Loud & Clear

Merry Christmas!

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Christmas Catharsis

Bah Humbug! It’s the season to fight off my Scroogeness. I’m ‘fessing up. Do I see any other hands?
 
In the days before Christmas I constantly battle the bah-humbugs! Every year I feel pressured by expectations that are not Christmas. I revolt against traditions for the sake of tradition. Is Christmas supposed to stress me out? How real am I really if I have to forcibly maintain the merry and cheery when I am feeling weary and leery?
 
The clincher is no one wants to be accused of being Scrooge
I battle the sorry stereotype that anyone who lodges a complaint, whimpers a worry, just doesn’t feel up to it, not now, not this year, not that, has been seriously scrooged.
 
I fear that if I don’t show appropriate fa-la-la-la-la someone will say, “What happened to your Christmas Spirit?” I’ll be scorned and branded. Brainwashed by songs like It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Have a Holly Jolly Christmas, Winter Wonderland, Jingle Bell Rock, and It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas, I feel knuckled every time I’m not having a holly, jolly holiday rocking through a winter wonderland.
 
Am I a frugal, stingy, no-joy, kill Santa who ought to be tied to an armchair to watch The Muppets’ Christmas Carol? (Not a bad idea–love that move.) I’m not against gifts, Christmas trees, lights, wreaths, parties, or even fruitcakes. I like waking up Christmas morning with half-dressed family members to unwrap presents around the tree. I just don’t like feeling forced to do Christmas as dictated by someone else.
 
Sometimes I get the feeling that someone stole Christmas and it’s not the Grinch.
Or maybe, I let it slip through my fingers. Perhaps I let it go. In the spirit of “love and joy come to you and to you a wassail too,” I have complied with the laws of tolerance, political correctness, and what’s true for me doesn’t have to be true for you. Let’s not offend anyone. I call it Christmas, you call it Hanukah, they call it Kwanzaa. Hey, peace on earth, let’s all call it “the holiday season.”
 
Can we just call the whole thing off? Bah humbug, Mr. Scrooge!
Or let’s just make sure that everyone has their choice of prophets and get on with it:
 
Door Number 1: Allah
Door Number 2: Buddha
Door Number 3: Joseph Smith
Door Number 4: L. Ron Hubbard
Door Number 5: Whomever Oprah’s following this week
Door Number 6: Satan
Door Number 7: Jesus
Door Number 8: Nobody because Nobody’s there

But that’s not Christmas
We should practice religious tolerance—literally tolerate others’ different religious beliefs. You can’t make people believe anything anyway: we all have to choose. But Christmas. Christmas is different.

Jesus IS the reason for the season, and Christ is in Christmas, and maybe the discomfort I feel, the frustration and my Scroogness is my fault. I have succumbed. I have surrendered. I have laid down my holy reverence for what Christmas really is and have let the holiday train steamroll me back and forth jingling it’s ho-ho-ho bells until I am as poor and crippled as Tiny Tim.
 
Christmas revolution
I’m not calling for a revolution of anywhere except my heart and my actions. I have to take back Christmas – not for others, not for the world, not for Jesus. But for myself.
 
Why? Because I do know the reason for the season. I know the story in history. And I know my story about why I honor the baby born in tiny Bethlehem to a virgin girl engaged to a clueless but faithful man. I know that hardly anyone knew the first Christmas was worth celebrating —some uneducated shepherds, some astrologists from out of town, some angels who descended from on high. No one hung wreaths, or made eggnog, or decorated cookies, or created any holiday sales.
 
And I know that I celebrate Christmas because Jesus Christ’s coming signified the end of the end and the beginning of the beginning. Jesus changed everything forever. He did what only the Son of God could do—collapse the unfathomable Creator of the limitless Universe, all his power, all his being, all his extraordinariness into a man who came to live among us with the sole purpose of telling us how much he loves us.
 
I have to do Christmas in ways that don’t pay someone to keep the holiday spirit but replay the original story of Jesus coming into the world—and how that has made all the difference in my world.
 
I need to change my playlist from Merry Christmas to Mary Had a Baby. From It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas to It Came Upon a Midnight Clear. And I have to let Christmas carols ring in my ears:

Hark the herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!
Peace on earth and mercy mild
God and sinners reconciled"
Joyful, all ye nations rise
Join the triumph of the skies
With the angelic host proclaim:
"Christ is born in Bethlehem"
Hark! The herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!"
 
