Scary Ghost Stories and Tales of the Glories: Wishing You All a Christ-Haunted Christmas

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Advent, Christmas, Flannery O'Connor, Holy Spirit, Tradition

This blog was begun out of Facebook posts I began writing during Advent. And so it is perhaps fitting that, as this time of year rolls around again, I should offer some thoughts on the season. As usual, they will be vexing and vexed, but here goes.

To begin, I don’t know who to be more frustrated with: those who reduce the season to commercialism and saccharine songs that are not even good by pagan standards, or those who allegedly want to put the Christ back in Christmas – by which they usually mean their favourite id(e)ol(ogy) which they have given the name Christ. If I were feeling uncharitable, I might make some sort of comment about it being impossible to put the Christ back in Christmas without putting the Mass back in Christmas, and you can decide for yourselves what I mean by that – at the very least, it means that it is certainly hard to understand Christ apart from the work of His bride through whom he has chosen to reveal himself. But I am not feeling much more uncharitable than normal, so I shall leave it at that for now.

What I do want to talk about though is how we navigate this odd holiday context in which Christ is in some way inescapable – for simply calling it “the holidays” or dating the world back to BCE rather than AD is just a manipulation of language; there is still the history behind the thing we are celebrating, and the uncomfortable fact that in secularity we are left with neither supernatural nor even basic pagan reasons for keeping the feast. In such a context, we are left with a vague feeling that we should have warm hearts and special generosity around this time because – well, because it’s Christmas.

Perhaps the most positive way we can put this is that the season is a mystery in the cultic sense – we don’t really know why or what we are doing when we celebrate Christmas, but we do so anyway because something in the mystery draws us; like Bryan Adams we simply feel that there’s “something about Christmas time,” and because of the difficulty of sustaining such a mystery religion in a modern, “progressive” world, we find ourselves longing for the infantile innocence of stupidity, which we excuse by mislabeling it as childlikeness, but nonetheless need if we are at all to maintain a state of confusion of which we are rightly fond as something preferable to pure secularity. In the immemorial words of Josh Groban, “you have everything you need, if you just believe” – and it is integral to the maintenance of this season that the fact of belief rather than the content of what is believed in is emphasized.

But if this is a problem for those who want to celebrate Christmas but have no idea why, it is equally a problem for Christians, who ought to know better than to simply lock themselves in a fortress-like dualism over against an ostensibly confused culture. We all know the rhetoric on the other side, the return to the “true meaning” of Christmas, whether this is understood as the iteration of Christ’s nativity narrative, a particular sobriety, the ousting of mammon, or the rather childish abolition of Santa Klaus and other Christmas mythopoeia. What always astounds me about this position is the dead certainty with which these people seem to know the “true meaning” of Christmas. Really? Is it so simple to grasp the fact of God becoming human and also remaining God? Have we really got a handle on this such that we can go about like busybodies correcting the imaginations of our friends and relatives? As you can see, I am happy about neither stance – confused secularism or dead certain faith with an emphasis on “dead.” So where can we find the answer? In ghosts, evidently.

Yes, quite seriously, I think we would do well to pay heed to Dickens and the spooky stories of twelfth night because they get at a fact about Christ’s incarnation that neither the secular sops nor the hard-nosed Chistian killjoys understand; what is primary about Christmas is that it is uncanny. Let me explain. In literary theory, when we talk about “the uncanny,” we are not talking about simple concrete gruesome horror, nor are we talking about something that cannot be known at all. No, what is uncanny exists in a realm that is related in a complicated way to our epistemologies – in negative terms, we might say it is uncertain, or in more positive terms, we might say it is a mystery. The uncanny disappears when certainty appears on either side, that is, when the ghost we are afraid of is debunked, or when it is put to rest within a solid and comprehensive metaphysics. In some Christmas traditions, this uncanniness is negative, as in the case of the poem “Old Christmas Morning,” but in Dickens, the uncanny ghost exists halfway between the worlds of marvel and terror, and the uncanniness of time – that is, the ungraspability – is shown in the persons of present, past, and future. What I want to suggest is that, far from being a distraction from the “true meaning” of Christmas, this tradition of uncanniness gestures in an analogical way to the central story of Christmas – the uncanniness of Christ’s incarnation. “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” speaks more truth than ought to be allowed such a schmaltzy song when it speaks of “scary ghost stories and tales of the glories,” for in a very real sense, the stories are of a piece. What ghosts are to our perception in a negative sense, the incarnation of Christ – inspired after all by a Holy Ghost – is in a positive sense. And we know this from the gospel of John.

