Stephen J. Matlock's Blog, page 51

The Key to Being a Productive Writer

There is one key thing to do when you want to be a productive writer. You simply write. And write and write and write.

I had not worked on my latest MS (tentatively titled “Many Waters”) for about 2 months. It was a NaNoWriMo effort, and after NaNoWriMo was over, I just couldn’t look at it. It was nothing like what I wanted. I know what I want the book to be about, and yet it just is so squirrelly. I have so many dead ends and so many terribly overwritten parts.

But you know, the secret is simply to keep writing until the main story is done. So that’s what I’m doing.

You see, it’s 1957, and Henry is still living in Windmill, still trying to find his way, but he’s older now, nearly 18, and there are many more opportunities to explore, and many thing beckon to him. He’s thinking about colleges and careers, and many people offer him advice and direction. He’s reconciled with Joey and fighting (still) with Peggy. It’s normal life again after several years of repair after the hurricane of ‘52. The only unsettling thing is the cloud the size of man’s hand—the return of a former high school prom queen with her baby and her new divorce, with an eye for someone who’s going places.

Then H. Paradise Trueblood rolls into town, anxious to set up his new college which will become the world-wide headquarters for his radio Gospel Crusade. He flashes and bedazzles the town and the young kids, and Henry is drawn to the light.

But his science teacher is also trying to establish a base of reason and rationality, what with it being the International Geophysical Year of 1957, and Henry is also drawn to examination and discovery.

And into this mix is the return of Tommy Jordan, older, maybe wiser, and surely with secrets of his own after his stint in the Army overseas as a “consultant” for a series of quiet, rumored battles defending the interests of America.

Henry must walk this path between faith and reason, between what he knows and what he feels, between the attraction of a mystic communion and calm rationality. The choice is made more difficult when the influenza epidemic strikes the small town, and no one is spared, not the elderly in their quiet retirement or the young innocent brother.

Well, that’s what I’m working on. Getting back to writing is what I needed.

Flash Fiction

I’m posting my flash fiction here: Stephen Matlock on Goodreads

Cookie Cutter

We step into a river, we believers, when we first decide to follow Jesus. The river is the great flow of believers from all nations and all times, a river that started thousands of years ago and that continues today, with a vast congregation of people called by God and living in his name.

We step into the river and there are so many who already are swimming, confident, powerful, assured of their journey, and it can be intimidating. So what we do is we copy what they’re doing. “Fake it ‘til you make it” is a good motto, and it works.

Along the way, though, sometimes we forget the point of diving into that river, following Jesus, is that we are following. We ourselves, and not our neighbors or friends or family. We must make our own choices on what to do and say and be, going beyond just doing what we see others doing to acting out our own convictions.

And I’ll tell you secret: it’s very hard to do this, because we can get used to doing things the way others are doing them. We get used to being copies of those we watch rather than being fully alive. We are used to being a cookie-cutter follower, matching the words and deeds of others, to fit in, to stay safe, to be accepted.

I think that’s what Monty was talking about this morning when he talked about the church and its actions in our culture. For whatever reason (and there are lots of reasons) we tend to do what everyone else is doing who says they are following Jesus. Not terrible, perhaps, but problematic, because we weren’t given life by God in order to just be like everyone else.

We are called to be alive in Christ, which I think means bringing everything in our own lives to God, and working with him to fully use our talents and our passions and our strengths, bringing to his light everything in our life that is broken and weak and wrong, becoming fully connected to him because nothing is hidden from him.

It’s terribly hard to do this, because all around us are people holding cookie cutters, and we like being the same. We like being safe and accepted and we like fitting in, and we end up not being ourselves, not being weird or passionate or giving, not being compassionate or thoughtful or enthusiastic, because it doesn’t fit in.

It’s too bad, really, that we do this. I think it’s a common temptation to give up on being ourselves, fully alive to God and fully committed to his work in our lives to affect the world, because it’s just easier.

And it’s too bad because we have the potential in us to affect our culture and our world. Perhaps we can’t do anything so dramatic as suddenly changing the conversation in the media or incorporating God’s values in the life of our community. But in whatever way we can, with whatever talents and passions we have, I think we can do tremendous things, changing our own lives and changing the culture around us.

It takes a willingness to be our own, true selves, and to stop being someone else’s cookie.

