The official LITD Christmas post

I often start my reflections on how I came to a genuine faith walk with one of my last few sticking points. There were a few, and a perusal of past years' Christmas posts is a good way to see them enumerated and elaborated upon.

You see, I didn't accept any of what I was taught at home or in Sunday school on good-faith reliance on the authority figures in my life. That's just not how I've ever rolled. I suppose some part of it was a demand for empirical proof, although I don't for the most part approach life scientifically. I think it was mainly the authority thing, submitting to a chain that went from "because mom and dad say so" up through "because the dean says so" to "because it is written in the Scriptures." Looking back, I can't see what kind of basis I had to go on for thinking that I could come up with a better set of guidelines for living, but by an early age the rock-and-roll rebel in me held sway. Believe me, there were consequences.

Anyway, one sticking point for me was that there was no discernible difference in human history, in the way our species behaved, between the time before Christ's earthly existence and after it. In fact, the Church founded upon his rock proved just as prone to corruption as any other institution.

So what was the point of his existence?

A way out of our predicament, of our being stuck in the way things seem to be, as I began to hazily intuit, but not yet fully embrace.

But, I then asked myself, what if there is no "predicament"? What if the chaotic fits and starts, the advancements and the setbacks, the acts of nobility and the acts of evil, are all we can expect from this thing called life?

Well, then, there's no point to any of it. None of it has meaning There's not a point to religion, let alone the Judaism from which Christianity sprang. There's no significance when justice occurs, or when mercy occurs. It's just as random as when the opposite occurs, and hopelessness and cruelty hold sway.

But something in the human heart knows better. And certain people throughout time and throughout the world fashioned myths and built shrines and temples to that which they reckoned decreed that a certain kind of order was right and proper.

We can see that the ancient Jews had the most accurate take on this. They listened most closely to what a sovereign universal ruler was revealing to humankind. Hence, the covenant, the Ten Commandments, the way David and other kings very much grew up in public, and the prophecies.

And then - Him. There's never been quite the same take on matters of the spirit and ultimate reality, not even from his Jewish forebears, let alone systems that sprang up in other cultures.

He was like us in every aspect, save one that is all-important: He created us - and, indeed, everything. Here was this guy, walking  around, x number of feet and inches tall, with a certain hair and eye color and pitch of voice. He got hungry and tired. He wept and laughed. He got mad on occasion. But through it all, he knew the end game, because he was the author of it. And he invites us to participate in that endgame with him.

Can we attain his perfect wisdom and mercy? No, but availing ourselves of his grace in spite of our inability to so attain achieves the same effect. We spend eternity free of what besets us during our brief time in this realm. That stuff is over for good.

And, indeed, the more closely people approach him, and the more people who do so, this world can become a better place to live. (Not that we want to get attached to it, though!)

"Look full in his wonderful face," as the song says.

You might as well look. His gaze is actually inescapable. He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake.

Just like when Judas kissed him, no matter what we do, he says, "I knew you were going to do that."

But his compassion is as inescapable as his gaze, and your crummy choices in no way diminish how much he wants you in his eternal company.

Look full in his wonderful face. It is the face of God.

Thoughts on watching It's a Wonderful Life for the gazillionth time, but maybe the first time on Christmas Eve

Since we're all as familiar with every scene as we are the sounds of our own voices, I'll cut to what just struck me.
It's the scene where George, at the coaxing of his mother, wanders down the street to casually visit Mary. Things get tense - in some part due to Mary's mother - and in the midst of it, Sam Wainwright calls and gets all ebullient about his business opportunity, and exhorts George to invest in it and says he might have a job for George. Georges starts to shake and grit his teeth and he grabs Mary's shoulders and says, "Now, you listen to me. I don't want in on any ground floors, and I don't wanna get married ever! I wanna do what I wanna do!" And they embrace.

The very next scene is their wedding reception.

Why did he marry her, given what he'd said in his outburst?

Because she was the one woman to whom he could bare his soul.

It occurred to me that in real life, we still put brakes on our willingness to bare our souls. (Actually, later in the movie, George kept a lot to himself.)

In real life, if you bare yourself to anyone - spouse, sibling, best friend, parent, child - there may be issues. The recipient of what you're conveying may have some kind of investment in what you're saying.

But there is one to whom you can bare your soul and there are no issues.

He's heard it all and in fact he's keenly interested in your story. And he'll have nothing but complete understanding for you as you tell it. When you're done, he'll let you know he's crazy about you, that he loves you like he loves no other.  He'll have no issues. Talk away.

And tonight we celebrate his birth. He created each and every one of us, but he still seemed remote to us until that night. He decided we needed to see him as one of us so we could understand who and what he was.

