Holidays

Night Watch

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And he came to the disciples and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, “So, could you not watch with me one hour? Matthew 26:40 ESV

Sorry, Jesus. I would have been there for the whole hour, but this is how my Good Friday morning went . . .

I am a lark, not an owl. So, when our church asked for volunteers for the night watch, a prayer vigil in our chapel between the Holy Thursday service commemorating Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, and the first Good Friday service at 8:00 AM, I volunteered for the 4-5 AM slot — a time I was sure no one else wanted.

I had set my alarm for 3:00 but woke at 2:30. I was a little anxious. The press has reported more random acts of violence in the subway in recent weeks. Someone is punching women in the face. A guy was pushed in front of a train last week. I chose my outerwear with some thought about how well it would repel a knife attack and whether my boots could provide a painful kick to an attacker’s shins. Nobody better mess with me. I’ve been working out!

Hey, in the Garden of Gethsemane, one of the disciples carried a shiv.

At 3:20, I didn’t find any muggers on the subway platform. I didn’t find anyone. It was the first time I ever saw it empty.

According to the MTA app, a train should have brought me to the church by 3:45, but it was now 18 minutes late.

After a few minutes, I saw a man slowly walk down the stairs to the platform. NYC is hard on people whose joints hurt. He got to the bottom and then sat down on the steps. That is a good way to get run over by people running to catch their train, but not at 3:30 AM.

After a few minutes, I walked past him to recheck the expected arrival time. As I did, I saw that he moved slowly because he was wearing a man’s white sneaker on his right foot and a woman’s low-heeled pump on his left. I suspect neither fit him well, but they matched the rest of his wardrobe.

I returned to checking my email but felt bad for the guy. Finally, I pulled a bill out of my wallet and handed it to him. He looked at me in surprise but didn’t take it. I thought at first he had no hands, but he had pulled his arms out of his sleeves to wrap them around his shivering body. He had to struggle to get a hand out to take my handout.

The amount I gave him might buy breakfast from one of the vendors who set up on the sidewalk outside the station. I don’t know. Inflation hits the poor even harder than people like me.

But it bought me an easier conscience. I’ve kept that price down.

I got on the train and started reading a story about how right-wing podcasters and politicians are attacking Catholic Charities for helping “illegals,” even though the director of one agency that has received threats against their staff says that everyone they help has papers. He agreed that there is a lot wrong with our immigration system. All the church is trying to do is pick up the pieces.

One center received about 75 threatening or obscene phone calls after Fox News targeted it. When the director said they were only trying to carry out Jesus’ command to welcome strangers, he was told “that the gospel was wrong.”

As I finished reading this, my watch told me that my 4:00 AM time to keep watch in the chapel had started, but my train was still crawling under the East River.

I looked at the other people in my car. There may have been twenty. I had no idea whether any of them were “legal.” What I did know is that my city can’t run without them. Four years ago, we were hailing the people who clean floors, deliver food to groceries, and empty bedpans in nursing homes as “essential workers.” They were “heroes.” Now, they were just people who would be late for work.

It was 4:00 AM. I said I would keep watch, so I started praying for the people around me, who were so tired that they slept sitting up.

I finally got to the church at 4:15. It is an architectural jewel on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The 12,500-pipe organ is the largest in New York City, and the preaching is world-class.

I call it “Jacquie’s church.” When we retired, she got to pick. It is an Episcopal church whose rector calls it “the poorest rich church in Manhattan.”

Jacquie and I go there because of the line of hungry men, women, and kids that stretches around the block every morning and every evening, waiting to be fed at the church’s hunger program. We also go because everyone is welcome at worship regardless of who they are, what they look like, what they wear, and who they love.

I took a seat in the chapel.

The clergy had left a plate of bread and pitcher of wine on the altar from the previous evening’s communion service — “Christ’s offering for us,” as the communion liturgy says.

Last night, I read what Thomas Merton wrote in his journal after contemplating these symbols. He saw them flowing through and dissolving life’s compartments—the walls we build between sacred and secular, clean and unclean, holy and profane, Republican and Democrat, rich and poor. All things come together here.

After spending (almost) an hour “watching” with Jesus, my train ride home was faster. My neighborhood was beginning to wake up — or had not yet gone to bed. One of the things I learned when I started going to my gym before dawn is that the “ladies of the evening” work into the morning. I’ve quit pretending that I don’t see them. One young woman I often pass wished me a good morning and I told her to stay safe. Another tugged my sleeve and used what may be the only English word she knows to tell me what she had to offer. I wished her well, too.

It’s a tough world out there, and the nights are long.

I am grateful that Jacquie’s church has taught me this prayer:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary; bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.

Blessed Are The Anguished

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— Demonstration supporting Sammy’s Law, March 22, 2024. Photo: Roger Talbott

This is the week when Christians recall the passion and death of Jesus. On Thursday, we have a service to remember his last supper. On Friday, we often have long services in the afternoon that recall the seven things he said on the cross or the 12 events that happened on the way to the cross.

All these are in preparation for the joyous celebration of Christ’s resurrection on Easter Day. 

Some churches also have a service of Tenebrae — a word that means “darkness.” The service consists of lamentations from the Psalms and the prophets. No one preaches. If there is music, it is also the music of lament and grief — think, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.” Periodically, a candle at the front of the church is extinguished, and the church grows so dark it is hard to see anything but the candles.

In the end, only one large candle remains lit and it is removed from the sanctuary. The congregation sits in silence. Then there is a loud noise. Last night, someone beat on an unseen kettle drum. The large candle is returned to the front of the church, a symbol of St. John’s words, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.” 

When I used to lead Tenebrae services in the suburban church I pastored when our sons were growing up, our son Matt helped me by making the loud noise at the end of the service. He created a loud, hollow noise that sounded like a door slamming shut on your tomb. 

