The Ramifications of Christmas

Stoning of St. Stephen, by Rembrandt

Even though his feast day is not technically connected with Christmas, it's interesting to me that the first day after it is the day Jesus' followers commemorate the execution of Stephen, the Christian Movement's first martyr. Today is the 'Feast of Stephen,' which usually only surfaces in our minds when we sing Good King Wenceslas.

Perhaps it's just a coincidence that Stephen is celebrated here, but it serves as a none-too-subtle reminder that the Messiah wasn't born yesterday to bring us bright baubles and candy canes; this is serious business.

Serious Business

Let's rehearse what happened here. The power-brokers back then were not terribly happy with Jesus' early followers. Stephen was one of the major exponents of what we stood for and, as the story goes, when his opponents couldn't out-debate him they simply accused him of "speaking blasphemous words against Moses and God." In short order Stephen was " seized... and brought... before the council," (Acts of the Apostles, chapter 6 verses 11 - 12, ).

In his defense Stephen delivered a long and rather blunt speech showing point by point that his people had an abysmal record of obeying God and now had capped it off by crucifying their own Messiah. His listeners did not take it well:

Upon hearing this, his audience could contain themselves no longer. They boiled in fury at Stephen; they clenched their jaws and ground their teeth. But Stephen was filled with the Holy Spirit. Gazing upward into heaven, he saw something they couldn’t see: the glory of God, and Jesus standing at His right hand.

Stephen: Look, I see the heavens opening! I see the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God! 

At this, they covered their ears and started shouting. The whole crowd rushed at Stephen, converged on him, dragged him out of the city, and stoned him. They laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul, while they were pelting Stephen with rocks. 

Stephen (as rocks fell upon him): Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Then he knelt in prayer, shouting at the top of his lungs, 

Stephen: Lord, do not hold this evil against them! 

Those were his final words; then he fell asleep in death.

(Acts of the Apostles, chapter 7 verses 54 - 60, Voice )

One may fault Stephen for tactlessness but not for lack of courage. Jesus offered his people a revolutionary way to be rescued from Rome, rescued from sin, rescued from failing repeatedly to fulfill the mission God had created them for. Even at this late date, when they had utterly failed to recognize their Messiah and turned him over to the Romans for a hideous execution, Jesus' offer still stood. Israel could still fall in behind their King. Stephen saw his duty clear and decided his best shot at shaking up the august leaders of his people was to rub their noses in the truth of what they'd done.

It got him killed, with many more to come.

First of Many

The line of martyrs with Stephen at its head has by no means come to an end. On this Feast of Stephen googling "latest attacks on christians" immediately brings up a story in USA Today reporting that, "Christmas attacks by Muslim rebels in Christian villages in the southern Philippines left at least 14 people dead." The numbers of Christians in the middle east are rapidly decreasing as they do their best to escape barbaric treatment. But don't think (as so many tend to) that it's purely a problem with radical muslim extremists. Open Doors, a group that monitors Christian persecution, reports that the country most hostile to Jesus of Nazareth's followers is North Korea.

In the comfortable, hermetically sealed western world we inhabit it's easy to assume the days of Christians being martyred for their faith is long past, that it may have happened back in "barbaric" Roman times, but not today. It's particularly easy when we are warm and full from the traditional holiday buying binge.

The Feast of Stephen helps us remember right after Christmas that that's not quite the case.

All Set Up

Matthew, the gospel author,  was quite a skillful writer. In the first chapter we find this famous quote:

"She will give birth to a son and you will name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” This all happened so that what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet would be fulfilled: “Look! The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will name him Emmanuel,” which means “God with us,” (Gospel of Matthew chapter 1 verses 21-23).

Then he bookends that with another statement in the last chapter from Jesus himself: "And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age," (Matthew chapter 28 verses 19-21).

The prophetic promise of "God with us" is confirmed and fulfilled by the risen Jesus of Nazareth to whom "all authority in heaven and on earth has been given."

Set Up

Nope

Photo by Jericho

So we should be all set up, right? The Messiah whom we follow now has all power and is High King of the universe. And we are constantly being told that we are "in Christ" (e.g., 2nd Letter to the Corinthians chapter 5 verse 17) -- that we belong to and are in union with the Messiah. From now on it'll be smooth sailing, the best of everything -- riches, mansions, perfect health, a Rolex and a Lamborghini or two. All to be used in the spread of the gospel, of course. What better way to attract people to Jesus than to show how blessed Christians are?

