New Year's Prayer

My prayers for you in 2013:

•  I pray that you will be known as a person for whom forgiveness comes as naturally as breathing.  That you won’t fear that people will thus take advantage of you—though some small souls undoubtedly will—but realize that good people are drawn to  those who accept them as they are, flaws and all.

• I pray that you will realize that there are things in this life that are worth striving for perfection, some that are worth striving for excellence, some that are worth striving for good enough, and some that aren’t worth striving for at all.  And that you’ll get everything sorted out in the right categories.

• I pray that when you strive for perfection and fall short, you’ll realize that God will cut you some slack.  And that you will cut yourself the same measure as God—but with a contrite heart.  God doesn’t appreciate it when his slack-cutting is taken for granted or leads to arrogance.

• I pray that you will realize that a God of forgiveness views punishment differently  than humans do; that for God the goal is never revenge, or satisfying some sense of justice that has more in common with the concept of karma, i.e. that every deed has its just reward or punishment; that for God the goal of punishment is always reconciliation and restoration, and if those goals can best be accomplished without punishment, then so be it.

• I pray that if you ever feel like you are being punished by God that it isn’t because he is angry or vengeful but because he believes in you more than you believe in yourself, and he is trying to awaken you to that fact.

• I pray that you realize that when you fall, God does not merely wait for you to come to your senses, but comes searching for you, full of understanding and care.

• I pray that you will know that God is not a God who is calculating and stingy in his gifts, but a crazy-farmer God who sows seeds everywhere without regard for waste or worthiness.

• I pray that you will sow the seeds of love and goodness without regard for waste or worthiness.

• I pray you will see God less as being immutable and more as being consistent.  Immutability implies rigid, unbending, incapable of adjusting to new circumstances.  But a habit that a person will not break for any reason is just an obsession.  Scripture reveals God to be anything but rigid, unbending, and inflexible;  it does reveal him to be consistently loving, consistently forgiving, consistently faithful, consistently reconciling.  All these (and more) mean that he can’t be rigid, unbending, and inflexible. 

• I pray that you will come to trust in a God in whose hands and in whose promise you are far safer than if you rely on yourself, or arms, or armies, or governments.

• I pray that you come to believe in a God who, if he is able to raise dead bodies to new life, is able, not merely to destroy what is evil and hopeless, but to redeem what is evil and hopeless.

• I pray that you will trust that a God who fashioned the depth of the universe and the deepest recesses of the human psyche is able to comprehend your life and all its complexity.

 All of these things and more I will pray for you in this new year.  And while I am praying for them for you, I will also be praying them for myself.

Baby Strength

      Here’s a truth you’ve probably never thought of: You can’t win an argument with a baby.  Ever notice that?  Think about it.  Babies don't try to compete, don't stand up to you, don't try to best you in an argument, and don't try to impress you with their answers. Indeed, they can't speak at all. You have to coax everything out of them, and that effort demands great patience.  Push at a baby too hard and it will begin to cry and the session is over.

And that is the Savior who was born in Bethlehem, and that is too how God is still basically in the world. Like a baby, God does not outgun anyone, out-muscle anyone, threaten anyone, or overpower anyone. The power of God revealed in Christmas is the power of a baby, nothing more, nothing less:  innocence, gentleness, helplessness, a vulnerability that can soften hearts, invite in, have us hush our voices, teach us patience, and call forth what's best in us.

The power of Christmas is like the power of a baby; it underwhelms in such a way so as to eventually overwhelm. There is a greater power than muscle, speed, charisma, and any unstoppable force: If you were to put a baby into a room with the heavy-weight boxing champion of the world,  the baby would win every time.  Something about the baby's powerlessness would overwhelm the boxer. Such is the way of God, and that is the message of Christmas to those who have ears to hear.

But we have always been slow to understand this; we want our messiahs to possess more immediate power.   And we are in good company here, because for centuries the Jews longed for a messiah who would be kind of a human superhero, someone with the earthly muscle to bang heads together and rid the world of evil by might as well as right. 

Even John the Baptist expected the messiah to come with that kind of power. He was concerned with justice and repentance, but with a sackcloth and ashes—or, rather, camel hair and leather—kind of attitude.   He warned people of an approaching time of reckoning and expected the longed-for messiah to come precisely as a violent fire, a winnowing fan that would separate the bad from the good and burn up the former with a righteousness that came straight from God.  When he heard reports of Jesus gently inviting sinners in rather than casting them off, John was scandalized.  That wasn’t the kind of a messiah he expected.  Why, that wasn’t any kind of messiah at all.  Jesus didn't fit his expectations or his preaching. That's why Jesus, in sending a response to him, invites John not to be scandalized in him.  John hadn't wanted a gentle, vulnerable, peace-preaching messiah.  He wanted bad people punished, not converted.  But, to his credit, once he saw how Jesus' power worked, he got it.  He accepted a deeper truth, stepped back, and pointed people in Jesus' direction.   “He must increase and I must decrease. I'm not even worthy to untie his scandal strap!”

