Category: Holidays

My Daughter the Santa Believer

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as posted at The Christian Century blog –

We tried to be those parents. We tried to tell our daughter that Santa Claus isn’t real.

We knew that this could get her in trouble at some point, that chaos would ensue if she destroyed the innocent faith of her kindergarten classmates with a declaration of Santa-atheism. Yet we did it anyway, perhaps to always tell her the truth about the world, perhaps to preserve the religious focus of the holiday. Whatever our reasons, the project didn’t work.

Early on she went along with our attempts. She even laughed at the silliness of Grandpa suggesting we put out milk and cookies on Christmas Eve. But as she matured to the more social age of four, everything changed. Her assertions to her Sunday school class and preschool that Santa isn’t real were met with uniform disagreement; she was outnumbered. Every single other child she knew believed in Santa, so the logical conclusion must be that her parents were wrong. She informed us without hesitation.

But around the same time, my daughter decided that the Christmas story–as in the whole Mary, Joseph, angels and baby Jesus tale–is just too far-fetched to be real. So I was stuck with a preschooler who believed in Santa but not in the Bible.

Strangely enough, I was okay with that. I didn’t care that the preschool constituency was against me; my daughter’s conversion woke me up to what it means to convey truth to her. I realized that our understandings of truth are communally created–the truths I want my daughter to understand have to make sense within the communal narrative of her world. The truth of the Christmas story is about more than historical veracity. And the Santa story provides space for meaning as well.

There will be time to explore the complexities of the historical Christmas story, but for now I am content to work within my daughter’s understanding of the world to kindle faith and encourage a love of meaningful truths.

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Third Sunday of Advent 2010

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As I explore the unexpected places God showed up in our story of Christmas, I think the most unsettling to our modern sensibilities how God was revealed to the Magi. It is one of those stories that we often try to explain away. We ignore the text that names these visitors to the Christ child as Magi and translate them as the more acceptable “wise men.” It makes for cute evangelistic cards that proclaim “wise men still seek him,” but it ignores the unexpected way God showed up.

Scholars aren’t certain, but tradition holds that the Magi were the actual historical Magi from Persia. Followers of the teachings of Zoroaster, they looked to the stars for wisdom. If they were official Persian Magi, then their tradition would have had access to the religious writing of the Israelites. For after the exile when the Persian emperor Cyrus permitted the rich and elite Jews who had been exiled by the Babylonians to return to rebuild Jerusalem, many of them chose not to go. They were the elites of the land – the royal families and the scholars; the comforts of an established society that valued their wisdom was far more enticing that roughing it in a backwater province that had been left in ruin. So it is a near certainty that these scholars of Judaism interacted with and shared their knowledge with the educated elite among the Persians. Even if the Matthew gospel included the story only to convey the idea that all nations will worship Jesus, it still suggests the same meaning – God shows up in other cultures and religious groups.

That is the part that freaks people out a bit and why the revelation is so unexpected. In our modern attempts to domesticate the story, we either ignore who the Magi were or we explain them away as converts to Judaism. We have allowed our expectations of how we assume God to work to remove the power from this story. God showed up unexpectedly not just to those who were told that an anointed one was coming, but also to those truth-seekers following a different path. Truth was revealed through their culture and their religious practices – and this is part of our Christmas story.

To even talk about this is unexpected. The exclusivity of Christianity has become a totalizing thing for most Christians. Insisting that Jesus is the reason for the season often has less to do with a commitment to Jesus as it does a rejection of other cultural practices. Hearing how God shows up in other cultures is unexpected because it is the last thing people often want to hear. But God does not play by our rules (thankfully). God shows up where God desires to show up. We have the testimony of the Nativity story to affirm that truth, perhaps we should stop letting it unsettle us so.

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God Even in Christmas

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as posted at The Christian Century blog –

I’m a sucker for Christmas songs. I’m not so far gone that I’m okay with department stores playing some pop princess’s version of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” on an 85-degree early November day here in central Texas. But let me join in on a round of “O Holy Night” or “White Christmas” and I’ll get choked up every time.

