"Then the dust [of the deceased human being] will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.  'Vanity of vanities,' says the Preacher, all lis vanity!'" (Ecclesiastes 12)

     So is existence without a God.  We are born, we live, we die.  Then our dust returns to the earth from whence we came, and we are no more.  Life is glorious, life is grand, but life is over, its wonders, hopes, and dreams indeed well lived, but now forever gone.
     And where are we then?  As the New Year dawns, consider your life.  Consider what you are doing, think about what you believe, ponder where you are going.  Remember your finitude, yet remember that you were created.  And step into the joy of knowing and living a life in a world of purpose, a world of point, a world intended and created, a world made for you, by God.
     Touch the object and heart of existence.
     Happy New Year!

     As the New Year looms, we think about the year that has passed, and we think aboaut the year to come.  Strolling through an art show earlier this year, I came upon a work which, as I reflect on it, captures, for me, the essence of this liminality with which we deal every day.
     This work featured a row of trees stacked atop a hill, a vista of cloud and sun lying beyond.  We all seek vistas, don't we?  We all dreams and meanings to fill the years of our lives.  And we all come to see, eventually, that the roads to such things are often filled with tangles of difficulties that we frequently do not expect or anticipate.  Eventually, however, joy comes.  It's life, life in the world God has made.
     We live in a tenuous moment, a moment perched between what has been and what will come.  And we never fully understand either one.  On the other hand, unless the world offered the recondite and intrigue, it would not be much of a world.  Though we often loathe not knowing, we remain aware that without it life would not be the experience it is, a mystery, a beautiful, glorious, vexing, and inchoate mystery, a mystery grounded in the infinite--and personal--presence of God.
     As this New Year dawns, rejoice in the hiddenness and incomplete, the opaque implicit in the meaningfulness of existence.  Embrace the liminality of the divine activity intrinsic to humanness.  And step confidently into what is to come.
     Happy New Year!

     Killing children?  Today is the Feast of the Innocents.  On this day, we remember the thousands of children, all under the age of two, who were ordered killed by the Roman king Herod in the days following Jesus' birth.
     Why did Herod order these killings?  Entrenched in his power yet well aware of the multiple Jewish prophecies about a coming Messiah who would topple all worldly powers, Herod feared the baby Jesus greatly.  Having been told by the Magi (the so-called "wise men") that a new king (Messiah Jesus) had been born, he set out to ensure that this Messiah would not end his reign in Palestine.

     What is a king to do?  Simply, slaughter all potential enemies.  And that is precisely what Herod did.  Not wishing to take chances, he decreed that all children in Bethlehem two years and under be killed.  It was a thoroughly brutal act, a despicable act of a tyrant so desperate to retain his throne that he was willing to eviscerate an entire generation of children.
     And for all this, Herod failed to kill the baby Jesus.  Having been warned by God in a dream to flee Bethlehem, Joseph had taken the family to Egypt.  Unfortunately, however, the damage had been done:  thousands of other babies lost their lives.
     We wonder why God allowed it, we wonder why Jesus eluded it, we wonder at the murderous lust of a frightened king.  We shiver at the evil in a human heart.  And we try to look at the bigger picture, the larger vision.  God in our midst can be a most fearsome thing.  We do not know what to do with a God who appears among us.  We can embrace him, we can reject him.  Or we can try to kill him.
     But as countless rulers through the ages have learned, usually, we cannot kill God.  We cannot erase him from our heart.  If God has really come, if God has really visited us in the form of a human being, baby or not, we are helpless to change it.  We can only believe.
     And if we do not believe, we will eventually see that we cannot legitimately believe in anything else before us.
     Love the little children.

     Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.
     Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If God has really come, if God has really visited his creation, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.
     Enjoy the moment, enjoy the day.  Enjoy existence.  Enjoy them rejoicing, fully aware that they now mean more than you can possibly imagine.  The light of eternity, the word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time has entered our world.
     God has come.

Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.
     But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, and not for the first time, by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds.  In the twenty-first century, most of us do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, shepherds were an integral part of the economy of the ancient world.
     Yet shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low. Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations. 




