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November 22 - December 25, 2020
“Who is still to come” . . . fully restoring us to God by taking away the sins of the world.
We see at the end of Revelation a vision of a new Jerusalem (in art) coming down, and God making Its dwelling among us, removing all that separates us from God, and ruling (crown) with love and justice (shepherd staff and scales). Hallelujah! Gloria! Maranatha! Come soon, Jesus.
Your life is the greatest treasure you can bring. And honestly, you probably don’t know where to buy frankincense anyway. By bringing the gift of your life to Jesus now, with hopefully many years of living still ahead of you, you can grow in conversation with Him about the gift of your life and your eventual death. Then Jesus, the “One who is still to come,” won’t feel like a complete stranger when you become the “you who is still to come” through your eventual disappearance.
May your belief in the resurrection of all things trust in the process of the death of all things.
the function of a paradox is not to find the solution to seemingly opposing truths, but to be transformed by living in the middle mystery of them.
Gratitude and thankfulness are choices you can make to transform your perspective in every situation you find yourself in. You have a choice in transformation.
And yet there are other parts of your transformation that are like a virgin birth—in the way that you’re not in charge of any of it. It’s less about your mustering up the strength to accomplish something and more about your being open to the transformation that God wants to do in you. It begins quietly and deeply within you. A divine inception in the deepest place where your truest life is birthed.
“For nothing will be impossible with God” was the answer Mary received from the messenger when inquiring about the mystery of how this could happen,1 and I believe we get the same answer about the mysterious transformation of our own lives. Most of us will not have an angel announce those words to us. But I do think all of us can whisper the statement that the Divine is looking for to do deep transformation and restoration: “Let it be to me according to your word.”2 May all your impossibilities be the very starting point for divine possibility.
Incarnation is the process of becoming seen. To be seen is to allow yourself to be known. To be known is to risk being loved . . . or not.
“I don’t want God to love me. I just want God to tell me what to do. Because if I let God love me, He will love me the way I am. And if I let God love me the way I am, I will have to see the way I am. And I don’t want to see the way I am. So I’d rather God just tell me what to do.”
Why is being seen so hard? It’s hard because when you decide to live into your true self—your strengths and weaknesses, your light and shadow, your superpowers and your kryptonites—you are revealing yourself to the world, and you can now be touched. Loved, rejected, embraced, ignored . . . and all of the other complicated interactions that come with human relationships. This is the exciting and terrifying proposal in an everyday life, so that some of us are questioning whether revealing yourself is worth it.
May it be known that the Giver of existence took the same risk we all have to take daily—to be seen and known as the person we really are. The risk of incarnation is the risk of love. And love risks heartbreak, rejection, and being sold out by your friends, because love is also the animating source that brings about all the wonderful things in an incarnation, like companionship, joy, healing, wholeness, and being seen and known in the world.
What I also love about cathedrals is that they were constructed during a time when most of the population was illiterate, so the majority of the communication devices are pictorial and symbolic.
how do you depict something sacred? To make something sacred is to give reverence to the weight of its importance.
Because when we dismiss the aches and pains, the fluids and hair, the naked fleshiness under all the fancy clothing, we can dismiss ourselves from being ones who could also find ourselves in a sacred story. It’s the meeting place where the Spirit of God meets every person—our physical bodies.
If the incarnation insists on anything, it insists that our physical bodies matter to God.
May the embrace of your physical body be remembered as one of your most sacred acts.
Can I be real in the relationship with the client? Real refers to a quality of genuineness that lets the client know that the counselor is not hiding anything. Will I find myself prizing this person? I love the wording here—prizing—because the invitation is for the counselor to cherish the person as they truly are. Will I be able to understand the inner world of this individual? Can the counselor move around the client’s world and see life through their eyes? The goal of the counselor is to know the client’s world of feelings and what it’s like to be them.
It sounds like the goal of a good therapist and the goal of a successful high priest are the same—to prize the ones who are being healed.
Rogers said that if these attitudes are present in the counselor, quite a number of things will happen in the session: The client will be free to explore their attitudes and feelings more deeply. The client will be able to discover hidden aspects of themselves that they weren’t aware of before. Feeling prized by the counselor, the client will come to a deeper prizing of themselves. (I love this one!) If the client senses a realness in the counselor, they’ll be able to be a little more real within themselves. Feeling that some of their meanings are understood, the client will be more readily
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Jesus became human so we would know He had nothing to hide. He lived in a complicated world so He could relate to the complexity of being in our world. His name is God-with-Us so we would know we are prized.
