The annual Christmas thought

Christmas can be trying. The rampant commercialism, overeating, stress and busyness all make “the holidays” a difficult time.  Trying to find meaning and depth during this time is incredibly impossible; it’s ironic that the admonition “Remember the Reason for the Season,” has become a staple catchphrase and is almost as clichéd as the rest of Christmas seems to have become.

But simply remembering the story of Christmas really doesn’t go far enough, because it’ easy to mention the name Jesus and then go back to holiday-craziness-as-usual.  American culture has co-opted the Christmas narrative to further emphasize a consumerist attitude: seeing Christmas as all about giving since the baby Jesus is “God’s Gift to mankind” limits the significance and some of the deeper implications of the Nativity.  Nowadays, in our gift-giving culture of knickknacks and trinkets, the connotations of the word “gift” can subtly lead us to cheapening and ignoring the rich mystery and meaning of the Incarnation.  Certainly, God did bring Jesus to us (and we can’t do anything but receive him), but the coming Christ is an incredible challenge to our behavior, our views on power and the oppressed.

Many of the implications in the Christmas story speak against the way we celebrate the holiday now, but in our American culture we downplay these aspects in the whirlwind of commercialism, individualism, and materialism.

Last year, fresh out of Africa, I mentioned some brief ideas about what the Incarnation meant.  The all-powerful God who should be celebrated and revered chooses to become the embodiment of weakness to become one of us.  Jesus becoming flesh, and his later message about his Kingdom, announce the coming of a new way of living that was in contrast to the idea of power, success and fulfillment of the day.  It’s an inversion of values that we miss: nowadays, we certainly don’t celebrate weakness at Christmas or embrace Jesus’ sacrifice as a model for us to live our lives. 

Also consider the Magnificat of Mary, her song of praise about her soon-to-be-born child.  In her well-known song, she describes God from

“He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:51-53)

I’ve heard sermons that mention this song, but very rarely do we hear anything about Mary celebrating God’s “option for the poor,” his choice to side with the down-and-out and oppressed instead of the powerful and wealthy.  This is a bold challenge to the ruling powers of the day and foreshadows the kind of reality Jesus brings with his Kingdom, and it articulates the kind of changes that come to the world with the Incarnation.  Mary’s song describes a God who is interested in changing the order of the world and celebrates and lifts up the broken and humble.  If we took her words seriously, how would we change the way we celebrate Christmas?  Would we then be impelled to act the same way as God does?  Instead of catering to the wealthy, piling up credit card debt, could we put our time and energy into feeding the hungry and lifting up the humble?

Sometimes remembering the “Reason for the Season” is seen as a comforting thing, as if Jesus and his Kingdom is a refuge from the way the world is.  From this new view, however, the birth of Jesus is an extremely difficult challenge to our everyday behavior, and it hints at how we’ve missed a great deal of the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas. 

The audacity of needing to be hopeful

But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. 1 Peter 3:15

From my youth (I say this as if I still weren’t a youth) I’ve been told that I have to be ready to explain what the Gospel is, if anyone ever comes up to me and ask. For the life of me, I can’t actually imagine a time when someone walking down the street would rush up to me and say, “Quick! Tell me the Gospel!” 

But, when I look at this verse again, it seems that 1 Peter 3:15 operates on a different level than I’ve always thought. The lesson, I always remembered, was that we first have to have our answers set before we engage in conversations with people, because they’re gonna have questions about the story of Jesus and what it means for our lives. The underlying assumption Peter operates on is that we have something – hope – that makes other people curious. Few people, perhaps outside those philosophically minded, will approach someone looking for answers about the nature of God. More often than not, people are interested in other people. They’re asking for a simple question, “Why are you so hopeful? Why are you behaving that way? What makes you different from everyone else around you?”

It’s a strange realization that God uses us to be his messengers. Even though we might wish our presentation of truths about God and Jesus will spur others on to faith, that’s usually not the most convincing argument. Turns out, people typically care about other people, especially if someone looks or acts differently than they do. Curiosity will drive them, and then the simple, honest question “What makes you tick?” is an incredible opportunity to show how the living God is active and present in our lives.

It’s my hope, then, that we’re living lives that make people ask questions. We should, as Peter suggests, live so that our lives are saturated with hope; it should flow from our lives so that anyone who knows us can see from the beginning that we’re different.

It’s interesting that Peter chose hope as the key characteristic that others notice in a follower of Jesus. Certainly there are other qualities that people may notice: as the song says, they will know we are Christians by our love, and people often observe how faith gives people contentment or joy. But hope causes even more curiosity, because it’s a posture towards life that we don’t often see in our society. Hope is strange and often unnecessary in our control-everything, comfortable lives. We don’t need to be hopeful, we just need to hunker down and get things done. I may hope for a good grade on the final I just took, but really, I operated on the assumption that it was ultimately my effort that gives me the grade I want, and hope has a minute role in how I feel about my GPA.

