Have a Merry Christmas

I have always been of two minds about Christmas. On the one hand, I harbor a wistful nostalgia that I think comes from when I was a young enough child to have no social concerns, and thus was free to anticipate what Santa was going to bring me. I lived in the north then, so there was also the imminent onset of winter, which was not a hardship for a kid with enough clothes and a warm house to live in. On the other hand, I have long harbored a resentment of the worldly commercial sensual goading that goes on supposedly in the name of celebrating God's greatest gift to us.

As I got older and found out there was no Santa Claus, the responsibility of buying presents for my family and friends weighed on me; I wanted to get everybody just what they wanted, fulfilling the promise of Santa's magic. Of course I seldom succeeded to my satisfaction, nor did anyone else. And of course I also absorbed the popular complaint that Christmas was becoming too commercial.

When I became a Christian, it added a great deal to my appreciation of the season, taking the time to meditate about the significance of Christ's coming to live among us; but it did not diminish that social responsibility of present-buying, nor the tension it creates regarding the budget and the time it takes out of a busy mid-life career. I also began to resent Christmas as being tainted by the pagan winter festival, the part so many unbelievers seemed to enjoy so much. It made me more and more Scrougey. Humbug! I esteem all days alike.

Now I'm getting older and I have been thinking of that holiday in slightly different terms. It appears that many Christmas traditions do have roots in pagan celebration, but rather than seeing it as tainted by them, I see that the early Christians tried to redeem the festival and apply it to celebrating the birth of the Christ Child, not a bad recyling job. The pagans are the ones that should feel tainted, as now they are beginning to express. Oh well, like a marriage ceremony, Christmas is a thorough melding of spiritual and carnal aspects of this life. Being older helps a little bit with a sense of perspective for present-buying too. I know I can't fulfill Santa's magical gift of giving people exactly what they wanted, don't even want to now, but I can show them I love them by getting something I at least think they will like. In this life, that will have to do.

Back to those Dinosaurs

It's over a year since I wrote my post What About the Dinosaurs?, and I am back to this question. Let me restate a couple of things:

1) the account of creation in Genesis conflicts wildly with the theory of evolution; yet there is a huge body of scientific observation that supports evolution. What's the deal?

2) I do not believe that God created things the way he did to either deliberately deceive us or to test our faith. God cannot be tempted by evil, neither does He tempt anyone to sin. We screw up just fine without any help.

I used to think that God created the universe "already in progress"; this tidy little idea supposes that He made it look the way it does because He just wanted to, and if you don't get it that's your problem. Having spent the last year or two thinking about the story of creation and the fall of Adam and Eve, I think a better answer lies in the artistic nature of the Creation and the un-artistic consequences of sin.

By that I mean that God created things in the order Genesis describes; but, for reasons I consider to be esthetic, the first six days' work comes together to suggest a different order to us who are stuck in the time-space continuum and suffer from the knowledge of good and evil. By the very nature of our perspective we misinterpret what we are seeing, however sincerely we try to discover it, so long as we leave God out. His sense of composition made Him do it the way He did. Creation is an act of self-expression on His part, and He must be true to Himself.

Evolution is built on our own esthetic sensibilities, like Feng Shui. We see all these similar animals and we have learned that genes make animals the way they are, and we somewhat hastily conclude that just the right mutation randomly caused the one animal to change into the next. We ignore the mathematically incomprehensible unlikelihood of this happening because, well, it obviously did happen.

In scientific circles, this is known as the Anthropic Principle, and I think it is every bit as lame as unbelievers think faith in a living, loving God is. Whadayagonna do?

Billy Graham Makes a Political Ad?

"I realize this election could be my last. I believe it is vitally important that we cast our ballots for candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel. I urge you to vote for those who protect the biblical definition of marriage between a man and a woman," says a full-page ad that will appear today in USA Today and that ran Thursday in The Wall Street Journal.

Billy Graham - really? Has this historically non-political evangelist made this statement? The guy is 93 and his son is a tool of the Republicans.

I have been studying and doing my best to live according to the Bible for over forty years, and I can tell you THERE IS NO BIBLICAL DEFINITION OF MARRIAGE. There are plenty of examples of marriage in the Bible, good and bad, and closest Jesus comes to endorsing any particular form is when he says that from the beginning He (the Father) made them male and female. And I think the Bible is unequivocal in denouncing homosexual behavior as a sin. Fine. I am happy to discuss God's attitudes about sex; but in the United States we have another document to live by, the Constitution, which establishes freedom of religion and the pursuit of happiness as some of our most important social principles. So when we Christians start trying to legislate our personal beliefs, we move into the Taliban's camp. Don't you think God could send ten thousand angels to enforce His wish that we would all behave? He long ago chose not to, and we need to respect that. Let us advocate our ideas of how we ought to live, and then let them stand on their own merit. Hopefully, we will also personally exemplify those ideas and not be hypocrites like the Pharisees.