Arms and the Man

If a foreign nation invaded America and as a result, 20 people every day were killed, at random, and no place was safe in America from violence–you could be dragged out and killed in your school, your home, your church, your mall, your car, in the park or on the street or at the movies or standing in line waiting for a burger–we would be at a near-riot condition, demanding our national defense do something to protect us from this daily violence which kills our mothers, our children, our wives, our brothers, our friends, our leaders, our pastors, our politicians, our police officers, our fathers, our sons, and us.
Instead–we shrug our shoulders and hope it won’t be us.

We let lobbyists pay Congress to keep things as they are. We let crazy white men rant at us for hours on TV and the radio, scaring us into submission about the escalation of violence and making us crazy with fear. We let this killing continue, day after day, because we are “free.” Free to be killed, anywhere, at any time, by anyone who thinks he needs to solve a problem. But “free.”

This sickness isn’t just the violence. This sickness is us, accepting this as normal, thinking that gun violence isn’t violence, thinking that the price of human life being destroyed day after day is worth it in order for us to think we are somehow better, somehow safer, because we allow weapons to flow so freely in our society. Violence at a rate no other civilized nation–no other nation claiming even to be “Christian”–allows or experiences.

It’s time to stop this.

Awash in a Sea of Tears

Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthian Believers, Chapter 10, lines 3-6

“For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.” (ESV)

“The truth is that, although of course we lead normal human lives, the battle we are fighting is on the spiritual level. The very weapons we use are not those of human warfare but powerful in God’s warfare for the destruction of the enemy’s strongholds. Our battle is to bring down every deceptive fantasy and every imposing defence that men erect against the true knowledge of God. We even fight to capture every thought until it acknowledges the authority of Christ. Once we are sure of your obedience we shall not shrink from dealing with those who refuse to obey.” (Phillips)

“The world is unprincipled. It’s dog-eat-dog out there! The world doesn’t fight fair. But we don’t live or fight our battles that way—never have and never will. The tools of our trade aren’t for marketing or manipulation, but they are for demolishing that entire massively corrupt culture. We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ. Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and building lives of obedience into maturity.” (The Message)

This message is in context in a world where Rome rule supreme without the mercy of Lex Talionis, “an eye for an eye,” which was a law of mercy (you can punish only as much as the original offense, and no more). The law of Rome was one where disobedience could be punished with extreme actions; a simple failure to acknowledge Caesar, for example, might result in financial ruin and the death of your family. In Paul’s world, disobedience was met with the sword of the government, corrupt and run for the benefit of those who wore the imperial purple. Justice requested was not justice guaranteed; life in the Roman empire was a mass of petty kings and kingdoms jostling to maintain their power and prestige, with a vast sea of humanity unseen and unserved by government. Government was something that upended your life, something was to be kept away, and life was lived with tremendous uncertainty as to taxes and the essential services of life.

And yet Paul did not advise Christians to fight fire with fire, but to fight the power of this world with the power of God and his overcoming rationality and love. The weapons Paul fitted his compatriots with were the armor of God, defensive and protective; the only offensive tool in the armory of the believer was the sword of truth. There were no hardened bunkers in Paul’s world; in his world, Christians lived their ordinary lives as if God was king, not Caesar. We fail to see this, but the word of Christ and the love of God upended the Roman world. A few dozen men proclaimed his mercy to the entire Mediterranean, and without swords and shields, Christians conquered.

Today we still send our missionaries to the most dangerous parts of the world, arming them only with this word, and with the love of Christ which compels us to speak and to teach, to make disciples of all humanity. We do not arm our missionaries with offensive weapons or even with protection. Our missionaries go forth with the Bible and the heart of God, to every nation and tongue and tribe and land. Christians have transformed society, building hospitals and schools and churches, bringing mercy and love and extending justice. Not every missionary and not every Christian has done right, of course, but the motivating force for outreach has been the love of God reconciling with his world. The Christian church, for all it has done wrong for the past 2000 years, has done some things right, which has meant that a people living in darkness have come into a great light. We can applaud ourselves as Christians for bringing order within chaos, for shutting down awful practices such as slavery and child prostitution (even though these practices have been common among people who called themselves “Christian”). Ever-so-slowly we are understanding God’s mercy and love for all people; ever-so-slowly we Christians are expanding the concepts of universal love and the humanity of all.

