Our Beginnings Are Middles

Our Beginnings Are Middles--January 1, 2o19

"It had been revealed to [Simeon] by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord's Messiah. Guided by the Holy Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, 
     'Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,
         according to your word;
     for my eyes have seen your salvation,
         which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, 
     a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
         and for glory to your people Israel'." [Luke 2:26-32]

It is weird to say it this way, but in life, most of our beginnings are really middles.

That's not a bad thing. It's really just a matter of honesty.  Most of the times we think we are at the start of something brand new, ready to turn a new leaf, begin a new chapter, or start a new adventure, we are really in the middle of something already, something which may have been simmering inside of us for some time until at last it bubbles up to the surface for us to notice.

It's the sprout, for example, that we think is just starting as the first few leaf buds emerge on a tiny stalk--before we can see it, it's been germinating in the darkness of the earth, and roots began to emerge.  The "new beginning" we see is really in the middle of the life cycle that has already begun before we were aware of it--and for that matter, the seed itself was the "end" product of some previous tree or flower somewhere else.

It's the journal you half-started a few years ago, forgot about, and then came back later, wondering if it was ok to start up in the same book, or if you should just start over clean with a brand new set of clean white pages... and maybe pretend there was never any half-finished book at all.

It's the way so many of our New Year's resolutions, if they are going to have any staying power at all, really have been percolating and poking at us for some time in our heads and hearts already.  If some half-baked idea pops into your head at midnight on December 31 for a "new thing to try" in the new year, chances are it will wither on the vine.  The changes that really stick are the ones that have been slowly beginning to taken root in your mind and habits already, even if you choose to use January 1 as your mental milestone for the sake of convenience.

And it's the same with the Christ of God as well.  Here is this infant child, his life seemingly just starting, and as Simeon takes a look at the child, he sees not merely a beginning, but the very climax of the story of God and the world.  We are knee deep already in the middle of the story, according to Simeon.  God had long ago promised, both to Simeon and to generations of people before him, that there would come restoration and redemption for God's people.  And so as this old man lays his eyes on the child Jesus, he sees that he--and we--are in the middle of what God has been up to, laying the groundwork, sending out roots, preparing and growing like a seed in the warm darkness of the earth.  The birth is maybe the moment that God's new action in the world sprouts leaf buds above the soil line, perhaps, but this is really the middle of the story.  We are in the middle of the action, in media res, as my English teacher used to say in high school.  The moment Simeon gets to see the child is the culmination of years and years of waiting, the consummation of hope and expectation, and the climax of human salvation--it's not the start, but a middle.

And that's nothing to be ashamed of, or to be embarrassed about.  Simeon, for one, takes it as a sign of God's faithfulness that there is first a promise, and then the foundation laid to bring the fulfillment, and then when all is ready, the keeping of the promise is visible.  And even though it takes centuries by human counting, it is all important time to let the seeds germinate.  God doesn't just out of the blue say, "Hey, I've got a great new idea--I'll love and save the world!" And God isn't just making this up as God goes along like Indiana Jones.  The living God has been moving in human history, sometimes slowly, sometimes barely perceptibly, but always.  Like Dr. King was so fond of reminding us, "The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."  Even the arrival of Christ on the scene isn't quite the start of something, but the middle--the turning point, if you like--that continues a trajectory God has been on far before any of us were paying attention.

Now, that's good news for us on a couple of fronts.  For one, it is a reminder that God doesn't just capriciously or chaotically show up on the scene out of nowhere, in a move that could be backtracked tomorrow.  Our culture is full of those sorts of impulsive voices who blurt things out on a whim without really thinking of the consequences, and then have to either walk back their outbursts, or double down on a foolish idea, or fade away quietly hoping we'll all forget.  But that isn't how the coming of Christ is.  God doesn't just randomly make an unscheduled appearance in Jerusalem to stop and say "hi" and then vanish when it becomes clear that there will be costs for loving and saving humanity.  God doesn't just plop down into human history, only to realize there will be a cross in store, and then bail out when that becomes too much to bear.  No, the coming of the Christ child is a middle, not a rash beginning.  It is a point along the way of what Daniel Erlander calls "God's unfolding promise to mend the entire universe," and that project of God's has been unfolding since before the beginning of our awareness.  And that means we don't have to worry that God will decide it's too hard, or too costly, or too tedious, or too unpopular to come into our history in Jesus.  We don't have to worry about God blurting out "I know--I'll send a Messiah!" and then hastily throwing together a plan around the sound byte to make it happen, like we so often see happening on the news and in the world around us.  God, in other words, is committed--and has been committed from eternity--to loving, reclaiming, and restoring all creation.  This isn't a fad or a fluke or a fit.

