Although Christmas has dominated the holiday news lately, we cannot overlook that the day after Christmas, yesterday, marks the first day of Kwanza.  Based on a Swahili term meaning "first fruits," Kwanza, its principles grounded in African culture, celebrates  harvest, bounty, and human diversity.

    

    Kwanza lauds the beauty and meaningfulness of this world, its harvest, its bounty, its joy of a year rightly lived.  The happiness of living in a world whose wonder speaks constantly to us, the beauty of the rhythms of the planet:  a call to treasure the immensity of existence.

     Christmas's celebration of God's presence in the world is essential, yes, but Kwanza's rejoicing in the munificence which this presence ensures is worth remembering, too.

  

    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, struck anew 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.

    Yet shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low, the modern day equivalent of the Roma of Europe.  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.

   But the shepherds were the first to know.  They were the first to be told.  Before anyone else knew, the shepherds knew about the birth of Messiah.

    God remembered those whom the world had forgotten.

    Christmas reminds us that when all is said and done, we should understand that God, the vastness of personal transcendence, is not about greatness.  He's about humility.  Humble thankfulness for the fact of existence.

    And love.  Love for a humanity who had dismissed and fogotten about him.

    Merry Christmas!

   

     Since the days of Auguste Rodin, sculpture has often occupied a special place in the artistic imagination:  what is it really trying to say?  Consider the works of American sculptor Charles Ray and his unique ability to speak through his creations.  Even though it is clear that, in his "Archangel," this sculpture has little to do with communications from the divine, it nonetheless seems to reflect, or so the critics say, transformation.  Or what theologians call an apotheosis:  a transformation into God.

    Yet on the other hand, most of us wish, in some way, to be different than we are today.  We may wish for better people skills, increased insight into what life means, greater compassion for our fellow humans, deeper love for our spouses or significant other, and so forth.  Bottom line, we want to find our greater point.  Even if it is a point that only we define.

    And we will do so whether we believe in God or not.  When I consider Ray's "Archangel," I therefore ponder how much it expresses who we are.  Be it people in passage, people in stasis, or some blending of the two, we long to see who and what else we can be.

    After all, we're purposeful creatures in an intentionally purposeful universe.  Otherwise, we would have no claim to aspire to anything.

     How do we measure faith?  In the first chapter of his account of Jesus' life and doings, the gospel writer Luke tells the story of Zacharias and Mary.  Mary is the mother of Jesus, Zacharias a priest who attends the temple in Jerusalem.  As Luke relates, both are visited by the angel Gabriel, who delivers to each of them a startling prophecy, an almost overwhelming prediction about what will soon come to pass.

    You will have a son, Gabriel tells Zacharias.  Even though your wife Elizabeth is barren, she will, in the coming year, become pregnant and give birth to a son, whom you are to name John.  And, Gabriel continues, God will make your son a great prophet, one who will announce to Israel that Messiah's coming is imminent.

    As any of us would be, Zacharias is puzzled and fearful at what he hears.  So as the text tells it, he replies, "How will I know this for certain?"  He's old, his wife is barren:  can I really believe this?

    Annoyed, Gabriel reminds Zacharias that he, Gabriel, is an emissary of God, and adds that therefore how can you, Zacharias, not be willing to believe what you hear?  He strikes Zacharias mute until John is born.

    Several months later, Gabriel visits Mary.  You, Mary, will be the mother of Messiah.  Though you are a betrothed virgin, you will become pregnant, not by your husband to be, but by the spirit of God.  Your son will be named Jesus.

    In contrast to Zacharias, Mary simply responds that, "How will this be?"  That is, she doesn't ask whether she can know this for certain, but rather, yes, I believe:  tell me how this will happen.

    As we venture into the final phases of the Advent season, we can all learn from Zacharias and Mary.  When confronted with a call to believe, do we ask how can we know for certain?  Or do we simply wonder:  how will this truth happen?

    How we respond makes all the difference.

      

      Defining spirituality is difficult.  If we attribute it to a god, we miss that many unbelievers attest to having spiritual experiences.  If we assign it to a nebulous immaterial presence, we encounter the problem of making something amorphous and undefinable into something that is physically real.  And if we say that spirituality is thoroughly human, we run into the perennial dilemma of understanding how consciousness can emerge from inert matter.

    Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian surrealist painter, thought much about spirituality in regard to art.  He did so as a way of explaining how art overwhelmed what he considered to be the spiritual darkness of Marxism.  In art, Kandinsky said, we feel hints of transcendence, intimations of things we cannot easily fathom, emotional insights that we do not experience otherwise.  We look into another world, a world of purer light, real or imagined, a world that eclipses the rigid (and, to him, meaningless) materialism of the Marxist worldview.

    Kandinsky's art reflects his words aptly.  It is sometimes difficult to grasp easily, but that's his point:  spirituality isn't supposed to be simple.  If it were, it would be no more than another product of our material human whims.

   

    Maybe that's why the Incarnation is so true yet so befuddling.

     

    

     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the Christ (the Messiah, "the anointed one") who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     

    On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light.  We remember how, like the rising sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often Munchian existence.  It is a light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it as fervently and without reservation, will change our lives forever.
    

    Though we may struggle with the idea of eternality, though we may question the presence of God, we all long for light. We all long for hope and meaning.  We all long for a window into a richer existence.
    

    In an accidental universe, however, richness is impossible, for value and morality cannot be.  Only in the light, the light of transcendence wrought in Jesus, Jesus the image and person of God, will hope therefore be, infused in its necessary light.
    

    The light of the world.

     

     What can we say about Ludwig von Beethoven?  This famous portrait of him captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer.  Beethoven's music comes to us as a force of nature, barreling and twisting its way into our hearts, breaking our souls apart, forcing us to grapple with and contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over the viscerality of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the humanness and universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and other things, of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.

