Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, "Glory to the Newborn King!"

As people of faith we have wondered and wandered the past four and a half weeks of Advent discerning God’s coming into the world. Two thousand years ago God came in a most unexpected way that we celebrate today, in the form of a vulnerable infant. The birth of the Christ child ushered us into witnessing God’s Kingdom on earth and the conquering of death. Yet, what was still more unexpected was that Christ went to the cross of death to free us from sin and give us eternal life. Such is God’s radical and wonderful Kingdom, where love knows no bounds and will go to any length for God’s creation.

Yet after Christ died on the cross and was resurrected, we have found ourselves in a world that continues to bear witness to God’s activity.  But it is one that is not completely conformed to the ways of the Lord. This life is one that the royal psalms write of and prepare us for the coming again of God.

The royal psalms as a genre within the book of psalms speak directly about the human Davidic King during certain times such as celebrating military victories, weddings, and times of mourning. As the Israelites adopted the governmental form of a monarchy they hoped that they might be saved by this king. However, they were not. King after king continually disappointed the people of God as well as God, never fulfilling their vocational calling.

During the compiling of the psalms into an enduring collection of songs and prayers, the editors found it important for some reason to keep the royal psalms despite the fact that the monarchy had been disestablished. That reason was hope that the King, not the flawed kings of old, but that the ideal and anointed King from God would come to redeem Israel. The royal psalms were kept because they offered this hope.

Such a confidence kept the faith alive that God would fulfill the covenantal promises of long ago made with our ancestors. Theologian James Limburg writes, “Even though there were no more kings, no more coronations, no more celebrations involving the monarch, the royal psalms were still used. Now they expressed the people’s hope for an ideal ruler who would come…a messiah” (Limburg, Psalms, 7). This messiah came, this messiah was born away in a manger.

Let us sing together with the saints and angels that God has indeed kept the ancient promises of salvation and redemption. Let us proclaim to all the world that God is with us. Let us go to Bethlehem to honor the Christ child, the newborn King!

Hail the heav'n-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings
Ris'n with healing in His wings
Mild He lays His glory by
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
Hark! The herald angels sing
"Glory to the newborn King!"

Christmas Blessings,
Tom

Christmas Faith Formation

It is one week from Christmas day! Time has certainly flown by since Thanksgiving and I am trying to catch my breath in light of finals and preparing for Christmas Eve. I think I am almost there!

In thinking about Christmas, it occurred to me that a lot of my childhood memories are from this time of the year. A tree with presents. Sledding with my siblings and neighbors. Eating Christmas cookies on Sunday evening. Attending Christmas Eve service at my grandfather's church. All of these formative memories flood my mind in a somewhat nostalgic fashion. However, Christmas is also a time in which our faith is formed.

Christmas provides a time in which we eagerly await the coming of God in unexpected ways. Christmas provides a time for us to slow down and to consider how we are living out our faith, are we like the shepherd in the field or are we like Herod? Christmas is a time in which we can concretely see that God has said yes to creation by coming to us.

I'd like to share with you a video about my definition of faith formation that I created for a class. It is short (3 minutes), but it gets at this Christmas view of faith formation. That such learning is not in a straight and narrow path, but it is a narrative with twists and turns. Faith formation is a beautiful mess.

Faith Formation Definition

Happy Advent!
Tom

Waiting for Help

Cars and me do not get along very well. I'll spare you the details, but this morning I discovered I had a flat tire when I really needed to be grocery shopping. After muttering a few obscenities underneath my breath I went back inside to scour the internet for the best deals and settled on a national chain that had a decent end of the year sale. However, I had to wait until 3:00pm for an appointment unless I wanted to wait there all day long. I took the appointment and began working on papers for my courses because it is finals week of all weeks! So I began to wait.

I went back outside at 1:30pm giving myself plenty of time in case any problem should arise...and of course it did. I emptied the trunk into the back seat (wow I have a lot of crap back there!) to get at the spare. I lifted up the false bottom to get at the spare tire and I discovered it had no air in it. Not enough to limp to a gas station to fill it, absolutely no air was in it. It was like a tire on a bike during the winter, you could squish the rubber down to the rim.

So I went to my neighbor's door and knocked hoping she could give me a ride to the nearest gas station to fill it up. I waited there pondering what would I do if she did not answer or could not help me. "I could walk or jog there, it wouldn't take too long. But then I probably wouldn't make my appointment" I told myself. It felt like forever as I played out different situations in my mind. And then she answered the door. "Of course I can help you Tom!"

We went and got the tire filled within 10 minutes. Now back to the business of changing the tire. I have changed many a tire, but this one was stubborn. Tried as I may, the lug nuts would not budge. I grew frustrated and in all honesty rather angry. Why today of all days?!?! So I did what any helpless person does, call AAA.

