the new year is upon us...

Well, another year ends and a new one begins, and I start another year of life (my b-day is new year's eve, in case you didn't know).  I have at least one resolution for 2012: write more substantial blog posts here.  We'll see if that materializes or not. :-)  Here's to the last year on the Mayan calendar!  The end is nigh.  hehe.

Back at home for the holidays...

Well, all I can say is... whew!  The last couple weeks have been a bit of a blur, and unfortunately part of that is due to the fact that I've been sick.  I started getting a sinus infection after my trip in early Dec. to Edinburgh, Scotland.  If you have not been to Edinburgh, I highly recommend going there, if possible.  Such a beautiful city.  I thought about getting medicine before leaving for the holidays, but I started feeling better, so I didn't worry about it.  Then I flew from the UK to the US for Christmas break.

By the time I landed in Oklahoma City on Thursday afternoon, my ears were bothering me and I was feeling sick again.  And, as tends to happen in my life, my timing was a bit off.  I flew again, on Saturday morning, to Seattle.  It was great to be in the Northwest again, and I was able to visit several good friends, but my time there was marred by the fact that I was getting sicker, and had to go to the doctor, and spent a couple days just laying (or is it lying?) around in bed.  I also ended up having to postpone my return flight from Tuesday to Thursday in order to let the antibiotics get to work so I felt well enough to fly.  Not the way I wanted to spend my time in Seattle, but thanks to good friends like Roy, I still had a good visit.

So, anyway, now I'm back in OKC and recovering.  I'm still very thankful to be back in the US for Christmas and to have the chance to see family and friends, but I also have a lot of writing to get done and I'm trying to figure out how to manage my time and rest enough to get well completely.  I'm sure I'll be fine, but you know how when you're just sick enough that you feel sluggish and not-quite-coherent (in addition to the sniffling and coughing), but not sick enough to just sleep all day and have someone bring you soup? :-)  Well, I've felt that way for two weeks now, and it's getting old.  haha.

But, enough whining.  There is a time of celebration at hand, and I refuse to let my minor sufferings take away from the hope and joy that are represented by this season of the year.  But this is also a time for serious reflection.  The Christmas season, as I'm sure we've all heard many times, is not about presents or trees or lights or snow or caroling.  It's not even really about family or church services.  All those things are great, but Christmas, at its core, is about sacrifice, humility, and transformation.  It's about the belief that God loves us enough to sacrifice Godself (remember, Jesus is God, not just God's 'son') in order to restore humanity to a relationship with God.

I suppose it's easy to hear that and simply say, 'yeah, how true', without really thinking about what it means.  I know I've done that.  But if we are people who genuinely believe that the Christian faith contains actual truth, then one of the most basic truths of our faith is this: God's sacrifice begins and ends with Incarnation.  In other words, Jesus' birth -- whatever the time of year, and however the events historically played out -- was and is the event that changed history.  But not only history, it also changed reality itself.  God actually became a person -- a huge act of self-sacrificial love on God's part -- in order to provide an ontological connection, so to speak, with humanity.

All this really means is that without Jesus, God and humanity would still be separated somehow.  Could God have made this metaphysical connection to us some other way?  Perhaps.  But Christians believe that Jesus is the way God did it, even if we don't fully grasp everything that means.  So, this is why it is so important that the Christmas story is not just a nice anecdote that we tell to make our hearts feel warm as we enjoy our meals with loved ones.  The Christmas story has to be historically valid if God really is connected to the human world in a meaningful way.  And, the Christmas story is the event that shifts all of reality, since it is the decisive moment where God meets us.

To really ponder all this should, I think, make us uneasy at first because it calls us to a much greater sense of humility, gratitude, and self-reflection than we often desire.  Some may simply shrug or scoff and say that it's nothing more than a story.  But for those of us who call ourselves Christians, Christmas is a reminder that God has changed, and is changing, reality.  That makes Christmas a profound opportunity for us to examine ourselves and see whether we have been allowing God to shape our realities or whether we have been fighting against God's 'reshaping'.  I don't know about you, but I do that a lot.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, I hope and pray that we will all acquire a new sense of the importance of allowing God to shape our lives during this Christmas season, so that the reality of God's love and grace may be more fully seen in our world.  Merry Christmas everyone.

wow, it's December already...

Please read this article: It's really well written and says a lot of things that we all need to take seriously as followers of Jesus.  Once again, I'm humbled by the fact that someone who is not a believer in Christ is able to articulate the situation much better than a lot of the people who do believe. As we enter the Advent time of the year, let's start/continue the habit of showing more love and grace to people who are 'different' from us.  Whaddya say?

http://www.danoah.com/2011/11/im-christian-unless-youre-gay.html

more of my favorite lyrics...

This is a classic underground Christian alternative rock song... and the album (has the same title) is definitely worth buying if you can find it.

Mike Knott - 'Rocket and a Bomb'

Think life begins at conception? Well... maybe...

[Update: The bill mentioned below did not pass, which is very interesting for a variety of reasons.]