As an adult, Matt sometimes attended a Tenebrae service even if he didn’t attend church on Easter morning. He said, “It is the world’s best horror show.” 

As I recited lamentations in my church’s Tenebrae service this year, I remembered how all of us who loved Matt felt when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and watched over the next ten terrible weeks as he slowly wasted away in front of us, even as the light of his love for life and his family fought back against the darkness. 

The feeling we had, like the feeling the followers of Jesus must have had in the last few hours of his life, was anguish. 

It is the same feeling I have had for the last six months about Israel and Gaza. 

I have Jewish family and friends for whom Israel’s national security represents a kind of psychological safety net in a world that periodically decides to blame Jews for everything. The brutal attack on October 7-8 poked a hole in that safety net. Many of them see the net being further degraded as Israel’s short-term military objectives risk the long-term safety of all the world’s Jews. 

As what might have been a just war has become just war, my friends and friends of friends who are Muslim, Arabic Christians, and people whose skin doesn’t match the paint samples Americans arbitrarily call “White” see our country’s support of Israel (now waning) as a clear indication that some lives matter more than others. 

The great temptation is to feel nothing.  After all, I can’t do anything about it. It is the way of the world. As one of my pastors said last Sunday, most of the people involved in Jesus’ crucifixion treated it the way we Americans treat mass shootings. It was just another day. 

His Sunday sermon, the Tenebrae service last night, Holy Thursday, and Good Friday remind me if I am to remain whole and human in this cruel world, I am called to feel anguish. 

I Googled “anguish” and found this:

“Anguish is often referred to as emotional distress or pain, and it can encompass several different emotions, such as trauma, grief, sorrow, fear, and anxiety. It’s a reasonable, typical, and sometimes even a rational response to a horrible situation.” 

Betterhealth.com

It isn’t easy to choose to feel distress and pain. No one can do it all the time, as the exhausted caregivers of dying loved ones know all too well.  Yet we also know that shutting those feelings out entirely makes us less than human. 

We need rituals and seasons that bring us back to our anguish.

 In the last few years, I’ve been fascinated by how people who never go to church, especially young people, show up for Ash Wednesday. Having ashes applied to your forehead while hearing “Remember you are dust” is as grim a ritual as there is in Christianity’s toolbox.  Yet, if a clergy person is willing to stand in a public place and perform that ritual, people will line up for it, showing that it reaches something that happy, clappy weekly “celebrations” do not. It helps us get in touch with the anguish of life itself. I suspect that if there were some way to take Tenebrae out into the streets, people would line up for that, too. 

I experience the same “vibe” when I attend Yom Kippur services at Malkhut, the Jewish spiritual community my daughter-in-law, Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg,  has formed here in Western Queens, and hear my son, Jim, chant in Hebrew alphabetical order the names of the sins we all commit. (You can taste that vibe by listening to Leonard Cohen sing “Who by Fire.”) I suspect that my Muslim friends who are observing Ramadan are getting in touch with the same feelings. 

 I have recently seen the importance of secular rituals of lamentation, too. I have attended demonstrations led by Jews and Muslims demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. I recently marched with neighbors who are demanding a radical change in New York State law — to give New York City the right to set its own speed limits — a week after another child had been run over in Queens. All of them are acts of communal anguish and lament.

As the Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann has repeatedly pointed out, lamentation is prophetic. It expresses humanity’s resistance to the Powers that Be, who insist cruelty and death are necessary. Living in this world without anguish means caving to the Powers that are trying to squeeze us into their image.  

Jesus once said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” We find comfort because we are not alone; we are part of the human race made in the image of God, who often weeps over us.  

This is part of a larger project on the Beatitudes. I would appreciate any comments you would like to share.

Light in the Groundhog Hole

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Measured by the number of times I have seen and referred to it, Groundhog Day is my favorite movie. I can’t help thinking about it on February 2nd. (Spoilers ahead).

Bill Murray plays Pittsburgh weatherman Phil Connors. He and his producer, played by Andie McDowell, and his cameraman, played by Chris Elliott, check into an inn in Punxsutawney, PA, on February 1 because the following day they have to report the annual ceremony in which a groundhog (also named Phil) will see his shadow at sunrise and predict six more weeks of winter — not a stretch because February 2nd is smack-dab between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

Phil gives a lackluster description of the meaningless event and is eager to return to Pittsburgh. However, a blizzard forces him and his crew to stay an extra night. The following day, he is awakened by Sonny and Cher singing, “I’ve got you, Babe!” — the same song that woke him up the day before, and the announcer says that it is February 2nd. Phil lives Groundhog Day over and over again, and then again, and again.

I’m reminded of the movie, not just because today is February 2nd, but because, like Phil, I keep repeating something over and over again.

I am trying to write a book about the Beatitudes of Jesus — nine sayings that each begin with the word “Blessed.”

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek.

These first three, especially, make no sense. What is blessed about poverty, spiritual or otherwise?

Mourning isn’t exactly “happy” (another possible translation of the word “Blessed.”)

And who wants to be meek?

So, I sit down every morning and write a few hundred words. The next day, I write a few hundred more without making any discernible progress toward writing a book.

I’m taking today off to think about Bill Murray’s Phil and what happens to him in the movie.

When the movie begins, Phil is an unlikable, arrogant bastard. He dislikes and looks down on his producer, cameraman, and all the people in Punxsutawney.

What makes repeating Groundhog Day hell for him is that he is stuck in this hick town with these dumb people, repeatedly reporting on a meaningless event.

However, over time, Phil begins to see how spiritually impoverished his life is. He has no friends. He loves no one. No one loves him. He isn’t doing anything that matters to him. This depresses him. Slowly, he starts to make some changes in his daily routine. For example, he takes a piano lesson every afternoon from a teacher who thinks he is her new student each time he comes to her door. The daily routine doesn’t change, but Phil learns to play the piano.

