The Digital Story of the Nativity

If you haven't seen this, you should. It is very cute... Merry Christmas!

Bottom Line Non-Negotiables

They come out of the woodwork this time of year even more than they do at Easter-time. They come challenging me to change their minds about the “magical” (their word, not mine) things, or the “superstitious” (again, their word, not mine) things about Christianity. As modern or post-modern people, they simply cannot reconcile their knowledge of how the universe works with what they think are the “bottom-line, non negotiable” about all sorts of things – the inerrancy of the bible, the virgin birth, how the bible says one thing one place and a completely contrary and other thing in another, and all the rest. It’s as if they are yearning to be convinced that they have it all wrong, that the bible really should be read literally, that the virgin birth can be reconciled with everything else we know about higher mammals reproducing, and how the bible is, as a piece of literature, a difficult but interesting cohesive and consistent whole. And they are disappointed when I am not smart enough to do that.

Mostly, I cannot do that because these things that they think are non-negotiables are very negotiable to me. Now, if they would only ask me what my bottom line about all this religious stuff is, what my non-negotiables were, they would likely be surprised by my answers, because they have little or nothing to do with miracles or biblical inerrancy or any of the other stuff that we get into arguments about.

I can think of 4 “non-negotiables,” and none of them have anything to do with:

-this or that style of worship,

-this or that style of study programs,

-this or that style of architecture, organizational schemes, dress codes, political affinity tradition, custom, culture, denomination,

-old hymns, new hymns, hi-tech, low-tech, intellectual distance, touchy-feely intimacy

Rather, at least today, for me those 4 “bottom line” things are:

1) Jesus is an embodiment of God. Somehow, through Jesus, God comes from beyond time and space to show us how it’s done. I have no idea how that happens, and it doesn’t really matter to me.

2) To be Christian is to be open and willing to be an embodiment of God like Jesus. To be like Jesus doesn’t mean dressing like him, eating like him, wandering from town to town like him; it doesn’t mean not listening to hard rock music and not dancing and not standing up for what you think. To be like Jesus means to try to be an embodiment of God, and that means to care for others with integrity, honesty, and true compassion.

3) To be a Christian, I have to know intimately the story of Jesus, because the beginning place for every interaction is the goal to be like Jesus. And that means that I need to know more about the story than Christmas, Easter, and the occasional platitude that excuses my non-Christian behavior while condemning yours.

4) To be a Christian is to embrace the notion that God loves me unconditionally, just as I am. God loves you unconditionally, just as you are. I am, and you are, therefore, freed from having to prove myself to me to you, or to anyone, and am liberated to love even those who seem most unlovable to me and you.

Much of the time, the stuff we pick fights about (miracles, the suspensions of the laws of physics, the often prejudicial ways very pious people often behave, literal or figurative reading of the bible and tradition, etc.) help us avoid the things that matter most. And today, 4 days before Christmas, these 4 things are at the heart of what matters for me.

A

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11: 6-9)

"A." A little child shall lead them. A little child. Not Jesus, supposed son of Joseph, son of Mary, son of God. Not the Messiah. A little child shall lead them. The realm of God's shalom, God's wholeness, justice and peace is to be ushered in by a little child. At least here, the poetry points not to a specific little one in the Davidic line; it simply hints at a little child. And one more thing: the Hebrew word Isaiah uses for child, năh'-ar, just like the English word "child", is genderless. The poetry doesn't say, "the little male child;" it says, "a little child."

Now you might think that I'm making a very big deal about a very little word. But I think the simple truth is that you and I have been conditioned by a lifetime of Advents and Christmases to read the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures as God-sanctioned, Nostradamus-like prognostications of Jesus. The problem is that while understanding Jesus in the light of these prophecies helps us get a full picture of how Jesus' contemporaries understood him, to understand the poetry as beginning and ending in Jesus misses the point.

The point is that the poetry says "a little child," and that while Jesus is everything that we say he is, and more, Jesus is not God's only chosen one. God has not finished acting in history, and God is not finished with chosen ones and promised ones, little boy and little girl chosen ones, little boy and little girl promised ones. A little child.