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross! PHILIPPIANS 2:5–8
Jesus is mighty not because of His capacity to overcome hardship but because of His willingness to go through human hardship, like we have to do. It is this compassionate empathy that has the power to transform the human heart.
How does God restore what It loves? By being with what God loves. How does love defeat its enemy, death? By accepting it and going through it. How does God show Itself to be mighty? God humbles Itself and owns being human. God accepts the humility and weakness of being born. God accepts the humility and vulnerability of eventually dying. And it is this mighty ground that God saves the world through.
May your present stage of life be the mighty ground for divine participation.
May you live into your true inheritance as the beloved offspring of the Maker of all things.
May Your kingdom, Jesus, be on earth as it is in heaven.
That this symbiotic with-ness gloriously proclaims we will never have to do transformation alone. May you see that you never have to do it alone.
The story of Jesus’ incarnation did not come without complications, but God provided room—a room—and the Giver of your incarnation will provide room for you too.
To finally see what you have hoped for for so long is a breaking experience. Our deepest hope is that God is truly with us in all this. That’s what Christmas is meant to celebrate. But could it be that God has been with us in all this already?
God has just been waiting for us to move from words to presence so we can join God there. May you believe in the gift of your presence. And may you bring that gift of presence to God’s ongoing work of restoration.
Divine revelation will come to you today through unexpected avenues you’ve probably ignored.
I’m not discrediting the avenues in which we expect to hear a divine revelation. Those individuals have done the secret personal work to bring forth a gift for the rest of us, and they deserve the attention they get.
But there’s a deeper revelation that Jesus speaks to in all of the ignored and hidden aspects of the life we find ourselves in.
Why God’s revelations usually don’t come through big flashy avenues is (1) God doesn’t need any money via merchandise at retail stores, and (2) bigness doesn’t ask the viewer/listener to have to transform to receive it . . . and God is all about the transformation.
So it is with you as well, that divine proclamation will come through very unexpected ways. It very well may be through the ignored and marginalized aspects of your life—the embarrassing, unsuccessful parts—that, if you take the time to listen, you’ll begin to hear the angelic proclamation: “Do not be afraid.
May you be given the eyes to see all the unexpected messengers carrying news of divine love birthing into today.
Nothing can be truly known through observation. Only through participation.
There’s a difference between reading books about life and the actual risk and reward of living a life of travel, valor, love, and service. There is a deep knowing that can only be attained through participation.
Their identity will most likely always be shrouded in mystery, but at least we get (1) a catchy song out of it and (2) a fantastic model of what it means to pay attention.
It may not be necessary to figure out the origins of the Magi, because the truth of their journey is what is truly transformational for us—that God places patterns inside us that will be revealed in the patterns of the exterior world.
The deep desire of the Magi was to connect with the Creator of the world, and they trusted the Creator to reveal the interior journey of the soul in the exterior world around them.
They wanted to know God, and they were willing to move from observation to participation in the pursuit of knowing.
The wonder in God-with-Us is found in paying attention to the exterior patterns that illuminate the patterns within. If you are watching, you’ll see them. Then you too will be asked to move from observation to participation in the ancient journey of knowing the Divine.
May you keep paying attention to what the outside illuminates inside.
Just a glorious stranger delivering an unbelievable message in a familiar setting. I think the invitation of the glory of the Lord that shines is less in the light show and more in the message.
A message from the Divine must start with “Be not afraid” because it is shattering the security you’ve found in limited conclusions:
that the Almighty didn’t enter the world as a judgmental titan set on condemning it but as a loving participant whose ultimate work of healing came through His ultimate loving participation that Love is intentionally inclusive in Its restoration invitation of all things and isn’t worried about not accomplishing what It has set out to do
Today, let our fears be the starting place of divine connection, because if a messenger from heaven were to show up with an announcement of good tidings of great joy, a message that will change everything, historically that proclamation would begin with the greeting “Be Not Afraid”—or, the way we say it today, “Merry Christmas.” May you be not afraid, for Love has drawn near.
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.3
