renewed from above for a new year

As we enter a time of renewal both in the secular culture through New Years and though the body of Christ via the covenant of renewal*, I find myself going over and over the following scripture from Matthew 7:

1Don't condemn others, and God won't condemn you. 2God will be as hard on you as you are on others! He will treat you exactly as you treat them.
3You can see the speck in your friend's eye, but you don't notice the log in your own eye. 4How can you say, "My friend, let me take the speck out of your eye," when you don't see the log in your own eye? 5You're nothing but show-offs! First, take the log out of your own eye. Then you can see how to take the speck out of your friend's eye.

In a nation divided by those clamoring for their rights and their rightness of thought, we in Christ are focused on humility and the forgiving grace of God in our lives for our sin...not others. We are not shaped by national boundaries, but by the variety of gifts we share within the body of Christ which lives around this planet.

I invite you in these next few days into a time of focus and renewal within your own life.

A brother in Christ,
David

* Lord Jesus, if You will receive me into Your house, if You will but accept me as Your servant, I will not stand upon terms. Impose on me whatever condition pleases You; write down Your own provisions; command me to be or do whatever You will; only let me be Your servant. Make me what You will, Lord, and set me where You will. Let me be a vessel of silver or gold, or a vessel of wood or stone; so I may be a vessel of honor. I am content. If I am not the head, or the eye, or the ear, one of the nobler and more honorable instruments You will employ, let me be the hand, or the foot, as one of the lowest and least esteemed of all the servants of my Lord. Lord, put me on whatever task You will; rank me with whom You will. Put me to doing; put me to suffering. Let me be employed for You, or laid aside for You, exalted for You, or trodden under foot for You. Let me be full; let me be empty. Let me have all things; let me have nothing. I freely and heartily resign all to Your pleasure and disposal.

Christmas at Fairlawn-West

For those of you not there, the Christmas Eve service was the most amazing service of that type I have ever been a part of. With Ed Upton playing King Herod, Al Ploenes as Caesar Augustus, John Gossett playing John the Baptist, and Karen Myers, Becky Gossett, & Patty Kerr playing the wisemen...and only one of those folks was even present for the service. We had all kinds of people playing different roles as we read the THREE Gospel versions of Jesus come to earth and used pictures of people around our church as the different roles were mentioned. We had kids chatting and laughing. We even had adults chatting and laughing. And music that went in all kinds of directions. We ended with communion/healing/prayer. And the place was packed. PLus, the Sun Morn Band hosted the wassail party before the service with umph from lead singer Helen Franks. That was a great lead into the evening.

Jim Davis, bass player in the Sun Morn Band, sang a song from over 30 years ago by "The Band." Here is a link to a page with the original and other versions of the song along with a link to a background page on it (thanks Rick Sonnecken) http://www.fairlawnwest.org/xmasmusic.htm and down below are the lyrics. A lot of us "swung" into Christmas with this song. - David Loar

Christmas Must Be Tonight

Come down to the manger, see the little stranger
Wrapped in swaddling clothes, the prince of peace
Wheels start turning, torches start burning
And the old wise men journey from the East

CHORUS:How a little baby boy bring the people so much joy
Son of a carpenter, Mary carried the light
This must be Christmas, must be tonight

A shepherd on a hillside, while over my flock I bide
Oh a cold winter night a band of angels sing
In a dream I heard a voice saying "fear not, come rejoice
It's the end of the beginning, praise the new born king"
CHORUS

I saw it with my own eyes, written up in the skies
But why a simple herdsmen such as I
And then it came to pass, he was born at last
Right below the star that shines on high

getting ready for Egypt trip

I'm starting to anticipate my trip to Egypt in a few weeks. I am doing reading, but doing as much exercise to be in shape as well! This is a group of 9 clergy who have been together for 2 years (1 more to go), funded by the Lily Endowment to learn together about the "sea-change" that is happening around us institutionally, organizational, missionally, and in the role of clergy. In Egypt we will learn how a small minority of the population being Christian has made such a major impact on the wider culture.