For it is in John more than any other gospel that we get the fullest account of Christ’s birth. No, it is not the gospel we usually associate most closely with the Christmas story, given the omission of historical details. Yet there is a strong case to be made that John does in fact recount the Christmas story in the opening of his book – the difference is that he is recounting it from a metaphysical rather than merely human perspective. John, the eagle, looks into the sun of righteousness, and is dazzled. To say John points to the “true meaning of Christmas” here would be moot; rather, the logos has got hold of him and won’t let go. The fish need not draw attention to the whale.

But if this – what John is describing – can happen, then anything might happen. And this is the explanation of the uncanny stories that crop up at Christmas. Our imaginations are tantalized. In such a world, challenged as it is by the incarnation of God, men might come back from the dead. Flowers might bloom in the bleak of winter. Sinners might even learn to repent.

Aside from the more frightening instances of uncanniness, this also helps explains much of the needless frivolity, absurdity, and complete silliness of Christmas – which is perfectly justifiable on Christian grounds. In a world in which God can become incarnate, even the most foolish of things has potential to be folly for God. We do very silly things like sing songs of hope in the middle of a blizzard, or gather together with the people we argue most with – our family – and talk about peace on earth, good will toward men. Indeed, this overturn – this incarnation – may be enough even to redeem the most unredeemable of things. Even kitsch and schmaltz and jest might with the mages lay their gifts at the manger. This comes to pass, when a child is born.

What is clear then is this – that, when Christians seek to have a stranglehold on the “true meaning of Christmas,” they often miss the fact that its truest meaning is dazzling mystery, a mystery indeed patient enough to wait out their clumsy attempts to wield it like a club. Seculars and pagans get the bit about mystery – but without anywhere to point, it collapses into a dualism between ignorant sentimentalism and cynical despair. And it is with these problems in mind that I want to wish you all a Christ-haunted Christmas.

The description is Flannery O’Connor’s, asserting that if the US south is hardly Christ centered, it is certainly Christ-haunted. And it is precisely this perspective I propose in our approaches to Christmas. The season is saturated with Christian images, and imagery, and palimpsests, and erasures. Yet simply trying to go back to a “good old days” when people knew what Christmas was about is not the answer; nor is the answer steamrolling current society so we can rebuild a Christmas worthy of Christendom. No, what I suggest is a return to the mystery of incarnation, a mystery so powerful it does not even need to speak about itself all the time, but can in fact sustain imagination and the beauty of the world – from the highest instances of these to the silliest. All these instances point of course to the one Instance in the scansion of the inscape of creation, and we would do well to follow O’Conner in the realization that even a chaos and confusion of symbols and theologies – a thoroughly haunted labyrinth – is not a great obstacle to a God who calls order out of chaos and enters that order in the ambiguity known to us as flesh, and as the Ghost Who haunts us, moving as He lists.

We’re Awake

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academia, Advent, Churl, ecumenism, Holy Spirit, John Henry Newman, Mary, Moot, sacrament, thing

Advent is upon us.

In the Gospel text (Mark 13.24-37), Jesus instructs his disciples, ‘Keep awake.’ Keep awake, he says. Pay attention to the signs: ‘The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.’

Though we may not seem like it, we are awake. Our founder Churl started A Christian Thing to be a Thing. Like the Ents in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a Thing is not an object – a Thing is a Moot, an Entmoot, a meeting of the wise. We do not profess to be wise, Churl wisely said. We only profess to have a Thing.