We too are slow to understand. Like John the Baptist, our impatience for truth and justice makes us want and expect a messiah who comes in earthly terms, all talent and muscle, banging heads together so as to rid the planet of falsehood and evil. We want the kind of messiah we see at the end of every Hollywood thriller, Mother Theresa turned into Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis, beating up the bad guys with a violence they can only envy.

But that's not the Christmas story.  That’s not the kind of power that God wields.  An infant lying in the straw in Bethlehem didn't outgun anyone. He just lay there, waiting for anyone, good or bad, to come to him, to see his helplessness, to feel a tug at his or her heart strings, and then gently try to coax a smile or a word out of him.

That's still how God meets us.

You can try to argue with that, but you won’t win.  Like John the Baptist, our ways must decrease, and his way—that of a baby—must increase.

Virgin

This time of year there is a lot of talk about virgins.  Well, one in particular.  Actually, when a lot of evangelicals talk about the virgin birth, they stay away from Mary.  Talking about the Virgin Mary is too Catholic and might lead to excessive Mary-veneration, and down the slippery slope of papacy we go!   No, evangelicals prefer to talk about the virgin birth of Jesus, as if he was the only important one involved.  The virgin birth is important because it demonstrates that Jesus did not descend from an earthly father.  He is God’s Son, and if a virgin birth doesn’t prove it, what does?  So the virgin birth tells us something important about Jesus, but nothing, really, about Mary.  Or you and me.

In other words, if all the virgin birth does  is point to Jesus’ divine nature, then it is one of those things about him that we can admire but not imitate.  Like the feeding of the 5,000, which is one of those really cool things that Jesus did but none of us should ever try, so also with the virgin birth.  It’s pretty cool, but none of us can do it ourselves.

But there is a moral challenge within the virgin birth which we shouldn’t ignore, something which invites imitation rather than just admiration.  To help us see this we need to briefly skip from Jesus’ birth to his death.  In those days tombs—usually caves—would contain the bones of numerous family members, but the gospel writers note that Jesus’ body was laid in a new, unused tomb.

Connection 1: Virgin womb, virgin tomb.

Luke adds that Joseph of Arimathea, who gave the tomb for Jesus burial, was “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God.”  And after he was laid in the tomb the women had to wait until the Sabbath was over before they could anoint Jesus’ body.  That’s a lot of waiting going on.

Connection 2: A virgin is a young woman who waits.

Oh, it would be easy to make this about sex, but the virgin birth isn’t primarily about sex before, within, or outside of marriage; it’s primarily about waiting.  The virgin birth is about waiting  rather than acting, patience rather than impatience, reverence rather than irreverence, respect rather than disrespect, and accepting to live in tension and even frustration rather than giving up and giving in to desire.   A virgin's heart accepts the pain of inconsummation rather than sleeping with the bride before the wedding.

It is from the virgin womb  that Jesus was born, and it is from the virgin tomb that Jesus also was “born” again.  Both emphasize what kind of heart and soul is needed to create the space wherein something divine can be born.

We all know only too well that our lives are full of most everything that is not virginal or pure: impatience, disrespect, irreverence, manipulation, cynicism, egotism, pride, etc.; and, as we also all know, within this matrix no messiah can be conceived and nurtured.

Only virgins' wombs bring forth messiahs because they alone live in Advent, waiting for a bridegroom who is late, who is hopelessly late, beyond the eleventh hour.  And still the virgin waits, trusting that the bridegroom has not forgotten nor forsaken her.

Still ,the virgin waits, refusing all other suitors who tell her that waiting is for fools, that her bridegroom is never coming, that waiting is unnatural.

Still, the  virgin waits, refusing impatience, delaying passion, ignoring the urge of flesh on flesh and a divine Kingdom on human terms.

Messiahs are only born in virginity's space, within virginity's patience.

Waiting.

Letting love be gift.

And God be God.

Waiting

      Wait.

Nobody likes to hear those words.  As children we were told that all the time, and we never liked it.  As adults we’ve all had to say it to a child or two.  Children don’t like to be told to wait.  If there is something good that they want, they want it now and can’t understand why they can’t have it now.  It’s part of the maturing process to learn how to wait.