I think it's clear that President Obama exemplifies marriage as being between a man and a woman, not between a man and a trophy. Many of President Obama's decisions have been made on Biblical principles, the "weightier matters of the Law, justice, mercy, and faithfulness" whereas Romney has spent his life as the servant of Mammon. That's mammon, never mind Mormon - which is indeed a cult deeply flawed in its theology whether the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has taken it off its cult list or not.

So who can you trust to "support the nation of Israel"? I think Romney would throw Israel under the bus in a heartbeat, if he thought he could make some money on the deal. All it would take is a more democratic Arab world saying 'we would support the US need for oil more if we didn't feel so threatened by Israel. That would be good for Business, right?

Dying to Self and Being Crucified with Christ

Rob Bell talks in a video about how death is the engine of life. He reminds us of the parable Jesus told about how a seed cannot bring forth fruit unless it goes into the ground and is buried. Rob pointed out how much we try to maintain a certain public portrait for our own benefit, but that if we are willing to admit we were wrong, apologize, and ask for forgiveness, that is like dying. It's killing a little bit of that fake person we spend so much time maintaining. That, he says, is being crucified with Christ. Makes a great deal of sense to me, and I thank him for the clarification.

And I'll go him one more step. When we are willing to die this way, and go to someone we have wronged and sincerely apologize, and then have that other person refuse or be unable to forgive us, that is even more like being crucified with Christ. Once you expose yourself like that, and the other person doesn't respond in the nice Sunday School way we all assume he or she will, then you are stuck. More like nailed. And all you can do is take it. Like Jesus did.

What to Do When Someone You Love is Making Bad Choices

What to Do When Someone You Love is Making Bad Choices
   is a terrific, well-balanced and courageous message given by Derek Benjamin, senior pastor of New Vision Ministries, a church in Great Abaco, Bahamas. I say courageous because many churches don't want to deal with the fallout of trying to teach their people how to exhort and admonish one another; but without this important show of the love of God, Christian growth is very difficult if not impossible. The link connects to a streaming audio message, so sit back, relax, and listen carefully.

Did Jesus Have a Wife?

Harvard Divinity School historian Karen L. King has announced that an ancient papyrus fragment in Coptic indicates at least the possibility that some early Christians believed that Jesus was married, and of course that the wife may have been Mary Magdelene. Professor King has tried to be careful in how she reported this, but of course the press have got hold of it and are happily presenting her findings as furnishing evidence that "the historical Jesus" may have had a wife. It sells papers, to use an outmoded expression.

I am not surprised that the discussion might have been going on all this time (the fragment indicates it was going on in the second century after his birth) but there are some good theological reasons why Jesus never married during his time on earth in the ministry of the Christ, the Annointed One.

All along, he said his kingdom was not of this world. Unlike Mohammed, Jesus was not interested in setting up a hereditary kingdom of his descendants: the children of God are born not of the flesh but of the spirit. For the Son of God, the New Adam, a New Eve is a-building; a greater metaphor than Adam and Eve is being created. It is the totality of believers, all spiritually built together in Him, that constitute his bride. At the end of the age will come the wedding feast of the Lamb of God and we will all be united with him once and for all. We will be a glorious manifestation of his love.

Looking forward to this event, Jesus was motivated to be celibate. He would not want to join himself to another woman: that would be adultery in the eternal scheme of things. I also believe that there is the matter of equality among believers. We all have to have our own relationship with Him, and nobody, not even his mother, has a special in. If Jesus-Christ had joined himself to a daughter of Eve, she would inevitably have special status, becoming one flesh with Him. He loved us all enough to deny himself this magnificent pleasure and instead, though his suffering, death and resurrection, make it possible for us all to be joined with him in spirit.

Jesus vs the Idea of Jesus

After hearing some good preaching last Sunday to the effect that it's all about knowing Jesus, himself, personally, and that all that doctrinal crap just creates insiders and outsiders, I came to a realization of that truth from my own standpoint. Jesus, himself, personifies the Truth, and the youngest "Baby Christian" has connected fully with that wonderful God-Man Person. Out of the mouths of babes has God perfected praise.