I placed the request for assistance and they said they would be there within an hour, officially making me late for my appointment. I called the tire shop and informed them. I waited in the car for the roadside assistance to call me when the mechanic was 5 minutes away. I paged through a magazine, thought about upcoming church services, and stressed about the homework that needed to get done. No phone call came. I sat there waiting.

And then all of a sudden a tow truck came. I hopped out and it stopped. The driver asked if I has called AAA and affirmed that he was sent to help. Within 10 minutes he changed the tire (he had an extended pipe that allowed for more leverage to loosen the lug nuts) and I was on my way to my appointment. And guess what?! I made it there on time. So here I am sitting in the lobby sipping on some weak, not so tasty coffee. But I am thankful that in all of my situations of waiting in need, help came. It arrived unannounced after long expectation.

My day thus far has been a day of Advent. In this church season we wait for God's coming to fulfill the covenants of old, sometimes patiently...sometimes not. We expect and have faith that God will be faithful to God's promises. The Hebrew word that expresses such faithfulness is "hesed." The New International Commentary of the Old Testament on the Psalms describes this word:

Hesed includes elements of love, mercy, fidelity, and kindness. Hesed is a relational term that describes both the internal character as well as external actions that are required to maintain a life sustaining relationship. While the term is used both of humans and God, in the Psalter it is above all a theological term that describes God's essential character as well as God's characteristic ways of acting - especially God's characteristic ways of acting in electing, delivering, and sustaining the people of Israel. Hesed is both who the Lord is and what the Lord does (NICOT, Psalms, 8).

The psalms of thanksgiving testify to such faithfulness, such hesed-ness. We see this word throughout the Bible, yet psalms of thanksgiving address God's tangible, concrete activity in the world. Rising from a crisis the psalmist fulfills their promise to praise God after God has saved them from calamity and woe. Advent is indeed a time of hesed-ness for God keeping the particular promise of coming to save us. God came two thousand years ago as a baby in Bethlehem and so we look into the future expecting that promise to come again...even if it means waiting for that help to come.

Waiting in the tire shop,
Tom

Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow

My wife recently received a new full time position at St. Joseph’s Home for Children as an assistant supervisor for daytime treatment and schooling. She was showered with congratulations from family, friends, and those from the realm of social media. However, not a one expressed praise to God! Have we forgotten how to thank and praise God for all blessings great and small? Or is it easier to give ourselves credit for such work? We need to shift our thinking from everything being our doing, and to praise God from whom all of our blessing flow. Additionally, we need to recognize that this needs to occur not just within worship, but in every aspect of life.

The hymns of praise in the book of Psalms can help us to refocus how we praise God. The purpose of these writings are, “to tell who God is by telling what God has done” (Jacobson and Jacobson, Invitation to the Psalms, 45). In other words praise psalms are explicit testimonies to God’s very identity and God’s unfolding action within the people of God. This testimony is completed through a call to praise as well as unfolding testimony to God’s actions. The same could be said of our congratulating of others. The flow is as follows:
Congratulation / Call to Praise
Reason(s) for Congratulation / Reason(s) for Praise

Let’s be honest though, we want to give ourselves credit for doing all of the hard work for things. My wife is the one who has worked her tail off at St. Joseph’s for over a year to get this promotion, shouldn't we tell her what a good job she has done? If we take such a road, we quickly forget where such gifts, talents, and abilities came from, God. Instead we create a world where we are the rulers and must take responsibility for all of its happenings, we limit our possibilities by saying no to God’s options, and finally we negate the polemical and political power of praise (Jacobson, The Costly Loss of Praise, 381-383). By praising God we are making God’s abundant blessings realized and recognized. Perhaps when we do this on a more regular basis we can begin to make praise a part of our everyday language.

But why should we do this? We praise God because we offer thanks for blessings and also to make a new world known. Both are important, but the latter deserves a bit more attention here. When we praise God we make God’s activity in everyday life known. Lutheran theologian Rolf Jacobson writes, “Praise assumes a world where God is an active agent, and then praise evokes this world by naming God as the agent responsible for specific actions and blessings. There is no such thing as uninterrupted reality. By ascribing agency to God for specific transformations, praise interprets reality in such a way that God is evoked as an active agent in daily life” (Jacobson, The Costly Loss of Praise, 377). Praising God acknowledges God as an active and thriving God who is not cloistered away in the heavens. Praise makes the bold statement that God loves each and every one of God’s creation to be involved at an intimate level, to come to us as a baby.

