Tag: Pasturescott

oh well, noël

The death of a beloved is an amputation.

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

There’s a 10-foot tall Christmas tree in Tustin, California for families who grieve the loss of their children to addiction. It’s put there yearly by Solace of Hope, a family support group for grieving parents. The tree is filled with ornaments and photos of the many lives lost far too soon to the damnable plague of opioids.

Alan Berkowitz and his wife Kathy lost their 26-year old son to heroin six years ago.

The toughest part for my wife and me is Christmas morning. Now it’s just the two of us. We get up and have coffee. And, well, it’s kind of hollow.”

Sandy and I share that isolating grief with the Berkowitz’s. Our Graham also became an ‘ornament on a tree’ nine Christmases ago at twenty-four. He had just completed a few months in rehab and we were happily working on getting him a flight home from Minnesota. On December 16th, word reached us he would not be coming home.

Our Christmases can still feel hollow for us too. More’s the pity because Sandy loves Christmas like no other day of the year. She can decorate to beat the band and transform any house or apartment into a glowing hearthfire of peace on earth. Fittingly, she’s a Christmas Day baby, but each year her birthday is eclipsed by a lingering shadow of grief.

I was streaming the first episode of a murder mystery which was mostly meh until the chief detective said something I immediately put in my notes app. Offering comfort to the victim’s teenage daughter he said,

“grief is love with no place to go.”

For parents like us who have lost a child at Christmas, we totally get that.

While many associate Christmas with “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy,” (even better in Linus voice) others are further down in the Luke narrative. There’s the headline we all know and love, but then there’s the fine print:

And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (AND A SWORD WILL PIERCE THROUGH YOUR OWN SOUL ALSO), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.

Luke 2:34-35 (emphasis mine)

Way to bury the lede, Luke!

Years ago many older hymns were passed down through oral/auditory tradition. The First Noel is one of them, which is why The Cornish Songbook (1929), printed the first stanza as:

O well, O well, the Angels did say
To shepherds there in the fields did lay;
Late in the night a-folding their sheep,
A winter’s night, both cold and bleak.
O well, O well, O well, O well,
Born is the King of Israel.

The season of noël is, for some, a painful ordeal. From the Latin ‘natale,’ meaning “birth,” Noël feels like anything but.

For a myriad of reasons, not only loss, it instills dread and invites depression. Scrooge’s dark night of the soul resonates more deeply than his Christmas morning grace awakening in some.

His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom

—Aragorn, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien

Sandy and I fight the good fight yearly to not get cheated out of Christmas. She still decorates and I still play the music. She wraps gifts in upscale department store fashion and I don’t. We make sure to see the lights, watch White Christmas, and sit graveside with our boy on Christmas Eve.

The two of us have found our safest place to be is with each other. We don’t do big family gatherings on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We prefer our holidays quieter. It’s worked for us nine straight years and we don’t plan to change.

If the manger means anything, it means the Savior swaddles our sorrows. Slowly, over channels of time, the comforted begin to realize their bandwidth for moving through the hard days has increased. The sword pierces a little less. You can surprise yourself by having the wherewithal to do stuff again.

Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, our Wisdom from heaven, has gifted us with a deeper Noël. Even in the midst of our bleak midwinter, and as a hurting world moans in unrequited protest, our grief becomes love that suddenly finds a place to go.

Joyeux Noël, beloved.

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what started out as a barn

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?

1 Corinthians 3:16

Christmas is nearly upon us. We can be certain we will be treated to all forms of ‘baby Jesus in a stable’ scenes and meditations (mine included). While a barn may have housed the babe of Bethlehem, it will not do to accommodate a reigning King.

That’s you and me, friend. We are God’s house. For better or for worse, Jesus makes his abode in us.

The cave or lean-to in which Jesus was born gives a certain charm to the incarnation narrative but is quickly discarded for a house when the Magi show up.

Here’s a question: does our life say ‘barn’ or ‘temple’? Maybe we think we’ve got a dream house going on when really we’re just unstable structures built on sand.

Early on the tabernacle of God was a mobile tent. It sufficed for a time, but it really bothered David.

