CHRISTMAS STORIES

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  

Today, I thought about all the wonderful Christmas stories I know simply because I was born after the advent of film and television.

Just about every famous Christmas story I read or viewed has one small element in common.  It is the motif of transformation.

The Grinch transforms from the Whoville boogeyman to a good old green guy as his mean little heart becomes larger and more generous.

George Bailey transforms from a failure in a town where he tried to raise the standard of living for poor working people to a successful, beloved citizen who realizes his self worth.

Scrooge transforms from a clutching, covetous old sinner to a man who could celebrate Christmas with the best.

Emmet Otter's jug band is transformed from penniless contestants who lost the grand prize in a contest into paid performers in Doc Bullfrog's restaurant called the Riverside Rest.

Rudolph is transformed when he discovers that the one thing that makes him peculiar saves Christmas.

There are stories also that are not about transformation so much, but they are about Christmas.

Ralphie gets what he wants for Christmas, an air rifle, and he receives so much more.  He receives the gift of being in a family that loves each other and can create marvelous memories together.

One of my favorite Christmas stories is a tale from World War II.  It tells of a shared Christmas between American GIs and enemy German soldiers.  It is a Christmas tale unlike any ever told. 

Of course, the greatest story for Christians transforms the world.  

In Luke it is the story of a nobody from nowhere whose birth was announced from the sky as if he were Caesar.  This announcement came to shepherds, the poorest of the poor, who were guarding their livelihood at night. The baby was born in a place where animals were kept and fed.

In Matthew, it is the story of astrologers who saw in the skies the birth of a king and departed to see that king.  All they had to lead them was a star.  It led them to a boy king who came from poor people in a poor land.  

On this night before Christmas, we know our story celebrates the unexpected, for it can spring into being and transform the world.  

This is an everlasting story that may not have happened, but is as true as history.  

In our love story, where the simplest hearts beat and where the unadorned places lie, our God of love is revealed...not in palaces.

Blessings...

CHRISTMAS THANKSGIVING

In beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.

I did not post for Thanksgiving, but that special holiday is ever on my mind because I love Thanksgiving. It is a uniquely American holiday.

It celebrates the underlying optimism of our nation which believes at its core, and expresses in its founding documents that life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity are human rights, not just for ourselves, but for all humanity.

You can’t be more Christian without mentioning Christ than that. 

And for that, I am truly thankful.

We Christians are expected to be thankful every day. Thanksgiving is built into the system of our faith.

We love our God of love for whom we are thankful. We love our messiah who revealed a kingdom of God that is possible when Christians love one another and others.

Now, it is Christmas time. It is that time when we express our gratitude for the birth of our brother, our father of our faith, and our savior of the world who showed what our God of love looks like in a human life.

We are thankful that we are condemned by people, but we are not condemned by God. All we must do is love God and love others.

In that, there is no condemnation.

I am truly thankful. To be honest, folks, I struggled with my faith.  

I struggled for a long time because of the load of condemnation that came with the ancient baggage that the substance of our faith came neatly folded within.  

I struggled for a long time with superstitions that conflicted with what I knew to be true and yet were presented as gospel.

I yet struggle with what faith means.

But I never struggled with this love for our God of love whom I have known—as if our God of love was loving God within me.

I am ever thankful that Christmas happens. I am thankful that there are such days as holidays, which are truly holy days.

I am thankful for no other reason than these are the days set aside so that all I have to do is be with people I love and who love me.

It will not ever be so: to know such good days as these are now. I have known lonelier days, desperate days during this time of year.

This past year has been a desperate year for billions of other human beings, including myself. 

But not now.  Not today.  For the sake of the joy I feel at this time, I will revel in the holiness of it.

I know nothing wonderful lasts forever, but it is marvelous that something wonderful happens still. 

Blessings…

A CHRISTMAS STORY

In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I just love this time of year.  This is the first year I can remember when I heard Christmas songs the week before Thanksgiving and did not change the station.  I must have needed Christmas carols at this time in my life.

I was so happy when the week before our recent Thanksgiving Day, I saw a Salvation Army volunteer ringing her bell beside her red offering bowl in front of Kroger.  

I said, "Welcome back!"  

Her face registered surprise.  She grinned broadly and said, "Thank you!  Merry Christmas!"

"Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!"

I know for a lot of people this time of year yanks hard at their heart strings.  I know, because I've experienced lonely Yuletides.  Even now, I sense the angst in myself as I anticipate a Christmas with family and friends.

For a lot of Americans, Christmas is a routine that includes travel.  It's finagling finances to afford the gifts, the cards, the eating out, and the long drive or airport ordeal.  

It's also finagling time.  Which relatives and friends will we visit?  How long do we visit them?  How many books should we take to read?   (The answer:  zero, but take them anyway.)

Visiting relatives can be stressful as everyone knows who has attempted it.  It's stressful having me visit. 

