Seeking Emmanuel

I love the promises of Emmanuel -- God-with-us -- that permeate this Advent/Christmas time of year. My correspondence for some weeks now has closed with various versions of this prayer for those who read what I write: "May these holy days draw you deep into the mystery and joy of Emmanuel."

In the baby born in Bethlehem God draws near. God comes in humble, unexpected, even scandalous ways to be with us, to be one of us, to bear our burdens and to bear us forward, leading us through darkness into light. God with us, Emmanuel: Is there a greater promise than this?

But this year, for some reason, for me, this grand promise has an edge. It's something not so peaceful, something challenging that keeps calling me to take a close look at the way I live my days and beckoning me beyond myself and my own little Christmas tree world. It goes something like this:

The texts and music of this great season do indeed beckon us to await, look for and welcome Emmanuel, God-with-us. But those same songs and scripture call us to also await, look for and welcome God-as-over-against-us (whatever that Hebrew word would be!), at least God-as-over-against our powers and principalities, our perspectives and practices that stand in the way of God-with-everyone, that prevent the wolf and the lamb from living in harmony with each other, that obstruct and resist God's reign of peace and justice among us and for all.

I hear it, for example, in the Magnificat, Mary's melodic magnification of Emmanuel that enables us to hear and see clearly both the joy of God-with-us and the challenge of God-as-over-against all that stands in the way of God's desire for the world:

...The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of the hearts.

God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted high the lowly;

God has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty...

Emmanuel is good news for the humble, the lowly, the hungry -- and for me when I am any or all of these things. But for the proud, the powerful, the rich -- for me when I am any or all of these things in ways that obstruct Emmanuel for others -- there is an edge to the promise. Beneath the lilting melody I hear a counterpointed call to turn in a different direction, to fall on my knees at the manger in order to be raised up to walk in the new life offered by the cross and the empty tomb that await this baby Jesus...and which our world so desperately needs.

Thankfully, in the end -- and every day and always until then -- the grand promise of this season is indeed that God is every and always Emmanuel, God-with-us-with-the-world, forgiving, drawing us deep into the presence of the God swaddled in a manger, empowering each and every one of us to experience the deep and abiding mystery and joy of being God-with-others. This is the counterpointed carol that I find myself humming joyfully and mysteriously this Christmastide.

May your Christmas be merry, mysterious and magnificent!

Elephant in the Room

Is there a more indigestion-inducing imposition on teenaged siblings than for their parents to announce that no one can move from the dinner table until a poem has been read? When we did just that a week or so ago, I saw again how amazingly adept the teenage face is at the simultaneous display of a wide spectrum of human emotions: Disbelief. Repulsion. Horror. Volcanic commitment to some thing left undone for weeks that suddenly must be done, now. Frantic, silent conspiracy between siblings. An angry stare at Dad and a quick flick of the irises toward Mom to assess shared responsibility for this assault on the teenage psyche.

Grateful for their cooperation (at least they stayed in their chairs), I randomly opened my beloved copy of Best Loved Poems. (Well, it wasn't totally random; I figured that a poem from the “Poems of Love” section might cause the kids' heads to explode, so I went for “Poems that Tell a Story.”) I landed on John Godfrey Saxe's retelling of the ancient Indian fable “The Blind Men and the Elephant.”

You probably know the story, if not the poem. Six unsighted men each have a tactile encounter with a different part of the same elephant. The fellow who bumps into the side of the elephant proclaims an elephant to be like a wall. Touching the tusk moves number two to assert elephants to be spear-like. Four more make their confident declarations: An elephant is like a snake... a tree... a fan...a rope. Each, in turn, proclaims the reality of an elephant as a whole to be contained in their own particular and distinct experience of it.

The rhyming recitation concludes by stating the moral so clearly that we can't miss it:

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Quickly and with unusually efficient teamwork, the kids cleared the table and scurried out of the room. In that postpartum silence unique to a room just vacated by teenagers, my wife, Janet, and I were left to a few moments of reverie followed by brief conversation. We were both a bit stunned at how accurately this old story captures what transpires all too often in the “theologic wars” of the contemporary church.

Whether it's worship, sexuality, mission, or any of the many other hot topics among us, too often we shout at each other across chasms carved deep by indefatigable disagreement about what is true and good. We each claim that our reading of scripture, our experience, our understanding of tradition or current reality reflects the whole elephant. We “rail on” and seldom pause to really hear – with deep and profound hospitality – “what each other mean” or to prayerfully discern how it might enhance, enrich, or even challenge and change our own particular “ignorance.”

“For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part,” wrote the apostle Paul – no stranger to prating about elephants – to the debating community in Corinth. “For now we see in a mirror, dimly.” Someday, he offers, in the fullness of time, the partial will come to an end and we will know fully. But for now, we are left with elephants in the room and our own limited ability to perceive and proclaim what is true and good about them.

Thankfully, moving in our midst is also the Holy Spirit who, as Jesus promised, teaches us everything and reminds us of all that Jesus has said to us (John 14:26). But that old Reformation saw simul justus et peccator (at the same time sinner and saint) suggests that our own sin fogs even that glass so that not one of us can ever see the teaching or get what Jesus is saying quite right, no matter how much or deeply we pray or study scripture or research tradition or analyze the context. Our vision is riddled with blind spots. Perhaps humility, rather than being “exceeding stiff and strong,” ought to lead us into our discussions of the elephants in the room.