Our Thing has been fairly quiet over the last little bit. Things have certainly happened on this Thing – we had a Thing about Mark Driscoll and the New Calvinists being crypto-Catholics, a Thing about mental health, a Thing about the place of Christians in an academy in crisis, a Thing about Churl’s conversion to Catholicism and a lively exchange about the catholicity of Protestantisms Anglican and Lutheran, a Thing about orientalization and Asian American evangelicals. We have had Things about things in the media, from natural disasters to the Newtown shooting to Occupy Central in Hong Kong.

And suddenly, quiet. Maidan. Ferguson. The Umbrella Movement. Ayotzinapa. Burnaby Mountain. Silence.

Have we fallen asleep?

Before we started A Christian Thing, we Christians, most of us Protestant moving up the sacramental ladder in fits and starts, had about a year of very intense dialogue at a very secular university in a fairly secular nation-state north of the one that most people think about in North America. We talked up a storm about Charles Taylor, we had Baylor University’s Ralph Wood deliver some mind-blowing lectures on Fyodor Dostoevsky and Flannery O’Connor, we debated how Christians in secular universities should be doing theology, we created friendships that have lasted till even now when we are scattered over the four corners of these two aforementioned nation-states.

Around this time, we came across a book written by John Henry Newman, which for most of us climbing the sacramental ladder was a bit of an unapologetic inspiration. This book was The Idea of a University. I got myself a copy and found something in there I didn’t expect. In the preface, Newman lambastes people who feel compelled to have an opinion about everything on the news. It’s not the point of academia, he says. Academic reflection is – in the wise words of a reviewer of an academic article that I just got notice to revise – about ‘digging deeper, wondering, and digging deeper still.’

Indeed, the truth is that more of our writing is likely moving away from the blog into places with our real names on them, including in peer-reviewed journal articles. That’s not to say that we’re done with this blog – far from it. But in talking with some of those of us on this Thing, I think having this Thing has helped us appreciate what this Thing is about – digging, wondering, and digging deeper still. The character of that Thing has permeated our work, academic, popular, and whatever.

That contemplative work is Marian in character. It’s no surprise, then, that the figure who haunts this thing is the Blessed Virgin.

Here’s the Thing. Our Lord Jesus Christ instructs us to stay awake, to pay attention to the signs that the kingdom of God is breaking into the world, that the end is collapsing into the now. We have detected the movement of the Spirit: breaking from our criticism of the New Calvinism and the gospels of boundary-making isolations, we continue to see that the Lord knew what he was doing when he put Francis in Rome, Justin Welby in Canterbury, Tawadros II in Egypt, and Bartholomew in Constantinople. We watch as the hovering the Spirit yields new ecumenisms we have never imagined, ecumenisms that are ecclesial like Francis bowing his head for a blessing from Bartholomew, as well as ecumenisms that seek to establish a true ecumene in the midst of a world still plagued by colonial capitalist racialization and the attempted silencing of the poor. We are awake, pondering these things in our hearts because even while those whom Cornel West calls the ‘oligarchs and plutocrats’ seem to be tightening their grip on our institutions and our lands, the dignity of the human person has been asserted in more ways than one over this last year.

But who is the one who taught us to see these signs? Is it not the Blessed Virgin? Is it not she who has gone ahead of the Pilgrim Church, she who undoes the knots that our sin has tied, she who displays for us what the fusion of nature and grace is? Is she not the one whom we ask in every Rosary and Angelus, ‘Mary, what do you see? What is the mystery you behold? What are the things that you ponder in your heart?’

Our Lord Jesus Christ has instructed us to stay awake. We, with the Virgin Mother, are awake. And we still profess to have a Thing.