Being knocked out of our daily routine makes busy the peace that should dominate our Christmas experience.  

I wonder if Christmas time for everyone, no matter where they are in life, no matter what they believe, creates a shift, even if it is a moment of ever-so-slight good will.

I have always loved this time of year.  I imagine Christmas time being the climax of a freshly lived, annual holiday story.

The story begins with Thanksgiving, giving thanks, and the action rises for days until it climaxes on Christmas Day.  

After the presents are opened, a strange sensation occurs when the action in the holiday story falls.  Activity may go on as we depart our relatives or return gifts, but we sense some kind of letdown.  

The holiday story moves to its crowning denouement, which is New Year's Day, my favorite holiday, the Gentile Yom Kippur.  

That is the time when I reflect on the person I've been as I resolve to be better next year.  

I experience New Years Day the way I experience any good story I read, even during sad times, which are experienced as stories with sad, but never final, endings.

I have been transformed by stories I read.  Each time, I am transformed following those weeks that are the holiday story I live.

I pray all our stories are special this year.

Although I have not mentioned our God of love in this post, does it not radiate faith, hope, and love?  I hope it does.

Blessings…

THE BAPTIST IN ALL OF US

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  A thought came to me this morning from my grandfather, the fundamentalist Baptist preacher who was mean, yet never cruel, and who believed that only Baptists went to heaven.

It was a thought, but it comes to me as a voice from the past. 

We all have the voices of our relatives, ministers, teachers, coaches, and other significant adults in our heads.  As we grow older, the addition of children and friends can make our minds into one crowded room, a raucous cacophony of the past, especially if all the voices are clamoring at the same time.

Fortunately, mine is a disciplined mind that has the stronger voice of my Self musing to a listening me who considers what is being mused.  Occasionally, however, that Self''s voice sounds a lot like my grandfather.

It happened a few minutes before I began writing this post. 

So please indulge me as I write a little about Granddaddy.

My grandfather attended Southern Baptist seminary after returning home from the Philippines during World War II.  

I surmise that at that time, landmarkism was still lingering as an influential force among Baptist professors and students.

I surmise this because my grandfather was a landmarkist.  He believed what James Graves taught in the late 19th Century: Baptists are the true New Testament church on earth. 

Baptists only preach the gospel and "get it right" while everyone else "gets it wrong."

Furthermore, the only baptism recognized by God happens in a Baptist church.

This might be the place where a lot of Baptists got lost.  While Methodists were saving people, Baptists were saving souls. What made Billy Graham a great preacher, in the minds of many Baptists, was that he saved souls. 

If the souls saved died soon thereafter of malnutrition, well... it's on them!

To save souls, the words you use to communicate your message are crucial.  The words must be true and come straight out of the (KJV) New Testament.  

Of course, the evidence that you were saved was that you attended a Baptist church, you believed a flat earth theology, and you practiced droll piety until you nearly perfected it. 

This kind of Christianity was about going to heaven, as if any of us had a say in that possibility!  It was not about revealing our God of love in the way we treat other people.

It preached transformation:  from a person who was lost and going to hell into a person who is saved and going to heaven.

It did not preach this transformation: from people who love imperfectly into people through whom God loves.

I think my grandfather believed that John the Baptist was the first Baptist.  I recall also that he believed the King James Version of the Bible was not only inspired, but the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic texts may have been retroactively translated from the KJV.

That voice about Baptists being the only way to God came back to me this morning.  

I tend to scoff at such notions:  Only way to God, indeed! 

How anybody can think that way after reading theology, studying the Bible, and living in a world informed by science?  
It strikes me as peculiar.

Theology today is so much better than it was when brothers and sisters believed God lived in the sky and the stars were lights, not suns.  Biblical studies are so much better now that we have scientific ways to compare texts, and we link history to the literature of the Bible.

Indeed, science has done us all a favor by extricating superstition from our faith.  In the past, the Reformers believed transubstantiation and indulgences were superstitions based on reason and on textual interpretation.

The Reformers and Radical Reformers did not see their own superstitions.

I am a Baptist.  I come from the Radical Reformation tradition.  Worse still, I am a Southern Baptist.  An ordained Southern Baptist minister, no less!  I come from a tradition that began over the acceptance of slavery.  

Few denominations are as heavily laden with superstition and ignorance as mine.

I ask myself often, why am I a Baptist?  I have admired the Anglican Church for decades.  Since Pope Francis received the vote, I admire Catholicism.  Both of those traditions are rich in history and wisdom.

Here's why: there's a simplicity that defines what a Baptist is.  
That simplicity exists as a hope for all believers.  I am hopelessly drawn to that.

We love religious liberty; at least we did before the larger part of us who are Southern Baptists started acting like moral and spiritual inquisitors.  

However, being a Baptist is knowing that all people have the right to believe whatever their conscience tells them.  Why? 

