God the Child

“To you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”  Luke 2:11-12

“Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ” – Elizabeth Stone

“And then something really beautiful happened, Daddy...” This morning my three year old decided he’d take a turn reading a story to me.  He pulled out a book about a rabbit we hadn’t read in a while, and he started.  This one had great pictures, and he has a wild imagination.  When he gets on a roll and gets excited, he gets hard to understand.  I was doing my best to follow along as the rabbit dodged one “spooky creature” after another, but his thought process and speech were about to lose me.  And then a deep breath, and clear as a bell: “And then something really beautiful happened, Daddy...”  Out of nowhere, he changed things for our rabbit, and out of nowhere the joy of being with this kid overwhelmed me. 

This time of year, we look at two stories in the bible – Matthew’s tale of great threat and peril, and Luke’s, of annunciation and joy.  Both stories setup the themes of who Jesus was and what his life was about.  And in Jesus we see a culmination of our revelations of God – from creator to deliverer, redeemer, and on to crucified and resurrected lord.    

But Christmas gives us a season to ponder God as something else too – a child. 

So here's an invitation to do just that – think about God as a child.  Think about God as your child.

We always call God “father” and ourselves “children,” and that is wonderful and deeply true in its way.  But take this Christmas invitation to turn things upside down for a minute. 

Think of the love you have as a parent for your child.  I am incapable of imagining greater love than that. What joy they bring us, what meaning and purpose.  What salvation.  Life is indeed never the same.  

And what utter amazement.  Every parent knows the tingling feeling of sitting in the dark, just watching your child sleep.  You know the joy of watching a kid open a present, ride a bike for the first time, and, well, you fill in the blank.

And what vulnerability.  The more you think about it, the more you see the genius of God in this parenting thing. Deep, true love, is born in vulnerability, and what is more vulnerable and loveable than a child? 

How immensely lovable our God is when we see this total vulnerability.  Stay with it – this is not the God of power and might; this is God the child, our child, completely powerless.  And yet we’d move heaven and earth out of love for our child.

This is our God, isn’t it?  The one that turns everything upside down.  The one who puts the last first, who turns the other cheek, who dies to give life.  And this is the God who comes to us as a child.  Our child. 

Christmas has many invitations; seeing God the child is mine to you.  Because this feeble soul, try as it might, can think of no love more powerful than love for a child.      

And then, maybe think out a little, a year, five, ten, twenty years from now.  Oh, the care we’ll take with this child.  And we’ll mess up loving him, but not too bad.  But we know this in our bones: we’ll try harder at this than at anything we’ll ever do because of this love, this animating love for this child.   

Words Without Knowledge

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind:  ‘Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? – Job 38:1-2

“God is not an answer man can give, God says. God himself does not give answers. He gives himself, and into the midst of the whirlwind of his absence gives himself.”  Frederick Buechner


“You are going to have to speak up sir, not everyone can hear you,” the bishop said to the young man in front of an audience of about 600 fellow Methodist strangers.  “OK, sorry,” his voice cracked as he tried his best to move closer to the microphone.  “OK. So, someone much wiser than me once said, ‘You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to…’” 

It was the young man’s second day at his first annual conference, a gathering of ministers and lay people every year in the Methodist church to fellowship and take up church business.  He was looking forward to the fellowship, and being the grandson of a Methodist preacher, he was looking forward to learning about the business of the church.  Little did he know, he was walking into a culture war mine field, and little did he know that he’d soon feel compelled to speak in front of a room of complete strangers.

Apparently every four years it get likes this.  The year before the bigger general conference of Methodists from all over the world, people at the local level submit petitions to be voted on that get submitted to the bigger gathering.  Every hot-button issue of our culture was well-represented on the list – abortion, homosexuality, evolution, you name it.  And not just once; they voted again and again on these topics.  They had discussion time before each vote with time for people to speak both for and against each petition, which was a more gracious version of a cable news point-counterpoint, though the arguments were the same. Could it have been any different? 

Someone should’ve warned him, but they didn’t.  He kept thinking back to the story of a vagabond who came in dirty and smelly to a prim and proper church who was asked by the preacher after the service to “Go home and pray, and ask God what he thinks you should wear when you come into this church.”  When he showed up the next week dirty and smelly again, he was reminded, “I thought I asked you to pray and ask God about what you should wear when you come to this church,” to which the vagabond replied, “I did, and God said he didn’t have any idea, said he’d never set foot in this church.”

So on the third separate resolution about banning homosexuals from some part of church participation, he asked to be recognized and spoke – not about homosexuality, but about Christianity - the good news of god’s presence, grace, love and mercy - and how any message we send to anyone should at its heart be about that, and how a “no” vote wasn’t a “yes” for anything but a “no” against clothing ourselves in our faith and speaking of anything other than the gospel. 

Maybe it was just his imagination, but he thought the vote after he spoke was at least 575-25 in favor of the resolution he'd opposed, compared to the 580-20 in favor of the other two.

