Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.

We celebrate here in temporality with a view to the eternal birth, which God the Father has accomplished and accomplishes unceasingly in eternity, so that this same birth has now been accomplished in time within human nature.  What does it avail me if this birth takes place unceasingly and yet does not take place within myself?  It is quite fitting, however, that it should take place within me.

-- Meister Eckhart

The Nativity of the Lord has mainly to do with Presence.  What we have been waiting for has really been here all along.  We were not in Advent waiting for anything for God to do, as if God were taking God's sweet time about it.  We were waiting for our souls to relax, focus, adjust, adapt, and emerge into the Truth.  We were waiting rather for our own baggage and blinders to drop away to we could see what was always here.   We were waiting until we lost our fears, desires, expectations, needs, fantasies, habits, and conventional ways of thinking.  We were waiting for the fog to burn off.  We were waiting for our imaginations to let go of both our obsession with what has gone before and our infatuation with what will come next.

Our waiting was purposeful, intentional, not inert or inactive.  It was a preparatory waiting: at once a self-emptying and a refurnishing.  I compare it to prospective parents making room for a new child; a two-fold movement of creating space by moving unnecessary things out, and moving necessary things in.  Nesting.  We wait by letting go and taking on.

Ego and Empire dominate us by manipulation of two pervasive ideas that are not actually real: past and future.  Beginning with the alienation that is a consequence of our mortality, we invent stories that invest meaning by telling us "how we got here" and "where we are going," in time. 

But now that time of waiting, preparation, divesting and furnishing is over, for Christ is born in Bethlehem!  The Creator is Present, "with us," Emmanu-el.  One great hymn describes the Creator's action in time this way: "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in him tonight."  Past and future are completely reframed for us.  Now our attention is not on what we imagine to be ahead of or behind us, but on something that has arrived; it is here and now, "above," "beneath," within, among us.  

This is not escapism into either the dreamy pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by or imploded "navel gazing," but an engagement with the Good, True, and Beautiful that is always Present, always "near," always "at hand," which Jesus Christ proclaims and embodies.  He is the eternal Presence, the divine Shekinah.  He is the Real that is always closer to us than we are to ourselves. 

One major problem in the Church is that we waste far too much time and energy looking back and/or looking ahead, and offer too little attention to looking "above," "beneath," or within/among at what is happening here and now.  We habitually and reflexively focus on what is not here.  Now is the time to open our consciousness to what is present with us.

Jesus says to seek first the Creator's Kingdom and justice (Matthew 6:33), which is within and among us (Luke 17:21), and "at hand" (Mark 1:15).

Thomas Merton affirms this presence when he notes that, "in the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at your disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.  This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us."  Maybe that little room, which he calls "the virgin point," pointe vierge, is what we have been preparing in Advent; a ready space.

We fritter away our time and energy on trying to "adapt" to the latest dopey and illusory big shiny, entertaining thing going on in the world out there, when everything we desire and need has always been right here, with and within us, in the spark of truth and clarity, at the center of our being.  Christ is born in astonishing and scandalous simplicity and poverty, revealing the glory of God shining from that bright point, in and throughout our world.  God, is present in the stable of Bethlehem, on the cross of Calvary, and in the shared bread that is his Body... which makes us, the Church, his Body, Christ-in-the-world.

Nothing could be more irrelevant or beside the point than allowing ourselves to be distracted by the imagined "historicity" of its details.  The Nativity is about birth, "which God the Father has accomplished and accomplishes unceasingly in eternity," now being "accomplished in time within human nature."  Within all human nature.  Within the nature of every human.  "Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today."  That's the point.  

Today.  Not tomorrow.  Not yesterday.  Today.  "Now is the opportune time; today is the day of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2b).  Nothing less than this is happening in the Incarnation.  A vertical bolt of pure light from beyond, welling up within us.  Jarring us into the realization of God, the Creator, with and within us, now.

And now... what?  If the Creator is born in us today, how do we live as the Creator's agents, messengers, witnesses, and people?  For we are Christ-in-the-world.

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The Virgin Birth of Christ Is True, Whether it Happened or Not.

(Slightly improved version of a previous post.)

A couple of Decembers ago, in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof interviewed William Lane Craig about the Virgin Birth.  Craig is a philosophy professor at Houston Baptist University.  His entire response was to say that it really happened, and to point out the historical sources: Matthew and Luke.

