"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.