A Christmas box from a friend

 “…one gift replacing another…”

--John 1:16

 

Gift giving has been on my mind lately.  Tis the season, you know.  In particular, I have been thinking about this one friend of ours who has sent us a gift box every year for the past –almost 30 years it seems.  She was a friend of mine in college, and over the years we have kept in touch by phone and mail, but our lives have gone off in their different directions. After college she moved back to Denver. She married, has 3 grown sons and a daughter. My wife and I are godparents to her daughter and she is godmother to one of ours. Like most people, we keep in touch by phone call and Facebook and letters, and remind each other how much we are loved. But, Barb is different from most friends.  She takes this whole friendship thing to another level.  And it includes gift-wrapping!  Every year just before Christmas she sends us a rather large box (or two--sometimes) filled with wrapped presents.  And when I say filled, I mean filled. She sends us a box full of presents; multiple presents for each member of the household. Books, toys, jewelry, clothing, candy, kitchenware, herbs from her garden. I think she even sent the cats a present one year. Each gift is wrapped and labeled, often with a silly note. And, keep in mind, she’s been doing this without fail for almost 30 years now. Some of the presents are silly, but some are beautiful, and so perfect—they seem like gifts from God. 

 

For instance, a couple of years back she gave me a black plastic fountain pen. It came in a goofy retro ‘50s packaging and looked like it was something she may have just tossed in at the last minute—thinking: Herman likes to write. He might have fun with this. And yet, it quickly become my favorite pen—and now, I do all my writing with it.  I think it may have even changed the way I write! The pen seemed to be filled not with ink, but with words, with ideas, with poems, with inspiration. But, I guess what it was actually filled with was love.

 

We joke sometimes about it, but it has become a part of our Christmas that we all look forward to. Not the presents themselves as much as the box! It has become for us a sign of Christmas, of the promise of Christmas. Has the box from Barb arrived yet?

 

There have been years when her gifts were just about the only presents under our tree.  And though we have on occasion reciprocated with boxes of biscotti and books and crafts and other homemade items, we have never met her level of generosity, nor have we ever been as regular and timely.  Yet still, regardless of our efforts, every year, the box from Barb arrives and on Christmas morning we open it with delight.  Her generosity, her constant and abundant generosity came to mind as I was thinking about this phrase from the beginning of John’s Gospel.

 

“…one gift replacing another…”

 

In other translations it reads something like “grace in place of grace already given…” or “grace upon grace.” Gift upon gift… Whichever translation, I hear in it a statement of overflowing abundance and generosity.  A vision of God’s love; a seemingly bottomless box of personally wrapped presents poured forth again and again! As soon as we open one gift, we find another. And if we aren’t happy with that, there is one more and one more after that.

Reading God’s word, I hear not a message of judgment and warning, so much as a message of love and generosity.  Again and again, the prophets remind us of God’s tender love for His creation.  They remind us again and again of His seemingly endless mercy and the abundance of His grace, His love for His creation. Each time we fail, we stumble and fall, He is there to lift us up and offer us again some new sign of His love, always replacing one gift with another, one grace with another, one covenant laid over another.  Until finally He gives Himself wholly and utterly into our hands. Taking upon Himself all our sins—our stumbles and falls, our rejection of His many gifts—He becomes the gift itself. Unexpected, undeserved, He is the gift.

 

Like that box from Barbara, that box overflowing with gift upon gift, God’s love comes to us grace upon grace and here at Christmas we are called to come together in joy over the abundance of God’s love.  It comes to us again and again, renewed again and again in great and small ways alike—even in the simplest and humblest gifts, individually wrapped and waiting for us to open with delight.  It may look like a Pez dispenser or a bookmark or a box of tea, a pair of socks, or even a newborn baby in a borrowed manger. Thank you Barb for helping me remember, the gift is always love.

Dependence Day --some thoughts on Independence

“Do not say to your neighbor: Go away!

Come another time! I will give it to you tomorrow.

If you can give it to him today.”

