Archive - December, 2008

What are People in Our Churches Resolving to Do in 2009?*

December 31, 2008 in church,fun with 0 Comments

As 2009 approaches, many people around American churches are finding ways to improve their programs. Here are a few of the highlights:

The Preschool Sunday School Teacher, First Christian Church
Resolution: Reduce amount of glitter lost by child ingestion by 10%.

The VBS Coordinator, Hope Bible Church
Resolution: This year’s VBS will be the best ever, thanks to a moon jump, dinosaurs, a firetruck and loads of donated popsicles.

The VBS Volunteers, Hope Bible Church
Resolution: Find a way to be absent on the day the firetruck shows up.

The Worship Leader, Second Street Worship Center
Resolution: Be more emotional, awe-inspiring and sexy, if that’s possible.

The Youth Leader, Church of the Resurrection
Resolution: Remember that games where hormonal teenagers are touching each other or passing objects to one another with their faces is mildly suggestive and asking for trouble, especially at a lock-in.

The Senior High Boys, Church of the Resurrection
Resolution: Sneak away during next lock-in’s ‘new and less-suggestive’ games in order to make out with girls.

The Recently Dumped Young Man, Harvest Church
Resolution: Never ever bring up Joshua Harris with any girlfriend again.

The Young Lady Who Recently Kissed Dating Good-bye, Harvest Church
Resolution: Read The Shack. Realize I already have a boyfriend in Jesus and have no use for lesser men.

The Pastor, Redeemer Presbyterian Church
Resolution: Use the word ‘postmodern’ a lot more. Also, continue to try to figure out what it means.

The Pastor’s Wife, Grace Episcopal Church
Resolution: Stop bringing old serving spoons from home to potluck dinners, switching them with others’ fancier serving spoons.

The Greeter, New Life Family Center
Resolution: More bear hugs.

The Usher, First Assembly of God
Resolution: Stop swirling the contents of the offering plate during offertory prayer.

That Weird Kid Whose Sheep Costume Exposed His Bum at this Year’s Christmas Pagaent, Holy Trinity Catholic Church
Resolution: Don’t end up a sheep at next year’s pagaent, no matter what.

The President of the Ladies’ Bake Sale Committee, Crossroads Baptist Church
Resolution: Make people forget the Methodists even have a bake sale coming up a week after ours.

The Church Treasurer, First United Methodist Church
Resolution: Get the Baptists to bail us out.

*Very scientific study conducted by me.

From the sound of it, many of you have sworn off New Year’s resolutions? Are there any resolutions that should be made around your church?

God’s New Year’s Resolution

December 29, 2008 in faith with 0 Comments

After a month long season of over-commercialization, over-indulgence, and generally over-doing everything, it’s now time for the season born of self-loathing: time for new year’s resolutions! I hope you each had a great Christmas. I know I did, and I drank way too much eggnog! So I’m trying to wake from my blogging slumber by throwing down some sweet new year’s theology on you now!

We make new year’s resolutions because we recognize that there are things about us that need to change. Maybe you feel the need to go to some gym to enhance your appearance, or find some way to be a better Christian, both of which I can help you with, as I am an expert on being a Christian and needing to go to the gym. Some of us don’t spend enough time with the people we love, so we’ll resolve to have more family dinners. After the first of such dinners, we’ll remember why we quit having family dinners, and resolve to just keep our traps shut and have just one got-dang family dinner without controversy, even if it kills us. The list goes on. There’s probably a lot of resolutions that are held over and reheated from last year.

Me, I’m resolving to continue to be awesome at all times and in all places. Also, to take more naps.

We make resolutions because we recognize that we are not where we need to be. We become lax, lazy, tired. We fall out of good habits and into bad ones. Our good intentions never get realized. We are constantly shifting, reshaping, reforming, and it’s probably not in a good way unless we reshape ourselves with purpose and determination.

