Today we woke up to the day known as "black Friday." After a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with good friends and Ronnie's beautiful decoration of our home for Christmas, "Black Friday" certainly does not do justice to the good feelings of yesterday. As I groggily sipped my morning cup of coffee, the TV news overflowed with reports of the day's shopping frenzy. In one particularly depressing case in Floriday, two shoppers were arrested after coming to physical blows when supplies ran out of a particular gift item.
So often we opine that others have forgotten the 'true meaning' of Christmas. We proclaim to anyone within earshot that those people clearly don't understand that Christmas is about joy and peace or we quip that the abbreviation Xmas takes the "Christ out of Christmas."
While we ourselves may not be fist-fighting in Walmart or Target, we are 'those people." We will write out our lengthy Christmas lists. We will ask every family member, "what do you want for Christmas?" We will scour websites and stores and malls for yet another year's attempt at the "perfect gift." For what? To show off our wealth? To make our family or friends like us better? As a replacement for forgiveness or as a dose of guilt? We have met the enemy, and they are us.
Yes, the wise men brought gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh to Jesus. If we truly want to have Christ in Christmas, we need to remember that Christ isn't a gift to be given, Christ is a gift to be received. This holiday season, let us be open to receiving, to recognizing and giving thanks for the rich blessings that are already ours.
Express joy. Practice peace. Live in love.
The best gifts for Christmas.
Friday, November 25, 2005
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Turning to God in Thanksgiving
When we imagine the 'first Thanksgiving' our minds turn to the classic image of dour Pilgrims gathered around a turkey in prayer. However, the first national Thanksgiving holiday was not instituted until 1863 by President Lincoln. Lincoln had been urged by Sarah Joseph Hale, the spirited writer and editor of that era’s most popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. As early as 1855, Mrs. Hale urged on her readers and the elected officials to create a national day of thanksgiving, the last Thursday of November. This day would celebrate the prosperity and growth of the United States, honor the work and industry of the people, and, according to an 1860 editorial by Mrs. Hale, promote, “the perpetual political union of the States.” Less than a year later, the American Civil war began.
In his proclamation creating the holiday, in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln called on the nation to observe a day of repentance and thanksgiving.
President Lincoln as he called a whole yet fractured nation to celebrate that first national holiday of thanksgiving, urged a nation to do so with penitence, that is repentance. For a nation deeply divided by war, political power, regional economics, a sense of unease about the future, and the death of family members in combat, Lincoln called a nation to both repentance and thanksgiving.
Repentance is a return. Repentance is not a dreary self-flagellation mulling over our myriad motives and mistakes. In Greek the word literally means, “to turn around.” In repentance we stop and do an about-face, a complete 180 degree shift of movement, of perspective, and of focus. Repentance challenges us to perhaps turn our whole lives but more likely to turn our priorities, our views or our relationships. Repentance means a return, not to fun or sadness or loneliness but a return to God.
In November of 1857, Sarah Hale in another editorial wrote that to celebrate Thanksgiving is a “return...to the gayeties of childhood... when the noise and tumult of worldliness may be exchanged for the laugh of happy children, the glad greetings of family reunion and the humble gratitude of the Christian heart.”
Thanksgiving, like repentance, is at its root a return. For some today is a return to the memories of childhood, a return to the warmth of family and home, a return to the simplicity of cherished traditions and favorite recipes. For others today is a return to memories of trusts broken, to the pain of family shattered, to the loneliness of faces that no longer grace our tables or our lives. Thanksgiving is a returning.
Of course, it’s important to know why we are turning. Every year at Easter, there is a church that practices an odd ritual in turning. After a rousing trumpet fanfare the congregation in unison faces the large rose window at the back of the sanctuary and turns its back on the 50 voice choir standing proudly on the chancel and their beautiful rendition of Handel’s famed Hallelujah Chorus. As long as anyone can remember, turning around has been the tradition. Few people know why they are turning around they just do. Only one old parishioner was able to explain...”well,” he said, “we turn around because in the old days the choir was in the back.” It’s important to know why we are turning around.
When we repent, we remember that it is not through our effort, but God’s work that protects us, God’s work that provides for us, God’s work that sustains and even disciplines us on our journey together. When we turn toward God, we too come to the place where we can recognize God’s blessing and bless God in return.