Peter Leithart, N. T. Wright, and the True Meaning of Christmas

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Advent, Christ, Christian, Christmas, Dr. Seuss, First Things, gnostic, God, how nt wright stole christmas, N. T. Wright, Peter Leithart

There are a variety of variations on the story. A character or group of characters are fixated on the material aspects of Christmas – what they will get as gifts etc. And then a crisis happens and these characters discover the “true meaning” of Christmas.  In Christian stories, this usually involves hearing the story of Christ’s birth, and pagan renditions tell us that the true meaning of Christmas is love. Both versions can be done successfully; Charlie Brown Christmas brilliantly avoids schmaltz through the ever depressed title character, Veggie Tales’ Toy That Saved Christmas brilliantly captures the near demonic frenzy that occurs around Christmas over absurd toys that have no reason to be popular, and Dr. Seuss’s Grinch is a well told rendition of the pagan version.

However, for Christian hipster types, the “true meaning of Christmas” thing is kind of overdone.  And the new popular thing is to turn to Advent.  Please don’t misunderstand me.  I love Advent.  It is one of the most precious things things God has discovered to me in my journey from low to high church.  And it is precisely because I love both Advent and Christmas that I need to call out a hipster-type Christianity that appropriates Advent via a postmodern tradition lite as an “alt, indie” way of celebrating the season.

I was particularly struck by this as I read Peter Leithart’s reflection on N. T. Wright, Advent, and Christmas.  Once upon a time, the narrative goes, there was a Bible that had some pretty powerful political things to say.  It stirred people up for a while, but then somewhere along the line someone lost the story and started thinking about sin and heaven and victory over Satan at Christmas instead.  And so we were left with only a partial understanding of Christmas – until one day a man named N. T. Wright was born to us and told us the true meaning of Christmas, that it was about politics and this-worldly stuff. And also that there should be no jollity; that we must be rid of any of those joyful festive parodies (such as  Twelfth Night, Christmas miracle stories etc.) that serve as foils for the real heavenly miracle and joy of Christmas; these are replaced by the earnest and dour voices of a certain kind of Protestant doing what he does best – protesting and politicking in a very grave religious way without the least crack of a smile.

The prior paragraph is a bit tongue in cheek, but it does in fact summarize some of the main problems I have with this article.  First, the article is exaggerated.  As if compensating for all those years of not having celebrated Advent, Leithart aggressively attacks certain aspects of Christmas tradition.  Now, I wouldn’t mind this so much if he simply critiqued Christmas commercialism, but he critiques things like joy, heaven, salvation from sin, Christ as the new Adam, and conquering the devil.  And the problem I have with this is, though limiting the season to these qualities is somewhat narrow, sidelining their association with the birth of Christ cuts against nearly all Christian tradition that I know of.

Leithart (and presumably Wright) here speak as if these things were mere inventions of modernity.  They are not, and so when Leithart sidelines them, he goes against much of the tradition of the Christian Church.  Of course, perhaps Leithart thinks that the Church went fairly wrong fairly early.  But he, and those agreeing with him, should be aware that in accepting his argument they are accepting an ecclesiology that sees the Church going wrong very soon after the time of Christ and being finally redeemed when N. T. Wright recently rediscovered it.  For though medieval and early modern Christians did use the language of politics in their interpretation of the Bible – Israel etc. – the more important thing this language was always understood to signify was a spiritual reality – yes, joy, heaven, salvation from sin, and beating the devil.

Leithart seems to accuse these traditions of being gnostic – paying too little attention to the earthly reality – but the curious reality is that a good portion of those who originally condemned gnosticism in its initial heretical form would in fact disagree with Wright’s and Leithart’s emphasis; though worldly particulars are important as a vehicle, the more important things are the spiritual things gestured toward – and this is not gnosticism, but what Christians, Protestant and Catholic, have believed for a good long time.  I understand why theologians like Leithart and Wright feel the need to speak as they do in a culture that has lost the ability to imagine a spiritual realm higher than yet not in competition with an earthly materiality (as in Dante’s Paradiso). The problem is that Leithart and Wright accept modernity’s either/or thinking, and choose earth over heaven, rather than trying to keep both.  There are four senses of Scripture, and here Leithart finds them in competition rather than in divine coordination, as they are.