God on the other hand will be making no new year’s resolutions. This is a much more profound idea than it seems on the surface. Think about this: God does not change. (Theology eggheads call this God’s ‘immutability.’) We take it for granted. The scriptures say that all will pass away, the world will be rolled up like a garment, the grass withers and dies, but God remains the same. God says for our sakes he does not change! Not a step to the left or right does God move in who he is!

There is nothing that remains the same! Except God!

Even that doesn’t sound like such a big deal, until we consider how much we change from yeear to year. What if God could change? The implications are staggering! The Bible tells us that God is love, that God wills goodness and salvation for us, that his strength and power are sufficient to work all of his good desires for us. That’s good!

What if God’s ability to invoke his will changed? What if he became less able to create, to rule, to love, to save, to throw down? That would mean that our path to hell is paved with God’s good intentions, but inability to save!

What if God’s intentions changed? What if his intentions in the Bible were benevolent and awesome, but then he changed his mind and became a bad, unloving, unawesome God? Seems rewriting ‘Our God is an Awesome God’ would be the least of our worries. I think we’d know if that happened. Last I checked, the universe still seemed to be in place. What if God just became apathetic – about us, about himself, about ‘being’ love?

And what would cause God to change? Just because he feels like it? Could we change God? That would be scary – a God truly fashioned in our image!

Our ability to trust God to save us is fundamentally linked to God’s refusal to change. If he were able or willing to change, he would not be worth worshipping! It is because he is, was, and will always be perfect in love, justice and power that he is worthy of praise. A malleable, changable God would be like the guy at your office that gets one too many promotions until he’s in charge of a bunch of stuff he can’t handle. He was really good at handling small stuff, but now he’s just a buffoon as a manager. He wouldn’t be worthy of love or praise, but pity and contempt.

This New Year’s as you think about all the changes you anticipate in yourself and in your life, be thankful that God’s new year’s day will be just like all the days that preceded it.

What do you think about that? What are you pondering this New Year?

Eggnog Was a Bad Choice!

December 23, 2008 in holidays with 0 Comments

Ah, Christmas. One of my favorite parts of this day is the copious amounts of eggnog I will be consuming. There is no more appropriate beverage for such a day.

And that being the case, that means that every other day is a slightly less appropriate one for eggnog. The most inappropriate day for eggnog? June 25. Just try it. I’m warning you, it is a disaster waiting to happen. Yes, the occasions for the viscous dairy treat are very specific, and we risk hurting ourselves should we attempt to make eggnog a part of inappropriate activities. The government tries to protect us by outlawing it before Thanksgiving. However, there are still plenty of opportunities to make eggnog a completely inappropriate choice for liquid refreshment even during the holiday season. I submit to you some occasions and places where eggnog is a bad choice:

The Movies
I love to sneak a box of candy and a bottle of pop in my jacket or wife’s purse. I’m just not going to pay for movie snacks. But it would be awesomely inappropriate to completely flaunt the rules by not sneaking in a modest 20 oz. soda, but a whole quart of eggnog. I think it would be worth it and awesome to get caught by one of the ushers with a ludicrous amount of eggnog, more than any one person could possibly drink in one sitting. It just makes me think of Dan Ackroyd stuffing that giant salmon under his filthy gray Santa beard in Trading Places.

The Gym
Maybe you’ve been booking it on the treadmill for like 10 minutes, and if you’re anything like me, you’re about to pass out. The sweat is dripping off of you. So you take your squirt bottle and squeeze it into your mouth. And maybe a little on your head and dab yourself with a stale gym towel. If you’re in a Gatorade commercial, you dump Gatorade on your head, because everyone knows flavored sugar water is better for cooling off than regular water. Know what isn’t good for cooling off during a sweaty workout? Eggnog. Try squirting that in your mouth or on your head while your heart is racing, and you’re going to be getting a lot of people to ‘sympathy’ throw-up after you hurl all over the treadmill.