These missionaries are protected only with the truth. They do not carry guns or armored vests. They do not arm themselves as teachers with weaponry ready to fire off someone who enters a classroom. They do not stockpile ammunition and trust in force and firepower to bring about the justice of God. They lay their lives down in the most hostile of lands, trusting in God to do right. The battle belongs to the Lord, they say, and they act as if that were true. Some–maybe many–have died to proclaim that truth, but the power of the words and love of Christ have transformed societies. Missionaries in the most dangerous of lands go forth in the confidence of their message and the power of God. They know God will do good for them.

But–somehow in America we Christians think that here we must arm ourselves beyond reason, holding guns and rifles, ready to shoot first and ask questions later, depending upon the power of the rifle barrel to protect us even as we claim that we trust in God and his power. We are fearful of everything and everywhere–schools and malls and theatres and churches and sports fields and restaurants and normal everyday life. We in America live in one of the most violent nations on earth, violent far beyond nearly every other nation, violent certainly beyond every civilized nation, and we continue to arm ourselves more and more, feeling less and less secure, ready to blast a stranger down who bumps into us, ready to find fault and to protect ourselves from the slightest hint that we might be affronted or accosted. We no longer blink at the reports of twenty human lives, every day, which are ended by guns, more lives each day lost here in America than almost every other nation on this planet suffers each year. We are the most churchified nation on earth, and the most overtly religious Christian nation, proclaiming the gospel on hundreds of stations and using tens of thousands of venues, a gospel that we say brings peace and justice. We have God on our currency and in our Pledge of Allegiance. But we continue to kill each other at a rate far above any other nation on earth, as if that gospel and power of God has no power to change hearts or provide assurance.

I don’t get it. Either the power of God isn’t really all that powerful, and he needs help from us using the power of this world and the weapons of this world, or he is all powerful and capable of enacting justice without our assistance of personal weaponry and we are foolish to think weapons are our protection. Either he does really mean it that we wage war in this world with the weapons of truth, or he doesn’t mean it and we should have a backup plan because he is, ultimately, unable to protect us and to provide for us. Either he means for us to arm ourselves with the truth, or we need to have a little extra protection in case he fails, packing some heat because, after all, God helps those who help themselves, and he can’t be counted upon when it really matters.

Someone needs to explain it to me why Christians who follow the Prince of Peace feel they must bristle with guns, and how they can square their love of gunfire with their love of God, because I simply do not get it anymore. I cannot understand how Jesus could look at us in America and think we are representing his sacrificial love and trust in God when we are the most fearsomely armed people on earth.

We are killing each other. We are destroying lives. We are tearing apart families. We are awash in a sea of unseen tears.

In the name of God, people, we must stop this.

Why Honor Dr. King?

Reposted from 2010,  2011, and 2012. I wrote this as a quick e-mail in response to some scurrilous nonsense forwarded to me, nonsense written by a white Christian eager to point out to me that Dr. King was a flawed man, too flawed to be honored and acknowledged.

Let’s get some things straight right off the bat: I’m a white male in my 50s with little or no experience through most of my life with any blacks/African-Americans other than incidental work relationships. My cultural outlook is white, whiter than snow, whiter than LiquidPaper™, whiter than polar bears in fog on an iceberg. My outlook up to this point has been we’re all Americans and we are all the same, diversity is really all about looking past any differences, and good people will agree on all the same things, and coincidentally that agreement will be to my viewpoint, and that all this talk about race and skin and oppression and holidays for Dr. King are simply unpleasant and unnecessary reminders of a past that no longer exists. They got black people on TV; one of the richest people in the world is black (Oprah), and we got ourselves a black president. So end of story.

What I say and think now comes from a process that started about a year ago when a black friend asked me point blank several times: “You do know that I’m black, right?”

I considered it an extremely rude and provocative question, because I’d been trying for most of my life not to see black Americans as black, but rather some non-color, because in my heart I didn’t think skin color mattered, and so I simply wouldn’t see it.

Of course I knew he was black, but I wouldn’t let that affect my understanding, because I am a nice person who accepts everyone.

But still, the question rattled me. Why would he have to ask that question of me, a considerate, patient, loving person? What made him think I didn’t see that obvious fact about him?

But really, I wasn’t seeing him in any way. I didn’t consider his history or his experience or his life or his choices, instead evaluating him and what he did in the context of my own undisturbed life. My thought was that we’ve moved beyond all the unpleasantness of racial tension, and as believers in Christ there was more in common with us in our hearts than in our bodies, appearance, or even our minds.

I had to think about that – really think about that.

