Have yourself a real little Christmas!

 

We are approaching Christmas, perhaps the refrain of a familiar carol still echoes in your heart: “Comfort and Joy, Comfort and Joy,” yeah, perfect!  Or maybe not, words and ideas tend to change over time, or rather what a certain word or idea means in a certain cultural context.  God doesn’t change, neither does the meaning of His words, but sometimes our ambient culture makes it a little hard to understand for those of now ‘late in time who behold Him come’ (yes, another carol reference!).  That famous chorus from God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen is a great example, even the title is odd to our modern ears, do these chronic party attenders need a nap?  Merry in this context means not only happy or delighted but also strong, great, mighty (like Robin Hood’s Merry Men), making the full title to mean something like ‘may God grant you rest, delight, and strength in Himself,’ which makes a bit more sense.

But what of comfort and joy?  Yeah, American comfort or rather comfortable: free of stress, trouble, annoyance, or discomfort is not the idea here.  Going back to the KJV and Handel’s Messiah, think Comfort ye, comfort ye, My people.  A lessening of sorrow, a hope in darkest night, an assurance that all is not eternally lost though mortal life is bitter and fleeting.  ‘They that sit in darkness have seen a great light!’  And Joy?  Not temporal, momentary, ephemeral, fleeting happiness as is the American ideal, but abiding, unabating Joy no matter our current circumstances.  Joy enough to willingly climb Golgotha’s Hill and bear the sins of all the world.

And that’s just one song, how about all of Scripture?  Here are a couple meme worthy verses I’m sure we all cling to or spout on occasion:

 

For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11 Plans to be kidnapped by fleeing exiles and die a torturous death in a foreign land, plans to be reviled and ignored and threatened and imprisoned by those he was sent to help?  Not really the American ideal of that verse!

 

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28. But further on Paul proclaims: For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered. 8:36”. But throughout he’s also talking about how NOTHING can separate us from God’s love and our future glory even though life throws some pretty nasty curve balls our way.  But we don’t like thinking (or reading) about that sort of thing, that’s not what God really means is it?  How can He expect modern Americans to trust Him if this is His idea of love, glory, comfort, hope and joy?  Darkness, death, disease, sin, sorrow, misery, hardship, poverty, struggle, trial, malice, slander…ugh!  Comfort and Joy!  Let’s have another chorus, anybody?

 

Many people hate Christmas, or at least the saccharine, Hallmark movie extravaganza our culture makes of it.  Because nobody has that sort of life, except superficially, but we all think we want it so drive ourselves nuts trying to attain it or give up in despair that we are undeserving of it.  Modern Christmas music about santa and snow and stars and glitter and peace and sweaters and hippopotami clashes as badly with reality as anything worn to an ugly sweater party and that’s why we hate it.  We know it isn’t real, it isn’t deep, but we all don our fake smiles and grin at one another while stewing alone in our private sorrows and fears telling everyone, even ourselves, we are fine, when we most certainly aren’t.

But real Christmas music, real Christmas, isn’t that way at all.  All the old hymns are written in a sad, mysterious minor key while all the modern drivel is in a bold, happy major, there’s room in those old hymns for all the woes and fears of real life with joy and hope besides, but there isn’t any room in a ‘merry little christmas’ for anything but false ideals.  If we delve into those archaic words we find spears and sorrow and nails and sin and gloom and death, the very stuff we are dealing with daily, the very stuff Christ came to overthrow after wading through it Himself, the very reason He came at all.  We don’t like it, we don’t like to acknowledge it, we want to be happy now, we want to be comfortable Now, can’t He just make it all go away?  Can’t we live the Hallmark movie instead of this epic drama He’s trying to make of our life story?  We want a comfy, cozy hometown little flick and He’s sending us off to Rivendell with little hope of a ‘there and back again,’ a hundred mile journey on foot with no paved roads or state patrol or McDonalds or Holiday Inn while you’re eight months pregnant.