The Cocktail Party
To a lot of people, one of the highlights of the holidays is putting on a fuzzy sweater and sharing some “holiday cheer” in a champagne flute, and then inarticulately singing the New Year’s song. Some amateur might feel it’s appropriate to put eggnog on his turbulent tummy after a few cocktails. This is a guarantee no one will meet you under the mistletoe, ever. There’s some kind of college frat-boy adage, “beer before liquor – never been sicker.” A similar old adage applies here, “booze before eggnog, you’re an idiot.”

The Nursing Home
Let’s be honest. Eggnog bloats your digestive tract and makes you smell like death. And when it comes to old people, their sense of hearing and smell has probably deteriorated. Combine that with that general “who cares, I’m 96″ attitude that old people get, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Right After Jack Black Punts Your Dog Over a Bridge on a Hot Summer Day

We know milk would be a bad choice. Eggnog would just compound the problem of having a sweaty beard and bitter tears of anguish.

What other places and time would delicious eggnog be a terrible choice?

This does it for me this week. I’ll be coming back to see all of your ‘non-eggnog’ venues. I hope some of them are true stories of eggnog gone wrong. I’ll be vacationing from writing for the week though. Have a wonderful and blessed Christmas holiday!

The Year of the Lord’s Favor

December 22, 2008 in faith with 0 Comments

“He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor.” Isaiah 61:1b-2a

I want to share with you some serious thoughts about an uncommon Chirstmas theme. Last Sunday, I studied the ‘official’ scripture for the day: Isaiah 61:1-4, which drew my attention to Luke 4:14-30. Then I went back and looked at Leviticus 25. Go ahead and read those, and come back. In Leviticus, God decrees a ‘Jubilee Year’ every 50 years. Basically, the whole economy goes back to zero. People return to their own hometown, slaves are released, debts are canceled, crops are not sown or harvested. (And this would follow a regular Sabbath year, so the land would not be sown for two years). God also stipulated that no Israelites were to be treated as slaves, because God had already redeemed everyone from slavery in Egypt. People were to redeem the debts of their relatives, so they would not fall into poverty. (The problem Ruth and Naomi had is that there was no next-of-kin to ‘redeem’ them – that is take them in, so they would not live in poverty).

It seems like such a radical idea to us, but the truth is that it was a radical idea then too! Israel never had a Jubilee year, even though God told them he would bless them beyond measure if they obeyed this difficult decree. He told them the land would require a Jubilee, and if they did not take a Jubilee, and leave the land fallow and return all that they own to the Lord, he would take it from them forcibly. It seemed the concept of redemption through a Jubilee was important to God.

So fast forward to Isaiah. God has kept his word. The Israelites never took a Jubilee, so God took everything from them, because they did not willingly give it to him. He sent them into exile, made them slaves again for 70 years (just about the number of years needed to make up for all those missed Jubilees!) So Isaiah is telling his people of a new Jubilee, when God will redeem them once again. In fact, the ‘year of the Lord’s favor’ is a pretty direct reference to the ‘Jubilee’ year of the old scriptures. Since the Israelites are exiles awaiting freedom and not land owners and creditors, this is good news; and end to their misery is coming soon!

Then in Luke, Jesus finds this very passage of Isaiah, reads it in the synagogue, and proclaims the scripture fulfilled that day. He would now redeem God’s people, free the captives who are slaves to sin, the Law, false righteousness. The religious economy would be turned upside down. Those who were ‘poor in spirit’ would now be blessed! Those who were ‘righteous’ would now be un-righteous! Those who were sinners and undeserving would inherit the Kingdom of God. Those who lived in exile from God would now live closely to him.

This should have been good news.

But you know the rest of the story. The people chased him out of town, and Jesus observed that only in his home town does a prophet have no honor. The people did not want to give up all the righteousness, all the piety, all the religion they had saved up by their own work. It was an insult to think that God would need to redeem them, not from slavery, but from their sins.