And there is a second bit of good news in all of this: it is okay that we are living in the middle of life, too.  I know how hard we may wish to have a new beginning, to start the year fresh, to wipe the slate clean, and to turn a corner.  But I also know that whatever baggage we have been carrying up to this moment is a part of our life story.  And even if you and I drop all of our excess unnecessary garbage and dead weight this very instant, it will still have been a part of the story that brought you to where you are in this moment.  All that came before is not wasted time before your "real" new beginning--it is part of the story that leads up to this moment in the middle, which is where your story turns today.  Like Ben Folds sings in "The Luckiest:"

 "I don't get many things right the first time/In fact, I am told that a lot/Now it seems all the wrong turns, the stumbles, and falls have brought me here...."

The things that have come before need not be seen as a shame or a waste or a mistake, but rather the time the seed germinates in the warm darkness of the earth, putting out roots and coming to life.  That means we don't have to throw out the half-written journals, or pretend the earlier chapters of our stories were all for nothing, or that God can only use people who make a clean break of all their past.  We cannot.  We are living in the middle of a story that began long before we were aware of it.

Maybe as the world makes a big deal about starting a new calendar year, we can put all of that into some perspective.  If this is the start of something brand new and great for you, great.  I am happy for you, and wish you success in the newness.  But I suspect that more likely each of us is really making a new beginning right smack dab in the middle of things--knowing that God has been at work in both the big sweep of history, and in the individual histories of your and my life, for a long time already.  There are roots that have already been digging deep into the soil to give strength for when the leaves open up.  There is already life being nurtured in the darkness of the soil.  We are beginning again... in the middle.

Lord God, let us have the humility to see that you have been at work bringing us to this moment long before we were aware of it, and give us the confidence to trust that you will keep working through all our lives long.  Take our hand.

Because Ideas Cannot Bleed

Because Ideas Cannot Bleed--December 31, 2018

"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]

It really all comes down to this: if we dare to be the kind of people who take Jesus seriously, and who take seriously what Jesus shows us about God, then we are going to have to deal with the messiness of a God who really becomes a walking meat-bag like the rest of us walking meat-bags. 

If that makes you squeamish, well, good--you're paying attention.  But let's not pretend we aren't walking meat-bags ourselves.  And at the heart of the Christian faith is the notion that God is neither embarrassed nor afraid to fully take on all the gross, messy, sometimes icky, sometimes smelly, sometimes hungry, sometimes tired reality of being a walking meat-bag like us.  That's what the idea of the "Incarnation" is all about, and so, in a very real sense, that's what Christmas was all about: the entry of God in a new way that fully embraces our meat-bag existence... by becoming a part of it.

This seems really important to the letter writer, John. He 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. It seems "beneath" a respectable religion to suggest a God who really traffics in the fragile, smelly life of human meat-bags.  Good thing that the God of the Scriptures has never really been all that interested in being a part of a respectable religion.

And like I say, against all of the protests of the respectable religious folks, 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.  "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 by going "all the way down," so to speak, embodied in one of our lives--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, the One who comes wearing our flesh without shame, the one who does not apologize to be embodied like us.

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.

In the Fullness of Time

In The Fullness of Time--December 28, 2018

"But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children." [Gal. 4:4-5]

Terrible things happen in the world sometimes.

God is not caught off guard by them.

Both of these are true, as hard as it is to hold them together.

In fact, both together are what the child in the manger is all about.  And without them, we run the risk of sentimentalizing Christmas into mush.

We cannot simply cover over the evil in our world with a slogan announcing that "God loves us" and ignore the fact that so often we feel as though our world has been abandoned.  And we cannot chirp back easy defenses for God to resolve the tension that comes from believing in a God who is both good and almighty in a world where goodness sometimes seems so utterly impotent. (The book of Job will teach us that, too--Job's friends all offer explanations and defenses for God in the face of evil, and in the end God seems to affirm Job's angry questioning of the silent heavens.  So let us not pretend that the Bible forbids us from bringing the hard questions right in God's face.) So, determined to be utterly honest about the tragedies of our world and our lives, we still come to this Word from Galatians looking for God to speak good news--and not just generically nice news, but genuinely good news that can meet us in this moment and this situation.