What then happens after a while of trying to follow Jesus and live in the Spirit? Our old nature is still there, giving us the Old Man's view of the Truth we have started to get to know, the view perverted by the knowledge of good and evil, and it starts replacing our first love with doctrine.

Now, our hearts are deceitful and we need to understand what the Bible says about the nature of our God, so we don't fool ourselves into thinking he is something more convenient. Doctrines are profitable for helping us stay on the path of righteousness; but doctrines are to the Truth of God as Scientific Theories are to the nature of the universe: they are useful ideas that enable us to understand and predict causes and effects. They are just flattened little pieces of a much larger complex thing. Too often an understanding of a collection of ideas passes for a relationship with the Living God, and the loving life in the Spirit gets quenched by the cold water of dogma. If your doctrines are not bringing you closer to the person of Jesus, you'd better take another look.

On Who Is or Is Not a Christian

I sometimes log into my church's website under one of the pastors' name. I do this because I'm the webmaster and I sometimes act as a cyber-scribe, writing little blurbs for the Sunday sermons, which we offer to stream on the site. I had adapted this feature from a pre-existing feature called "From the Pastor's Desk" when I revamped the site and it just seemed like a good idea at the time. But now, when I log on as one of them and make an entry, nobody knows that it isn't them. I do my best to write something I think they would have written had they the time, and I always notify them right away and ask for any changes they might like. They have always let my writing stand. But meanwhile nobody else has any idea that it was I who acted in the pastor's name. I find this a daunting and instructive experience.
When someone in the world invokes the name of Jesus, the rest of the world generally is perfectly happy to blame Jesus himself for whatever that someone does or says. In fact the world generally assumes that if you voluntarily say you're a Christian, then you must be one. It's like saying you're a virgin: virgin's don't lie.
At this point, let me offer a fairly simple, though impossible-to-check, definition of a Christian. It is someone who believes that Jesus is the only begotten son of God and that God has raised him from the dead - and coming to this belief, this person surrenders his own life, subordinates his will to the best of his ability, to the living Christ (that's what they call "repentance" or turning around). That's it in a nutshell.
This belief and surrender transforms us immediately, spiritually (the idea of being born again and being baptized into Christ), but we bring to this moment a lifetime of decisions and actions that do not reflect this belief. Fortunately, God is willing to provide the therapy we need to remediate our minds and bodies, increase our trust in Him, deepen our relationship with Him. As we pursue this loving God, we will make choices that confound the people around us. We will still make mistakes and do things that do not reflect well on the name of Jesus, and that makes it all the more tricky for anyone else to be sure of our standing.
Because this all takes place in the heart, it is 1) pretty easy to know for sure whether you yourself have taken that step; and 2) pretty much impossible to know for sure whether anybody else has.
Some people seem to resent the very idea that someone is or is not a Christian. Surely this all-or-nothing thinking is simplistic, even dangerous, us-against-them? If people are nice and go to church, maybe give money to charities, like doesn't that count for something?
Jesus says that not everyone who calls him Lord will enter into the kingdom of heaven: what counts is doing the will of the Father. Some people may have spectacularly successful - by all appearances - "Christian Ministries", even prophesying and working miracles; and He will say to them "I never knew you, depart from me you evildoers."
Faith in Jesus is not the only motivation by which people do charitable works, and it is certainly better for the world for people to engage in charitable works than in selfish ones; but God, who sees the heart, cares more about having a personal relationship with each of us than anything else I can think of. Charitable works are all very nice and in fact our relationship with Him, if it has any reality, will motivate us to such works. But citizenship in the kingdom of heaven is only available by birth.

On the Spritual Glass Being Half Empty

Because I believe in the inherited sinful nature in all of Adam's children, I have been accused of viewing the glass of my spirit as half empty, whereas a more humanistic person views her glass as half full, ie we all are imperfect, but we all also have a spark of the divine. So my correspondent views herself as more positive-minded than I am.

Now, I will allow that many pharisaical christian types seem to dwell indeed on the sin and imperfection of our nature, especially that of people other than themselves. For me, it seems virtually impossible to consider the concept of our sinful nature without also recognizing the redeeming work of Christ. Then there seem to be many evangelicals who are so taken with the emotional experience of getting saved that they never move far from it. These, I think, are missing out on spiritual maturity.