And it’s the same with us. God declares a Jubilee, but rather than looking at the blessings he wants to give us, we look at what he’s taking away. We hold back all the things we hold dear and say, ‘No, I must have this. I can’t give up that. I’ve worked so hard for those!’ The things we own, the righteousness we build for ourselves ends up owning and enslaving us! Our desire to follow God becomes stifled because it conflicts with our own interests. This is just the case with the rich young ruler. All the wealth he ‘owned’ ended up enslaving him. He could not boldly follow Jesus, because of the fear of losing his belongings. God wants to pour out immeasurable blessings on us by freeing us from what enslaves. But we look at what has enslaved us and feel we just cannot do without it. Like an abused woman who defends and depends on the one who abuses her. We tell ourselves that the ‘masters’ in our life are under our control, are not all that bad, are really quite good. So we remain slaves in exile who need a Jubilee.

Christmas is about the gift of Jesus and the Jubilee he brings – the end of exile from God, enslavement to sin and death. But we will never see Jesus’ Jubilee and rejoice if we hold too tightly onto all the little worldly charms He tries to pry from our fingers. “Freedom in Christ” means freedom from all that ensnares – all the vices and lies that God wants to resuce us from. I hope this Christmas you find the joy of God’s Jubilee – freedom from all that has enslaved your life and the joy of being redeemed as a slave is redeemed from his master.

My Christmas Tree Can Beat Up Your Christmas Tree

December 19, 2008 in holidays with 0 Comments

Christmas trees, like many holiday traditions, are intensely personal parts of our lives. We look at the way we grew up, the way our family has always done things, and everyone else seems just wrong! It’s just impossible for a ‘real tree’ person to cross over and live with a fake tree! I touched on this last week with the subject of mealtime prayers. Then I realized while reading other blogs that a great feud is to be had by pitting our Christmas tree traditions against one another. We’d go to my Dad’s parents around Christmas, but their real cedar tree always looked so transparent and lifeless compared to our lush, full fake tree at home! The only thing saving that real “tree” was the copious amounts of tinsel they threw all over it.

What does your family do? Does it go real or fake? Do you chop it down yourselves? Do you pick a particular kind of tree each year? Have particular ornaments you are especially fond of? What other Christmas tree traditions are essential in your family? Any Christmas tree debacles that come to mind? Oh, do you have one of those ornaments of Santa kneeling beside baby Jesus? If you don’t I’m not sure what to say to you, but I’ll pray for your soul.

Here are a few traditions that come to my mind, not necessarily from my family:

One family in my church never fails to purchase a Christmas tree that is not about 3 sizes too large for their living room. They take into account the tall height of the room, but seem to forget the tree’s incredible girth, big enough for the tree to watch TV, eat dinner and tuck the kids into bed, all in three seperate rooms.

Another family procrastinates getting the tree until the week of Christmas. Maybe they’re hoping they can sock it to the tree salesman, desperate to unload his unused stock, but it seems the trees would be pretty picked over by then. But then there’s people who do their shopping exclusively on Christmas Eve.

My best friend growing up lived in a family full of sci-fi superfans. I was shocked at their Christmas tree. Almost every ornament was the Starship Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, or some other stupid Stargate or Dune themed bric-a-brac. But better yet, most of the ornaments lit up, moved, or made noise! I’m surprised Santa had any Christmas magic left to bring them any presents!

My family had a small fake tree for many years. The problem was that my mother is a teacher, and kids are always giving her ornaments. So once each of the tree’s branches had three ornaments a piece on them, and they looked as if they would snap under the weight, we had to upgrade. We’ve always stuck with fake, except for one year, which we did not like. My brother’s and my tender hands were skewered most unpleasantly by the tree’s needles while hanging ornaments.

I count my blessings often that I did not grow up being my grandfather’s son. My mom’s dad was a mechanical engineer. He was meticulous, a perfectionist like none other. I cannot adequately describe the minutae he dedicated himself to in his hobbies and life in general. Except to say that my mom tells us their tree was very precise. She and her two sisters did not help decorate the tree. To leave such a thing as important as a Christmas tree to the whims of three little girls would be much too random. Why would you want a completely slapdash, sloppy looking tree! What would the neighbors think? Grandpa had fashioned a diagram of the Christmas tree. A diagram to document where each light and ornament was to be placed. My mom did admit their silver tree was very beautiful…in just the methodical, calculated, emotionally removed way only a mechanical engineer could achieve.

