Have a Blessed Christmas!

I'll be away the week following Christmas. We plan to visit family as well as attend the wedding of our friends Troy and Leigh Ann. As I wrap things for Christmas Eve and we get ready for the trip, it is my prayer that all have a blessed Christmas celebration this year.

This Christmas and every Christmas are about the birth of Christ in us. The story of Jesus’ conception by the Spirit describes how it always happens: Christ is born in us through the union of the Spirit of God with our flesh. This Good News brings joy and empowers hope as it unwraps our souls and reveals that God loves us just because that is who God is!

The earth meets the transcendent.
Waiting ends.
God comes to us.

Helsinki Complaints Choir


A friend shared this with me and I'd like to share it with you. I thought it was pretty funny!

More Questions

I received a couple of response to my query several days about the questions of meaning. Some of those responses were in the form of emails, others in conversation, and one as a comment on the blog. I'm interested in what questions others are asking and then how others wrestle with these questions. My interest is not that I think have the solution to them but rather in the possibility of initiating a dialogue about them as a means of helping others explore them and ultimately as a part of my exploration.

Thomas Naylor, Magdalena Naylor and Will Willimon published a book several years ago entitled, The Search for Meaning, that grew out of a seminar they co-taught for undergraduates at Duke University. In the introduction they state,

There may be no escape from spiritual emptiness, unless one learns to ask the right questions:
Why am I here?
Where am I going?
What is the purpose of life?
Is there a God?
What will happen when I die?
Is there life after death?
These questions have in common a longing for a sense of grounding, purpose, or meaning in life.

Our culture doesn't necessarily give us a context in which we can easily find a sense of purpose and meaning for life. So it seems to me that we are dependent upon finding others who are willing to ask the questions along with us and search for answers in that process, recognizing that the process is as important as the conclusion. If not more important.

Joy! Joy! Joy! - How can it be?

Joy! Joy! Joy! That is what our culture says it is all to be about in these days of the Christmas season. What do you do with that message when you have grief to deal with? Are we just to leave it aside? Pretend it isn't there? Deny it?

This topic is on my mind because I presided at a funeral service today. It was a service of memory and hope for a parishioner. It had been a tough year for her with the death of her husband earlier in the year as well as with her own physical health even before that. She decided earlier this fall not to pursue treatment related to her recent diagnosis. As she and I talked about things, she approached our conversations with tremendous honesty and clarity. When she had something to say, she said it. When she had questions, she asked them. When I didn't offer an easy answer, she asked more questions. Tonight as I write these thoughts, I feel as if she shared a gift with me over these past weeks. She invited me into her struggles and pain and grief. She also invited me to know her hope.

I've been thinking about hope a lot lately - particularly as it relates to the coming of the Christ child. How does God in our midst - God with us - give us hope? How is it real to us? Is it something that we can touch and feel or even see? Or is it nothing more than a nice idea to hang onto?

As we talked about hope last week at the Elders' Circle (a time when the elders gather for prayer and discussion), one of the elders suggested that perhaps we have to face adversity before we can really know what to look for or know what it is that we are looking for. Maybe sharing hope means standing with another and holding her hand as she stares into the abyss??
I know that doesn't fully capture the essence of hope but I do think it says something about hope's essence.

Today wasn't Joy! Joy! Joy! But I find myself this night with a deeper sense of hope even if I can't quite describe it well as my ramblings above suggest. May hope be with you as God is with us always!

Never Not Nothing

I need some help parsing this phrase.

Last night as I was leaving a cabinet meeting at church, I hit the scan button on the radio and happened to hear these words used in one sentence. Some will be perhaps appalled by the use of such grammar others will perhaps care less. My mind went racing elsewhere - the implications of what the person was saying.

