I Needed This Christmas

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." (John 1:5 NRSV)

"I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ."                    (Philippians 1:6, NRSV)

I needed this season.  Yes, I love the Christmas tree anchoring the great room, and the nutcrackers standing guard.  I love the nativity set handmade by a friend, populating the mantle.  I love making use of the Christmas dishes and the extra sweets and the holiday playlist emanating from the speakers.  I love the anticipation of cards from loved ones reconnecting the gift of our lives.  I love the memories stirred reanimating people and places and stories from the past.  All that, and wrapping paper and bows never hurt anything, either.  

But none of that names the dimension of the season for which I only now realize I was desperate.  The darkness, I now can name, had overcome me.  

It is, by now, a familiar litany:

• The virus and the ensuing quarantine that have in countless ways stood over us like a severe parent with the constant refrain, "you can't do that."  The illnesses of friends.  The deaths.  So many deaths.
• The economic anxiety that has gripped so many as businesses have shuttered, jobs have been put on hold, while the rent still comes due and the nourishment and medicines still need taking.
• The racial acrimony that is a virus all its own, killing our souls and too many of our neighbors just as savagely as COVID-19.  And the tragic recognition that we don't even seem to be looking for a vaccine to "cure" this social, moral pestilence.
• The political rancor that long ago abandoned the microphone of honest and earnest debate, in favor of the boxing ring where we simply intend to bludgeon our adversaries into blood-covered unconsciousness.  
• The "Poor-Loser-in Chief" who persists in a toxic cocktail of self-aggrandizement and outright sedition.  Persuasively, so it seems.
• A church that, through the years and increasingly today, too often squanders its energies on its own popularity and "fun," and the insularity of enjoying its own salvation to the neglect of the incarnation it is called to be.

It has all been just about too much.  

It is certainly true that the darkness is incomplete.  I am literally surrounded by love and life in ways too plentiful to enumerate.  Unlike so many I know; unlike so many in the world, I live amidst an embarrassment of riches - health, comfort, shelter, food in the pantry, and medical insurance.  I know this.  I am humbled by this.  I am persistently challenged by this to be a better, more faithful steward of these assets to which I am not entitled but of which I find myself in possession; resources and opportunities I have "earned" only by virtue of a constellation of circumstances on which I have had minimal influence.  

Increasingly, however, over the recent months and years these brilliant beams have seemed more like a penlight by which I have been trying to read while huddled under a blanket, as the battery gradually dimmed.  

I haven't been in a good space.

I suppose I have to admit that I drifted far off the path.  

My soul got out of focus.

In ways of which I repent, I lost the faith...

...the faith reasserted this Christmas, with candle flames shared and lifted high, that, "what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."

Darkness, after all, is nothing new.  My particular darkness is hardly novel.  Poverty, disease, xenophobia, despotic and self-serving leaders are no strangers to the human family.  John's assertion of persistent light has never been an easy one.  Or obvious.  Or, I now realize, personal.  How is it that I have never heard it for the radical affirmation it is?  And ponder, prayerfully, what it has to say to my particular state of mind?  I needed John to remind me, this year especially, that we do not - dare not - ignore the myriad blights; we simply refuse to grant them sway.  Darkness, yes, but the darkness does not overcome it.

That determined affirmation, along with Paul's confident trust that the One who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.  

I needed this season, more than ever - more, perhaps, than I even realized.  

A reality check, of sorts.  

Or perhaps it has been the Spirit as obstetrician, slapping my infantile faith into cries of new life.

Let the New Year begin.

I Wonder...Out Under the Sky

It was there but a brief time – proudly plain in the southwestern sky as evening settled into darkness, then gone an hour later; descended, we assumed, beneath the horizon for someone else’s viewing pleasure.  It was intriguing, yes, but why all the interest?  Novelty is surely part of the answer.  This grand romance between Jupiter and Saturn won’t happen again in my lifetime, so there is that.

 

Coming as it does, however, on this Christmas week, perhaps the wonderment has to do with more than novelty.  Aren’t we, after all, always looking for signs?  Of what, we never really know, and signs are best read in retrospect, but we are always…wondering.