Reading Frederick Buechner talking about Job this week reminded me of that story.  Job can only hang his head when God in the whirlwind asks: “Who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?”  And so should we hang our heads too.  We sow this wind and reap this whirlwind with him.  We all trade in “words without knowledge,” don’t we, when we talk for God, when we quote scripture for a moral code or try to speak to someone’s darkness that we’ve never encountered. 

“Words without knowledge” is a simple concept, but it is enormous; it’s everywhere, and it’s in so many of our beliefs.  “Words without knowledge,” is anything - scripture, creed, doctrine, opinion, argument - anything not grounded in experience.  Albert Einstein puts its much better than me, “Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”  The only part of me that resists that universal truth is not my faith, it’s my ego. 

“Words without knowledge” are a cheap and dangerous substitute for experience.  They soothe our egos, “Hey, you are right!”  They keep us away from people we are called to love, they keep us away from feelings we need to feel, and they keep us bound up in ignorance and away from living life in the world with ourselves and others exactly as God made it all: very good.

Paul tells us this as well.  He opens the famous “love is patient” chapter of 1 Corinthians with, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”  Love is the language of God.  And love, no matter how much we read and study about it, can only be known by experience. 

No one can tell you with any conviction what they don’t know by experience.  And so let us tell of our faith only what we know. 

I know a God who has carried me through some very dark times.  May I be there for others and help them experience it when the time comes. 

I know there is always hope.  May I speak that kind word to others when they are in need of it. 

I have known the pain of deep regret and failure.  May I share that experience with those I see walking a similar destructive path. 

I know there is always redemption.  May I encourage those who are outcast by their own shortcomings.

I have known the freeing power of forgiveness and mercy I’ve never deserved.  May I grant them both before they are asked for. 

I have witnessed personal destruction wrought by hate and injustice, and I have played a part in perpetuating both.  May I stand with those who are persecuted and pray for those who persecute.

I have had the rough edges of my perspective smoothed time and again by simple conversation with good friends, complete strangers, and my three year old kid.  May I carry the candle of peace in my heart to quietly share with others as well.

I’ve known immense joy and happiness.  May I look for ways to pay that joy forward in this life, and may a deep sense of gratitude be the lens through which I see the world.

I have known the unyielding grace of God in Jesus in ways unspeakable and dumbfounding.  May I live a life in communion with the rest of creation that in ways ever so small but ever so significant spreads the good news that I have come to know through experiencing this life.

Buechner is right.  God gives no answers, only himself – on the cross and in our lives again and again and again. 

What can we proclaim more honestly than that?

Fully Human

“Then he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.’” – Mark 2:27

We call Jesus many things – the Christ, the Son of God, Lord and Savior. But in Mark, the oldest of the gospels, these aren’t the titles Jesus wants us to hear. Over and again, he refers to himself as the Son of Man. Thrown in with those other titles, we take the enigmatic “Son of Man” to be a high title. But “Son of Man” is not a title like the others. A “son of man” as opposed to a “son of god” is another way of saying “a person,” or “a human one” or even “the human being,” as people have translated it.

To hear Jesus refer to himself as “the human being” for an entire gospel is refreshing to me. So much of the message of salvation I hear preached has a singular focus: your fate in the afterlife. And please don’t misunderstand, I am not saying the message of salvation Jesus preached has nothing to do with eternity; but I am saying it has at least as much to do with life on this side of the grave. Jesus did not simply come to sell us fire insurance for when we die; he came to teach us what it means to be alive. In Jesus, our concepts of human and divine merge into one. He is both human and divine. And I think he would say the same thing applies to all of us, each a son of man, and each a child of God.

Jesus took living seriously. He ate and drank, he healed, he tore down social barriers, he told stories, he forgave, he taught, he loved, he subverted, he prayed, he did grand gestures, he gave thanks, he spent serious time with friends, he suffered, he gave life. And he tells us how we live matters. In his story of separating those to be rewarded and those who are cast out, those who have missed out ask, “When did we see you and do nothing?” and he tells them, “Whatever you did to the least of these, so you did to me.” This is a serious call for us to tend to those hurting in the world, but it is also a serious wakeup call to us to pay attention and start living.

Paula D'Arcy puts it wonderfully, “God comes to you disguised as your life.” My own experience has taught me this as well. In the times that I am alive, really alive and not on auto-pilot, God is there. If you are there with a friend in need, surely you have sensed it to. When you are laughing with friends, fully present, you see life brighter. If you have ever fallen in love or had a child, the joy there is nothing if not holy. If you have ever suffered or been fully present to someone who has, those dark times can be sacred space if you have the courage to walk through them. When you stop, really stop, and give thanks, you see it – a life and world shot-through with the glory of God and the suffering of God both just waiting to be attended to by you.