That one question sparked a thought process in me to examine what I really believed and thought and felt about the Other – the people that moved around me with unknowable motives, who had so many unspoken experiences, who chose and acted and talked in ways that simply didn’t make sense to me.

It was a long process to see how he lives in the America I live in, and yet has so many divergent experiences, experiences that I cannot comprehend as actually happening. And yet they happen, and continue today.

That discussion folded around in my mind, and I continued to think about what the question meant. Why would someone need to tell me that I was blind when I knew that I could see?

That led to the novel I’m working on, set in Texas in 1952, the story of a 13 year old boy who wrestles with racism, Christian belief, growing awareness of self, and his unfolding understanding of his own sexuality. So I’ve been doing a lot of research and thinking about what it means to open one’s eyes, to look at the world for the first time, and to grasp the fact that we each can choose what we want to do with our lives and what values we want to hold. Take this, then, with a grain of salt – the ideas are still being formed.

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I think a lot of white people don’t get the impact MLK had upon the souls of black people, people who were invisible for so long in our American culture. Most white people don’t know that the first black slaves came to the Americas in the 1500s; the first black slaves landed at Jamestown in (I think) 1619. Most white people don’t know – or don’t figure it out – that a lot of black slaves captured were Muslim, and thus brought Islam to America quite early – much earlier than popularly believed. Most white Americans think of what happened in the past as something perhaps unpleasant, but surely by now those black people should be over it, forgetting how black people had been pushed into a box of inferiority and invisibility for 400 years. Most white Christian Americans don’t think that black Americans have Christian souls or worthy Christian beliefs because their version of Christianity is so different from white American Christianity. (As some have said, the most segregated place in America today is still the American church on Sunday morning, and each side points their fingers at the other.) Most white Christians don’t think about the incredible cognitive dissonance required to teach black slaves about Christianity, a religion where there is neither slave nor free, and with the hand that holds the Bible to also hold the whip that beats them into submission as slaves, slaves for the simple reason that someone said “I have the power to own you and steal you away from your homes and families.” I can’t ever think of a time in church or in school where this was discussed: did anyone ever think Isn’t it weird that we call them our brothers and sisters and yet treat them like furniture or horses?

MLK – who was killed at 39 – accomplished so much to bring awareness to black people that they were human beings with dignity and worth. I don’t think his main accomplishment was to raise the consciousness of white people – although he did do that in some part. It was that he made black people believe they were worthy of their God-given rights and citizenship. At Malcolm X put it, “I shouldn’t have to ask for what’s mine”; it was MLK that brought that idea to the mind of ordinary black people – that they shouldn’t have to ask for their ordinary civil rights, the right to live as they wanted to live without permission or oversight of others, the right to just be treated as human beings. His hope, in my opinion, was that just by saying they deserved participation in their civil rights, ordinary white Americans, Christian Americans, would understand their plight and their longing and their need to participate in America – and would enable it, willingly, because it was the right thing to do. A bullet ended that dream, and it’s been 50 more years of talk and fights. We’re closer than we were, but we’re not there yet.

Was MLK a perfect man, an ideal man, even a moral man? Is he someone worth looking up to? Complex broken people are always found in situations where revolution happens; often they are the reason for the revolutions. LBJ – the man who is most singularly responsible for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – was a corrupt, selfish, adulterous, racist man who lied about things he didn’t even need to lie about, who destroyed people not just because they stood in his way, but because he could. (LBJ along with J. Edgar Hoover so thoroughly politicized the FBI that it’s hard to accept how much those actions tainted anything the FBI “discovered.”) LBJ cannot be claimed to be the friend of anyone because he could never be trusted to be telling the truth – and yet somehow he was the one who pushed through these two transformative acts of 1964 and 1965 – as well as the unknown Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction. As leader of the Senate he finagled this ‘57 Act through the Senate, bypassing the liberals of the North who wanted more and the conservatives of the South who wanted not just less, but to take away even the rights blacks already had. (Essentially the ‘57 act was to grant jury trials to people convicted of federal crimes of suppressing voting rights; the law opened up the way for registration of blacks in the South that led directly to the marches on Washington and the Freedom Riders of the South.) LBJ bungled our way into Vietnam, one of the most wasteful and useless wars in our history. He made himself into a multimillionaire in office through the corrupt use of federal power to essentially steal TV and radio licenses in Texas. No one should hold him up as an example of a moral, caring, thoughtful, Christian man.