The second issue is that I’m not exactly certain what Leithart means by a turn back to a political read on the Christmas story – to me, it frankly sounds joyless and wearying. I look at post upon post of hackneyed and simplistic political fluff on Facebook, and find fifty different ways to change the world, convenient automations that save us from the business of actually caring, which in fact involves listening, researching, and bothering with something more than cheap and clever punch lines. Of the making of many politics there is no end…

In fact, one might argue that it is precisely in such a politics-weary context that Christ came. And what made him different than the other messiahs was the fact that his kingdom was not of this world.  Of course this makes people mad in the political realm (and it would seem in the theological realm, too), and it makes people like Caesar mad enough to kill.  But saying that Caesar must kill Christ and His church for not being the world does not seem to be what Leithart’s article gestures toward, but rather a version of Advent that is the new Christian hipster form of political activism – an activism that seems to think it is up to us and our efforts to save Christianity and God’s world, and that places a huge burden on the theologian who must heft the burden of a completely revisionist theology while avoiding the traps of modernity-driven Evangelicalism as well as the “errors” of traditionalism.

Of course, God is perfectly capable of saving his Church without the shouting of someone like Leithart.  As my friend Chinglican noted on Facebook, the programme that Leithart advocates as such a radical and innovative project at the end of his reflection is hundreds of years old in liturgical traditions, and probably even practiced by people you know, too humble to shout about it in the obnoxious Advent-will-change-the-world tone of Leithart.  Of course, God will change the world and so will liturgy without regard for what people like Leithart do or do not say.  But if they want to be part of this in a way other than that of the prophets Jonah or Balaam, it might help them to stop protesting so much about Advent as the new secret weapon for an alternative and forward thinking church, and instead start grinding down their individualism on a liturgy that teaches them that they are dust destined for glory in Christ who gifts them in His Church with a holy anonymity that makes them ever more themselves.

Of Mayan doomsdays and Christmas celebrations

Tags

Advent, apocalpyse, Christmas, darkness, end of the world, light, Mayan doomsday

Today is December 22, and if you’re reading this, the world hasn’t ended. So it looks like the Mayan doomsday believers were wrong—just like all the other end-of-the-world predictions thus far. In my column for the November/December issue of The Canadian Lutheran, I take on the connection between doomsday predictions and the season of Advent (which we’re still in for a few more days). A segment follows below:

But Christians are not the only ones in a season of “waiting” this December. A small number of conspiracy theorists have been predicting December 21st as the end of the world. The idea arises out of some Mayan records which cite that date as the end of an era—the ending of one cycle of creation and the beginning of the next. While Mayan scholars dismiss doomsday interpretations of these records, believers think the Mayans knew something we don’t— that some great catastrophe is coming and that humankind’s time is drawing to an end. Consequently, this has been a year of great darkness for doomsday believers. They have been living under the shadow of death, a shadow growing ever blacker and grimmer as December 21st approaches.

How different from the Christian’s hope! We too dwell under the dark shadow of death, but it is a shadow we know is defeated. We await reunion with our Lord Jesus; doomsday theorists see only the approach of death. At the first Christmas, God Himself entered into our world. In Him was Light, a Light that was the Light of all mankind; and that Light broke into the darkness (John 1:4-5). Yes, on the people dwelling in darkness a great Light dawned—and it forced the shadow of death to retreat (Matthew 4:16).

Check out the full article entitled “Joy comes with the morning” over at CanadianLutheran.ca.

——————–

Joy: a defiant sermon

Tags

Advent, Aurora, Barack Obama, eschatology, Gaudete Sunday, hospitality, ideology, John the Baptist, joy, Luke, Newtown, Newtown Connecticut, politics, Pontius Pilate, public safety, Roman occupation, Sandy Hook

[I did not preach today, and I do not envy those who must. However, in solidarity with those who mourn and those who must preach despite their mourning, this is what I might have said. I was also very affected by the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber’s sermon on the Aurora shootings. God, come to my assistance; Lord, make haste to help me.]

