The Seventh Day of Christmas

A Look Back on the Year . . .

You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord...

 - From Isaiah 61

The Christmas Season covers it all. From the joy of Christ's birth, to the sudden remembrance that His mission has a distinctly grave element . . . to some final words of great encouragement as we move on to a new year. 

Seven Days of Christmas. The Number Seven has always had profound significance. It seems to represent completion, or fullness. Seven days in a week. Seven colors in a rainbow. It is easy to reflect on this day, first on the idea that we have wrapped it up: a year is over. But then the rainbow emerges, as a reminder that God has life, and good things in store for us, in our future. 

(As a side note, we really do need to reclaim the rainbow as a symbol of God's grace, and of purity).

And so we come to this place where the year is over, and one week of Christmas is fulfilled. We read the words of Isaiah, where he writes that we will be crowns of beauty in God's Hand.

Most of Isaiah 61 is in the first person. It describes a man that has felt isolated and marginalized. All he has been doing, is speaking the truth. But the people have maligned him for being so bold. In our times, you can get in big trouble for doing what's right. You can lose your reputation, your job, your marriage. 

Crazy, right?

But it's true. We've all been told to just keep quiet, and not to stir things up. Whether its an ethical matter, or maybe even something criminal; there is a power structure in society and we are expected to fall in line. The "Me Too" movement of 2017 brought this to light, as women with decades of horrible memories finally felt empowered to come forward. What gave them such boldness? For starters, true courage. But it didn't hurt, that they had strength in numbers.

Isaiah understood this. He preached God's truth, and was stigmatized for it. But in Chapter 61, he looks ahead to the final outcome:

We will be vindicated.

You will be vindicated for doing what's right. You will win, in the end. 

You will win.

And that's a great way to wrap up the year. 

The Second Day of Christmas

St. Stephen's Day

Therefore I send you prophets, sages, and scribes, some of whom you will kill . . . 

 - From Matthew 23

The King has been born. We celebrate a great day of peace, humility, beauty and grace. But in the Christian calendar, no time at all is wasted, before setting our sights on the next most important thing. Yes, the King has been born. But He has been born to die.

December 26 is the Feast of Saint Stephen. It is the day upon which Good King Wenceslas went out. There is a focus on the poor, on beggars, the homeless, the hungry, the penniless. 

It is "Boxing Day," which pop cuilture says is the day in which everybody puts all their Christmas stuff back into it's boxes (hopefully the reader avoids this, and keeps it all for the full Twelve Days). But Boxing Day actually refers to the British custom of remembering people employed in a service type of job. Give an extra tip to waitstaff. Share a gift with custodians, mail carriers, trash maintenance people and road crew workers. 

If only 10% of us did these things, faithfully, I would bet most of our political strife would go away.

But what is the connection back to St Stephen, the Church's first martyr? Christ came to serve . . . and for whatever reason, people hate that. Especially in our times, people hate the feeling that they are being "judged." And acts of kindness towards the less fortunate, particularly when we do so eagerly and fully, without fanfare; well, this drives people crazy - - - people that would rather just vote politicians in that will raise taxes so that government can do all of our charity for us.

Love and Truth are the same. And when I say "love," I mean Real Love - the kind that is not expressed only so that my own physical needs will be met in return. No . . . . selfless love; love that does not tie, at all, to political arguments. Love that really, truly, is about others, and filling their basic needs. 

Stephen preached the gospel, and it was about love, and it was the Truth. Jesus promised there would be prophets. There would be wise people, and there would be people writing things down so that our acts of kindness and truth could be remembered in future ages. It seems as though there is nothing like connecting people to the past, to really inspire and motivate them.

We do not take care of prophets, sages, and scribes. We need them desperately, but we don't pay them well - - - we ignore them ("Why do they have to be paid? Let them share their gifts as simple acts of kindness"). 

But there comes a time when truth tellers say something that people don't like. We wish they would shut up. We advise them to "let it go." We ask them why they always have to "stir things up!" And if it gets bad enough, we start contemplating rather harsh, inhumane and undignified ways to silence them.

We just can't stand it. 

The Baby in the Manger was a glorious, and tender, and wonderful sight. But following, in instant succession, is the reminder that He will be killed, for the simple act of living and expressing His beauty for the next three to four decades. He came to be hated, tortured, and killed.

That's what St. Stephen's Day is all about.

Secret

...the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret ...

 - From Romans 16

Why did God keep important eternal truths from us? Why did He keep things secret? Why does He toy with us so?

Well, at least that's the way most skeptics that I have known, would frame it. Consider elementary education. You can't teach derivatives to a classroom of 4th graders. You will fail. They'll hate math even more, and they'll start off life with a sense that they are doomed to failure. You keep that information from them. You reveal new doses, one at a time. In effect, you make a secret of derivatives. This isn't cold. It's not heartless. It's wise, and fair. 

