The Power of Christmas

      We had a wonderful Christmas.  Our daughters, and two of our grandchildren were here along with both of our great-grands.  Rosie cooked a ham, everyone brought something and we feasted.  It was the best Christmas gift we could have received.  We have a delightful family who gives love extravagantly.   I now have a picture of Samson, my great-grandson looking at a dessert that Jennifer brought to us.  It is the background on my computer and it reminds me of the wonder of this family.

  I spent Christmas eve at Calvary Church with its glorious music and awesome liturgy.  This is the second year that I have done this.  That place provides all of the pomp and glory that this season requires.  The choir, the brass and the harp all make the power of this night rise and shine.   The theology of the incarnation is full of incredible mystery and is difficult for most of us to comprehend.  The very idea of God coming to earth in human form eludes most of us.  It is the whole reason for this magnificent festival.  The very idea of God walking this earth in our shoes brings tears to my eyes as I even think about it.

This is why God understands what human life is all about.  This is not some white bearded God up on a cloud judgeing us from afar;  this is God who has known human being also, who has felt hunger, thirst, want and judgement, who knew the pain of loss and death and who can see through our eyes the frustrations of human life.  That is what makes the Christian experience so dynamic.  When we celebrate this feast of the Incarnation, we are celebrating the human face of God who knows us better than we know ourselves.

The first eighteen verses of the Gospel of John expresses the theology of the coming of God to earth in brilliant poetry.  If there was ever argument about including this Gospel in the New Testament, these verses refute it.  The elegance of the words are overpowering and give us the best reason to hope that I can ever imagine.  Our loving God gave himself for our salvation.  That is breathtaking and certainly true.  Despite the way that Christmas has devolved into a festival of craving material things, this is the best gift that any of us could possibly crave.  We are not judged by our failure to live up to the law, but by the Grace of our loving God, who wants us to belong to God more than he wants us to be perfect.  That, I think has become the cornerstone of my life.

I hope your Christmas was full of beauty and hope.  With all of the pain and turbulence in the world, it is a measure of God’s glory that we can reach out to each other and offer hopefulness.  God blesses us in all that we do.

Guns and Hope

All of our hearts are broken after the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut.  The killing of twenty small children by a gunman who possibly had Asberger’s syndrome is monstrous.  The simple availability to him of an assault rifle and lots of ammunition is a terrible indictment of this culture of ours where the second amendment to the Constitution is revered above all things.  The National Rifle Association has been able to defend with impunity their ridiculous stance that guns are appropriate in just about every situation.  The absurd idea that we ought to be able to buy as many guns as we want has led to trafficking in guns in almost unbelievable ways.  The proposal to allow people to buy only one gun a month is in itself absurd.  Twelve guns a year?  Good Lord, what is in our minds.

I don’t expect congress or the president, or anybody else to come up with an adequate solution to this terrible gun problem that plagues this country.  We don’t need a conversation about guns, we need action and we need it now.  We tolerate guns in our video games, guns in our movies, guns everywhere.  We subtly teach our children that guns are a reasonable part of our lives.  I don’t know any hunters who take assault rifles with them when they go to hunt deer.  That doesn’t even make any sense.  But we have allowed senselessness to inhabit this argument for far too long.  We are now reaping the wild wind that overarching gun ownership has brought us.  It isn’t enough for us to ban the sale of assault weapons.  There are enough of them already in people’s hands to continually cause events such as Newtown.  We need to get these weapons out of the hands of people who aren’t qualified to possess them.  No one outside of the military ought to have these weapons.  That seems to me to be just common sense.

We are in the last week of Advent.  We are waiting with anticipation for the birth of our Messiah, the one who will bring peace and hope to this world.  I am attracted to Mary’s beautiful Magnificat and the past tense that she uses in describing God’s work in the world to touch our lives.  She says:

He has shown the strength of his arm; 
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.

In the birth of Jesus, our Messiah, we have the guarantee that God has adsorbed the intense hurt and pain of this world,  most of which is caused by ourselves.  I know that God’s tears have joined ours in our mourning over the precious lost lives in Newtown.  As we have caused this problem, it is up to us to find a way to solve it.  That is what God gave us minds and hearts to do.  God bless everyone touched by this horrible disaster, and God bless all of us as we find a solution.

