Category: Christmas

God Came for Us: A Christmas Cure for Loneliness

12/23/2017

The winds were scornful,
Passing by;
And gathering Angels
Wondered why
A burdened Mother
Did not mind
That only animals
Were kind.
For who in all the world
Could guess
That God would search out
Loneliness.
~Sr. M. Chrysostom, O.S.B. “The Stable” from Mary Immaculate: God’s Mother and Mine Marist Press, 1946.

Jesus is God’s wounded healer: through his wounds we are healed. Jesus’ suffering and death brought joy and life. His humiliation brought glory; his rejection brought a community of love. As followers of Jesus we can also allow our wounds to bring healing to others.
Our own experience with loneliness, depression, and fear can become a gift for others, especially when we have received good care. As long as our wounds are open and bleeding, we scare others away. But after someone has carefully tended to our wounds, they no longer frighten us or others….We have to trust that our own bandaged wounds will allow us to listen to others with our whole being. That is healing.
— Henri Nouwen from Bread for the Journey

Home, it's said,
is the weightiest word
in any language--
one syllable with a density
impossible to deny
or quantify.

You, Jesus,
chose displacement
that we might know
at- home-ness--
chose absence from
your joy of Three
that we might
have it, too.

You left your home
to build for us
a home that cannot

be destroyed:
peaceful...
protected...
permanent...
true.

All praises be to You.

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.
Galatians 4:4-5 ESV

Merry Christmas and a beautiful winter season! May you see Him everywhere!

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The Political Meaning of Christmas

1/4/2016

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I'm always amazed at people who think Christ's life was not political. I understand they may have a contemporary understanding of who God is and what He has done. It's that focus on the merry-making...

For 12 days we celebrate the joyful news that Christ is born, that God is with us, that God became one of us. It is a rollicking season of unceasing merry-making and revelry from Christmas Day to the festival of Twelfth Night.

Or not. Our forebears in faith were not content with one-note seasons. They tended to trouble the waters. They insisted on truth.

On December 25, we celebrate the birth of the Messiah and gaze with wonder at this Child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

December 26 is the feast of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr.

December 27 is the feast of St. John the Evangelist, exile and prisoner for his testimony to Christ Jesus.

December 28 is the feast of the Holy Innocents, children slaughtered by Herod in his mad bloodthirsty zeal to protect his precarious throne.

Merry-making and revelry?

Yes. And no. Our forebears in faith were wiser than we. They were certainly better psychologists. They refused to take refuge in false binaries, in one-note simplifications. They understood, profoundly, that we live between the Now and the Not-Yet.

Yes, Christ has come. Already come. He is already laid in the manger, adored by shepherds and magi and His own mother. He is already nailed to the cross, wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. He is already risen from the grave, gloriously triumphant over death and evil and sin and all that would separate us from Him.

That is true, even now.

But it is also true that death and evil and sin are fighting hard. They know they’re already defeated, and they’re trying to drag as many of us down with them as they can. They want to steal our hope, take our joy, snuff out our light.

They want to kill our faithful, exile our prophets, destroy our children. That is the world we live in, even as the Babe lies in the manger. Refugees fleeing for their lives (just as He and His family did), bombings, shootings, beheadings. And closer to home: cancer, estrangement, the missing face at the table never to be seen again in this life. Grief, loss, pain.

Those who followed in the footsteps of Jesus, in the footsteps of Stephen and John, knew suffering. Their world was one of violence and persecution, too. In their world, children died at the hands of greedy tyrants. In their world, military might made right. They knew fear and grief and pain and loss, possibly more deeply and certainly more immediately than we do, mediated as so much of our world is by a screen. They had no screens. They had a bloody God on a godforsaken cross, right before their eyes.

They knew suffering.

And they knew Jesus.

And they held the two together. They said, we will eat and drink and be merry and we will remember the martyrs, the exiles, the prisoners, the innocents. They said, we will lift up our voices in song, in praise, in shouts of glory, and we will grieve the deaths of those we love, the absence of those long lost. They said, grief is part of our praise, part of our celebration, because it is part of us and part of God. They said, we will feast and remember, remember the joy, remember the loss. But we will feast.

They knew, as we seem to have forgotten, that life is woven whole, that Christmas is a celebration of God made human, and the fullness of all that means. That Baby would grow to a Boy and then a Man, and He would know all that we know—joy and sorrow, love and loss, confusion and grief and horror. And He probably knew it more deeply than we can imagine. He was fully human.