I propose the following to help us praise God anew: we ban the word “congratulations” as a reminder to praise God and embark in an Advent of praise. The refusal to say the “C” word will remind us that it is not our efforts that generate our blessings, but it is God. For example, when a friend has a new baby praise God with them for this new life and blessing. Or when someone graduates from school, praise God for the blessings of education and leadership.

Finally, such focus will praise God for all that God has done in the past to deliver God’s people and it will praise God for coming to us as a child. But furthermore it will evoke God as the incarnate Word as an active agent in the world who is deeply needed to make a new horizon of healing and justice for the world. If we do not praise God, this radical reality of God coming to us is not recognized and may go unseen. Let us praise God from whom all blessing flow on Thanksgiving day, then let us look to the manger as the proof positive of God’s active agency and bring forward the gift of praise.

Peace,
Tom Westcott
tomw@stmarks-nsp.org

What is Real Community?

A few weeks ago my favorite TV show started a new season, The Walking Dead. It's a show about people surviving in a world of zombies. It may not seem that appealing to most folks, but the show is more about the relationships between the survivors than about gore. In the opening episode a new minor character was explaining his view of friendship in light of the zombie apocalypse. He said, "I don't have any friends. I mean I know people, they are just assholes I stay alive with. Is that other woman your friend? I used to have them, we used to watch football on Sundays. Went to church. I know I did, but I can't picture it anymore" (AMC's The Walking Dead, season 5 episode 1). This clip asks us in our current context, that is not ravaged by zombies, if we have a community as well or if we have people we just survive with. While we can take many different approaches to this question, it seems to me that German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers us a unique perspective on what it means to be community as Christians in his work Life Together.

“Christian community means community through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. There is no Christian community that is more than this, and none that is less than this. Whether it be a brief, single encounter or the daily community of many years, Christian community is solely this. We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.”
 – Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 30

This passage from the opening chapter of Life Together illustrates Bonhoeffer’s main thrust of his definition of community that it can only exist through the mediation of Jesus Christ. He expands on this point in the following pages by describing Christians as needing others for the sake of Christ, a Christian comes to others only through Christ, and finally that we are united with Christ in eternity (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 30-31). This threefold description of what it means to be in Christian community begins with our justification. It is not done by our own merits, but through Jesus Christ alone (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 31).

This means that in the Christian community there is a continual movement of death and resurrection. The Holy Spirit works in us from the outside, deconstructing us and our self-made constructions, and giving us new life in Christ. It can then be said that Jesus on the cross is the primary moment of deconstruction, it is the moment in which we are told we do not save ourselves because it is Christ on the cross who does. Such a realization creates community because it relieves us from the expectation of performance before God, or climbing the spiritual ladder, it frees us to serve our neighbor.

From this comes Bonhoeffer’s second point, “…a Christian comes to others only through Jesus Christ” and our efforts to do so on our own are failures because we run into our own egos so we rely only on Christ to mediate our knowing of the other (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 32). This means that we can only experience others from Christ’s actions, not our own. We are then opened up to live, love, and serve with and for others. We are once again freed from the expectation of serving according to our egos and we are shown a way of being through Jesus’ ministry and the Holy Spirit stirring within us.

Bonhoeffer’s final point of defining a Christian community relates to the person of Jesus Christ and how we are united with him. He writes, “Third, when God’s Son took on flesh, he truly and bodily, out of pure grace, took on our being, our nature, ourselves…Wherever he is, he bears our flesh, he bears us. And, where he is, there we are too…” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 32). With this description, community becomes much more than a gathering of people, community becomes the body of Christ that lives out the life of Christ in the world. Such a community embraces the costly grace of God, clamors for the theology of the cross and resists the theology of glory, serves the neighbor, and engages life in all of its beauty and messiness.

Indeed we seek relationships out of self-serving goals (like this character's noting he gathers with people to simply survive), so it is God who mediates community for us showing us that community is not about physical connection, but instead a spiritual one. Such a community is about the Word of God in Jesus Christ, truth, light, service, and where the Spirit and Word of God in Jesus Christ rule (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 38-40). This is what Bonhoeffer envisions as being the Christian community, the spiritual community that is radically active in the world.

While we agree with Bonhoeffer and admit that this is what we strive for, we know that it is not necessarily reality because it is a hard calling! Yet, Bonhoeffer further challenges us, “Christian community is not an ideal we have to realize, but rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength of all our community is in Jesus Christ alone, the more calmly we will learn to think about our community and pray and hope for it” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 38). This makes Christian community not something that humans must meet as if it were a law, it is the opposite. We enter into community simply by the free grace, faith, and justification from God. We are wholly undeserving of these things, but we are given it. It is God who created us to be in community and provides us such an opportunity.