(Readings are taken from the Revised Common Lectionary, Year C: Zeph. 3.14-18a; Is. 12; Phil. 4.4-7; Lk. 3.10-18)

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Third Sunday of Advent is, as my wife likes to say, the day to light the pink candle. It is not without reason that this Sunday is called Gaudete Sunday, a Sunday when the readings, the music, the church decorations, and even the pink candle are supposed to be gaudy. It’s supposed to be a party, a day of joy. And thus, our first reading in Zephaniah 3, like our responsorial psalm from Isaiah 12, calls on the daughter of Zion to rejoice, for the Lord has saved her from her enemies; in our epistle from Philippians 4, St. Paul tells the church at Philippi to rejoice—‘and I will say it again, rejoice!’

If only we could.

Can we indeed say that the Lord has been the saviour from our enemies when 26 people, 20 of them children, are gunned down mercilessly in an elementary school in a Connecticut town? Can we rejoice with St. Paul when, in a completely unrelated incident, 23 kids are stabbed in a school in China? Are we even allowed to light the pink candle and be gaudy when we have endured our nineteenth such shooting spree in America in five years, countless such murders in China, and untold accounts of violence worldwide?

Compounding our grief is the way that these horrors have immediately been politicized. Barack Obama may have responded more as a parent than as a president, wiping away tears from his eyes as he read his statement on the Connecticut shootings, but already, our civil discourse from the left is screaming for gun control, from the right is raging for concealed carry firearms, and from the cynical is wondering how anyone in good conscience could manipulate grief on this level for politics. Our theological discourse is no better.  We have heard from the theologians and pastors who have no words or answers for our innumerable questions, and we have heard from those who have an answer that God in his sovereign will did not stop the bloodshed.  We want to celebrate the heroes—already, our Facebook and Twitter feeds are flooded by stories of teachers and the principal who sacrificed their lives for their students, and we do call them ‘heroes,’ except when we do, our voices choke with grief and we cannot actually say it, reframe the situation, and think positive about what hope we must have for humanity now.

No.  We are not joyful. We are not even pretending to be. We have had enough.

We preachers have been told that the task of preaching after such tragedy is difficult, if not impossible.  We are told that the congregation wants us to be empathetic, to simply understand, to keep our mouths shut.  Yet we are preachers, we are also told, and so we must say something.  Whether our theology is that we are shepherds over a flock, fellow pilgrims in the midst of the people of God, or somewhere in the middle of that continuum, the fact remains that, as much as it seems that no one wants any of us to say anything, our liturgy requires that we speak.

But what do we say—indeed, what can we say?—especially in the midst of such senseless violence on Gaudete Sunday?

The Gospel tells us that the crowds asked John the Baptizer, ‘What shall we do?’  The crowds asked John the Baptizer what they should do.  We are told that the crowds consisted of a motley crew of people, tax collectors and Roman soldiers in tow.  The crowds, we are told, are not innocent of violence, passive victims of Roman occupation with its culture of violence. The crowds, as implied from last week’s Gospel earlier in Luke 3, know very well the level of violence it takes to maintain Roman colonization in Palestine.  Pontius Pilate was known to violently repress, if not pre-empt, any sign of Jewish identity politics.  And this was just an example: we haven’t talked about the political intrigue at multiple levels of the colonial government managed by the Herods and the Temple rulers.  The violence then was as senseless as the violence now. And yet, with collaborators with these regimes of violence like tax collectors and Roman soldiers in the crowds, the crowds, it is implied, are very much collaborators with regimes of terror, empires of murderous liberation, cultures of death that fetishize weaponry for the recreation of bloodlust.

John is the voice crying out in the wilderness.  Like us, John had to preach, even in the midst of a senseless culture of violence.  Attuned to the injustice of the senseless violence they have experienced as well as their own complex complicity in it, the crowds ask John: ‘What shall we do?’

What does John tell them to do?