They might be overdone and cheesy, but there is something visceral about the collective emotion that Christmas songs tap into. Something is stirring even in all the schmaltz and sentimentality, something that goes beyond the consumeristic trappings. God shows up in the midst of all that cheese.

This week I finally allowed myself to click on the “Christmas Songs” playlist on my iPod (yes, I waited until Thanksgiving week). The songs shuffled between Willie Nelson and Enya and Harry Connick Jr. and The Wiggles. Then the player landed on U2’s version of “I Believe in Father Christmas.” Released two years ago to raise awareness for World AIDS Day, this quickly became my favorite Christmas song–mostly because of a one-word change Bono makes to the lyrics.

The original lyrics question any deeper meaning of Christmas and encourage people to simply enjoy the chance to be with family. The song writes off the reasons for the season as a mere bill of goods:

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
They told me a fairy story
Till I believed in the Israelite.
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked at the sky with excited eyes
Till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

We were apparently sold to and told until we believed. But Bono changes the fourth line to “But I believe in the Israelite.” This present-tense affirmation changes everything:

—

We still have the trappings of Christmas and the competing narratives. But God shows up–there is room for belief. Yes, our eyes are full of cheap tinsel; yes, we can see through Father Christmas’s disguise. We may not get the snow at Christmas or peace on earth–but that isn’t all there is. We can say, “But I believe in the Israelite,” and this affirmation provides a meaning that the season otherwise lacks–and even infuses the season’s trappings with meaning. The sparkly lights, the trees, the tinsel and the songs (even the cheesy ones) can connect us with a surprisingly weighty soul language.

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God Showed Up

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Our Advent service at Journey today was all about the unexpected ways God shows up in our lives. We decorated the room in cheezy Christmas decor and played the video to Stephen Colbert’s Another Christmas Song juxtaposed against traditional seating in rows (really odd for my church) and somber hymns. For even in those everyday extremes God shows up in unexpected ways. We told the story of Elizabeth and how God unexpectedly turned her world upside down. The following are some readings and a monologue for Elizabeth that I wrote for the service.

God Showed Up
(to be read by two readers, like slam poetry)

A: Unexpectedly
B: Intrusively
A: Undeniably
B: God showed up
A: In the least likely of places
B: Where no one thought God would ever go
A:God appeared
B: Fear not, I am with you, Be not dismayed
A: For unto you this day is born, a savior
B: A baby
A: A child for the woman who thought she could bear none
B: A child for the girl who was not yet wed
A: A child to change their lives
B: A child to change the world

Elizabeth’s Story

I was, how do I put this nicely, well advanced in years when God showed up. You would think with a priest for a husband that I would be ready for God to appear in my life, but I think God likes to show up where we least expect him.

You see, my husband served in the temple, we were good folk, but that doesn’t mean that I never heard the rumors. The whispered questions wondering how Zechariah could be approved to serve as a priest when God was so obviously withholding his blessing from us. The questions that echoed the cries I had uttered to God for years. Why God can we not have children? Why are we not granted this joy? Eventually my cries had turned to reluctant acceptance. At the age when other women were getting a rest from their labors as daughters and daughter-in-laws assumed the brunt of the day to day chores, I finally had to accept that I would never have what I had spent so many years longing for. That doesn’t mean that my heart didn’t break everyday knowing that the dream was lost to me forever, but I had no choice but to accept that my body had long since passed the point where children were a possibility.

So the last thing I expected was for God to send an angelic messenger to my husband to tell him that we would soon have a child. Thankfully I didn’t laugh out loud like my foremother Sarah did when she heard similar news. But I do admit to a moment, okay, maybe a few moments of incredulity. Me, have a child? At my age? It seemed impossible. But I soon learned that the words “God” and “impossible” don’t go together well. God showed up and turned my world upside down.

