It seems that Christmas is the time when people are at their most hypocritical. They beam smiles back and forth while grief consumes them. For most people, Christmas is anything but merry. It is the time when they remember that their family is not whole, their dead loved ones are but vaporous memories, their love echoed by a thousand betrayals.
More than anything, Christmas is the season of contrasts. Everything that is meant to be celebrated is scorned. I can picture the word irony in tacky little blinking lights.
Even at the heart of Christmas, the manger scene is a study in contrasts: unconquerable life in the midst of death and decay; light piercing darkness; innocence into guilt. Everything beautiful about Christ coming into this world often seems negated by this present darkness. It is especially pronounced on a day of supposed triumph.
Christmas becomes a dividing point between Christians and the rest of the world. For Christians, Christmas imbues pain with purpose; restlessness with resolution; pain with peace; hollow with hope. It points us onward, past a manger, a cross-strewn hill, and an empty tomb to a heavenly city placed upon the earth. For non-Christians, Christmas is littered with disappointment. It is utopia gone ugly--where all the good virtues of man are dashed upon the rocks.
This study is contrasts should provoke its own contrast in the heart of the Christian on Christmas: gratitude and empathy. Thus my day will be innundated with the knowledge of triumphs and travails, and my heart will feed upon my inward tears.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
My God is For Me
Let me count the ways in which I don't love you...
God is an omnipresent reality, but so is sin. In fact, sin is much more real to me in many respects because I am it, in a sense. Although I was created in God's image, my identity since birth has been "sinner." It is impossible to avoid the reality of sin because it pervades the senses, even if the reality of God is elusive because we suppress the knowledge of Him in unrighteousness (Rom. 1). Perhaps that is why sin has always been the perfect platform for the Gospel. If you tell me about God, I'll have to take you at your word. You need not convince me of sin, however. It is all around me in a world wavering on the brink of chaos. It is in me. It is me.
And that is my reality today. I feel mired in sin. I wish I could feel mired in Christ. I don't want to pray or read God's Word; I don't want to feel, think, dwell inwardly. I have remained seemingly content with compartmentalizing the Gospel in my own life as I pretend to manifest it to others. I don't have time to "meditate day and night" on the Word of God and ponder its riches--I must work 9.5 hours, recover for .5 hours, prepare the next Sunday's lecture for 2 hours, and tend to my oft-neglected wife for the remainder. (She is so precious.)
At my wife's behest, I will take a moment to ponder a passage, and I choose Luke 13:34-35 and 19:41-45. Why? Because I will use those passages in an upcoming lecture, which makes meditating upon them pretty darn convenient.
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, you house is forsaken. And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'"
And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation."
Will He weep for me? Will He weep for the one whose tears dried up in the barren wasteland of a savage childhood. He weeps for the lost and perishing, but what about those who remember the pangs of the brokenness and can't shake it? Will He gather me like a hen gathers her chicks, though I feel barricaded by the enemies of my soul? I know "the things that make for peace," but I keep those things from myself. I want war. I want my enemy cast down, but my enemy is me. No one can snatch me from the hand of God, but I can refuse to feel His embrace.
I was often told when I was younger that my sin grieves the Spirit. I always pictured the Spirit as One ashamed and disappointed in me. Perhaps I cast my own fears and my own pitiful self-image upon the mind of the Spirit. But as I force myself back into Scripture (or am drawn?), I think for just a moment that Christ's Spirit is not aggrieved by my sin in the same way as He is over the unrepentant sinner. What if He grieves with me and for me? What if His heart breaks over mine and pours out with grief over the reverberating pangs of death. What if I am not shaming Him, but grieving Him? And what if my grief over sin is not merely a shallow attempt to follow my culture's perpetual self-victimization, but a grief that recognizes that I am simultaneously transgressor and victim?
What if I am the resurrected Lazarus, slowly being stripped of the grave clothes that wrapped my old body of death? What if the tears of Christ for His elect friend are not the acids of retribution, but the cathartic salve of grace? What if God really...really...is for me, not against me? Can I finally live like I am alive?