They knew that death and destruction had been defeated when He submitted to death and destruction. They knew, the evidence of the world around them notwithstanding, that Heaven had broken through, that Life was on the loose, and that not all the forces of hell could prevail against Him.

They knew that was the world they inhabited, and they wanted us to know it, too. In their wisdom, they gave us the 12 days of Christmas, with the feasts of St. Stephen, St. John, and the Innocents right here at the start to remind us: this is part of the story, but it is not the end of the story.

The juxtaposition of these feast days with the season of Christmas gives us permission to live in the messy middle, the between times. We light our candles and sing our carols in the face of all that is ugly and evil. We join hands around the table and say grace and dig in to the feast and laugh and cry and remember those who are no longer with us and cling to the hope of that Heavenly Table of which ours is an icon, a foretaste, that Table where all our lost loved ones are even now feasting with the Risen King of Glory, where one day we will join them in the happiest reunion this world has ever known.

This Christmas feast, these Christmas carols, that pan of cookies for the neighbors, those cards for far-flung loved ones, your head flung back in laughter or bowed down in grief, your arms flung wide in embrace, your heart’s yearning and breaking—are acts of subversion, of defiant joy that refuses to be swallowed by your newsfeed, of rebellious hope that this is not the way things were meant to be, of stubborn faith that refuses to believe it will always be this way.

These are the outposts of the Kingdom here in the land between Already and Not-Yet.

Every time you link hands around the table, pray for peace, hope for a better future, light a candle, soothe a flaring temper, open your arms and your heart, weep over loss, rage over injustice—you proclaim the coming kingdom. And you usher it in. It starts with a mustard seed, a grain of yeast, a single lost son come Home.

A lowly babe in a manger. A small family fleeing from a king. A young man nailed to a cross. An empty tomb.

And the candle you light at your table tonight. And tomorrow night. And the night after that.

Come, Lord Jesus.

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Do You Hear What I Hear? Zechariah's Silence

12/7/2015

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Did you sing a little when you read the title to this blog post? It's one of my favorites because it speaks so clearly to the season of Advent. The song is filled with the joyful anticipation, the wonderous waiting of the coming Savior Jesus Christ.

The song “Do You Hear What I Hear?” was written by Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker in 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were well known and had been asked to produce a Christmas album, but hesitated because they did not feel comfortable with the consumerism of Christmas. However, when the nation found itself on the brink of a nuclear holocaust--people fearful of enemies among them, digging backyard bomb shelters and praying to avert another world war--Regney was inspired by babies being pushed in strollers along the streets of New York City. He returned home and penned the words to this song of peace, since sung by countless high school choirs, recorded by hundreds of artists, and played endlessly on Christmas radio.

The imagery captures something of our longing as we prepare for Christmas in another era hovering on the brink of war, with fear of our neighbors and worry for our children. The night wind speaking to a little lamb, the shepherd boy and the king singing about a star, a song and a child, such humble, earth-bound creatures, somehow give us a sense of hope amid the fear and violence of the world—a promise that peace is out there, asleep in the ordinary, whispering and waiting for us, if we only awaken our senses to hear it, see it, feel it. Though I took some liberties with the words for our season, the original words evoke the Advent spirit on their own. Do you hear what I hear? Do you see what I see? Do you feel what I feel? Do you know what I know?

That’s what Advent is all about. These weeks before Christmas are supposed to awaken our senses to the presence of God in quiet, ordinary places, because when God-With-Us arrives on Christmas Eve, it is in the humblest of stables. So we prepare by remembering that God is seen in the glow of a midnight angel, felt in the leap of a child in the womb, known in the song of a mother-to-be, and today’s story—heard in the silence of the priest.

Yep, you heard that right—heard in the silence of the priest.

(The irony of writing a blogpost/sermon about the silence of a preacher is not lost on me, I assure you.)

Zechariah’s story is the tale of a man of words, the man to whom the community had assigned the task of speaking about God, even speaking FOR God, being struck mute when God actually spoke to him.

It was Zechariah’s big day. There were thousands among the priestly clans, each rotating through the temple, taking their turn to care for the Holy of Holies. When his family, the sons of Abijah, came to take their turn, they lit the fires, tended the sacrifices, oversaw the prayers for the whole temple, the whole people of Israel. But only one man could step inside the Holy of Holies to perform the ritual there. Only one man each time, and no man could enter twice—it was a once-in-a-lifetime honor, and most, even among the priestly families, were never chosen.