By the end, Phil begins to appreciate Larry, the cameraman and falls in love with his producer. He starts living a meaningful life, not by spending hours meditating or studying any religion’s scriptures, but by simply facing the fact that his life isn’t worth living and meekly (the word in the Greek New Testament means “teachable”) learning how to live a better life step-by-step.

The working title for my book about the Beatitudes is A Life Worth Living Forever.

I think that is what the gospels mean by the phrase “eternal life.”

Jesus transitions from the Beatitudes to the rest of the Sermon on the Mount by declaring, “You are the light of the world. You are the salt of the earth.” He says keeping the light under a bushel basket or for salt to lose its flavor isn’t right.

In the movie, Phil eventually gets out of his own way. He creates a community of friends that resembles the Kingdom of Heaven on a small scale. He accepts and makes amends for how he has treated his co-workers and television audience. He eventually becomes the richest man in town, measured by how much he is loved. His light shines.

I can’t seem to explain the Beatitudes, but I can point to Bill Murray’s Phil and say, “That’s what they look like.”

Like Phil, we all have a light inside of us, and Life will teach us how to let it shine if we will let it.

And thank you, friends, for reading this. I’m trying to learn to write like Phil learned to play the piano.

Christmas Dinner in Heaven

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Years ago, I was waiting tables for a spaghetti dinner — a fundraiser for the church put on by our men’s group. As I refilled water glasses, an older woman with lots of red lipstick and L’Oreal’s best black hair asked if she could talk with the pastor. 

I wiped my hands on my apron and admitted that I was the pastor. 

“Could I ask you a question?” She said timidly. 

I suspected I was the first clergyperson she had ever spoken to, so I encouraged her to ask whatever she wanted. 

She asked, “When we get to heaven, will we be able to go out to eat? I like going out to eat and hope I can still do it in heaven.” 

I didn’t know what to say at first. When telling this story to friends, I ask, “Where were Paul Tillich and Karl Barth when I needed them?” And people who know who Paul Tillich and Karl Barth were laugh uproariously.

I’m proud to say that the earnestness in her voice kept me from laughing at her. Although I suppressed a grin when I pulled an old sermon illustration out of my brain’s back pocket:

“You know, the Bible doesn’t say a lot about heaven. It is kind of like trying to describe Florida to an Eskimo without the aid of pictures. You couldn’t convey palm trees and warm sunny beaches. You could only talk about what isn’t there: no ice and snow, no polar bears, or blizzards. Most of what the Bible says about heaven is what isn’t there: no pain, no mourning,  no crying, or death. But, it does assure us that heaven is good.”

I was pretty proud of that.

I now know that I got things backward. She was teaching me. Not the other way around.

The woman’s question and my response illustrate a problem all religions have. The mystics, theologians, and religious professionals monopolize the faith. They have the visions, create the philosophical systems, and perform the rituals. They often give the impression that you have to be inclined to meditate and pray for hours. You have to have a vocabulary that includes words like “eschaton,” “numinous,” and “ontological.” And you need to be able to calculate the dates of Rosh Hashana, Easter,  or Eid in your head to be religious. 

So where does that leave the lady who wanted to go out to eat in heaven? It leaves her in a category we professionals call “the laity,” whom we “serve” if they are pious enough to sit at our feet and absorb our wisdom. 

But this lady didn’t even come to church unless we were serving a delicious spaghetti dinner for even less money than Denny’s early-bird special.  What about her? 

Well, who do you think Hell is for? 

I am ashamed to say that I used to think that this religious caste system was real.  I, of course, was deeply concerned about those who were “lost.” I did everything I could to “save” them by getting them to come to church. 

In reality, I was the one who was lost — lost in the clouds of theology, biblical studies, and religious ritual, stuff that can be helpful if, in the end, it comes down to earth where people really live.  

Thank God that religion isn’t left only to us religious professionals. Occasionally, religions produce Great Souls who bypass the pros to bring faith down to earth.  

One of those Great Souls was Francis of Assisi, who helped ordinary people in the 1200s CE understand the most difficult Christian doctrine, Incarnation: the claim that God became human in Jesus of Nazareth. 

The theologians who are way higher up on the Christian caste system than I am have come up with ways that try to express what we mean by Incarnation: 

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,  
⁠the only Son of God,  
⁠eternally begotten of the Father,  
⁠God from God, Light from Light,  
⁠true God from true God,  
⁠begotten, not made,  
⁠of one Being with the Father.  
⁠Through him all things were made.  
⁠For us and for our salvation      
⁠⁠he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit  
⁠he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,  
⁠and was made man.

Nicene Creed

Francis could recite these words in Latin and did so every time he went to Mass, and maybe he found them meaningful. But to most people, that theology is made from the same fabric as the Emperor’s new clothes. 

Francis found another way to teach the Incarnation to ordinary people. He lived it. That means he lived, as much as possible, like Jesus. Like Jesus, he depended on the generosity of others to give him his daily bread, believing in a God who loved him as much as the birds of the air who neither sow nor reap. He did not have a closet full of clothes because he trusted a God who clothes the lilies of the field. Maybe he couldn’t heal lepers like Jesus, but he could embrace them. 

When people saw Francis, they saw what Jesus looked like. When people saw Jesus, they saw what God looks like. 

That is tough for us. Jesus lived in a world where people thought God was like Caesar. 

Francis lived in a world where people thought God was like a King or the Pope, who was even more powerful than kings at that time. 

Today, many people believe they see God in a billionaire who lives in Mar-a-Lago and is a once-and-future POTUS.

But God is like Jesus, and Jesus is like Francis, and Francis is like you or me when we are most open-hearted and vulnerable. 