Christ by highest heav'n adored
Christ the everlasting Lord!
Late in time behold Him come
Offspring of a Virgin's womb
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see
Hail the incarnate Deity
Pleased as man with man to dwell
Jesus, our Emmanuel
Hark! The herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!"
 
Hail the heav'n-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings
Ris'n with healing in His wings
Mild He lays His glory by
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
Hark! The herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!"

I have to not think about Scrooge.
Scrooge was a fictional character. I am haunted by the Scrooges of Christmas past, present, and future, and I need to close the book on him, pull the plug, let him take a backseat to the main character in the one and only Christmas story – Jesus's birth.
 
 And I have talk about Jesus
It’s my choice to talk to people about Christmas and not about “the holiday season.” It’s okay to see retail stores’ decorations for what they are—bait for bringing in the bucks. It’s my prerogative to seek to enjoy Christmas for what it is, and not for what it isn’t. It should be my joy to rightfully make Christmas the opportunity to share about my Savior—and not apologize for it.
 
So, bah-humbug, Mr. Scrooge. You’ve been scrubbed.

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Who Turned the Lights On?

Bad weather today.
 
We’re having the first winter storm. Heavy sheets of rain drench everything, pouring off roofs, spewing out of gutters, turning yards into lakes. Wild sluices rampage down the mountainsides, drowning valley streams, issuing flash floods. In the high water streets, cars move like boats piloted by novice captains. Rogue gusts push people around, deform umbrellas, and deface clothes. Outside is one big soggy mess. Thankfully, inside it’s dry, calm, safe.
 
However, every once in a while, the lights flicker and sometimes we lose power completely for a few seconds. During the day, recovery amounts to the simple but irritating task of resetting every blinking digital clock—bed stand clock radio, TV, stovetop, microwave.
 
But night is a different story. In the few moments of utter darkness my slow processing mind goes from “Who turned off the lights” to “I think we’re having a power outage” to “Omigod, I can’t see!” Neurotic people like my husband station flashlights in every room of our house for just that reason. Non-neurotic (stupidly stubborn) people like me grope blindly in the dark trying to remember if the strategically placed flashlight was there or there—and then yell for help.
 
Few of us in this day and age experience pitch black. We have become accustomed to having light at all times of day. A flick of the switch, or even a flip of a cell phone, and we feel like God on the first day of Creation (And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. Genesis 1:3)
 
Used to be that when the sun went down, people stayed in. Now the setting sun is met by the twinkling start up of city lights. Cities change persona after dark. The dirt so obvious in broad daylight blends into the shadows while high above, skyscrapers dress the skyline like women in sequined gowns. Ablaze in electrifying trim, they become titillating, tantalizing, glamorous, glittering, gaudy spectacles in the night sky. New York’s Times Square, Tokyo’s Ginza, The Bund in Shanghai and Hong Kong Harbor, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and the Queen herself, Las Vegas call out, “Look at me!” and defy the darkness.
 
But what happens when the lights go out? What if all the lights went out? What if they didn’t come back on for a very long time? And what if the thank-God-you’re-neurotic-I-love-you-because-you’re-crazy neurotic’s flashlights began to fail us?
 
Well, that’s kind of what happened in the 400 years between the end of the Old Testament prophets’ writings and the coming of Jesus Christ – an era known as “the intertestamental period.”
 
There were no electric lights to go out, but the Word of God, the voice of God through his prophets that had illuminated people’s lives, guided them, offered hope in shadowy situations, that had said there is still a way, my way, when you can’t see two feet in front of you—the sound of comfort and exhortation, promise, a future and hope—went out, went silent, dark, blank. A long, uninterrupted nothing.

For 400 years, God was silent. He sent no prophets, crazy as they appeared, who did weird things like walk around naked (Isaiah 20), eat bread baked with cow dung (Ezekiel 4), take back his promiscuous wife multiple times (Hosea), survive the belly of a whale for three days (Jonah), or build a great, big boat for two of every living creature (Noah).
 
For 400 years, the lights went out on the world. There was no new news from God, no word of encouragement, no reminder of His promise that He would someday send a Messiah to save the world from utter darkness. Nada. Those who waited lived on the fumes of faith. They clung to old prophecies, such as the last words issued in the last chapter of the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, where God says this:
 
"Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and that day that is coming will set them on fire," says the LORD Almighty. "Not a root or a branch will be left to them. But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings. And you will go out and leap like calves released from the stall.” [Malachi 4:1-2]
 
And then the light broke. After 400 years of darkness, Jesus came—The Light of the World, the Messiah, Emmanuel – God with us, came with, as promised, healing in his wings! As Matthew, who wrote the first book in our New Testament say, Jesus came to fulfill the prophecy by Isaiah: the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. (Isaiah 9:1-2)
 
Jesus came to be the way for all people through the ages, across all cultures, men and women, slave and free, to have a permanent connection with God He would maintain
 
Jesus came to shine a light on our lives that would, yes, point out the unsightly, blemished, broken down, damaged, scarred, mean and far from perfect parts of us that we would rather hide. And he came not to condemn but to free us from them.
 