This was no popularity contest or piety award—Zechariah and the members of his family stood around and drew lots, and Zechariah’s hand happened upon the lucky straw. He would step into the holiest sanctuary, the sacred room in the Temple inhabited by God’s own presence, representing the whole of his people before the Holy. When he emerged, the people would gather around and await a blessing, a word from God himself, delivered by Zechariah.

The Gospel writer goes out of his way to tell us that even though he got this honor by sheer luck, Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth were people of exemplary faith. They prayed, they followed the law, they were righteous and blameless, good and faithful in every way. Zechariah must have trembled in holy awe that he was chosen.

And yet, even though Zechariah and Elizabeth had been faithful all their lives, but God had not rewarded them. They were barren, childless. They had prayed, they had obeyed, but God had been silent. Month after month, cycle after cycle, nothing but silence. Silence in Elizabeth’s womb, silence in their home, silence from God. By the time Zechariah was chosen to enter the Holy of Holies, it was too late. Too many moons had come and gone, and they grew old. God had remained silent for years.

When Zechariah entered the Holy of Holies that day, I imagine he believed that God still had a word for the people he represented. Certainly God had a blessing for everyone else, a message of hope and encouragement for the masses—even if God had only silence for he and Elizabeth.

But the angel had not come with vague promises or generic words of comfort. This was no anonymous platitude or nameless blessing. It wasn't for everyone else. The angel of God came with a very specific word to them, Zechariah and Elizabeth, a silence-shattering, new-world-opening, mind-blowing, unthinkable, impossible word. “Your prayers have been heard,” the angel said. “Elizabeth will give birth to a son, and you must name him John. This child of yours will not only bring you joy and delight, he will be the one who brings many people back to God. He will make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”

Zechariah, terrified and stunned, responds to this breath-taking announcement in the most awkward, graceless, bumbling way possible. “How can I be sure? We’re old,” he says. If there were a soundtrack, you'd hear one of those record-screeching-to-a-halt sounds right here.

I can almost hear the angel Gabriel sigh. “Because I am the angel Gabriel, and you’re standing in the Holy of Holies, and I’m telling you so.” Shaking his head, Gabriel continues, “Because you didn’t believe, you will remain silent, unable to speak until the day when these things happen.”

Some would like to see this silence as punishment for Zechariah’s sin of disbelief, but I don’t think it’s quite that simple. I’m with Barbara Brown Taylor, who calls it “a failure of imagination, a fear of disappointment, a habit of hopelessness.” (Bread with Angels, 93)

Zechariah had grown so accustomed to God’s silence that he was unable to receive the word of God when it came. While he never stopped praying, never stopped obeying, he had long ago abandoned any sense that God was listening. Zechariah, whose very name means “God remembers” had become convinced God had forgotten.

Who could blame him? How many of us, likewise, have prayed and obeyed, but long ago given up hope for an answer? How many of us have ceased to imagine God hears our prayers? We pray that our family could grow, our illness be healed, our relationships mended, our job meaningful, our finances successful—but how strong is our hope in God’s response? We pray for peace and justice and love to win, but it is murmuring into a void. The news of more shootings, more hatred, more violence, more abuse have given us likewise “a failure of imagination, a fear of disappointment, a habit if hopelessness.” Imagining the promises of Isaiah about a light in the darkness, a Prince of Peace, reigning with justice and righteousness forevermore are impossible dreams. The best we have come to hope for is some nameless blessing, generic word of comfort, or vague platitude.

Instead, what Zechariah discovers is that God has a hope just for them. He and Elizabeth, their deepest and most intimate prayers, have been heard, and God is about to fulfill their hopes and dreams, even when they themselves have given up on them. Zechariah’s name and his story instead proclaim that God remembers. God’s silence will not be forever, and when it arrives, God’s voice will not come to us as a vague, generic, nameless message. When God speaks, it will be so stunning, so personal and convicting and convincing and life-changing and mind-blowing and new-world-opening that it will render us speechless.

The 19th century mystic Baron Von Hügel said, "Sometimes when we speak before great things we shrink them down to size. When we speak of great things sometimes we swallow them whole, when instead we should be swallowed by them. Before all greatness be silent, in art, in music, and above all in faith."