Every year, when Christmas comes around, we have a chance to understand Incarnation again. We can see God when we look in the manger. 

We don’t put up a tree at our house. We hang a quilted one on our dining room wall thanks to Jacquie’s sister, Joanne. And on the sideboard beneath it, we arrange a motley manger scene. Most of the characters were carved from thorns by an artist in Nigeria, where my aunt served as a missionary. But there is also a silver elephant from India. 

When our boys were small, we had wooden figures created by Fisher-Price. They spent the month of December rearranging them every day. As soon as they grow to be too big to fit in a manger themselves, kids understand, as they look down on the scene like angels, what the scene is telling us: 

God is here
In the messiness of birth. 
In the love of the two people who gave him life. 
With the cow, sheep, donkey, camels, (and elephant.)
And we take our cues from the shepherds and kings who bow down before him in love and wonder — the same love and wonder we feel in the presence of every new baby.
 


If I had been looking in the manger instead of up at the heavens that evening when the lady asked me if we would be able to go out to eat in heaven, I would have remembered a story that begins: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding feast for his son.”  It goes on to say the people you would imagine a king would invite to the feast were all too busy to come. So, the king had his servants go out and pull people off the highways and byways to join the feast.

In other words, the answer to the woman’s question was right in front of her — and right in front of me — in that plate of spaghetti set on a paper-covered folding table where she sat with her friends on each side of her and had a lively conversation with people sitting across from her whom she just met. That’s heaven. In fact, it’s where people who never darkened the door of a church get waited on by pastors who fill their water glasses and take their orders (meat sauce or mushroom?) — and the creators of the Nicene Creed wash the dishes.

When we look in the manger and see God wrapped in swaddling clothes, we begin to see God in the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, in animals, in young lovers and old ones, too. We are in heaven when we share our deepest hurts and greatest joys with a friend or vice versa.  Even a small piece of bread and a sip of wine can tell us who God is, why we are here, and where we are going better than all the theologians in the world. 

So, Merry Christmas. 

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The Light in A Winter Solstice World

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tealight candle lit up
Photo by Mohammad reza Fathian on Pexels.com

As a pastor, I knew that the Christmas Eve candle-lighting service was probably the most important religious experience many congregation members would have all year. One proof was a bride who insisted she wanted a candlelighting service at her wedding. I explained to her that it would have a different impact on a July afternoon than on Christmas Eve. She insisted. I could tell by the look on her face, as the candles were barely visible in the sunlight, that I had been right.

But, on one of the longest, darkest nights of the year, lighting those candles does pack an emotional and, yes, spiritual wallop. It still moved me, as tired and frazzled as I usually was by the time the organist began to play “Silent Night” around 11:40 PM.

The symbolism is obvious: a single candle lights another candle and those two candles light two more and the four light four more, and by the time we were singing:

Radiant beams from Thy holy face

With the dawn of redeeming grace

Jesus, Lord at they birth!

the dark sanctuary was bathed in a beautiful warm light. Yes, once again, we see that “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” (John 1:5)

I got up early this Christmas morning and reread a journal entry from a few years ago in which I recorded the words of St. Symeon the New Theologian (if you can call someone who lived 1,000 years ago “new”), who had another perspective on the lighting of one candle by another:

Just as if you lit a flame from a flame,

it is the whole flame you receive.

It caused me to look at this sad old world differently this Christmas morning, guided by St. Symeon and Fred Rogers, who told parents that when there is news of wars and disasters, they should teach children to “look for the helpers.”

Where are they?

They are the people who, Jesus says, not only do the works that he does but will “do greater things than these.” (John 14:12)

For example, the gospels tell us about the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people that Jesus healed. Every day, millions of people heal millions more in our world because the healers believe in life, which I believe is the same as believing in the One who called himself “Life” (John 14:6).

Jesus is said to have fed “five thousand, not counting women and children.” Yesterday, our pastor said that our church’s hunger program serves almost that many meals weekly, and we are just one of hundreds of programs in New York City. There must be millions around the world, from the small churches that serve a meal once a month to the UN trucks trying to get into Gaza. It is still not enough, but the number grows every year.

Jesus welcomed into his fellowship people that others rejected. I understood early that every church, no matter how small, always has at least one person whom one of my colleagues called a “humdinger” — someone who was difficult to love. Yet, the congregation did, in fact, love that person. If you go to church, you can name that humdinger. And even if you don’t, I am sure that someone in your circle of friends and family is difficult to love, but you include that person anyway. And, if you are like me, there are days when you are the humdinger. And I believe that anyone who welcomes a humdinger welcomes Christ. As Mother Teresa used to say, “Jesus wears distressing disguises.”

I know that our world is torn apart by war. Millions are being forced out of their homelands by hunger, violence, and extreme poverty only to be met by walls built by people who have not yet been forced out of their homes. I know (too well) that cancer still kills people before their time, and new diseases appear without warning. I believe my own eyes, so I see the climate changing in real time. There is so much to be discouraged about.

But, if I look for the helpers, the people who have caught fire from Jesus — or have the same fire that Jesus had whether they call themselves Christians or not, I do not despair. They are not “little Christ,” which is what the word “Christian” means. They burn with the whole flame and fill this world with a soft, warm light if only we would look for it today.

The Mystery of Three

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“Is Jacquie there?” 

This question — the very first words I heard after I picked up the phone –  told me that my mother-in-law was calling. It was back in the day when people paid for long-distance calls by the minute and she didn’t have the pennies to spare on chit-chatting with her son-in-law. I got it.  I also suspected that her feelings about me were . . . complicated. 

Over the years, however, we forged a relationship.

She and I were both early risers. When she would come to visit, we would sit together in the kitchen drinking our first cup of coffee of the day and we would talk about the three people we both loved with all our hearts.  Not long before she was diagnosed with the cancer that would take her life, she sent me a Father’s Day card on which she listed all the good qualities she saw in me. It was an affirmation I still cling to. 