So, to live a life that is characterized by hope is a call to live a life that, at its very basic foundation, requires hope to keep us going. Having hope in us comes from a need to be hopeful, and you can’t hope when you have every need and desire currently filled. Hope is a proclamation that things will get better and a declaration that things are going poorly right now and are in need of fixing. The context of this verse in 1 Peter is an acknowledgment of the possibility of suffering for attempting to “do good” because of people who misunderstand and oppose progress. Those seem to be those times when you try with all your heart to change things and make the world better, to only have everything fall to pieces: people to spit in your face, abuse you and take your efforts for granted. The situation is out of your control, and there’s nothing in your power you can do to make things better.

Nevertheless, Followers of Jesus still have hope. They believe that God is at work, and in establishing his Kingdom on earth hope can come to others as well.

Living with hope is different from the way that we live our lives here in America. Our society doesn’t have need for hope. In fact, it’s almost downplayed: if someone says “I’m hopeful that this happens,” it often suggests more doubt in the possibility than faith it will happen. Perhaps that comes with wielding such incredible power – we begin to think we have to control everything, and when a situation is out of our power, we lose heart and think it a lost cause.

Maybe that’s why hope stands out and makes people ask the “What makes you tick?” question. To be in a position of risk, of self-exposure and weakness, simply because we believe that there’s a different kind of reality out there is incredibly odd and interesting.

And at that point, we have to explain ourselves, hint at what the Kingdom is like, and tell the story of the Person whose story is our prime example of why we never should lose hope, because even against the power of death couldn’t hold him down.

Eternal life, 4 – right now

So, I’ve been talking about eternal life the past several weeks, and in each post I’ve tried to hint at how (and when) everything adds up together.

Paul, in his first letter to Timothy, finishes up his letter saying:
“Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called…” (1 Tim 6:12)

Again, to drive this point into the ground, eternal life is something that affects us right now. Paul uses a present-tense verb here – by telling Timothy to “take hold,” he’s asking him to begin to experience this eternal life right now.

Taking eternal life, something that has no end and bringing it into this finite existence has incredible implications. I don’t know them all, but can think of one:
Eternal life means that our past is transformed into something that God uses to lead us forward. Also, it means that our future story is already determined – God wins. (And, when God wins, Good wins, Love wins, humanity wins, and we’re included in this victory.)

Since we’re now in between these two poles, our challenge to living in the present is to live with both of those in mind. How do we live our day-to-day life while holding the whole of eternity in our minds? What an incredible challenge…

“Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12

There’s something to being able to see things from a larger perspective. The big-picture view of eternal life places significance and value on things and actions that are usually a lot different from what I’m fussing over in my temporal, day-to-day mindset. It sees our lives as part of a big story of God’s action in our world, from past to future. We’re currently knee-deep in it, where it’s often easy to get mired down in the details without realizing where exactly the Author of our lives is leading us.

With finals coming up next week, it’s always a good reminder that what’s going on this week, or even this hour, really isn’t as important as it seems. I focus and stress too much about something – that final, that paper – that holds my thoughts and worries for only a brief time. In this day-to-day mindset, it’s easy to begin thinking of life as a constant string of challenges and tasks.  That pattern creates a cycle of stress that keeps building up without ever allowing for rest or release. Seeing eternal life in our midst can help us overcome this hectic cycle by helping us think beyond “that next hurdle.”

Doing that is a huge challenge. Mentally, I don’t think I can comprehend it all – there’s too much going on in God’s big plan for the world to see how eternal life is playing out in my life today. But I don’t think that’s the whole point – this awareness is not about expanding consciousness or our mental ability to file, process, and understand everything that’s ever happened (or will happen) in our lives. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: since eternity is so big and our understanding so limited, the best way to connect us to this story is to relinquish our control over our part in it. A great deal of understanding eternal life in our present is recognizing that it’s out of our hands, and we must recognize that we’re simply supposed to be playing out the parts He’s written for us, one brief moment at a time.

Thinking that way is very hard, because it goes against how we were trained to think from a very young age.  We value this talent and call it responsibility, or foresight, or good planning.  This new way of eternal life is counterintuitive – I stop trying to get my mind around everything in order to feel (not understand) myself in God’s hands and that gives some assurance (but usually no clear answers) as to how I fit in the grand scheme of eternal life. Getting there most often means getting away from everything, dropping what I’m doing, and recollecting myself. I’ve noticed that I am most able to reconnect with the bigger picture of things by simply shutting my mind off for a while, recognizing my limits, and resting. With that perspective in mind, it’s possible to approach the day with a better perspective, because I can understand that my role in everything is so small.