The prophet's poetry is not about predestination, where in some corner of God's heaven there's a book with a script for every child's life in it. The prophet's poetry does suggest something about our self-disciplined predisposition toward the little ones who at every level people our lives. What if our predisposition toward every child – regardless of wealth or lack of it or beauty or lack of it or parentage or circumstance or Wexler scale scores – included the notion that each child begins life as a little child imagined by the prophet. What if we decided that we would see and embrace each little child –

Ä the babies we baptize with some regularity,

Ä the well-scrubbed little faces lit up with their holiday programs,

Ä the hollow little hungry faces that stare at us from the site of the famine du jour,

Ä the babies whose births we await with both joyful anticipation and great fear and trembling –

as if that child were a promised one and chosen one of God?

What if you and I took seriously the notion that we were to be stewards of God's gifts to us, and that God's highest priority were the compassionate, impassioned care of God's promised and chosen little ones? What if you and I behaved as if each child we encountered – again, regardless of wealth, or lack of it, or beauty, or lack of it, or parentage, or circumstance, or Wexler scale scores – was one of God's highest priorities? Even when they won't stop crying. Even when they are stubborn. Even when they remind us of us at our very worst. What if we determined that we would be in relationship with each child we encounter as if she or he were a chosen, promised one from God?

If we did, the day would certainly come when no longer would one American child die every 53 minutes from the effects of poverty. If we did, the day would certainly come when no longer would 14 million American children live below the poverty line. ( see the latest report from the Children's Defense Fund on "The State of America's Children" at http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/state-of-americas-children-2010-report.html) If we did, the day would certainly come when we realize that taking only adequate care of the children among us is less expensive than taking care of their broken adult lives to be.

God's little boy and little girl chosen and promised ones don't decide when or where to be born. They don't decide where to call home. They don't choose their family's religion. They do not chose their parents' irresponsibility. The greatest temptation is to assume that all I'm called to do is take care of my own. The greatest truth is that all of God's little boy and little girl chosen and promised ones are my own. And your own.

U2 "Yahweh"

Our reading material for our next Faith Journey gathering (Tuesday January 18th, 6:30 PM at First Church of Lombard) mentions U2's song Yahweh. Here's a video of U2 performing the song at a 2007 concert in Chicago. Lyrics below...

Take these shoes, click clacking down some dead end street

Take these shoes and make them fit.

Take this shirt, polyester white trask made in nowhere

Take this shirt and make it clean, clean

Take this soul, stranded in some skin and bones

Take this soul and make it sing

Yahweh, Yahweh always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh still I'm waiting for the dawn.

Take these hands, teach them what to carry

Take these hands, don't make a fist, no

Take this mouth, so quick to criticize

Take this mouth, give it a kiss

Yahweh, Yahweh always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh, still I'm waiting for the dawn.

Still waiathing for the dawn, the sun is coming up

The sun is coming up on the ocean

His love is like a drop in the ocean

His love is like a drop in the ocean

Yahweh, Yahweh always pain before a child is born

Yahweh, Yahweh why the dark before the dawn?

Take this city, a city should be shining on a hill

Take this city, if it be your will

What no man can own, no man can take

Take this heart

Take this heart

Take this heart

And make it brave.

God's Reign/Realm/Kingdom... and Frederick Buechner

You wouldn't really expect any other 1,900 year old literary collection to reflect the cultural sensitivities of a completely foreign contemporary setting, but that's exactly what many of us do with the Bible. We are surprised and sometimes taken aback when we expect the Bible to express itself one way, and what it really says is something strikingly different.

Case in point. Many contemporary thinkers and church people are uncomfortable with the phrase "kingdom of God." Some are uncomfortable with the "male-ness," the "assumed patriarchy" of something called a "king-dom." Those who pay attention to these kinds of concerns have attempted to alleviate that tension by translating male terms for monarchs and monarchies with non-gender-specific words (eg. "Sovereign" for "King," "realm" or "reign" for "kingdom" and the like. That makes some old favorite hymns a little difficult to sing ("Lead on, eternal sovereign" doesn't roll off the tongue for many as does "lead on, o king eternal), but it kind of lets folks at least talk about what the Bible means when it mentions it.

Another way to approach the whole "kingdom of God" discussion is the way author Frederick Buechner does in his remarkable little book Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, published the year I graduated from college. In Wishful Thinking Buechner offers brief essays on a number of very common but often misunderstood and confusing personalities and ideas in a way that makes them accessible. Here's what he writes about "The Kingdom of God:"

"It's not a place, of course, but a condition. Kingship might be a better word. 'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,' Jesus prayed. The two are in apposition.

"Insofar as here and there, and now and then, God's kingly will is being done in various odd ways among us even as this moment, the kingdom has already come.