My love for her daughter and her love for our sons transformed a difficult relationship into a kind of friendship. She died more than 30 years ago, and I still miss her.

We are tempted to see the world in binaries. The most fundamental being “I” on the one hand and anything else, including “You,” on the other. And when it is just “you” and “me,” we either try to absorb each other, or push each other away.

The first page of the Bible says God made it that way. On the first day God creates the first binary: day and night. On the second day, God separates earth from sky. I never noticed until someone pointed it out to me recently, that God does not bless these first two days. These binaries are static; in opposition to each other. But, on the third day, God separates the land from the sea and these binaries start producing a third thing: Life. That is when God starts calling the Creation “good.”

This is the mystery of Three.

The ancient alchemists were focused on transformation.  How does one thing turn into another? The alchemists knew that one substance all by itself was inert. Two substances, like oil and water, would never really come together. But, add a third thing — a coagulant — and they would form something new. 

The alchemists wanted to turn lead into gold. But there is also an alchemy that makes a distrustful stranger, a competitor, even an enemy, into a friend if you add a third thing. According to the mystics, that third thing is either Love or Fear. Both of them can turn enemies into friends.

You know the saying:  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Fear seems to be the basis of everything from family dysfunctions to international relations.  

We create communities based on fear, not because we are bad people, but because we have evolved to sense threats to our existence. And we have learned that we have a greater chance to survive those threats if we band together. The members of NATO have many competing interests, but they recognize that Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine implies a threat to each of them. That is not an irrational fear. 

However, alliances based on fear can survive only as long as the threat persists. Indeed, NATO was on the verge of falling apart as Russia became more integrated into the global community. 

Lacking any genuine threat, human communities are tempted to manufacture fears in order to hold themselves together. Just think of the ways our political parties energized their bases to get out the vote two months ago. Sadly, it works. And it is easy to do. 

But, there is another image of the “Three” that appears in front of churches during this short season of 12 days called “Christmastide” — a mother, a father, and a baby. You don’t have to be Christian or even religious to understand that this is a symbol of Love with a capital “L.” 

It is a reminder that human beings can and do forge relationships based on their mutual love for some other person or thing.  At weddings we laugh and dance with each other. At funerals we cry and hug each other. We connect with complete strangers and create community because we all love the same people. People who love growing flowers form garden clubs. People who care about the poor form the crew at the hunger center. 

While the headlines focus on the building up of international alliances based on the fear of Russia’s military aggression and China’s economic hegemony, tens of thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations are banding together rescue people from poverty, hunger, and disease in ways that seldom appear on Fox News or CNN. These groups are often coalitions of people from many nations and of different faiths.  

When people band together to fight a third party they often feel a sense of belonging and purpose. But, ultimately, those relationships are destructive.

In his play, No Exit, the philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, created a vision of Hell as a cell containing three people who would spend eternity creating shifting alliances based on their fearful hatred of each other. It is a hell in which a lot of us live every day. Fear encourages lying and betrayal. It creates a “brood of vipers” as one biblical prophet called them. 

In contrast, the relationships forged on mutual love are usually marked by deep loyalty and faithfulness that persist over years. These relationships  encourage honesty and integrity in those who enter them. And they are creative.

It does not have to be a child, but it does have to be something that calls out the best in people — something they love and serve with all their hearts, and also makes them want what is best for each other.

Again, the Holy Family is an obvious symbol of this mystery and Christians have spun it out into the doctrine of the “Trinity.” I would assert that, in the conversation between the great Wisdom Traditions of the world, Christianity’s main contribution may be its insight that this Mystery of Three is what puts the “uni” in “Universe.” *

As a teacher of mine who was well-versed in both theology and science pointed out: planets and solar systems and galaxies are held together by gravity. Atoms and molecules are held together by atomic forces. The universe is held together by mutual attraction — the universe is held together by love.

As the New Year begins, consider the Holy Family and ask yourself These questions:

  • Which relationships do you have that are based on fear?
  • Which are based on love?
  • Which ones are most satisfying?
  • Which call out the best in you? 
  • Which ones will you work on?

And, If you would like to transform a relationship ask:

  • What do both of us love?  

Do you have any stories of transforming a relationship? I’d be curious to hear them.

The Feast of the Holy Family, January 1, 2023

*(Although, sadly, Christians have spent almost 2,000 years fearing and hating people who understand this mystery even slightly differently from the way they understand it.) 

figurines of the nativity of jesus

The First Christmas After Death

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Jacquie and I are grateful for the cards, emails and other messages we have received in the past few weeks that acknowledge our ongoing grief.

One of the hard things about losing someone who is as much a part of you as your arms or legs — or more precisely, your heart — is that the rest of the world quickly goes on with its business. As it should. As it has to. We understand. We have done the same. However, we are comforted by those who remember that something important stopped for us this past summer.

In all honesty, our Christmas, on the surface, won’t be much different this year. Matt, and his family live(d) in Portland, OR, across the continent from us. He would call us on Christmas Day. We will miss that — that voice. (A church secretary once announced he was on the phone by saying, “it’s your son with the great voice.”) But, we won’t have the empty chair at the table like our daughter-in-law and grandchildren will. Just thinking of their table brings tears to our eyes.

I wondered if we would just try to skip Christmas this year.

However, as Advent progressed, it felt more and more like Christmas — not the way the bouncy Bing Crosby tune puts it. But, more like Christina Rossetti puts it:

“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan.
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
. . .
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.”

I am late to the Rachel Held Evans fan club, but this morning I came across something she wrote that resonates with me at a deep level:

“I know that Christians are Easter people. We are supposed to favor the story of the resurrection, which reminds us that death is never the end of God’s story. Yet, I have never found that story even half as compelling as the story of the Incarnation.