  
     Christmas calls for humility.  It calls us to look not at how we can spend our money on ourselves, our friends, or family, but rather what we can do for others, what we can do for the "shepherds" among us.  Christmas teaches us to reach out to those on the margins.
     And in the person of Jesus, we can.  In the humility of the baby born in a manger, in the announcement made to the forgotten shepherds, we can give.  We can see Christmas as an occasion for humbly recognizing what we can do, not for ourselves, but for the world.
     Merry Christmas!

In a few days, in all corners of the planet, literally billions of people, religious or not, will remember Christmas Eve.  Regardless of how they view the birth of Jesus, Christmas Eve will be a time of remembrance, generosity, warm familial gatherings, and much more. It's a night unique in all the year, a night in which countless families around the world enjoy, for at least a few hours, each other. It's a time in which life, for a moment, seems suspended, captured in a hourglass of human bliss.

     And why not?  The event that birthed Christmas Eve is an event on which all of history hinges, a pivot of time, space, and eternity that transformed the entire span of human challenge and endeavor.  Jesus' birth changed everything, absolutely everything.  In Jesus' coming, we sense and appreciate, definitively, that God can--and does--irrupt into our experience, that God, in ways we cannot always fathom, can, and will, make himself known in our lives.  God will manifest himself in our history.  Christmas Eve tells us that we tread on a very thin skein, a achingly slender liminality of moment between time and destiny, the most profoundly possible doorway into who we can be.

     Christmas Eve opens our eyes to the totality, the absolute and unimpeded totality, of God, the one who made all cosmos, space, and time, for us.

The solstice.  Today,11:28a.m. EST, winter, in the Northern Hemisphere, "officially" begins.  Traditionally, the day of least light and most darkness, the winter solstice is the day, and night, on which time, or at least our perception of it, hinges.  It's the end of the light, yet its beginning, too. Though we lose the autumn, we win the spring, and though we wander through long and dark nights, we are also moving, ever so imperceptibly, to the greater light to come.
     In this is the rhythm of the world, the heartbeat of the universe:  the endless pulsing of the wisdom of God.  As we trek through these darker days and hours, we come to understand that the light we see is not just what we think it is, illumination and no more.  We see that light is rather the underlying message, the empowering song of all creation, a reflection of divine favor upon all that exists.
     So did Jesus say, in the eighth chapter of John, "I am the light of the world."
     Enjoy the day, enjoy the winter.  Enjoy the wonder of God.

     Well, I'm back from surgery, happy to be so, grateful for modern medicine, thankful for a good recovery.  As the surgeon promised, I was able to put full weight on my leg the day of the operation, and was walking, with a walker, the next day.  Now I'm down to a cane, and soon will no longer need it, either.  I look forward to hiking and biking again.

     Being in the hospital a couple of days, I met a number of interesting people.  We had many good discussions, talks about little things, talks about more weighty things.  As I chatted, I thought often of an observation made in a lecture I heard a couple of months before.  Talking about our human ability to think, create, and develop ideas, the speaker asked why our ideas matter.  Why does what we think matter?  For if our ideas matter, she continued, we matter, too.
     It was a profound point.  Whether we know it or not, when we insist that our ideas matter, we are affirming the worth of who we are.  On the other hand, we are doing so within the compass of who we think we are:  how do we know?
     Our bones break, our bones heal, and we move on.  And we believe we matter.
     Ah, humanity.  Apart from an integrating transcendence, a divine intrusion into the present moment, humanity is the most disturbing of mysteries:  how do we know we are anything, anything at all?

     Integral to faith is steadfastess in privation.  Faith is the ability to believe even in times of loss, even in times of downturn and disappointment.  As the psalmist remarks (Psalm 116), "I believed, therefore I spoke."
     So I speak.  You may recall that this past July I had emergency surgery to repair a fracture in the neck of my femur.  Unfortunately, despite the surgeon's best efforts, the bone he repaired has failed to fully close and heal.  X-rays still show a fracture line, and although I am highly mobile, I still, on occasion, limp.
     The solution?  To go back in, remove the existing bone, and put in a new one.  The wonders of modern medical technology.  Happily, my recovery time from this surgery will be much shorter than that of my previous surgery.  Nonetheless, I will likely not be posting for a while.
     On the other hand, as Advent continues to unfold its wondrous mystery, I encourage you to seek ever greater insight into its all encompassing explanation for human destiny, how God becoming flesh brings all things, material and ethereal, together, to eternal and life changing effect.  Such a thing is difficult to picture, yes, but we strive in vain to find another reason as to why we are personal and moral beings.
     We speak to God, God speaks to us.  We believe in God, God believes in us.
     Thanks again for reading.  Hope to write soon!
     

