When Joseph Awoke (a father at Christmas): some thoughts for the 4th Sunday of Advent

 

“When Joseph awoke, he did

as the angel commanded him.”

--Matthew 1:18-24

 

Who, over the age of 25, has not experienced that frightening moment when you wake up and suddenly realize: Oh my gosh! It’s almost Christmas! But, I’m not ready!  And suddenly--if you are like me—you rush out to the garage in search of lights you promised to hang a month ago, and the wreath that still needs to be put on the door. By golly, those Advent candles aren’t going to light themselves!... And has anyone seen the inflatable pug?

 It’s just not Christmas without the pug!

 In a desperate frenzy of activity, we set about doing everything the season commands. Wanting our house, our tree, our table to be just right!  Perfect, in fact. But there is always one more trip to HEB in search of gluten free ginger snaps for Aunt Lucy, or to Hallmark for a box of cards we still intend to write—Christmas is a season, you know; not just a single day!

 And the presents! Aargh. What size sweater does my sister wear? Would your bother like a new tie? With Snoopy on it? What about Aunt Hildy? Does she still smoke a pipe?  And I forgot to buy that tea your mother loves so much!

 

And just when it seems like it might come together, suddenly your niece announces she is vegan. Or someone else is added to the guest list and we need to borrow a card table from the neighbors, and get a few old folding chairs out of the garage… The chaos that comes with Christmas can be overwhelming. So much to do and if you put it all off long enough, so little time to do it.

 

Think about Joseph, he goes to bed one night certain of one thing: he is about to get divorced. But then an angel appears in his dream and everything changes.

 

Can’t you just see this humble old carpenter waking up and realizing he isn’t ready? Rushing about trying to make his house perfect for a new wife and this mysterious child of her’s—who just happens to be the savior of the world… When suddenly there is another messenger. Another command.  This time from Caesar; Everybody pack your bags and head home for a census! 

But I have plans for the holidays.

 

And again Joseph has to pivot, change plans, make new ones. A road trip. No problem.

 

But there isn’t any Trivago or AAA to help with reservations. But, surely God would provide a safe place for His son to be born, maybe even a room with a private bath and a view of the winter hillside.  I hear the night sky is full of stars and the gathered sheep look almost like drifts of snow this time of year.

 

And like most of us (especially fathers), Joseph had to learn that no matter how well you plan or hard you try, something (or someone) unexpected shows up and the best laid plans come crashing down like shards from a shattered ornament.  I am pretty sure if you asked him,  Joseph would tell you a stable full of animals and strangers was never part of his plan.  In fact, in his eyes, it probably seemed like a catastrophe, a sign somehow of his own failing as a husband and a step-father.  And yet, in the fullness of God’s plan, it was anything but; it was the fulfillment of His Word, of His love.

 

“Thus says the Lord:

Heaven is My footstool, and the earth My throne;

What kind of dwelling can you build for me?

What is to be my resting place?...

This is the one I approve: the lowly and the afflicted,

the one who trembles at My word.”  --Isaiah 66:1-2

 

God chose to enter into the world as an infant, vulnerable to the dangers and afflictions of the flesh and this world. That is the dwelling God chose, the dwelling He prefers. And no matter how we try to clean it up, sanitize it for Christmas cards, or Hallmark movies, God will always find a way to break through our plans, our desperate attempts to create a perfect Christmas, a perfect family, a perfect life… and through the vulnerability and chaos of our discomfort and failure and dysfunction, He will reveal Himself: a helpless baby lying in a manger, hungering for His mother’s tender breast, the warmth of His father’s gentle touch, offering us the chance to give Him not a gift card or a carefully wrapped present, but ourselves, our hearts, our love. That’s all… 

 

And so here it is, Christmas is upon us, those final days before the celebration. We have just celebrated the 4^th Sunday of Advent. We are at the eve of Christmas eve and yes company is coming, relatives, friends (folks you don’t know), and yes there are still cards to write and presents to buy and wrapping to be done.  But, instead of entering into the frenzy of it all, slow down. Take a breath.  And remember this: This Christmas don’t let the colored lights, and the glitter of the wrapping paper, the tinsel and the bows (and all your plans and expectations) blind you to the unexpected grace found only in the actual gift waiting for you right probably right where you least expect it.