Jesus came to restore us and restore our relationship with God.
That is what we celebrate at Christmas.
 
So I have to ask: Have you discovered that part of Christmas yet?
 
If you feel like the lights have been turned off in your life, or maybe like you could never find the switch. If you feel like you have a little light but it’s just never enough and you long for more so that you can see clearly for once. If you have been living in darkness and in the shadow of death. If the world seems silent and without meaning. If you have no hope to grasp onto and see no future. If you question what love is. If you have been groping for a flashlight and now want to yell for help…
 
May I introduce you to Jesus?
 
It’s not hard. It’s simpler than any of us can imagine. Just say:
Jesus, I want you to come into my life. I want your light to shine in my darkness. Come into the empty and deserted places of my heart that no one has been able to occupy. Let me know that I am never alone because you are here. Forgive me for the things I have done and the things I have failed to do. Show me God’s love and open the heavens for the miraculous to occur in my life. Let me experience the power of the Holy Spirit to do the things that I cannot do. I want to live in the light, Jesus. Show me how. Show me now.

May your lights be turned on perpetually from this moment on.

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Worship Music: Who Am I | by Casting Crowns

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Listen on posterous

Who am I, that the Lord of all the earth
Would care to know my name, would care to feel my hurt
Who am I, that the bright and morning star
Would choose to light the way, for my ever wandering heart
Not because of who I am, but because of what You’ve done
Not because of what I’ve done, but because of who You are
 
 
CHORUS
I am a flower quickly fading, here today and gone tomorrow
A wave tossed in the ocean, vapor in the wind
Still You hear me when I’m calling
Lord, You catch me when I’m falling
And You’ve told me who I am, I am yours...
                    
 
Who am I, that the eyes that see my sin
Would look on me with love, and watch me rise again
Who am I, that the voice that calmed the sea
Would call out through the rain, and calm the storm in me
Not because of who I am, but because of what You’ve done
Not because of what I’ve done, but because of who You are

CHORUS

Not because of who I am, but because of what You’ve done
Not because of what I’ve done, but because of who You are
 
CHORUS

I am Yours...
Whom shall I fear, whom shall I fear
Cause I am Yours, I am Yours

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N.T. Wright on Worship

This brings us to the first of two golden rules at the heart of spirituality. You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object or your worship. Those who worship money become, eventually, human calculating machines. Those who worship sex become obsessed with their own attractiveness or prowess. Those who worship power become more and more ruthless.

So what happens when you worship the creator God whose plan to rescue the world and put it to rights has been accomplished by the Lamb who was slain? The answer comes in the second golden rule: because you were made in God’s image, worship makes you more truly human. When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive.

Conversely, when you give that same total worship to anything or anyone else, you shrink as a human being. It doesn’t, of course, feel like that at the time. When you worship part of the creation as though it were the Creator himself—in other words, when you worship an idol—you may well feel a brief “high.”  But, like a hallucinatory drug, that worship achieves its effect at a cost: when the effect is over, you are less of a human being than you were to begin with. This is the price of idolatry.

The opportunity, the invitation, the summons is there before us: to come and worship the tru God, the creator, the redeemer, and to become more truly human by doing so. Worship is at the very center of all Christian living.

N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, pp 148

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The Bottomless Pit

It started with a small pimple that then became a blackhead on my sister’s back. Every couple weeks or so, she would have me check to see if it had disappeared, and if not I’d squeeze the blackhead to try to get out all of the collected subcutaneous material (sebum and dead skin). This went on for weeks and months, as it was always still there, always more to squeeze out, never ending. We began calling it “The Bottomless Pit.”
 
This went on until I moved away, until she got married, at which point The Bottomless Pit became her husband’s responsibility. Whenever I returned home to visit, I’d ask about The Bottomless Pit – and over time it did disappear…but not disappear as in we found no trace of it, but disappear as in The Bottomless Pit gave in to a new identity, evolving from a small pinprick of a blackhead to a larger nodule, and eventually a cyst.
 