. . . the true miracle of the Incarnation— the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us.

Rachel Held Evans with Jeff Chu, Wholehearted Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2021) p. 5.

I hope that, when Easter comes around next April, some power beyond my own will have rolled away the stone in my heart. But, right now, I agree with Evans. I don’t know if I believe in an empty tomb right now. I do believe in a baby in a manger.

The one thing death does for us is enable us to see our loved ones whole. Whenever I think of Matt, I see him not just as the almost skeletal, cancer-ravaged remnant of himself who looked out at us the last time we Facetimed a few days before he died. I see him as the man who came to celebrate Father’s Day 2021 with me, bringing his own grown son with him. Both his mother and I were proud of what a good father Matt was.

At the same time, I see him as the young man I visited when he was working in Poland after college. I especially remember his ardent efforts, a decade before cell phones, to place a call to a young woman whom he had met in Geneva. I was not surprised when he married her.

I can see him in adolescence and in boyhood and as the baby his Mom and I brought home from the hospital, tiny enough to cradle in one arm, nursing like every baby ever born and sleeping like . . . well, like a baby who can sleep soundly in a bassinet or a feed trough.

I used to wrap the baby Jesus in metaphysical swaddling clothes. This year, for me, he is like every baby, including Matt. Therefore, he is the Incarnation of Life. As Matt was. As you and I and everyone we love are. He came into this world, whether he knew it or not, to live and to love, which means taking on all the risks of skinned knees, viral infections, broken hearts, cancer, and crucifixions. But also to delight in sunrises and sunsets, good food, friendship, skin contact, and new babies.

Matt loved every moment of Life. Incarnation was not wasted on him.

Easter may promise something after death, but, in this bleak midwinter, all I can believe in is Christmas and the life in this world that Christmas celebrates and calls us to live generously, gratefully, . . .fully.

The first poem I ever memorized — before I could read — were the last four lines of Rossetti’s poem. It was a “piece” I said at our church’s Christmas pageant, with my parents and grandparents of blessed memory looking on:

“What can I give him, poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd, I would give a lamb.

If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part.

What can I give him: give him my heart”.

“A Christmas Carol” by Christina Rossetti.

Seventy Christmases later, I finally understand those words. It is safer to give those other gifts: lambs, frankincense, Walmart gift cards. Giving your heart means to risk having it broken. Yet, to not give your heart would mean that you would miss Life — the real meaning of Christmas.

The April Fool Beatitude: A Good Friday Meditation

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The optical illusion “The Young Girl—Old Woman” 

I suspect that this is not the first time you have seen this picture. What do you see?

  • Do you see a beautiful young woman? April Fool! It’s really an old lady.
  • Do you see an old lady? April Fool! It’s really a beautiful young woman.

What I see depends on the day. I’ve seen an old lady quite often. But today, for the life of me, I can only see the young woman.

Did you know that there is a Bible verse that works like this? It is not just any Bible verse. It is the last and longest of the nine Beatitudes:

“Blessed are you, when men revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven. For so persecuted they the prophets who were before you.”

Matthew 5:11-12 KJV

I know, the language is a bit archaic. My 4th grade Sunday School teacher made us commit the Beatitudes to memory. Back in those days, everything was in the King James Version.

I got a glow-in-the-dark cross as a reward for getting them right!

About 10 years ago, I decided to recommit the Beatitudes to memory. I have repeated them to myself almost every day since. For some reason, I still do it in the King James Version.

It’s a little hard to see the joke in something so serious. After all, this verse calls up images of Christians being thrown to the lions in the arena, saints being burned at the stake, Coptic Christians being beheaded by ISIS — to say nothing of Jesus on the cross.

This Beatitude gives American Christians the courage to say “Merry CHRISTMAS” to the check-out lady at Walmart in response to her “Happy Holidays.” It prompts them to repost a Christian meme on Facebook that says, “Most people won’t share this, but remember that Jesus said:

For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

Luke 9:26 ESV

If the check-out lady rolls her eyes or you lose Facebook “friends” for Jesus’ sake, you can console yourself with the promise that you will have a great reward in heaven.

But, depending on the day, when I repeat these words to myself: “Blessed are you, when men revile you and persecute you and say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.”

Depending on the day, I might lose the comma.

Do you miss the comma?

Jesus spoke these words in Aramaic. Matthew wrote them down in Greek. There are no commas in Greek or Aramaic. You just kind of have to know how to say it.

Yes, Matthew probably understood Jesus the way King James’ translators did when they inserted that comma into their English translation. Men persecute you, for Jesus sake.

If you are a Christian, it’s hard to see it any other way.

But, Christians have had a way of making this verse work like that picture above. Christians have a long history of persecuting people — for Jesus’ sake.

Good Friday is an example.

Our son, Jim, is married to a Rabbi. Jim and their two children are also Jewish. That makes me aware that for centuries, and in some places even today, Good Friday was one of the most dangerous times to be Jewish. Christians would hear the story of Jesus’ arrest, torture and crucifixion. In John’s gospel, especially, the “Jews” are named over and over again as the perpetrators. *

These Christians would often emerge from their churches ready to do to the “Christ-killers” what their ancestors did to Jesus. Beating up Jews, burning their homes, and even killing Jewish children was as much a part of Easter as coloring eggs.

Of course, these Christians persecuted them for Jesus’ sake.

Today, I run into Christians who believe it is their duty revile and persecute and say all manner of evil against Muslims, homosexuals, and transexual people falsely for Jesus sake. As a recent Tweet said, “More U.S. Congressmen have been convicted of sexual assault in a public restroom than transexuals.” But, good Christians insist that you show your birth certificate before you enter the Ladies room.