Paul here sketches out God's way of dealing with the ever-present tragedy in our world, and it has two edges to it.  First, God's way of engaging the  evil of  the world  (evil which is made all the more palpable because the Law points it out to us) is to come into the world among us--"when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son."  It has been the claim of Christians from the beginning that this Son is no less than God, too, so God's way of dealing with evil is not simply to wave a wand from outside the evil, Deus ex machina style, nor is it to simply send a heavenly employee to represent God in the world.  None other than God-in-the-flesh enters into the same world in which we live and suffer and weep with those who weep.  We may become impatient as we wait for the "fullness of time," but the Christian story hinges on a God who enters into the story, into the world, into the face of evil--not just in Jesus (although most definitively in Jesus), but all along.

Now at the same time, the Christian story insists that God meets us in the pit, so to speak, in order to do something.  Jesus comes as one "born of a woman, born under the law" in order to redeem those who are under the power and curse of the law--that is, all of us--in order to make us children of God.  This is an important point--God doesn't just impotently sit with us crying in the pit, sorry that nothing more can be done.  (Sometimes, it is all we can do, as believers in community, to sit with someone who is suffering and weep with them, and that is perhaps enough for us to do.  But God has more in mind.)  The story of the Christian faith announces that God is not afraid of being in the pit with us, but that God is then determined to bring this world out of the pit, to heal it, not just to weep over its sickness.  The God of our story is more than a big gooey ball of feeling.  Our story is of a God who acts, who really and truly acts in history, and in our presents.  Paul dares to say that the central point at which God's suffering and God's acting meet to heal this whole world is in the human flesh of Jesus.  But Paul yet affirms that this God is still suffering and acting in and with and under this world.  

And so we will call on the living God to do both for us--perhaps it seem audacious to call on God both to act and to suffer, but it seems that it is precisely what God would have us do.

Lord Jesus, We give this day into your hands because it is all we know to do. We trust that they will be strong enough to bear us up and carry us through present trouble, even as we know they still bear the scars of weakness and of troubles past, taken on for us. Hold us, and all who grieve this day, always close in your strong embrace, with those same arms ever outstretched to us in love. We pray to be held there, even in the life-worn arms of those people through whom you love us, too. We ask it, Lord, in your own strong-and-weak name.

Open Eyes and Doors

Open Eyes and Doors--December 26, 2018

"While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave born to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them..." [Luke 2:6-7]

We made no room for them.  We were unwilling, or unable, to give up an inch of space for the child. And yet... he came anyway.

This, I think, is the real wonder of the story of the birth of the Christ.  Humanity makes no room for the intrusion of God, but it doesn't stop God from coming among us.  Nobody could set aside a private space in the house for Mary to have her baby, so the basement-level garage where they kept the animals at night was the best anyone could do.  And yet... God doesn't cancel the plans, or refuse an appearance, or go look to some other city with a more respectable set of accommodations.  God comes...anyway.  The Christ is born... anyway.

We could get sidetracked chasing down the precise specifics of what kind of place the child was born in, but let's not lose the forest for the trees here.  Yes, it is true that there probably wasn't an "inn" because the word Luke uses here that often gets translated "no room in the inn" is really the word for "guest room" like the upper room where an adult Jesus will have his last Passover.  And yes, it is also true that 1st-century homes in the hill country of Judea were most likely to have been built with a ground-floor space where the animals were kept at night both for protection and warmth.  And, indeed, it seems hard to imagine that if Mary and Joseph were coming to their own family's hometown that no relatives would have taken them in for their stay.  So, sure, it's more likely that Mary and Joseph are staying with relatives who have done the best they could to offer at least a semi-private space once the contractions started, and with a whole house full of guests, the best that they could offer would have been the lower-level area where the animals fed at night.  But whether it was the shed or the garage or a Motel 6, when the time finally came, there was no private place available for the child to be born... and yet, the birth happens anyway.

And in a larger sense, this is the whole Christian story: where human beings think they are too busy, or too important, to set aside space for the divine to enter in, God doesn't just give up on us.  God isn't stopped, or offended, or upset, that there is no private suite in the fanciest hotel or maternity ward at Bethlehem General.  God doesn't get huffy, or self-pitying, about how no one will make any room.  And Christ does not stomp off with arms crossed like a petulant child grumbling that no one has made a big enough deal about his arrival. God doesn't feel threatened by our lack of pomp and circumstance.  God comes near... anyway.

Most of the time, we don't realize we are pushing God out when we are doing it.  You really don't hear villainous shadowy figures saying, "Aha! Here's our nefarious plan--let's keep God out!  We'll stop him!  We'll tell him there's no room!  Take that!"  Most of the time, we are simply convinced that we just don't have the time, or the space, and we can't be troubled to make any more room. And most of the time, God's presence into our lives doesn't look very much like what Respectable Religious people are looking for anyway.  If you are assuming that God will walk in to the sound of trumpets and organ music while a parade of people in matching robes processes in to clear the way, you will miss the arrival when it turns out God shows up in a poor young couple looking for a quiet corner away from public view where a young mother can nurse her newborn. 