--Proverbs 3:28

It is the 4^th of July, and here in America we are celebrating what we like to call: Independence Day.  We broke free from England and declared ourselves an independent nation.  But in time, perhaps even from the beginning this declaration of our independence has been something of a two-edged sword; on the one side, we declared ourselves free as a nation, from the reign of a distant king who seemed to rule over his colonies with little concern for the people who lived there.  And we underwent the great experiment of self-rule, became a land ruled by laws and shaped by the consent and will of the citizens.  But the other side of this sword infected our language and our ideals with a kind of cancer also known as independence. Our national mythology became inflamed with a philosophy of self-creation & self-invention; stories of self-made men, rags to riches tales of men and women who rose from “nothing” to become mighty heroes of commerce and industry, politics and economy.  This myth of self-creation is truly a cancer.  It destroys and yet, how often do we (as a nation) conflate the national myth of independence, the ideal of inventing ourselves as a new and independent nation with a personal dream of inventing ourselves as a new and independent person?

But the truth is—we are not independent.  Not as a nation and definitely not as a people.  We were made by God to be in community, to be in communion, to be dependent.  I need you.  You need me.  We need our brothers and sisters of every race and land.  All of them.  All the time. Especially when they come to us asking for help. 

You see, in the myth of independence, they shouldn’t need us.  There is something wrong about their needing us.  Living in our 4-bedroom ranch-style houses with climate controlling AC and wifi extenders and hot-tubs and remote controlled refrigerators full of apple pie and corndogs and mayonnaise, we surely don’t need them!! What’s wrong with them?  Why can’t they grab hold of their own bootstraps and… just go away?  Can’t they see we’re busy celebrating our independence? Come another time!  Maybe, when you have something to offer.

But what if the thing they had to offer us was a truth we can’t find streaming on Netflix? Dependence.  The fact that being made in the image of God means we were made for community, and being made for community means we need each other.  And so when someone comes asking for help and we say: Go away.  Get a job!  Learn how to pay your bills and follow the rules and take care of yourself!  Learn how to be independent! Like me.  We aren’t just being tough, or hard, or cruel, we are being fools.  We are missing out on something glorious and grand, a gift from God: dependence.  We are missing out on the opportunity to become even more dependent. To participate in the interdependence of God’s creation.

Think about this: when you help someone, when you feed the hungry, visit the sick, clothe the naked, you do something for their body, and often they are very grateful, but at the end of the day who lays down feeling more blessed?   Let us greet those who need our help as  not a burden to be avoided, or borne with (though with bitter resentment), but as an opportunity to become more fully who we were made to be. Your need is a gift to me, just as my insufficiency, my brokenness, my need for help, for community, is a gift to you. On this beautiful Fourth of July morning, I ask you to consider taking a moment to celebrate Dependence Day.

Happy Dependence Day. 

The grace of gift and giving

“What return can I make to the Lord

for His generosity to me?

I shall take up the cup of salvation

and call on the name of the Lord.”

--Psalm 116:12-13

I keep hesitating to write, waiting for something profound to say or some beautiful epiphany to happen. Waiting until I have something to share.  But this morning during my prayer I was contemplating these 2 verses from psalm 116 and it occurred to me:  I never have anything to share… except that which is given to me by God.  And so, here is what God has given me and I (like the psalmist) take it up and offer it back to God.

What do we have to give to the Lord save that which the Lord has already given to us?   Even if we would make an offering in thanksgiving we would only be giving back to God what God has already bestowed on us.  We have nothing of our own to offer.  Consider the example in the psalm: The cup of salvation –the literal cup—comes from materials God provided, and is shaped by hands God created, through talents God bestowed. As well the spiritual cup “of salvation,” it too is a gift, a grace God offers us through the gift of Jesus Christ.  And all we can do is take up that gift and offer it back to God in praise and thanksgiving.  In a sense, all we can do is “re-gift” the gift we have been given.

And as I pondered that, I began to think: isn’t that a kind of reflection of the Holy Trinity.  The gift of grace and love radiating back and forth between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in a kind of eternal communion of re-gifting. God’s love is not only a gift that keeps giving, but a gift that calls out to be given—as if it were never completely accepted until it is given away!

We receive the gift and the gift itself calls us to give it away, to give it back to God, and by doing so we take part (in however small and humble a way) in the beautiful relationship of love that is the Trinity, a relationship of generosity, of abundance, of sharing, of love.    

What has God given you today?  Offer it back to Him.  A quiet rainy day? A moment of laughter? The tears of a friend?  A prayer? A cucumber sandwich? Or the cup of salvation? Don’t hesitate. Share it; in fact, re-gift it! And remember, whatever you have been given, its not really yours until you give it away.