And yet – he was the central figure in the 50s and 60s to bring civil rights to black Americans. There is no one else who had the power he did, and no one else who had the capability to do what he did. It happened because of this broken, racist man. Churches that preached the love of God and the humanity of all mankind preached and taught – but it was the actions of a man without a church and without a governing principle other than “me first and me only” who initiated these transformative acts in the American political and cultural life.

In a similar way, MLK was broken and flawed and unfaithful. He likely plagiarized his writings while working for his degree at Boston University. He did not have extraordinary preaching skills beyond all other preachers. He didn’t even have a unique theological vision; indeed, I’d claim his theology was undeveloped and based more upon feelings than upon strict logical construction. As a Reformed believer, I find that his theology devolves into folk wisdom. His work is derivative, and it is set crisply in its time. Reading his work now requires work to understand the decades of the 50s and 60s; his writings seem now more worthy of research than of wide dissemination. (Howard Thurman and W.E.B. DuBois are much more readable today and require much less understanding of the times.)

But MLK found a way to emphasize to the American people the moral injustice of treating people as if they were trash, bringing an awareness to blacks that they were not trash and to whites that they would need to start considering blacks as if they were as truly human as whites were.

Like others who pointed out these hard facts, he generated opposition. I’m pretty sure his theology and political viewpoints weren’t well-thought-out; I’m pretty sure he hung around with people he shouldn’t have; and I’m pretty sure he didn’t pay careful attention to the motivations of the people who wanted to claim him as part of their movement. And while we celebrate (and ignore!) his words about racial harmony, we ignore his words about other great problems such as the propensity of America to wage war, and the almost incomprehensibly tragic effects of the vast social and economic disparity between classes in America. I think he used Marxist terms because Marxist terms are convenient for economic and social analysis; by doing so he made a mistake, because (in my opinion) instead of listening to what he said, we can conveniently look at the terms he used or the people he associated with to ignore what he said. Lincoln said a nation could not endure half-slave and half-free, and he was right; MLK said a nation could not endure where generations and races were locked in perpetual poverty and dead-end despair, and he was right, but Lincoln has had the benefit of being dead and elevated so that we have forgotten his very human foibles: MLK has unfortunately not been dead enough for us to wring out the essence of what he said from the mistakes and errors he made.

I’m not sure of the motivation of people who feel the need to point out MLK’s flaws, though he had many. I think there’s a time for that, just as there’s time to point out Washington’s flaws regarding slavery or Lincoln’s desire to save the union whether blacks were freed as a result or not. (Pointing out those flaws doesn’t take away from who they were. It simply points out that Washington, Lincoln, and others were humans who sometimes rose out of their own times in a spectacular fashion.) I suspect the need to point out the flaws of Dr. King (who was no saint) is a way to say “he does not deserve respect or attention” and then we can move along with our lives without pausing to think what drove this man to live a life with such privation and fear? What drove him to walk and march and preach when so little changed? I wouldn’t elevate him above any other person – he was just a man, like us – but with the few tools he had he moved a nation. Whether we like him or not, he has been a powerful man in our American life, an almost unwitting agent of the essence of the American experiment “to form a more perfect Union.” What he did was profoundly American in spirit: he looked at what we were and what we could be, and decided not to settle for what we are.

Dr. King was a minister of the gospel who preached and acted in a style familiar to the American black church. And being a minister doesn’t guarantee sanctity (although one would hope that the salesman would use his own product; a preacher who doesn’t act under the light of the gospel seems to be questionable.) But I don’t see that the gospel guarantees the moral superiority of any believer in either thought or action when compared to any other person; the essence of the gospel is that it saves sinners and makes them whole and gives them working tools to better their lives until their homecoming. (As C. S. Lewis pointed out, you don’t compare person A to person B to see if the gospel is true and powerful; you compare person A before and person A afterwards to see if it’s true and powerful in that person’s life.) I won’t excuse moral failings, because we are called to a holy life, and when a minister who purports to preach the true gospel of a holy God misbehaves, it hurts people and hurts the message of the gospel. But let’s not think that only ministers fail, or focus on their failures and ignore their service. As you and I both know, God uses flawed and broken people – sometimes critically flawed people – to bring the message of the cross in order that no man can boast that salvation came by his own power, but only by the power of God.