So we have choices every day. The first is to decide that God does come disguised as our lives, and the second is to live and live with that in mind. And by living, I think I mean something positive and negative. Positively, I think I mean loving on people & loving life as fully and as often as we can. Maybe that means - sincerely paying attention to people around us, whether it’s a spouse, a customer, the girl bagging groceries, or an elderly relative or person from church; setting aside time to pray, whether that’s with your bible and a verbal prayer or whether that’s on a bike ride with a thankful state of mind; being deliberate about having a positive attitude about this amazing God-disguised life no matter what is being thrown at us; reaching out to people who are hurting (this is serious living) and asking how they are doing and letting them know you are praying for them (it’s that easy & that hard); making quality time much more often for the important people in our lives; planning and crossing some things off the bucket list and doing generally things that make us happy; finding places in our communities to pay forward all the wonderful time and influence people invested in us along the way; and expressing gratitude to God and others often for everything they do for us.
 
Negatively, I think I mean turn off whatever is distracting us from doing the positive things: turning off the cell phone (don’t let it buzz or beep while you are trying to live or let it lure you into idly reading it instead of smiling and talking to the person next to you); turning off the computer and television as well when you’ve got somebody you could be talking too; turning off negative influences and negative people who darken your view of this God-disguised life; not letting fear of failure, awkwardness, or not knowing what to do or say stop you from trying something or saying something to someone or generally living your God-disguised life; and not waiting until tomorrow to do what there is time to do today.
 
Here is our one promised shot. And the Human One wants us to experience being human as much as he did. In so doing, both our faith & our experience teach us that we’ll meet God again and again and again disguised in our lives. And the more we practice being fully human, the more we’ll pick up on the disguise.
 
“The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” - Saint Irenaeus

Owning Our Wounds

[I was honored to preach something close to this at the Laity Sunday service last week at a wonderful little country church - Summerville UMC in Phenix City, AL.]

Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given to me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated.  Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. - 2 Corinthians 12:7-9

I asked Judd what I might speak about, and he said it's laity Sunday, so you if don't have anything else prepared, you can speak about laity in action.  And I told him I'd try but that I was going to take the advice given to someone else asked to be a guest speaker in church, “Come tell us about what's saving your life right now.” I think that what I've prepared can at least compliment this wonderful service that has been led by the laity so far.  What I've heard today is about our mission, to minister to the world.  And what I'll talk about is what gets in our way of doing that, and a possible path toward being able to fulfill that mission.  And that path, as Paul tells us, is weakness, or as the title of this message describes, "owning own wounds." 

This is hard for us in 2012 in the United States because weakness is despised by our culture.  "Weak" really is a four letter word.  If you had the unfortunate experience of watching all of the post-debate analysis, it wasn't about substance.  No, it was about who looked weak and who looked strong, weakness was dismissed and strength was “presidential.”  And it's not just in politics, it's everywhere.  Weakness needs to be rooted out, things that are broken need fixing or replacing.  And it's only natural.  We don't want to be weak and limited in what we can do.  No one wants pain and suffering.  Because it hurts.

So here is the great apostle Paul.  And he was weak, broken in some big way.  It’s so bad he calls it a messenger of satan sent to torment him.  So he cried out to the lord three times to take it away from him.  Honestly, I can’t always relate to Paul, he confuses me.  But here, can't we all relate to him?  He's hurting.  We don't know what it is, and maybe he does that so we can all find ourselves in this passage.  He's going through hardship, which we've all been through. 

And his prayers were heard, but God did not grant his wish.  God is not in the wish granting business.  God is in the salvation business.  So what Paul hears is not, “I will remove this hurt from you.”  God's answer was, “Paul, my grace is sufficient for you.  Paul, my power is made perfect in weakness.  Paul, you are a boastful man, so go boast of this: you are broken and weak, and once you finally accepted that, the power and grace of God met you, and it was enough for you.”

That is the good news for us if we are willing to hear it – not that God will take away our struggles, but that when we move toward what hurts, we move through it, and there we will be embraced by the overwhelming grace of God.  And it will be enough for us too.

It's not just Paul; this is at the heart of the gospel.  Jesus tell us that “I did not come for the healthy, but for those who need a doctor.”  He’s telling us that he’s going to have a hard time reaching and transforming us if we aren't willing to embrace what hurts us.  One of the great travesties of living in a culture of strength is this “I'm fine,” response to everything that happens.  Divorce?  Don’t need to talk about it; I'm fine.  Chest pain?  I'm fine, it's probably just indigestion. Overworked?  Dealing with a sick or elderly loved one?  It’s OK; I'm fine. 

What a lie.  When Jesus says the sick, not the healthy need a doctor, he's telling us don’t be too proud to come looking for healing or you won’t find it.  He's telling us, "hey be honest with yourself.  Where are you hurting?  Where are you weak and broken?  Find that place in yourself," Jesus says, "and I promise I'll meet you there." 

We serve a crucified savior.  The way of the cross is the path through pain and death, and ONLY then onto resurrection.  The resurrected Jesus is not in shining white robes that we see in our Sunday school room walls.  Jesus still had his wounds. “Here Thomas,” says Jesus, “don't believe it's me, look right here, touch my wounds.”  Those wounds don't go away and neither do ours, but part of our salvation is that they can be transformed into something very sacred.   