 

But that is how we know Scripture is true and God is real, when we instinctively know all the sugar coated garbage we culturally associate with Christmas only causes indigestion and cavities but imbibe it still yet shrink from the depth and scope and wonder of the Truth.  How about all those ‘heroes’ of the faith recorded in Hebrews or whom we celebrate in Sunday School?  Real, fallible, unwilling, foot dragging people with foibles galore but God still used them to accomplish His will and He can and will still use each of us, for His glory and our good, but we need to listen and obey, not run off to Tarshish when God sends us to Ninevah, like silly Jonah who thought he was smarter than God.  He delights in taking the foolish things of the world and using them to overthrow the wise, popular, respected, cool, and strong things of this benighted world.  A shepherd overthrows a giant and becomes King, a penniless child will overthrow sin and death forever, what can’t He do?

 

But we’ve got to let Him.  God pointed at Moses and Moses says send Aaron.  Gideon keeps making excuses and testing God.  Jonah thinks he can outrun God in a boat.  The demons believe and shudder but don’t change their ways.  Sarah and Zechariah both laugh at the thought of the elderly becoming biological parents.  What impossibilities have we laughed at, run from, shrugged off, ignored or reinterpreted?  It is the original lie, straight from the serpent, “did God really say?”  Yes, yes He did!  We don’t have to like it, or agree with it, but if God said it, He means it, and it doesn’t change or fade with time or culture or distance or popularity for God Himself is unchanging.

 

We must accept it as Truth, for that is what it is, despite our personal feelings or failings on the matter, or reject it, we can’t alter it, distort it, ignore it, reword it, reinterpret it to comply with our opinions and preferences or those of our culture.  Well we can, people have been doing that for as long as there have been tongues to lie or words to twist, but we can’t do that and truly call ourselves Christians.  For what is a Christian: a true follower of Christ.  Not a fan, not an expert, but a follower, one who gets off their butt and follows, an active pursuit of Jesus, not just a comfy seat and mental acknowledgement, we’ve already admitted the demons do the same and they certainly aren’t His!  

 

And what does Jesus say is required to follow Him: They will know we are Christians by our Love.  Love God, Love Neighbor, even love your enemies!  If you love Me you will keep my commandments.  Love is probably the most abused word in the English language.  I’ve heard it said the Inuit have 200 words for snow, true or not, we only have one word to describe everything from our feelings for food, sports teams, activities, our romantic interest, good friends, pets, kids, distant relations, books whatever, certainly pizza and grandma are not on the same footing in your mind, or so I can only hope, but such is our limited vocabulary.

When God says Love, He means doing the best for the beloved, no matter the cost or convenience to the lover and no matter what the beloved thinks about it, it may be downright unpleasant to both but love is costly, sacrificial, if it doesn’t cost you anything it ain’t real love.  We as a culture are very fond of niceness, but true, heartfelt, charitable kindness is rare.  Nice is just fake love, sort of like a Hallmark movie being thought an epic on the scale of Lord of the Rings.  It makes us feel good about ourselves and that’s what matters, we really don’t care about that other person at all, just how they make us feel about ourselves.  Real Love asks how can I benefit that person even though it will cost me something and probably be of no material benefit to myself.

Yeah, it is hard, but it is also real!  You want real peace, real joy, real comfort, you need to get off the couch and follow, not just like it on Facebook or say all the right things to all the right people.  We need to lose this cultural mentality of ‘have it your way.’  If your idea of god complies with all your wishes and whims, it doesn’t require anything of you but to be content and happy, it’s an idol and if you look closely you might even discover that it is actually you you are worshipping, and you’ve reinvented Jesus to justify your own preferences and opinions. Whereas the real God made you, not you Him, He has revealed Himself to us in a certain way and anything that contradicts that is wrong, false, and heretical.  We are made in the image of God, not He in our image, though we’ve been trying to reimagine Him since Eden.

But He came into this broken story and lived a man Himself, He not only made us and everything else, but He has personally redeemed all creation, including you!  You don’t have to like what He says or agree with it, but if you truly want to follow Him, you have to do it.  His ways are not our ways, and happily so, else we’d be living a shallow hallmark movie rather than a grand epic.  That’s why we hate Christmas, and good gospel preaching, it reminds us of the things that truly matter, the things we don’t want to embrace or even think about, like taking up our own cross, daily!, and following Him, but we know in the end it is the best way, the right way, the only way that is worth walking, no matter how painful or scary or tedious it might turn out to be.

