Are You Really Excited for Christmas?

Below are my thoughts for my Christmas Eve sermon. The text that I am using is Psalm 96 - enjoy!

MAIN IDEA – Christmas Eve is one of those services when one is supposed to bring out the “big gun,” have the multi-brass choir, the live animals, the angelic children’s choir, and every other gimmick that you can put your hand on. On the one hand I see this as a gimmick and have a deal of disdain towards such an approach, on the other hand, there is a level of truth to the praise. Yet why do we praise? I don’t think I’m just being cynical when I say that we offer the upbeat, powerful service because people expect us to do so, and we want people to be pleased. We do it because we hope that maybe one of those C and E Christians will be inspired to start to attend our church on a regular basis – we do it because we are desperate.

So I have always had a certain amount of skepticism towards such manufactured joy on high holy days (Easter is included in this). Yet on the other hand, this is an amazing part of the Christian story, the salvation story that I embrace. There is a level of necessary praise that calls to be embraced when I am authentic and honest not only about what Christ’s birth means for Christianity but what Christ’s birth means to me.

The Psalm offers a form to follow in praise. It almost authentic the praise that I want to embrace without becoming fake. I hope I can embrace the steadfast trust and faith that the Psalm proclaims (v. 10 – “Say among the nations, ‘The Lord is King! The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved.’”). I also hope that I can embrace the promise that the Psalm proclaims (v. 13 “…he is coming, for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with his truth.”).

Free me, Lord, from the expectations of others and allow me to embrace my own joy, to incarnate my celebration in my life as this Psalm is driving me to do. May my worship be honest and true to you.
Amen

THEOLOGICAL IDEA – There seems to be a couple of things going on here. One, we are called to praise with all creation. This speaks to a kind of theological anthropology and natural theology – perhaps suggest that all are drawn towards to goodness and grace of God, even creation itself.

We are given the idea that God is in control, but not in a predestination kind of way. It seems that God’s control is in how God reacts to and is involved with the people. God will judge with righteousness and equity. When we are moved to distrust of the powers, principalities, and systems, we are drawn to trust in God.

Finally the idea of salvation as a now and a not yet. God is coming even as God has come into the world through the birth of Christ. The celebration of Christmas is never fully over until Christ returns.

Christmas Overload!

Here are my thoughts on the sermon for this week (12/19). The scripture passages are Isaiah 7:10-16 and Romans 1:1-7

MAIN IDEA – The signs of Christmas are overwhelming. They
suffocate, they fall upon you without your asking and demand to be seen. I’m not thrilled with the signs of Christmas, I would say the commercial ones specifically, but when I saw a Santa Claus kneeling at the manger I realized that there was no longer any difference between secular and sacred signs of Christmas. You will find snowmen and crosses all on the same lawn. Wise men will carry gifts with a sleigh. These are the signs of Christmas that we have come to expect and that have become saccharin and empty in my mind.

Yet there is one sign that I still look to and that is the worship service anticipating the birth of Christ and celebrating that birth. In this time of year we sing certain songs, we have an advent candle, we decorate the church (although in a kind of secular way), and I preach about preparing for the coming and the birth of Christ. This is a sign of Christmas, but it is a sign that is not often named and claimed. It may partly be because it is difficult to put a worship service on one’s lawn with lights, and partly because it is something that is hard to sell.

We try. We try to make the worship service a performance with the best music possible, with live animals, with living nativity scenes, and every other bit of craziness that we can think of. There are people who go to one specific service every year because of the x, not because of the celebration and the sign of Christ.

It is my hope that I can find, celebrate, and experience the sign of Christ in worship these last few days before the season is over.

Close my eyes to the flashing lights, the presence, the songs, and all other baubles of Christmas. Open my eyes and my heart to the prayers, the singing, and the worship looking forward to your presence in our lives and in the world.
Amen
THEOLOGICAL IDEA – Most glaringly this seems to speak to the sacramental nature of worship. As a Baptist this is not an easy thing to acknowledge, but I believe it speaks to an experiential reality. In our prayers, preaching, and singing we anticipate the coming and the presence of God. When we do this as a community we embody the hope spoken of in Isaiah, and the faith that Paul lifts up.

A theology of incarnation is a big part of this expectation. During Advent we notice the absence of Christ in our lives and in the world. This close to Christmas, we begin to grasp the power and the profundity of the incarnation. God is made flesh in the world. The birth, the hope, the salvation is a reality.