And that's the hard and beautiful gospel for our hard and beautiful lives.  We can't leave the hard parts out.  We deny the transforming grace of God when we don't deal with what hurts us.  And it has real life consequences.  A favorite author of mine, Richard Rohr, says “the pain we don't transform, we transmit to others.”  I can tell you without reservation that the most embarrassing moments of my life, when I am hurtful to those I love, they come out of some unresolved pain that I'm just not dealing with.  I've either been hurt or slighted by someone else, or I'm insecure & not sure I'm up to the task, but I don't admit that & I so I just bluster my way through when things get hard. 

Please don't ask my wife for any specifics, but she knows better than anyone else.  When I'm being especially difficult to live with, and I’ve got some darkness that I haven't dealt with, but, “Hey, I’m fine,” get ready for trouble if you point out where I’m coming up short.  My ego gets upset and I lash out. 

Rather than owning where I'm wounded, I let my wound own me.  I AM THE VICTIM, I have been treated unfairly, and I can't relent from it.  And that cuts off the path to healing and forgiveness.   I end up missing out on so much of the beauty of life right in front of me because I'm just too proud to admit I am broken need to deal with it.

This is what we all do when we refuse to get in touch with what's wrong with us.  Stress from work, sickness or death of a family member, strained relationships, financial harship, broken trust.  These things wound us. If you live long enough, life is going to wound you deeply.  There is just no getting around it.  And if we don't transform the pain, we will transmit it to others.  We look for ways to patch it up: food, alcohol, television, internet, smart phones, work work work.  Anything to keep from checking in with ourselves and deal with how we’re broken.  “Lord, just make me numb!“ We don't say it, but isn't this what we are asking when we don't deal with what hurts?  

But numb is not where god's grace is found.  It is found on the other side of pain.  And we only get there by dealing with what hurts, dealing with where we fall short, dealing with the suffering that life has placed in our path.  And please hear me, I don't not for a second think that God causes us to suffer for some reason.  Death and depression and disease and divorce are not instruments of God, they are not put there for a purpose.  But the genius of God is knowing that in the fullness of life, we are going to suffer, we are going to hurt and cause others to hurt, and God says that's where he's going to go to work.  He's not going to leave us there unchanged.  Like Jesus, our wounds won't go away, but we will start to see them more fully.  Not just as a place of death, but as the path to resurrection life.

There's a song I love that has this line in it: “There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.”  I love that line because it names what Paul says, the light, the sufficient grace of God, is there with us when life is cracked and broken.  And that grace comes when we go down toward the darkness, and not up and away from it.  We've got this cultural image of climbing.  Climbing up the ladder of success, climbing up and away from what's weak and dirty in us through achievement, climbing higher and higher up toward a God that we imagine is sitting in a kingdom on high.  Climbing away from our pain and weakness.  And there’s a whole Christian tradition that tells us what we find when we climb up looking for God, looking for the high life free of difficulty.  It tells us when we get to the top, there's nothing there.    It's only when we fall do we realize that we fall into the grace of God.  600 years ago a woman named Julian of Norwich said “First there is the fall and then the recovery from the fall.  Both are the mercy of god.” 

And what do we find when let ourselves fall and be broken?  We find ourselves on a path downward.  But it’s a path we walk along always, always with God.  If we are promised anything, it is that God is with us in our suffering.  And that path he takes us on leads to a very sacred place, to a place in each of us that we see cannot be wounded, because it is the very image of god that is in each of us.  It's something that we all have, and it is undefileable and unbreakable, it is our deepest truest self that is always in communion with God and is waiting for us to rediscover it. 

There is a story that I love about a little boy, 4 or 5 years old, whose parents bring home his newborn baby sister.  And the boy tells his parents to give him some time alone with his new sister.  They knew the issues with bringing home a new sibling, but they have the baby monitor setup, so they tell him to go ahead into her room, and they sneak into the other room to listen to the monitor.  And they hear him close the door and hear his little feet patter over to her bed, and they hear him get real close to her and whisper: “Hey! Tell me all about God, because I've almost forgotten.” 

We grow up, get wounded and forget, don't we, about our union with God.  It's like layer upon layer upon layer of paint and wallpaper from life gets plastered over that original beauty and oneness that has always been in all of us.  And when we embrace our brokenness, we get to see through that crack in everything where the light gets in, we get to remember our oneness with God.  We get to experience his grace that is sufficient for everything we face in this life. 

And when it happens, we cannot help but share it, to try to see the weakness and brokenness of others and wrap our arms around it, and try to bring God’s grace to it.  As the scripture says, we go looking for Jesus in others, in the hungry, the sick, the naked, the imprisoned.  And I think we end up being more gracious and patient with people in general.  Feeling the embrace of God in our own insecurity, we have more patience with it in others, don't we? 

To claim our brokenness is to help bring the power and grace of God into our world.  And don’t just believe me.  Think about the most gracious people you know, who show up when times are hard,  who can speak words of comfort in grief, who tend to the sick and the poor, whose egos don’t ever seem to get in the way of anything God is trying to do; they are almost always people who have endured great pain or struggle and moved through it.  I've heard it called “the terrible gift,” and that is very fitting.  Life has handed them something terrible, but out of it they have received the gift of the grace and strength of God to get through it, so they share it with others. 

