Christmas and God's Love

            Christmas is certainly a beautiful time of the year.  I know that you have done a lot of shopping, decorating and getting ready for visits from relatives.  There is a wonderful sense of community that surrounds this day.  Certainly we think of Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward all people at this moment in our year.  It would be wonderful if we could extend this wonderful feeling to all of the rest of the year too.

            I have always been intrigued by God’s reasoning at Christmas.  In the beginning, God created humankind male and female.  God watched as we tangled with each other over every conceivable issue.  We fought over land, over wealth, over everything.  Our greed and our egos got in the way of our peace.  Even when we created religion, we built into it prejudices so that we could continue to harass each other.  When I read the scriptures, it is certainly apparent to me that our blindness to our selfishness continually got in the way of creating peace on earth and goodwill toward all people. 

            It isn’t possible to argue that we refrained from sin, even for a moment.  Continually, God worked to repair what we destroyed by our self-focused actions.  After a very long time of this, and after many, many destructive events, God decided to do something about our way of sin once and for all.  God decided that the only way to completely understand the human condition would be for God to come to earth in human form and live our lives the way that we lived them. 

            That decision by God produced the incredible occasion of the Angel Gabriel coming to Mary and giving her the news that she would be the bearer of the Son of God; that her child would be born    and live life with Mary and Joseph as parents.  It was astonishing news to Mary.  She was a virgin, a poor woman who was engaged to an older man, Joseph who was a carpenter and a man with not many prospects in this world. 

            The occasion of the birth came after the census was announced and Mary and Joseph travelled to Bethlehem, Joseph’s home city because he was of the lineage of the mighty King David.  The couple couldn’t find housing in Bethlehem and were given lodging in a stable.  On that evening, the child was born and laid in a manger with straw and the cattle and the goats watched.   .

            The story continues with an angel choir visiting shepherds, tending their sheep and telling them of the child’s birth.  The shepherds leave their flocks and travel to the city to see and to adore the child.  Shepherds are interesting as a part of the story because, like Mary and Joseph, they were people of little prospect, with no resources who were looked down upon by the rest of humanity.  Here, they are lifted up by God and given a first glimpse of a new creation and are able to see the Son of God at his birth. 

            Oh, the story has been disputed, called a fable and discounted.  But the essence of the story is that God has come to earth and to life as a human being to be able to understand exactly what it is that we go through in this life.  God came to experience poverty and being shunned so that by knowing that, a complete understanding of the human condition would be available to God.  Along the way, God would also encounter human arrogance and be able to see the source of this terrible condition.  Through all of Jesus’ life, he would encounter those who wished him ill, strangely the leaders of the religion were in the forefront of this effort.  It was the Pharisees and the Sadducees who finally conspired to bring Jesus before Pontius Pilate and condemn him to his death on the cross. 

            That is origin of this beautiful night.  The wise men come later, at Epiphany, but we bring gifts to each other in commemoration of the great gift that has been given to us in the birth of Jesus who became the Christ; the living presence of God on this earth and in our lives.  It is by that gift that we are forgiven our sins, our arrogance and our egotism and are given another chance to be the children that God created in the beginning.  That is a great reason for this holiday and all of the things that we do to celebrate it.  May you all have a wonderful celebration of our Lord’s birth and may God bless you richly.

            

Fear is Our Enemy

                

         This is a prophetic time that we are living in.  With all of the chaos in the world, and our own political situation in such turmoil, we wonder what may be coming.  Sometimes it seems to me that fear is the driving force in what we are told by the media and how our politicians relate to us.  I would like to tell you that everything will be all right, but when I look at what the world seems to be up to, I can't say that.  A new ground war sounds terrible to me, with all of the years that we have been fighting in the middle east, it seems to me that it is a time to refrain from further bloodshed.  The war in Iraq is what brought all of this mess to us and more war will simply inflame it more.  Fear is not the way to approach this calamity.

       In Luke’s gospel, John proclaims what he calls the “good news” to the people.  He tells them of the wrath to come, which doesn’t sound much like good news to me, but John is talking about the coming of the Messiah, the Christ who will redeem the world. The people listened to him and many of them thought that he might be the Messiah.  John told them no, that he would baptize them with water, but the one who was coming would baptize them with the Holy Spirit and with fire.  This is Jesus, who would come to lead the people toward God’s way.  

                Indeed, Jesus came and called his disciples and began the redemption of the world.  In his three short years of ministry in this world, Jesus challenged the powers that were in charge, the religious leaders and the political forces who ran the country.  It cost him his life, and it also cost the disciples their lives. But fear was never a part of Jesus work in this world.  He confronted every disaster that came his way.  He healed, he comforted, he raised the dead and he constantly preached compassion and forgiveness as the way that God chooses to interact with the world.  When he found people who were outcast, he included them.  One of my favorite moments in Jesus ministry is the calling of Matthew to be an apostle; Matthew, the tax collector who was rejected by everyone.  He was hated by everyone because he represented the Roman Government.  But Jesus included him and taught him; so Jesus does with each one of  us.  Even with our flaws, we are accepted and loved by our God who created us in the beginning.  We are promised eternal life by our Lord.  With that in our future, what is there to fear?  We have been given life and promise by our Lord. 