There are wounded people in the church of Christ who carry their wounds deep inside and use them to explain their behavior, hiding behind words of sanctity and fruit-checking. I’m sure none of us could stand up to the scrutiny of others to such a degree; I’m sure all of us have stories to tell that would explain why we fail where we do and when we do. I would only offer that, as a class of Americans, black people have been put down and shut down and kept down, kept away from education and access to ordinary lives where they could assume safety and control, not knowing whether their kids would be safe or well-educated or fed or protected. The ordinary experience of blacks in America for 400+ years has been one of complete disruption and exclusion from what the rest of us just assume we’ll have – from the assumption that we can walk down any street we want, go to any hotel we want, eat in any restaurant we want, buy from any store that we want, see any doctor we want, send our kids to any school we want – you get the drift. I would expect that as we excluded our black Christian brothers and sisters from ordinary life, they have, as a result, developed their own patterns of living and beliefs that to us seem destructive and unhealthy and even unchristian; I don’t see how we’re going to help them or respect them if that’s the first thing we focus upon.

You might be interested in the viewpoints of Dr. Boyce Watkins, a black political analyst, who shares the viewpoint of the necessity of seeing the flaws in our heroes. His take is for, I think, different reasons.

http://www.bvblackspin.com/2011/01/17...

Here I’ll quote a bit from his article:

[B]y pretending that Dr. King was perfect in life, we are making his legacy vulnerable to those who can prove that he made mistakes. For example, there are some who simply wish to pretend that there was no possibility and no reason to even mention the fact that Dr. King was not always faithful to his wife, Coretta. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that African Americans keep on our religious figures has not only ruined lives, but it makes all of us look silly. It also heightens the impact of the scandal when the truth finally hits the light of day. I had a friend in the south whose 19-year old mother was impregnated by a 45-year old married pastor. The pastor forced my friend’s mother to keep the love child secret, which she did for over 20 years. So, my friend grew up watching her “sanctified” daddy walk right past her in public places without even acknowledging her. You think that might have affected her psychologically? Yes, it did.

Honoring Dr. King doesn’t mean deifying him. It simply means we acknowledge that for all his many flaws, he affected us. He was not perfect. No man is. But he did show that an imperfect man with imperfect dreams and goals can accomplish great things.

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Of Mansions and Mangers

This morning we were treated to the kids’ choir singing the familiar songs of Christmas. Charming, sweet, innocent, a bit mischievous, they won our hearts (as they always do) by being who they are—kids. As with every kids’ production, nothing went exactly as planned, and there were unexpected surprises. (And there’s always that one kid who is apparently performing in another show of his own making…)

And that is what makes the production even more charming. We see in our kids a little of us. We see in them the seeds of becoming something like us. There is a bit of grandstanding, perhaps, and a little of the desire to please another, but there is a whole lot of trying to do the best you can in a difficult environment. We love them all the more because they are so wonderfully earnest and truthful.

I think of this in context to the way God moves in the life of his people here on earth, by using unexpected people and surprising, disruptive events. But he started it that way by being born in an unexpected location with anonymous parents and no family celebration. No mother was around to help Mary give birth. Joseph was there, anxious perhaps, but the only attendants he had were the animals stabled there at the inn. Of course there was love, and of course she treated him with the love every mother has for her child, but his place of rest was a feeding trough, comforted by hay and random bits of barley. Later would come the witnesses—the shepherds who while tending their sheep were waylaid by overly excited angels looking to tell someone what had happened. Much later would come wise men from the east. And much, much later would come the elders of his village to voice their surprise at the growing boy’s wisdom, then friends and crowds and attention by leaders—and loneliness and abandonment by his loved ones while he was upon that rock of Calvary. And then resurrection and life and glorious heaven. It’s all there, from beginning to the middle. Manger to Messiah to Mansion

God surprised us on Christmas morning because he arrived in such an unexceptional manner. Born of a young, overlooked girl with a man to marry her, but no comfort of family. Shepherds not the sophisticated leaders. Animals jostling in the dark rather than worshippers with candles. Like a hundred or a thousand others that night, a baby born and laid down with what was handy for comfort.

And that baby in the manger would one day return to his mansion—and bring so many more with him.

Now believers in Christ have exceptional gifts from God, starting with that greatest gift of unblocked access to him. Because Christ was born, we know God has come down to us to speak to us. Because Christ died, we know God has wiped the account books clean of our debts. Because Christ has risen again, we know we have eternal life with God throughout the ages and beyond the end of the age. We are promised a mansion with God one day by the same Jesus who came to earth to lie in a manger. We have these great gifts because our great Savior came down for us men and women, and our salvation.