And to use some good Methodist language: it shows up in our mission and in our nurture.  A couple of examples: our church hosts a community-wide Christmas dinner every Christmas day.  Full Christmas dinner with turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, you name it is served for about 300 people, and most of them probably wouldn’t get Christmas dinner otherwise.  Inevitably, every year this mission is led by those who have lost someone they love, a spouse, parent or child.  These are people who know what it's like to have a hard Christmas. 

In my own life, I lost my father last year to a brain tumor.  He lived with it for 20 precious and hard months.  It was and continues to be a very big wound in my life. But let me tell you, the grace we received in that time could fill the time of 20 more sermons.  Amazing acts of love and kindness were with us every step of the way.  God's hands were so often the hands of friendship, cooking meals, cutting the grass, holding our hands while we laughed and cried and prayed.  I can testify without reservation to the power of God made perfect in weakness, and to a God that showed me in the middle of deep pain that there is still a place in me that is whole and unbroken even in the face of tremendous loss. 

And out of that has come a couple of missions at our church.  My wife started a caregiver support group seeing the struggle of my mom caring for my dad and knowing of others dealing with that in our community.  I was eating lunch after my dad's funeral with the pastor of his church who told me of a mission he was excited about – Stop Hunger Now, where your church partners with this group to buy bulk food supplies and packages them into individual meals that are shipped to school feeding programs in the poorest and hungriest places in the world.  So I felt led to help start that in Union Springs.  Over the last year and a half, we've raised money and packaged 30,000 meals in this program that have fed kids in Uganda.  It is a wonderful mission. 

And one of the greatest honors of my life came several months after my father passed.  I was asked to speak at the funeral of a fellow church member who had died of pancreatic cancer.  Though I would have thought about it, “Hey, we need to go take them some food,” I probably wouldn’t have done so if I had not experienced those same acts of grace by others in my own family's hard time. And so we did go visit and take them a few meals.  And out of that came a wonderful friendship and some very holy time accompanying them on that journey.

And owning our wounds is a journey.  It’s healing work that is never really finished.  But we can learn so much from it.  It teaches us how to live, how to live faithfully.  And ultimately it teaches us how to die faithfully, unafraid because we already know that god will meet us there too. 

The work of the laity, I think, is to first own our wounds, to be broken and accept the power of God that we find in weakness, to experience that love in that deep and holy place in each of us.  And then be there to cry with others who are broken, and to share with them the grace we've experienced. 

When our stance toward life is a stance of weakness and brokenness, it is all that we can do to go out looking to comfort the weakness and brokenness in others and share the good news with them.  And that good news is this: “Hey, I am here with you, and so is the grace and power of God, and it is sufficient for you.”  

My prayer for us today is that we have the faith to believe this, and the courage to go to those hard places where God promises us he'll meet us and transform us.  Amen.  

Burning

“When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God."

 – 1 Corinthians 2: 1-5

I took off an afternoon from work a couple of weeks ago to spend a little time in the woods.  It’s springtime, and there’s nothing like being out in nature to remind your body that winter is over.  But I went off into the woods this day to see something specific – fire.  Every few years my in-laws will do a controlled burn in their woods.  It is quite a site to see.  A concoction of gas & diesel spews forth through a flame and lands on the ground, sending an infantry line of fire along the ground that advances and advances, consuming pine straw, stickers, dead wood, weeds and unwanted saplings that clutter out the forest's beauty.  But to watch the process is to watch a literal scorched earth.  It takes what is unwanted and superfluous and consumes it, filling the air with thick ash and leaving the ground a field of soot.  It can be troubling to watch.  But it leaves the mature trees, deeply rooted, unharmed except for some charring of the bark at the bottom.  It is an awesome display of creative destruction. 

The next day everything is black, seemingly dead and destroyed.  And the most haunting part is the dark of night right after the burn.  Pine stumps still soaked in turpentine burn well into the night.  They litter the otherwise complete darkness of the forest with seeming camp fires of a vast medieval army bedded down in these very woods.  And then three months later, everything is more beautiful than before the fire started its consuming work.
 

I cannot help but think of the season of Lent when reflecting on this scene.  We open the season in many of our churches by administering the ashes on Wednesday with a solemn reminder that “from dust we came, and to dust we go”.  It is a call to remember our mortality and the reality of death, that force that can shake us out of mundanity and move us toward meaning like no other can. It is creative destruction, indeed. 

And Lent is preparing us for the creative destruction that is the crucifixion and resurrection.  And it is most certainly both creation and destruction.  Jesus is killed, and yet after the destruction, Jesus continues to live.  And for this story to really mean anything, we’ve got to connect our own mortal life and the life of Jesus that endures. 

And for our feeble minds, this is a hard thing to do.  And I think it’s made harder by sincere yet superficial attempts at naming the un-nameable, trying to utter what is ineffable, and trying to grab hold of the arrow rather than align our beings in the direction the arrow is pointing.

