Another Front On the War (Against Christmas)

     I talked yesterday in worship about the war on Christmas being essentially a war on the mission and purpose of God's Christ.  Choosing Mary, in Nazareth, in Galilee, in Judea at the farthest corner of the Roman Empire...poor, temporarily homeless, hunted by the authorities, sneaking across the border to a foreign land, etc.--it's radical stuff.  Go back and reread the first chapter of Luke.  No wonder the powers and principalities of this world are willing to go to war in order to stop the momentum of the Kingdom Movement Jesus came to start.
     But there is another way to think of the War on Christmas.  And that is the war that is being waged by consumerism, corporate marketers, big box and online stores, a huge economic engine that looks more and more to the Christmas season to make ends meet.  It's subtle and insidious.  It takes advantage of our desire to give gifts of love and gratitude and turns it into something much more self-centered and contrived.  
        I came across a blog last week while working on the sermon and though I intended to quote it during the message, it got cut due to time.  The author is Mark Sandlin and I'd like to quote one paragraph from his blog:

[Is there a] War on Christmas? [Or is there...]A war on what Christmas has become? A war on worshiping consumerism in the sacred halls of Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy while the world is swallowed up in the darkness of not having enough food to eat, a place to live, clean water to drink, access to reasonable health care? Sign me up, because I refuse to let the story of my faith be co-opted by corporations who only wish to convince us that we are privileged and we do deserve what we have more than othesr and we should revel in our abundance even as we celebrate the birth of the child who laid in a feeding trough, who lived his life with no place to lay his head, who told us that “just as you do it unto the least of these so to you do it unto me," a child who gave up his very life that we might understand what true love looks like. 

I'm not entirely sure how we fight against this attack on our hearts and on the heart of our Christmas worship, but fight against we must.  I would begin with prayer, in fact, I will begin with prayer.  And after that it wouldn't hurt to try and gain a little perspective on our compulsion to spend and give to a certain level rather than to share the greatest gift--the gift of ourselves, offered in love.  It's not easy, especially if you have young children.  But it is especially important, if you have young children, to make sure that they know the deepest meaning of Christ's birth.  It's a whole lot easier to set up traditions when your kids are young then when they've grown accustomed to big expensive gifts, or toy after toy after  toy.  I think this might be one front on this war that we can actually win if we are clear what is at stake and take it seriously enough to do something about it.

If you'd like to read the entire blog check out:

http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/11/30/war-christmas-sign-minister

Christmas Not Just for Christians Anymore

       Christmas isn’t just for Christians anymore.  Actually, it never was.  The baby was born to all this [Christmas] day in the city of David, just happens to be Christ the Lord.  Sure, I know the Jewish context.  Yes, I’m aware of the fact that Christians are the ones who have kept his birth front and center for a couple of thousand years.  Yet God came into the world, the light entered into the darkness, to save the world, and to illumine the darkness—all of it.  Just because we Christians “get it” doesn’t mean the nativity was just for us. 

Think of it this way:

         You develop a vaccine for AIDS.  Do you sell it to the highest bidder knowing that it will be safeguarded for those who have the wealth to afford it?  Or do you do everything in your power to make sure that those who are at risk can receive it, no matter what the cost?

         You hear a song so beautiful that it inspires the heart of all who hear it.  Do you sing it for yourself and your family and friends? Or do you bombard the airwaves for those whose lives are devoid of inspiration?

         You happen upon a protein rich, delectable vegetable that can grow in nearly all conditions and is about as hard to get rid of as a thistle.  Do you leave it to the small remote tribe that thrives on it or do you take the seeds and send them to Sub-Saharan Africa, ship them to the protein poor Altiplano in Bolivia, or offer them to Palestinian women in the Gaza strip to supplement their meager gardens?