The cyst grew to walnut-size and became fibroidal and hard. No longer could anyone extract anything from it. Lodged between her shoulder blades, it couldn’t be ignored, and she sought a dermatologist who referred her to a surgeon to have it surgically excised.
 
The Bottomless Pit had taken on a life of its own, morphing from something small and, we thought, manageable to a problem requiring a specialist. The surgeon’s concern now was not just the cyst but that the fibroids had sprouted root-like threads attaching themselves to surrounding muscles…and growing in the direction of the spine. The longer he waited to remove the cyst, the greater the probability that he might cut too close to the spinal cord and cause even greater irreparable damage.
 
Such is the nature of sin. It starts as a simple pimple (acne [http://ad.vu/p3sk]), a pore or hair follicle irritated by bacteria. Unattended, the pore settles into a blackhead made of sebaceous material and dead skin that we then pick and prod with unclean hands. When it becomes noticeable, we try to squeeze it out, time and time again, but it is a bottomless pit. No matter how many times we go back and try to extract all the dirt that has become an oily, infected mess, there’s still more.
 
It’s easy enough to know where I’m going. Yeah, yeah, “and that blackhead will become a cyst that grows to infect the larger body which can only be surgically removed by the Great Physician, God.” 10 points for you.
 
But my main point is not about the cure, it’s about the pit, The Bottomless Pit—acknowledging, understanding, grasping in the depths of our being the helplessness of sin: That it’s bottomless, And that it is a pit in the worse sense of the word, pit being the biblical metaphor for hell, punishment, death. The psalmist cries out in Psalm 88:1-4
 
1 O LORD, the God who saves me,
       day and night I cry out before you.
 2 May my prayer come before you;
       turn your ear to my cry.
 3 For my soul is full of trouble
       and my life draws near the grave.
 4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
       I am like a man without strength.
 
This understanding about sin and distance from God is not Christianity 101, not mere definition of terms. This understanding is not academic head knowledge to check off our list and move on. Coming to grips with what sin is in or lives is a lifetime experience that shadows every person, a condition that we cannot shake. It does not go away because we are human.
 
How do I know that sin is a lifetime condition and affliction? I know because Paul the apostle writes about it. Paul, whose thoughts became the foundation for Christian theology because they reflected the experience of all believers, wrote about it in Romans 7:
 
14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
 
Paul’s voice echoes our own that no matter how hard we try, sin lives in us. We are infected with the bacteria of sin and we cannot wash it off. Our nature is that we are not God, and as I reflected in an earlier journal entry (The S-Word http://40dayfast.posterous.com/day-31-the-s-word <http://40dayfast.posterous.com/day-31-the-s-word> ), sin is anything and everything that is not God.
 
Paul concludes his thoughts in Romans 7:24-25 with “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

What a wretched man, woman, being am I! The longer we live with Jesus, the more we realize this. The more we see how good and holy, righteous, loving, and just God is, the more we see that we are not.
 
We cannot fool ourselves at any time that we have “arrived,” that we have come to a special place of spiritual maturity that lifts us out of our human condition and sets us apart from others. That is the most dangerous place of all. When we believe that—and all of us at recurring moments do fall prey to that illusion and lie—we have deconstructed the bottomless pit, degraded it into a self-contained cyst that grows on its own, resistant to change, redemption, and new life.
 
The best place—the bottomless pit
Anyone who has gone through Alcoholics Anonymous or a similar recovery program will tell you that you have to hit bottom, and until you do no one can help you. What happens when we hit bottom is that we feel powerless to change and finally admit that we need a higher power.
 
That is what scripture tells us in Psalm 40:
1 I waited patiently for the LORD;
       he turned to me and heard my cry.
2 He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
       out of the mud and mire;
       he set my feet on a rock
       and gave me a firm place to stand.

And in Psalm 103:
1 Praise the LORD, O my soul;
       all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
 2 Praise the LORD, O my soul,
       and forget not all his benefits-
 3 who forgives all your sins
       and heals all your diseases,
 4 who redeems your life from the pit
       and crowns you with love and compassion,

And what Jonah cried out from the belly of the whale:
To the roots of the mountains I sank down;
     the earth beneath barred me in forever.
     But you brought my life up from the pit,
     O LORD my God.  [Jonah 2:6]

The mystery of a life in Jesus Christ is that we can hold in tension the dual realities of the pit and the heights, sin and sanctification, heaven and hell. That mystery is encapsulated in one word: faith.
 
Faith is what Hebrews 11:1 says— “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” More than the “suspension of disbelief,” a term coined by the 19th Century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to explain why we can temporarily accept implausible works of fiction and art, faith dismantles disbelief.
 