It’s a problem that seems to have been around since not long after Jesus’ death.  I can imagine his first followers asking the same questions we do: “Jesus lives, of this we are certain.  He animates our souls.  We know him still as intimately as we know ourselves.  Yet how?  What does that mean?  And why did he die?  Surely there is something good and redeeming to come out of his death.”  These are the thoughts of every mortal who’s experienced God’s love through Jesus, be they his first disciples or be they church-goers in 2012.  And from here, we do what only seems natural – we say, “Come, let us explain it!”

I have spent much time in the den of explanation, more than enough time to know that it is a closed loop rather than a means of grace.  In fact, explanation of the crucifixion, resurrection, and what all that means has led to many of the most difficult and embarrassing times of my faith, and certainly my most ungracious (though I never picked up on that at the time).  Whatever your theory of atonement, it is ultimately only that – a theory, one explanation among many (and believe me, I’ve known many!).   This exercise no doubt gets us answering questions, but it’s been my experience that even if we think we come up with the right answers, we nonetheless still have the wrong questions.  As Frederick Buechner says, “It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence.”  And to Buechner I’d humbly add, “It is not the genus and phylum of the salvation tree we want to know but the taste of the fruit it bears.” 

And what a difference that is in emphasis.  Dead questions are replaced with alive ones:  “What happened then?” becomes “what is happening now?”  “What does it mean that he saved me back then?” becomes “How he can save us right now?”  “Exactly how was I reconciled?” becomes “Exactly where do I now need to reconcile?”  And finally, “What is the nature of the God revealed in that theory?” becomes “What is the nature of the God I experience right now?” 

To get from there to hear, I think we need to do a little Spring burning this holy week.  What is keeping us from tasting the fruit, from encountering God?  For me, and for many, I think, it’s our own safe doctrine that needs to be set afire.  Whether you hold dear to or are uncomfortable with how and why you think God reconciles us through Jesus, what would happen if we threw that understanding in the fire?  We’ve got to admit that at least part of us is consumed with understanding the “how it is” that could be focusing on experiencing the “what is” in our lives. 

Occupy yourself with figuring out the key and time, and you’ll close your heart to hearing the beauty of the song.  Focus on the type of paint and canvas and you’ll miss the glory of the painting.  Listen for the meter, and your ears will miss the deep emotion in the poem.  Spend your time figuring out and explaining the how of it and completely miss the magic of the experience.   

Our problem is that we’ve been led astray in thinking it is the technical "how" parts that are meant by what it means to “believe” theologically.  Stop for a moment and think of someone you love dearly.  “Believing” in that person has to do with your heart, not your head.  It’s a radical trust in the core of that person based on shared experience and loving relationship with them.  And talking about the “how” of that love and that belief in your beloved (think endorphins, attachment theory, etc) not only seems silly, but seems to do an injustice to the very nature of the love and belief itself.    

We are reading a wonderful book for Lent in my Sunday School class from Brennan Manning call The Ragamuffin Gospel.  When so much of Christianity seems to be looking in one direction, Manning’s looking in another.  When others are looking at sin as a place of shame, he’s looking at it as a place for God’s holy grace.  Along with Peter Rollins' book Insurrection, a quote from The Ragamuffin Gospel got me going down the path of writing this.  Paraphrasing Rabbi Joshua Abraham Hescel, Manning prays:

Dear Lord,

grant me the grace of wonder.

Surprise me, amaze me,

awe me in every crevice of Your universe.

Delight me to see how Your Christ plays in ten thousand places

to the Father through the features of men's faces.

Each day enrapture me with Your marvelous things without number.

I do not ask to see the reason for it all;

I ask only to share the wonder of it all.

Amen. 

This is where I am trying to get to this Easter, not asking to domesticate and understand the reason for the season, only hoping to share in the wonder of it all.  And getting there has taken me through this season of creative destruction.  A forest consumed of all but its big beautiful trees is one that can be enjoyed without the brambles and the thorns snagging your legs.  What is destroyed and entombed on Friday is raised to heavenly glory on Sunday.  What I leave behind in certitude, logic and order, I receive tenfold in experience, relationship, and reverence. 

Now let us hear Paul again from above – “I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God."

So may we too burn up every explanation except Jesus and him crucified.  And may we discuss this season of our faith not with human wisdom but by describing God’s power through Jesus in our own weakness and fear and trembling.  Barbara Brown Taylor tells a wonderful story of a preacher inviting her to preach at his church.  When she asked what she should speak about, his answer was simply, “Tell us about what’s saving your life right now.”  Those are stories each of us can tell and tell much easier when not concerned with exactly how we were saved way back when.  Our stories about God in action right now are testimony to our claim, "Jesus lives!"  And as Paul says, it doesn't come from lofty words or wisdom but from the very heart of our lives and our relationship with Christ and each other.
  

So may that be our witness this week – Jesus lives.  He died and he rose.  He goes on, and he is alive in my life.  Let me tell you how he’s saving my life right now.