                 This is why we need not fear.  What those who want to oppress us want to use fear to drive their agenda.  When we look out our window and become afraid of what is there or who is there, we play into their hands.  When we lean on our Lord and remember his overwhelming love for the world and for everyone in it, our fear can dissolve.  Remember that Jesus was not a Christian.  He was a Jew and stayed a Jew through his death and resurrection.  It was his followers who created Christianity and the followers of Mohammed who created Islam.  All of these religions are loved by the God who is at the head of all of them.  God bless us as we try to live together in love and follow our Lord and show his compassion to this world that he  loved so very much.

God's Love in a Hurting World

            Once again, we confront the plague of mayhem created by angry people with firearms in our culture.  Twice on Wednesday, innocent people were shot down by angry assassins who had their own agenda that we probably will never understand.  What I do understand is the wreckage that this kind of activity creates in this nation.  The faces of those bereaved people in San Bernardino and Georgia were heartbreaking.  The statements by the political leaders were hard to listen to and our hearts went out to all of the brave police who responded so well when all of this happened.

            The problem that we face is inactivity.  These episodes all continue along the same path; we mourn the dead, call for action, blame other people and then do nothing.  We have the highest concentration of gun slaughter in any nation in the world.  Even Switzerland, where everyone is armed because they are required to be members of the army, has a very small incidence of this kind of activity. 

            It certainly isn’t hard to point to the source of the problem.  We have no difficulty regulating automobiles and requiring licenses and issuing tickets to those who don’t behave well when they drive them, but when it comes to firearms, we regulate very reluctantly, if at all.  There is well documented opposition to any kind of regulation proposed to limit the purchase of guns by people who just shouldn’t have them.  The worry that is always put forth is that simple regulation is a “slippery slope” leading to confiscation of everyone’s weapons.  That seems to me to be both unlikely and impossible.  We need to get our opinions in order so that we can deal with the mess that this lack of regulation has created.

            I’m sorry that I need to talk about this again.  I would love to talk about this beautiful season of Advent when we look for our savior to come to tidy up the ungodly mess that we have made of this planet.  It is ironic that the 20 plus nations are meeting in Paris to discuss Climate change, another subject that seems so often to be out of our reach, even when all of science seems to agree that it is an apocalyptic problem. 

            If I have ever seen a time when we needed a savior, it is today; a Savior to save us from ourselves and our foolish ideas that we can manage this world’s resources and activities all on our own.  For too long, we have trusted that those who have power and wealth will also have the good sense to regulate themselves for the good of us all.  That is obviously not the case.

             In the Gospel of Luke, John the Baptist appears in the wilderness proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin.  What I notice about this passage of scripture is the way that all of the leadership of the world is noted.  Tiberius was the Emperor; Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod was ruler of Galilee, his brother Philip was also a ruler, of Ituraea and Trachonitis.  It also says that Annas and Caiaphas were the high priests.  Here are the elite, but the repentance that God is calling for is for everyone.  Nobody is excluded.  John quotes the Prophet Isaiah saying Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  He ends this with the words: all flesh shall see the salvation of God.  These words didn’t sit well with the elite.  They saw John as a threat to their authority.

            I have always pictured John as looking like a homeless man – dressed in a camel hair garment with wild hair, holding a staff and making great gestures as he talked.  I think he would have been a little bit scary and intimidating to the people who were watching him.  For most of the poor people who were watching him, I think he might have looked like a savior.  He made a wonderful person to introduce our Lord to this world.  The poor and the needy have a champion and he will bring hope to those who have nothing.  What could be better news?

            That God would present Jesus the Christ to the world in this way is a great testimony to God’s priorities in this world.  He was not a friend of the elite and those who have it all.  He was and continues to be a great friend to those who are oppressed, homeless, poor and afraid.  That is to whom the good news of the Gospel is directed.  God has no expectation that those who have power and wealth will always seek the best for all of the people.  That is why Jesus is sent by God to be one of us; to take on human flesh so to understand what it means to be a limited human being in this world.  That is why the understanding that Jesus is God’s only son is such a critical distinction.  God coming to earth and living like one of us; knowing hunger, thirst, grief, sorrow and finally death.  Along the way, he sees with human eyes what so many people have to go through in this world.  He heals, gives strength to the weak, and even raises up the dead.  It is clear that the priorities that Jesus brings to this world are not the same as those who are in charge of it, but are a firm indication of the heart of God.  That is why our worship is so critical to who we are and what we do.  We are the inheritors of the goodness that Jesus brought to this earth.  It is our job to continue to love, have compassion and do the work that he laid out for us.  Will we win in the long run?  Certainly.  But in the meantime, there will be difficult times like the ones that we are in.  It is our job to make sure that God’s love always shines forth, not our own private desires.  Let us keep our hearts and minds open to the possibility of solutions to the problems that we face.  God’s will is that they be solved.  God’s love abounds