“Here I am inside a cathedral, while God is out there in a cardboard box!” he groused. David intended to do something about it, but God gently withstood him. We know the reason why, of course, but I think that story reveals something about how we approach life.

Put simply, we aren’t meant for this world. We are called to something more permanent, ever more glorious. Like David, we should be bothered. There should be in us a “holy restlessness” until God gets all that he rightly owns. Us. His temples.

In one gospel story, Peter and his boys had just watched a rich young ruler foolishly walk away from Christ, unwilling to liquidate his assets for the kingdom. What just happened, they wondered.

The disciples couldn’t believe what they were hearing, but Jesus kept on: “You can’t imagine how difficult. I’d say it’s easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for the rich to get into God’s kingdom.”
That set the disciples back on their heels. “Then who has any chance at all?” they asked.

Mark 10:24-26, The Message

The disciples were dumbstruck. They’d been brainwashed to believe since birth that the rich and powerful were fast-tracked into God’s kingdom. Jesus upended that heresy by exposing the hypocrisy of the religious elite. That those (air-quote) other guys (end air-quote) wouldn’t gain entry they understood.

But this guy wasn’t a hypocrite. He wasn’t combative. He was sincere, respectful, even desperate. I mean, he actually ran up to Jesus and fell to his knees! If that’s not an altar call I don’t know what is.

Only he went away lost, owned by his wealth. Eugene Peterson helpfully writes, “His possessions were his millstone strangling the very life from his soul – that is why Jesus touched on the topic of what he owned. ‘It’s killing you man, it’s owning you!’”

The young aristocrat preferred his bigger barn portfolio to the Savior of the world.

Characteristically, Peter just had to inject himself into the uncomfortable silence.

See, we have left everything and followed you.

Mark 10:28, ESV

Except…

…much of what Peter and the others thought to be important was not really so, and that what they thought to be of no importance was often of great significance before God.”

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, p. 121

If you’re out here just doing stuff to get reimbursed, rewarded, or recognized — even in the name of Jesus — forget it. That stuff’s just gonna get burned up.

Praise God, we know how the disciples’ story ends. Their faith in — and obedience to — Christ made their lives a fit habitation for King Jesus. They certainly did their share of slumming from time to time, but in the end they were temples.

One day we shall thank God we built with enduring material. It is so easy to let up here and there and work in a little wood or stubble, but blessed is the man (and woman) who will not substitute even the good for the best.

—Vance Havner

Jaroslav Pelikan, Yale scholar and historian of religion, observed:

Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull up out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?

—Quoted from The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard, p. 12

Setting aside the meta narrative of human history for a second, let’s address it on a more cellular level:

how much of ‘Jesus’ will be left in us when the fire purges from us everything that is not him?

That’s really the question. Are our respective ‘inns’ so crowded all we can offer Jesus is a mucked-out stable? Is he worthy of more?

As I’m writing this, I’m listening to the pounding of hammers on the other side of the house. For the past 251 days (yes I’m counting!) we’ve been temporarily lodging in a converted garage without a single window. All that pounding and sawing and drilling is sweet music to our ears; it means we will be moving into a spacious suite of rooms with plenty of windows through which the Florida sun can shine all the live long day!

You might say our living situation is a metaphor. I don’t want my life to be a garage without windows. I want to be a wide-open, well-lit, fully-accessible house for my Jesus.

Selah, beloved. Until next time.

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good tidings of great joy to those who aren’t feeling it

If you’re at all familiar with the sitcom Friends, you know Chandler. The likable character, played by Matthew Perry, captured fans’ hearts through his youthful innocence and memorable lines. But his celebrity cost him dearly. Opioids and alcohol have very nearly done him in. In the opening lines of his memoir he writes, “I should be dead.”

The price tag on his trying to get sober has topped $9 million. Tragically, he has yet to find salvation in either drugs or their prevention.

In his recently-released memoir, 53-year old Perry confides to the reader:

That beatific moment is something I still seek. . . . I want that connection to something bigger than me because I’m convinced it’s the only thing that will truly save my life. I don’t want to die. I’m scared to die.

Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir

The “big terrible thing” in Matthew Perry‘s life might be substance abuse, but his heart-twisting confession reveals an even more terrible thing. How awful it must be to be so close to the door of salvation and not be able to find the door knob.

Not Chandler Bing, I thought. God, send a gospel preacher to him! Who has his ear? Who could tell him about the healing love of Jesus? But then: maybe he has heard it and didn’t choose Door Jesus. If so, well that’s a whole other “big terrible thing.”

What is needed here is a Christmas miracle.

The Christmas story is set against the background of night. Joseph was visited by an angel in the night. The shepherds watched their flocks by night. Mary and Joseph welcomed their little bundle into the world in the middle of the night.

But, suddenly, like the opening verses of our Bibles, there was light. And it was good.

Recently, I discovered that the tiny book of Haggai casts some of that light. Looking at it in a certain way, one might catch a glint of Christmas cheer.

Let’s take a look.

Haggai preached three short sermons to the people of God over three months, but he was given yet a fourth — really a sermonette — for a single individual. At the beginning of what is now our traditional Christmas week, Haggai gave Zerubbabel a gift-wrapped message from heaven.

I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms. I am about to destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the nations…On that day, declares the LORD of hosts, I will take you, O Zerubbabel my servant, the son of Shealtiel, declares the LORD, and make you like a signet ring, for I have chosen you, declares the LORD of hosts.

Haggai 2:21-23

“Your ministry isn’t finished quite yet, Haggai. I have one more sermon for you to preach. It’s a sermon for a specific person. Go to him and let him hear the gospel of grace.”

That guy’s name is Zerubbabel, meaning “birthed in Babylon.”

What a beautiful story of grace. Like Zerubbabel, we each come into the world, citizens of ‘Babylon,’ steeped in sin. God’s mercy finds us there and gives us a new story, a new identity, a new home.

God called a man, whose name means “festival,” to go and cheer up a man who’s wearing all the weight of Babylon on his soul.

In this Christmas season, is the Lord perhaps sending you to someone who needs some good news? Could you possibly be their own personal angel at Christmas?

Sandy and I have a friend on social media. I’ll call her Cindy. Cindy has been our prayer warrior for years. Recently she entered a contest online hoping to win an expensive winter sweater. Turns out, she won the sweater. She shared the good news with us immediately.

I’ll be honest the last week or so have really been difficult! I can feel the black cloud of deep, dark depression settling in like it does every year at the holidays!! I’ve been praying & pleading that this year it not happen! That this year the holidays would be different! I’m trying so hard to be joyful & happy!! To believe they will be different!! To not let the depression settle in again! This win really helped!! I wanted that sweater so badly!! I hope that doesn’t sound crazy! It was like a hug from Jesus! Telling me it’s going to be alright!!

I shot off a message to her right away:

This doesn’t sound the least bit crazy! Anything that comes into your life that we can turn into praise to our Father is a gift from heaven. You know that “every good and perfect gift is from above, from the Father of lights” — even sweaters! This beautiful sweater delights your heavenly Father even more than it brings happiness to you. The Father knows how much you needed this win! He is for you, he is for you, he is FOR you!

Someone you might know is secretly afraid of dying. The stink of Babylon is on them and they need to hear it’s not their destiny. He or she needs to hear that God wants to shake their world in a good way.

In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Matthew Perry self-diagnosed his soul’s great wound:

I have a never-ending need for attention, but it’s never the right kind of attention. It didn’t work. It didn’t fix that hole in me…

Do you have an incurable wound on your soul? Do you know someone who thinks — or you think — they are beyond salvation?

If Christmas tells us anything, it says GOD IS LOVE. He’s in a festive spirit and is eager to give you himself. People may fail you but he’s a true “Friend.” If you’re crying while everyone else is caroling, the Savior is sitting in that corner with you and whispering,

I’ve chosen you. You are a jeweled ring on my finger. I’ll never pawn you or throw you away. You are mine. Just watch and see what I’ll do. It’ll be epic.

Selah, beloved of God. I hope this has been a welcome message to you in this season of Advent. If I can pray for you, don’t hesitate to email me.

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