But we’d rather dither and drag our feet and admit Jesus is a nice guy and we like and admire him and maybe we’ll follow someday, like we’ll eventually go to the gym or call that old friend, someday.  But Today is the day of salvation and no other!  Are you in or out?  If you are going to follow, then get going, and if not, then at least be honest with yourself and God and say it isn’t for me and get out of the way that others may pass and you not cause a traffic jam.  In the end it is His will that will triumph and in submitting our own to His, so too shall we, but we will never win in pitting our wills against His, the question is will we make that decision, one way or the other, or just float along through life, vexed and uneasy but never finding resolution or knowing quite why.  The Christian life isn’t easy or comfortable, but in the end it is the life truly worth living, all else is mere existence.

 

The long awaited review of The Boy Who Lived

 I tried to jump on the Harry Potter bandwagon back in college, half a lifetime ago, I got halfway through book 6 and gave up, not because it was a difficult read or I wasn’t used to reading long books (hello Wheel of Time, gave up that one too after about 9 books!), but rather I found it depressing and not all that interesting.  Lately I was staying with friends and had nothing to read, she had the series so I gave it another go.  The first three books are okay, but obviously the first work of a young writer, Rowling hits her stride in book 4 and never looks back.  She has great characters in almost everybody but the title character!  After all that time traipsing around in Harry’s head I don’t know much more about him than that he’s a generic angsty teenager, which I already have plenty of experience with in my own kids except they have a personality too, it is a sad day when Neville is more personable than Harry! The plot sort of meanders hither and yon, while there are some unique plot points, many feel trite or completely random, and ironically the characters themselves admit that most of it is luck.  The world building is intriguing but shallow, sort of like the scenery for a play, cool at a distance but no actual depth.  And the whole series the mood is very depressing and angsty, moody and uncertain, it is always November and never May!  Can’t we see Harry have even a happy couple of months, maybe one uneventful game of quidditch?  But my biggest issue with the series is its indifferent metaphysics, what the heck drives the characters, powers the world, does anything mean anything?  Star Wars has the force, Lord of the Rings and Narnia are Christian spinoffs, Wheel of Time has a complex dualistic Ferris wheel, Spider-Man has pseudoscience, but what drives Harry Potter, teenage angst?, dumb luck?, the modern bureaucracy? 

It is one thing to write a silly little story with no depth or deeper meaning and leave the philosophy, religion, and metaphysics well out of it, but it is quite another to delve into life and death, morality and ethics, the soul, the supernatural, etc with no thought or direction at all given to the underlying worldview.  But it is secular post modernism you proclaim, no it is not, we have right and wrong, good and evil, where does that come from?  Professor Umbridge and the Dursleys are secular post modernists, they define their own reality, but outside the bureaucracy everybody else seems to have set ideas about an external right and wrong.  While we have a few mentions of churches, a couple bits of scripture, and celebrate Christmas and Easter, this is not a Christian book, the only mention of any sort of deity is surprised ejaculations referencing the first person of the Trinity without any sort of belief or reverence.  You can’t be a secularist and admit you have a soul (major theme in the last book).  But you can’t be a deist and have no idea who or what your god is.  If you are going to deal with serious topics, you should do it in a serious way, but there is no depth, no meaning, no purpose, no reason to keep going, which is why I gave it up in the first place.  The mood is so bleak because we are depending on luck to get us through, there is no hope, no purpose, no reason we should expect things to get better, no point in living even if they do.  No, I was not happy with this series, it is trying to be Lord of the Rings, but instead of echoing the gospel and the Hope therein, rather we have something based upon the gospel according to modern, post Christian man, a superficially happy mishmash of cultural relativism but with no meat and no depth and no meaning.  While many are ravenous for real depth, they rave about these books thinking they are the real thing, little knowing it is diet soda masquerading as the real thing.  But so shallow is our cultural understanding of anything, few are those who realize splashing in the shallows doesn’t mean you understand the ocean’s depths; their feet are wet so they must be expert seamen.