The thing is, Christ keeps showing up in all sorts of places we never bothered looking.  We didn't expect a manger, but there he is anyway.  Our inability to recognize him in our midst doesn't stop him from coming.  And our busy-ness with other things does not keep him from entering.

The nativity says something about the relentlessness of God to keep showing up when we are dense and dim-witted and do not recognize who it is that has just been laid in our spare food trough.

To be fair, you and I probably don't intend to ignore or miss the presence of Christ among us.  None of us do. We are more likely to overlook the presence of God, not because God is being "kept out" of anywhere (you can't really "keep God out" anyway), but because we do not know what we should have our eyes open for. If we feel like we cannot see God, it is not because someone has taken God "out" of the world in some kind of diabolical conspiracy (evil does not have that kind of power over God, after all), but rather that our vision is inadequate to see the Mystery in the manger, the Christ in the commonplace, and the Almighty in the faces of anybodies.

Today, let us have our eyes open--God comes to us here and now, regardless of our ability to recognize the arrival, and with or without our permission.  But it just seems an awful shame to miss because we weren't looking.

So...keep your eyes open today, and your doors as well. The ones  from out of town seeking a place of their own among us just might be bringing the very presence of God.

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see you where you are today, and open our eyes and doors to you.

The Direction of Hope

The Direction of Hope--December 21, 2018

"In days to come the mountain of the LORD's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.' For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." [Isaiah 2:2-4]

Let me ask you a question.  Why on earth do you supposed the prophet shares this vision of a future day of peace before it happens?  Why, if this words have come from God, does God promise people that there will come a time when war will have ended, when weapons will be reforged into useful tools for the farm, and when all the nations will be welcomed into God's holy temple to learn God's ways?  I mean, let's assume for a moment that God is intentional in whispering such visions to the prophets, and that their oracles and writings were not just the random firing of synapses in their brains, so why give this glimpse at all, if it is a picture of a future day?

Well, maybe let's start with a thought experiment a little bit closer to home.  I have two kids--seven and five--and they know that Christmas is coming.  Truthfully, they know in large part because their mom and I keep telling them so.  They are surely picking up on the cues around them at school and at the stores, but we are the ones they ask daily about how many days it will be until Christmas, and we are the ones reminding them about what will happen when Christmas comes.  They are fully aware of a coming day when presents will be exchanged, they'll be off of school, and our whole family will be together around a crackling fire while the jazz piano of  A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack plays in the background (go ahead and try to tell me that isn't the best Christmas album of all time!).  My children know, because we, their parents, have described to them images and mental snapshots of what it will be like when Christmas Day comes.

Now, here's a little bit of a funny thing: the more we tell them about Christmas, and the more they are aware of how close it is coming, the more and more excited they get.  They get fired up with energy, they don't want to sleep, they want the Christmas lights on more and more, and they get basically consumed with Christmas excitement--which also means they are harder to corral for bedtime, harder to get wound down at the end of the day, and harder to get to do their homework or eat their vegetables, since they are so focused on hot chocolate, gingerbread cookies, and presents.

So why do we, the grown-ups in the house, tell our kids about the coming of Christmas?  Isn't it in our self-interest as parents to keep them from getting so worked up about it?  Aren't we setting ourselves up for additional nights with impatient kids who insist they "can't wait for Christmas" and extra fuss while we count down the days?  Why bother giving them the picture ahead of time of what will happen at Christmas?

Well, in a sense, it's because we actually want them to get excited about Christmas.  The day, the celebration, the story, the time, all of it--and yes, even the presents--we want them to enjoy that day.  But also, I am convinced, we do it because we think that knowing about what will happen at Christmas has the power to shape what they are doing now.  Not in a "be-good-or-else-Santa-won't-bring-you-any-presents" kind of way.  But it's more that we want our kids to begin to act now in light of what will happen come Tuesday morning. We are getting the house ready, we are thinking of each other and what kinds of gifts we are giving to others, we are helping support other people in our community to be able to provide presents for their kids, and we are getting excited for the arrival of family from far away.  In a sense, we are teaching our kids what to get excited about, to give their excitement and their hope a certain shape.  We are teaching them, for example, that it's worth getting excited about seeing family we haven't seen for a while.  It's worth getting excited about giving to someone else.  It's worth getting excited about everyone being around the table.  We tell our kids about what's coming at Christmas in order to give their hope a particular direction--to know what to be looking forward to, and to help them align their lives around that, not just when the 25th rolls around, but in the mean time.