     "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  What is Paul saying?  Simply, that as we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can come to understand more fully that in Jesus, God in the flesh, we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward us.  In Jesus we see the fullest possible picture of God's benevolence, his intentions to grant us favor and compassion.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God loves us.  And he provides us with a way to know and love him, fully and intimately.  Jesus is the grace of God.

      We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that enables us to see and do much more, to see and understand that amidst the frequent senselessness of reality and confusing vagaries of the world in which we live, there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see--but which frames and orders what we do.  Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever.  All we need do is accept his invitation, his invitation of his son Jesus, to us.  God's extended the invitation; now he's waiting for us to reply.
     What else, in this Advent season, do we really need to do?
     

     I heard the other day the poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  It reminded me of Canadian (and now American) singer Neil Young’s song, “When God Made Me.”  In it, Young questions God, asking him why he made people a certain way, why he made people when he knew they wouldn’t believe, why he wanted people to have faith anyway, and more.  Both pieces ask a very good question:  how can I believe in a God if I do not understand him?  Why must I wander in the darkness when I’m standing in the light?
     It almost makes one long for the simplicity of former Beatle John Lennon’s song, “God,” in which he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me.  That’s reality.”

     Though I get that Lennon, along with countless others, wishes to reduce what is real to what is immediately before him, and that on the face of it, this looks as the most viable way to look at the objects of our perception, I also wonder, given the possibility of the metaphysical and transcendent as well as the difficulty of reducing ourselves to a brain and attendant vat of chemicals, whether he is overlooking that reality is more than what he wants to perceive.  Otherwise, we are merely projections of ourselves—and who and where are we?!

       Granted, transcendence and religion do not lend themselves well to our perceptions.  And that’s the problem.  Ironically, it’s also the solution.  If we could explain everything with chemicals, if we never developed questions like Cohen and Young pose, if we subsumed all experience into a plastic (or computerized) box, then, yes, we would need nothing else.  But we can’t.  So we wonder.
     So it is, on the 37th anniversary of Lennon's tragic passing, we ponder the ultimate human challenge.  And God is waiting for us, today, tomorrow, and beyond, to respond.

     December 7, 1941.  For members of the so-called "Greatest Generation," this is a day, the day of the attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, which will forever remain in their memories.  In the same way, December 8, 1980, is a day which (along with November 22, 1963) will likely forever remain in the memories of their children.  On this night, John Lennon, the former Beatle, was assassinated in front of his apartment building in New York City.  Similarly, September 11, 2011, the day that two jets flew into the World Trade Center Towers in downtown Manhattan, is a day which, although it will certainly remain in the minds of all Americans for many years to come, will perhaps burn most strongly in the memories of the Baby Boomers' children.
     Three days, three generations, three seminal events, three transitional moments.  Such moments are the stuff of historical angst and cultural tragedy, the Urstoff that moves hearts and shapes minds, the liminality that bursts categories and horizons, thrusting those who experience them into unexpected perceptions of what life can hold.  They change the way that people see the world.
     As they should.  When such momentous tangles of metaphysical and material horror erupt into our everyday experience, we are often aghast, struck at the seeming capriciousnss and unanswerability of existence.  We weep, we ponder; we wonder why.  We wonder why they happen, we wonder why they have to be.  And we feel helpless that we cannot go back and stop them.
     But this is our reality, our place, our world.  We wander in the shadows of forces and movements over which we have absolutely no control, living out our lives in the umbra of twists and turns of space and time from which we at times wish only to flee, only to find that we cannot.
     Yet, really, should we?  To flee is to deny the facts of existence.  Not that we embrace the tragedy, not that we rejoice that we experience it.  But we understand it is part of living on this planet, part of walking on a globe bent and broken by sin.
     What can we do?  We weep, we wonder, we restore and repair.  Ultimately, however, we trust.  We trust in the fact of a loving God.
     Darkness, be it come in 1941, 1980, or 2001, need not be ascendant.

