A king.  As they studied the Zoroastrian and biblical prophecies about a coming king, the magic of ancient Persia realized this king would be a special king.  In him, the magi saw, God would really come to earth.  Small wonder that they made the arduous journey over the Zagros Mountains, across the arid expanse of Arabia, and onto the international trade routes that coursed through the Levant, to enter Palestine.  Who would have imagined such a thing?

    Epiphany demonstrates that only when we allow inklings of the divine into our hearts will we understand what the world is really all about.

    

    God is there, yes, but we are fallen human beings.

    Physical sight is only the beginning.

    

    Although the Feast of the Innocents, the Christian Church's remembrance of the Roman king Herod's first century order to slaughter all the newborns in Bethlehem so as to eliminate the newly born Messiah, occurred last week, its modern day parallels are all too clear.

    

    If we substitute the name of Vladimir Putin for Herod, we see that then or now the motivation for killing innocents is the same:  a craven desire to hang on to one's power at all costs.    

    Not wishing to take any chances that Messiah would live to bring his message of salvation (meaning, literally, "rescue") to Israel, Herod 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.
    

    So it is in the mind of this modern day "king":  power is all.

    Pray for the children of Ukraine.

    Though it's often very difficult to reconcile the evil machinations of a human heart with the fact of a loving and omnipotent God, we must try.  Unless we do, we will continue to wrestle struggle with a dark, dark unknown:  a cold, cold world  without any point.

    God can be confounding, yes, but a pointless world is even more.

      Have you seen Edward Munch's The Scream?  A piece that has puzzled and cajoled people for decades, The Scream seems to exemplify the alienation that so often characterizes the inhabitants of the West.  Overwhelmed by a world that offers them everything but meaning, countless people in the so-called developed world cry out for help, some help in making sense of what seems to be a pointless reality.

     Affluence reigns, yes, but without any foundation other than the assumption that life is worth it, and this only because those who decide this have nowhere else to go.  If the world is a closed system and we are therefore born only to die, then life, however wonderful it may be, ends before it begins.  So we scream:  why must this be?

     As we look into the New Year, as we continue to do what we can to live a good life, we realize that the world is not closed, that it is in fact entirely transparent and open, open and streaming into a web of reality vastly larger than we can imagine.  Life is meaningful because it is grounded in a transcendence that has spoken, a transcendence that has made itself known.  Life is more than itself.  And we are more than who we are.  Love is present, ascendant and true.

     

    Hence, in contrast to Munch's bleak perspective, we scream not why must this be, but rather how can such wonder be?

    Enjoy the second day of 2023!

     "Midnight Sky" tells the story of a scientist living alone in a research outpost in the far North who is one of the only people to survive a global catastrophe that killed most of the planet's inhabitants.  As a result of the catastrophe (whose precise nature is never fully explained), the planet's air is toxic and unbreathable.  No one will live above ground again.

    One day, however, he hears from a spaceship, Aether, on its way from Jupiter back to earth.  He tells them to go back to Jupiter's inhabitable moon.

     

    At this point, only two crew members, a man and woman, are still on the ship.  She's pregnant.  What to do?

    

    They leave to start a new world.

    

    What would you do?  Would you take a chance on a new world?  Or would you brave your way into the decimated old?

    

    Put another way, what are you most willing to trust:  what you hope in the new or what you remember from the old?  As we go into 2022, ponder this question.  Ponder your life, ponder God:  what is most worth knowing?

    Happy New Year!

    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 the Creator has come, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.

    

    What has made has come to what it has made.
    

    Christmas reminds us that we live in a universe of meaning.  And that we could not live otherwise.  Christmas also tells us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it is birthed in a spoken origination of space and time, a definitive genesis of all that is real and true.  It is only then that it can be.
    

    Christmas is only the beginning of what we see.

 

    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!

     As many of us enjoy our Christmas season amidst our varying degrees of affluence, we must not overlook those among us who, in what for most is one of the happiest times of the year, are suffering.  In countless ways.  In particular, I am thinking about the people of Ukraine, pummeled daily by the missiles of a person deluded by a dream of lost empire.  Bereft of heat and electricity, thousands of Ukrainians are suffering horribly.

    I think also of the millions in Africa who are likewise affected by the maniacal actions of this person in Moscow.  Due to this person's perfidy, these millions cannot get sufficient grain to make bread.  A vast famine is imminent.

    Moreover, how many more millions, those who live close to the borders of Russia, who labor daily under the threat of invasion, their lives and livelihood hanging by a too slender thread, remain?  Too many.

    Closer to home, I think about one of our neighbors whose mother passed away shortly after Christmas last year, enduring his own sense of grief.  Christmas will be very different for him and his family this year.

    And then I wonder, given the innately divine goodness and purposefulness of the world, how to put it all together.  More than ever we are to be reminded  f how much we, walking as "in a riddle," need to believe in it.

    And, in the biggest picture, very little more.