True thanksgiving comes from repentance, remembering to whom we owe our blessings, even our whole lives.
In the children’s classic The Giving Tree, a boy grows up loved by a tree. The boy would visit her, play with her leaves, climb her trunk, eat her apples and nap in her shade. As the boy grows older he goes away, only returning throughout his life to take blessings from her - first her apples to sell, then her branches to build a house and finally her trunk to make a boat. The tree willing showers these blessings upon the boy, but each time it is not enough to make him happy. Each time the boy presumes that the tree will bless him, because of her love for him.
In the last scene of the book, the tree welcomes the boy, now and old man, saying, “I am sorry, Boy, but I have nothing left to give you.” The boy answers that now he is old, he only needs a place to sit and rest. The tree offers the only thing she has left, her stump. The boy sits. “And,” the story says, “the tree was happy.”
Each time he returns, she does bless him. But both are blessed when as an old man, the boy returns to her, content to sit on her stump and rest in her presence and thankful for the gift, not yearning for more.
Today, as we celebrate the bounty and blessing that surrounds us, we can rest in God’s presence, thankful for the gift of life and the abundance that has been showered upon us. We can turn toward God and remember to whom we owe our lives. We can turn toward God and remember our God who has protected and provided for us, who has sustained and saved us. We can turn to God in thanksgiving.
In his proclamation creating the holiday, in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln called on the nation to observe a day of repentance and thanksgiving.
“It has seemed to me fit and proper that [our blessings] should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation...” (emphasis added)
President Lincoln as he called a whole yet fractured nation to celebrate that first national holiday of thanksgiving, urged a nation to do so with penitence, that is repentance. For a nation deeply divided by war, political power, regional economics, a sense of unease about the future, and the death of family members in combat, Lincoln called a nation to both repentance and thanksgiving.
Repentance is a return. Repentance is not a dreary self-flagellation mulling over our myriad motives and mistakes. In Greek the word literally means, “to turn around.” In repentance we stop and do an about-face, a complete 180 degree shift of movement, of perspective, and of focus. Repentance challenges us to perhaps turn our whole lives but more likely to turn our priorities, our views or our relationships. Repentance means a return, not to fun or sadness or loneliness but a return to God.
In November of 1857, Sarah Hale in another editorial wrote that to celebrate Thanksgiving is a “return...to the gayeties of childhood... when the noise and tumult of worldliness may be exchanged for the laugh of happy children, the glad greetings of family reunion and the humble gratitude of the Christian heart.”
Thanksgiving, like repentance, is at its root a return. For some today is a return to the memories of childhood, a return to the warmth of family and home, a return to the simplicity of cherished traditions and favorite recipes. For others today is a return to memories of trusts broken, to the pain of family shattered, to the loneliness of faces that no longer grace our tables or our lives. Thanksgiving is a returning.
Of course, it’s important to know why we are turning. Every year at Easter, there is a church that practices an odd ritual in turning. After a rousing trumpet fanfare the congregation in unison faces the large rose window at the back of the sanctuary and turns its back on the 50 voice choir standing proudly on the chancel and their beautiful rendition of Handel’s famed Hallelujah Chorus. As long as anyone can remember, turning around has been the tradition. Few people know why they are turning around they just do. Only one old parishioner was able to explain...”well,” he said, “we turn around because in the old days the choir was in the back.” It’s important to know why we are turning around.
When we repent, we remember that it is not through our effort, but God’s work that protects us, God’s work that provides for us, God’s work that sustains and even disciplines us on our journey together. When we turn toward God, we too come to the place where we can recognize God’s blessing and bless God in return.
True thanksgiving comes from repentance, remembering to whom we owe our blessings, even our whole lives.
In the children’s classic The Giving Tree, a boy grows up loved by a tree. The boy would visit her, play with her leaves, climb her trunk, eat her apples and nap in her shade. As the boy grows older he goes away, only returning throughout his life to take blessings from her - first her apples to sell, then her branches to build a house and finally her trunk to make a boat. The tree willing showers these blessings upon the boy, but each time it is not enough to make him happy. Each time the boy presumes that the tree will bless him, because of her love for him.
In the last scene of the book, the tree welcomes the boy, now and old man, saying, “I am sorry, Boy, but I have nothing left to give you.” The boy answers that now he is old, he only needs a place to sit and rest. The tree offers the only thing she has left, her stump. The boy sits. “And,” the story says, “the tree was happy.”
