Christmas Day Nine 2015

This blog post is a total cheat. I forgot about it and realized I won't have time to write anything even semi-thoughful later.

It's January 2, 2015, and I'm about to go engage in my most favorite incarnational experience: dancing.

It's a worthy way to meditate on our flesh-ness. Some call it carnal, and it can be that, too, but I seldom have more joy when I engage my muscle and bone and breath in the simple act of movement with other people.

I highly recommend it.

Christmas Day Eight The Holy Name 2015

Today, the liturgical calendar remembers the circumcision of Jesus. How's that for a Happy New Year?

You may come across, now and then, arguments that feasts like this are important because they emphasize the full humanity of Jesus, appropriate in these 12 days when we recognize the Incarnation.

This notion of incarnation, however, remains one of the main stumbling blocks for Christians. It's always been an issue and I continue to hear it. Much argument went into the formulation of "fully human and fully divine" to describe Jesus.

The notion is there in the Bible, in the epistles, the earliest Christan literature (predating the written forms of the Gospels by a decade or more, depending upon which one you're talking about). One of my favorite passages, from the second chapter of the letter to the Philippians, is very direct about the notion of Jesus giving up the "form of God" to become human. It's an example of Jesus' humility, a trait we are exhorted to imitate.

Still, the early church wrestled with this idea of "God-made-man," having all kinds of arguments with very subtle definitions making the difference between orthodoxy and heresy.

My own thought? I think it is an important teaching of the church, the notion of God being like us, if only in that one instance of Jesus. I also see in it a syncretized faith built out of the common Greek belief in a man-god (the Caesars became gods, for example) and the Hebrew idea of the Son of Man or the idea of Messiah (Anointed, Christ). The idea of a man also being God was common for Greeks and offensive to Jews. I've wondered if this was a way for an early teacher to the gentiles (like Paul) to explain who Jesus was. I wonder if this was the mythology that was constructed, in that highly mythological world, to illustrate who Jesus was.

I realize these are heretical thoughts for some. Perhaps, they are a way to enter into the doctrine of Incarnation for others.

What I do think the "fully human and fully divine" formula does for us is help us keep things in balance. The Eastern Church has the theology of theosis, which is a process of becoming like God or accomplishing full union with God, but I think it would be a mistake to say that we become God. We may understand Jesus as fully human, a little boy who had a penis and the foreskin of it cut off according to Jewish custom, but we also have the idea that God would give up godhood to experience our limitations and fragility.Meditating on these ideas without presuming that we might become gods nor denying the Image of God that dwells in us seems like a potentially fruitful path to walk.

Creator becomes creature and we get a glimpse at the cost of divinity.

All of which is only tangentially related to today's festival. Or else it's deeply in the middle of it.

Maybe it's both, like being fully human and fully divine.

Christmas Day Seven 2014

I try not to make a big deal of New Year's Eve, and yet I can't help but get a little bit reflective at the end of a calendar and the start of a new one.

There are things I want to change (always), things that were amazing and gratitude-provoking in the past year (always), and disappointments in the past year, too (always).

But I honestly don't have anything I want to share with the internet tonight. I had a full day which ended with some good friends and that's enough.

It's about to turn into 2015. I will spend the first hour or so with my cat, reflecting and praying.

Happy New Year! Peace and blessings on us all!

Christmas Day Six 2014

I just deleted another long, rambly post. It was about troubling news in the media with a side of concern for some friends' troubles and transitions.

All I really want to say on this Sixth Day of Christmas is that a part of our Christian theology of incarnation is that we, as the church, as the Body of Christ, also embody the presence of God for each other.

All I really have to say today is that we need to pray for one another and check in on one another and do what we can with our hands and feet and minds---all signs of God's gracious love.

No geese here. Just a hope that we can learn to be a little bit of Jesus for one another, bringing hope, healing, and release. In short revealing the Reign of God among us.

Christmas Day Five 2014

Fiiiiive Gooolden Riiiiiinnngs!

There are a lot of complaints about the commercialization of Christmas. I've lodged my share. I just barely participate in it myself these days.

I watch the few children in my life and I remember the giddiness of Christmas and the hope of what we might get from Santa. Figuring out that Santa shopped at Sears, their annual Wish Book catalog was left around the house, open to pertinent pages.

Christmas was such a mixed thing for me. I got some things I wanted, of course. Other things were close to what I wanted, but the off-brand version (never got a Six Million Dollar Man action figure, but had some dollar store action figure that had a name I no longer remember). Then there was the year that my parents apparently were busy and did all the Christmas shopping at the local John Deere dealership at the last minute. They had a line of toys, all modeled after the latest in tractor and other farming equipment. Granted, we played with those for years afterward, but in the moment I was somewhat crushed. These were not at all what I wanted for Christmas.