When Zechariah emerged from the Holy of Holies, the greatness of God had swallowed him whole. The people stood around him awaiting his message, the blessing he would give directly from God. There were no words. Sound caught in his throat, his hands flapped helplessly. This man assigned to speak for God found himself mute when God actually spoke to him. The look of holy awe must have lingered on his face, the reflection of the angel still in his eyes, because the people could tell he had seen a vision, and they fell silent too. Because they know God remembered, God heard, and they had hope.

This opening Sunday of Advent, hear the story of Zechariah and know that God remembers. Even when there is only silence, God is still there—and when God does speak again, it will be a word so surprising and life-changing, so for you, that it will swallow you whole and leave you speechless.

So maybe then Zechariah’s story is also an invitation to fall silent, a reminder to just shut up, because the greatness of God is all around us. Just shut up and listen, in wonder and hope-filled imagination, to the night wind and the little lamb, to the child and the shepherd boy, to the presence in the Holy of Holies.

How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given.

Do you hear what I hear?

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Counting Gifts

1/9/2014

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I have been counting gifts for over two years now. I started this on Christmas day two years ago after reading Ann Voskamp's '1000 Gifts'. With my whole heart, I endorse both reading her book and counting your own gifts over the next year. Let's celebrate life and all of its beauty together.

Highlights from this month's list of gifts have been very special. I saw some birds sitting on a snow covered tree singing praises (similar to the picture above). My sons smiling and laughing are always good to boost my spirit. My husband's thoughtfulness of a hot water bottle on my aching back. Playful 'talks' with the baby. Good meals with family and friends.

Have you noticed that these things are not big? These gifts are small things that warmed my heart, caught my attention, and let me notice the beauty in the everyday things. What richness!

This is not to say that life is always good. Sometimes I am amazed and paralyzed by my inadequacies, weaknesses, and attitude. But isn't this the point? When I can only see myself, I need to look around me to see goodness, light, love, and God.

Christmas day is a yearly reminder that God is with us. He was born in a barn filled with mud, muck, hay, pigs, and other animals. He reaches down into our messy, mud-filled lives and does His best to get our attention.

The beauty of this that I don't fully grasp is that He has chosen me. Me? My shame and inadequacies as a mother, wife, teacher, lover, friend, writer, cook, and occasionally, an artist, He knows me very well. He changes me. As I count gifts, as I become more and more grateful for life around me. He transforms me. He is filling me with love, light, patience, and grace. He is with me.

Isn't that the point of Christmas? God is with us.

He is with me as I count gifts, struggle with students, interact with my kids, talk to my husband, bake muffins, take walks, and live life! He is with me. Just. Waiting. For. Me. To. Notice. Him. He is here.

He is.

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The Christmas Story Told by an Angel

12/26/2013

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To say that His birth was opposed is to touch the limits of mortal language. The mighty one has been hated since the pride of the bright one led many away. Your world war comes close, but even then, believe me, you have no idea.

We sang that night as we had never sung before. Those shepherds believed they were the primary audience. True, they were important — the Mighty One has always favored the lowly. But there was much going on that night. The other reason we sang in the fields was to hallow the ground where Rachel would weep over her sons. There the graves would be dug, the graves for the little boys of Bethlehem.

Herod’s rage soon stripped dozens of firstborns from the breasts of their mothers. Those so fresh from heaven, so quickly silenced. Slaughtered like animals. So much blood.

The town had no room for Mary, and Herod’s heart had no room for another king. He would not share his glory.

Although we do not exist in time, there are moments when the affairs of earth are hard to endure. Even Angels desire vengeance.

“Vengeance is Mine,” declared the Mighty One. “Justice is coming. I need you to sing.”

And so we sang. What the shepherds heard as an anthem the innocents would hear as a lullaby. We sang as we had never sang before. A song to bring Him safely into the world, a song to guide them safely from it, and a song to help Mary endure it:

Glory to God in the heavenly heights,
Fly, fly to the breast of the Father,
This wrong will be righted,
Jesus is here,
Peace to all men and women on earth
who please Him.
Rest, rest in the arms of the Father,
His fury remembers,
His love holds you dear.

Many do not sing of this horror at Christmas. That is understandable; it was an unspeakable deed. But I remind you that His birth was opposed. You have no idea.

(This version of the Christmas Story has been adapted from Touching Wonder: Recapturing the Awe of Christmas by John Blasé)

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God Came for Us: A Christmas Cure for Loneliness

The Political Meaning of Christmas

Do You Hear What I Hear? Zechariah's Silence

Counting Gifts

The Christmas Story Told by an Angel

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