...and that is what Christmas is all about

by Dan Phillips

First:

And then:

The last two Sundays at CBC were given to framing the Christmas history against the larger backdrop of the saga of redemption.

First, we started literally at Genesis 1:1, in Christmas in Genesis.

Then in Christmas in Isaiah, we traced the thread of the Seed, from Genesis 3:15 to Isaiah 53.  (This includes a robust presentation of some of my reasons for insisting that Isaiah 7:14 looks to the birth of Jesus Christ, and no other.)

Merry Christmas!

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When We Had Gone Astray

by Frank Turk

So here's the point: Christmas is not a celebration of everyday life.  The purpose of Christmas is not to celebrate your middle-class life and ethics, or even to enjoy simple human good will, or to inspire it.  It's not even to give thanks for a decent year past -- however good and godly it might seem to try that.  The point of Christmas, if I may say it this way, is that God is fully aware that the world and the lives of those living here are all headed for a sad and sober end if nothing changes.

Because let's face it: things don't really change.  You might make a case for all manner of improvements in law or economics or standards of living, but our core complaint this week is that innocent people die all the time for no reason.  That never changes -- it's the status quo of the world.

That is: until Christmas.

Look: a few years ago I made a point of telling everyone that God's view of Christmas is a strange and amazing balance between his threat to bring justice to disobedient people and his promise to save them from their utter disregard for him.  Another time I made it a point to tell you that the miracle at Christmas is not that a legion of fantastic beings sang out to God's praise in a field -- it was that a baby was born and laid in a manger, fulfilling the promises of God with God Himself.  That was a pretty good one.

This year, let me say this: in this world where your home may seem empty because of a gigantic loss, and where the death of innocents seems to be an insurmountable sign of how the times have turned, God has already taken it upon himself to change the status quo.  The point here -- the actual reason that there is a Christmas, actually a moment when the world affected by the church of God stops and stares, expecting to see something completely amazing -- is that Jesus, who is God, didn't try to remain equal with God. Instead he gave up everything, and was born in a manger to became a slave, when he became like one of us. Jesus was humble the way only God can be humble, surrendering the Glory which Isaiah saw in the throne room of God to become a miracle wrapped in rags. He obeyed God -- and his obedience didn't stop at being born in a barn.  His obedience took him lower still, to a death on a cross when he deserved worship and honor and power, so that the death of innocents would, in an eternal and permanent way, be defeated forever.

Jesus is not just some ephemeral housekeeper who can tidy us up right now -- or at least until we toss ourselves back into the filth. He's not someone who merely helps us avoid the worst right now, as if God has nothing better to do than to stop us from doing exactly what we want to do.  His story is not just a story about truth: he's the one guy who understands our weaknesses because he has suffered through them all, refusing to sin, and then he died for them all so that they can all not only be defeated, but forgiven.

And here we are -- worried that the something was ruined because the sins of our society are more obvious this week than they are most other weeks. I think something was ruined when the angels sang, "Glory to God in the Highest! And on Earth, peace to men on whom his favor rests," -- and what was ruined was the status quo.  Since then it has been our problem to catch up with that -- to live as if that really happened, so we can make much of this Jesus, and enjoy him forever.

This is the true meaning of Christmas, dear reader, and tossing out another example of human moral destitution which tears down our illusions about how safe and civilized we are doesn't harm even one thin angel hair of tinsel in that kind of Christmas: it causes the brilliance of Christmas to shine like an arclight of hope which leads us to our one and only savior.

This Christmas, I beg you: look for him, find him, and throw yourself on him, because in that stable, and at his cross, and ultimately at his empty tomb and his seat at the right hand of God, is your only hope in this world where death is the common end.  Let nothing you dismay: for Jesus Christ our savior was born upon this day to save us all from death and sin's power when we had gone astray.  Those are the tidings of comfort and joy.

I wish you good tidings of great joy this Christmas, and true prosperity and eternal life in the New Year.

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The Natural State

by Frank Turk

Yes, I am aware that I stole Dan's slot yesterday, and I am now using my normal slot this week -- the bad news for you is that I will also steal Dan's slot tomorrow and then post a final time on Friday.  You are stuck with me this week like gum on the bottom of your sneaker.