So let's go back to Isaiah and his vision of peoples from all over creation streaming into the very heart of Israel, into the capital city of Jerusalem, and in fact, into the very "house of the God of Jacob," the Temple.  What sort of image is this meant to be?  Are Isaiah's hearers supposed to be... afraid?  Concerned?  Defensive?  Excited?  Hopeful? Confused?  Indifferent?  And this business about beating their weapons into farming tools--are the people supposed to react with disgust and outrage? "Why will someone be taking our weapons from us? Don't let them get our spears, boys!" Or does the prophet want his hearers to be on board with God's sword-to-plowshare policy?

Or to put it differently, what is the direction of the hope Isaiah wants to point his hearers in?  

I think it's supposed to be obvious: Isaiah sees this vision of the future, not as something to be afraid of, but something to get excited about.  More than that, it's something to re-align your life around now.  Isaiah tells the people ahead of time, "There's coming a day when all peoples will be drawn to learn God's ways here!" in order to get them excited about the idea of many nations coming to join them to practice justice and mercy.  Isaiah wants the people to get excited about not needing swords and spears anymore when all these foreign nations come streaming in to their capital.  

Think about it--you could imagine some other voice in Isaiah's time wanting to twist those words into a message of fear: "Look out, or else we'll all be overrun by foreigners streaming into our country, right into our very temple, and we won't have any swords or spears to stop them!"  You could imagine some false prophet taking the same images and trying to use them for the exact opposite purpose of Isaiah's intention.  You could imagine someone trying to redirect the people's hope to manipulate them into being afraid of all those nations coming and to fear not having their swords and spears when it happens.  But that's not what Isaiah is trying to do.  Like me getting my kids excited about Christmas, the prophet wants to get the people excited about God's promised future--the coming of people from far away, the surprise of good gifts, the presence of love.  Isaiah--and the God who prompts him to speak--has an agenda, a particular message, and a certain direction of the hope he is holding out.

This is how we live as the people of God: with a certain hope, a particular future that pulls at us, and glimpses from the dreams of prophets of God's Reign that welcomes all.  If our hope had a different direction, we would see the world differently.  If the prophets said, "Keep those other nations away from getting to our capital!" or "Look out--someone is going to try to convince you beat your sword into a plowshare!" we would become fearful of the idea of many peoples coming into God's very temple, and we would be opposed to this spears-into-pruning-hooks program.  But because of the particular direction of our hope, we are being taught to that these are good things: it is a good thing in Isaiah's mind for all the nations of the world to come streaming into the very heart of their nation, their capital, and their temple.  It is a good thing not to have to learn war anymore.    If we can dare to let that trajectory of hope shape our minds and our hearts now, we will live differently now.

Why does a prophet like Isaiah give a glimpse of this future day?  To teach us what to get excited about, rather than afraid of, now, and so that we will live in the present in light of a promised day when everyone from all corners of the world find a welcome to God's holiest ground, and when we are finally done with needing to carry around things to kill each other with.

Such a future is worth thinking about... talking about... and living for.  That is the direction of our hope.

Lord God, keep raising up voices to give us glimpses of your new creation, so that we will know what to hope for, and arrange our lives in light of it.

Confession of a Hopeful Cynic

Confession of a Hopeful Cynic--December 20, 2018

[Mary said:]

"[God] has helped his servant Israel,

    in remembrance of his mercy,

 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

   to Abraham and to his descendants forever." [Luke 1:54-55]

Forgive me for having learned the cynicism of my generation, but I do not trust most big-name important people to keep the big public promises they make.  Not anymore.

I don't believe the promises politicians make--not when they are elected, and certainly not when they are running for office.  

I don't believe the promises institutions make--for example, I sure don't expect Social Security to be around for me when I retire, and I don't think of the money that comes out of my paycheck to fund Social Security as "mine" that will come back to me.  I just assume it is gone and is paying for someone else's retirement now.  But I don't believe it will be there for me when it is my turn.  I don't believe that promise will be kept.

I don't the believe the promises of advertisers that their product--whatever it is--will make my life better, or my outlook happier, or my kids better behaved.  I just assume that advertisers believer their job is to tell me things I want to hear rather than to make claims they can actually back up with evidence.