 

The Fulfillment of the Law

 

                             “…love is the fulfillment of the Law.”
                             --Romans 13: 8 -10

Why is the world so angry these days? Why is America so angry? Why are Christians so angry? And why are we all so reflexively defensive? It seems to me that part of the problem is we have forgotten how to love, and forgotten what love looks like, how love acts, and what love costs. A man gets shot and instead of coming together in sorrow and compassion as a nation we start pointing fingers, Democrats desperate to blame Republicans and Conservatives righteously blaming Liberals! Each side bitterly blaming the other. A husband and wife are brutally murdered (possibly by their own son) and our president posts cruel self-righteous messages about how the victim brought it on himself. After a school shooting, instead of coming together in solidarity to protect our children each side reaches for a camera to start broadcasting vitriole and reasons why the other side is responsible for another unimaginable nighmare, another empty seat around some poor family's table. Why is it that we aren't coming together? Why are we treating each other this way? What has happened to us as a nation? As a society? As a people? It's like we are just looking for enemies? Why aren't we treating each other with love?
Perhaps we just need someone to remind us what that is... and what it looks like.

Here at Christmas time we often get quite caught up in the whole sentimental baby in the manger with lovely clean sheep hovering about, breathing their sweet warm grassy breath over the rosy cheeked, pink and freshly swaddled infant. This image of Christmas with its gentleness and radiant beauty can distract us from the truth—Love is hard. It requires sacrifice. It demands patience. And it can be exhausting…and risky. When we are expecting something tender and sentimental, we may be utterly shocked by the truth-- the wood of that manger inevitably leads to the wood of the cross. It’s unavoidable. Love makes us vulnerable, and that is very uncomfortable. Something we (by instinct) avoid at any cost. And yet, here at Christmas that is exactly the image of Christ we are presented with. A newborn child, helpless; the God who is Love lying in a manger, dependent for food and warmth upon His own creation, the comfort of His mother's breast and the warmth of her flesh holding Him close. The rough fingers of his carpenter "father" gently lifting him to change a diaper or at least the straw that makes up His bed.

Love makes us vulnerable, and that is always uncomfortable. And Love maes demands upon us, demands we too often might rather avoid.

But, as Paul reminds us in his letter to the Romans, “love is the fulfillment of the Law.” The Law is capitalized here because it refers not just to human laws but to the Law of God (as found in the Torah). Think about that; Paul is telling us that all those rules found in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy—all those hard and fast regulations—boil down to one thing: Love.

Paul gives us three wonderful lessons at the end of Romans that—if we take them seriously—will utterly change the way we treat each other. Especially anyone we might be tempted to call our enemy. First:

                             “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, thus sayeth the Lord.” (12:19)

This tells us that getting revenge (or getting even) is not our business; that belongs to God.

Second:

                            “If your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat;
                             if thirsty, give him something to drink.
                            By doing this, you will heap red-hot coals on his head.” (12:20)

Hence, if we begin to think of someone as our enemy, we now know how God wants us to treat them: with generosity and compassion. This is what Love looks like... The answer isn't revenge, the answer isn't cruelty or meanness, but generosity and compassion. Of course, we might think this is just the old "Kill them with kindness" ploy, but is there something more to it? Is the strangeness of this lesson not just about how we treat our "enemies" but how we transform them (and ourselves)... By heaping red-hot coals of generosity and kindness upon them, we might change their hearts... But, more importantly we might change our own. It is hard to hate someone you are caring for, harder even to see them as an enemy when you see their hunger and thirst and their need for help, for compassion, for Love. It seems that the Law of God is asking us not to harden our hearts against our enemy but to become even more like Christ as we approach them. To see them not with the eyes of politics or nationality but with the eyes of Jesus.

