Monthly Archives: December 2013

New Years Resolution

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Today, just a bit of original poetry.

indexNew Years Resolution

Well 2013,

(or should I call you “Twentythirteen”?)

you had a good run.

The events, memories, touchstones,

too many to now recount

even if I had the desire to recount them all,

were all leading up to this one moment: the clock striking twelve.

And, sure, people who call themselves religious made fools of themselves this past year

as they did in 2012

and even as far back as year 1

(and before then),

but I expect nothing less.  Fear seems not to know that all things can be new

in the new year,

and it continually shows up, right on time, staying long past the party is over, waking up in a haze on your living room floor expecting breakfast.

Fear does that.

Fear of the other, of difference,

fear that “not being right” means failure.

Fear has survived too many years in a row, even past the angel’s cries of “Fear not.”

Fear doesn’t take a hint.

For 2014, I wonder if we can all make this resolution:

Let us hold that someone else’s opinions

beliefs

thoughts

convictions

aren’t threatening to me.  We need not fear them.

Let us instead hold that the only threatening thing in this world is indifference.

And then, maybe, we’ll get somewhere.

2013, you had a good run.  But sometimes the clown car took over the religious circus.

2014, here’s to hoping that you have within you

(and you do, as the incarnation makes clear)

the ability to have it done differently.

Blessed New Year

pt…

 

“Power Sucks” or “Sing the Magnificat Carefully”

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So, I’m going to try my best not to join the chorus Phenom-Power-631of people lamenting Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyers and Beth Moore and the like.  Well, at least not too much.

Needless to say I think they’re all full of it; I don’t think I need to point out to you why that is in any great detail.

But too many in the church are calling them “false prophets” and other such crazy names.  Frankly, I think that’s giving them too much credit.  We shouldn’t call them prophets at all because their message isn’t, in the least, prophetic.  They’re just people trying to make a buck, I think.

No really, I think that’s all they are.  They’re great showmen.  They’re good speakers (not great speakers, mind you).  And they’re good at organizing other people around them.  Natural leaders.

But they’re not prophets.

To be a prophet, to speak prophetically in the historical sense, was to speak truth with some boldness.  It was to speak in such a way that the very powers and systems of the world were shaken, afraid of your message.  This is why Paul speaks of teaching and preaching, “boldly.”  He does so in such a way that the very powers were afraid.

Hence why he ended up in jail so often.  Prophets usually ended up dead because of their message.

I’m pretty certain Olsteen, Meyers, Moore, Dollar, Jakes, and basically the personalities of channels 460-480 on my cable package will end up in jail.

For tax fraud.

Not for speaking too boldly against the powers of this world.

See, their message is one of power: God wants you to be powerful.

Powerful bank accounts.  Powerful influence.  Prestige.  Powerful enough to look at a house and “claim it” before you can afford it (aka “The Joel Osteen Story” coming to a Lifetime time-slot near you).

Powerful enough to actually believe that Living Proof Ministries would be an attractive name for a company that publishes “educational material” written by someone with no scholarly training in Biblical history or interpretation (that’s Beth Moore’s ministry outfit, in case you were wondering).

I need the living proof that she’s qualified to write material…

Here’s where the cognitive dissonance comes for this Christian: Jesus, in his life, in his birth, in his death, in his interactions, was not powerful by any worldly definition of power.

In fact, the song we’ll be singing in my faith community on Sunday, The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-56), talks about how God throws down the mighty from their thrones, fills up the hungry but sends the rich away empty, scatters the proud, and causes all sorts of ruckus for those who play by the power rules of the world.

Look, Jesus was a homeless man, born to an unwed mother.  He had no job, lived off of the kindness of others, and died when he was a young man in the most horrible way possible.

By all accounts, Jesus was a failure.

And apparently Meyers’ and Olsteen’s and Jakes’ message to Jesus would be, “God’s got a blessing just waiting for you!  Just wait and see!  God doesn’t put up with people who are down on themselves, who don’t think they can. You are powerful in God!”

To which Jesus replies, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Power sucks.  It sucks the life out of us.  It sucks the message out of the church.  It just plain sucks.

Look, I’m not down on wealth or self-esteem.  God hasn’t made you to be a Debbie Downer (though God did make Rachel Dratch for that role).  Nor has God made you to be scraping by economically (though, I think there is such a thing as having too much).

I’m just down on wealth and self-esteem being pandered around as the central message of the church in this nation’s biggest churches.  And especially at this time of year, when laser-light Christmas pageants are being planned, and live camels are being rented, and all sorts of nonsense is costing people millions of dollars and hundreds of hours because they think God desires “bigger and better!”…

I have to imagine Jesus is in the back row, quietly lighting a candle, looking up at the stage and saying, “Father forgive them…for they know not what they do.”

Oh, and Father, forgive me, too.  This reluctant Christian is often just a little too proud in his thoughts.