Here in the U.S. we are use to being the "big kid on the block", but that has clearly changed...even though many folks still think we are, or are resentful that the "world" doesn't kowtow to them like it use to. As my O.T. prof from seminary, Walt Brueggemann said about the post-exilic community (returning from Babylon around 500 B.C.)...it looks the same but it doesn't function like it use to.

time marches on and...stops

Yesterday was my 57th birthday. I am in the ballpark of the time of life when my father died of cancer. My daughter commented to me that I was starting to get some wrinkles. That made me think that the man she is looking at as her father is similar in look to the last recollection of my father. He didn't age beyond this. For most of my life I have thought as my father of being "ahead" of me in life experience and wisdom. At this point I have served in ministry longer than he did. At this point the life issues including professional issues that I face were the ones he was facing when he died. I have "caught up" with my father. A strange thought. All those years ago when he died, I was panicky because he wouldn't be around to be there when I needed help, got in a pinch, bail me out etc. Now, I look to my Father in heaven, not to bail me out, but to journey with daily. The years have been generous to me.

Tomorrow the Christian world observes time standing still. God enters into our world in flesh and all time now enters into "kingdom" time. Not time chronologically, time passing by, but time as a gift of the moment, of deep love and relationship that is surrounded by forgiveness. None of us can improve on forgiveness from God in Jesus Christ. There is no "progress" with it. It is! A gift. In the now. Time doesn't really stop, but it doesn't march on any more. Time is now one piece of the world that is dying in my own life. Like Garrison Keiller says about Lake Wobegone, "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve." Time cannot improve what has been given to me and to us. We can though begin to see it more and more for what it is...heaven has come to earth in the Prince of Peace. This Christmas I give my allegiance to the sovereign ruler, the Prince of Peace, over any other ruler and my loyalty as a citizen of the heavenly kingdom to God's realm.

variety of comments

1. If as President Bush says that the intelligence was wrong which was used to begin the war in Iraq, but the results are right...why do we need intelligence agencies in our government?

2. All the hoopla about saying or not saying "Merry Christmas" feels like a wolf in sheep's clothing. Merry Christmas has become the signature statement of the secularized expression of Christmas. It sounds to me like folks who want to keep Christmas as they have known it with a little Jesus and a lot of carols and trappings, are using the term "Christian" in self-centered ways to keep what they want. And among many of those same folks there is a demand for Biblical inerrancy. So...where is Merry Christmas in the Bible? Where is Christmas in the Bible!! Only two of the Gospels have birth narratives that we use at Christmas and at that most folks couldn't tell you what are the different particulars of each one.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. That phrase has become entwined in the U.S. It is a wonderful greeting. But it doesn't necessarily mean much about the incarnation of God entering the world full of truth and love. In this case, we would be less verbal and more humble because we are so awed by the gift and the presence of this One!

are we who we say we are

This is a post I sent to our congregation a few weeks ago. - David

The following op-ed piece is in today's Becaon Journal. I am sending it to all of us because it takes "us" to task with the contradiction of our tradition in the Congregational/Purtian church and present day practices around the holiday of Christmas and an email of opinion I sent to Fox News Network. - David Loar

This Season's War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else

By ADAM COHEN
Published: December 4, 2005

Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They're for it.

The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the words "Merry Christmas" in its advertising. (Target denies it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for "Christmas." Bill O'Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a "Christmas Under Siege" campaign, has a chart on his Web site of stores that use the phrase "Happy Holidays," along with a poll that asks, "Will you shop at stores that do not say 'Merry Christmas'?"

This campaign - which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk radio - is an odd one. Christmas remains ubiquitous, and with its celebrators in control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and every state supreme court and legislature, it hardly lacks for powerful supporters. There is also something perverse, when Christians are being jailed for discussing the Bible in Saudi Arabia and slaughtered in Sudan, about spending so much energy on stores that sell "holiday trees."

What is less obvious, though, is that Christmas's self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting the holiday's history. They claim that the "traditional" American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls "professional atheists" and "Christian haters." But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America's Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda.

The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it out of America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole source of religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the Roman heathens' wintertime celebration. On their first Dec. 25 in the New World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building projects and ostentatiously ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681 Massachusetts went further, making celebrating Christmas "by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way" a crime.

The concern that Christmas distracted from religious piety continued even after Puritanism waned. In 1827, an Episcopal bishop lamented that the Devil had stolen Christmas "and converted it into a day of worldly festivity, shooting and swearing." Throughout the 1800's, many religious leaders were still trying to hold the line. As late as 1855, New York newspapers reported that Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches were closed on Dec. 25 because "they do not accept the day as a Holy One." On the eve of the Civil War, Christmas was recognized in just 18 states.