I am pro-life. I oppose both abortion-on-demand and the death penalty (and attempt to live as a pacifist) because I believe that human life is a sacred gift, given by God, and we don't have the right to take another human life. Only God has that authority. Unfortunately, just saying this is not enough to solve many serious ethical dilemmas, including the issue of abortion.

But, it seems to me that taking seriously the question "When does life begin?" is vital if we hope to get closer to a valuable understanding these ethical dilemmas. Of course, for some, there is no question. Poor thinking takes place on all sides, but here is one example:

The state of Mississippi is going to vote this week on Initiative 26, which has gained notoriety as the "personhood amendment." Essentially, the voters of the state will decide on how the beginning of a human life is defined. It seems likely that the decision will be that life begins at conception. The problem is, this view does not have much scientific evidence to support it, and, I will suggest, it does not have much biblical support either.

I didn't write this...

This guy did. But it's so good I just had to re-post. (His blog is great, by the way. Very thoughtful theologian getting a PhD at the University of Durham.)

"The Church is the place where water is thicker than blood, and where married partners, whose earthly unions survive only until the parting of death, enter into deeper and eternal unions in the body of Christ, where the eternal friendship of Christian sibling-hood overcomes the barriers of blood, race, and status. This new order transcends and translates the old order into it. Christian married couples remain married, but now participate in a deeper and more lasting set of relationships. Rather than playing off celibacy against married life, I think that what we need to do is focus on those deeper sets of relationships, and how they transform and shape our existing ones. In a context where most parties in the Church seem to be obsessed with marriage, family, and sexuality, perhaps we should remember that the perfect human being that we follow was a lifelong celibate, with a rather ambivalent attitude to his blood relations...

People have wondered how Jesus of Nazareth, who never married or fathered children, could embody perfect humanity. Jesus may not have been a husband or a father, but he exemplified a sort of relationship that speaks beyond all of these roles and can transform them: Jesus was the Friend. While this fact is often presented in the trivializing fashion of Jesus as the ‘life and soul of the party’, this falls so far short of the truth. Jesus had an unparalleled capacity to give himself to other people in a manner that brought freedom, health, life, comfort, forgiveness, and joy. People wanted to be with Jesus. No human being has been a friend like Christ.

Jesus' friendships broke boundaries between the sexes, and between social insiders and outsiders. In the realm of true friendship we are all equals and contemporaries. Generational differences no longer matter and the differences between the sexes need not be a divide. Jesus had close friendships with both men and women, including forms of friendship that can be very rarely practiced in certain contexts today, such as profoundly homoaffective but non-sexual friendships and unsexualized friendships with the other sex. The various vocations we have as individuals are nothing but innumerable different species of friendship, conjugations of that more fundamental relationship...

In the contemporary Church, I wonder whether our incessant focus upon the categories of marriage, singleness, and sexuality is bound up with a myopic failure to see the deeper category of friendship, which both relativizes and transforms them. In the midst of the innumerable theological works that are written on the subject of sexuality, one could be forgiven for forgetting that the Bible really has hardly anything to say about what we call sexuality and that, when it does, it is accorded only a marginally important significance. In a like manner, the centrality of family and marriage in the contemporary evangelical church and awkward place of singles seems somewhat strange when perceived against the background of a New Testament in which families are most noticeable by their absence and where familial, marital, and blood bonds are consistently transcended.

A thoroughgoing theology of friendship has the potential to puncture numerous myths and radically to reorient our understanding and vision. A Church that spoke far more about friendship than sexuality, for instance, would have a far more challenging message to present to a sex-obsessed age. A Church that unapologetically proclaimed that a celibate person embodied perfect humanity, and carefully articulated the consequences of this belief, would strike at the heart of some of the greatest idols of our age. The fact that this is seldom done is perhaps evidence of the fact that we are also enthralled by them."

notes on William Cavanaugh's politics & theology...

According to Cavanaugh, the common assumption in modernity with regard to the relationship between religion and politics goes something like this:

The 'wars of religion' in Europe during the modern period (15th-18th centuries) enabled the rise of the nation-state as a 'neutral party', which attempted to solve the problem by reducing religion to a private sphere away from the public discourse.  In other words, religious discussion was relegated to personal pietism and worship, while law, politics, commerce, etc. were maintained as public areas of discussion that would hopefully be debated in a rational, 'peaceful' manner, something that was apparently made more difficult when religious belief was brought into the mix.  This, it is said, is a primary reason why we have less religious violence now than in the past (though that assumption has been called into question post-9/11).

Cavanaugh thinks this narrative is wrong, and ought to be reversed.  It is literally backward in his view: rather than religion and religious violence being the catalyst for the nation-state, the European states, caught up in conflicts over territory and power, used religion as a way to deflect from what was really going on.  The 'social contract', according to Cavanaugh, allows individuals to gain certain rights (esp. property) in exchange for allowing the state government to have certain coercive powers.  This leads to a situation where loyalty to the state becomes paramount, since it offers protection for what we value (safety, shelter, food, etc).  The state soon usurps religion as the source of what people are willing to die for.