Still, even as adults, nobody likes to be told to wait.  We’ve perhaps grown used to it, maybe come to accept it, but, still, nobody likes to hear it.  “Wait” means there is something you want, and you want it now, but you aren’t going to get it now.  You never have to be told to wait for something you don’t want or need.  “I'm going to question your integrity and impugn your character, but not right now; you are just going to have to wait.”  No, there is usually an element of anticipation in the notion of waiting.  You want something, you want it now, but you can’t have it now.  You have to wait.

It’s common now to say that we are not as good at waiting now as we used to be, that in this age of instant gratification, of microwave dinners and faster and faster computers that our waiting muscles aren’t as developed as they used to be.  There may be some truth to that.  Two-hundred years ago it could take a letter weeks or even months to get from one person to another, depending on the distance it had to travel.  Then came the locomotive cutting that time down, then the truck, then the airplane.  I remember when airmail was something special that you paid extra for that could cut delivery down to a couple of days; FedEx made it that normal.  When email came along messages could be delivered around the world instantly.  If I was away from my computer they would all be waiting for me when I got back.  Now I don't even have to wait for that—I have two devices, my tablet and my phone, from which I can get email, and since I'm rarely without my phone, I literally get mail almost as soon as it is sent.  So, yeah, we don’t have to wait for a lot of things the way we used to, and maybe that has impaired the waitability of this age over previous generations.

But I'm not so sure.  I'm not sure that waiting has ever been something we’ve been that good at.  Impatience isn’t a new condition; after all, Paul wouldn’t have listed patience among the fruit of the Spirit if impatience wasn’t naturally a fruit of the Flesh.

For kids, the Christmas season is a time of waiting and anticipation, and what makes it hard for children is that they have little concept of time—telling them to wait a week is like telling them to wait a month, they have no concept of how long that really is.  And, my goodness, tell them to wait a month and you might as well tell them to wait a lifetime.  That’s how it feels, anyway.  Do you remember that?  And that’s because, perhaps paradoxically, time moves slowly for a child.  For an adult months blow by like pieces of paper in a tornado, but for a child a month lasts forever.  Waiting is excruciating when time moves slowly.

But it’s one thing to wait for something you want; it’s another thing to have to wait for something you need.  That’s when time really does seem to move slowly.

This is the season of Advent.  It’s a season of waiting.  Advent lasts for roughly a month, but it commemorates a wait that lasted for over four hundred years.  After the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem, destroying the temple and the city wall and carrying off the son of David who was the king, the people had to wait.  They had to wait for God to return to Zion and for another son of David to become king.    Understandably, after a couple of hundred years a lot of people gave up waiting.  They either gave up on the dream, or they gave up waiting and tried to force the action with a sword.  Either way, when God did return and the king did arrive—and in the same person, which no one anticipated—they couldn’t see it.   

The only ones who saw it were the ones who, with great faith and undying hope, still waited.

I'm Back

For those of you who look forward to reading my stuff...sorry, I've been neglectful the last few weeks.  I'll try to catch up in the next few days and try not to let it happen again.

Thanks for hanging with me.

Energy and Order

      In Genesis 1 God creates order out of chaos.  The original conditions were inhospitable to life—there was complete darkness, utter emptiness, no land, nothing but a raging wind over a restless sea.  Then God proceeds to bring order to the chaos—he creates light, he pushes  the sea back to allow the land to show, and he fills the emptiness with trees, fish, beasts and humans.  Order out of chaos.