Only once has someone that pure walked among us.

Let him listen to you.

Let him hear you say yes.

Which will we shout?

Our pastor's sermon this morning was based on the lectionary Gospel reading, John 12: 20-33.

As he usually does, he provided some context to set the table. It actually takes place after Palm Sunday, the entrance into Jerusalem. We were reminded that the last miracle Jesus had performed prior to the entrance into Jerusalem was bringing Lazarus back to life. Jesus was personal friends with Lazarus and his sisters, and it was upon being summoned to the place where Lazarus's body, dead four days, lay decomposing and stinking, that we read of one of those moments in which the Lord's human side took precedence: "Jesus wept." These siblings came from a well-to-do prominent family, and many people, not just Jews, had gathered at their house and witnessed what Jesus did. It got the attention of he Saducees and Pharisees, as well as the Romans. It brought the controversy surrounding Jesus' ministry to the fever pitch that characterized that last week of his mortal life.

In fact, such other groups as the Samaritans and Greeks knew what was going on.

Recall that Jerusalem during Passover was party central, and the presence of Jesus was just one more source of commotion. But some Greeks were specifically interested in checking him out:

20 Now there were some Greeks among those who went up to worship at the festival. 21 They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, with a request. “Sir,” they said, “we would like to see Jesus.” 22 Philip went to tell Andrew; Andrew and Philip in turn told Jesus.

They go to hear him, and what he has to say is yet another moment of his human side taking precedence. With perfect forthrightness, he acknowledges being troubled about what is to come as the week concludes (presaging the even greater degree of dread he expresses the following Thursday night in the Garden of Gethsemane). But he tells the crowd that not only can he not beg his father to save him from his fate, but that that very fate was what he came for.

Then comes the otherworldly voice from somewhere that can't be pinpointed as a location in the physical world. John merely describes it as being "from heaven."

Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it [His - that is, the Father's -  own name], and will glorify it again.” 29 The crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him.

Now, how's this for heavy?

30 Jesus said, “This voice was for your benefit, not mine. 31 Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. 32 And I, when I am lifted up[a] from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” 33 He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die. 

In this whole passage, we are getting a foretaste of one of the most heart-rending themes of Good Friday: people coming up to Jesus and saying, "You could stop this right now. Just tell the authorities what they want to hear," and Jesus looking at them with an expression that says, "No, I have to do this."

He and only he could fulfill this horrible mission, because he was the only human who has ever existed that didn't have an earthly father, but the father he did have had this mission for him, by which we also become the Father's children.

The sequence of events, taken as a whole, makes irrefutably clear the holiness of Jesus. His person is the Truth. All things came from him and return to him.

Our pastor wound up his sermon by posing a question: As we enter the last two weeks of Lent, which will we shout? While it be, "Hosanna!" or "Crucify him!"?

He employs occasional little pauses in his preaching style, and while I was waiting for the second choice, I kind of thought it might be "meh," in the manner of contemporary secular agnostics who regard the whole thing as of tertiary consequence at best, not something that has much relevance to anything else in life. Then he dropped the other shoe, and, once I had the chance to ponder it, I could see that "meh" and "Crucify him!" amount to the same thing.

You cannot take the attitude along the lines of, "Look, Jesus had some profound things to say, as did a lot of spiritual teachers and philosophers, but that's hardly the end-all and be-all of what we need to consider."

Some like to cite theologians who forthrightly deviate from sound doctrine and speculate that perhaps one kind of offbeat theory or another explains what Jesus said and the whole matter of his divinity. This is the assumption that we don't really know for sure what he was about, that some fresh perspective can shed light on the matter that scripture doesn't.

And that inflicts fresh wounds upon our Lord, not to mention the way it endangers our prospects for eternity.

If we hedge on unequivocally calling him Savior, declaring him so to all and any who might ask us what he was (or, more accurately, who He is), we've chosen one option in our binary choice over the other.

I'm reminded again of the dialogue in C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, in which a young man gets the chance to converse with an old family friend who gets a short reprieve from Hell, but looks at the time after a short, polite exchange and, of his own volition, says he must be getting back, so as to attend the weekly meeting of his discussion group, which is going to take up the question of what Jesus's mission might have looked like if he'd lived a little longer.

We remain forever separated from the Truth, and the grace it can bestow upon us, if we cling to our own cleverness.

It really comes down to this question: Which do you like better, darkness or light?

Intention for this week: to make it a mindful walk to the cross

Why is the cross the primary symbol of Christianity? One sees it on church steeples, on necklace pendants, on Bible covers, bumper stickers (including those "coexist" stickers that also include the Star of David, the Muslim Crescent and the yin-yang symbol), graves and tattoos.