On the other hand, many non-christians seem to try to fill up the half-empty glass with something other than the gospel of Christ. They numb or distract themselves with drugs, food, sex, and the pursuit of these and other things. Or they try to perform good works, laying up brownie points against the day of judgment.

Other secular types, though, engage in this positive thinking. They see their glass as half full, and endeavor to continue personal growth so that it might get more full, and with that noble effort they are quite content. They find a simple blanket statement that it cannot be good enough to be arrogant and offensive. How can I say such a thing? I can only rely on what Jesus himself said, that there is none good except God; that if you call someone a mean name, it's just as much a sin as committing murder. If you so much as look at a woman to lust after her, it's just as much a sin as committing adultery with her. He said that stuff, not me.

But I don't really want to dwell on that. I really want to get back to how I see the glass. Well, I do see it as half empty, to keep the original analogy, due to my own sins; but now I must extend the analogy. Picture the world covered with half-empty glasses. I would assert that the love and life of God is falling like rain upon all of these glasses - but there is a problem: the glasses are leaking because they have flaws. That is why they never fill up.

When I decided to follow Jesus, when I accepted Christ in my heart, however you want to conceptualize that born-again experience, that leaking glass gets put inside of Jesus' perfect glass. Then begins a process, even if I'm safe from my leaks, of repairing my own glass. To the degree that I can allow him to fill me with the righteousness that Christ's sacrifice has made available, I can see how far short of his glory I still fall. I think this is a good balance, becoming more aware of my sinful nature as I become more aware of Christ's perfect nature. By grace, this increased awareness actually has the power to improve me. The damage of sin is remediated; the glass fills up.

A Moment of Fellowship in New Orleans

I have been traveling in the South for a little while, visiting family, and so I found myself in the French Quarter in very heavy traffic last saturday afternoon. The Saints were going to Play the Lions that day in a play-off game and the town was packed to the gills. In the heavy traffic, my car suddenly started steaming off the antifreeze. This had happened before and I had some antifreeze in the back to replenish what was being lost, but it was with some apprehension that I pulled over near a corner. There had been some work barriers blocking about a car's width of the street near an intersection, so I was able to get out of the traffic's way with the barriers blocking for me. It was an illegal place to park, but I wasn't just out sight-seeing, so I figured the cops would understand.

Two young men were standing on that corner as I got out and raised the hood, and one of them came over and tried to help. He said he worked in the bar across the street, and offered to go get a bar towel to help protect my hand as I took off the filler cap. He warned that I should wait a bit for it to cool down first, but it was really in a helpful spirit, not condescending at all. We stood there in pleasant conversation as the antifreeze steamed away on a beautiful warm afternoon in New Orleans.

Finally, I went to the back of the car and extracted the antifreeze bottle. When I came back, the young man had gone to get the bar towel. My fiancee then told me that he had said to her that he would have invited her to use the bathroom in his bar, but it was a gay men's bar so he didn't think it was a good idea for her to go inside. She didn't need the facilities anyway, but thought it was nice of him to mention it.

He came back presently with the towel and handed it to me, saying he had to get back to work, but to simply bring it back to him when I was done with it. The cap came off without a problem and the antifreeze was topped up. So I left my fiancee with the car and went into the bar to return the towel. It took a moment to find him in the relative darkness, but after standing in the doorway, my eyes adjusted and I went over to him. He was sitting at the bar, and I shook his hand as I thanked him again for his kindness. He kept hold of my hand and asked me, "Are you at all a religious person?"

I answered, "I believe in Jesus, and have been following him for over forty years."

He said, "Well, I hope you will understand that just because a man works in a bar, doesn't mean he can't be a nice person."

I laughed and said, "You know, Jesus wasn't afraid to have a drink of wine, and it got him into all kinds of trouble with the respectable types."

He smiled back and said, "Would you mind if I pray with you a bit?"

I told him not at all, and still holding hands, we put our heads together and prayed to the Lord, right there in this gay bar in the French Quarter. He asked for the Lord's blessing on us and our children and grandchildren, and that we would get where we were going without further trouble. I was just kind of overwhelmed with his loving kindness and all I could get out was amen and thank-you etc. It was such a lovely, innocent moment of fellowship, and I wished it could go on; but I was beginning to worry about my fiancee on the street with the car, so I wished him well and left.

I told my fiancee about it when we were on our way again, and there was no further problem with the car. I really wish I could have talked with him some more about his situation. Perhaps some day we can meet again, and Josh, if you read this post, I hope you understood how much I enjoyed our little time together.