That doesn't mean there haven't been people, through the ages, that could handle the truth right away. These are rare people that emerge in history as prophets or great philosophers. But in some cases, these naturally-gifted people with insight have used their knowledge to fight God, to resist Him. They think too much. They have dropped the critical element of faith, and through the exercise of their limited intelligence, seek to diminish God. 

Christmas is the great mystery, the secret. 

God knows how we love a mystery. He made us people that loved childhood, and that were drawn to the magic of things like Christmas. And so, the most important revelation in human history became immersed in the most wonderful magic possible to human creativity. 

God made it so . . . so that we could appreciate and love it all the more. 

"Christmas is for children. But aren't we all children, Christmas day?"

Sheaves and Sadness

Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.

 - From Psalm 126

So, here is the Scripture reference that inspired the great hymn, mostly from the Southern Baptist tradition: "Bringing in the Sheaves." A sheaf is a bundle of a cereal plant, as in wheat, or rye. An essential grain. And in the Year 2017, grains are more popular than ever, as long as they're gluten-free.

The 126th Psalm is replete with promises of joy, to those that had wept. 

One of my biggest learnings in 2017, was this: As you look about you, always assume sadness.

When you are dealing with an angry person, assume sadness.

When the child is acting out, assume sadness.

When the spouse is arguing, assume sadness.

When the co-worker or employee is underperforming, assume sadness.

When the relative is voting differently than you, assume sadness.

See what I'm doing?

Sadness permeates everything that is wrong with the world. So when God promises joy, especially to those that had been weeping, He has nailed it right on the head. Dead-center. His hammer comes down to perfectly leverage the nail so that it secures back together, forever, the pieces of our lives that had been torn asunder. He does it with one stroke. (I will leave it to the reader to guess where I am going with this hammer and nail illustration).

You can't be angry with a sad person. You just listen. You wait. You serve. You give them space.

The planting of seed, when it is essential to one's survival (not as in the Victory Garden type of planting, where people with everything garden for the fun of it), is a drudgery. But you get it done. 

But when the grain is brought back in, in the Harvest time, it is a time of joy. We're going to make it another year. 

Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,
Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;
Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Wait

I will keep watch to see what he will say to me, and what he will answer concerning my complaint.

 - From Habakkuk 2

Advent is about waiting, and waiting is not something that humans are good at. 

When we get good at waiting, we reach to a higher level of dignity, and even, of evolution. It is a great virtue for humans. It elevates us. Waiting requires us to think of others ahead of ourselves.

The inability to wait creates road rage, "unwanted" babies, divorce, terrorism, war. A lot of diseases would go away if we were better at waiting. 

For one month out of the year, the believer is given the specific task of waiting. We practice waiting during the month of December. But we don't even do that very well. 

We can't wait until December 25, to open our presents. We hurry through all of our appointments and parties, treating the 25th, not like the realization of God's promise, as we should, but as a deadline. And we frantically push ourselves and others to get a set of tasks completed by midnight, as the 24th gives way to the 25th.

That's not waiting.

During what's left of Advent 2017, just stop. Just wait. 

And enjoy.

Pride

... he has scattered the proud in their conceit.

 - From Luke 1

Social Justice Warriors may have all the right goals. They just don't have the tools, and they don't have the patience.

God has promised to make things right. He's going to take care of the proud. And He's not particularly fond of the rich.

There are plenty of connection points between the Lord and SJWs. They would have a lot to talk about.

The problem is, SJWs can't wait, and they get so impatient that they want action now. But when they say action, they really mean, vengeance. They have resentments going back to childhood, and they want the prideful people in their past, that hurt them, to pay . . . even if they have to take some innocent people along with the carnage.

The middle initial stands for "justice," but they really don't want justice for everybody. They want payback for those that offended or hurt them. 

God's got this. But you've gotta wait!

And God actually will be fair. He will be just, because, well . . . everybody's prideful, perhaps especially SJWs. They are so certain of their own rightness, that the best word to describe it surely must be "pride."

I'm fighting my own battle with pride this week. It's hard to articulate, even positive things, without rubbing someone the wrong way. They see my certitude as arrogance, or pride. And it's hard to argue the point. We all have some pride. If people think you're prideful, you can't really argue them out of it.

A sad impact of empire has always been, what to do about the conquered peoples? They will forever be a risk to strike back, wreak vengeance, and reclaim their land. One strategy is to scatter them about the globe. This is what happened to the Jews. And it is what will happen to the proud. This seems to say that, perhaps, the proud need each other. The meek need numbers to make an impact. If there were only one proud person among hundreds, he would be considered a fool by the community. Proud people must sort of cover each other's backs, without knowing it.