    I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank Beethoven for showing us as we are, beings of mind as much as creatures of heart, dynamically personal entities who are made to step bravely into the contingencies of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.  Although we may never know exactly how Beethoven felt about a personal God, we nonetheless recognize that his music forces us to ponder the mystery that such a being--and presence--lends to existence.

     Beethoven opens and unfolds for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.

    We err when we suppose that, "Science is not just omnicomptetent but unchallenged, the sole form of rational thinking."  Mary Midgley, a British moral philosopher who died a few years ago, appreciated science.

    As should we all.  But Midgley understood science's limitations very well.  She knew that when a society elevates science, a discipline that does not seek to know what is moral or what the world means, but simply how the world works, to a position of unquestioned rational and moral authority, it loses its sense of what is possible.  It loses its sense of what is possible for beings like us who are moral and believing animals to learn in a vast and often bewildering world.

    And in so doing, science misses the larger point.  Unless the world is regarded as something more than "what is," we have no basis to know what it means.

    There is rationality, and there is morality.  And neither can be understood without the other.

    "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).  As we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can think afresh about the idea that in the historical person named Jesus, we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward humanity.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God is love:  the grace of God.
    

    We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that elevates us above the senseless and confusing vagaries of the world in which we live.  It is this grace that tells us that there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see, a reality that frames and orders and grants meaning to all we do.  It is a grace that 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. 
   

    This may leave you nonplussed.  Fair enough.  However, do we really want to believe that this world, this magnificent and bounteous and amazing world, cannot speak beyond itself?

     Last night I celebrated, with a Hasidic Jewish congregation, Hanukah.  It was a wonderful time of joy and light.  When I woke this morning, I realized that today, December 8, is the forty third anniversary of the death of former Beatle John Lennon.

    Such a  divergence, such a contrast.  In one of Lennon's most famous songs, "God," he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me.  That’s reality.”

     Maybe.  Granted, transcendence and religion do not lend themselves well to our rational perceptions.  On the other hand, if we could explain everything with chemicals, we would never really know why we find the insight to pose assertions like Lennon's.

    

    Rightly should we then wonder why we are who we are.  Rightly should we wonder why we can celebrate, why we can write music.  Why we choose to challenge our limits.

    

    Hanukah speaks of openness, the openness and mercy of God.  As we consider this, and as we remember the very different openness of John Lennon, we also ponder the ultimate challenge:  how do we know who we are if all we know is ourselves?

    It's no accident that we wonder about God.

  

    Hanukkah (Chanukah) has begun!  Although it is a minor holiday on the Jewish liturgical calendar, because Hanukkah usually occurs around Christmas, it has tended to generate a significant amount of attention in the Western world.  For some, it is considered the Jewish "equivalent" of Christmas.

    While this conclusion is far from the historical and theological truth, it does communicate an important point.  Although Chanukah commemorates the rededication of the Temple after it had been profaned by the Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes (he sacrificed a pig on the inner altar) in the second century B.C.E. and not the birth of Jesus, it is nonetheless a time to rejoice.

    To rejoice in lights.  To rejoice in the light and faithfulness of God, to delight in God's continuing bestowal of life and illumination to human beings.  Chanukah reminds us that whether we know it or not, each day we walk in the grace of a infinitely remarkable light, a light without which we would not be.

    The light of a personal God.

 

      Is God incomprehensible?  It's an age old question, one that has occupied many, many books.  The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, long known for his deeply measured thoughts about God, asked this question constantly.  Buried at the heart of his inquiring was his notion that life itself was incomprehensible.  If we can't comprehend God, how can we expect to understand the life he has bequeathed us?  So, he asked, how do we live?

     Rilke's answer was to embrace, in living our lives, all that is beyond our control, particularly death.  To fully understand life, he suggested, we must wrap it in what we do not know about it, that is, the specter of death.  To ignore death is to ignore the fullness of life.
     

    Though Rilke's position may sound rather morbid, it is, on the other hand, decidedly cognizant of the framework of our mortal existence.  We all will die.  If we believe there is no afterlife, however, then we may conclude that death, though it be inevitable, may not so much affirm the fullness of life as it will underscore its futility.  What has it been for?  But for Rilke, to embrace death is to embrace the incomprehensible, that is, God.  In this is the fullness of life, to know that from which it has ultimately come.  Life has meaning beyond itself.

     We may agree that God is incomprehensible, but if we believe that life is incomprehensible, too, we have missed the point.  If we reject the idea of God, we are still faced with the grim reality that life is incomprehensible.  And what will we then do?

     Believe it or not, yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent.  Christmas is upon us.  "Level every mountain," says Isaiah, "raise every plain.  Make the rough smooth, make the way straight.

    "And all flesh shall see the glory of the Lord."
    

    Isaiah is telling us to get ready, to get ready to commemorate, once more, the culmination of centuries of prediction and longing, to make ourselves ready to remember, again, that the metaphysical is more than cosmic nebulosity, that it is personal, that it is faithful, that what it promises will surely come to pass.

    

    Advent brings to mind the things of God that, in the words of Gary Schmidt and Susan Felcher, may "have," for many of us, "disappeared."
    

    Put another way, Advent tells that we can look with hope.  It reminds us that we can believe in the worth of the past, the past which, rippled with the hidden movements of God, has been pointing to this very day.  It underscores the essential hopefulness of existence.
    

    Advent says to us that what seems to have disappeared (that is, for many of us, God) hasn't disappeared at all.  Advent tells us that, in the person of Jesus, God has come, and God is here, completely and wonderfully present, available, and new.