         You have a dear friend who can literally fix anything.  If it’s broken, unassembled, if you cannot figure out how to make some project around the house work—you know you can call him and he’ll drop what he’s doing and come over and within the hour he’ll have the problem solved.  He’s retired and he loves to be needed (and he’s truly a great example of servanthood).  Do you keep him your little secret, knowing that you’ve got more than your fair share of things that need fixing?  Or do you introduce him to friends and acquaintances that could use his help?

         I know that Jesus shows up as a new born baby.  He’s extraordinary, I know that, but I also know that as far as babies go he’s pretty much limited to crying, eating, sleeping, and dirtying his swaddling cloths.  He’s born to poor parents on the run from the authorities, refugees in another nation, and then goes on to become either an apprentice carpenter or a rabbi-in-training with the local teacher of the law.  It’s going to be a while until he sets out to publically reveal that he is the long-awaited Anointed One of God.  But we know who he is because we’re experiencing this celebration in rewind/reverse.  We see the manger in light of the cross.  We see the angels coming down from the heavens from the perspective of Jesus ascending upward into heaven.  As Christians, we experience Christmas the birth of our Savior from the perspective of sinners who have already been saved—as the blind who can finally see—as lost souls who have been found and restored to our place as sons and daughters of royalty.

         If we just go about our advent season, if we just chug along toward our family Christmas celebration, without inviting the folks who populate our daily lives to come and join us, it would be the equivalent to keeping the vaccine, the beautiful song, the life sustaining vegetable, and our miraculously gifted friend all to ourselves.  And in each of those contexts we would consider such behavior unconscionable.  We would consider it heartless.  Keeping Jesus to ourselves—hoarding his grace and forgiveness for ‘me and mine’—especially during this holiday season, is equally unconscionable for followers of the living Christ.

         Christmas is not just for Christians, in fact, if you go back and reread the Christmas story you discover that Christmas was specifically directed to those who could be found outside the synagogue and Temple of the day:  scruffy shepherds, foreign magicians, provincial out-of-towners holed up in the caves on the outskirts of the city, and so on and so on.  I don’t so much think God cares how you do it, but I do honestly believe that God expects you and I to share the incredible news that “God is With Us”.  And, though we are often reticent to mention it in today’s church, I think God will hold us accountable for what we do with the Good News He has entrusted to us.  I suspect it will be part of that difficult conversation some of us will have with our Creator when He brings us Home once and for all.

         I’m going to invite a few folks I know who don’t attend worship to join me during this advent season at St. Andrew.  I’m going to be a little more eager to offer to pray for those who share a concern or worry with me in the course of my day.  I’m going to put a yard sign in my front lawn, a window sticker in my car, and I’m going to carry a few cards in my pocket that include an uplifting Christmas promise and the times for our Christmas Eve worship.  I may or may not knock on doors up and down my block, but when I stop and consider—even for a moment—how richly the Christ of Bethlehem has blessed me, I know that I should not and cannot keep it to myself.

         It helps to remind myself:  Christmas is not just for Christians anymore.