I rolled my eyes and fumed in frustration.  Claiming that the Virgin Birth “really happened” neutralizes it into the absolute irrelevance of a distant historical event which means nothing to us today.  It is an artifact.  Nothing more.  It is merely asserted to have happened by smug, self-righteous, credulous Christians.  As if deciding that it happened is all that matters.

The “did it really happen” argument is pointless because there is no way to answer it.  Even if proof could be available one way or the other (which it can't!), it misses the meaning of the stories.  Indeed, I wonder if the real point of Modern historical arguments isn’t to neutralize and deflate the truth so it can be domesticated and shelved.  For deeper and higher truths may only be communicated by means of myth, story, image, symbol, ritual, metaphor, and poetry.  These are exactly the kinds of discourse that Modernity has ruled out of hand as lies, superstition, fiction, and fairy-tales. 

To reduce a story to mere history is to kill it.  It is to render it a dead past event, something to be dissected and disposed of.  The demythologizing project of Modernity was always intended to undercut truth, so that the Empire's self-serving propaganda may be inserted in its place.  And the most effective way to do that is to evaluate a story based on its “historicity,” as determined by Modernity's arbitrary criteria.  Thus the “did it really happen” question is taken for the only measure of truth… and it just so happens that it is unanswerable.  In this way the Modern Age systematically replaced truth with its own fake news.  In the end it’s all reduced to entertainment in the service of commerce.  For Modernity, what is "real" is merely what sells. 

Once we have hit the impasse of, “yes, it did happen,” vs. “no, it couldn’t have happened,” we have nowhere else to go.  If we are arguing about whether Mary "really" bore a child without having sex, we have failed to listen to the story itself.   

The Virgin Birth story is not about history or gynecology.  One person who understood the story well was 19th century anti-slavery activist, Sojourner Truth.  When challenged by male religious professionals who attempted to silence her, she pointed to the story of the Virgin Birth.  Christ comes into the world by God and a woman, she said; a man had nothing to do with him.  Therefore, one meaning of the story is that God’s entry into the world is an explicit contradiction of a world order that privileges maleness.  It is an inherently anti-patriarchy narrative. 

And that’s just one political meaning of the story.  There are meanings that go even deeper into human identity and destiny.  Meister Eckhart talked about how it shows God being born in each of us.  Karl Barth noted that it tells us that humans do not have the power to bring God into the world.  And then there is the whole question of the Incarnation, and its meaning in terms of the relation of Creator to creation.  “God became human so that humans might become God,” is the way the early Christians talked about it.

And so on.  All of which is lost if we focus exclusively on the tiny, distracting, pointless, and unanswerable question of whether it "actually happened" or not.  

Caving in and allowing the Modern world to define truth for us is what is killing faith and the planet.  I used to think that Christianity was courageous for allowing historical analysis to be applied to its core documents and history.  Maybe.  Certainly we may have gained a lot of helpful knowledge about the context of the Scriptures.  Certainly we have liberated the gospel from some forms of self-serving institutional oppression.  But at the same time we have lost way too much in this exchange.  And too often what we were left with was even worse, if more subtle, forms of institutional oppression.  

Fortunately, we did not lose the stories themselves.  In spite of Modernist attempts to extract and dissect, slice and resect, delete and excise parts of the Scriptures, the texts remain.  And the faith remains.  Because in the end reality wins.  Truth is.  Propaganda, fake news, advertising, and “history” all collapse for lack of any purchase in reality.  But the Word of the Lord endures forever.  (It is not by accident that the attitude of some scholars to the text is identical to the way the petrochemical industry comes at the planet:  Extract, waste, consume, and profit.)

The late Phyllis Tickle related how she once talked about the Virgin Birth story at a conference.  One of the young hotel emplyees overheard her, and approached her later to observe that the Virgin Birth story is “too beautiful not to be true, whether it happened or not.”

Exactly.

 

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Advent 4 - Soon and Very Soon

In the season of Advent I would often use the gospel song, "Soon and Very Soon," after we pass the peace in worship.  One year I got pushback on this when someone noticed that the song appears in the section of the hymnal dedicated to funerals.  "How is is it appropriate for this season for us to be singing about dying?" she asked.