Burn the rest, and trust that what is important will endure.

"When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply;
The flame shall not harm thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.

(“How Firm a Foundation”)

Christmas East of Eden

Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’— ²³therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. ²⁴He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.  Genesis 3: 22-24

I recently had a bird’s eye view of a congregation watching a choir perform their Christmas cantata.  This was the Sunday before Christmas.  I did not see what I expected to see.  Rather than faces filled with joy, hope, and peace, I saw entire bodies in a defensive posture, with calloused expressions.  The joy of Christmas had not yet reached into the hearts of the parish.  And that’s when this scripture came calling to me.  For many of us, Genesis 3 is the setting for Christmas. 

                       

If you have young children, or even the faith of a child, and are excited about this Christmas, this message may not really be for you.  But for the rest of us, I have a feeling that maybe you know what I am talking about.  At this time of year, our sense of being east of Eden is stronger than at any other time of the year. 

             
I have heard countless explanations for the Genesis story, from a factual account of creation and the first human beings, to a symbolic narrative chronicling the dawn of agriculture and civilization.  But the one that has always had the most meaning to me is this being a personal narrative of growing up.  This is the story of our lives.  If we are so lucky to have loving parents, we are created, nurtured and go about our first years in a state bliss, in the garden, untainted by the harsh realities known only to the adult world.  And Christmas is the pinnacle of the pure joy of childhood.  No birthday, summer vacation to Disney World, or Easter Bunny surprises could hold a candle anywhere close to the anticipation and fulfillment of joy that the Christmas season brings.  Presents, pajamas with footies, time with every family member we know and love – it just doesn’t get any better.

Yet, inevitably, and without us even realizing, life nudges us away from the womb of childhood and into awareness of the cruelty of living.  Somewhere along the way, we catch the virus of maturity, and the symptoms of grief, loss, mundane existence, stress and adult responsibilities set in.  Having succumbed to the inevitable temptation of knowledge of these things, we realize that we are naked, or if not naked, that what we are wearing isn’t nearly good enough.  The ground beneath us shifts ever so subtly to the east, and without knowing it, we have slid away from our center, out of the garden, and into the doldrums. 

And one day we wake up in the Christmas season and go looking for the joy that we left behind.  “Where is it?  Why didn’t the magic of Christmas come this year?  I did everything the same, but still I can’t find it.”  And as we continue the process of growing up, life takes this opportunity to really show us the true contrast from where we were to where we are now.  The abundance and leisure of childhood are replaced with financial struggle and an overbooked schedule.  Time with the ones we love is replaced with the pain of fractured relationships and the immeasurable sense of loss from the death of a loved one.  Cancer, traffic accidents, divorce, infidelity, bankruptcy, loss of faith, grief, apathy and indifference – these are the realities of going through life.  And like it did when we lived in the wondrous cocoon of childhood, Christmas intensifies the experience of our existence.  We begin to see the tragic irony of putting the holiday in the dead of winter rather than a more temperate time of year (as the shepherds’ presence would suggest).

So there it is.  We are living our grown up lives out of the garden, and we are receiving Christmas out in the cold, east of Eden.  And it can be a very sad place.  As this chapter of Genesis closes, only three chapters into the good book, we already know that this story is about us.  And many of us spend many Christmases at this point in the story.  In fact, we can find in these short verses so much of the significant parts of our lives that no matter if we keep reading, we cannot help but to think back to this part of the story.  But we must keep reading because that is not the end of the story. 

But this does draw to a close the garden part of the story.  Cherubim and a flaming sword block the way back, and the footprints of life trampled all over our backs have fuzzied our memories of where the garden even is.  To put it back in the framing of Genesis - we are infected; we have eaten from the tree of knowledge, we have known true heartbreak, and there is no cure on earth for what now runs through our veins.  That is the bad news.  We are fractured from the land of fond memories and the joy of being a child of God in the garden. 

But hear this: the Christmas story does not take place in the garden.  And it isn’t designed to show us the way back to innocence.  If that is what you are looking for (it certainly is what is being peddled on every street corner), you will be disappointed, or left with a brief but fleeting emotional boost that will not sustain you. 

The Christmas story engages us right where we are, in our brokenness.  What better clue do we need that this story is for us, broken down and in despair east of Eden, than the enunciation that God has come to us from an unwed mother in a stable?  In the deadness of the winter season, and in the shattering pain of our lives, we are told that there is more, always more.  A star, a newborn child, the comfort of an old friendship, a new friendship, a grandchild, an opportunity to minister to someone else’s hurt, the promise of a season of Spring, possibility, redemption, forgiveness, a heart of gratitude for the joy we have had and the hope of joy to come, Emmanuel – “God with us.”  We are east of Eden, but the Christmas story tells us that God is here with us, and there is plenty of rejoicing left to do.

This part of our story, the Christmas story east of Eden, is a time to reflect with immense gratitude for our time in the garden of life’s joy, to wrap our gratitude around our grief and allow God to mourn with us for what is lost, and to find hope and salvation for where we are now.  It is my prayer for you that you will follow the story to this point, find the faith to believe it, and continue writing it for a long, long time to your own wonderful conclusion. 

