have bought enough presents for the people in our lives to prove to them we love them... it all just strikes my ear as so much... well, noise. 

And I get it--that sounds rather cynical. But I'm okay with that.

I say that because it is that cynicism that force me to cut through all the stuff that is just window dressing and to keep getting back to the heart of what the Story really is about... and why it matters.

And that is what I need.  But it should also warn you--cynicism over the spectacle of the Christmas "industry" pushes even deeper for me.  Because the thing is, it's not like we get lost in shallow sentimentalism and marketing ploys just for this one time a year.  At Christmas, the shallowness and fakeness might be more obvious, but the dirty little secret is that all year long, we give our hopes and put our confidences in voices who promise much but all let us down.  And for me at least, the seasonal reminders of how much shallowness we are accustomed to force me to be honest about all the rest of the empty promises and flashy packaging we have just come to accept as "normal" all around us.  And I think I need a certain stripping-away of the wrappings and trappings to remind me what I held onto as real... and to help me test whether it still is solid or not.  It is a necessary cynicism--one that reminds me not to give my heart or my soul away to institutions that are not worthy of that trust.

So, for example, I'll just be honest here: I don't trust elected leaders to have my interests at heart.  Not my elected leaders, not someone else's elected leaders.  Not just one party or another.  I just simply don't expect anything of them anymore.  I seriously don't think they care.  I am learning not to put my trust in anybody's party, anybody's agenda, and anybody's platform of solutions.  They may all say--as indeed they all do, on both sides of the aisle--that THEIR plan, as opposed to their opponents, is really about helping me and my needs, but I simply don't believe them anymore. 

For that matter, again just in the name of honesty, I don't expect there to be any kind of social safety net or insurance or Medicare or Social Security around when I am in my sixties or seventies.  Whether that's fair or not, right or not, it's just not something I count on being there.  And at least on that point, I don't think I am alone--I think in large part I am part of a generation that just assumes there will not be Social Security or any of those programs by the time I would get to that part of my life.  I don't anticipate getting to retire, for that matter--that's not how my brain is wired.  For that matter, I don't really know that I expect the church structures of denominations and synods and such to last forever, either--the big ol' hippopotamus called "Church" has to deal with its own lumbering institutional life-expectancy, too. But at any rate, while I have no particular guesses about how or when any of those programs will fizzle or fail, I have just grown up through enough of disillusionment with the way we collective ignore problems that I have learned the lesson, "Don't expect those things to be there for you.  Don't put your trust in them."  Now, to be clear, I happily and gladly pay into those systems for the sake of others, and I would not have it otherwise--I just don't need the illusion that I am "paying in" money for my future self to use.  I fully understand--and am OK with--the reality that part of my pay goes to fund other people's retirements or healthcare, and that I will not have the same done for me when it would be my turn.  I just don't expect that anymore from the society in which I live and its leadership.

None of that may sound very chipper or cheery, and it's not.  But it's necessary.  It's necessary especially to make sense of what Christmas is really all about.  It is necessary to let cynicism bulldoze away all the decrepit and crumbling empty and fake hopes that were not sound to live in, so that we can see what is left standing.  It is necessary to clear away the rubble to see where any solid ground might remain on which to build something that could last.

And this is why my heart keeps pulling me back to words like Ezekiel's here.  Ezekiel first brought a word from God that was very much a voice of cynicism--but a holy cynicism.  It was God just unloading on the supposed leaders of the people, the "shepherds" of Israel.  They were supposed to have the interests of the people at heart--their well-being, their livelihoods, and their communities--but instead got caught up in using their power and position to make things better for themselves.  Ezekiel says that they were supposed to be like shepherds who take care of their flocks, but instead they just prey on the people entrusted into their care.  And Ezekiel calls them all what they are: false shepherds, poor stewards, and bad caretakers. Ezekiel effectively says to the people of Israel, "Your leaders have been salivating over you, looking for ways to line their own pockets while they don't give a care about you." And in particular, Ezekiel notes that the supposed leaders of Israel were supposed to feed the hungry, heal the sick, mend the injured, strengthen the weak, bring back the lost, and tend to the people gently... and instead, they have just taken care of themselves and their own wish-lists.  So Ezekiel just says, "God is giving up on expecting good from such shepherds anymore. God will take sides against such pretenders."

