Ring in the New

                When I was a child of 12 or so years, I earned the esteemed and highly coveted position of bell-ringer at First Congregational Church in Moline (IL). The position was usually filled by boys, because it was heavy and messy work (it involved climbing crude wooden steps to a dirty, dusty, cobwebby bell tower, not something to be done in “girly clothes”), but my brother held the position before me and I learned the ropes from him. One rope, actually. You had to pull hard but once you got going you could ride the rope up off the ground, and that was exhilarating!

                That was just one of several church-related jobs I have held over the years. Another was baby-sitter to the children of our Associate Pastor and his wife, Bob & Julie Ullman, a job I sometimes shared with my sister. One New Years’ Eve when we were babysitting, Bob and Julie returned home before midnight and Bob offered to drive us down to church, to climb the bell tower and ring in the New Year! All along that river city, bells were ringing, from First Congregational and First Presbyterian, and First Lutheran, St. Mary’s… all the churches that still had bells in towers.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

                These lines, penned by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, are part of a much longer work, “In Memoriam,” published in 1850. The previous years had not been kind to Tennyson. For more than a decade, he had been mourning the loss of his close friend from college days. The one good thing, the love of his life to whom he had been engaged to be married, was lost to him: her family broke off the engagement when Tennyson lost the fortune he had inherited. Grief, heartbreak, diminished circumstances—no wonder he wrote “Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.”

                Of course we know nothing is really dying. We are turning a page, hanging a new calendar on the wall. January 1, 2012 will look very similar to December 31, 2011. But we pause to acknowledge the passing of time, perhaps to shed a tear for missed opportunities, perhaps to raise a parting glass in memory of those whom we have lost. And perhaps we will raise another, to life, to hope, to promise.

                What I sense most of all in Tennyson’s verses is release. “In Memoriam” seems to mark the end of grieving, a final relinquishment of mourning. Is it the poet’s declaration of independence from despair? Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is an invitation for hope to enter in.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be. 

So be it. Amen.

                You can read more of “Ring Out, Wild Bells” here.

God and Material Engagement Theory

Here’s how my brain works:

One day last week, while driving from one place to another, I caught a snippet of an opinion piece on the radio. It was about resisting the ludicrous material excesses of the end-of-year holidays—all the time spent shopping and the money spent procuring just the right things to give to our friends and family, things which would be forgotten and possibly discarded before the thawing of the frozen ground. The voice on the radio suggested we cut the number of gifts we give in half. Use some of the money we would have spent on gifts to make a donation to a charitable organization that does some good in the world, like Heifer International. How very Puritan, I thought. Who is this guy, preaching the gospel like he invented it?

I found the answer on the National Public Radio website. This guy is Adam Frank, who authored a book called About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang. A couple of clicks later I was previewing the book on Amazon.com, and I noticed frequent use the phrase “material engagement.” So I “searched inside the book” as Amazon allows and discovered seventy-one results. That seemed significant. That led me to Google “material engagement,” and after I filtered out “fabric” and “weddings” I discovered Lambros Malafouris and Colin Refrew at Keble College, Oxford Univeristy, and soon I was in too deep.

So, paddling back to the shallower pools of Adam Frank (no offense intended), I pondered the phrase “material engagement.” It struck me because even though it is still Advent, my brain has long been contemplating Christmas and Epiphany, and God’s incarnation. Which is, it seems to me, God’s material engagement with the cosmos. The theological leap from the God who could not be seen face-to-face, whose voice could not be heard but through the prophets, who could only be addressed through the rituals the temple, to a God who is present in the person of Jesus—that leap requires a new theory of God. If God who spoke to no one face-to-face could suddenly be present in human form, that means God changed the rules of engagement with God’s creation, from immaterial engagement through dreams and visions, to material engagement in human flesh. What the church calls “incarnation,” God getting fleshy, could also be called God’s praxis of material engagement.