So, who is the “you” that Jesus is blessing here? The April Fool Beatitude is always about “you,” not me.

It undermines the self-righteousness that underlies all our blaming, shaming, and maiming of people who don’t look like us, believe like us, pray like us, or love like us.

I just realized that I just reviled, persecuted, and said all manner of evil against my fellow Christians falsely (in the sense of overstating my case to make my point). Of course, I did it for Jesus sake.

That’s why I keep repeating the Beatitudes every day. Just when I get to be such a good person that I can persecute bad people. Jesus says, “April Fool!” and blesses those I persecute. He reminds me just how poor in spirit I really am. I have to start again.

* This is a bit of a puzzle, because John, Jesus, all the disciples and followers of Jesus were Jews, too. Also, most of them were also Galileans. That is, they came from “Upstate” or whatever people in your nearest metropolitan area call the nearest rural area. The Galileans were the rubes, the apple-knockers, the rednecks. You could pick them out of a crowd. One of the most intriguing theories is that the Galileans called people from Jerusalem and its surrounding area, Judea, “Jews.” Jews from Ju-dea, get it? They were the slickers, the snooty city people who always thought they were better.

How to Know When To Let Go

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We all know intuitively that the essence of the art of living is knowing when to let go. This is longer than usual, so I’ll begin with a summary:

  • It’s not wise to let go too soon.
  • It’s costs a lot when we don’t know when to let go.
  • If we let go at the right time, we get out of jail and find joy.

The good news is that we have practiced letting go all our lives. You took your first step when you let go of a parent’s fingers. You can’t take a breath without letting go of the one you took before.

We stumble in life when we don’t let go. My college roommate began Freshman year wearing his high school varsity jacket around campus. He was proud of it because his basketball team had won the division championship. But, after a couple of weeks, he realized that upperclassmen were laughing at him. He had to let go of that jacket or look foolish.

On the other hand, it took me almost a year of getting C’s to let go of my high school self-image as “the smart boy” to whom A’s came easy.

Letting go isn’t that hard in the first half of life. Like the toddler taking that first step, we are reaching out for freedom when we:

  • Take the car by ourselves for the first time.
  • Get our first job.
  • Leave home.

In this Third Half of Life, however, we often feel diminished when we:

  • Have to let go of our job/career/identity.
  • Let go of driving the car.
  • Let go of the home we may have lived in for decades.

I bet you know people who didn’t let go of those things soon enough. Do you think you will know when to let go?

Pharaoh can teach us about letting go.

Pharaoh? You mean the Egyptian king?

Yep. Pharaoh

.

I ran into Pharaoh a couple of weeks ago when I was asked to lead a Torah study for the National Advisory Committee of the Jewish Grandparents Network. How did a retired Methodist preacher find himself doing that? Because I let go. I’ll get to that below.

The Torah portion began at Exodus 3:17. Jews name their weekly Torah portions using the first word or two in the first verse. But the first word in this verse, in Hebrew, is “Pharaoh.” They didn’t want a Torah portion named after the Hitler of the 13th century B.C.E, so they used the second word, b”Shalach. The root, Shalach, means “to let go” — an action.The prefix “b’” turns it into a time. B’Shalach means “letting-go-time.”

So we translate it: “WHEN Pharaoh LET the people GO.”

This Third Half of Life is b’Shalach, “letting-go-time.” Time to let go of:

  • A job. A blessed relief for some. For others (OK, for me,) it means letting go of our identity.
  • The house we needed to raise a family.
  • Habits that our younger bodies could sustain (or survive) but are damaging our aging bodies.
  • Our role (and status) within our communities or in our family.
  • Communities in which which we have lived most of our lives.
  • Beliefs and prejudices that we grew up with that we have never examined.

What can Pharaoh teach us about when and how to let go?

Something will tell us when it is time

Pharaoh had Moses — a voice that kept coming to him to say, “Let my people go.”

You and I will hear a voice. It may be a doctor’s voice, a spouse’s voice, a child’s voice, a friend’s voice, or that voice inside our heads. It will say, “Time to let go.”

For many years, I was part of a committee that interviewed and guided people who felt “called” to become ordained clergy in my denomination. That may sound like religious mumbo-jumbo to you, but bear with me.

Most of these folks were going to have to let go of good jobs in order to go back to school to prepare for a profession that is usually underpaid and overworked and that carries a psychic load that few others in our society have to bear. That is a big jump. The only thing that sustains people through that change and in the practice of pastoral ministry is a deep inner conviction that this is what they are meant to do.

We asked if they were hearing that inner voice?

We got all kinds of answers. Some people had visions rivaling the Prophet Ezekiel. Others heard a still, small voice.

We also asked if anyone on the outside was saying the same thing?

Some people only heard the outside voice — a parent or spouse telling them they should become a minister. Others only heard the inside voice. No one else thought they would make a good pastor. We were most sure of the people who heard both voices.

We were even surer if they had a history of resisting those voices.

If we are smart, we will ignore the voice at first, like Pharaoh did.

Pharaoh didn’t rule Egypt by obeying every crackpot carrying a staff who criticized his policies.

You didn’t get to where you are by stopping every time the going got tough, leaving a relationship at the first argument, or changing your mind every time someone told you that you were wrong.

Most of the pastoral candidates we interviewed confessed that they kept thinking they were mistaken — or God was. They were there because they couldn’t shake the feeling that this is what they were supposed to be doing.

If we are stupid, we will continue to ignore the voice even after it starts to cost us, like Pharaoh did.

Pharaoh, famously, suffered — and Egypt suffered — through nine plagues, including the death of the first-born in every household, before he let the Israelites go. Pharaoh illustrates this truth:

“There is that law of life, so cruel and so just, that says that we must change or else pay more for staying the same.”

Norman Mailer, The Deer Park

One day I stepped on the scales at the doctor’s office and the nurse said cheerfully, “198. First one under 200 today.”