Now, that by itself just sounds like an unflinchingly cynical report.  It sounds like God is giving up on the whole of Israel's society, and that there's no hope for the scattered sheep of God's flock.  But in truth, God has simply let the harsh (and cynical) word of the prophet silence all the shallow background noise, so that what is left will be the true tune of hope.  And that hope is not grounded in bringing in a different political party, or passing a new bill, or electing a different human leader, or making an alliance with a new neighboring country, or ending old alliances, either.  The hope comes in a decisive change God promises to make: God says, "I myself will be the shepherd."

At last--something solid.  At long last, music without distortion.  And this is the difference: God is the One who guarantees a different way, a different future.  God is smarter than just saying, the solution to the human condition is lower taxes, or higher taxes... or the real problem is that you humans have too many rules, or not enough rules.  The deeper problem is our perennial bent towards ourselves, so that when any of us get into positions of authority or power, we slide, just like the would-be "shepherds" of Israel did in Ezekiel's day, into complacency about taking care of the hungry, the sick, the injured, the weak, and the lost in the flock.  But the living God loves fully... and selflessly... and offers us another way. The answer Ezekiel dares to hope for is a future in which none other than the living God shepherds and saves the people, not some bigwig king or blowhard emperor or self-centered leaders.  The only way things could be different in human history would be for God to enter into human history to be the shepherd.

And that, boys and girls, is precisely what Christmas is.  The story of the birth of Jesus, Christians have insisted for two thousand years now, is the story of God coming among us down to our utter humanity, and bringing a different way of being the shepherd.  Jesus doesn't toot his own horn, prey on the weak and call it a windfall for them, insist on pomp and ceremony for his public appearances, or even engrave his name in big gold letters on any buildings.  Jesus isn't like the selfish leaders Ezekiel knew about.  His way of exercising his authority and power is in suffering love--in a cross.  And his way of being King--of being the servant-leader that Israel's shepherds were always meant to be--was in laying down his life.  Jesus is what it looks like when God doubles down on the promise to BE our shepherd.  

But unless we allow Ezekiel's harsh and cynical assessment to be heard first, we won't understand why it really is good news that God has come among us in Jesus.  Unless we can bear to have all the false hopes knocked down will we see that it is good news to find the manger-born God as our solid and dependable ground.  Unless we can bear to have the prophet show us that all the other human leaders we fawn and fuss over have missed God's truest priorities, we will never understand why it is good news that God has not given up on lifting up the lowly, the weak, the hurt, and those lost on the margins.  Unless we face the rather cynical truth that our would-be shepherds do not really have our interests at heart, we will always be a little afraid of asking whether God is any different than the rest.  We need to have the ground cleared so we can see that a manger still remains.  We need to have the bluster of the selfish would-be shepherds stilled so that in that silence there can be a prelude to hope.

And maybe that's what this Advent has been all along--not hope itself, but the prelude to hope... the tearing down of things to prepare the way for what is good, the clearing away and leveling of mountains and valleys to help us see the One who is the Good Shepherd.  If we have to roll our eyes at a couple more bad TV holiday movies or unnecessary cover recordings of second-tier Christmas songs in order to remind us of the value of that bulldozing, so be it.  It helps me to remember that if we dare clear away the junk, we will find what has been solid--or rather, Who has been solid--all along.

Lord God, we admit it--we let far too much garbage clutter up the horizon to be able to see you sometimes.  Clear it away, and give us the courage to see where we have put our trust in things and people who will let us down... so that we can instead pin our hope on you and your unexpected priorities.