 

“I wonder as I wander out under the sky…”

 

Earlier in the day we were pondering the various birth stories in the Gospels, especially the lack of one in Mark’s account.  His is likely the more honest telling.  Matthew’s fanciful story of the Magi notwithstanding, who would have imagined or predicted much significance in the ordinary birth of an irrelevant baby to an irrelevant couple from an irrelevant town?  Mary, according to the stories, “kept and pondered these things in her heart,” but that isn’t unusual for a new mother.  Nobody else was likely taking notes.  It was only later – decades later – that people would have started to care about the beginnings of the man about whom they had come to care.  Hence, the “backfilling” of those natal blanks.

 

If, then, we completely missed the significance of that obscure 1^st century Palestinian birth – even if understandably so – it’s only natural I suppose that we would loathe the thought of missing the significance of other potentially earth-shaking convergences.  If it will mean that something holy is afoot, according to the psalmist, when “justice and peace kiss each other” (Psalm 85), then perhaps there is something consequential about Jupiter and Saturn kissing as well?  It would be nice if it were more than mere planetary grinding.

 

A sign of new global health, perhaps.

 

Or the dawn of a new age of sanity.

 

At the very least, perhaps it signals the rebirth of curiosity to fill the void resulting from the erosion created by our leaden certitude about that which simply isn’t true.

 

Maybe that’s why we all trouped outside last night and looked up into the sky.  

 

Hoping…

 

…for even a little fresh light.

Who knows, after all, just what might be being born?

 

 

The Precipitation of Awe

Some keep the Sabbath going to church
by Emily Dickinson

Some keep the Sabbath going to church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I’m going, all along.

 

Loving Without Bared Teeth

We experienced our first episode of puppy “resource guarding” here at the epicenter of puppy training 24/7.  We were expecting such challenges between the puppy and the older dogs, but painfully Cai perceived the threat to his chew bone to be Lori.  Ouch!  “Resource guarding” is that almost reflexive protection, via a snarl or a baring of teeth or a quick snap, of a highly valued object - such as a toy or food or the aforementioned chew bone.   In essence, it is an act of communicating, “This is mine.  I have it and you don’t, and you can’t have it.”  

According to one of the new volumes in our training library, “resource guarding, like so many other behavior challenges, is a natural, normal dog behavior that just isn’t acceptable in human society.” (Pat Miller in The Power of Positive Dog Training, 2nd Edition, pp. 220-221).

Our dwindling bandaid supply confirms that assessment.  It isn’t a behavior we can or intend to tolerate.  It isn’t a permissible style of interaction for a community of humans and canines that share a common space.

Sadly, the human community at-large hasn’t adopted for itself that simple but essential wisdom.  We are resource guarders.  With seasonal exceptions, signaled by the Salvation Army bells outside of grocery stores, our primary business is taking care of ourselves; hoarding our own bones; hovering over our dinner plates.

It is a persistent pattern that prompts no small amount of dismay in a guy like me who has spent his entire life in the church, first being taught and then proclaiming a very different character of life.  This year the evidence has been acute.  As we noted in our annual Advent reflection, “Each passing week of 2020 has confronted us with mounting and irrefutable evidence of how little skill we have for living together as a people, as a culture, as a country and world.  Two thousand years after Jesus elevated love of neighbor to the second highest commandment, and told the parable of the “Good Samaritan” by way of illustration, we reveal how much we still have to learn about discipleship.”

It isn’t just our behavior.  Our theology has gotten twisted up as well, though which came first - our snapping or our believing - is hard to say.  As Richard Rohr recently noted, “The common Christian understanding that Jesus came to save us by a cosmic evacuation plan is really very individualistic, petty, and even egocentric. It demands no solidarity with anything except oneself. We whittled the great Good News down into what Jesus could do for us personally and privately, rather than celebrating God’s invitation to participate in God’s universal creative work” (Daily Meditation, 12/7/2020).

For all our talk of “love,” we demonstrate little comprehension of it, or facility with it.  Our literary luminaries recognize the problem.  Leo Tolstoy, for example, once observed that, “Love is real only when a person can sacrifice himself for another person. Only when a person forgets himself for the sake of another, and lives for another creature, only this kind of love can be called true love, and only in this love do we see the blessing and reward of life. This is the foundation of the world.”