eGossip is Still Gossip & God Hates It

        I read an interesting blog by a Methodist pastor in Alabama about eGossip.  A friend emails you something that makes your blood boil, or makes you afraid, or breaks your heart.  Since the person who sent it to you is above suspicion in your eyes you forward it right away.  The problem is that many or most of these just aren't true.  Passing along political gossip, religious gossip, and even some versions of celebrity or important people gossip--without taking the time to verify it--is still gossip.  And gossip is roundly condemned again and again by God in our scriptures.
       It's like the story about a man who passes along a choice bit of gossip that deeply wounds someone, someone who ends up being entirely innocent of what was said about her.  In fact, the story damages her reputation in the eyes of their mutual circle of friends and the man feels terrible about it.  He goes to his pastor and asks what he can do to take it back, to make it all better.  The pastor tells him to take a down pillow, slice it open, and put a handful of down feathers on the front stoop of everyone who was touched or deceived by the gossip he passed on.  
       He comes back to the pastor and says, "Now what?"  The pastor says, "Go back and gather up all the feathers--and don't miss a single one."  It becomes apparent to the man very quickly that he cannot get those feathers back.  It turned out to be a blustery day and the feathers have been scattered everywhere.  He does the best he can, but he comes back to the pastor more or less empty handed.  "I can't get them all back," he blurts out, "So what do I do now?"
      The pastor then says just like you cannot get those feathers back after taking them out and spreading them around, you can't go back and retrieve the harm your gossip has produced.  But, the pastor said, it doesn't mean that you don't try.  "You go back and apologize to the one you've hurt and beg her forgiveness. But before you do that, you need to do your best to figure out who was harmed by what you passed along. It's your job to correct the impression you gave.  And then, of course, you don't ever do anything like that again."
      Once you negatively alter someone's perspective--prejudice or poison someone's view of another--it's almost impossible to get all of the poison out of their system.  It doesn't matter if they are an acquaintance or the President or the Governor or a movie star.  Gossip is almost always false witness.  Gossip may even be true.  Having a juicy piece of knowledge that others don't have is intoxicating, that is it is intoxicating when you share it. But is it noble?  Is it building up or tearing down?  Are you yourself above similar reproach in your personal life?  Is this how you would want others to treat you or your husband, or your son, your best friend?
       I am personally tired of the paranoid conspiracies of the political left and right being passed around as truth.  I really get worried when stories about missing children are sent around--where someone might actually go out and try to help--when the story is ten years old.  I think I'm going to scream if I get another forwarded email about how Hollywood, or the government, or the Target Stores are running God out of the public square.  God doesn't need to be in the public square--God needs to be in the lives and homes of faithful women and men.  God needs to be alive and well and at work through God's church.  If the celebration of the birth of Christ has to rely on a department store standing up for Christmas, then we've got a lot bigger problems than holiday greetings.
     I always tell myself, "They mean well."  But I wonder if God differentiates between well intended gossip and the garden variety gossip that is batted around.
     Please check out the web site snopes.com before you send something along--no matter how innocuous it may seem.  Please be careful what goes out from you on social media:  facebook, twitter, email, texts.  It is so easy and immediate to just push send that often what we send has a very different effect than what we may have first thought.  Once a piece of gossip travels from your phone or computer out into cyberspace it is not only beyond your control and ability to take it back, but in many ways it can become a permanent byte of data that will live far beyond your frustration, anger, or rash judgment of the moment.
    If you'd like to read the full blog about egossip, check out:
http://www.churchandtea.com/2012/11/avoiding-egossip/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ChurchAndTea+%28Church+and+Tea%29

Thank God the election's Over--the challenge of working together begins

   I'm like a lot of you.  I'm glad it's over.  I don't know how many more of the nasty election ads I could have handled.  I know that elections is to end up with winners and losers.  I don't imagine anyone is completely satisfied with yesterday's results.  But elections do have consequences in a democracy and I guess we will all have to watch those consequences unfold for good and for ill.

    Here's what I was thinking though today.  The election is over but the hard work of being a United States or a United nation has really just begun.  There are real problems and I have to believe that there are more reasonable ways to address those problems than what how we've been trying to meet or avoid them up to this point.

   Actually, this is what I thought today.  I thought how glad I am that Jesus died for me.  And then I thought how sad I am that Jesus died because of me.  It was my sin, my brokenness, my willful rebellion that required his sacrifice.  And I realized that moving forward as a citizen of this country--as well as a citizen of God's Kingdom--that I am a beneficiary of all the good things that go along with being a part of this great country.  I am blessed beyond measure as a child of God.  But I am also responsible for the mess we find ourselves in.  It's not a Republican fault or a Democratic fault--it's a human fault and we all share it.  Tony Campolo once said something to the effect that there is no Us and They.  There is no Me and Them.  There is just a line running down the center of who I am reflecting the bad and the good.  I am gentle and I am harsh.  I am kind and I am self-centered.  I am the best and the worst of what God intends me to be.