My Facebook friends list is diverse enough that I have friends who had rather privileged childhoods and speak fondly of Christmas memories and also friends who speak of "that one Christmas" when they had a gift. Singular.

If there was ever a holiday to highlight class differences, it's the secular Christmas. Rooted in the story of the Wise Men, I get it and even kind of like the idea, but that it becomes a thing that creates such starkly different childhoods among kids in the same city seems unfortunate. At best.

As noted above, I have participated in this holiday's most commercial side and there's a part of me that doesn't mind the commercial side, and I even wish I had the means to participate in it more fully. But I am of many minds about this. The Christmas Eve service at my church has become the important Christmas observance for me, but all around me, I see this other piece of the observance, the excitement over products and their accumulation. I feel outside of it and yet swimming in it, disdaining it yet wishing to participate more fully in it.

Someone today posted on Facebook that the five gold rings in the popular carol, "The Twelve Days of Christmas," were ring-necked pheasants, a reasonable theory given all the other birds in the first half of the song. Googling about the web, I find this theory is out there and there is also some disputing it. The earliest illustrated version of the song, in a children's book, shows jewelry, but that was still a few centuries after the earliest recorded version of the song. Who knows what the first singers meant, the first listeners understood?

And so we come to a favorite theme of mine, I suppose. Without this becoming about "the reason for the season," for there are quite possibly a number of reasons for the season we now call Christmas, I'm always mindful of how meanings change over time. Within my lifetime, personally, Christmas has become less about gifts and much more about "midnight mass"---something I knew nothing about in my rural Texas Lutheran childhood. Historically, we don't have much in the way of evidence that Christmas was even observed before the 4th Century. What did it mean then? Gift giving was a part of the pagan winter festival of Saturnalia, so just how much does gift-giving have to do with the Matthean story of Wise Men anyway?

Another friend posted on Facebook about the need for capitalism to be tempered with humility and empathy and civility (actually the friend of a friend's words---I might have chose another three or more words, but these work for me). I think these are words to hold close when thinking about things like gold and Christmas and gifts and commercialization the "reason for the season."

This was intended to be a quick paragraph or two. Well, I often say this blog is the unedited me, and my free-association got the better of me, as it often does. Here at the almost halfway point, I hope your Christmas season is joyful, and that any happiness comed from something deeper than material possession. I also hope you maybe get a little something you wanted for Christmas, too.

Christmas Day Four, Holy Innocents 2014

Random disconnected thoughts today.

Four calling birds or murdered toddler boys? On the fourth day of Christmas . . .

You will notice that the Christian calendar does not go in narrative order. The slaughter of the Holy Innocents happens after the wise men leave Bethlehem, but we don't celebrate the arrival of the wise men to Bethlehem until January 6. Don't let this confuse you.

According to the Wikipedia page for Holy Innocents, there is disagreement about whether this was a historical event. The Gospel of Matthew is the only extant piece of literature to mention it. The writer of Matthew is very concerned with fulfilling passages from the Hebrew scriptures, so he may have told this story to reference Rachel weeping for her children. The counter argument is that the Greco-Roman world practiced infanticide with some regularity, so a puppet king murdering all the boys under the age of two in a small town would not catch the attention of a general historian like Josephus.

We don't know how many boys were murdered. The story doesn't say. In a small town, how many infant boys under the age of two would there be? A dozen? A few dozen? Not that a low number lessens the horror of the situation.

If this event never happened, what would the writer be wanting to tell us with this story? If this is myth without factual basis, what should we look for? I'm not going to do a lot of exegesis here, but these things come to mind.

The Jews generally had a higher regard for the life of infants than the larger culture. Matthew was written with a Jewish audience in mind (or so the scholarly consensus goes), and so a basic message might have been that Herod, Hellenized Jew that he was, colluding with the Roman Empire to maintain his little bit of power as king of the Jews, was a terrible person, sinking so low as to practice infanticide like those Romans did. It may serve as a way to show the readers to what extent Herod had assimilated to the conquering culture.

There's also the Matthean concern that Jesus be seen as the new Moses, come to set his people free. Matthew is full of parallels with the Hebrew scriptures, and an escape into Egypt follows the pattern of Israelite history. The dream that come to Joseph, the father of Jesus, also parallels the dreams Joseph of the many colored coat had. 

Right off the bat, we see how dangerous Jesus is. This story is a bit of foreshadowing to the trouble Jesus would have with authorities, both secular and religious.