As it turns out, I had inadvertently found the local ABC affiliate who evidently broadcasts on FM radio in addition to television. I discovered later that I was listening to the start of "Wifeswap" and one of the participants was a mother, from Kentucky, who spent 1/4 of her family's income on beauty pageants for her 5 year old daughter. Now before you start railing on Kentucky, remember that is the state of my birth, the state in which I attended college, and the state of my favorite basketball team which happened to defeat Indiana over the weekend (although I'm not sure they'll win any further games this year). As they were introducing the participants, I heard this woman say that "My daughter never walked off the stage with not nothing." I'm not promising that this is an exact quote but I do believe it is what I heard.

It started me thinking about what she was really saying. I think she was trying to say that this was a rewarding experience for her daughter and that she always took home a crown or trophy of some kind. But I think what she really said was that her daughter always walks off the stage with nothing. Where is the meaning in these activities? Where is the depth? Is this mother teaching her daughter to contribute to the world and make it a more humane place? Never, not nothing -- nothing to hang on to, nothing to build upon, nothing to share with anyone else.

If you get it parsed, please let me know so that I might find something else in the words she offered. By the way, the next station that the scan button found was the "Classical Connection" - a nightly offering of classical music on public radio. It was a fascinating juxtaposition.

What Are your Questions?

In my post yesterday, I suggested that in order to experience substantive change in our lives that we need to wrestle with the questions of ultimate meaning. I listed a few examples -

Why am here?
What am I supposed to do with my life?
Where is it all going?
What are my relationships with other human beings to be?

There are other questions as well as other ways to frame these questions. What I am curious about are the questions that other people wrestle with at the deepest level. Maybe they are the questions that come and stay with you for a while or they are the ones that pop up for you in moments of crisis. Maybe they come to you in the midst of prayer. Perhaps they are the questions that nag at your in the midst of facing struggles or your moments of great joy.

What I want to hear are the questions that you are wrestling with. Please feel free to post them as a comment on the blog or email them to me.

An Interesting Idea

A friend put a copy of a newspaper article in my mailbox at the church this last Sunday. It is an opinion piece and I'm sorry to say I don't know what paper it is from. The author is Mary Jane Wilkie from Morristown, NJ, and the title of the essay is "To truly honor Christmas, end its status as an official holiday." It is an interesting suggestion Ms. Wilkie makes - that if the official holiday status of Christmas was removed by Congress, as it bestowed that status in 1870, that we as Christians and consequently the church could recover the deeper meanings of this holy day.

I suspect Ms. Wilkie is struggling with the consumerist mentality that pervades this holiday season and she wants to recover some sense of a "truer", or more faithful, celebration of Christmas. As her argument goes, we as followers of Christ would have to consciously choose to celebrate the holiday by taking personal days or vacation time and therefore would be more committed to the faithful celebration of Christ's birth. There is something appealing about this suggestion.

What is appealing about it is not that her suggestion would work but rather that she has accurately described the problem with the culture's celebration (i.e. consumerism) of Christmas and taken a stab at a solution. While I like the idea, I personally don't think it would work because the issues that she describes are ultimately symptomatic and don't go to the source of the issue. While it would be good if we were less consumeristic, we cannot be unless we address the issues that are behind that turn to consumerism. To address those issues, then we have to turn to face the ultimate meaning questions of living - "Why am I here?" "What am I supposed to do with my life?" "Where is it all going?" "What are my relationships with other human begins to be?" These are only a few examples of the kinds of questions that I think we would have to wrestle with in order to address the deeper issue. It seems to me that we turn to consumerism in an effort to bring meaning to life when we don't have the opportunity, we don't choose to take the opportunity, and/or we don't have the skills to ask or answer those ultimate meaning questions. For the church to reclaim Christmas, or for that matter any holy day and its relevance and message of good news, then we have to reclaim teaching folks how to wrestle with those questions and help them find some answers. It won't always be easy or necessarily lead to easily found answers. But like Jacob at the Jabbok, if we don't give up the wrestling, then we'll discover a blessing in the struggle even if we walk a little gingerly afterwards.