Of course Tolstoy didn’t simply make that up.  Long before him, the apostle Paul admonished, “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4).

Even Paul, though, had whispers in his ear.  

It was Jesus, after all, who taught, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise” (Luke 3:11).  And later, still more boldly, he asserted, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

Indeed, our puppy has much to learn about living within a household economy.  As do the rest of us.  There simply aren’t enough bandaids to go around.

Some Evil is Easy to Name - And We Must

 "The Democrats, the news media - if the leftists, if scientists, professors have been working secretly with the Chinese Communist Party, then line 'em up against the wall and shoot them.  That's what you do with them."

--Rev. Rick Wiles, Senior Pastor of Flowing Streams Church, Florida

A few years ago, during a season of prolific terrorist activity perpetrated by Islamic extremists, many - myself included - wondered where the moderate Muslims were who could step forward and condemn these heinous acts in service to, and in defense of, a different, more honest expression of Islam.  It would be the voices of the moderates, we believed - insiders rather than outsiders - who could best counter and quell the madness of the extremists, and serve the better cause of humankind.

 

My gentle nudging from the sidelines was, I confess, more than a little hypocritical.  I have been a roaring disappointment to colleagues and friends through the years who have chastised me for not more effectively leveraging my voice in service to the common good.  They have a point, although I maintain the conviction that I had a point - at least a methodology - as well.  We choose, after all, our words but also our platforms. 

Suddenly, however, I have to take my own advice.  If it was true for Muslims, it is equally true for Christians.  Moderate Christians are suddenly obligated to speak out against our own who are vilely and publicly ravaging the cause of Christ.  Take a moment to read again the quote at the top of this entry.  Go ahead, reread it.  Ponder it.  Take your time.  I can wait.

Let those words sink in, and filter them through the Gospel message you read in the New Testament.  Surely it doesn't take deep scholarship or hours in prayer to recognize how egregiously oppositional that statement is to the way and words of Jesus.  There is, quite simply, nothing in them that represents the witness of Jesus or the Reign of God to which Jesus constantly pointed.  

 

Nothing.  

 

They could not be further from the Gospel, and it shouldn't be hard for Christians to condemn them for the very articulation of spiritual death that they represent.  

 

Unequivocally.  

Forthrightly.

Steadfastly.

With all due humility.

Earlier this fall, flag-flapping vehicles bearing signs in support of one presidential candidate attempted to run off the road a campaign bus of the opposing candidate.  I am aware that the electoral contest was heated, but surely we can agree that such behavior is unacceptable.  Around the same time, radicals attempted to kidnap a sitting Governor, purportedly to put her on trial for treason and mete out their own form of justice.  Regardless of your partisanship, surely we can agree that such behavior is self-evidently reprehensible, unAmerican, and a fundamental violation of the rule of law.  They represent the early seeds of anarchy; the antithesis of the lofty aspirations of our nation's founders.  We ought to be able to agree on such things, but given the selective silence that ensued, we appear to be too far gone as a citizenry to manage it.

But all of that is a civil matter.  Law enforcement officials should take these matters in hand.  I have no knowledge of the faith persuasion claimed by the perpetrators of either of these earlier atrocities - or if they claim a faith tradition at all.  That's their business.

The assertion at the top of this entry, however, is a different thing.  These sentiments come from the lips of a Christian pastor - at least one who represents himself as such.  They aren't my paraphrase of his words; they are his actual words.  Spoken, I might add, with calm, cool self-assurance.  I copied them verbatim as he said them.  And here is what I would say:  they are an affront to Jesus and everyone who seeks to follow him.  Neither an American, nor a Republican or Democrat, Jesus did not live and die for such blasphemous nonsense as this.  This neither characterizes the "Holy City", nor marks the way there.  It is, to use a good churchy word,  simply heresy.  This is not what scripture teaches.  This is not what Jesus modeled.  This is not the "good news" we were commissioned to proclaim.  This is not the face of Christianity we should want the world to know.  This is the soul's sickness unto death.

 

And every Christian ought to readily say so.  Loudly, and often.

 

It ought to be easy.  

 

Regardless of political persuasion, it ought to be easy.  

Uncharacteristically for me, then, I am saying so.