Yesterday, I said you can't ruin Christmas with the death of innocents, and most of you opened up the book of Matthew to start second guessing where I am going with this.  Well, close your Bibles, OK?  Not because they are useless or that we won't get there: close them so you are not distracted by your own Bible-Drill cleverness from what is happening in the world this week.

As I page through the stories about the tragedy at Sandy Hook, this one stands out to me as the current conventional wisdom (even if it got the shooters name wrong).  In it, we find this observation by one of the locals:

At St. John’s Episcopal Church, 54-year-old Donna Denner, an art teacher at an elementary school in nearby Danbury whose classroom was locked down after the shooting, said she feels the same way she did after 9/11 but isn’t sure the rest of the country does. 

“I don’t know if the rest of the country is struggling to understand it the same way we are here,” she said. “Life goes on, but you’re not the same. Is the rest of the country — are they going about their regular activities? Is it just another news story to them?”

Now, let's not run this woman over for her grief at the loss, the violence, and the invasiveness of what happened near her.  She lives in close proximity to a lunatic shooting spree.  What has happened to her and to everyone within driving distance of the Dunkin Donuts in Newtown is a moral and civil transgression of what we think is the natural and safe state of our own homes and lives.  It is to our credit, in a Romans 2 way, that we believe we actually live in a peaceful society.

See: what has actually happened here is not that the unthinkable has occured.  It is that the unthinkable has happened to us.  On the exact same day this tragedy took place, for example, exactly half-way around the world in China 22 children were knifed to death by a lunatic (a repeat of a fatal attack on 23 children in 2010; thanks to alert readers for the correction).  But even in saying that, let's be honest: statistically (Thx, CDC), last week, 662 people died in car accidents.  610 were accidentally poisoned -- that is, they probably drank or ate something they thought was harmless and it turned out that it would kill them, and about 10% of those were children.  476 people fell to their deaths.  If it was an average week in Chicago, 6 people were shot to death.  The President isn't delivering eulogies there.

You know: deaths by medical error outnumber firearm fatalities by a factor of 17:1; deaths by medical error outnumber auto fatalities by a factor of 5:1.  You think you're safe in the hospital, but I would suggest that you're in one of the most dangerous places in the world for two reasons: both you and the care providers are, in all real respect for their years of hard work and real intention to be doing no harm, overconfident.

My point is not to minimize the death of these children, or make you fear the hospital: it is to open your eyes to the fact that the natural state of the world is not safe and secure.  The natural state of the world -- the way it really is all around us every day and we simply overlook it -- is that it is a deadly and dangerous place.  

See: the natural state of things is that people die all the time due to no direct fault of their own.  Families are left fatherless or motherless -- or both.  The oldest child, or only child, is safe on the rainy night driving home from work and is killed the next night when she went to the convenience store for milk and a drunk ignored the red light.  The fellow in the locker next to you at work doesn't realize the safety on the overhead crane is broken, and you have to explain it to the OSHA investigator because you pulled him out from under it, too late.

But here's the thing: this does not spoil Christmas.  It in no way denigrates Christmas, or makes Christmas a joke.  This fact makes Christmas necessary.

We'll consider why tomorrow.

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A Whiff of Sense

by Frank Turk

I've gotten a few e-mails this past weekend asking about or anticipating my blog post in the week before Christmas about the act of insane violence in Sandy Hook.  Let me say that on Friday, I was dead-set against writing anything about this event for a couple of reasons.  One is that everybody has written about this already, right? Everyone has laid their idiosyncratic viewpoint on the thing and come up with everything from banning guns to handing out free guns to some truism with the word "Gospel" in it.  And of all the things I hope to be as a blogger, being one voice like the others has never been my objective.

Another reason, frankly, was that I am actually tired of blogging.  I have been having a modest conversation with Dan about my ennui, and while he makes a decent point about the things we have accomplished in the last 7-8 years ("we" including Phil and Officer Pecadillo), this isn't 2006 anymore and I'm not in my mid-30's anymore.  So one thing weighing on me is that I have more important things to do, like ministry.

The greatest reason, for better or worse, that I did not want to blog about this, if I can invite you to be invasively-curious, is that I was off on Friday for the first time in months.  I was spending the day at home with my exquisite family, and I wanted nothing to do with anything other than them.  My daughter and I built an amazing gingerbread house out of graham crackers.  We bought Christmas presents which will blow minds.  I ignored work and the world long enough for my wife to enjoy my company AND I also got to watch about 3 hours worth of new Avengers episodes on Netfix with the Boy.