"It says we're going to see the King," I replied.  That's what we're doing in Advent, isn't it?  Going to greet the newborn king?"

But the connection to death is still there, and not unimportant.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted that, "When Christ calls someone he bids them come and die."  Jesus repeatedly  teaches about how we need to die in order to live, and Paul indicates how baptism is a symbolic death.  Death is not annihilation so much as transformation.  I am reminded of the monastic motto: "If you die before you die then you won't die when you die."

This focus on death and transformation is one of the Advent themes that receives too little attention.  As we make our way to the manger in Bethlehem we expect to find a cute little baby, harmless and vulnerable.  We expect to bring our gifts to him and worship him.  We do not necessarily expect to die in the process.  We do not expect to emerge from the stable completely different from when we went in to see him.

But unless we do, we have really not seen him at all.  The story is ridiculously familiar and thoroughly domesticated.  We know it by heart and cherish its telling.  But if we look at this infant and don't see in him the King of Creation, and ourselves as his subjects, we have missed the message of the Nativity.  The only way we indicate that we see him as the King, is by realizing that we are bound to do whatever he tells us to do.  

Of course, this is America and we don't know from kings.  We have no experience with or tolerance for the idea that there is someone, anyone, literally entitled to our unconditional obedience, especially someone who received their status by accident of birth.  The actual monarchs who remain in this world are at best noble and unifying, if anachronistic, figureheads, and at worst rich, celebrity jerks.  There is no question of our having to give our absolute obedience to any of them.  The idea is laughable.  

But Jesus is a king, but also different from other human monarchs in not depending on tradition or genealogy as the source of his legitimacy.  They pretended their right to rule came from God... but it did not.  Only Jesus' monarchy is the true and only expression of authority because he is the Author.  By him the universe was created and held together in being.  He is the embodiment of the Creator, authenticated, not by ceremonial pomposity and coercive power, but by his simplicity, humility, generosity, and self-emptying love.  Through him God's Presence, goodness, truth, and beauty flows into the creation.

In submitting to him, to this King, the True King, Jesus Christ, we have to let go of our ego-centric identities.  We have to see ourselves in a radically different way, and define ourselves by a fundamentally different story.  We have to relinquish the comfortable illusions of our individualism, autonomy, and independence.  We turn from one way of seeing everything to embrace another.  We move from one way of thinking to a completely different one.  We have to repent, reorient our minds and our lives so that we are no longer motivated by selfish fear, desire, and anger, but instead see ourselves as interconnected, interdependent parts of a larger whole, in Jesus Christ, our King.  This repentance is what it means to die to our old selves that our new Self may emerge in us.

In other words, becoming a subject of the King means dying to who we thought we were.  We give up our sense of being isolated individuals, and come to participate together in Jesus Christ.  We become part of his self-expression and unity with and in all creation.  We move from a sense of being separate from all things, to an awareness of being integrated into a nest and network of communities of creation.  Hence, some choose to use the language of "commonwealth" here, which expresses well the horizontal aspect, how we relate to each other within creation.

Here we also find the meaning of the Eucharistic meal as the place where we "see the King" regularly, eating his Body in order to become members of his Body, together.

Unless we become Christ, we haven't really seen Christ; but we can't see Christ until we become Christ.  This is the challenge of the Advent and Nativity moments: to use this preparatory time to shed our false and destructive self-images in order to live into the Image of God within us and become subjects of the King, whose lives are shaped according to Christ's life of compassion, justice, equality, freedom, peace, and goodness.

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Advent 3 - The Crimson Cord.

In the book of Joshua, the invading Israelites send spies to scope out the city of Jericho.  They stay at the establishment of a woman named Rahab, a prostitute.  Rahab, significantly, is in favor of the coming invasion.  She represents the people languishing under the oppressive regimes of the petty rulers of Canaanite city-states.  They see this wave of former slaves from Egypt as a liberation movement, an uprising and insurgency of poor, marginalized, and exploited people.  In the economy of Jericho, Rahab herself has to resort to sex work, servicing the wealthy and privileged men of the city.  She is ready for the overthrow of the corrupt system ruling her life, and she eagerly awaits this vast throng of people coming out of the wilderness, who understand what it means to be at the bottom of society.

So when Israelite spies need a headquarters from which to do their work, she eagerly offers her home and place of business, asking only that the invaders save her and her family when the assault on the city comes.  To this the spies agree.  They tell her to tie a crimson cord in the window of her house to identify it for preservation by the Israelite army.    