Because we Baptists believe in the competency of the person to make up his or her own mind, since our God of love comes to each of us and loves each of us in God's unique way.  

So let's say I'm an atheist, right?  Then our God of love is coming to me as no God at all and loving me, keeping me, and beatifying me as mysteriously as if I were any other person of faith.

So being an atheist is okay.  By talking or writing books about no God, I am talking about God, nonetheless, and thereby talking with God.

I love religious liberty.  It's spare, so I'll keep it.  It's spare, so I have more fun appreciating the diverse flourishes all peoples of faith create in their worship.

Who am I to say they are merely flourishes?

Blessings...

A SABBATH WISH

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

May our God of love bless you, keep you, and heal you wherever you may be torn or troubled.

A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  

It's almost Christmas time.  I hope everyone is as excited as I am about it.  I love the lights, the songs, and the stories even more.

Christmas is a nice metaphor about reality and God.  In reality, Christmas is just another day in the calendar.  

In fact, December 25 is just another turn of our world as it orbits the sun.  

In fact, a day is a name we give to a turn of the world as it orbits the sun.

All that would pass unnoticed if human minds had not given names to these events.

You see, I think the nature of reality explains itself.  Anything that happens has a natural cause.  If we do not discover the cause, we will if we keep looking.  We do not need any supernatural agents to explain anything.

That way of thinking is called monism.

Now, monism is about oneness, but it is complicated.  To account for the plurality in the nature of reality (the phrase nature of reality implies duality, doesn't it?) philosophers have conceived of different monisms.  

Imagine that.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which can be accessed online for free, explains different monisms.

Yes, December 25th is a day, but when we think of it, imagine it, experience it... that day...for centuries even before the Christ...that day with all of its oneness as a day is transcended by so much more.  We add the magic to that day.

Our faith imbues the reality with magic.  That is why Christianity can assimilate any philosophy because it is more about love than reason.  

Faith and reason are in a dynamic relationship with one another.  

We take a leap of faith where reason cannot move us.  We leap back to reason when faith tumbles down cliffs that fall into superstition and silliness.

But love transcends faith and reason.  We who are Christians experience the mystery of life as love’s conundrum.

Someone has said that when we stare into the abyss, we see it staring back…or maybe we see a reflection.  Some just see the abyss. 

We who love our God of love see all that and more, even a shadow of Being-itself within which we live, breathe, and have our being.

I look forward with glad expectation to that mere day to which our world turns and beyond.

Blessings…

PERSON OF THE YEAR: POPE EVERLASTING

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. 

I took some time off recently as life swarmed upon me these past few days like angry hornets pouring out of their troubled nest. That happens a lot when you are a teacher, and so many responsibilities overtake you and sting you. But I am back where I should be.

I just love this pope!

When NBC revealed Time Magazine's possible covers for their Person of the Year--the notorious, the nefarious, and the nice--was there doubt in anyone's mind that Pope Francis would be chosen?

It amazes me the fuss over this pope as if he has brought something new into the world. He is not bringing anything new, but something that has existed since the Big Bang of creation. He is showing us what God's love looks like in a life.

Jesus did this two thousand years ago, so we are seeing nothing new. But it seems new because it comes to us as good news. Pope Francis, like Jesus, is giving us permission to love one another.

He's saying, "It's okay to be humble and kind. Go ahead.  Show love to strangers. You don't have to hate. You don't have to own the most toys. You need not prove your self worth is greater than others.  What a terrible burden that is to bear. Love one another instead as I have loved you and as your Father in eternity loves you."

Jesus of Nazareth gave us that permission two thousand years ago. This excitement over Pope Francis reveals a deep and abiding hunger for who Christ was on earth. 

He manifests to the world what the church should have been revealing for centuries everlasting.

Pope Francis is right-on when he remind us that the love of Christ is beyond doctrine.

It amazes me that Jesus-in-the-world is so popular even after centuries of distortion. Compare that Jesus to the popular theology of Jesus the Stern, Judging, Heterosexual Son of God who would never want his government to be just and fair and who will make you wealthy if you follow him--compare Him to him. 

He is more like the Jesus who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, not the bloody conquering octavius-caesar-christ that John of Patmos imagined and many of our fundamentalist brothers and sisters celebrate.

We know so little about Jesus. We know not how he looked, his height, his weight, yet only what the earliest Christians wrote for us. What remains is so obscure yet everlasting.

We know all we need to know to make real our God of love in this good, beautiful, sad, cruel, indifferent, awesome world.

I love what I see in Pope Francis. Apparently, so does Time Magazine.

Indeed, I know I want to be like that Jesus whom I see in our brother Pope Francis, for that Jesus has shown our God of love in the flesh.

By the way, I haven't forgotten that I owe a post about reconciling Christianity with Monism.

Blessings...