     Ah, individualism.  We love it.  But does it love us?  We dearly wish to pursue our own ends, we seek earnestly to find our place, our unique place in the universe.  We very much want to be who we are.
     But so does everyone else.  And therein is the problem.  We are all looking for eternity in a finite sea.
     How delightful to know, then, that beyond the finite sea is, necessarily and logically, an infinite vision.
      How else would we know who we are?

     "All is futility, all is futility," says the author of Ecclesiastes, "all is futility."  Is he correct?  Indeed, he is.  We come, we go, and we never return.  Likewise, although it will be around for much longer than we, the world comes, too, birthing us, amazing us, then folding in on us, letting us go, now and forever.  And one day, the world will be gone, too.

     Then what will anything matter?  Yesterday, I wrote about way that Advent preserves and sustains memory, how, in a world in which, to quote Ecclesiastes again, "there is nothing new under the sun," Advent ensures that what is gone will always be with us, living still.  And all the lonely people of whom I wrote a few days ago will not die unheeded and unknown.  In Advent, God, a living God, an eternal God of dynamic presence, demonstrates to us that even if the world appears futile, it is not.  Nor are we.
     Why else would God come?  Beyond the mutability of quotidian affair, beyond the futility of the ordinary and mundane, Advent affirms the absolute worth of everything we do.  And are.

     Advent is upon us.  Advent is a time to celebrate:  Messiah is born.  It's also a time to reflect, to remember.  In Advent, we think about Christmases past and the joy they gave us; we think about those with whom we enjoyed those  Christmases but who are no longer with us; we think about things as they were, we think about things as they now are.  We think, we ponder.

     Advent brings time and memory together.  It's the culmination of hundreds and hundreds of years of memory, hundreds and hundreds of years of preserving those things that, though now disappeared, remain with us still.  Advent tells us that we can remember with hope.  It reminds us that we can believe in the worth of the present precisely because it is built on the trustworthiness of the past.
     Advent says to us that what has disappeared hasn't disappeared at all.  In the person of Jesus, the point of Advent, it is here, completely and wonderfully present and new.

     "All the lonely people; where do they all come from?"  So asked the Beatles many years ago.  Indeed.  Where do all these people come from?  About a decade ago, I stood in a line at the international airport in Denver, Colorado, waiting to board an airplane.  As I stood, I looked at the other people standing in line, the many, many people waiting to go, waiting to go somewhere.  And I thought, why are we all here?  Why us and no one else?  So many people, so many lives, so many hopes and dreams.  Why?
     Within ourselves, we have no answer, really.  We just "are."  Perhaps.  But if I just "am," I have no idea why I live and why I die.  Everything just happens.
     Is this a rational way to live?
     All the lonely people.

     I am so happy that I did not vote for Donald Trump.  What kind of a person is he, really?  Was he worth a conservative Supreme Court justice?  Was he worth the repeal of the Johnson Amendment?
     Does America really want a person who posts false and inflammatory videos of Muslims as their leader?
     As one who has been followed Jesus for over forty years, I am appalled at the behavior of the American president.  And I am dumbfounded by the many numbers of other Christ followers who continue to insist that this president is preferrable to his opponent.
     What am I missing?
     Pray for the United States of America.

     We who live in the twentieth-first century, enamored as we are of the seeming infinitude of human achievement and possibility, largely bent on maximizing our existence, on living life to the absolute fullest, yet oftentimes rejecting any notion that a personal God could have any genuine connection to our lives, may forget that, at one point in history, one glorious moment, human possibility and divine order came very close to reconciling and coinciding, to wondrous effect.

