Abiding God,
The invitation to be with you is overwhelming yet resonates with my deepest and truest desires. I often don't pay enough attention to just how much I want to be with you. At the same time, I also resist going into solitude. I don't know what is there for us to do together. I am scared that I might find you to be boring or inaccessible. I am worried that the web of entanglements in which I live might unravel if I go away to be alone. I have parts of me that I like to hide––even from myself––and I am fearful that they might come to the surface if I am alone and quiet for long.
But you keep inviting me nonetheless. All of those fears eventually lose their energy as I sit in the quietness of your love. Your presence and your silence gently invite me to find my home in you and to discover that you are already dwelling in me. Here I find you, I find others, I find the world in which I live, and I find my own life hidden in yours.
Read More"...A few years after my dad died, my mom moved out of the house they had shared for more than forty years, and asked my brothers and me to go through the house and see if there were any of his things we wanted.
Only one really mattered to me: the desk. It’s where I sit as I type this now. It’s where I will turn around in a few minutes when my kids get home from school and hug them as they run into the room. It’s where the man who modeled God’s mercy for me taught me to hope in it, always."
Read MoreI love this story from James Bryan Smith about John of Kronstadt: “He was a nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox priest at a time when alcohol abuse was rampant. None of the priests ventured out of their churches to help the people. They waited for people to come to them. John, compelled by love, went out into the streets. People said he would lift the hungover, foul-smelling people from the gutter, cradle them in his arms and say to them, ‘This is beneath your dignity. You were meant to house the fullness of God.’”
That is incarnation.
- The Word became flesh in Jesus, in whom "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell."
- Because of this, we are ones in whom Christ dwells. We are meant to “be filled with all the fullness of God."
- Therefore, as Christ’s body (the church), we do what John of Kronstadt did and carry the message to whatever part of the world in which we find ourselves: "You, too, were meant to house the fullness of God."
Jesus did not live in human flesh for his own sake. You are not one in whom Christ dwells for your own benefit. The church is not Christ’s body just so that we can have a good time together. Rather, we follow a Messiah who understood himself as sent from his Father in the heavens–he came in the flesh, lived, died, and rose again to show us what God is like and to give us the opportunity to "share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity."
The challenge of carrying a message like that into the world is the degree to which we must allow ourselves to be touched if the message is to go anywhere. It simply isn’t a message that can mean anything if shouted from a distance.
Read MoreI can’t imagine church without Christmas. I’ve been in church frequently from the time I was born, and a number of my favorite church memories have to do with Christmas.
One memory that still gets relived each year in my family is of when my oldest brother was home to visit with his new bride. My brother is 6’4”, and his wife is–well, I’m not sure of her exact height. I only know that she’s just the right size for her hair to be at the same level as my brother’s candle during a Christmas Eve service. I’m not sure if she felt something, or if it was the smell of hair burning that caught their attention, but younger brothers thrive on having things like that to tell about our older siblings. He has now successfully gone more than twenty years without lighting her on fire, but the story doesn’t go away. (By the way, I did not ask my brother’s permission to tell this publicly.)
Another memory is from years later when I was on staff at a church, and therefore was sitting on the platform able to see the whole, full sanctuary during our Christmas Eve service. I remember the richness of the entire evening, as a soloist sang “O Holy Night,” and then we all joined in on the hymns. When it was time to listen to the Scripture’s account of Jesus’ birth, I was gripped by the moment as everyone in the place stood in reverence for the words we were about to hear. Then, at the end of the service, to have everyone light their candles against the background of the darkness outside the sanctuary, it created a vivid memory that will remain imprinted on my mind. We were gathered there two millennia later, and on the other side of the world from Bethlehem, but still as people of the Messiah who was born there–just as millions of others of our brothers and sisters around the world were doing that same night.
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