WORKING ON MY ADVENT SKILLS, PART ONE

          In the beginning the elohim created skies and earth.

          Religious traditions (and Star Trek) speak often about being a better person. My own religious tradition, Baptist Christian, urges me to be a better man in principle, but I am often at odds with the ideal human being posited by that tradition.  

          I was raised to believe a better Christian is growing spiritually the more legalistic he or she is, the more magical his or her knowledge is, and the more ascetic is his or her spirit. 

          I truck not with that.  On the contrary, I’ve latched onto something else that seems more authentic.

          A truer faith urges me to believe a better Christian is growing spiritually the more loving he or she is, the more truth and fact based his or her knowledge is, and the more abundant is his or her spirit.  

          Allow me to be more specific.  Being kind, loving kindness, is essential to growing spiritually.  Seeking justice, which includes the knowledge and work that lessens suffering and defends those the world could not care less about is growing spiritually.  Making love incarnate so it overflows in my life and reaches those I love is growing spiritually.  

            I could go my entire life and never cuss, never take a drink, never miss a church service, never doubt life started out in a garden with a talking snake, never stop believing women are second class Kingdom of God citizens, never forget to insist self-righteously to everyone else that my interpretation of the Bible, my theology, and God's theology are identical--yes, I could do all that and still be mean as hell to others.

          I truck not in that.  That crap is way too easy, especially when you have the personality for it.  What's hard as quantum physics is believing all that Sermon on the Mount/Plains stuff is what Jesus intended us to be in this world...now...and not waiting until we get to Sky World.

          Advent proclaims this gospel.  Advent proclaims it with the hope that a new Emperor dwells among us, a son of God who is not a Caesar, but a Son of God who is a Messiah whose peace is not a Pax Romana enforced by violence, but a Kingdom of God enforced by love and justice.  

          Enacting that program is being a better human being and then some.  I so long to be perfect at that, but the plain truth is, I suck at it.

          You see, the problem is this: I might turn the other cheek a hundred times, and speak kindly to insolent others a thousand times, but one moment of meanness reveals to me how I’m no more steadfast than those pillars of Dagon that Samson caused to collapse.

          Next time, I’ll share the event that inspired this post.  The event itself was an Advent inspired good-deed-for-the-day exalting my inner Boy Scout until my big mouth screwed it up.

          Blessings…

ADVENT, SPACE, AND TIME

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Yesterday, I wrote about space and time.  Let’s think some more about that in relation to Advent.

All of us, when we die, may be remembered fondly for those things we say over and over again.  My family will remember me always for saying about any event in the past, good or awful, “If there had been a hair’s difference in the past, I never  would have met my wife.”

I say that because it’s a miracle I met her, and the greatest miracle of all: she agreed to go on a date. 

In the Bible, when space and time were experienced as sacred, the person gave the place a name and erected an altar.  All of us have places and times in our lives that are unforgettable to us.

Susan and I first met in a space, a teacher’s paper and supply store which was the right place.  We met after school, about 4:00 PM on a Wednesday, which was the right time.

Momentous events unfolded rapidly that transcended mere clock time.  Coincidences fell into place so naturally the word “synchronicity” comes to mind (note one of the root words for time embedded in that word). 

First of all, we never should have happened.  I hate shopping, especially after school, but I was in desperate need of dry erase markers. No dry erase markers meant no Essential Question on my dry erase board which meant all my instruction would have blown apart until such time I purchased dry erase markers--according to the educational fad of that time.

Indeed, being ensconced on my sofa, nullifying with movies or video games the object permanence of angry, defiant inner city students would have been normal chronos time for me. 

Second of all, when it did happen, it never should have happened.  I sported a mullet at the time. I thought it was cool. She did not.  Susan hated mullets.  But the kairos kicked in with good conversation and one synchronicity that made it all happen.

I happened to have in my back pocket at the time, a card that represented another space and a future time.  In that space, five ballroom dancing lessons awaited me.  I imagine anyone who knows how to Foxtrot experiences kairos as they glide across the floor.  But I had no partner until in that space and time Susan said, “Call me," after I asked her.