I do plan on watching Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown this weekend. In fact, we have it on DVD. I don’t care that I’m in my mid-20s, have no kids, and have seen it a thousand times. So there. Do you realize that show is the reason pastors have to keep around a King James Bible just for the Christmas service?

Christmas Vegans

December 17, 2008 in holidays with 0 Comments

I don’t have any problem with vegans at all – at least the ones who don’t try to make me feel bad duing my daily animal sacrfice. I like meat, and various other animal products, and I don’t feel bad about it. I feel bad for vegans who have to eat tofurky.

But I’m not here to talk about the virtues of meat or veganism. Rather, I’ve noticed that a lot of Christians are unsure of what to do with the holidays our culture celebrates. Halloween, what do we do with that? A day adopted from pagan solstice ritual that now involves little kids running around like banshees, demanding candy. Easter? the biggest Christian day of the year, except it’s been overrun with more candy (just in time for the Halloween candy to finally run out), plus the chosen day for Easter is also an adoption of pagan fertility festivals. And then there’s Christmas. Don’t even get started on that one. The blessed celebration of sweet baby Jesus’ birth sends millions of Christians into fits of inner turmoil and conflict of conscience.

I think the problem is that Christians feel guilty about participating in the worldly celebrations (which can be potentially excessive) that have come to define our holidays, especially Christmas. Who determines what is excessive? Is everything the world does excessive? This inner conflict bubbles inside them until it results in what I now call:

Christmas Vegans

By this I mean Christians who have decided to forego the modern conventions of Christmas. So little to no gift giving. Maybe don’t tell the kids about Santa, etc. It’s fine with me if you’re a Christmas vegan. My only problem is how your new-found piety makes me look in comparison! It’s like I’m about to tear into a juicy, delicious hamburger, just as some well-meaning vegan begins telling me about how he just has more compassion and thought for the poor animal, but I shouldn’t worry myself. But my appetite is already ruined. I end up feeling bad about my material ways when a Christian just casually says “Oh, we don’t give gifts. We celebrate Christmas by volunteering at a soup kitchen.”

Okay, I’ve never heard it put quite like that, but you get the idea. Like the person who casually mentions that he doesn’t own a TV. Just by saying it, I feel like it implicates me for being unintelligent, boorish, and lazy. The Christmas vegans might as well say to me, “Oh, you got an ipod for Christmas? I didn’t know you were so carnal.” They don’t mean it like that, it’s just my own brain taking it that way.

Here’s my point. I’m not hating on Christmas vegans. Celebrate or don’t celebrate however you wish. But I’m not ragging on Christmas carnivores either. It was our holiday to begin with, even if the world did invent a bunch of sweet peripheral ways to celebrate. I’m not going to stop enjoying colored lights, eggnog, and gifts just because a bunch of pagans enjoy them too. A bunch of pagans go to church on Christmas too, but I’m not going to stop doing that! Because it’s all in perspectice, and I have freedom in Christ to celebrate as I wish. There are plenty of worldly Christmas celebrations I don’t participate in. I don’t go to movies on Christmas, for one thing.

I know the relative importance each little candy cane has compared with the birth of my Savior. I just think a bunch of Christians are being too hard on themselves, overthinking things, and not enjoying life as they are allowed by God to do. I mean, are children thinking about pagan sacrifices when they dress up and go trick-or-treating? Or are they thinking about candy? Just because a day used to be important to a bunch of dead pagans, doesn’t mean it’s still important for that reason. I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness. My brother and I have great memories of childhood holidays (with all the pagan traditions) while growing up in a preacher’s home, and learning the true beauty of Christmas.

So, is your comment going to shame me for being so worldly? Are you a Christmas vegan? A carnivore? What’s your favorite ‘worldly’ part of Christmas? What part do you wish would go away? Probably everyone is going to comment that they don’t give gifts or own a TV. That would serve me right.
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