Does John give the socially and politically conservative answer, that what is simply needed is a conversion of the individual heart, that weapons control is useless because the central problem of personal repentance has not been solved?

Does John give the concerned parental response, that the private sphere is under threat from such violence, that public safety will soon be a myth if such violence continues, and that for the sake of our children, we must enact some policy to make sure this never happens again?

Does John give the ‘I have no words to say’ sermon, a reflection on mystery in the midst of grief, that God weeps with the wretched of the earth but really has nothing better to do than to cry with you as you are terrorized?

No.  None of the above.

In the midst of such colonization, terror, and violence, John’s answer is a call to radical hospitality. If you have two coats, he says, give one to your neighbour. If you have food and your neighbour doesn’t, share it. If you are a tax collector, don’t collect extra tips. If you are a soldier, you are not to use brute force, extortion, and the secrecy of lies to get your way.

John’s call to action is cryptic. It is as if in the midst of the senseless violence in both first-century Palestine and the twenty-first century globalized world, John is calling us to a defiant hospitality.  In the midst of violence, the Church defies the common sense of private security that we need to batten down the hatches and arm ourselves for safety.  No, John says, we open our doors wider.

John the Baptizer is saying what our other readings for Gaudete Sunday are saying.  Rejoice, St. Paul says, again I say it, rejoice, because hope against hope, sending your petitions with thanksgiving to God, the peace of Christ that surpasses all understanding and defies the common sense of anxiety in the midst of this crooked and perverse generation will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.  Rejoice, the prophets Zephaniah and Isaiah say, for God is our savior from our enemies, he has removed our judgment, he sings over us now as songs are sung at festivals.  Rejoice.  Be hospitable.  Open wide your gates, daughter of Zion.

These acts of joy run counter to our feelings of horror, despair, anger, and rage at the events of violence that we have so viscerally experienced this week.  Our common sense tells us that we should be taking up arms for private security.  Our righteous anger should move us to call on the state to save us from our ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ ways.  Our emotional sensitivities know that any display of joy will be viewed as insensitive and that any mention of gaudiness should be regarded as distasteful.

How can we be so stupid?

Because, John goes on, someone is coming, mightier than he is, bringing a baptism by fire and the Holy Spirit.  Someone is coming, the thongs of whose sandals he is unworthy to untie, to actually do some justice, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to actually set the world right.

He is coming, John says, but as we look forward to his return, he isn’t back yet.  So yes, we should grieve at this present darkness. Let your voices choke as you remember Connecticut, as you think of China, as you contemplate the imperial cultures of death that have the world in its grip. Yes, we should have no words to say to explain the horror.  Yes, do be angry, rage at the senselessness. But as the people of God, in our sorrow and in our anger, in our disbelief at the level of injustice that has been perpetrated this week, in the activism for justice that will no doubt rightfully ensue from this, we also defy the common sense that calls us to take up arms and protect ourselves.  No, hope against hope, we declare with our actions that this is indeed a time to act, but with the radical acts of hospitality, to let our rejoicing not be empty words, but shocking deeds of expansive welcome to the stranger, solidarity with the hungry and the naked, and renunciation of the ways of extortion and greed.

Today is the Third Sunday of Advent.  Jesus is coming, winnowing fork in hand, to sort out the wheat from the chaff.  We grieve with the grieving, mourn with the mourning, are in solidarity with those who cry out against the senseless violence of this week, are stopped silent in our attempts to give simple answers about just what happened.  And yet with tears in our eyes, choking in our voices, and anger to the depths of our bowels, we rejoice defiantly by flinging open our hearts and our doors to welcome the stranger and love our neighbour. We do this because the one who holds the winnowing fork in his hand came to live and die as one of us. He stretched out his arms upon the cross, a victim of the very senseless brutality and injustice against which we rage today.  His disciples, once the followers of the same John the Baptizer who had proclaimed this radical hospitality, locked themselves in an upper room for personal security, fleeing, hiding, defending themselves against the unjust, horrible violence that took their Lord’s life.  And yet, hope against hope, defiant against all common sense, confounding all sense of reality, in a story that will strike us in our grief as the stupidest wishful thinking imaginable if only it didn’t happen, Jesus walked through those locked doors into that room and said to them, ‘It is I.  Do not be afraid.’