So what? Well let me tell you what. Many people live as if the material world doesn’t matter. Many of these people even consider their point of view to be Christian. What really matters, they say, is what is in your heart, what you believe. As long as you accept Jesus into your heart and believe, really believe, then you are saved. Saved from what? From this dirty world, which will be destroyed. And they proceed to excel the rate of destruction, because their engagement with the world is based on the assumption that mater doesn’t matter, or worse, that mater is evil.

That’s just messed up.

If God created the world, and loved the world enough to become materially engaged in the world, then everything—every last thing—has holy potential. Our own praxis of material engagement should be informed by God’s praxis of material engagement. If God was present in the person of Jesus, then God is potentially present in every person. If God slept in a manger in Bethlehem, then God is potentially present in every barn, every favela, every shanty town and shelter. If God walked the back roads of Galilee and the streets of Jerusalem, then every country lane from Mississippi to Mozambique to Myanmar and all around the world is highway in the Holy Land; and every city street is potentially a street in the City of God. If God bathed in the Jordan River, then every river… you get the drift, right?

How can we despise anyone who is potentially God? How can we abandon the streets of God’s city? How can we remove the mountain of God’s presence?

If we believe, really believe, or reluctantly believe or even entertain the possibility for a moment, that God is present in the world, then how should we live? Think about it.

Christ of the Carols: Child of God, Love's Pure Light

December 4, 2011

Text: Silent Night, Holy Night

When I was in elementary school, I remember seeing an educational film about the story of the song, Silent Night. The dramatic recreation of events was set in a small village in Austria and filmed in black and white. You probably know the story as well as I do, how the organ in the village church broke down, and no one could be found to repair it. So the Choir Master, Franz Gruber, and the Pastor, Joseph Mohr, collaborated on a simple hymn which could be accompanied by guitar.

It is a tale of adversity was transformed into advantage. Which is probably why it has become an American favorite. We like our legends of adversity overcome. We like to imagine that if it weren’t for the apparently unfortunate circumstance of the organ that went kaput, the song might never have been written. God works in a mysterious way, wonders to perform.

The thing is, no one can find an account of this story that predates 1965.

The hymn was written in 1818.

So this dramatic account is probably a complete fiction.

And yet, we know this is true: God does work in a mysterious way. God does turn disappointment into blessing, time and time again. And that is why the broken organ story will last. Because whether or not it actually happened that way, it is a true story. The story is not truth, but the story is a container ship of truth. It is the vessel that carries a truth into the future.

And that is why the stories of Christ’s nativity are so precious. They need not be factual to be true. We don’t need to pretend to suspend our disbelief in a virgin birth.  We don’t have to pretend to suspend our disbelief  that a star could guide travelers to one particular house among many, or that we could call men “wise” who thought that it did. We don’t have to pretend not to notice that Matthew and Luke’s gospel tell completely different stories of Jesus’ birth, and that two of the gospels don’t mention it at all. Because the truth of the story is not in the details. The story holds the truth. And it is a beautiful vessel for the truth. It is a story richly embroidered, lovingly crafted, polished to shine like gold.

The hymns and carols of Christmas similarly vessels of a truth, a faith, a devotion passed from generation to generation.  Still nacht, heilege nacht, Alles schlaft, eimsam wacht nur das traute hochheilege Paar, holder Knabe mit lockigen Haar, Schlafen in himmlishe ruh. Silent night, holy night, everyone sleeps, no one is awake except the faithful, holy few. The beautiful boy with the curly hair sleeps in heavenly rest.

Anyone who has spent a night with a newborn knows that the heavenly rest could not have lasted long! But don’t sweat the details, because that is not where the truth is found. The truth is that Jesus, like every baby, is born into a world that, for all its faults, becomes holy to those gathered around for the event. Time seems to stop, and for a moment there is no one in the world except mother and child, looking into one another’s eyes for the first time. The rest of the world might as well be asleep.

The truth is that generations of Christians have found in the person of Jesus a God-presence so powerful, so complete, that their devotion found expression in stories and songs that identify that presence as extending retroactively through childhood and into infancy. And so Jesus, the Man of God, became Jesus the infant Child of God. And our hymn for today is a song of praise to the Child of God, love’s pure light. Let us join with our brothers and sisters in Christ in all ages in this song of praise.