Today's reading is part of the Advent season. It comes from the Song of Mary.

Peace and Goodwill to all people! This will be made possible, partly, by doing something about the proud, once and for all.

Good News for SJWs. Maybe.

Real Peace

 Then they said among the nations,  "The Lord has done great things for them."

 - From Psalm 126

Imagine a nation that grew to be a world power, through conquest and expansion of its borders. In time its inhabitants enjoyed a lifestyle of luxury, compared to the rest of the world. This began to look like greed to the rest of the world. Their attitude of happiness was interpreted as arrogance, to other nations. 

The people of that nation were pleased that their ancestors had sacrificed to make this standard of living for them. They believed that their system must be superior to others, yielding as it did, such a comfortable existence. But other nations, and foreigners living within their borders, attributed their attitude to racism. 

This nation was generous, providing relief to other parts of the world, to a level unsurpassed by its rivals. But this didn't matter. It was just another example that they were the haves, while other nations were the have-nots. The envy and anger of other nations only intensified. 

But in the harshest charge yet, the people of that nation ultimately gave thanks to God, for their success. In this, of course, they were accurate. But this angered other nations even more. "How dare they claim to be God's chosen!"

The criticisms of other nations became a self-fulfilling prophecy. They went from looking greedy and arrogant, to being greedy and arrogant. This started a process that led to its downfall and conquest by others, whose hunger, to see them pay for their arrogance, expressed itself in violence. 

One day, God tired of seeing the wretched latter state of His people. He restored them to favor. And when He did, the other nations said "The Lord has done great things for them."

....

The above narrative is true, of course. It described Israel, but also, perhaps any other great civilization in history. The part that seems like fiction, is when other nations end up happy their fortunes are restored. 

If the US returns to being the world's foremost, sole world power, will Iran and North Korea praise God for it? Probably not.

But it describes an endpoint in history. You'll know it's real, and that we have reached our pinnacle of human development, when a great, powerful, wealthy, and generous nation can be lauded by others; by all others. 

It's the same thing with friendships. So many broken relationships go back to jealousy. 

There is no peace on earth as long as there is envy and jealousy. And it starts in our own lives. We can't expect nations to be good to each other, or races, when we can't even visit and assist the widows in our own families. 

Our protestations of social justice are vain, if we are not respectful and kind to our elders. All of our elders.

Our observations of privilege are dead, if we act towards anybody, as if we're better than they.

Can you say, of someone else, despite their flaws and humanity: "The Lord has done great things for her (or him)"?

Can you say it, and genuinely be happy for them?

That's peace on earth. 

Jerusalem

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem . . . 

 - From Isaiah 40

Jerusalem was in the news this week. 

Jerusalem was in the news last week.

It was in the news last year.

Jerusalem has been in the news my entire life. It has been in the news since Melchizadek met Abram, fed him, and blessed him at his home in the city of Salem, forerunner to Jerusalem. It is a central city in Scripture, and in world history. The name means, "City of Peace."

The City of Peace has been in the center of the vortex of war, for centuries. Abram made it a critical hub, and then King David solidified that designation by making it the capital of Israel. It became, and remained the symbolic home to which the scattered people of Israel would return, one day. It is their capital. It inspired them, and moved them to keep the faith, and one day, return.

Jesus will return with the City of New Jerusalem. Not New Berlin. Not New London. Not New Moscow. Not New New York. Not New Baghdad. Not New Tel Aviv.

New Jerusalem. 

And yet others have made it their symbolically most important city, too. 

Why? Why did the Jews, of all history's peoples, when it came to their Shangri-la, their Mecca, have to deal with other claimants upon their central, defining place? 

This will be a question for our discussion group at Cafe Omega*, some day. 

The Christian and Hebrew Scriptures speak tenderly of Jerusalem. God knows the pain of Jerusalem. His heart cries on its behalf. He longs to cradle the city and its people. He says, "Speak tenderly to Jerusalem." 

This is our call to action. Let others scream and threaten, when it comes to Jerusalem. But let our response be as though Jerusalem were an injured, frightened cub. Let it be a gentle topic for us. Others may stir things up. But we will settle them down.

Speak tenderly. 

* Cafe Omega. A coffee shop in eternity, where we will all get together to talk about all these things. 

Gang Up

And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him . . . 

 - From Mark 1

John the Baptist was a rock star (yes, I called him "Baptist" rather than "baptizer." I'm not afraid people will assume he was a member of the Southern Baptist Denomination).

For a period of time, he was the most popular thing around. He hit his stride, and everybody had to see him. He was the new thing. He was different. He had odd practices, and we may assume that a wave of people adopted his ways: his look, his diet. 

But just like that, he was gone, and when Herod imprisoned him and had him executed, there was no one around to defend him. 