And, again, forgive me if this sounds especially cynical, but I don't believe the promises we all insist we are serious about when we as a society say things like, "Never again."  A school shooting in Sandy Hook six years ago this past week made everyone say, "Never again," which was a follow-up to the "Never again" after Paduka... and Columbine... and so on and so on.  And here we are six years after Sandy Hook with our "Never agains" thrown back in our faces after Las Vegas and Pulse Night Club and Tree of Life Synagogue and Charleston, and too many more to list.  For that matter, we all said, "Never again" after allowing the Rwandan genocide to happen (which was supposed to be the lesson we had learned after the Holocaust taught of to say "Never again"), and yet the Rohingya people, the starving children of Yemen, and the devastated towns of Syria all reveal that we don't really mean "Never again"--we mean something more like, "We wish this wouldn't happen, but we are not really going to do much to change our current actions in order to prevent other people from facing this same tragedy all over again."

Look, the bottom line for me, cynic that I am, is that we human beings are crooked schemers when it comes to our promises.  We talk a good game, and we may even have the best of intentions, but we are terrible at actually living up to the commitments we make, especially when we realize there will be a sacrifice involved in keeping our promises.  We might do a half-decent job keeping our promises when we are getting something out of them, but that's not really how a promise is supposed to work, is it?  Commitments aren't meant to be fair-weather arrangements that are only valid when we want them to be.  And yet, time after time in my decades of life, I have been let down by the public figures, from government to television to the editorial page, who talk big and do not keep their promises.  After enough disappointment, you just stop expecting anyone to actually do what they have committed to do.  You expect people to bail out when things get difficult--because so many times, that's what they do.

And that is what makes Mary's concluding insights about God from here in her song so powerful.  Mary sees that God is faithful in keeping promises.  Even before her baby is born--which means even before Mary can see what her son Jesus will do and say and accomplish--she sees his very existence as the keeping of a divine promise.  God had promised a savior to deliver God's people, and it had been a very, very long time.  But Mary sees that God is not one to bail out, even when we make it difficult for God.  Even when we keep wandering off and walking away, God does not give up on us or shirk responsibility for keeping promises.  And more than that, Mary knows that God does not back out of commitments just because it gets difficult or we make it more complicated.  God's keeping of promises does not depend on our worthiness or deserving, but simply on God's commitment to be faithful.  

And that, dear friends, is honestly the only thing that keeps me going some days.  I don't have a solid trust in my elected leaders or the institutions and systems they manage to keep their promises.  I don't trust the "better angels" of our nature to stay the course with the difficult commitments we have made, because I have seen us collectively bail out when things get costly or painful.  And I don't even trust in my own ability to keep my own promises perfectly, because I know I am constantly failing to live up to my best intentions and spoken words.  But I do trust God to keep promises.

I trust the God of whom Mary sings to keep every promise God makes, because she saw it in her own baby--the promises made to Abraham and Sarah, to Isaac and Rebekah, to Jacob and Rachel and Leah, to Moses and Miriam and Ruth and David and all the rest.  God keeps promises, and so even when we are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled, we can take God's promise to the bank.  We can live now as though God's promises are sure... because they are.  That doesn't mean God is obligated to do everything I want God to do--that was never the promise.  But when God makes a promise, God keeps it.  And when we complicate or confuse things, God does not walk out.  That faithfulness is strong enough to keep us going, even when the talking heads and purveyors of hot air on television let us down.  I don't trust any other big name or important person to keep their word, as much as I wish I could--but God, yep.  

God is faithful.  

God keeps promises.  

Call me a hopeful cynic, but knowing that changes how we wait now for them to be kept.

Lord God, ground us so completely in your faithfulness that we can stake our lives on your promises, even when it is hard to believe.

Look Down Here (Poem and Picture 017)--December 18, 2018

Look Down Here
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 017--December 18, 2018

Turns out
twenty feet up on a ladder
leaning on the brick wall
of a church
doesn't bring you any closer to God
than staying on the ground.
That's the miracle, really
and the scandal:
the divine will not be held
"up there"
in heaven or over steeples.

Look down here.

#seeChristhere

The Moon Was a Baseball (Poem and Picture 016)--December 17, 2018

The Moon Was a Baseball
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 016--December 17, 2018

For one December afternoon
the moon was a baseball
caught in a tree,
eighty quintillion tons of rock
hung on a bare branch.

Such immensity and brilliance

seemingly held
resting on a bit of wood,
like the Incarnation of God
cradled in a borrowed manger.

#seeChristhere

God Says Checkmate

God Says Checkmate--December 19, 2018

[Mary said...] 

"His mercy is for those who fear him,

    from generation to generation.