But the news of the shooting kept intruding.  At one point I was walking into my house, and it occurred to me that it was possible that there was a father walking into his house in Connecticut, which he spends his waking hours paying for, where he spends his nights loving the people in it, and now (for him) there would be one of those people gone forever.  There are presents under his ridiculously-merry-and-bright tree for that person who is now gone.  There's a room in this house where that missing person still has his or her stuff, and that person isn't coming back to play with the Legos or the American Girl dolls or the Thomas table or the Ponies, or to need a bed time story prolonged by a glass of water or a few crackers.  As I walked into my house, I could feel the oppressive emptiness that this other fellow in Connecticut was getting sucked into by the lack of one person.  And all he did wrong in this instance, on that day, was what he does right and has been doing right for the last 2200 days or so.  And this, at Christmas, when we think the world will be full of tidings of comfort and joy.  For my part, I wanted nothing to do with insulting or offending that guy, and the other parents like him, because they were the victims who had their human love and human joy murdered.

Let me say this: I doubt a few verses of Silent Night or Oh Come All Ye Faithful will be enough to console that fellow.  He now has to live with Christmas in the real world where a fatherless boy murders his mother, and then other people's children, on a Thursday.

This past week, by way of comparison, RC Sproul Jr. has been celebrating the first anniversary of his wife's death.  "Celebrating" is the right word, however incongruous it is, if you watch him -- because he is in the process of translating his sorrow in loss, through the immeasurable gain his wife Denise has received in leaving this life and coming into the immediate presence of God, into seeing the face of Christ.  You know: I have been rather hard on R.C. Jr. over the last few months as he and I have had very different ideas about political activism and the American citizen's role in creating political justice in this nation.  He's almost exactly my age, and we are two guys who, except for a few details, have enough in common to get on each other's nerves.  But there are empty places in the Sproul home which I cannot imagine and refuse to consider myself because, if I am honest, I am not sure I would present the faith and hope RC does as he faces them.  He looks into death and sees Jesus, and is glad to the measure that he is also at a loss -- for his loss is not swallowed up in death, but in victory over death, and sin, and sickness, and so on.

I realize that this doesn't make a whiff of sense to most people -- other Christians especially.  You know: melancholy memes go around when stuff like this happens.  Christmas is Ruined for someone.  Christmas is Ruined when I lose my job at Christmas.  Christmas is Ruined when I am evicted at Christmas.  Christmas is Ruined when I suffer violent crime at Christmas, or I am diagnosed with terminal death at Christmas, or a beloved member of my very home and heart who sleeps in one of the beds I have provided and whom I feed and cloth not merely out of duty but ought of love and fatherly concern is murdered when he was trying to learn the alphabet.  Christmas is ruined, and for someone like RC to spout his fantastic praises and felicitations speaks more to hypothetical-me about his lack of seriousness about what has just happened rather than to his faith.  He's another Calvinist quack negating real loss and sorrow and claiming they are nothing.

Well, let me suggest something before you go and toss the tree into the fireplace and put the gifts into the compactor at work out of a desperate attempt to crush the small symbols of joy with your rightfully-large burden of sin-sickness and loss-weariness.

It's possible that maybe you could ruin Christmas by making it into a holiday of introspection.  You could make it a time when we reflect on ourselves and who we have become in the last year -- or as you get older, who you have become since you were young and full of expectation that next year's return would be greater than this year's baubles.  That kind of introspection will, as Dickens taught us with Scrooge, make us old and bitter.  That kind of "holiday" will destroy us over time as we become, over time, the people who do what seems right in our own eyes.

It's possible to ruin Christmas, I suppose, by making it into a mere tradition of family reunion.  Many have already done that, and let's face it: it's a bad deal for the people related to us because you have met us, right?  Nevermind that we feel the same toward them -- getting together in those circumstances won't make it any better.  We'd be better off saving the money we'd shell out for such a thing for our retirements as it would turn into real money after 50 or 60 years if we are fortunate enough to get than many white Christmases.

But here's the thing: I'm willing to say, in the shadow of the insanity at Sandy Hook, that you cannot ruin Christmas with the murder of innocents.  You can only make the need for Christmas more obvious.

More tomorrow.

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