one-trick pony

It is Christmas day, and I just returned from celebrating Holy Communion and preaching at All Saints'. I was blessed to preach on the Prologue of the Gospel of John.

The first chapter of St. John's Gospel (yes, I know – the Gospel of Jesus Christ according to St. John; it's shorthand. Deal with it.) is one of the more widely known, heard and recognized passages of Scripture. A member of my family once told me of going to a Christmas service where the preacher stood up after reading this passage and said, "What else is there to say?" He then spent the next ten or fifteen minutes proving his point. The great sadness is that there is so much in this passage that a preacher could preach a lifetime and never exhaust the goldmine of John 1.

Because the message of the Incarnation—God who comes with skin on—is simply and solely this: God loves us, is for us, and would rather die than live without us, to the point that He would set aside all the perks of being God and become a tiny, helpless, human child. And He did so with purpose: that He might live a life without rebellion and be slaughtered for ours so that we could once again be able to stand the heat of a relationship with the One who set fire to the stars.

That's John's story. That's my story; and I'm sticking to it.

Merry Christmas, friends. May you find in the straw-strewn baby the saving joy of God in human flesh.

community

Last night All Saints' Church in Belmont Heights held it's somethingth-annual Living Nativity, replete with straw, goats, sheep and, um... New World Camelidae—all this in the midst of the 10-year monsoon SoCal is experiencing. As I drove over to the church I was thinking to myself, "This is gonna be a complete bust. There'll be three kids and a drowned rat, and no one is gonna show and this is gonna be a washout."

O me of little faith.

I showed up to find Dan and Tom, soaked to the skin, throwing blue tarpaulins over the roof of the stable and putting spotlights in trees to highlight the performers. Shane was stringing microphone and speaker cable from the display to the parish hall. Cheryl, Anita and Henrietta were wrangling costumes and preparing young shepherds, angels, Marys and Josephs for their tableau. Jane was being crafty with the kids and Bette and Laura were loading the tables with sweets and savories. Spirits, contrary to the weather, were not dampened. There was coffee, cocoa and cider.

We are blessed to have Grace Harbor Church sharing our facilities on Sunday evenings, and they all showed up and partied with us in the rain. Chuck, our music director, rocked out carols on the piano accompanied by a mandolin-wielding bishop and vocalists of every shape and size. Families came and shared fellowship, our children—and a few of our adults—endured the dripping roof of a stable. The goats ate the burberry bushes. And we all went home smelling of damp hay and goat and burlap. It was glorious. It was community.

It was community that took the holy family in that time in Bethlehem. Dr. Kenneth Bailey, biblical Ancient Middle East scholar and professor, tells us that Luke's "stable" was not some out-building behind an over-crouded inn. It was, rather, the "attached garage" of someone's home. This was Joseph's hometown, and the dictates of hospitality would not let the community leave him and his pregnant wife to fend for themselves. No, the community—some family—took them in. And the world was never the same.

Community is what is left to us when we have expended all our own personal resources. Community is what carries us when we have no ability—or will—to go on. Had any one of us been left to our own resources last night, the somethingth-annual Living Nativity would've been a bust. In community, it was, as one reveler said to me, "the best one ever." Glory to God!

the world as it is

I found myself in a local coffee shop today among a number of people who didn't look like me. But they didn't necessarily look like one another, either. The habitués of the corner caffinator are an eclectic lot—which means that I fit in because everybody does. I enjoyed a triple Mexican mocha, although I denied myself the whip, and had a conversation with a guy somewhat older than myself about his iPad, and a fellow substantially younger than myself about the terror of finals, and the potential of film communications.

This is the world around us. We (and by "we" I mean those who are followers of Jesus) are blessed to carry the light of creation into the world as it is. Too often, however, we seem to spend our time bemoaning that the world is not "the world as it should be." One attitude looks outward; the other inward. The one sees deep potential and the object of God's love; the other see the darkness and the evil and the eclipse of the light. Most of us (and by "us" I mean those who are human beings) live most of our lives not thinking much about either of those two views. We (followers of Jesus) don't have that luxury. But I submit that we should be more concerned about the world as it is, and do our part to make it ready for the world that is to come. There is not, in that view, much room for "the world as it should be." This kind of embodies the idea of Advent for me.