Which leads me back to this:

                             “…love [truly] is the fulfillment of the Law…” (cf.13:8-10)

Why do Christians so quickly forget these essentials? Especially in a time of conflict? Whether it is personal or social or even international, what is it about these simple lessons that eludes us? Why does their obvious meaning fade so quickly when our eyes are clouded by anger and resentment?

Let us ponder this as we approach the celebration of the birth of God’s Love made flesh. This whole turn the other cheek, feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit the prisoners, clothe the naked, care for the vulnerable and the outcast thing isn’t just some liberal agenda run amuck. It is the fulfillment of the Law of God. And it is our call as Christians, as the Body of Christ we are called to live it, to embody it, to love our enemy and bless those who curse us, to give ourselves away, and by so doing to give our flesh to the Love of God. To let God’s love shine through our words and actions we must abe willing to allo the wood of the cradle to reveal the wood of the Cross. This way of life, this way of Love –it is the salt we are called to be for the earth; it is the Light our faith must shine in a world frightened and lost in the darkness of hate.

It is the Law and the Law is Love. What kind of blessing will you become this Christmas? And who will you bless? If you are still looking for a way to shake up your holiday season, let that become your Advent prayer.

A great and fixed gulf: Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31)--thoughts for the 26th Sunday of Ordinary Time

A great and fixed gulf: Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31)

  

“But that is not all: between us and you

a great gulf has been fixed, to prevent those

who want to cross from our side to yours

or from yours to ours.” –Luke 16:26

That fixed gulf has been bothering me. It sounds slightly harsh, and even hard-hearted on the surface. And that feels like a kind of stumbling block messing with my idea of God’s love. Of course, having my ideas and notions challenged is almost always a good thing. Like most people, I too easily get set in my own patterns and habits of thinking. And it is good for me to be reminded that my ideas are not God’s. But, it is a particularly painful stumbling block just now because this week I have been listening to a few voices talk of “tough love.” And on the surface, a teaching like this might seem to be an affirmation of such talk. Tough love sometimes has to set boundaries, create barriers, even fix a great gulf between people, even people who want to help.  And yet, the tough love talk I heard seemed to have much more emphasis on the tough than on the love. And the voices seemed to only grow harder the longer they talked, opinions and ideas becoming fixed... The life-giving warmth of love fading into something cold and lifeless. So I am struggling with the idea of tough love, and with this vision of a gulf that seems intended to prevent the flow of mercy or compassion, and with the idea that this gulf was “fixed” (or created) by a loving God.

Ok; so, start there. (And yes—I understand this is a parable, and I may be over-thinking things. Again, let that be part of the very premise I am about to present.)

Now, with that groundwork in place, let me for a moment ponder some ideas about that “great gulf.” My initial concern is: why? Why would a loving, merciful, life-giving God (who—in fact-- is Love) “fix” a gulf between the saved and the lost to prevent souls from crossing? What would He be preventing? Repentance? Access to His grace? To His Mercy? His love? Why?

Of course, some might answer because real love is “tough,” and choices have consequences, therefore some souls may find themselves hopelessly suffering in Hell, because they deserve it. It’s natural consequences.  Divine justice. That reading turns this great fixed gulf into an element of God’s justice. Seen through the lens of “tough love” this fixed gulf is an actual barrier –like a vast chasm between two spaces, something like the afterlife’s version of the Grand Canyon—a truly uncrossable space—even for a Heavenly Evil Knievel. And yes, that feels like tough love. But, to my ear it doesn’t actually sound like God’s love.

And so, I turn back to the parable itself, wondering if there might be a clue about that gulf and how and by who it was fixed. A truth that might reveal something about the toughness of God’s love.