I barely knew what to do with myself. How I ached and the confinement nearly drove me crazy, but I rejoiced in every moment of it. This blessing was so unexpected and wonderful at the same time. I think I started even seeing the world differently. When God shows up in such a dramatic way in one area, it was hard to expect God not to show up in similar ways in everyone’s lives. So I think it was this impact of the unexpected blessing of my pregnancy that prompted my exclamation of joy when my cousin Mary showed up for a visit. I took one look at her and felt my babe leap inside me. Out of nowhere I exclaimed, “You’re so blessed among women, and the babe in your womb, also blessed! And why am I so blessed that the mother of my Lord visits me? The moment the sound of your greeting entered my ears, The babe in my womb skipped like a lamb for sheer joy. Blessed woman, who believed what God said, believed every word would come true!”

I think I scared the poor child. She heard me say those words and immediately burst into tears. It took a while to work it out but apparently God had shown up a bit unexpectedly in her life as well. Young and not yet wed she too was with child. And she was beside herself with fear. She knew she carried the hope of our people inside her, but who in the world would ever believe that the child was of the Lord?

We needed that time together, helping each other see the joy in the unexpected. Sharing in those few months our special bond, a secret that shouldn’t be so secret, but somehow always is – that God can show up in the most unlikely of places. That God can shatter every preconceived notion of how this world should work. That God uses even ordinary folks like us to turn the world upside-down.

Sending Blessing
May God enter your life in unexpected ways. May you see God at work in even the busyness and commercialism of the season. May you always be discovering that your box for God is too small. May you be impregnated with possibilities you never dreamed were possible. May God turn your world upside down. Go in peace and expect the unexpected.

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Second Sunday of Advent 2010

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My reflections for Advent this year are focusing on the unexpected ways that God shows up in our lives and in the Christmas story. For this second week I want to explore the idea of how unexpected it was that God showed up in a womb.

Obviously kings and messiahs have to be born of women, but that fact is generally overlooked. It is the great men they become that is focus of the narrative, not their humble origins as children. Perhaps if the hero of the story performed some miracle as a child or possessed great wisdom tales would grow around the events of their younger years, but usually the humble story of a woman carrying a child in her womb has no part in the stories of great men. Kings win battles, they are anointed by prophets, they inspire the people – their stories don’t start with God appearing and announcing that one woman’s world will be turned upside down.

Mary was no Bathsheba or Jezebel – women only included in the narrative for their role in destroying the great men in their lives. Mary was ordinary and yet God showed up unexpectedly in her life – and her tale ended up being told. On one hand I can lament the fact that telling the story of a woman’s pregnancy is unexpected. But I can also rejoice that surprisingly the narrative of God scorning not the virgin’s womb is part of the story of redemption.

Often in our theologizing about the role of Mary we forget the unexpected physicality of this part of the story. We want to jump ahead to the story of the child she carried or debate her role as mediator. But God does not just show up in the safe boxes of our sanitized theologies. God was in the womb. Mary’s reality – from suffering bouts of morning sickness to feeling the savior of the world kicking her lungs with an intensity that took her breath away – matters. God showed up and grew in her. It is an easy thing to overlook or skip over in the telling of the tale, but God showed up there nevertheless.

In a church that often despises the offerings of women or sees our contributions as inferior, it is important that God showing up in a womb is remembered. The ability of women to gestate and birth the divine is just as possible today as it was with Mary. Perhaps recalling that God elevated this often overlooked contribution of women can help us not be so surprised when God chooses to speak through women these days. God shows up where the culture least expects just to remind us that perhaps we should have been expecting God there all along.

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First Sunday of Advent 2010

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Advent. From the Latin adventus meaning “coming,” this is the church’s remembering through expectant waiting of the coming of the Lord. The incarnation. God with us. Yet often the re-living of the waiting for the advent of the Lord becomes familiar. We know how the story ends. We’ve domesticated the audacity of the Nativity story. We’ve become so used to the babe in the manger, the herald angels singing, and the visiting magi that we forget that when God shows up it is generally in the most unexpected of ways. But that truth has been recurring in my life recently, so this Advent I’ve decided to focus my reflections on examining the unexpected ways God showed up in a story that has become almost too familiar for many of us.