Finding Christmas in a Difficult World

This is the last Sunday before the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world hits us on the 21st of December.  Frankly, I’m not particularly worried about it.  I really believe that this world that God created and saved will go right on.  Doomsday prophecies seem to be a part of our heritage.  Every couple of years or so, there is somebody claiming that the end of the world is approaching.  It never seems to occur, even though we don’t seem to understand that pumping endless supplies of CO2 into the atmosphere is not doing it any good and that climate change is much more than a theory, that it is upon us and that we may at this point be beyond salvation.  We’ll have to see about that.

In the meantime, we are in the middle of Advent and getting ready to celebrate the birth of our savior.  If you can ignore the commercialism all around us, this is a good time to quiet down and meditate on the goodness that also surrounds us.   Every week the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette publishes a column dedicated to the kindness that is shown by people in the city.  They get letters about good things that people have done, such as returning lost wallets, helping children and the such.  It always makes me feel good to read these things.  I know that there is an innate goodness inside each of us that can transcend the badness that is so obvious.

When I had my prison ministry, I was always impressed with the way that the men in my group cared about each other, and the way that others in the prison population came to the fore when there was need.  That was not obvious to those outside the prison who held all inmates in disregard and who seemed to want increased not decreased sentences.  That is probably why our prisons are so full today.  We incarcerate one out of five people in this country.  That is one of the highest figures in the world.  We are on a par with China and Iran in this regard.

But Christmas is coming.  Once again we are reminded of God’s glorious love for all of humanity, particularly including those in prison and those in need.  Instead of our intense desire to gather more and more things around us, it would be better if we could focus our financial attention on those who live their lives without even the basic things that we all take for granted.

I know that if Christianity disappeared from the face of the earth, Christmas with all of its merchandising would go right on.  We long ago lost control of the theology behind it.  God’s love is a powerful part of the message of this season.  When we become calm and small and meditate on the real meaning of this time, we can see that the need of those around us is more than cards and baubles.  The need is certainly for food, shelter and care.  And more than that, the need is simply for kindness.  God blesses us richly when we provide it.  Do something nice for somebody today. You might get your name in the paper!

Finding Peace in a World of Conflict

      The English church has rejected the idea of consecrating women to be bishops.  This was because the vote was a few shy in the lay order after the bishops and the priests had voted for it.  They say that there will be a delay in this, but the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury says that he will consecrate a woman to be bishop during his tenure.  In the meantime, Presbyterians in Pittsburgh are splitting over doctrinal matters in the same way that the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh did a few years ago.  It is really becoming more and more difficult for all of us to live with the contradictions of opinion that we all have.

I am also a bit surprised at how stunned the Republican party was after their defeat by President Obama in the presidential election.  They believed the polls and Fox news and got most of it wrong.

We live in a time when differences of opinion become fiscal cliffs or reasons for war, not peace.  We have a hard time finding compromise and accepting the profound differences that we all have with each other.  I suspect that it has always been like this, although it seems to me that we have in the past been better able to resolve our differences and to get along better with each other.

The problem is our common sin.  The idea that we get in our heads that we are the center of the universe and that only our opinions matter.  That has been going on throughout all of the human experience.  Over the ages, we have looked to God to solve this terrible problem, to somehow bring peace to a world where we are constantly the reason that there is no peace.

God has tried a number of times to get our attention, to help us to find ways to agree with each other and to stop our constant arguments.  God sent the Law to Moses, then the prophets to speak to us, and finally God came to us himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to show us in his humanity the way that God would have us to live.  Jesus healed, took care of the poor, lived with those who were called sinners and chastised the rich.  And for his efforts, he was crucified by all of us because we have the same trouble with God that we have with each other.  We love ourselves more than we love each other.

But that wasn’t the end of the story.  God brought Jesus from the grave in the miracle of the Resurrection. The followers of Jesus gathered together after this powerful event and became the church.  They worshipped God and continued the work that Jesus had begun.  The interesting thing is that the church over the centuries continued to argue and bicker just as they had before the church existed, even though the work of love continued.  During the season of Advent, our yearning is once again for the coming of the Lord to free us from ourselves and to make the world whole and peaceful.  That is certainly the Spirit of Christmas.  Somehow deep inside, we know that without the help of God we will always be unable to live the lives that God intended for us.

The way of peace, however is not for us to wait expectantly for God to come and fix us.  That has been tried.  The way of peace is for us, the Church, to live in the love that God provided for us in the teaching of Jesus.  To love God and to love each other above all things.  That is the only way that God’s will can be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.  It is up to us to make this world better.  And it is within our power.  Thank God for all of the love that has been lavished on humanity.  May we show our thanks by the way that we respond with our love for each other.