 He has shown strength with his arm;

    he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

    and lifted up the lowly;

 he has filled the hungry with good things,

    and sent the rich away empty...." [Luke 1:50-53]

Mary's a smart lady. Of course, she knows that somewhere in some imperial palace in Rome, Caesar Augustus is still sitting on his throne, issuing press statements about how his ascension to power is "good news" for "all the world" (see the famous Priene inscription for more on that).  

Mary knows that the angel who surprised her with a message about a baby didn't disappear to go lead an army of the heavenly host to overthrow the Empire's occupation of Jerusalem.

Mary knows that her pregnancy did not, as if by magic, raid the imperial treasuries for some 1st century Robin-Hood-type to go distributing to the slaves and peasants around the Mediterranean.  

She knows, in other words, that the child she carries inside her is not going to fight the way the world expects--with swords and armies and big stacks of cash.  Mary is nobody's fool: when she sings about God having scattered the proud and taking down the powerful, she is under no illusion that some kind of violent revolt would be underway. And yet, she truly is convinced that the universe is a different place because of the baby in her belly.  Mary knows that God has already won a revolutionary victory that even rejects the rules the world has been playing by. The empires of the day have been playing checkers, and Mary knows that God is playing three-dimensional chess.

See, here's the real revolution that the God of Mary's Song has begun: instead of just raising up one more "new" empire to fight with the old empire and then take its place on top, only to be thrown off by another newcomer after a century or so, God's way of ruling the world is through intentional divine weakness and holy subversive vulnerability.  God has unmasked the impotent bluster of Caesar (who really has a thing for getting his name inscribed on buildings, the poor pathetic imperial sad-sack), not by sending an army to kill him, but by asking the permission of a poor, brown-skinned woman from a forgotten backwater town to bear a child.  God has undermined the heft and might of the Empire, not by backing a competing nation's army to win against Rome on the battlefield, but taking on the humanity of a child who will have to flee for his life as a refugee while he is still in diapers because of the dangers in his home country.  God deflates the puffed-up egos of all the high and mighty, not by bullying them around with an even bigger booming voice or lightning bolts from the sky, but in the quiet and confident dignity of a song like Mary's, who will not be made to tremble in front of the Roman Eagle or give her allegiance to its puppet king Herod.

God is not only undermining the powers of the day, but God is even demolishing the ways those powers do business.  God doesn't fight bullies with more pushing and shoving--God comes in the vulnerability of a baby.  God doesn't threaten or cajole in order to make people afraid--God takes the side of an unarmed, unpretentious Jewish girl experiencing morning sickness for the first time in her life.  God doesn't overpower the arrogant and the proud in order to defeat them--God defeats the whole notion of needing to "overpower" anybody in the first place.

And this is precisely why Mary is able to sing about God's actions like they are already accomplished.  This is what makes her song more than naïve idealism and wishful thinking: she isn't dreaming that God will one day send a new empire to replace the old one.  She sees, clearly and without illusion, that God has undermined even the old ways of defining "winners" and "greatness."  God will not be drawn into some kind of petty contest with Caesar Augustus to play a round of "Who is bigger and badder?"  That would give too much legitimacy to Caesar.  So instead, God has just rejected the whole way that Caesar evaluates himself--God has rejected the nonsense of that kind of childish measuring, and instead comes in the amazing power of intentional divine weakness.  That undercuts any of the potency of Rome's bluster and bragging, because it's like God has said, "You have all these armies, and all this wealth, and all this hoopla... so what?"

And instead, God has already won the victory by rejecting Rome's terms and refusing to play by Caesar's rules.  Caesar has said, "King me!" to the world, and God has responded in turn by saying, "Ahem... Checkmate."  The fact that the God of Mary's Song will not stoop to Caesar's level is the very evidence that the game is already up.  Caesar wants a fight on the Empire's terms--the use of armies and coercion, of centurions and shows of force--and God's refusal to engage on those terms takes all the wind out of the Empire's sails.  It's rather like watching two children squabbling, and as one tries to goad and provoke, every so often the other will do the smart thing and refuse to get drawn in.  Well, God is always the smart one... and Mary knows it.  Her song is about a God who has already won the victory by not fighting on Rome's terms, but saving the world in the holy, subversive vulnerability of a child born to a peasant girl on the margins of the Empire.

And in that sense, even though empires still come and go, and even though new Caesars replace the old ones with bluster that is just as loud, just as obnoxious, and just as bad at covering up their insecurities, God is still triumphant over all the empires, all the "powerful" on their thrones, all the puffed up and proud.  And God has still given a victory to all the nobodies, the poor, the lowly, and the hungry, because God has come as one of them--a needy baby boy laid in a food trough on the run from law enforcement.

Mary senses that God's kind of victory is different.  She is, after all, a smart lady.