People are no different today. The Information Age, our modern equivalent to the Tree of Knowledge of Adam and Eve, is too much for us to handle. 

One week Senator Al Franken has a best-selling book. The next week, members of his own team are demanding he step down. 

There's hope for anyone that is down, in the public eye, to be lifted up for almost any reason. And a person at the top of their game can come toppling down, with very little warning. And we all play along. 

The Gospel has to be different than that. It needs to be rooted in things that do not change. We can't count on anything else, or any thing. Everything changes, and we are carried to and fro by the latest trend. But in Christ, we have to find steadiness and constancy. 

Here's something to resist: The ebbs and flows of popular opinion. Let's rise above it. An easy thing to resist is partisanship. Just refuse to play.

When I was a kid in Rochester, New York, my friends in my neighborhood were the best. They helped make my childhood wonderful. 

But they were human, and immature, and occasionally they (we) would start talking about someone not present. The negatives would percolate and soon we would decide to "gang up" on the missing person. When he or she showed up, they (we) shunned them. You would have to go back inside and wait until it passed over. A day or two later, one of them would come to the door and say that it's okay, everyone wants to play with you now. 

It was an ugly system, but it was a fact of life. And it still happens today, in the adult world. (Yes, it does, right?) And I developed a sort-of "radar" where I could pick up when things had made a bad turn about me. It is not a good feeling.

This is what partisanship is. It is what "following the crowd" is. And let's face it . . . with the anti-Franken stuff, the anti-Trump, the anti-Hillary, the anti-Kaepernick, etc., etc.,...  At the heart of so much of it, we want to fit into a crowd that we have selected. 

Resist it. Wouldn't it be great, to have been someone that actually stood up for John the Baptist, a public figure who, just last week, was adored by tens of thousands?

At Peace

...strive to be found by him at peace...

 - From 2 Peter 3

Our lives should be lived as though Christ would return at any moment, any instant. 

We used to talk about that a lot. But in the intervening years, and decades even, we have become more and more like the people Jesus spoke about in other parables: people that were not ready, that got distracted by the cares and pleasures of life. Cares AND pleasures.

But don't we deserve to be happy? 

I don't know about that, but God wants us to be happy, and interestingly enough, the road to happiness is grounded in selflessness and service to others, not in doing things that stimulate our senses.

We should be found "without spot or blemish" when Christ returns. That's a whole thirteen week Bible study right there. But can our generation handle a discussion of the definition of "spots" and "blemishes"? If it were easy, would we require such an admonition? Spots and blemishes are so much easier to identify, on others.

It is the Season of Peace. Would we be found "at peace" if Christ returned today? 

Or would we be frantically fighting crowds at shopping malls? Would we be rushing from one party to the next, barely taking the time to listen to someone?

Would we be engaging in ugly, angry political debates on-line? Would we be carping about the last thing Donald Trump tweeted, or Barack Obama did? Is that what it looks like to be "at peace"?

Simon Peter is quite clear in his list of things to think about, relating to the Coming of Christ. Can we even handle the "peace" part? It's not something you have to go out and make others observe. It's a state of mind that you must cultivate in yourself. 

Solution

Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

 - From Psalm 85

What's the big deal about mercy and truth meeting together? 

Is it supposed to be shocking, that righteousness and peace have kissed?

Aren't these all a bunch of nice-sounding concepts that belong in the same pile?

Not really. We need to let Scripture move us, and challenge us. And most verses will do that, if we let them.

Mercy and truth, together, is like saying Toby Keith is doing a joint album and tour with the Dixie Chicks. It's like going to a dinner hosted jointly by Lenin and Nicholas II. 

It's like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton drafting a joint policy statement on consensus problem-solving in the US.

That's what it's like.

People that are merciful don't care about truth. As long as we're being nice to each other. As long as we do not offend anybody. But to do that, you have to fudge the details a little. It's like rules in charitable organizations today, that say you must provide assistance to teen unwed mothers, but you are not allowed to advise them as to how to change their behavior so that it doesn't happen again.

Righteousness and peace? It's hard to have a peaceful community when someone's out there being all judgmental and pushing their values on others. But that's what righteousness is: It's establishing rules of proper, unselfish behavior and then expecting others to follow them.

Somewhere in the blend of these concepts, comes Real Truth and Real Mercy. You really are not being merciful if you're not telling it like it is. And Real Peace is only attained when people are acting right. 

Our biggest problems can't be solved by one side of the aisle. We need the mix, the blend. The solution. (In chemistry, you make solutions by blending two different elements). The conflict that results when disparate parts come together, is a prerequisite to creativity. 

And creativity is awesome. Creative people feel great about themselves, and they feel great about others. 

The Creator knows how to be creative, and He knows how to make us creative. We should listen to Him.