But why not the empty tomb, or, say, the manger? Do they not have a bit more of an upbeat connotation?

And it's hardly recent. Iconography from the faith's earliest days puts the cross front and center.

It's clearly an insistence that something be acknowledged. What is it?

Something interesting about the way this ubiquitious symbol is displayed, and has been over the centuries, is that it's either presented as flamboyantly decorative, with curly-cues adorning its edges, or so simple - two perpendicular lines, basically - as to be starkly abstract. It's almost as if the faith is saying that the graphic details are best left to the observer's private thoughts and imaginings.

I guess that's understandable. Say you wrote a novel about some grisly crime that took place in a particular room. Would you not want your publisher's graphics people to put something rather subtle on the book cover, say, an open door, with a beam of dim light projecting out? Your target market might recoil from your work if you got too literal, or mistake what you're offering for some kind of low-brow sensationalism.

Maybe this goes a ways toward explaining why Good Friday is not the big deal on most Christians' - or Westerners' generally - calendar that Easter, or certainly Christmas, is. The most devout try to find time on that day to make it to a service somewhere, but nobody stays home from work, or gathers family for some kind of meal.

But there it is, up on that hill, with the last vestiges of daylight fading behind it, the murmur of weeping Jewish women and astonished Roman soldiers fading with it.

Step right up to it, so you can see the blood. There's lots of it.

At some point, anyone who begins a serious inquiry into just what this Christian-faith thing is has to ponder deeply what happened in the twenty or so hours between the kiss on the cheek from Judas in the Garden of Gesthemane and the scene depicted above.

What happened to that guy - our Lord, the son of the author of all that has ever existed, and is ever going to exist, anywhere in this infinite universe - was abuse of a degree of viciousness and savagery to which very few human beings have ever been subjected. The scourgings went on and on, and the Romans who administered them used the most diabolical of instruments, The spikes dug deep, tearing muscle tissue and causing massive blood loss. He was shoved, kicked, hit and spit upon, taunted. Mocked with the title - "King of the Jews" - that codified the way in which he was most misunderstood, as the anticipated political leader of a liberation movement.

Throughout the entire time, various people came up to him - including the man most responsible for his fate, Pontius Pilate - and said, in so many words, "Why are you putting yourself through this? Tell the authorities what they want to hear, and you can put a stop to this."

We all should conjure as vividly as possible this week an image of the facial expression with which He gazed at such people in response. Consider that he was weaving in and out of consciousness and lucidity, a chunk of barely recognizable shredded human tissue drenched in his own blood. But surely when directly asked why he didn't choose to end the Hell, he'd engage their eyes directly and convey something with timeless implications, implications for your soul and mine: I have to do this.

And conjure an image of the cross being raised to its full height, in the hot sun. The impact of gravity on the points - hands and feet - at which the body of Jesus of Nazareth was fastened to the wood would bring him to the moment of maximum anguish.

And consider the full depth and  mystery of the things he uttered once up there:

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

"Into thine hands I commend my spirit."

"It is finished."

Over the past several decades, Western culture has become enamored of the quest for direct spiritual experience, and has come to value that more than truth revealed in scripture. Some of it is surely due to the instant-gratification value of a mystical experience. As with everything else, we want the full measure and we want it now. We want something cosmic and mind-blowing.

What fits that bill better than what happened on that cross? The utterances listed above, the suddenly darkening sky, the rending of the temple curtain?

The removal of the seam between the profane and the sacred, the reuniting of the mundane and the divine. Creation reconciled with creator.

How's that for cosmic?

But where does the individual human being fit into this?

As I've said before, my last sticking point before fully committing myself to a faith journey was that it looked like a rigged game, that the exercise of this great gift from God, our free will, would inevitably result in sin, and that the only way to avoid the eternal outer darkness resulting from that sin was to make some sort of confession, made a mockery of that free will.

But if you'll permit yourself to really let in the details of that Friday afternoon on that hill, you'll see that it's not just "some sort of confession." Nobody would go through what that guy did, particularly after a ministry filled with parables of lost sheep and prodigal sons, and exhortations to repentance, without desiring something infinitely precious.

He had you on his mind that awful day. Your name, your face, your soul.

You may not even have an inkling you were lost until you really let in what he went through.

He wants you and me with Him in eternity.

Let's make this week truly holy. There is much on humanity's plate, but that is always the case, is it not? For this week, let us put the moment, two thousand-plus years ago, when time and eternity were wedded, and Christ invited us to see Him in paradise, front and center in our minds.

Let's accept being cleansed.