But he doesn’t rid the earth of chaos, he simply restrains it.  But it is still there.  At any given time half the earth is in darkness.  Hurricanes form and the wind and sea rages, imposing itself over the dry land.  Tornadoes drop out of the sky, tear a path through the land, and recede back into the sky.  Rain falls for days, sending rivers over their banks; or it doesn’t fall at all, turning the landscape from lush green to dry brown.
But these are normal events.  Though they seem random and episodic, they are all quite common—and necessary.  Hurricanes and tornados regulate the earth’s surface temperatures, dissipating excess heat into the atmosphere.  Floods enrich the soil in the floodplains, bringing life everything living nearby.   In fact, engineering to contain flooding on the Mississippi  has had the unintended effect of creating more damage when there are floods, due to higher water levels and faster flows.  They also  are reducing the wetlands at the mouth of the river, leading to encroachment by the Gulf of Mexico northward. 
In other words, chaos is as necessary to life as order.  It helps to understand that what we call chaos is simply uncontrolled energy, and that’s not always such a bad thing.  Energy is a good thing.  Life is energy.   The soul is about energy.  There is only one body that does not have energy, and that is a dead one, and a dead body has no soul.  It has no energy.  Think about music.  Music that has no soul lacks energy, lacks the ability to move us.  The music that is so often heard in airports, supermarkets, and elevators is soulless.  It does nothing to you.  It doesn’t stir you.  It is just filler.  But certain music does stir you.  It is full of energy—what the Greeks called eros. 
The soul gives energy, but it also holds us together.  It makes us alive, but it also makes us one.  Once again, look at a dead body.  At the moment of death, all the chemicals that work together to form a single organism begin to go their own way.  As they fall away from each other, the body starts to fall apart.  This is the essence of decomposition.  The chemicals aren’t destroyed, they just don’t hold together anymore.
A healthy soul does two things for us.  First, it puts fire in our veins.  It keeps us energized, vibrant, zestful, and full of hope that life is worth living.  When this breaks down, something is wrong with our souls.  Cynicism, despair, bitterness and depression paralyze our energy.  Second, a healthy soul keeps us fixed together.  It gives us a sense of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, and what sense there is in all of this.  It holds us together as one.  So a healthy soul is a combination of energy and order, and each must be given its due.  Too much order and you die of suffocation; too much energy and you die of dissipation. 
That raging wind that blew over the restless sea in Genesis 1?  In Hebrew that word is ruach, and that same word is used for the Holy Spirit.  In fact many translations say that the Spirit of God was upon the face of the deep.  Jesus said, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."  You cannot control the Spirit, or a person infused with the Spirit.  And that same Spirit makes us one.   “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”  (Eph. 4:4-6)
The Holy Spirit is both Energy and Order.  Our souls need both.

Love and Fear

“Knowing God’s heart means consistently, radically, and very concretely to announce and reveal that God is love and only love, and that every time fear, isolation, or despair begins to invade the human soul, this is not something that comes from God.”                                                            —Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus

Fear is a good motivator.  It can keep you from doing things you shouldn’t, as when your mother warned you as a small child not to touch the hot stove, and it can spur you to do the things you should, as when I studied hard for a test because I didn’t want to face my parents and explain to them why I received a bad grade.  I am not sure that it isn’t the first and most basic human motivator; I’ve not studied these things, but my guess is that when the first humans were struggling to survive in a hostile environment that fear kept the species going.  Fear of starvation, fear of wild animals, fear of heights, fear of the cold, fear of being abandoned by the tribe or clan and left to fend for yourself—these all seem pretty basic fears.  The fight or flight instinct are both spurred by fright.  I imagine you fight with more desperation when afraid, even more so than when angry, and I'm pretty sure you run faster when afraid of whatever is chasing you.  Fear is the first and most basic motivator.

That’s why political campaigns always seem to go negative.  You can motivate people to vote for you by promising them the world, but when you really need to motivate them, you have to scare them.  Tell them the other guy will take away your freedom, your money, your rights, your dignity.  Tell them the other guy can’t be trusted, tell them he’s dishonest, tell them he crooked, tell them he’s a cheat.  Scare them enough, and they will vote for you—or at least not vote for the other guy, which is the same thing.

Unfortunately, religion uses fear as well.  What’s even more unfortunate is that it’s hard to tell if the politicians learned it from the religious or if the religious learned it from politics.  I'm not even sure which would be worse, but it doesn’t really matter.  While politicians have been trying to, metaphorically speaking, scare the hell out of people for millennia, religion has been doing the same thing for at least as long, not metaphorically but literally.  If you don’t believe the right things and say the right words you will burn in hell for the rest of eternity.  If you don’t  do this for God he will withhold his blessing on your life.   You will lose your health, your kids will rebel, you won’t be happy, etc.

And it works.  People walk down the aisle, pray the prayer, get baptized all to make sure they don’t get sent to hell.  People tithe, attend worship, read the Bible, teach Sunday School so they can, if not stay healthy, at least avoid the bad diseases and accidents, and have a relatively tragedy-free life.

And some do but even those who do live a relatively joyless life.  The absence of tragedy, and even the freedom from hell, doesn’t mean the presence of joy.

Fear does work in motivating people to do good things for God.  The problem is that however good it is in getting proper behavior, it isn’t from God.  Nouwen is exactly right:  every time fear, isolation, or despair begins to invade the human soul, this is not something that comes from God.  Beware of those who claim to speak for God and for what is right for God, the church, your family, the country, etc. but whose primary aim is to provoke fear and despair in your soul.  They are not from God, neither do they speak for God.

The evangelist John said that we should love others “because God loved us first” (1 John 4:19).  God is love, and God is only love.  His love is perfect because it is pure and complete, and because it is pure and complete it is fearless.  “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).

The voices of fear are not from God; listen only to the Voice of Love, for it is God’s own Voice.