Since reading that poem with my family, I have found myself reading and rereading chapters 12 through 14 of 1 Corinthians. And I have come to think that it's time to rescue 1 Corinthians 13 from its matrimonial exile and return it to its intended dwelling place: smack-dab in the center of our life together as the body of Christ. Maybe this chapter and the surrounding two ought to be read every time we sit down at the table (and certainly before we get up from it) to talk about what it means to be the body of Christ and how we are to address the many issues and challenges we are called to face together.

I can just about see the look on some of your faces, the look like the multifaceted one on my kids' faces at the dinner table. But for the sake of God's mission of healing and hope in the world, the regular confession that “if I understand all mysteries and all knowledge...but do not have love, I am nothing,” empowered by God's Spirit, just might assist us in embodying some other words purported to be from the pen of Paul:

Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. [Ephesians 4:29 – 5:2; NRSV]

You are Dust

Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.

I don’t really need to hear that reminder. And I sure don’t want to hear it.

I know it’s Ash Wednesday, the day on which many Christians impose a cruciform smudge of incinerated palm leaf on each other’s brow and proclaim, “This is you, buddy!” Truthfully, I am already quite aware of my own mortality, thank you. Every single day imposes its own reminders aplenty.

Within any given 24-hour span I am haunted by my shortcomings and confronted by my failures. I am frustrated by my inability to keep promises or establish commitments or keep up at work or be the sort of husband, dad, or friend that I really want to be. These and their siblings smudge me and mark me as mortal. Every gray hair, lost opportunity, impulsive bad decision, each aching knee, sniffle and cough and broken relationship cry out my dusty origins and dustier destiny in nagging, niggling, sing-songy unison.

No, I really don’t think I need the smudge and the words imposed, as if to hammer home something that I have somehow forgotten or to etch it indelibly like some permanent thumb and finger angled to an “L” on my forehead to proclaim: “LOSER!” I don’t need an unwelcome outward sign of the inward reality that confronts me – and with which I struggle – every single day.

Here’s what I do need, though, what I crave in the dusty depths of my soul, what I’d welcome as I try to lean into Lent and spring and lengthening days: the mark of someone who will embrace my stumbling humanity, won’t hold my mortality against me, will receive it as gift and help me welcome it and steward it better than I do.

Of course, I’m not looking for some sort of “I’m okay, you’re okay” overlook of what I am and do that is destructive or unhealthy or irresponsible or hurtful.

I am looking for some sign of forgiveness, a reminder that it’s okay not to be God, a marked assurance that, as for Adam and Eve before me, divine breath brings dirt to life. I guess, as it turns out, I really yearn to have Jesus etched on my furrowed brow – dead, entombed in dust, standing again in that earth-scented garden. I need, desperately, that cruciform smudge of ash, promise of life from death, hope enveloping despair, new beginnings following mortal mistakes. And I need to hear in the “remember…” the promise, the hope, the new beginning that draw me toward Easter.

Even as we live each day, death our life embraces.
Who is there to bring us help, rich, forgiving graces?
You only, Lord, you only!
Baptized in Christ’s life-giving flood;
Water and his precious blood.
Holy and righteous God, Holy and mighty God,
Holy and all-merciful Savior, Everlasting God,
By grace bring us safely through the flood of bitter death.
Lord, have mercy.

(hymn text: Martin Luther, as found in Lutheran Book of Worship © 1978)

Everyday Mystery

This morning it was a few degrees below zero in Indianapolis. We are supposed to hit fifty on Saturday.

Freeze. Thaw. Snow. Rain. Winter. Spring. Lent. Easter. Death. Resurrection.

We find ourselves caught up in and moving toward interesting rhythms this time of year, don’t we? Of course, most of our focus tends to be on the daily stuff, the little things that dominate our days. It can be challenging to lift or deepen our focus a bit and see the bigger, even cosmic, rhythms that throb like imperceptible bass lines beneath the quotidian.

Oops. How did that archaic word slip in? Quotidian? Dictionaries say that the word means “occurring every day” or “commonplace” or “ordinary.” Author and poet Kathleen Norris connects this word with another old one, “mystic,” behind which is another word that’s often absent from contemporary vocabulary, “mystery.”

Perhaps our most valuable mystics are those of the quotidian....They search for God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people, and duties that can submerge the self.

Norris enlists Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that feisty founder of an illegal seminary in Nazi Germany, to draw our attention to the profound reality lurking in, with and under the everyday stuff of our lives.

We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for the daily gifts….How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things?

The ancient voice of the prophet Isaiah also echoes through the centuries to chime in on God’s behalf: I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Sometimes the details of the day are just that, details of the day. But most often, just beneath their surface a deeper reality moves, waiting to spring forth and use drudgery, demands and details to connect us to each other and to the cosmic rhythms of sustaining, life-giving grace.

Let those who have eyes to see, see!

[Quotations from Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (© 2008 Riverhead Books) and Isaiah 43:19, NRSV]