Real community then is about embracing the struggle of everyday life while simultaneously living out the gospel message. For the characters in The Walking Dead, their morals and their underlying discipleship to God is tested daily by decisions to act mercifully or selfishly, emotionally or spiritually, peacefully or violently. And in these decisions their view of community and communal reality is challenged. Do we welcome this person into our group out of gain because of their skills? Or do we welcome them because that is what we do, extending hospitality and love in a dangerous world?

This reality is not so far from us is it? My wife has a thousand and one friends whom she would consider real community because they do just about anything for each other and build each other up out of love and live in service to the world. But I find myself having far fewer friends when I look at my real community. There are of people I stay alive with and know, but not many that fit into Bonhoeffer's vision of community. Now I do not lament over this, rather it opens up a perspective about how we all interact  in the world and challenges us to live out of thanksgiving to God for giving us such an opportunity. Where do you find yourself in this spectrum of community? Are your friends plentiful or just enough? Do you have real community or ones that you just live with?

May you rethink who your community is and in the process find God calling your community to more than survival.

Peace,
Tom

Online Testimony

I am going to be completely honest, I see people posting things on Facebook that make the individual seem holier than Thou. In essence, I see a lie. I know them to be deceitful, harsh, rude, and disrespectful yet they present themselves as a saint online whose life revolves around the Bible. So how far is too far when we provide testimony in our online communities? Or does it even matter? 

Perhaps this is not even a true testimony. Thomas Hoyt Jr. writes about testimony, "In different ways, testimony happens in every vital Christian community. It also happens, as we shall see, in the midst of daily life and in the life of society. In testimony, people speak truthfully about what they have experienced and seen, offering it to the community for the edification of all" (Practicing Faith, Kindle Loc. 1912). Perhaps then the sanctification of the self is not even true testimony because it does not tell the truth as it is. True testimony from this perspective might look like this, "I am dishonest, selfish, and narcissistic. I am a sinner. But God love me still..."

I am guessing that most of us will not be posting or tweeting our faults and flaws online anytime soon, but maybe we need to check ourselves before we write something online about God or make ourselves appear to be saintly. Are we really providing a true testimony? It seems to me that we need to revisit providing testimony to God throughout our lives and not just posting a picture of a sunset with a psalm. One of my friends who is a new mom was driving home and she ran into some car problems on the highway. While neither her or her son were injured, her Facebook post notified her community of friends what had happened and expressed how thankful she was to be safe and how lucky she was to be a mom. This might be the testimony we are after. A story from the randomness of life that describes what God has done (Practicing Faith, Kindle Loc. 1952).

These are just a few thoughts on the matter. I'd love to hear what you all think!

Peace, 

Tom

Fasting

This week I took up the spiritual discipline of fasting. In all honesty this is not something I have a lot of experience in. The extent of my practice in this discipline before this week has only extended to refraining from eating meat on Fridays during Lent. As you might be able to tell, fasting is not something I am used to, and in all honesty it is not something that is all that interesting to me. I love to cook and try new recipes, so the thought of abstaining from this hobby of mine seemed outrageous. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the insights I learned this week.

 

I emailed my professor for assistance before taking this on. His wisdom framed fasting as a way in which the body prays and is reminded of its limits. He also told me not to do anything too radical, rather skip a specific meal or food. With this in mind I decided to forgo lunch this week and in its place I decided to enter into a time of silence or reading as a form of prayer. I have mixed feelings about the practice of fasting after a little less than week of regular use.

This spiritual discipline was able to help me focus on my body and what my body actually needs (not necessarily food, but hydration and rest). This was accomplished through reflection and realizing that I deeply resonated with a book I am reading on spirituality, I think I know what my body needs, but I don’t. And so I took this learning to the realm of spirituality. Am I engaging my spirituality enough? Or am I settling for a mediocre form that really leads to spiritual stagnancy?

I also noticed that when I fasted during the usual lunch period I was not too terribly concerned with my hunger, but an hour or so after I found myself craving food. It got to the point where I was focusing on dinner and not the work at hand! And while this was annoying and concerning, such thinking gave way to more intentional applications of fasting. This lead me to rethink how much my body needed to eat, how much I actually ate, and how others in the world do not have nearly as much to eat.

All in all this exercise humbled me, made me aware of our culture’s infatuation with food, and helped me to appreciate how much I have been blessed with. However, I am unsure how practical this practice is for most people. I am concerned that fasting from a meal for an extended period of time may not be of any help spiritually or physically. Rather it would distract the participant from spiritual practice and focus instead on the physical needs of sustenance. So when might fasting be appropriate? It seems to me that fasting would be able to add importance to liturgical seasons. For instance, fasting on Good Friday would highlight humanity’s need for God’s grace as much as we need daily bread and water.

Peace,
Tom