C. S. Lewis was once asked, "Which of all the religions of the world gives to its followers the greatest happiness?"

"The greatest happiness?" he replied, "While it lasts the religion of worshiping oneself is best!... If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity." (God in the Dock, "Answers to Questions on Christianity," question 11).

The Christian movement is a group of people who have thrown in our lot with the King of the universe alright, but he is a King who walked a hard road and was executed in a particularly gruesome way. By his own choice he lived among the poor, the hungry, the ill, the downtrodden. And he did not set himself up as a special case; Jesus makes living the same way a test of our Christianity.

So we don't find the leaders of the early Christian movement living in marble palaces overlooking Nazareth and spending their days in strategy sessions moving little gold crosses around on a map. Instead we find them constantly on the move, being beheaded, enduring beatings, stonings, and shipwrecks. We find them in ragged clothes and considered the dregs of the earth.

Jesus' later followers got much the same, both the leaders and the rank and file. The movement continued to follow Jesus' demand that we care for the suffering, poor, and imprisoned. Interestingly, they also took on the job of freeing slaves wherever they could.

With Us

God is with us, just as he promised, down to the very end. But for those who want to find out what Christianity really is (the purpose of this site), it's important to know what you're getting into. The Christian way is full of joy too, and joy of an intensity and endurance unavailable anywhere else. But it is not designed to make us rich, popular, and happy.

If  you happen to live in a well off culture with a social safety net and the expectation of iPads and smartphones, it is possible to think of joining the Christian movement as rather like joining a Gym. You pay your dues, you try to attend on a regular basis and focus while you're there, and you reap the benefits. Maybe it helps you to have "your best life now." But the focus is on what it does for you. Which is entirely appropriate for a gym membership, but not for following Jesus of Nazareth.

Hardships and pain can and do happen to Jesus' followers and he honestly is always with us, but he is with us through the events of life, not insulating us from them.

As St. Paul put it, “If we are to enter God’s kingdom, we must pass through many troubles.”

Bottom Line

Some people think Pope Francis is a marxist, socialist, radical for his idea of restructuring the global economy so that it revolves around human need rather than "the bottom line." This may be true, but he is in good company.

A girl in India

Courtesy of Varun Chatterji

Those who enact unjust policies are as good as dead,
those who are always instituting unfair regulations,
to keep the poor from getting fair treatment,
and to deprive the oppressed among my people of justice,
so they can steal what widows own,
and loot what belongs to orphans.
What will you do on judgment day,
when destruction arrives from a distant place?
To whom will you run for help?
Where will you leave your wealth?

(Book of the Prophet Isaiah 10.1 - 3, NET)

God of the Pit

<< Read the first part of this series
On Tuesday I told you about a blunt, obscure sentence in the Bible's most pessimistic book that speaks to me like nothing else when I'm depressed. It helps somehow that the book Jesus taught from is quite open about the fact that life stinks and seems utterly meaningless sometimes.

'Job's Despair'
by William Blake

Actually, Scripture is full of depressed and depressing people, stories, and poems. The 42nd psalm (psalms are just poems and song-lyrics) is a real downer. In the Book of Job one man's utter depression over losing everything leads into one of the world's great epic poems about why people suffer. Even God shows up at the end but gives no real answer other than, "It's way, way over your head, but ultimately I'm in control."

This could be an intensely frustrating response, but oddly many people find it comforting. Abraham Lincoln for one is known to have read Job through several times during the Civil War and somehow it strengthened him. Sometimes you're way beyond the point where an explanation would help. But knowing you're not alone, that this is in some awful way 'normal,' that God fully acknowledges what you're going through and neither condemns it nor tries to pull you out of it with platitudes and happy-talk -- you may not be beyond that.

The Depressed God

One of the most mind-blowing things about the Christian Movement, if we can disengage our minds from two millennia of fairy tales and idealized pictures that have built up around it, is that we are worshiping a man who was tortured to death. The records tell us that Jesus did it willingly, the way you might willingly die to save your child. But they also tell us that he did not do it easily.