God is an omnipresent reality, but so is sin. In fact, sin is much more real to me in many respects because I am it, in a sense. Although I was created in God's image, my identity since birth has been "sinner." It is impossible to avoid the reality of sin because it pervades the senses, even if the reality of God is elusive because we suppress the knowledge of Him in unrighteousness (Rom. 1). Perhaps that is why sin has always been the perfect platform for the Gospel. If you tell me about God, I'll have to take you at your word. You need not convince me of sin, however. It is all around me in a world wavering on the brink of chaos. It is in me. It is me.
And that is my reality today. I feel mired in sin. I wish I could feel mired in Christ. I don't want to pray or read God's Word; I don't want to feel, think, dwell inwardly. I have remained seemingly content with compartmentalizing the Gospel in my own life as I pretend to manifest it to others. I don't have time to "meditate day and night" on the Word of God and ponder its riches--I must work 9.5 hours, recover for .5 hours, prepare the next Sunday's lecture for 2 hours, and tend to my oft-neglected wife for the remainder. (She is so precious.)
At my wife's behest, I will take a moment to ponder a passage, and I choose Luke 13:34-35 and 19:41-45. Why? Because I will use those passages in an upcoming lecture, which makes meditating upon them pretty darn convenient.
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, you house is forsaken. And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'"
And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation."
Will He weep for me? Will He weep for the one whose tears dried up in the barren wasteland of a savage childhood. He weeps for the lost and perishing, but what about those who remember the pangs of the brokenness and can't shake it? Will He gather me like a hen gathers her chicks, though I feel barricaded by the enemies of my soul? I know "the things that make for peace," but I keep those things from myself. I want war. I want my enemy cast down, but my enemy is me. No one can snatch me from the hand of God, but I can refuse to feel His embrace.
I was often told when I was younger that my sin grieves the Spirit. I always pictured the Spirit as One ashamed and disappointed in me. Perhaps I cast my own fears and my own pitiful self-image upon the mind of the Spirit. But as I force myself back into Scripture (or am drawn?), I think for just a moment that Christ's Spirit is not aggrieved by my sin in the same way as He is over the unrepentant sinner. What if He grieves with me and for me? What if His heart breaks over mine and pours out with grief over the reverberating pangs of death. What if I am not shaming Him, but grieving Him? And what if my grief over sin is not merely a shallow attempt to follow my culture's perpetual self-victimization, but a grief that recognizes that I am simultaneously transgressor and victim?
What if I am the resurrected Lazarus, slowly being stripped of the grave clothes that wrapped my old body of death? What if the tears of Christ for His elect friend are not the acids of retribution, but the cathartic salve of grace? What if God really...really...is for me, not against me? Can I finally live like I am alive?
Saturday, June 6, 2009
The Wonder of War
The wonder of war. The sharp edge of the razor of evil that scrapes and scars the face of the earth.
Words can do no justice to the horrors of war--especially those penned by one who has never entered into those horrors. But I can remark on the wonder. It is in war that we see the very worst of fallen mankind. On occasion, however, the tide of evil is met and rolled back by mankind at its most noble.
Men (like those pictured above) left the safety of these transports in order to wade through water, trudge through sand, and scale cliffs under merciless enemy fire. They willingly offered themselves to certain death--like sheep to the slaughter--in order to subdue a tyrant who wished to subdue the earth.
They are our heroes. What would lead a man to throw himself into death so that others may live free? Pure moral fiber. It is the epitome of courage: Sacrificing oneself for no immediate or certain gain, but for the possibility of a better world for one's posterity.
And I am left in wonder.
Reclusive No More
Dear Friends--none of whom likely read this blog anymore--I am coming back online. I disappeared for a whirlwind engagement, months of Army training, and a new marriage. My professional writing opportunities may be frustrated for a time, but God gives us alternative outlets. May God bless whoever amongst you happens to stumble upon this forsaken blog once more.
Your Friend,
Stephen
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