I think Luke perhaps suspected as he crafted his narrative of the coming of the Lord this tendency towards complacency that plagues the faithful. It is easy to get used to our habits and rituals of worship. The most devout followers of God can easily reach the point where even if they do not necessarily substitute the act of worship for actual communion with the divine, they skirt fairly close. For when our acts of Eucharist and sacrifice are generally met with only the response of the devotion they inspire we can lose sight that they are not ends in themselves but serve the ultimate purpose of divine encounter. I have to wonder if such a forgetting is at play in Luke’s opening narrative, his telling of Zechariah’s story.

The text says Zechariah was a good man, very devote. He followed all the laws and served God faithfully. Yet when his turn came to offer prayers and incense to God in the holy place in the temple, he ended up being overwhelmed with fear when God actually showed up. Granted, if a messenger of the Lord appeared before me, I would be a little freaked out, but one might think that if one is in the midst of praying to God in the holy place where God was said to dwell it wouldn’t come as that much of a surprise when God makes his presence known. Yet there was Zechariah approaching the altar of the Lord and becoming terrified because there was actually an angel there.

Part of me wonders if all the tales of God showing up unexpectedly are more the stories of how people forgot to look for God’s coming in the expected places. But whatever the reason, the appearance is still unexpected. God showed up in the holy place – in the temple – for Zechariah, and it was terrifying. Was he just so used to experiencing God in one way that he couldn’t accept a new revelation? Had he stopped looking for God or seeing the everyday incarnations around him? Had he unconsciously turned his observance of the ritual into a thing to be worshiped in itself? His story doesn’t say. All we know was that for him the encounter was unexpected – in an overwhelming and terrifying sort of way.

His story makes me wonder if I am prepared to encounter God when God shows up. I rehearse the story of waiting for the advent, I seek the Lord in prayer, and I join in on worshiping God communally, but I don’t know if I have left any room for God in the daily rhythms of my devotion. Would I be terrified if God responded to my prayers or appeared in reply to my call of “O come, O come Emmanuel”? Am I prepared to let God into my rituals or open to letting God appear even in the holy places of my church? I don’t believe I am, nor that I will ever be. For that I find comfort in Luke opening his Gospel with the reminder that when God shows up it is always unexpected.

The advent of the Lord is a tale of God breaking into our world and demanding we pay attention. We may be so used to the tales of the coming in the Nativity that we forget to be mindful of these everyday unveilings. But God shows up no matter our complacency. God shows up unexpectedly.

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Preparing for Lent

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The point of Lent is not denial.

But for a long time I thought it was. Everything I heard about Lent revolved around the acts of self-denial. It was all about what object or habit one would give up and how hard it was to deny oneself of that thing. Of course that denial was meant to help one think about God and Christ’s sacrifice, but in truth the focus was always on the act of denial itself. The question always is, “what are you giving up for Lent?” as if that is what the season is about.

On one hand it’s understandable that we miss the point of Lent. In our religious traditions rituals and legalism are far easier to promote, understand, and implement than spirituality and faith. We can grasp rules. It is far easier to tell kids to obey rules than to explain to them why they should desire to act rightly. They then end up following the rules simply because the rules exist. When it comes to Lent we often do the same – denying ourselves something for the sake of denial. We give up chocolate or Facebook thinking that act of denial is the purpose of Lent. And we end up missing the point.

But Lent isn’t about denial, it is about transformation. It is the season in which we prepare to encounter Christ’s sacrifice by endeavoring to become more Christ like ourselves. Transformation is about letting ourselves be filled with God’s presence so that we can be shaped by God’s grace. Our acts of kenosis – denying ourselves in order to empty ourselves enough to allow God to fill us – are means to an end. They are disciplines that prepare us to be transformed. We deny ourselves so that we can be reborn as new creations – to live more fully as the Kingdom citizens God desires us to be.

So I am very tentative in choosing what disciplines I will follow during Lent to open myself up to God’s transforming power. I’ve discovered that for me personally, legalistic denial for the sake of denial often achieves the opposite purpose. Giving up coffee doesn’t make me a better follower of Christ, it just makes me more irritable and more of a bitch. Giving up Facebook doesn’t help me build community in the body of Christ; it simply helps me as a detached introverted person creep further into my shell. Those disciplines don’t assist me in emptying myself in order to let God in; they simply fill me with more of me.