Lord God, open our eyes to the reality of your victory, even when the world doesn't recognize it.  Let us live in the reality your servant Mary sang about, the reality your Son brought to light.

The Already-ness of Grace

The Already-ness of Grace--December 18, 2018

"And Mary said, 

    'My soul magnifies the Lord, 

       and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

   for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

     Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

  for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

     and holy is his name....'" [Luke 1:46-49]

She hasn't even had the baby yet... but she knows she is blessed already.

These words, the opening few lines of what we sometimes call "Mary's Song," or the Magnificat (because of the first word of the song in Latin), are set while Mary is still pregnant with the child announced by the angel.  And yet she talks like someone who has already won the lottery, got the promotion, and received her Christmas bonus all at once.  She sings like the goodness of God to her is an already accomplished fact, even before the birth, even before she first holds her child, even before she gets to bring him home.

And that is perhaps precisely the point.  There is an "already-ness" to grace that makes joy possible even before the good things we are looking forward to.  There is a sense that blessing can begin now and become even fuller and more complete in the future, even while it is still completely true to recognize it right now in the present.

For Mary, before she ever heard her baby cry and had her eyes fill with happy, holy tears, before she held her child, and before they could finally rest easily in their own home together past the fears of Herod and the strangeness of being refugees in Egypt, she already sense that "the Mighty One" had done "great things" for her, in all of her ordinariness.  That made every moment that followed, every other minute spent with her son, every sigh of relief when the labor was over, and every smile she got from her child all the more grace.  Before any of the good memories are made, she knows she is blessed just having been chosen.

And maybe this is the real wonder: Mary knows this was not a competition or a pageant.  She was not chosen by God because of her moral character, her religious devotion, her physical attractiveness, her political influence, her dizzying intellect, or her accumulated wealth.  What she brings is, as she names it, her "lowliness"--the fact that nobody else treats her like she's worthy of notice. She brings her ordinariness--no bargaining, no deal-making, no quid-pro-quo, and no promises of future favors or pay-offs to God. She just is who she is... and God chooses her in the midst of her ordinariness.  That is precisely what grace is all about--the way God gives, to our eyes recklessly, without regard for earning or future returns on the investment.  Mary knows that God has revealed the priorities of the divine in her being chosen--that God is not nearly so impressed with our status, influence, or wealth as we like to think, and even that God doesn't simply hand out good things on the basis of outstanding religiosity.  God just chooses us in our ordinariness, rather than on the basis of what we can do for God, how we could pay God back, or how impressive we are.  We are chosen, like Mary is chosen, simply because God delights in us, while we are also still stinkers at the same time.

And when you know that you are loved apart from how "useful" or "influential" or "powerful" anybody else thinks you are, well, it feels like a "great thing" has been done for you.  That's the start of Mary's awareness of grace.  She is blessed already, because she sees that God hasn't picked her for what anybody else would have seen in her, but simply because God chooses to love her this way.  And compared to the way the world operates--where everything is about currying future favors, leveraging influence, and trading transactions--God's choice to be born into Mary's life is a sign of God's rejection of the conventional wisdom and ways of doing business.  God isn't wowed by the people whose names are in giant gold letters on their buildings, and God isn't impressed with the folks who are at the top of the Forbes list.  God doesn't play the game of impressing anyway.  God chooses Mary the way love always does--as she is, and without regard for "getting" something in return.  That up-ends the old order of things, and it begins a new kind of order--a new kind of Reign, one that is not dependent on earning or impressing or intimidating or threatening, but simply on the abundant goodness of a God who chooses us in our ordinariness.

So even before the baby is born--while the child is still in the womb, in fact--Mary knows it is a wondrous thing just that she has been chosen by God.  The grace has already begun, even before the manger and the shepherds and the whole heavenly host show up.

The same is true for us, too--before we get to glory, before resurrection and new creation and gates of pearl and all the rest, we are graced.  God has seen us--you, and me, and this whole mess of a world--and called us beloved, chosen, and precious, just as we are, in all of our ordinariness.  We have been chosen, called, beloved, and claimed, not because of what we have done or avoided doing, not because of what we will do or how much we will contribute, not because of the size of our estate or the strength of our influence, but just as we are, without regard for what God "gets" in return.  We are simply beloved.  And before we even get to other ways that God's goodness shows up in our lives, that makes us already blessed.

That is the already-ness of grace.

Lord God, thank you for love that meets us and cherishes us as we are, in all of our ordinariness.  Make us able to stop trying to pretend to be more than we are, or less than we are, and instead simply to abide in your love for us all.