“There was a rich man who used to dress in purple
and fine linen and feast magnificently every day.
And at his gate there used to lie a poor man called
Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to fill
himself with what fell from the rich man’s table.
Dogs even used to come and lick his sores…”
Luke 16: 19-21

Do you notice another gulf in this story? The gulf between the rich man’s table and his gate? The gulf between the rich man’s feasts and Lazarus’s hunger? The gulf between his fine linen and purple garments and Lazarus covered with sores that are licked by the dogs. And what about those dogs? Are they there at the rich man’s gate to drive away poor ragged beggars? Or were they wild strays that also hungered for scraps, and licking the wounds of Lazarus was somehow a comfort to them and perhaps even him?

Ah, but I must let those dogs run free for now, and return to that fixed gulf. As I read this parable, that gulf isn’t fixed by God—but by the rich man. And it isn’t waiting for him somewhere in eternity, it is forming inside of him every time he feasts, and every time he turns away from the needs of the beggar who waits at his gate. It isn’t a sign of God’s judgment, but of the choices, the blindness and the selfishness that have shaped his life. It is a habit of the soul and is fixed by choice, not by God. The rich man lived a life of chasms and barriers, a life of self-protection, and self-defense one might say, protecting his own comfort and defending his own security with wealth and gates and dogs (maybe) and protecting himself from discomfort and vulnerability by carefully managing his finances and willfully turning away and ignoring others—especially those unpleasantly in need. This fixed gulf is not an imposed barrier or punishment from a righteously indignant God, but a sign of a Loving God’s willingness to allow His creation the freedom to be who and what we choose to be. Even if that means we make a private Hell from our own choices.

And this reading—again, let me remind you (and myself ) that my understanding could be clouded by my own willfulness or prejudices, focused through the lens of my own theological preferences, BUT… there are two things about God that seem pretty clear to me: 1st, that the Love of God excludes no one, and 2nd that the way we receive that Love is what determines our eternity. Are we open to it? Do we long for it? Have we nurtured within ourselves the desire to be in His presence, to enter fully into His love? To die to ourselves and say with utter certainty: Thy will be done? Or have we nurtured within ourselves a desire to become our own gods, to selfishly protect and defend our own opinions and ideas like they were sacred idols, make an altar of our own security and safety, putting always our own desires and needs on that altar, and chanting always to ourselves: My will be done?

In fact, I wonder now, isn’t it clear that—how we live shapes that gulf and fixes it in place. A tough love that excludes others, drives them away, ignores their humanity or has no patience, compassion or sympathy for frailty and weakness --that kind of love --Is it really love? Or is it actually an emptiness that creates a gulf and fixes it inside my own heart by ignoring those in need, the vulnerable, the challenging, the lost, those who are different, those who make me uncomfortable?

Or have I built a bridge across that gulf by opening my heart and life to those in need, by feeding the hungry, caring for the sick and the sorrowing, visiting the prisoners of poverty and loneliness as well as those in actual prisons?

 

In other words, we can hide from love behind a gulf of “toughness” or we can lay down our lives, take up the cross, and let the Love of God become a bridge between us. 

 

And all of this does have (for me) a very personal connection.  I had a brother who was not easy to love. He was an addict, a thief, a drunk, a man who would promise to change, but found the effort often beyond him. And there was a time when I turned away from him. Didn’t want him around my family, my children because I was afraid of what he might do or say.  He made life hard, uncomfortable. And things often got broken when he was around—vases, toys, feelings.  I was afraid of him, of what his needs might demand from me, and of losing the secure, comfortable life I was trying to build for myself.  In the end, as he was dying in utter poverty, his dog, always beside him, his only comfort… I have to wonder.  What would have happened if I had taken up his cross, instead of driving him away?  I was not a bad brother, helping him with money when needed, talking to him on the phone for hours when he would call… But I was not a brother who was willing to lay down his comfortable life for the sake of another.  My love wasn’t tough.  It was cowardly.

 

The memory of my brother, and my failure, has shaped my life. Every day I must ask myself: Have I fixed a gulf or become a bridge? Which kind of love sounds tougher to you? And which one sounds more like Jesus?

Take up your cross and follow Me, Jesus says.  Talk about toughness.