"Insofar as all the odd ways we do God's will at this moment are at best half-baked and half-hearted. the kingdom is still a long way off, to be more precise and theological.

"As a poet, Jesus is maybe at his best in describing the feeling you get when you glimpse the Thing Itself -- the kingship of the king official at last and all the world his coronation. It's like finding a million dollars in a field, he says, or a jewel worth a king's ransom. It's like finding something you hated to lose and though you'd never find again -- an old keepsake, a stray sheep, a missing child. When the kingdom really comes, it's as if the thing you thought you'd never find again is you."

Notes from Marcus Borg

When Marcus Borg wrote The Heart of Christianity, he was interviewed by Deborah Caldwell for Beliefnet. In addition to recommending that website to you (www.beliefnet.com), I found this interview fascinating, and very relevant to our conversation in a couple of weeks (Tuesday, October 19, 6:30 PM at First Church).

Why Be Christian? (from www.beliefnet.com)

Interview by Deborah Caldwell

In renowned Jesus scholar Marcus Borg's latest book, The Heart of Christianity, he responds to an audience of readers who, over the years, have asked him about the essence of their faith. How, they ask, can Christianity be relevant in a time of ever-expanding historical and scientific knowledge? In a conversation with Deborah Caldwell, Borg answers that question, touching on the afterlife, living in a multi-cultural society, the meaning of salvation, and being born again.

You say that Christianity in North America and Europe is going through a paradigm change-that a new vision of how to be Christian is emerging. What is it and why is it happening?

Broadly speaking, there are two different visions of Christianity in North America today. The earlier vision is the product of the last few hundred years, especially the last 150 years. This earlier vision of Christianity is literalistic in its understanding of the Bible, absolutist in its understanding of the ethical teachings of the Bible, and exclusivist--meaning Christianity is the only way.

That's the vision of Christianity that the majority of us grew up with, whether we are mainline Protestant, Catholic, or conservative Protestant. But that way of seeing Christianity has become unpersuasive to millions of people--who can't be literalists or absolutists or exclusivists. But now there is an emerging vision, an emerging paradigm.

The conflict between these two paradigms can be seen in many different places. In the second half of the 19th Century and early in the 20th Century we saw conflict over evolution. Thirty years ago the conflict was over ordination of women in mainline denominations, and of course today we see the conflict about gays and lesbians in the church. For Protestants, the two visions have everything to do with biblical authority. The earlier vision sees the Bible as divine product with a divine guarantee to be true. The emerging vision sees the Bible as a human historical product, the product of two ancient communities [Judaism and Christianity]. It tells us what they thought, not what God thinks.

My book has almost an evangelistic purpose--to show that Christianity makes persuasive and compelling sense, that the intellectual stumbling blocks that many people experience with Christianity are unnecessary and artificial and largely the creation of the last few hundred years. I'm persuaded that Christianity, rightly understood, makes sense--and so do Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. And they make very much the same kind of sense.

You say the original way of seeing Christianity has become untenable for a lot of people. How do you know this?

Mainline denominations have seen a membership decline of roughly 40% over the last 35 years. But most of the people leaving mainline denominations have not joined more conservative churches. They've simply dropped out. Presumably, a major reason many of them dropped out is that the form of Christianity they learned growing up ceased to make compelling sense to them. If it had made sense, they still would be in the church.

Another example: The vast majority of Americans, according to polls taken in 2002, cannot be religious exclusivists. Only 18% of people surveyed in two different polls taken in 2002 said yes to "My religion is the only true religion." Another example: In a Gallup poll taken in 1963, 65% of the sample were biblical literalists. By 2001 that figure had gone down to 21%.

But hasn't this issue of the paradigm shift, how to make Christianity relevant, been going on for at least 35 years? What is different now?

The shift has been going on in seminaries for over a century. It actually began a couple hundred years ago, but then it was a tiny circle of theological elites. Maybe in the last 10-15 years it's become a major grassroots movement among the laity. If you look at the number of religious bestsellers on the New York Times list, all of them reflect the emerging paradigm, with the exception of the Left Behind series.

No Faith Journey meeting September 28

We're having a little trouble getting our gatherings scheduled, so we're wondering if either the 3rd Monday or 3rd Tuesdays would work better for folks. Could you e-mail me at rhatfield@firstchurchoflombard.org and let me know, and then, hopefully, we'll get things rolling again in October.

Thanks for your patience.