It is good to remember the mansions, and it is good to remember the manger where it all started.

Merry Christmas.

God and Newtown

To my fellow Christians who are posting that “Newtown is God’s judgment on America for taking prayer out of schools”—

I’m not speaking for God here, for my church, my religion, or anything official. I’m just speaking for me.

But I want you just to stop. Stop. Right. Now.

God doesn’t kill 20 kindergartners to prove a point. He didn’t cause bullets to rip through their bodies in order to “show us what happens” when we take God out of our schools. He didn’t put Victoria Soto in the way of death to prove to us that only the Christian religion could save us.

A man with a gun did this. A man with a gun that is designed to kill lots of animals, lots of people, quickly, is the one who took this action. He was not “disturbed” unless you think people with Asperger’s Syndrome are disturbed. He had access to an extremely powerful weapon, a weapon far too powerful to be used in our public, civil society, and he killed those kids, those teachers, those school officials, and his mom with a gun that anyone with enough money can buy at Wal-Mart, no questions asked. Ammunition, too. Sale prices for Christmas. A weapon used on the battlefield, but now ready for you to use on those predators who might want all the stuff you have piled up in your houses. Because, you know, stuff is worth more than people.

When you Christians tell the world that “God did this as judgment,” my non-Christian friends and my non-believing friends ask me to explain how I can worship such a wicked God who would kill children in order to “prove a theological point,” as if education can’t take place unless he kills the innocent.

Twenty children went to school that morning loved by their moms, hugged by their dads, holding hands with their brothers and sisters and friends, innocently believing that the Friday before Christmas holidays would be full of fun and excitement, along with the usual events of kindergarten such as staying in line, tying your shoes, or learning to keep still while the teacher read Charlotte’s Web.

God didn’t walk into that room spraying bullets to tell America that he was pissed he wasn’t in school anymore, and I am frankly ashamed at you—and I am speaking DIRECTLY TO YOU, MR. HUCKABEE AND DR. DOBSON—that you would say such evil, wicked things about the God I love and worship.

My God left his throne in heaven and became a baby in a world that was full of wickedness and sin and danger. He took the chance of being slaughtered along with all the other innocents by Herod, but he took the chance with us. He took the chance with us, the people who were his direct enemies, and loved us, completely and thoroughly, to the point where (according to my faith) he laid himself down on that cross himself. Now he works through us to reach a world full of pain and hurt, through us who were his enemies. And we who have nothing so much as mere disagreement with our fellow citizens are using our holy God as a weapon to further wound and shame and separate them from our loving God, teaching them that God is cruel and wicked and perverse and capricious.

Bad things happen. Sometimes they’re hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes, and I can’t figure out why God allows those things to happen. They are awful, they are destructive, they make us all wonder if God hears us—but they also are opportunities for us to reach out and help one another. God can use those awful events as we take up the responsibility to reach out and heal.

But this that happened at Newtown—and at Columbine and Aurora and Portland and Oakland and Virginia and some twenty-five more towns across this nation—this thing is something we ourselves can take action to stop, because it is something we ourselves are doing to ourselves. God is not behind this crazy worship of death we have with our love of guns and ammo and shooting and killing. God is not the one that drives us to fear and frantic searching for more and more powerful guns. God is not the one driving us to fear our neighbors and hate the stranger. God is not the one that is turning us to hate our opponents or our friends or our families simply because they don’t hold to our political opinions.

God is not doing this. We are. We are doing it to ourselves. We are listening to cruel, awful men (and it is mostly men doing this speaking) who are, for whatever purpose, whatever reason, whatever design, driving us to craziness. We live in one of the most, if not THE most, prosperous, safe, and happy country in the history of this planet. We are rich, richer than any other nation or time or land. We are healthier and more able to nearly anything we want. We have shot our rockets to the moon and to the edge of our solar system. We have through the prodding of men and women such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and even Mother Teresa learned to accept the poor and the weak and the unwanted among us; we have as our nation made very difficult progress to allow many more of us to become “us.”

We are rich and happy and confident and smart, and yet we are letting these small men with evil purposes speak to us daily, through our radios and TVs and newsletters and websites, words of poison and hate and distrust. We who have every opportunity to succeed are told to be afraid of the stranger who might take our jobs, our homes, our families, our riches. We who are richer than our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents ad infinitum combined are convinced that we are one step away from being robbed and that we must hoard and suspect and hate. We who have every opportunity to speak our minds, out loud and on the internet, and to freely choose our leaders, are being told that our government is evil and wrong and against us, and that we must hate those who are our leaders.