Christmas gained popularity when it was transformed into a domestic celebration, after the publication of Clement Clarke Moore's "Visit from St. Nicholas" and Thomas Nast's Harper's Weekly drawings, which created the image of a white-bearded Santa who gave gifts to children. The new emphasis lessened religious leaders' worries that the holiday would be given over to drinking and swearing, but it introduced another concern: commercialism. By the 1920's, the retail industry had adopted Christmas as its own, sponsoring annual ceremonies to kick off the "Christmas shopping season."
Religious leaders objected strongly. The Christmas that emerged had an inherent tension: merchants tried to make it about buying, while clergymen tried to keep commerce out. A 1931 Times roundup of Christmas sermons reported a common theme: "the suggestion that Christmas could not survive if Christ were thrust into the background by materialism." A 1953 Methodist sermon broadcast on NBC - typical of countless such sermons - lamented that Christmas had become a "profit-seeking period." This ethic found popular expression in "A Charlie Brown Christmas." In the 1965 TV special, Charlie Brown ignores Lucy's advice to "get the biggest aluminum tree you can find" and her assertion that Christmas is "a big commercial racket," and finds a more spiritual way to observe the day.

This year's Christmas "defenders" are not just tolerating commercialization - they're insisting on it. They are also rewriting Christmas history on another key point: non-Christians' objection to having the holiday forced on them.

The campaign's leaders insist this is a new phenomenon - a "liberal plot," in Mr. Gibson's words. But as early as 1906, the Committee on Elementary Schools in New York City urged that Christmas hymns be banned from the classroom, after a boycott by more than 20,000 Jewish students. In 1946, the Rabbinical Assembly of America declared that calling on Jewish children to sing Christmas carols was "an infringement on their rights as Americans."

Other non-Christians have long expressed similar concerns. For decades, companies have replaced "Christmas parties" with "holiday parties," schools have adopted "winter breaks" instead of "Christmas breaks," and TV stations and stores have used phrases like "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" out of respect for the nation's religious diversity.

The Christmas that Mr. O'Reilly and his allies are promoting - one closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward nonobservers - fits with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools.

It does not, however, appear to be catching on with the public. That may be because most Americans do not recognize this commercialized, mean-spirited Christmas as their own. Of course, it's not even clear the campaign's leaders really believe in it. Just a few days ago, Fox News's online store was promoting its "Holiday Collection" for shoppers. Among the items offered to put under a "holiday tree" was "The O'Reilly Factor Holiday Ornament." After bloggers pointed this out, Fox changed the "holidays" to "Christmases."

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to Fox News

The "Christmas" you are "fighting" for is really a secularized version of Christmas. It no where fits the ancient or even more modern Christian traditions of what the holy day is about. On one hand I agree, those of us who are disciples of Jesus Christ need to focus more clearly on what the season is about. The tradition is that Christmas season begins on December 25th, not Thanksgiving, and goes to 12th Night on January 5th. The present practice in our culture of begining the "season" in line with the end of the year sales needs is exactly the opposite of the Christian tradition of the season. It feeds the opposing values of the culture over against the deeply spiritual ones of humility, sacrifice, obedience and prayerful practice.

Truth be told, I don't care what other folks call the true Christian holiday because it isn't their holiday. I do care deeply about how the followers of Jesus prepare for the coming of the savior of humanity and the return of the King of all Kings, political and economic. The culture has developed trappings from the original Christian holiday which are not the Christian holiday. Its your right to fight for that holiday. But please, don't mix the two.

fur or agin or...

One of the listservs available through our church life is called "Daily Scripture." This is the posting I had for Dec 9th.
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Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. -- John 14:5,6 (ESV)

Quotation: How can we know that what Jesus has shown us of God is the truth; or how do we know when we look into the face of Jesus that we are looking into the face of God? The answer is so plain and simple that it is a marvel how intelligent men can manage to miss it as they do. Look at what Christ has done for the soul of man: that is your answer. Christianity is just Christ--nothing more and nothing less. It is a way of life, and He is that way. It is the truth about human destiny, and He is that truth. ... R. J. Campbell (1867-1956), The Call of Christ [1932]