   I'm just thinking it is time for us to own up to our complicity in the problems that we face as a people.  It is time to put love ahead of blame and dismissiveness.  We've got a lot of hard work to do and I hope that as followers of Jesus we can show the world what real compromise and cooperation looks like.  Maybe it's at times like these that we have a chance to let that infamous light shine in ways that might not have ever been apparent to Jesus in his day and time.

   I offer the following prayer as a model for moving forward after a bitter, divisive and decidedly ruthless political season.  I think of it as the Prayer of 'Get Over Yourself'.  Policy and economics, taxes and entitlements, rights and responsibilities aren't some kind of football game in which everybody lines up on one side of the field or the other.  It's about people's lives.  It's about living together in close proximity.  It's about duty, integrity, and compassion.  So why don't we let it go and get over ourselves as soon as we possibly can.  This prayer has helped  me in that direction.  It's one of my favorites and I think it works pretty well under the circumstances.  It's attributed to St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Lord, teach me to be generous.
Teach me to serve you as you deserve; 
to give and not to count the cost,
to fight and not to heed the wounds,
to toil and not to seek for rest,
to labor and not to ask for reward,
save that of knowing that I do your will.

Nothing worse than An Unwatered Blog

My apologies for long time no blog.  I have several excuses to offer, but I'd have to pick just one and they are all so good...Sorry.

I came across a couple of political blogs which wrestle with the whole idea of what it means to be a Christian and a citizen.  One is much like the last blog--a ten commandment list, but a different tone and a different focus.  The other is a reflection on the last debate.  It compares our national fixation on strength over and against the Biblical obsession with Integrity.  Both are well worth reading and the links are below.

I overheard a wonderful conversation at a local restaurant this morning where I sent to get my coffee fix and catch up on some reading.  The only thing that bothered me were the generalizations which were in no way that I could tell based on anything necessarily factual.  Take out the current candidate's names and you could have put in the names of the last dozen presidential aspirants and they same arguments would have made about as much sense.  The other thing that bothered me was the approach to the whole debate could have been about Purdue Football and its current season.  It was all about "the game" and not about the purpose of the game:  teamwork, character building, entertainment, etc.  It was all about arm chair direction of fumbles and completions and which coach was stupider than the other.

Now the folks talking were obviously warm and jovial.  They believed what they believed and weren't mean spirited about it.  They were simply reflecting the way we all talk politics--or at least the way politics get covered in the media today.

No wonder so many folks throw up their hands and conclude it hardly matters who wins or who scratch their heads wondering which they should vote for.  We put more energy into tailgating than most folks put into knowing the issues and the implications of their vote for the future of our community, state, nation, and world.  It doesn't make me want to vote less, it makes me want to go out and make sure my vote counts.  This matters.  It matters to Christians even though our ultimate allegiance is the God and the Kingdom--it still matters how we live and what we prioritize here and now.

Take this as my final admonition to get out there and vote.  I would say vote early and often, but since I come from Cook County, Illinois--I'd better just suggest the one time.

http://eugenecho.com/2012/10/16/thou-shalt-follow-these-10-commandments-of-the-presidential-election-season/

http://morganguyton.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/strength-vs-integrity-a-biblical-response-to-the-presidential-debate/#more-2478

Ten Things Christians Need to Remember About Politics

   I came across a blog which referenced an article in the Macon Telegraph.  The column is from Rev. Ben Gosden who is the associate pastor at Mulberry Street United Methodist Church in Macon.  I thought the list he offers about Christians and politics was a helpful place to start in thinking through the relationship between church and state in the upcoming U.S. elections.  Nothing too radical or provocative here--but then again tried and true wisdom isn't nearly as provocative as we sometimes wish it were.
     I'll let you look them over for yourselves.  You decide what you would add or subtract from Gosden's list.