I was there because my acid reflux was so bad I began worrying about getting esophageal cancer. I had been ignoring my body, my doctor, the scales, the mirror, and reality itself. It was costing me too much to stay the same. I was as dumb as Pharaoh.

I weigh 148 this morning because I let go of eating meat, dairy, eggs, salt, oil, and sugar. It wasn’t easy, but I also didn’t do it all at once. In fact, it has taken me twenty years to make these changes. Ninety percent of the credit for that is that I eat every day with someone who has made getting healthy her life’s mission.

Letting-go-time is when we move from jail to joy.

Your first act of letting go — birth — happened because you could not grow anymore in your mother’s womb. It was a good place for you, until it wasn’t. When b’Shalach came, you and your mother both let go and you were free to grow into the mature adult you are now.

We have to leave Pharaoh behind here. He did not see letting go of his slaves as a growth experience, although it could have been.

Every time I have let go of something in my life, I have grown. That’s how I wound up on the National Advisory Committee of the Jewish Grandparenting Network. It is both a great honor and a source of much amusement when I think about where I came from.

I grew up as a conservative evangelical Methodist. I still think I’m a conservative evangelical Methodist, although many of my conservative evangelical friends would disagree so much that they want to start a new denomination that will keep out people like me. They think I am “tossed about by every wind of doctrine”.

Instead, I kept running into people of faith that led me to realize:

  • God is not a Methodist.
  • God is not a Protestant.
  • God is not a Christian.
  • God is not a White heterosexual male.

I didn’t even know that I believed some of those things until I let go of them. But, every time I let go, my heart grew, and my God got bigger.

When our son, Jim, decided to convert to Judaism and marry, Rachel, a Reform Rabbi, it was b’Shalach, letting-go-time, once again. We don’t celebrate Christmas and Easter with our grandchildren, but that’s OK. We get to celebrate Passover and Yom Kippur. Our lives are larger because we have Jewish grandchildren, which makes us Jew-ish grandparents. It was only a few more steps to doing the Torah study that night.

One final story. Four years ago, Jacquie and I started talking about the possibility of moving to New York City to be closer to those grandchildren and . . . to be in New York City. One more adventure. But, that meant letting go of a house that we had spent years (and thousand$) to make our own. It meant letting go of a neighborhood and city we loved. I, newly retired, and still reeling from having let go of a job I loved, was resistant.

Jacquie said, “Today’s joy is tomorrow’s jail.”

What time is it in your life?

In some ways, it is always b’Shalach, letting-go-time. We let go of every breath. We let go of every day when we go to sleep. It may have been a good day, but we have to let go.

Indeed. Life is like the monkey bars on the playground. If you don’t let go and reach out, you just stop and swing there. You have to keep letting go in order to reach the next one.

That’s the secret of life. The day will come to each of us when we will let go of our last breath and reach out for whatever joy lies beyond. That will be easy or difficult depending on how much we have practiced letting go.

After Christmas: What to Keep or Throw Away

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What is your favorite Christmas memory?

One of mine is of my two grandfathers reminiscing about their boyhood Christmases. Each of them got an orange in his stocking, as I recall. They were in wonder about how times had changed.

My memory of their memories is how Christmas works. It is memory piled on memory leading back to a memory of a child’s birth in a stable a long time ago.

Christmas kicks up memories. You hang up the tree decorations that your kids made in third grade. You stumble onto your mother’s recipe for gingerbread. The tree in the corner of your living room reminds you of other trees in other rooms. Those memories will tell you important things about who you were and what Christmas used to be.

This Christmas, no doubt, created new memories. As you shove wrapping paper into recycling bags, you may decide to forget some of what happened this Christmas. As you put away the china, you may decide to keep other memories.

What do we save and what do we throw away?

I am now an expert on this question. Last summer we moved from a 5-bedroom house to a small apartment. The five-hundred-mile move meant that it would cost more to ship our stuff than we would pay to replace it. So we got rid of about 90 percent of what we owned. That included Christmas decorations.

I learned to distinguish between things that created nostalgia

and those that create hope.

A psychiatrist once wrote:

“Nostalgia is the enemy of hope

because it makes us believe

that our best days are behind us.”

In many ways the Bible is a book full of memories that were left when all the nostalgia was gone. The memories in the Bible are memories of what God did in the past that give us hope for the future.

The Christmas stuff was not easy to sort. But most of it  only reminded us of Christmases that won’t come again. We threw away a lot of stuff. One exception were some tree ornaments Jacquie made our first year in our first parsonage.  They were Christian symbols called “Chrismons.” We did not keep them to remember the giant tree we splurged on that year. It went in a bay window and it cut the windchill in the living room. We kept them because they give us hope that Christmas, and life, can be improvised in new times and places. They remind us that the best parts of Christmas and of life will not come from a store.

The other thing we kept was a manger scene my Aunt Joyce gave us. Joyce spent forty years as a missionary in Nigeria. A Nigerian artist had carved the figures from large thorns that grow on a tree there. The manger scene takes us back to that earliest of all Christmas memories. That memory gives us hope that, even when the world is ruled by cruelty and mean-spiritedness, even when there is no room for the poor, God will come and be with us in the darkest times — in the midnight hour.

The way Christmas comes each year, and the way it goes, reminds us that nothing will ever be the same again. But, the love that put oranges in my grandfathers’ stockings, the love that sewed homemade decorations for our tree, will come again in new ways and even to new people.

I keep my memory of my long-dead grandfathers sharing their memories. I do not do so because I long for a simpler time. But because that memory gives me hope that sharing my memories  with my grandchildren will give them hope for days long after I am gone. I hope that they will be able to share memories with their grandchildren that will give them hope, as well.

So, think about what you throw away this year and what you keep.