I do not understand you, my Christian friends. You claim to believe in a God who created the worlds with a word, who breathed life into dust to make man, who conquered death of his own volition—and you are running scared for the next thing that will save you, whether it is gold or guns, and you are being taught to hate your neighbor and to suspect the stranger.

I am being asked, over and over, by my non-Christian and non-believing friends, to explain. How can I worship a God who is cruel? How can I fellowship with believers in a loving God when they are so full of anger and distrust?

I can’t explain it. I can’t explain  you. I can only do this, I can only say this: you are just like me. You are lost, and broken, and dysfunctional, and only the cross can fix you—can fix me. We are all strangers and aliens on this journey. We are broken and we want to be healed.

That’s what I tell them. But it is so hard to tell them this when you have so little joy and love, and so much hate and fear, and so much dependence upon your guns and not your Jesus to save you. I have to tell them that they shouldn’t look at your actions, because they don’t represent Christ’s mercy, and they shouldn’t heed your words, because they do not represent Christ’s message, but then they ask me: what can they look at? What can they listen to? If you—and I—are the representation of Christ, we are showing them—the people God came to save—that he is out to kill them unless they become just like us—fearful and angry and divisive. Hateful and bristling with weapons. Preaching a Christ behind a wall of guns.

We are doing these awful things because we have lost our way. We have forgotten our Lord. We have lost our faith.

We need to stop this reliance on the weapons of this world and we need to return to our reliance upon the weapons of our Lord. We need to stop the words of hate and divisiveness to the stranger among us. We need to stop thinking that our things are more important than human beings.

And I understand you want to argue for guns and self-defense and the Second Amendment and all the things that will keep you safe in your silos. I just don’t care anymore to listen to it. Your way of life is dead and gone, and no one but people exactly like you want it anymore. The rest of us—the rest of us who love life, who want our kids to live in a world safe from gunfire, who want to walk the streets unafraid that someone walking beside us is packing a gun because he’s scared of us—we are going to change our country and our world. We are going to see a future where we are as free from the terror of guns as we are free from the terror of polio. Your ways are past. Our ways are the future.

And if you disagree and want to rant about your guns—just don’t. Do me a favor and unfriend me now. I have nothing more to do with you. I don’t recognize you. I probably just don’t even know you at all.

Everyday Saints

We’re on the third Sunday of Advent, and Christmas is so close we can taste it—the taste of chocolates and oranges and nuts and peppermints, the smells of hams and turkeys and roasts and pies, the sounds of kids and grandkids and tearing paper and squeals of delight.

It is a good thing, this Christmas celebration, this festival of the birth of our Savior and the coming of our King. We use this time every year to remind ourselves of where we fit in in this great community. We are family, we are friends, we are the fellowship of believers. This is our home, and we make room each year to invite the Savior in and to celebrate with us.

The ordinariness of us can get lost sometimes in the rush to make Christmas happen, though. Sometimes we just get so busy to get things into just the right order that we can lose sight of the whole reason we’re doing this—for the joy and love and laughter, for our family and friends and the great circle of community we call us.

For it is God with Us that makes this the Christmas season, the time of Advent. It is God who comes down to us, silently at first, quietly in disguise as an ordinary baby born in an ordinary way (in perhaps a bit of an extraordinary place—a barn for a room and a feeding trough for a crib). We don’t quite get it all, and everything is a bit of a blur. But then things settle down, and the gold glistens here and there on the tree, the lights come on, and we see the faces. The adoring family surrounding the baby. The angels, perhaps, and then the field hands. The animals crowding around demanding attention and feeding. Later will come the gifts and the visits, but now it is a time to look at the baby and remember.

We are a church of everyday saints, really. We don’t need extravaganzas and events to make us remember. We don’t need angels descending and kings bearing royal gifts. We really need all the ordinary things at Christmas: family, friends, a warm place to be surrounded by love, food and drink and laughter. And remembering. A time to remember that God came down, once, for us, and is here with us now in these long nights of winter. The lights are so bright in that darkness, brighter perhaps because it is so dark. But the baby is all in light. It is all right. It is like this every year, and we’re all going to be OK. We are loved and held and cherished, and we know—we know—we are loved so deeply by the God who came down for us.