When Joshua arrives with the Israelites, after crossing the Jordan, they surround Jericho.  And when they blow the ram's horn trumpets, the walls of the city famously "came tumblin' down."  (It is a story that had particular resonance for the African-American slaves who sang about it.)  Except for Rahab's house, which remains standing.  She and her household receive safe passage, while the Israelite army storms in and kills everyone in the city.  

This story emphatically is not and was never intended to be a literal historical account somehow excusing or authorizing genocide.  Rather, we are to understand here the consequences of our participation in injustice, and realize the choice we all have to make concerning whether to stay cowering behind the walls of our status quo or to welcome the arrival of God into our lives.  God's coming -- "advent" -- is always cataclysmic because it is a collision between God's truth and the flimsy, illusory world of ego and Empire, formed by violence based on fear, desire, fantasy, and memory that we have dreamed up and try to live by.  The little world of Jericho, built on idols and lies, and expressed in its high, thick walls of oppression, inequality, social stratification, and exclusion, is doomed when faced with the reality of God's coming reign.

The message is identical to that of the Book of Revelation: God is coming; the Empire is falling.  You can fall with it into oblivion, or you can gather with the people of the Lamb and be saved to participate in God's new future.

In other words, the walls are coming down.  The walls that would divide us into separate interest and identity groups, easily set against each other, making us more malleable and controllable, the walls between races, nations, genders, classes, generations, and religions, which are illusory and invented categories, are all crumbling into dust.  It is time to go to Rahab's house.  It is time to tie that crimson cord in the window, and await the uprising of God's people, coming like a tsunami from the east.

It is common and easy for us to reduce Advent to a time of waiting for the cute little baby, nestled snug in the manger, surrounded by angels.  And so on.  Less common because more challenging is the deeper meaning of the season, in which one world violently ends so another can begin.  This is the apocalyptic heart of Advent, as the revelation of the Presence of the Creator deflates and disintegrates the very systems and relationships we have come reflexively to follow.  "He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.  He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty," in the words of the mother of the coming Messiah.  

That's what happened to Jericho.  Except for Rahab and her household.  We might want to think about putting our qualms about what folks will say aside, and get ourselves to the house with the scarlet cord in the window.  Soon.

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The War on Advent.

When I was a kid in the Presbyterian church, we went from “Thanksgiving Sunday” at the end of November to “Christmas Sunday” just before December 25.  On the Sundays in between we sang Christmas carols.  In other words, the church’s calendar was identical to that of Macy’s and the rest of the secular, commercial culture.

One of the most important things the Presbyterian church has learned over the last half-century is that there is this season called Advent that comprises the 4 Sundays prior to the Nativity.  (Of course, more liturgical denominations never forgot this.)  I recall my dad (also a pastor) introducing the Advent Wreath and even Christmas Eve worship services in the churches he served in the 1960’s.  Many Presbyterians were not used to doing these things.  It was even somewhat controversial at the time, believe it or not.  These practices were considered “too Catholic,” by some.

The Presbyterian attitude towards Christmas has shifted dramatically over the years.  It is easy to forget that Presbyterians were deeply influenced by the Puritans who basically banned Christmas.  They did this in 17^th century England and New England for three reasons: First, there is no biblical warrant for celebrating the birth of Jesus in December.  Secondly, the whole liturgical calendar was considered by the Puritans to be hopelessly “Popish” and was advocated by their Anglican rivals.  Thirdly, Christmas was infamous for being a time of, well, debauchery, drunkenness, lewdness, disorder, and even violence.   So the Puritans ditched the whole Christmas thing, and therefore Advent too, and so did most Presbyterians.

And that ban lasted for quite a while.  It did not start to change until the middle of the 19^th century, when American Christmas morphed into a homey, child- and family-centered holiday, and then, in the 20^th century, into a commercial festival of shopping and spending.  As this developed, the church apparently sort of unconsciously went along with it.  So that when the Christmas carols started getting played in the stores downtown, the church reflexively started singing them in worship as well.  Even Presbyterians started celebrating secular Christmas.