So scatter my ego as well.

Then perhaps I, too, can sing The Magnificat with Mary this Advent.  Carefully.

On Why I Will Allow (and Encourage) My Kid(s) to Believe in Santa Claus

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Just like the perennial “Waimagesr on Christmas” creeps its Grinch-like head around this time of year, so do the calls for people to abandon Santa Claus, the “Elf on the Shelf,” and other child-pleasing myths that we’ve come to associate with this season.

Apparently because we celebrate the birth of Jesus at this time of year, everything else must come to a halt…lest we overshadow the “reason for the season.”

Well, to be honest, if we’re trying to get back to the “reason for the season” at its roots, we should probably leave Jesus out of the equation, too.  December 25th was not originally known as “Christmas,” and didn’t become so for many years after Christianity had been around.  “The Feast of the Undying Sun” was marked on December 25th, an acknowledgment of the solstice that would now ebb away into increasing daylight.  A nice pagan festival in the dead of winter.

We invited Jesus to the party late.  He wasn’t the original reason for celebrations at this time of year.

Christians now celebrate the “Feast of the Undying Son” (I should trademark that little monicker because I think it’s pretty darn clever), but we should be honest and recognize that it’s not our original festival to claim.  And it certainly wasn’t chosen because it was the date of Jesus’ birth.

Face it, we put the “Christ” in Christmas.  Any attempt to “keep” Christ there are done so because we cemented him there…

But back to Santa and the crazy Elf on the Shelf: I say “do it.”

As a pastor, as a father, as someone who thinks that life is more than water and trace elements forced to eek out an existence, I say “do it.”

As I preached this last Sunday, St. Nicholas can provide a real depth of meaning in this season where we celebrate Jesus’ birth (for Christians) by buying one another a Lexus adorned with a huge bow.

St. Nicholas was known for his giving…not for getting whatever he wanted.  And by keeping St. Nick in this season, we too, can focus our children on the giving of the season, rather than the receiving.

“Keep Christ in Christmas” the bumper sticker reads…on the gas guzzling car.  What about keeping Christ in consumerism? In fact, if you want to eliminate the real issue with this season, it has nothing to do with saying “Happy Holidays” or burning effigies of the jolly fat elf.  It has everything to do with buying and selling and how and why and where we do it.

But I digress.

Even more than the historical St. Nicholas, there is a bit of wonder and awe that is lost from this season if we don’t allow our children (and our adults) to play around in the great mystery that comes from things not being dark forever, from lights that shine out of a tree planted in the living room, from characters that point to good virtues and mischievous glee.

I encourage you to believe in Santa Claus, who is chief giver in a season where our natural inclination is to conserve and save-up to survive the winter.  Likewise, believe in the elf that creates havoc in the middle of the night.  Lord knows we all need another example to follow when our tendency to look out for ourselves butts up against the command to look out for our neighbor’s needs first.  Lord knows we all need a reminder that, though things seem to run havoc in the darkness, a little light can expose the havoc and encourage us to laugh at it all.

Santa and the Elf and the like can encourage our children, and even us, to live deeply in the season, look lightly at ourselves, and look wondrously at life.

The real trouble, I think, happens when we start teaching our children that believing in Santa Claus is analogous to belief in God.  That is the real fear behind inviting these characters into the season: belief and attention to them will point away from “true” belief and attention to Jesus.

But if we start holding Jesus and Santa at the same level, when we teach that belief in the Elf on the Shelf is like belief in God, and that you can’t hold both at the same time, then we do a real disservice.  Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers sing that wonderfully awful song, “I Believe in Santa Claus” where they also claim to believe in magic, in God, and in human destiny…as if it’s all on the same level…and we’ve bought into that perspective.  It doesn’t help the situation.

They are different types of belief.

I don’t trust Santa like I trust God.  Santa is a mental assent I allow myself at certain times with a wink and nod; hopefully a mental assent that points me toward a deeper truth in the world.

But God…I don’t allow myself to mentally assent to God’s existence.  I tried to do that and ended up an atheist for a while.  Rather, I trust God’s existence and lean on it (for more on this line of thinking, see what I wrote here).

Santa, the Elf on the Shelf, it all lends itself to wonder and awe and joy.  I say that you shouldn’t take that away from children.  But also don’t make belief in it all analogous to trust in God.  That’s the real problem with this whole season, I think.  We feel we’re in competition for “belief resources.”

In fact, the God who invites imagination, who inventively sung creation into being (and sung salvation into being through a lullaby), pulls out of me the desire to embrace these traditions.

They’re not harmless; they’re helpful.

And they’re only hurtful when we put them on par with faith.  And sometimes I’m a reluctant Christian because that’s exactly what Christians have done.