Hallelujah for the miracle of life and the wonder of it all!  Merry Christmas, 

(written Christmas 2009)

Thanksgiving

“Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, beloved, to admonish the idlers, encourage the faint-hearted, help the weak, be patient with all of them. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. Do not quench the Spirit.” 1 Thessalonians 5: 19-21

2011 is a year of many firsts in my life.  We celebrated the first birthday of our child in July.  We’ve made it through our first year on one income.  I tried my first case all the way to a jury verdict (& won!).  I bought a Jeep.  I started this blog.

But 2011 is also the year I lost my dad.  So it was my first birthday without talking to him, my first moments of joy without being able to share them with him, my first moments of doubt and concern that I could not talk about with him.  And this will be my first Thanksgiving without him. 

Life has come at me full throttle in 2011.  And in all of it, Paul says, “give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”  So here’s what I’ve learned lately about thanksgiving and singing “hallelujah” in all circumstances.

First, there is little to no room for “hallelujah” in a heart and head that hasn’t accepted life exactly as it is.  God is, was, and always will be found in life where we are.  Listen to Moses asking God to define God:  “But Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you”, and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, “I am has sent me to you.’”  So to Moses’ question of, “What is your identity?” God answers, “I am.”  It is a cryptic and at first blush utterly unsatisfying answer to the question of the character of God, but it is also the secret hidden in plain sight for where we are to meet God.  We meet the “I am” when we accept life where “we are.” 

Acceptance isn’t resignation.  It isn’t numbness or turning off your feelings.  And it isn’t apathy or indifference toward wrong and injustice.  Acceptance is honest acknowledgment of where we are in life.  It is overcoming the fear of what it will feel like to really know who we are and the state in which we find ourselves. Acceptance is an invitation to feel.   

And equally important, it is acknowledgment without judgment or excuse.  Let them go.  Just simply be where you are.  I’m hurting.  I’m lost.  I’m fretful.  I’m tired.  I’m anxious.  Wherever you are, this is where God wants to meet you.  Paul can say “rejoice in all things,” because Paul has ridden life’s rollercoaster all the way, including the scariest parts.  “Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’”  It took Paul a long time to accept a part of his life, but when he did, when he stopped trying to make it something it was not, when he allowed himself to embrace his weakness, he found God there saying, “My grace is sufficient for where you are right now.  My power is made perfect in weakness.”

Hopefully acceptance and its invitation to feel will do what it is intended to do - to wake us up to being fully present to our lives as they are.  So much of life is lived on auto-pilot with us looking forward to some better day in the future, backward to some better day in the past, or out the side window at someone else’s life or how we want ours to be.  But in doing so, we miss out on our own present life.  And we miss God.  As Richard Rohr so eloquently says, “God comes to us disguised as our life.”  If we are paying attention, if we are allowing ourselves to unplug, turn down, slow down, and see the people and things right in front of us, we will experience God.  For me personally, this is hard.  With so much access to so much information and entertainment, it’s as hard as it’s ever been to turn it all off and just be with those around you. And even scarier, to just be with yourself. 

A Sunday School lesson we’re doing right now on “attentiveness” makes this point wonderfully by contrasting living in the world we’re born into versus living in the world we're baptized into.  It is a different lens through which to see life, and it illuminates everything and everyone around you when you have the belief that God comes disguised as your life.  And my, how we all do shimmer in the light when we see God among us.

Out of this acceptance and present-ness flows a general approach to life grounded in gratitude.  A thankful heart is your hometown from which you go out and experience life.  And it’s entirely appropriate (and inevitable) to visit other places like sadness and grief.  It’s even perfectly OK to visit anger, anxiety, and other dark and lowly places.  Because you always remember where you’re from. You take home with you everywhere you go. 

Gratitude goes with you because you know God is going to be wherever you go, waiting with grace sufficient and power to meet any weakness.  This promise is fulfilled in so many ways, but most especially through the kindness of others.  And along the way you’ll start looking for every opportunity you can to pay that kindness forward, because you’ll never in a million years be able to pay it all back.

 

So wherever you go and however deep you go, you know that you’re just visiting, even if it’s a long visit, but that one day you’ll return home when you are ready.  You’ll probably come back with scars, but you always want to come home to a heart of gratitude. 

And don’t the scars make us wise? 

Of course, Mary Oliver can say all this in 13 lines so much better than I can in 200.

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Hallelujah, anyway I'm not where I started!

And have you been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years?

Hallelujah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.*

So in all things, hallelujah.  Hallelujah for our clamoring.  Hallelujah for the comfort in hard times and the joy in the so, so many good.  Hallelujah for kindness and the epiphany that it is upon us to spread.  Hallelujah for the chance to be fully alive at this very moment.  Hallelujah for the chance at this life and the God who we constantly meet in its disguise.  

* (Mary Oliver, "Hallelujah," Evidence, Beacon Press: Boston, 2009, p. 19)