Each time he returns, she does bless him. But both are blessed when as an old man, the boy returns to her, content to sit on her stump and rest in her presence and thankful for the gift, not yearning for more.
Today, as we celebrate the bounty and blessing that surrounds us, we can rest in God’s presence, thankful for the gift of life and the abundance that has been showered upon us. We can turn toward God and remember to whom we owe our lives. We can turn toward God and remember our God who has protected and provided for us, who has sustained and saved us. We can turn to God in thanksgiving.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Advent Time
If you’ve been anywhere near a church in the season of Advent, you have most likely have heard that, “’Advent’ means ‘coming.’” Advent traditionally begins the fourth Sunday before Christmas and is supposed to be a chance for us to prepare ourselves for the celebration of the coming of Christ into the world as well as Christ’s future second coming. But for me, to simply define Advent as ‘coming’ lacks the power to get me out of the consumeristic whirlwind already underway at Hallmark, Starbucks and the Galleria.
More simply Advent is the time that separates us from when we mark our awareness of Christmas’ coming and the actual event. Time is the operative word, for our modern sensibilities seem to have but one mode for time, now. Whether it’s our desires, our goals, our relationships or even our latte order, we want it now. And if not now, at least as quickly as possible. The mere existence of FedEx points to our obsessive desire to shrink the span between the time our need is realized to the time it is filled.
The Greeks, obsessive about their use of language, had two different words for time. The first, ‘kronos,’ referred to human, measurable time. Our modern minds deal almost exclusively in the realm of kronos. How long does it take? How many days till Christmas? And how can I get my package there faster? Kronos time.
But the Greeks described another kind of time, ‘kairos.’ Kairos time means the fullness or the ripeness of time. We talk about time that way when we say something’s “time has come.” Kairos time is God’s time. Kairos time is not time that we measure. Kairos time is not something we can shrink or stretch. Kairos time is time in which we patiently watch and wait. Kairos time is when we work steadily in the fields, preparing for the harvest that will come only on its schedule, not ours.
Advent is not lived in kronos time. Advent should not be about counting down the days, or trying to control whether the time goes slowly or quickly.
Advent is kairos time. In Advent’s kairos time, we too patiently watch and wait. We work steadily, anticipating, not controlling, the harvest. Only if we live Advent in kairos time will we receive God’s Christmas gift, ripened to perfection.
More simply Advent is the time that separates us from when we mark our awareness of Christmas’ coming and the actual event. Time is the operative word, for our modern sensibilities seem to have but one mode for time, now. Whether it’s our desires, our goals, our relationships or even our latte order, we want it now. And if not now, at least as quickly as possible. The mere existence of FedEx points to our obsessive desire to shrink the span between the time our need is realized to the time it is filled.
The Greeks, obsessive about their use of language, had two different words for time. The first, ‘kronos,’ referred to human, measurable time. Our modern minds deal almost exclusively in the realm of kronos. How long does it take? How many days till Christmas? And how can I get my package there faster? Kronos time.
But the Greeks described another kind of time, ‘kairos.’ Kairos time means the fullness or the ripeness of time. We talk about time that way when we say something’s “time has come.” Kairos time is God’s time. Kairos time is not time that we measure. Kairos time is not something we can shrink or stretch. Kairos time is time in which we patiently watch and wait. Kairos time is when we work steadily in the fields, preparing for the harvest that will come only on its schedule, not ours.
Advent is not lived in kronos time. Advent should not be about counting down the days, or trying to control whether the time goes slowly or quickly.
Advent is kairos time. In Advent’s kairos time, we too patiently watch and wait. We work steadily, anticipating, not controlling, the harvest. Only if we live Advent in kairos time will we receive God’s Christmas gift, ripened to perfection.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Intelligent Design?
Today, the Kansas Board of Education approved new science stardards which attempts to poke holes in the theory of evolution. At the behest of a misguided religious right who neither understands the roots of the scientific method nor the implications of theology, six Republican board members outvoted their four colleagues to draft the new standards. The new standard states that basic evolutionary concepts must be understood by students but that recent biological research has questioned Darwinian assertions that all life started from a common origin and arose from natural chemical and biological processes. This opens the way for other ''alternative" explanations to be taught such as "intelligent design" which asserts that life is so amazingly complex that a "higher power" must have been responsible.