I’ve come to learn that in order to become more fully the person God wants me to be, I instead need to make sacrifices that actually allow me to achieve those ends. Often those sacrifices are less about personal denial, and more about following disciplines that encourage me to love others more. In the past I’ve attempted to eat more ethically or shop fairly – which of course required discipline and sacrifice on my part (and a bit of denial as well), but the outcome of these outwardly focused changes was far more personally transformative than if I had just eliminated something from my life for forty days.

So for me the question for Lent is not “what am I giving up?” but instead “what can I do to allow God to transform me this season?” The answers to those questions might be the same for some people, for me changing the question shifted how I observed Lent. Whatever the case, I think it is important to understand what the ultimate purpose is behind why we engage in certain disciplines unless we miss their very point.

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Birthing

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Fourth Sunday of Advent 2009

Births aren’t generally unexpected.  I mean, you kinda know they are coming.  But that doesn’t mean that you won’t be in the early stages of labor and not wonder if you still have time to rethink the whole thing.  Birthing is hard, it’s messy, and it doesn’t always go a planned.

I think of Mary, unexpectedly pregnant, having to face the scorn of her culture – a taint she and her son would have to carry through life.  Then she is forced to travel to Bethlehem, “now obviously pregnant,” as some translations put it.  She was anticipating a birth, a special birth, but I have to wonder if even so it took her by surprise.  Was she at term?  Or did the long journey send her into preterm labor, forcing a child into the world before anyone was ready for it?  Having two children born prematurely, I understand how even something anticipated and desired can still unexpectedly alter one’s world.

I think we often in the church have to face these unexpected births.  When we are pregnant with ideas or passions or a call, we have to see it through.  As much as we want to live in denial that there is new life growing within us, that life is going to emerge whether we are ready or not.  That baby’s coming out.  And it’s guaranteed to be messy.  It’s guaranteed to be painful.  And sometimes it may even come early.  Difficult journeys strain the body to the point that new life has to be birthed in order for both the mother and the child to survive.  It’s sudden sometimes. And it’s scary.  But it’s still a beautiful child.

Mary willingly birthed the messiah – the one she knew would bring rulers down from their thrones and lift up the humble.  And she did it without the support of family, with a strange midwife at her side, and a dingy manger to lay the child in as her broken and bleeding body was tended to.  Was this what she envisioned as she sung the Magnificat? Will generations call her blessed for this?  Or do we forget the pain, and the mess, and the unexpected in our vain attempts to sanitize the way God worked in history?

Are we willing to let God birth new life?

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Journeying

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Third Sunday of Advent 2009

The other day my four year old daughter told me she wanted to go on a journey.  I told her that we would be going to New Mexico for Christmas and asked if that would count.  She said, no, that was just a trip, not a journey.  Journeys involve going on a quest to find something important and discovering stuff about yourself along the way.  So she wanted to find a journey to go on.  I explained to her that often the journeys she’s thinking of are often thrust upon people by strange twists of coincidence or fate.  Dorothy  gets carried in a whirlwind to Oz.  Alice falls through the looking glass.  Lucy steps through the wardrobe.

And a suspiciously pregnant Mary is forced by the government to journey while heavy with child to the town of Bethlehem.

This week’s Advent theme is that of journeying.  Of making our way through life with awareness.  Anyone can get along and move ahead.  We can go on trips and reach destinations, but it takes awareness to give it meaning.  To journey through life requires a commitment to seek after something and to be open to have ourselves changed along the way.  We can be scared and unsure of exactly where we are going, but we accept and commit to it nonetheless.