          That first date was kairos time too.  I knew then I wanted to spend all my time, any kind of time, with her. 

Ray Bradbury once wrote a science fiction story about a man who traveled back in time and stepped on a butterfly he should not have stepped on, hence “the butterfly effect,” and by doing so he changed the outcome of an election in the future from a democrat before he time-traveled to a fascist after he returned.

If I had stepped on other insects than I did, if I had been afraid and not ridden that horse that threw me off and broke my glasses, if my beloved sister had not died in a car accident, if I had become an atheist instead of a Christian, if I had joined any denomination other than Baptist, if I had taken a bus to seminary from Chattanooga to San Francisco instead of completing a third of the journey on my bicycle, if I had only read the King James Version of the Bible, if I had never drunk a beer, never smoked a joint, or if I had called AAA just once to change my flat tire which I was perfectly capable of changing myself, I doubt I would have met my wife. 

          Let me bring this to Advent.  Anyone who has ever been in a place where and during a time when the presence of God has elevated life to pure joy has experienced Advent.  Anyone who dreads a day, yet feels dread dissipate the second one remembers all our days belong to God knows the experience of Advent.

The stories tell us all about it.  Indeed, they do more than that.  They show us so we might experience Advent again every year.

I know the wonder of it all.  In a paper and supply store, my future wife and I made wonderful kairos together. 

          Blessings…

HEARD AT CHURCH

                         In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

            Welcome back.  Let’s talk about space and time.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which my pastor tells us is a season all to itself.  He began his sermon with a story about a 1974 encounter with a woman at Vanderbilt University who told him she had met a man who changed her life. 

So, I’m thinking she met her husband, or she met a doctor whose surgery saved her life, or she met a celebrity.

She had met Sun Myung Moon.  He would turn out to be the founder of the Unification Church.

          My pastor said he and a friend went to hear Mr. Moon that day.  The meeting place was not a mountaintop, not a stadium, not beside a river, and not in heaven, but in the Nashville Ramada Inn.  My pastor said it was the most remarkable two hours of his life.  I wish he had elaborated on the latter. 

          As the sermon unfolded, as indeed all sermons must at least do, the impression of the story was to illustrate how uneventful the first Advent would have seemed outsiders.  Furthermore, the event it proclaimed, Jesus’s birth, also would have all the excitement of a Ramada Inn religious gathering circa 1974. 

          Indeed, the Christian Bible suggests that Jesus’s birth was not so earth shaking.  Much about his birth is obscure.  We have the earliest Christian writer, Paul, never mentioning a nativity. Mark, the first gospel, contains no birth narrative.  The nativity is absent in the last gospel written which is John.  Only Luke and Matthew, who include a lot of their words and timelines of Jesus’s life from Mark, have birth narratives.  They are not the same.  Do they agree?

          Yes, they do agree.  Here’s where and when:  something wonderful happened for humanity in space and time. 

Space:  something wonderful happened where Jesus was born.  It happened locally to the shepherds and townspeople; it happened globally to itinerant Magi who visited from other nations; it happened politically within Judea, a conquered nation of the Roman Empire.

Time: something wonderful happened for humanity when Jesus was born.  We have one word for time.  The Ancient Greeks had two words: chronos and kairos.  We get our word chronology from chronos. Anyone who has ever recorded their plans on a calendar knows about chronos.  That word indicates clock time. 

We do not have a word for kairos, but we experience it.  Kairos means the right time, which we know in our experience in phrases like “Seize the day” or “Opportunity knocks.”  Kairos is the right time, the right moment that had to happen the way it did because it was supposed to happen the way it did given what preceded it.  Because it happened the way it did and when it did, then other events must happen the way they will and when they will. 

In Luke and Matthew’s birth narratives Advent proclaimed the birth of God’s Messiah in chronos time, which is the hour in history when Jesus was born; and in kairos time, which is that divine moment when Hebrew, Greek, and Roman history came together at that one birth--where and when events that would usher in God’s kingdom on earth were just beginning.

It would take decades before that "Nashville-Ramada-Inn" event would become meaningful to millions.  It would take centuries before it would become meaningful to me.

Blessings…