Now, let us put aside for the moment that while the theory of evolution cannot be tested directly, the scientific assertions that underly Darwin's naturalistic insight remain one of the bedrocks of modern evolutionary biology not to mention many other scientific disciplines. And, I suppose we can even put aside the dangerous theological problems of asserting that just because we do not fully understand some things about the nature of the beginnings of life, someday we might, closing God out of yet another sphere of authority, because we chose to stuff God into that lone sphere in the first place.
No, I think the most cogent argument against "intelligent design" is a theological one. While advocates of this view conveniently like to refer to their 'intelligent' higher power, the Bible in no place talks about a 'higher power." The witness of the Bible, to which these Christians ostensibly subscribe, is not to a nameless higher power, a faceless behind-the-scenes figure that somehow sticks a finger into the mirky soup of existence to tweek an atom here, a molecule there, to make the glorious creation that is our universe and of course, the potently proud humankind.
The Christian faith asserts that is God, the LORD, Yahweh of the Old Testament that created us. The Christian faith asserts that this God is a God we know by name, a God who knows us by name. The Christian faith proclaims our God that cares so deeply not just about us but about the whole of the created universe that this God came to us in a human child, a baby that grew into a man - a man with a face, with hair and hands and feet and eyes and a name; Jesus Christ.
Intelligent design is not only unscientific.
It's un-Christian.
Now, let us put aside for the moment that while the theory of evolution cannot be tested directly, the scientific assertions that underly Darwin's naturalistic insight remain one of the bedrocks of modern evolutionary biology not to mention many other scientific disciplines. And, I suppose we can even put aside the dangerous theological problems of asserting that just because we do not fully understand some things about the nature of the beginnings of life, someday we might, closing God out of yet another sphere of authority, because we chose to stuff God into that lone sphere in the first place.
No, I think the most cogent argument against "intelligent design" is a theological one. While advocates of this view conveniently like to refer to their 'intelligent' higher power, the Bible in no place talks about a 'higher power." The witness of the Bible, to which these Christians ostensibly subscribe, is not to a nameless higher power, a faceless behind-the-scenes figure that somehow sticks a finger into the mirky soup of existence to tweek an atom here, a molecule there, to make the glorious creation that is our universe and of course, the potently proud humankind.
The Christian faith asserts that is God, the LORD, Yahweh of the Old Testament that created us. The Christian faith asserts that this God is a God we know by name, a God who knows us by name. The Christian faith proclaims our God that cares so deeply not just about us but about the whole of the created universe that this God came to us in a human child, a baby that grew into a man - a man with a face, with hair and hands and feet and eyes and a name; Jesus Christ.
Intelligent design is not only unscientific.
It's un-Christian.
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Risk Heresy!
Several years ago, a mentor charged me at my ordination to ministry, to "Risk Heresy." As I've witnessed the ongoing polarization of this country around concepts of religion and specifically Christianity, this brief charge has been a guiding principle to me as I think through faith and attempt to lead a life of faith myself.
Michael Servetus, above, risked heresy, and struggled against John Calvin.
Servetus also ended up burned at the stake. No one said heresy was easy.
To risk heresy, we must be willing to admit we do not in ourselves have all the answers.
To risk heresy means we must humbly encounter others who have challenging ideas about what God is up to in their life and lives together.
To risk heresy means that we must open re-examine and re-explore our own beliefs and ideas.
To risk heresy reminds us that our faith is not equal to our limited construct of our understanding of the faith.
To risk heresy forces us to remember that ultimately it matters less what we have to do with God than with what God has to do with us.
Michael Servetus, above, risked heresy, and struggled against John Calvin.Servetus also ended up burned at the stake. No one said heresy was easy.
To risk heresy, we must be willing to admit we do not in ourselves have all the answers.
To risk heresy means we must humbly encounter others who have challenging ideas about what God is up to in their life and lives together.
To risk heresy means that we must open re-examine and re-explore our own beliefs and ideas.
To risk heresy reminds us that our faith is not equal to our limited construct of our understanding of the faith.
To risk heresy forces us to remember that ultimately it matters less what we have to do with God than with what God has to do with us.
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