Mark's rough-n-ready, just-the-facts-ma'am gospel says that in the hours before his arrest he, "became very troubled and distressed. He said to [Peter, James, and John] “My soul is deeply grieved, even to the point of death." Then he proceeded to beg God not to make him do the thing preachers often say was the very reason Jesus was born -- die. The Saviour of the World did not walk evenly and impassibly to his cross. He was depressed and didn't really want to go. (What he did want to do right down to the end was to obey God, but that's another topic for another post).

Co-Sufferer

The thing about the Christian Movement, the thing about the Holy Scriptures, the thing about Jesus of Nazareth that gives me a ledge to hang onto when I'm deep down in "the hole," is their utter realism. They don't deny or demean anything I'm going through, they don't tell me to cheer up or grow up.

When I cry out, "'Futile! Futile! Absolutely futile! Everything is futile!'" (Ecclesiastes 1.2) I say it -- even when it seems for all the world that I'm alone -- to a God who's yelled something similar,  and can look me straight in the face and say, "Yeah, I know. I wrote that."

The Verse That Keeps Me Christian (It's probably not the one you think)

Read Part 2 >>

Van Gogh's 'Sorrowing old man'
("At Eternity's Gate")

Sometimes you just feel like your whole life has been a waste. At least I do, and I can't imagine that I'm the only one. Sometimes it just impacts you that your life hasn't turned out at all the way you wanted, that all those hopes and dreams have come to nothing. Sometimes it seems that nobody really cares about you, that no one actually loves you, and when you look at yourself you really can't blame them. Sometimes you just reach bottom -- the bottom of bottom, and it really aches.

Now I hasten to point out that generally I'm a happy-go-lucky, easygoing guy. Ask anybody. But I have been right down in that dark hole. Maybe you have too. The worst part is that it's almost impossible to communicate what you're feeling to anyone else. Nobody seems to get it. You're in that hole by yourself.

Everybody, I would think, handles 'the hole' differently, hopefully in healthy ways (e.g., not drinking yourself into a stupor and deciding to live there). Being a follower of Jesus of Nazareth you'd think I should be able to pull out a magical Bible quote to sustain my soul. And I do have a verse... but it's probably not the one you think.

The Depressing Book

Back in the Old Testament there's a rather depressing little book called Ecclesiastes (or sometimes Qoheleth, after the title of the person who wrote it). It's one of those books that theologians -- Jewish and Christian alike -- have wondered what the ancients could have been thinking when they included it in Scripture. But there it is. Ecclesiastes is the kind of book that doesn't encourage you with the idea that one day you'll go to Heaven; it says, "Who knows?"

That's the book that helps me when I'm in the hole.  My 'magic Bible verse' is in the 2nd chapter:

This made me hate life. It was depressing to think that everything in this life is useless, like trying to catch the wind.

Ecclesiastes 2.17, (ERB).

Not exactly the 23rd Psalm. But this guy gets it, at least for me.  This is God saying, "Welcome to the hole. Yes, I even know about this place."

In my life I have found that what helps me in the depths is not all the encouragement in the Bible, but God's frank acknowledgement and full comprehension of the fact that at that point I hate life and it looks useless.

I have often thought that without a book as 'real' as Ecclesiastes in the Bible, I probably wouldn't trust it as much as I do. The Christian God isn't a fluffy bunny God who doesn't want to hear about certain parts of our little human lives because he'd rather ignore the hard stuff. He's not a Disneyland God; he's a battlefield God, a bad-side-of-town God.

Somehow this sharp little verse sums that up for me.

The Gospel Truth About Social Justice

This is my first post for Synchroblog, a little community of Christian blogs that post on a particular subject each month. Read more about it here and (assuming you're on Facebook) here. This month our topic is "Social Justice -- What is it really?." The Synchoblogs who posted are listed at the bottom of this post for you to peruse. Visit them all! We're an interesting and eclectic group!

________________

I have a problem with Social Justice.

If you try to research the term on the Internet you won't read long before learning that, while most people agree it probably includes things like helping the hungry and ending discrimination, there's no broadly accepted definition of what it is or the best way to do it. Some scholars even feel that when you analyze it the phrase itself is nonsensical, "like the term 'a moral stone."