The Modern Vision of Music

 It has often baffled me how Taylor Swift can be the voice of our culture and multiple generations, but then I went to a junior high choir concert the other day, the band played a song apparently written by someone with mental health issues and meant to inspire people against suicide, which was sadly appropriate as after the song selections for the choir I was feeling rather depressed and nihilistic.  I remember singing one or two such songs back in my own early choir years of similar persuasion but this time it was every...single...song!  We at least had a few Disney or show tune pieces in there, my elementary aged daughter has an upcoming concert with several painful (but chipper) childish ditties, but why was the junior high selection so extremely awful?!  The better question is what does one sing about when the whole point of our existence is pointless?  We are a culture and society happily building legos on the deck of the capsizing Titanic!

Music throughout time and history, culture and place has been a language, an art, an expression of feelings, sentiments, events, myth, legend, history, story, notions, and the essence of being far beyond what simple words can say.  But like real art, Modern Music has replaced music as it should be.  Now it is a discipline without rules, without borders, without meaning, a banana duck taped to the wall of life!  The hum of my fan has more meaning than any random song of modern selection.  I can understand why the kids weren't enthused to be singing (not that they are enthused about anything not of their own choosing!) about looking into their own souls for meaning (if they have one), finding all their future in dreams and hopes centered on a chaotic, meaningless universe, and finding all their purpose inside themselves and in their own visions.  Ye can be gods!  Yes, and what petty, miserable gods we be!  No wonder a vocal artist with mediocre talents who mostly whines/sings about her pointless life and relationships is the epitome of our culture.

Some guy calling himself 'The Preacher' wrote about this a couple thousand years ago, and his book is still a best seller, so it isn't just a modern phenomenon, but something that wrings the heart of every mortal under heaven.  John Lennon's 'Imagine' is the grand hymn to this worldview, and just as despair inducing as any of the lesser songs presented by our local student vocalists.  We don't need to imagine, we live, as functional materialists, in a world where we assume 'there is no Heaven and no Hell,' but the problem is, nothing means anything in such a world!  Our whole existence is based on the random fluctuations of subatomic particles set off at the explosion that began Stuff, (did you know hard core secularists are Calvinists!?) and nothing means anything because there is no meaning, point, or purpose, yet some deep part of ourselves demands there must be.  So either the secular realists are wrong or some deep part of our being is.  Back before the heady days of advanced scientific discovery, The Preacher remarked, 'God has set eternity in the hearts of mankind,' now obviously he didn't understand astrophysics or subatomic particles so what can he know?

But then what do all these all knowing scientific philosophers know?  How is it Order arose from Chaos, or Something from Nothing, why isn't Chaos increasing to the point of Vacuum instead of being held in check that Order and Life can exist?  Why does my deepest yearning turn towards Something, Meaning, Purpose like a compass needle to the North Pole?  Why am I discontent in the 'Son of Man' revealed in Phil Collins' "Tarzan" soundtrack (catchy music, but if you actually dissect the lyrics there's nothing there!) but find boundless hope, desire, and interest in an itinerant Jewish carpenter of the same title who rode into Jerusalem on a donkey some two millennia ago?  The crowds that hailed Him as King wanted the same things we brilliant moderns demand: I want it my way.  They killed Him a week later because He  said that wasn't the point of life at all, ironically fulfilling the entire point of this reality!

But our songs are still about nothing, as are our sad little lives, but they don't have to be.  I am in no way saying that music is in any way artistically good or bad based on the meaning or contents, but rather that it can be intrinsically pathetic, even with the most catchy beat in the known universe, if it doesn't mean anything.  I will be the first to tell you that there are some (lots actually) of really horrible Christian attempts at music out there, but I'd rather sing a 45 minute chorus of the worst Christian song I can think of than listen to 2 minutes of the inane drivel that passes for modern music (okay, maybe a little longer if it is Bon Jovi but only if you are working out to it and not really contemplating the lyrics), just like I don't own any modern art pieces, unless you count where the kids have left marks on the wall.  But I'll leave you to choose the soundtrack to your own life, be it 'Amazing Grace,' or 'Imagine,' and your workout will proceed accordingly!