Faith does not ignore the pit, it suspends us over the pit. It holds us safe even though we are close the fire, in the lions’ den, standing among accusers, and when we lose traction in life. Faith is remembering how good God is, not just relying on our honest attempts to be good.
 
And, yes, faith is knowing that God through the unparalleled act of Jesus Christ excises our sin, removes it completely when he covers over our sin with his own body. Jesus is the cover over the bottomless pit. We just have to acknowledge that it’s there.

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N.T. Wright on Worship

When we begin to glimpse the reality of God, the natural reaction is to worship him. Not to have that reaction is a fairly sure sign that we haven’t yet really understood who he is or what he’s done.

N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, p 143

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One to the Power of One

Mathematics is a magically complex, intriguing mechanism. The number of fascinating math tricks is endless, and through its relationship with science, numbers can now explain almost anything: how fast, how high, how far, how long in both microscopic and galactic scales.
 
Numbers now help us fathom the universe, such as how far to Jupiter or a distant nebulae or how large a particular plant cell. I can visit my doctor and she’ll read me the numbers that describe my health: cholesterol levels (both HDL and LDL), liver function, bone density, glucose, heart rate, vision, and of course weight.
 
I read the news and watch the stock market go up and down, weather forecast up and down, gas prices up and down, presidential approval ratings up and down, surf at  Waikiki and Waimea Bay up and down.
 
My computer screen top menu tells me how much battery charge I have left, cell phone how many minutes I’ve talked, calendar how many days until, cash register how much I owe, YouTube screen how many seconds until the end, Facebook how many friends, USDA nutritional box how many calories.
 
Numbers, numbers, numbers. Mathematicians and scientists love them as a language all its own. Musicians rely upon them for rhythm. Chefs employ them for proportions, heating requirements, cooking times. And what parent has not counted to 10 as a warning of things to come?
 
But the most important number? I thinks it’s one. One. 1. Uno, Une. Ichi, 一 .
 
One is the basic unit upon which all other calculations are based. One is the plumb line that every other number, gargantuan or fractional, multiple or decimal, is measured against, compared with, understood.
 
And One is the number that God cares about most.
 
Of course, the Bible is replete with numbers. From the beginning, in the beginning, the writer of Genesis describes the number of days God took to create the world…starting with Day 1. And when He created man, God started with one. Then He added to the one, saying, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."  [Gen 2:18]
 
We read in the Bible about Noah and God’s command for him to bring two of every kind of animal on the ark, with specific dimensions: “450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high.” We know how long it rained during The Flood—40 days and 40 nights—and we know how old Noah was when the rain began falling: 600 years old, and that it commenced on the seventeenth day of the second month of the year.
 
The Book of Numbers has its share of digits, and scripture gives the exact dimensions for the Temple that King Solomon built. And let’s not forget that in order to locate all these scripture passages, we rely upon numbers, chapter and verse, meticulously added in the second millennium A.D.
 
And yet, the most important number among all of these remains one. God cares about the one, the individual among the masses. He selects the one to accomplish specific tasks, singling out Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Ruth, David, Daniel, Mary, John the Baptist, Paul. Jesus tells of God the shepherd leaving the 99 to find the one lost sheep and says, “there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."
 
Who is the “one” that Jesus talks of? To which one did Jesus come to show the love of God? Who is the one that Jesus died for? And to which one has He given the Holy Spirit?
 
I am that one. You are that one. Every individual person, every one is that one.
 
Moreover, Jesus did not come just for the one, but he came to make us one—that is, to make us whole, a complete integer. He came to restore us so that we would not be a fraction of the person that God created us to be. God subtracts nothing from us but adds until we are absolutely full. Jesus came to take the crumbling parts of who we are, patch us back together, and regenerate us in God’s Holy Spirit into something, Someone, more whole, complete, integrated, fully functioning, more wonderful than we could ever be by ourselves.
 
The Power of One is one raised to the One power – God’s power that makes us more fully one than we could humanly be without Him. We are stronger for The One. We are more humble for the one. Raised by God to stand tall in the shadow of The One, each one of us has purpose, meaning, value that can never be torn from us. Nor can we be replicated. God’s made only one of us, and that pleases Him to see us come as we are—come one by one to Him.
 
In a world fraught with numbers, counting, calculating, comparing, it would do us good to stop daily, every day, to consider The One who loves us and knows who we are apart from others. We need to know that God sees us, one among the many. And that’s the only thing that counts.

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