Mary committed to the journey she was thrust into.  Despite the ridicule and judgement of those who could count the months between the wedding and due date which is likely the reason there were no rooms for them in Bethlehem, Mary journeyed anyway.  Even as the hardship of the journey brought on the pains of labor, she accepted her path.  Even as strange visitors praised her son and fear forced them to flee the country, Mary treasured the moments and journeyed on.  Bethlehem was just the first stop along a journey that led her eventually to see her son crucified on the cross and the Spirit descend in wind and flame at Pentecost.  She was committed to the journey she had accepted no matter the pain it caused her as it unfolded.  It is believed that a good deal of our gospel accounts come from Mary telling the story of her journey.  This wasn’t someone who proceeded through life unaware.  She treasured her experiences in her heart – understanding the significance of the path she was on.

I wish I was more like Mary.  Or like my daughter asking to go on a journey.  I want to see, truly see, the world around me.  I want to seek something truly significant and be willing to let myself be shaped into an instrument of the good along the way.  I appreciate this reminder in the Carmelite Advent tradition that Incarnation isn’t just about God coming to us, but also about us choosing to seek and journey after God as well.  We choose to follow and to do so with open eyes – building awareness of the ways we can better serve.  We choose to journey together.

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Which Jesus?

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baby jesus dollsbaby jesus dollsWhen I first stumbled across this image, I thought it could be a perfect illustration of the commercialism of Christmas. You know, something along the lines of how we have replaced the true meaning of Christmas with crass consumerism. But as I thought about it, I was more struck at how it represents what we in the church so often do to Jesus. We’ve packaged him and turned him into the equivalent of cheap plastic crap that has no greater impact than kitschy home decor. We’ve made Jesus innocuous and safe. Jesus gets reduced to a nice cross necklaces or fish stickers on our car. We sing love songs to Jesus and claim the power of his name without ever taking the time to understand him. This Jesus exists only as a part of the financial transaction of saving us from our sins, as if the point of our existence was to give lip-service to someone so that we can get the goodie in heaven when we die. As I’ve mentioned before, this Jesus is little more than a talisman or fetish. Like the baby in a cheap plastic mass-produced creche, this Jesus is there for adorning our lives when we feel like putting him on display.

This Jesus always makes an appearance at Christmastime. We fight to win the war on Christmas making sure his name gets mentioned or his image displayed. We are more concerned with chanting his name as our mantra and forcing others to do the same than we are following a real person. But when Jesus is just there as decoration, or reminder of a past transaction, I feel as if we are denying the Incarnation. If the particularities of how Jesus lived and the way of life he called his followers to live are ignored in favor of a generic consumer-ready figurehead, then what was the point of God becoming flesh and dwelling among us? We could just as easily have created an idol that looks pretty and unassuming on the mantle without having to have had God go to all that trouble. Unless the Incarnation prompts us to do something other than create cheap plastic Jesus’s for our own sake then I think we’ve missed the point of the whole thing.

In an interview about my book recently, I was asked why people who are saved and just living out their lives as good Christians should even bother complicating their lives by caring about justice. On one hand answering that question is part of why I wrote Everyday Justice. But at the same time, it amuses me that the faith tradition that taught me to pity and ridicule those that say “I’m a good person, why do I need to follow Jesus?” are now the one’s saying “I’ve said a prayer to Jesus, why should I follow him?” Fully embracing the Incarnation means that we actually let it transform us – not just in some brief moment of salvation but in the entirety of our lives. A flesh and blood incarnate Jesus calls us to follow him in tangible flesh and blood ways. Plastic figures and cheezy slogans are insubstantial next to this incarnate God. This transformation makes us the hands and feet of Jesus in such a way that we can no longer ask why we should bother caring but instead accept that this is the only possible way we can live as true Christ followers. Incarnation isn’t a cheap decoration that adorns the veneer of our lives, it’s earthy and messy and complex and demanding. The incarnate Jesus grabs hold of our lives and wakes us up from our complacency.

Some days I honestly would prefer the mass-produced piece-of-plastic-crap Jesus I can idolize or ignore at whim while believing myself to be a “good Christian.” I don’t want to come face-to-face with the flesh and blood Jesus who demands I serve him in real flesh and blood ways. I fight it. I make excuses. I’m a miserable follower. But having woken up enough to start to see the Incarnate Jesus, I can’t go back to sleep.

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