This is a very short episode in the Matthew gospel, so it's really about the accumulated effect of all these episodes that helps Matthew communicate to us who Jesus is---chosen of God, Anointed (Messiah in Hebrew, Christ in Greek).

But taking this episode on its own, we might think on a few things. Remember the people who are caught in the cross hairs of Empire machinations, particularly the children. We might take some time to reflect on how we assimilate to the ways of Empire to maintain our personal power. We might notice and take seriously the ways that just the appearance of Jesus on the scene threatens the status quo, the power systems. We might reflect on the ways we are threatened by Jesus.

That's what I've got for now.

Christmas Day Three, John Evangelist and Apostle 2014

There is much about the Bible that is uncertain. It is a gift.

Today, the calendars of many western church bodies recognize John, Evangelist and Apostle. To be honest, it's an idea that is recognized, more than a certain person.

There is the tradition, of course, that John, the beloved apostle of Jesus, wrote the Gospel According to John, the three Epistles of John, and Revelation. Koine Greek scholars will tell you that the Greek in Revelation is not as well written as the Greek in the Gospel and epistles, so most are pretty sure "John of Patmos" is not the same John, whatever the tradition might say. The authorship of the other pieces with "John" attached is questioned, although there seems to be likelihood that these were all products of a "Johannine Community," That is to say, there was a community that identified with someone named John, perhaps founded by the apostle, perhaps not, but used poetic language and lots of symbolism (particularly light and darkness) in their understanding of God and Jesus.

(As a side note, let me say a bit about the "Gospel of Judas," which was published a few years ago, and how that gospel had Judas being cognizant of his cosmic role in betraying Jesus. There was much talk about how Judas was really a hero, doing God's work for the salvation of the world, etc. There was also general acknowledgment that it was a gospel written later than the canonical gospels. My thoughts at the time was that this very likely didn't tell us anything about the historical Judas and I wished the conversation would turn from that aspect of the gospel Much more interesting to me was that there was a community, however small, that told this story to each other and understood Judas---and the crucifixion of Jesus---in this way. But I digress.)

There are people for whom it is very important to believe that the authorship of the gospel, the epistles, and Revelation are all from one person, the beloved disciple, John. It was, perhaps, what was taught to them by a beloved pastor or Sunday school teacher, and to have the authorship questioned is to question these beloved people in their history, the people who played foundational roles in their faith.

I sympathize with this. No one wants to learn that everything you thought you knew was wrong (Note the influence of comic book hyperbole on my writing. But again, I digress.)

One of the things I struggle with is transmitting to people who are not theologically trained how to read the Bible with reverence and spiritual insight without needing the Bible to be all the things we may have been told it was in Sunday school.

For me, the benefit of this understanding is freedom. We are free to read the Bible, to wrestle with it, to argue with it, and still find within it the Good News of the Reign of God come near.

I realize that some of what I do in this blog is what was once called "de-mythologizing" the scriptures. It's not really my intention to do that completely, as I think we need to approach the bible with a more mythological mindset. It was written in a time and place that was saturated with myth and the symbolism and slant-told-truth (a poetry reference) that myth brings us.

But myth requires interpretation and we tend to want reportage that leaves no room for interpretation. Just the facts, please.

We cannot, however, read, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God" as strict reportage, a piece of cut and dried fact. It is full of theology and philosophy of the first century Greco-Roman world. Is there truth to be found within this language? Certainly. But it's not the truth of "a car crash occurred on Loop 610 at 5:43pm this afternoon."

(By the way, I made that up---I don't know if there was a car crash anywhere on Loop 610 today. It's an illustration to get to a broader truth.)

This is such a bigger issue than can be covered in a blog post, but if you're the sort for whom it is important to believe everything you're beloved teachers told you in your youth, I want to gently and with as much love as possible tell you that they were doing the best they could with the information they had. We all are, and we're all wrong sometimes.

And maybe the authorship of all these Johannine pieces of literature are not from one pen, from one person. We still receive them as scripture, handed down through the ages. If you were the sort to study the history of interpretation, you'd find that the understanding of these scriptures has changed through the centuries---sometimes for the better, sometimes for horrific worse. (The Gospel of John has been cited as a source for justifying antisemitism, for example.)

That there is uncertainty in this history, for me, gives me the freedom to wrestle with what these scriptures mean for me---for us---today. We can study the way words were used in the time they were written and gain insight to what they meant to the first people to hear them, but only to a certain extent. We ultimately need to find the key to the scriptures for ourselves, for our time, for the love of the world as it is today.

No matter who wrote it, we can all benefit to ponder these words:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.  [I John 4:7-8]