Cry out with joy and gladness, then, for among you is the great and Holy One of Israel, Jesus Christ who has died, is risen, and will come again. Lift up your hearts; let us give thanks to the Lord our God; let us share in the joy of the Triune God; let us love our neighbours with the expansive love of Jesus Christ who comes to us even now in our grief, in our horror, in our confusion, and in our anger, and says to us—indeed, hope against hope, he calls us by name and says, ‘It is I. I have risen. Do not be afraid.’

O God, we pray then, we have heard with our ears, our ancestors have told us, what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old; you with your own hand drove out the nations, but them you planted; you afflicted the peoples, but them you set free.  Yet you have rejected us and abased us, and have not gone out with our armies.  You have made us like sheep for slaughter, and have scattered us among the nations.  Because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter.  Rouse yourself!  Why do you sleep, O Lord?  Awake, do not cast us off forever!  Why do you hide your face?  Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?  For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help. Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love. I believe; help thou my unbelief. O Lord, in you have I trusted; let me never be confounded.

Amen.

A Reflection Between Christ the King Sunday and Advent, in Poetry and Prose

Tags

Advent, Christ, Evangelical, God, Interpersonal relationship, Jesu, Job, John Donne, Liturgical year, personal relationship, Poetry, Second Coming of Christ

One of the things I appreciate most about the liturgical calendar is the richness and depth of its conception of our relationship with God. I grow generally frustrated when modern Evangelicals want to talk about their “personal relationship with Christ.” Not because such a relationship is contrary to orthodoxy – for two thousand years we have believed that our relationship with God is an interaction of persons and not a mere submission to an impersonal force. What annoys me though is that, in most conversations I hear, people forget to define “personal.” And when they do this, they usually assume that synonyms for “personal” might consist in words like “warm, fuzzy, and emotive”; non-words like “relatable”; or words denoting individual ownership – we have our own personal Jesus to go with our personal computers and our personal pan pizzas. While I will not deny that there are possibly some aspects of this set of words that has something to do with what “personal” means, I feel that the word has lost its full force and depth – to have a personal relationship is to relate as persons, and while this can include aspects of the aforementioned words, it can also include things like the dark night of the soul, Job’s confrontation by God in the whirlwind, and experiences like that which Donne describes in “Batter my heart, Three-Personed God.” In the liturgical calendar – between our consideration of Christ’s kingship and our practice of waiting for his return during Advent – we are given ample space and time to reflect on the various ways we relate to God, as members of his body, the Church. As someone who “gets” the God in the Jobean whirlwind far better than I “get” the vagaries of warm fuzzy relatableness, I submit the following poetic meditation on the season:

Meet God? Ah, yes;

Maybe shake his hand,

Exchange pleasantries,

Share a cup of coffee

In cozy homes.

We forget Christ coming

Like a thief by night,

Coming unbid

When we least expect;

You speak in pastel tones

Of letting Christ enter your heart;

Better to speak of letting a lion

Enter a chicken coop.

For, oh, we are haunted

Through highways and hedges

To the depths of hell,

Hunted like dogs

Protecting our mange

So fiercely we deny our depth of hunger.

But see, we see when He is not looking,

He has left scraps under table;

“Scraps are nothing, He will not notice,”

We say.

He does, who cares for nothing even.

We shy away cursing Him for it,

The rich meat He lets us taste

Leaving us satisfied with nothing less,

But wondering if dogs dare dream; and is it shame we feel?

Better a quick brown dog

Than killed lion’s carcass ooz sting-jacket honey

No sweeter for death.

They say Christopher was a dog once; he bore Christ.

Perhaps just maybe, the power of the dog can be chrismed

And Christ come to us in odd ways by odd means;

Our hungry thirst for blood and flesh not broken,

But blessed with difference.