     I speak of the Renaissance, the grand "rebirth" of civilization that surfaced at the close of the Middle Ages in the West.  The Renaissance was marked by a powerful belief in human possibility and destiny, that humanity was a special and anointed creation of God and therefore fully capable of doing anything it wanted.  Its future was limitless.  Simultaneously, however, the people of the Renaissance (for the most part) never stopped believing in God and his guiding light and presence in the world.  Though they firmly believed in unlimited human potential, they also believed, with equal fervor, in the fact of God, in the reality of the one who, as Nicholas of Cusa put it, "is the center of the universe, namely God, whose name is blessed . . . the infinite circumference of all things."  The people of the Renaissance demonstrated that we can believe in human greatness and magnificence while acknowledging and submitting to the presence of a living and personal God and, in so doing,underscored the truth of Ecclesiastes 7:18 that, "It is good to grasp one thing and not let go of the other, for the one who trusts God will come forth with both of them."  The Renaissance confirmed that if we properly manage and understand our boundaries and possibilities, we really can have it all.
     God has made humanity infinitely special, and so we are:  infinitely capable of astonishing and amazing things, yet infinitely bound to acknowledge from whom we have come.
     Would that we always strive for both.

     Well, it seems that the Christmas season is upon us.  Surveys tell us that this will be one of the biggest Christmas spending seasons ever recorded.
     Should we be happy?  I'm happy for the people these sales will employ.  I'm happy for the people who will enjoy the gifts they receive.  I'm happy for the joy many people feel in this season.
     I'm most happy, however, at how the Christmas season should cause us to examine what we are doing with our money.  In the end, it's all about giving, giving, that is, to others rather than ourselves.
     Thinking about the congregations in Macedonia many years ago, the apostle Paul observed that, "According to their ability, and beyond their ability, they gave of their own accord, begging us with much urging for the favor of participating in the support of their brethren" (2 Corinthians 8:3-4).  Consider:  these people didn't wait to be asked to give; they instead begged for the opportunity to give. Moreover, they gave beyond what anyone thought they could give.  They understood that, "God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed" (9:8).
     If God is there--and he is--we can never give enough.
     Let the retailers worry about what we should get.  What do they know?  Let us concern ourselves with what we can give.  As you go forth to "conquer" the stores before you, realize that it's no challenge to "get."  We can always do that.  The far greater challenge is to give.
     Life is a gift; give of it freely.

     "You just don't even what to say to God anymore."  These poignant words come from Sherri Pomeroy, wife of Frank Pomeroy, pastor of the Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, which, as you may recall, was the target of a horrific armed attack recently.
     Mrs. Pomeroy is being admirably honest.  Those of us who believe in God know (or should know) full well that even if we believe that God is always good, we will inevitably encounter life circumstances in which we are at a loss for words.  Even for God.
     In such times, it is all too easy to say that God is in the darkness before us.  Of course he is.  But this assertion seems unspeakably empty in the face of overwhelming tragedy.  What does God's presence really do for us?  We may think we sense him, we may suppose he is guiding us, we may venture to acknowledge his compassion and companionship.  Yet we are still left with the vicissitudes of a fallen and broken world.
     Some of my atheist friends tell me that they envy me.  Why?  They envy me because even in awful circumstances I find comfort, an indefinable yet purposeful comfort, in the fact of God.  They do not have such comfort.  And they readily acknowledge this.
     So what do we do?  We are left with believing in God in the midst of evil and pain, or not believing in God in the midst of evil and pain.  The latter, one might argue, is the braver option:  it seeks no other comfort than that of one's fellow human beings.  It doesn't pretend there is anything else.
     But the question remains:  why, in an accidental world, do we even seek comfort at all?  We may not know what to say to God, but in a random world, a world of accidental plops, we have nothing, absolutely nothing, really, to say at all.
     We'll never unravel our ultimate emptiness 

      "God opens his hands," writes the psalmist, "and satisfies the desire of every living thing" (Psalm 104).  Although we all have much for which to give thanks, perhaps the most important thing for which we can be thankful is that we can give thanks.  We can rejoice that we can be aware of who we are, that we can experience the gracious bounty of the universe, that we can know, really know, that we are beings who can create life, culture, and moral sensibility.  We can be grateful that we are here.

     Many a theologian has observed that all truth is God's truth.  If so, we can also give thanks for that which enables us to know everything else:  truth. Even more important, we can give thanks that truth is embodied in a living being and that, in the providence of God, we can find it.
      Give thanks that despite the fractured state of modern spirituality, God is nonetheless able to disclose to us truth, the truth of life, the truth of death, the truth of existence, existence as it was communicated in the most wondrous existence of all, the person of God's son, Jesus Christ.
     Happy Thanksgiving!