So, Findley will be finding some presents from Santa on Christmas morning (and we’ll probably address some from the cats as well even though they don’t have the opposable thumbs needed to wrap presents).  It won’t be the primary focus of our festival, but it’ll be there. And he’ll squeal with joy and, for a moment, feel the wonder in the magic of the season where a jolly fat guy fits down a non-working fireplace and cats wrap presents to give to their owners.

And while we don’t do the Elf on the Shelf thing (mostly because I find the elf’s proportions creepily elongated) if that’s your bag, go for it.

And if Christmas bells deliver your presents, or if Santa rides a donkey, or if gnomes put presents in stockings…all traditions from around the world…allow yourself the wonder and awe to believe that this world might just be a little bigger than we want to make it.

Perhaps you’ll find yourself caught up in joy that points to Joy greater than itself.  Perhaps you’ll figure out why the ancient church put Jesus’ natal day on December 25th.  In the time of darkness, the lightness that comes from such joy is a welcome guest.

Really Re-Claim Advent. We Need It.

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I love Christmas.7772528906_b6961079fb_z

Secular Christmas, religious Christmas, Christmas movies, Christmas cookies, Christmas eggnog, Christmas candles, Christmas lights.

I am the quintessential consumer of Christmas crap that every marketer dreams of and every minimalist fears.

Because at Christmas it should be classy…but the definition of classy has permeable boundaries.

And I listen to Christmas music early in the season.  Mostly because I think it reminds me of Christmases when I was a kid, which were always full of magic and mystery and all sorts of greatness.

And perennial calls for stopping “wars on Christmas” or yelling for “no Christmas music until Advent is over” is all a bunch of nonsense from people who love to control things and who have an inordinate amount of time to obsess over nothingness.

But one thing is true: Christmas is for children.  And I’m not just talking about secular Christmas with the fat elf and the flying Rangifer tarandus.  

Religious Christmas is for children, too, in many ways.  You may not want to hear that, but it’s true. The myths that have grown themselves around the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke (often conflated awkwardly with the first two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew) have created a narrative that theologically resonates, but realistically falls flat.

Angels, traveling Magi, virgin births…it’s all hard to swallow as reality, even for the faithful. It’s a story for children’s books.

And I’d advocate that you need not swallow it all to be Christian.  In fact, it sounds like so much myth mostly because it was written to evoke that kind of thought in the reader and that kind of hope in the reader’s heart.  You, too, are supposed to see that something unusual, epic, of mythical proportions is taking place in the person of Jesus.

Yes, you too.

But we’ve taken the mythical narrative and have tried to pass it off as history, and it all makes for people creating wars on Christmas (real and imaginary), and people rejecting theological truths because they don’t line-up with historical reality, and…

Well, here we are.

But see, this is the thing: the mythical nature of Christmastide is, and should be, balanced by the stark reality of Advent.

If only we could really re-claim Advent.

And I’m not talking about the Advent calendar with nice little doors that have chocolate inside until you get to Christmas eve.

That’s not real Advent.  That’s commercial Advent.

And I’m not talking about just banning Christmas hymns or music in deference to Advent music.  That’s like only focusing on one tire on a car, when the whole thing is broken.  It won’t do what you want it to.

No, we need to reclaim the totality of Advent because Advent is for adults.

Advent is for adults who wait for births, or for diagnoses, or for the death of a loved one, or for a new job, or for any job, or for that pink slip they know is coming, or for relief from pain, or for visitors to arrive and cheer up a lonely existence, or…

Or anything that we wait for that causes anxiety.

Because Advent is all about receiving the uncomfortable news that God is on the scene, is going to show up, is going to shake up your world in some way.  And that news when coupled with the “Fear not!” of the angel message is what balances out this season.

Your life is going to be shaken.  But fear not!

Jesus, we need to hear that again.  And I mean that phrase in every way it can be taken.

Because all the ridiculous anxiety around this time of year just points to the unrest that we have, the imbalance that we feel, when we focus so closely on one part of a larger issue.

The church needs to reclaim Advent because society, humanity, lives in Advent quite a bit of the time.  It’s one of the shortest seasons in the church year, but one of the longest seasons of our lives: the season of waiting.

And we need to practice waiting well.  Advent can do that, for the secular and the religious alike.

And I’m a reluctant Christian at times because most of the Christian world just skips right over it in deference to “defending Christmas” or focusing on music rather than meaning, or just abandoning it all together because, who cares?

Who cares?

That’s a question I’ve asked myself many times while waiting  as both ends of the wick burn, as patience runs thin, as the meagerness of my existence comes colliding with the immensity of the existing world and I feel like a measly piece of nothingness against it all.

And I don’t have time for nothingness.

Who cares?

Advent’s answer to that question is, “Wait for the Lord, whose day is near.  Wait for the Lord; be strong take heart.”

I don’t like answers.  I like questions.  But when all I have are questions, Advent’s response is balm for a weary soul.