But when we recovered Christmas in the culture, it is interesting that we did not at the same time embrace Advent.  I suspect that this is because the culture does not like Advent.  Advent has almost no commercial potential.  We will never see much advertising using Advent themes.  John the Baptizer’s words, “You brood of vipers!  Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?!” will never be featured in a commercial for electric razors.  Children will never put together a cute pageant based on Mark 13.  Even Mary’s great hymn in Luke 1, the Magnificat, gets disregarded because the commercial culture does not under any circumstances want the rich to be sent away empty.

Advent was also traditionally a time of preparatory fasting and self-denial.  That’s why it had the same liturgical color as Lent: purple.  Our Orthodox neighbors still fast from November 15 to Christmas.  Catholics may still remember being required to abstain from meat during Advent.  The market does not want to hear about a season in which we consciously and deliberately don’t consume.  

Indeed, the late autumn and early winter was historically about feasting and enjoying the produce of the recent harvest.  In the days before refrigeration a lot of meat simply had to be eaten (or preserved) in December, or lost.  People often gave away what they had left over.  The church’s Advent fast was radically counter-cultural.  When everyone else was celebrating and consuming, the Christians were preparing themselves for the Nativity by disciplines of abstinence and penitence.    

Without Advent, Christmas was easily redefined, drowned-out, and buried in an avalanche of mercantile trash.  It is this tawdry, loud, sentimental, chaotic, season of cha-ching! that Americans mistake for a Christian holiday.  The cultural War on Advent takes the form of rushing the Christmas holiday so that store decorations go up in September, and TV commercials start before Halloween.  This doesn’t happen because of any deep faith in Jesus, God knows, or any breathless anticipation of his birth.  Obviously, what we now call “Christmas" has been thoroughly severed from Jesus and reconfigured to serve as a festival of greed and commercialism.  Part of this is the necessary suppression of the inconvenient and contrarian season of Advent.

It almost worked.  However, as Christianity began its decline in America in the second half of the 20th century, the nearly forgotten and largely repressed themes of Advent began again to resonate more with many Christians.  For one thing, we started listening to long-silenced voices of marginalized peoples, for whom the end of the present oppressive order was not a bad thing.  In this we began to identify with the early church, under threat from Rome.

Advent is the most apocalyptic of liturgical seasons, focusing as it does on Christ’s coming, in the past, present, and future.  In Advent we are turning our attention to the arrival of God’s Reign, in which all the injustices, violence, inequalities, and ignorance of the regular world order are overturned and reversed.  Jesus explicitly comes to constitute this Reign, leaving behind and inspiring a community to implement his vision and await its fulfillment.  

These themes were unintelligible to a church that was largely identical with worldly power, wealth, prestige, and privilege.  But when these perks get stripped away, the church can hear the Bible as it was meant to be heard: as good news for the poor and downtrodden.  And Advent, a season anticipating the lifting up of the powerless and the casting down of the elites, started gradually to make sense.  So, over the last 60 or so years, churches have slowly found value and meaning in recovering the season of Advent.  (For example, the number and quality of Advent hymns increases dramatically in each successive Presbyterian hymn resource.)       

It is only when it is preceded by an authentic celebration of Advent that followers of Jesus access the true meaning of the Lord’s Nativity, the festival of the Incarnation.  The message that “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us,” and that Christ “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” cannot be heard unless we first clear away the clutter in our lives and make room.  The apocalyptic season of Advent does this by reminding us of how flawed and temporary, indeed, even unreal, is our normal existence and the economic world we have invented.  In Advent we are preparing ourselves for the coming of the real and the true, which will reveal the shallowness, emptiness, transparency, and instability of everything we think we know.

That’s why the culture's War on Advent consists of a persistent blizzard of blaring words, images, and noises, often appealing to our baser instincts.  The Lord comes in our silences and empty spaces… therefore the culture must fill these with entertainment and lust, avarice, and gluttony, sentimental traditions, and rituals.

But perhaps the most pregnant and effective way through Advent is found in silence.   

I still occasionally get the question from people, in December, about why we’re not singing Christmas carols in church.  My answer is, “Because we are in the important season of Advent and unless we prepare ourselves spiritually by observing this time as well as we can, we will not understand what the Nativity is really about.”

Then, when the great day does come, and we gather to celebrate the Lord’s birth the evening of December 24, we can sing with joyful hearts in celebration of the One for whom we have waited and prepared: the God who comes to save and transform!

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