1. People in both political parties go to church. God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. No political party has a monopoly on the will of God and there are good, Christian people who affiliate with both parties.

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2012/09/22/2185949/ten-things-christians-need-to.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2012/09/22/2185949/ten-things-christians-need-to.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2012/09/22/2185949/ten-things-christians-need-to.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=1. People in both political parties go to church. God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. No political party has a monopoly on the will of God and there are good, Christian people who affiliate with both parties.

1. People in both political parties go to church. God is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. No political party has a monopoly on the will of God and there are good, Christian people who affiliate with both parties

2. Talk radio and cable “news” only want ratings -- it’s about the money. Remember, we live in a time where news stations would rather incite than inform the electorate if it means better ratings.

3. Those who argue about politics don’t love their country more than others. Our passion for issues comes out of a deep and abiding love for country. Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they somehow hate the country.

4. Thinking a party’s platform is not flawed is a mistake. A lot of wheeling and dealing goes into forming a party’s platform. Compromises are made and it quickly becomes a document for a large group of constituents. This means it attempts to please everyone in one way or another. Think of it as more of a work-in progress.

5. Scripture tells us to pray for governing leaders (2 Timothy 2: 1-4) and to respect those in authority (Romans 13: 1-7) -- whether we voted for them or not. When we mock or denigrate current or future leaders, the Holy Spirit is grieved. Christians are called to offer a witness to the world that rises above name-calling and insults. Period.

6. Don’t be paranoid. America has functioned and even thrived under both Democrat and Republican leadership. God is the only one truly in charge. Great leaders come in all shapes and sizes. We will not fall apart as a nation as a result of a single election.

7. Stop saying, “This is the most important election in our history.” We’re not nearly as unique as we might want to think we are. There will be another election and another one after that. We’re all striving to grow and become a better nation with every election.

8. Don’t spread those toxic political e-mails. Be the one to stop the circulation of propaganda-driven materials. Lovingly ask friends to stop sending them to you and be a witness for civility.

9. Don’t circulate partisan materials at your church. Encouraging people to vote is good. Telling them who to vote for from the pulpit or any other sacred space is not why the church exists.

10. Hold a prayer service the day after Election Day. With Election Day on a Tuesday, this could be a great way to use your weekly Wednesday time at church. Hold a service of prayer. Open your church all day for people to drop in and pray. Distribute liturgy and prayers for our nation and encourage people to make that a part of their day. We are the church, and that means we’re a people called to prayer.

I like the idea behind number 10.  What if we plan a prayer service for our Wednesday evening service the day after the election and pray for our leaders--no matter what the outcome of that election (see number 5 above)?  Every election is important and there are plenty of important decisions that need to get made and won't get made until the election is over.  Let's pray for that together:  Democrats and Republicans united in our love for God and our commitment to embodying the character of Jesus Christ.

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2012/09/22/2185949/ten-things-christians-need-to.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

Food For Thought Wednesday 9-26

     We will stay with Amos for another week.  We didn't so much get to income disparity and the biblical response.  So let's try and spend some time talking about that tomorrow morning.  I'm particularly interested in what the Bible says about those who have no earning power--about those who are dependent on the generosity of others and the larger community.  Where does that come from?  Other than God, of course.  In a world that was all about might makes right how in the world did the Hebrew culture come to value care for those who could not care for themselves?
     You've got your widows, orphans, sojourners, and to a lesser extent slaves.  What do these folks have in common?  What is their equivalent today?
   And why don't these modern poor or their equivalent earn greater discussion from our presidential candidates and the press that is covering our upcoming elections?  Check out the following link.
http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20120923/OPINION1805/309230009/Candidates-ignoring-struggles-working-poor?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7COpinion%7Cp
    Otherwise, I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning at Greyhouse.  If you're looking for a safe place to park, try the Eastside of the Morton Center's parking lot.  We've got their permission to use it from 7:45 until 9:45 a.m.