Too many folks use this passage as a way to condemn "Christianity." That might be valid from the way it has been used to condemn others. However, when this was first communicated as we study the language, the literary style, the political and social context...it wasn't condemning, but inviting and freeing. My sense is today that little of what we call Christianity is truly about Jesus Christ. There are many who desire to be in the body of Christ and yet go to great lengths to avoid or even deny what has been at the heart of the confession of the Christian church since the 1st Century. That denial and avoidance has happened since the 1st Century as well. Some will seek to use new historical findings to try to reshape or change the central faith of the living Christ in the present. They can do that, but...that isn't the Christian Church then. The body of Christ is the reality of the living Christ that has been known for 21 Centuries. The living Christ has done more than any other being to free humanity from its slavery. The forces of power and control have sought to contain and revamp that reality. And, I usually find, that those who are attempting to revamp or deny the living Christ who is the Savior of the world, know very little about the Judeo-Christian scripture or the history of the church. They presumptuously think that what they know now is more true than the reality that has been known for these 21 Centuries. And they use only the negative side of Christian history for these 21 Centuries to claim that the church and thus Jesus Christ isn't all he is cracked up to be. I have learned in 15 years of being around 12 Step recovery meetings that there is much history happening of lives being changed and freed that are not making the headlines nor the history books!!!

The living Christ is known more in our lives than in intellectual thought. Intellectual thought can "lead" us, but it can't ultimately claim to be the living Christ. This is exactly what Jesus confronted in the 1st Century...those who sought more through their intellect than through their whole being...body, mind and spirit...to try to use him for their own purposes. They tried to reduce him down as a "mini-denial" of his messiahship. Again, they can do that. But they can't claim then to be part of the body of Christ as it has been for these 21 centuries. Even with all the differences there are in the Christian church, the essential kernel or heart of being a Christian is the profession of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

Before we seek to accomodate who we want Jesus to be to our own desires...lets first study and learn the tradition (not the supposed tradition that is talked about for good or for ill in our present time in the popular media). This Christmas, get to know Christ! Don't simply reach for a sentimental, easily accomodated sense of Christ, but truly love Christ by committing your life to getting to know him! Otherwise...why celebrate Christmas rather than to make ourselves feel good? There's no reason to do that in the church...the body of Christ.

its cold...will Christmas be enough?

I find the older I get I wonder each year if "Christmas" will be enough to "pick me up" from the onset of winter blahs and foreboding. And it feels like all the disappointments and anxieties of my life glom on to this cold, windy, snowy time of year.

Now, I like snow! I love it when a good snow storm blankets everything for two reasons. 1) its beautiful 2) it forces people to slow down en masse. Like Aug 14 2004 when we had the huge black out and everyone just went outside and related. That's what snow storms do. People tend to complain about them, but I think they are a gift.

But the just plain cold, windy winter days seem to take their toll. They rarely are a day when I say "This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it." Sure, I can speak it out loud and I do from time to time. But I don't mean it.

There is one day a week in the cold, windy days that I look forward to. The gathering of brothers and sisters to worship God. I love that. It is an oasis, maybe we could call it a winter sabbath, in the blahy winter days. And, visiting with people at Coco's during the week does the same for me. I look forward to those visits. Times spent in connecting around life and God rather than short snippets of conversation on the road to accomplishing so many tasks that each seem to run into one another.

Since I was a child, I was programmed to expect that Christmas would pump me up for the long darkness of winter. But as I get older, there doesn't seem to be enough. I have come to realize that Christmas is a staged event or a reenactment by the community of faith to help us be confirmed in faith that God is breaking into this world right now with the gift of love known as Jesus Christ. God's own flesh and blood. The savior of all that aches in us and ails us. December 25 is not suppose to be in and of itself the "pump me up." It is the reminder of that which God is doing that is aeons beyond just being a pump me up.

Christmas started in the northern Europe Christian context centuries ago because they felt what we feel in the same climate...foreboding, anxious and the blahs. So, they decided the best time of year for them to be reminded of God's present and future action was at the time of year when most people seemed to hit the bottom of life. They used it to plant deep in their soul that God is breaking into our lives and into the world all the time. Christmas is only the window through which our memories, our senses, our hearts, our faith is reinforced to expect it and to discern it. Don't expect the Christmas season to be the salve for your ache and ailments of life. Use Christmas as a window into the wonderful gift that God is giving throughout our lives.