But that's not what my problem is.

It's also not that the phrase tends to be identified with one side of the political spectrum or that, as a writer, I find it awkward and non-euphonious. It's hard to write stirring prose using a clunky, two-part, technical term. One doesn't find "social justice" in many poems.

No, my problem is that Jesus' followers (myself included) use it at all.

I was at an informal meeting a few years ago where we talked about the church's responsibilities to the city, the people around us. One snippet of the conversation that has always stuck with me went something like this:

Person #1: "I've been seeing so many more people out on the street lately because of this economy, even some families. We really need to devote more of our resources to the social justice needs in this area."

More Official Person: "I'd really love to but funds are limited. Right now we need to devote the bulk of what we have to proclaiming the Gospel." 

Actually I think he called it the Evangelism budget.

I understand the need to have an efficient budget that accurately reflects your situation (I was a non-profit Debt Counselor for 7 years so I've built a lot of budgets), but the unconscious decoupling of social justice and the Gospel as two distinct things really bothers me.

The Gospel and social justice are the same thing. Or rather, wherever the Great Announcement of Christ's Gospel "happens," there the thing most of us mean by social justice also "happens" (or should).

Let me explain what I mean.

God's Kingdom has always been bound up with what we delineate today as social justice. The ancient Israelites sang of a God who, "protects the foreigners among us. He cares for the orphans and widows," and who incorporated care for the poor into his law (here, here, and here, for instance). His prophets inveighed against the wealthy oppressing the poor and disadvantaged: "Exercise true judgment and show brotherhood and compassion to each other. You must not oppress the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, or the poor, nor should anyone secretly plot evil against his fellow human being." (Prophecy of Zechariah chapter 7 verses 8-12, NET).

Jesus of Nazareth came as Israel's long awaited Messiah announcing that the Kingdom of God was almost here. As he did he invited everyone in, particularly the sick, the hungry, the poor, sinners, and other "undesirables." Nobody was exempt. Jesus famously proclaimed, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest."

When he rode into Jerusalem and fought the Messiah's prophesied climactic battle against the enemies of the Israel, the weapons he used were completely unexpected.

"Instead of the usual military revolt, it was time to show the pagans what the true God was really like, not by fighting and violence but by loving one's enemies, turning the other cheek, going the second mile. This was the challenge which Jesus issued in a series of teachings that we call the 'sermon on the mount.'"

(N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, p. 101)

Today, on the other side of that battle, with Jesus enthroned as High King of the Universe, we who follow him fight to advance his Kingdom using the same unconventional weapons he used: Love, service, and self-sacrifice -- healing the sick, cleansing the lepers, and casting out demons -- feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and inviting everyone without exemption into the Kingdom of God. This is how the Gospel is proclaimed.

As one of my favorite writers, Eberhard Arnold, said, "The injustice of the world -- sin itself -- is the disease of the world's soul that leads to death. Our mission on behalf of the Kingdom is to be the salt of the earth: to stem its injustice, prevent its decay, and hinder its death." (Eberhard Arnold, Salt and Light, p. 61).

Social justice is not a program or priority, not for us. It is what happens when the Gospel of the Kingdom touches human need.

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October 2013 Synchrobloggers

• K.W. Leslie – Social Justice and Social Darwinism 
• Jeremy Meyers – Did Jesus Teach Social Justice? 
• Glenn Hager – Notes on Not Saving the World 
• J.A. Carter – The Gospel Truth About Social Justice
• Sherri Huleatt – Sex Trafficking: the Story of a Young Girl, the Problem of a Generation
• Edwin Pastor Fedex Aldrich – Social Justice or Social Programs
• LIz Dyer – A Social Justice Story 
• Carol Kuniholm – Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places 
• Leah Sophia – Justice is Important, Food is Essential
• Kathy Escobar – Justice is More Than Equality 

Christmastide - Innocents

According to the old carol, on the fourth day of Christmas your true love sends to you four calling birds. But in the old calendar observed by many in the Christian Movement this day brings with it something quite different. The fourth day of Christmastide is the "Day of the Holy Innocents" when we are brought up short by the fact that, in the midst of Mary and Joseph's joy over "the newborn king," other babies were being slaughtered in an effort to eliminate him...