Violence of Biblical Proportions

Currently I’m reading through Joshua which is not easy. It would make a great action movie with a very high death count, but hard to find myself in the story. Most likely I would be one of the kings who would hide in the cave and wait all the violence out.

I’m having a difficult time because I’m taking scripture seriously. This partly means I wont do what the pansy liberals (sorry, “progressives”) do and just read the sections that make us happy like the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, Micah, and Isaiah. I really do believe that the entire canon of scripture needs to be taken seriously or we cannot take any of it seriously – we are picking and choosing.

Nor do I want to read it in the same way as the stuck-in-the-mud conservatives who also like to pick and choose, but tend to go to Romans, Titus, Leviticus, and other hard-nosed, damning texts. I bet the progressives would look at Joshua and say, “well, we just don’t take that section of the Bible seriously,” and the conservatives would say, “well, that is a part of who God is, so get right with God or get ready to go to hell with fire!”

I like to take a narrative approach to the scriptures where I try to find myself in the passage. It is easy with the psalms and with the Gospels and with the prophets, but Joshua (along with other parts of the Bible) is tricky. God tells Joshua to wipe out whole nations – it is genocide. And while much of this has been shown to be historically inaccurate it is something that needs to be contended with.

It could be an embrace of identity – we are God’s people. It could be a sense of righteousness – we are chosen by God over these other, pagan nations. It could be justification for nationalism and war. I don’t have a good answer. All I know is that it is a bloody book and it is in the canon. I can offer suggestions but I cannot offer anything that I am comfortable with.

Hmmm…. Perhaps this is a lesson in itself. There are times when we should not feel comfortable with our faith (please don’t state the trite bit that Jesus came to comfort the afflicted and came to afflict the comfortable, it isn’t clever, it just isn’t).

There are times when we might even want things to be different than they are. If I could, I would rewrite Joshua with a much more peaceful approach, but I can’t. So I will remain off balance as I read through Joshua knowing that I may never get to a place where I can make sense of what it is that I am reading.

A Bleak Prespective

I have recently read the entirety of Charles Dickens’ masterpiece, Bleak House. My first reaction – good glory that is a long book!

I haven’t read Dickens since High School, and I was young a foolish then, missing many of the subtle jabs and undertones in his writing. Now that I am ancient and wise (that deriding laughter you hear in the background is my wife). I would like to think that I have a mature perspective on the book.

Of course I need to offer the disclaimer that I am not a literary critic, or an English professor, or any other person qualified to give a full critique of Dickens’ work. I’m just a humble Baptist theologian who is trying to make sense of a classic.

Dickens seems to get the disparaging separation of classes and does not hold back in mocking the rich and showing the honest difficulty of the poor. He does not make the poor heroes, but portrays them in an honest way. It is a reading of society that could be applied to today. This is something that I enjoyed.

The most puzzling aspect of the book is the title itself: Bleak House. I cannot count the number of times someone said to me, “Gosh, that must be Bleak, ha, ha,” showing a complete lack of knowledge of the work. Yet there is something about the title of the book and the house that cannot be ignored. Esther Summerson, the main character, becomes the caretaker of Bleak House. Esther is an ideal picture of grace, goodness, perspective, and just a ray of sunshine in everyone’s life. In the end of the book (Spoiler Alert – as if anyone is going to make it to the end) Esther and her husband are given a house that is given the name Bleak House where they raise two daughters and live happily ever after.

Maybe the name is just one of those English oddities that can be easily overlooked, but consider. With Esther’s presence, the house is not bleak. She make something of the home, she continues to give it life and hope. Consider life itself. Life is Bleak. We are born, we live, we die, and that is it. Yet we do not have to be confined to the projected idea of life (bleak) that many may embrace. We can find hope and offer a sense of joy into our lives and the lives of others.

This isn’t an optimism/pessimism distinction, but a taking what you have and living through it with grace. Esther loses much and continues to see good in life, perhaps this is a lesson for us all. This isn’t a pie-in-the-sky future hope, nor is it an optimistic belief that things will someday get better. This is an approach where you find the good in the worst and avoid any sense of self-pity. This where I look to religion for hope more than just doing your best. It is the idea that God can lead you to work with the biggest pile of crap that you have. There is a lot of theological implications in such a statement, but that will be an entry for another time.

I should talk about the Jarndyce case and the obvious metaphor for holding onto something that is not realistic, but this has been long enough. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and don’t count on an inheritance to cover all of your debts.

Is Dickens bleak? Yes. Is Dickens hopeless? No. Kinda like this blog post – bleak but not hopeless (although it may be pointless).